That’s How I Roll

efore Tory-boy came back, Miss Dyson had healed me. I don’t mean like a doctor. Or a preacher, either. Only a person marked like we both were could ever really do what she’d done, and then only for another of our own kind.

For the first time, I was glad I wasn’t really paralyzed below the waist. I would have traded every pain I’d ever felt in my whole life for what Miss Dyson showed me I could do.

When she was done—when I was done, I guess I mean—she just stood up and walked off.

She came back quick enough. All she’d done was put some retouching on her face.

Something, something powerful, told me that if I had offered her money then, I would have lost something more than precious. Something I could never replace.

When she said, “Now, you have to promise to do something for me,” I thought maybe she wanted somebody to die. But I didn’t really know her, not then.

“Now—and from this moment on—you have to call me by my name,” she said. “Jayne. That’s my name, Esau. Jayne.”

went to see her any number of times after that. Tory-boy would drive me over, and come back whenever I told him to. Once I got him a cell phone, I didn’t even have to say a word. One ring followed by a hang-up, Tory-boy would know it was me.

At first, there wasn’t but one way we could … make love. I feel I have a right to call it that, because I know what was in my own heart. I had to lie on my back, and Jayne would kind of straddle me.

Later, she showed me some other things. They all worked, too. I mean, I worked. No, that’s wrong. Nothing we ever did was work. What I’m trying to say is that parts of me worked.

It was as if everything had come full circle. I remembered how proud Tory-boy had been when he was telling me he could cast spells himself. How he could turn a girl into a lady, by treating her like one. But that spell only worked if she believed she was a lady herself.

I realized, lying there, my arms around Jayne as I kept myself inside her, that she must have believed what she told me, too, that first time. She wasn’t casting any spell; she knew.

I must’ve gotten lost in that thought, because the next thing I remember was, Jayne started panting like she’d just run a race, making little gasping sounds. She bucked so hard I was afraid she’d come loose from me, but she put her face down and bit into the pillow I’d learned to slip under my head.

I don’t know how to write down the sound she made before she collapsed against my chest. But she recovered quick enough.

“Don’t stop, Esau. You’re not done yet. Come on!”

ou want to know what that was all about, don’t you?” she said, a few minutes later.

“Not if you—”

“Ssssh. That was an orgasm, Esau. That’s what you have every time when you … shoot off inside me. It’s not the same for a woman. We don’t feel such things in only one place; it takes over our whole bodies.”

“But you never—”

“Did that before? Of course not. I didn’t even know I could. Listen to me go on. I know what they’re supposed to feel like—I’ve faked them often enough.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Not every man wants the same thing, Esau. Most of them, all they care about is satisfying themselves. But there’s always a few that want to believe they’re such bulls in the bedroom that they can make any woman … come, that’s the word they use. Any woman, even a whore.”

“You’re no—”

She put two fingers over my lips. “Not to you, Esau. I know that. Just like you’re no … client to me. I knew you were a very special kind of man the first time I ever met you.”

“I—”

“Shush, now. I’m telling you things of value. It’s kind of a tradition around here for men to bring their sons to a … to an experienced woman for their first time. But they don’t really want their boys to learn anything, not from a woman like me. The only lesson they want taught is that there are women so low you can pay them to have sex with you.

“But you, you wanted Tory-boy to learn to be gentle. To kiss a girl sweet. None of these men wanted their boys to kiss a … woman like me at all. They didn’t want them to learn how to talk, how to caress, how to … well, really, how to do anything at all. What they wanted is to be able to take their boys down to wherever they hang out and brag that he’s a man now.”

“So, when a boy like that gets full-grown, when he gets married, what does he know about … doing it right?” I asked her.

“Nothing is what he knows. Why do you think they’re all brought up to marry virgins? How is someone going to spot your ignorance if they’re ignorant themselves?”

“That all seems so … Well, you said it yourself just now: ignorant.”

“That doesn’t matter. Not to the men. If their wives don’t know what to do, there’s always women like me.”

“But there are folks who love each other. I know there are.”

“Don’t confuse those things, Esau. Just because a man may be faithful, he’ll still feel it’s up to the woman to make him happy. And the only way a man is going to be happy is if he thinks he’s got the magic touch when it comes to his own woman.”

“How would he know that?”

“Remember what I said before? About faking an orgasm? Well, for that, a woman has to be good. Good and kind, both. Faking the orgasm, that’s just a skill. Something you can learn; something you can get good at doing. With most men, you don’t even have to be all that good to fool them, because they want to be fooled.

“But kindness, that isn’t faking it at all. There’s nothing in that for the woman, you might think. But you’d be wrong. Doing a kindness because you want to make your man feel more like a man, that’s love. True love.”

“So, before, you—”

“Just stop right now! You’re supposed to be such a genius, can’t you use your mind? If I was faking—before, I mean—if I was faking just to be kind, why in the world would I explain how that works? In this bed, that first time, the only virgin there was you. Understand? That was you, trusting me. Can’t you keep on doing that, Esau?”

“I never stopped,” I told her. And it was the truth.

aybe Lansdale had just used me to get rid of an old enemy, the way Judakowski had sent that hyped-up young man into Lansdale’s bar a year or so back.

Or maybe he was showing me real respect by knowing I’d want to square accounts with Judakowski my own self. The way a man should.

None of that matters. If it wasn’t for Jayne being gone, I never would have told a word of how she’d healed me.

But I don’t mind admitting that when she’d said “honey” that night, it made me think of the first woman to ever use that word on me.

I don’t even mind admitting that I couldn’t wait to drop in at Lansdale’s bar. Once I’d made sure it was a night Nancy would be working, that is.

aybe it’s just as well my hand was forced. Sooner or later, the day would have come when Tory-boy wouldn’t have been able to drive me home. So what difference was there between the hospital and the penitentiary?

ven after Judakowski, I wasn’t in any danger. Nobody was going to suspect me of such a thing. Yes, Judakowski always had a lot of jobs out. What happened to him can certainly happen when a man doesn’t get paid for work he did. But even the cops who knew what I did and who I did it for, they believed I only worked long-distance. How else is a cripple going to shoot anyone, especially a wary man like Judakowski had been?

Judakowski was right to be wary. I doubt there was a person in the world he could truly trust. His men weren’t with him the way Lansdale’s men were with him. They were nothing but a paid labor force, and they had to know that.

You can buy obedience, but you can’t buy the kind of loyalty that makes a man throw himself between a pistol and his boss.

Lansdale might have had plenty of worries—being shot in the back was never one of them.

verything had been going along just perfect until those master-race morons showed Tory-boy a club he could join. Not some club that maybe might let him in if he did things for them; this club, they wanted him for himself.

“I’m a pure Aryan, Esau!” he told me, all excited. “See, there’s ice people and mud people, and I got the perfect blood in me. They’re a great group of guys. And they understand, too. The first night, they tried to get me to have beers with them. I told them I can’t do that. Mostly, when I say that, folks look at me funny. But not them, Esau. After I told them I had to keep bad stuff out of my body, they looked at me like I was just talking sense.

“The leader, he even said I was the ideal example! Pure, clean living, that was the way to build our race.”

thought it would pass. Tory-boy could get all excited about something and then forget about it by the next day.

But it only got worse. One morning at breakfast, Tory-boy told me he had a new girlfriend. “They picked her for me, Esau. And guess why! ’Cause we’ve got the best blood. She’s pure white, too. So we’re going to make babies. We’re going to uplift our race!”

I knew that was never going to happen. Years ago, I’d had Tory-boy fixed. I got the doctor to read the medical records, and he agreed a vasectomy would be “in the young man’s best interests.” With me signing as guardian, it was all over in an hour.

Tory-boy didn’t know why he was getting the “operation.” When I told him it had to be done, otherwise he could end up in a wheelchair like me, that was all it took.

I needn’t have bothered with all that. Tory-boy knew I never would do anything that wasn’t good for him, no matter what.

It would be a while before those skinhead imbeciles found out Tory-boy couldn’t make babies, but they already knew what he could do with a baseball bat.

They didn’t need Tory-boy, but they sure knew how to use him. When he told me about going out on “actions” with his “brothers,” I knew it was just a matter of time before they killed someone. And who would end up taking the blame for it.

I couldn’t put protection on Tory-boy anymore. He had learned too much new stuff. He wasn’t exactly sure why muds and homos and race traitors were all controlled by the Jews, much less why they all had to be exterminated. Still, he was ready to do his part.

I guess he didn’t remember the real reason why the Beast had killed Rory-Anne that long-ago night. Telling him nigger cock was much better than his was the same as her asking him to do it.

I felt my heart start to crack in my chest, stress fractures already forming on its surface.

had almost waited too long. When Tory-boy came home and showed me the swastika tattooed on his arm, that’s when I knew things had changed forever.

Not because of the tattoo—because he hadn’t asked me first.

That’s when Tory-boy told me he needed the tattoo because a real important meeting was due to happen the very next month. The big leader himself was coming all the way from Louisville to speak. Men were driving from Columbus, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Wheeling, Richmond … and a lot of other places. He couldn’t be the only one there without what he called “White Power ink,” could he?

The night of that important meeting, I suffered some kind of attack. It was so bad I could hardly speak, and my upper body was locked up so tight I couldn’t get much of a breath, either.

Tory-boy picked me up, carried me to the van, and drove me to the emergency room, paying no attention to red lights or stop signs.

When they took me in the back, the doctors told him he couldn’t stay there with me. Tory-boy didn’t move. So some young doctor called for the security guards. But they were local boys, and they told the doctor they weren’t about to get themselves broken into pieces over nothing—all the young man wanted to do was stay with his brother, what was so wrong about that?

That really infuriated the doctor. He ordered a nurse to call the police. She told him, “I’m sorry, sir, but you’re not from around here. Trust me, the police won’t come, not if you tell them who it is you want them to try and haul out.”

t took a long time to run all their tests. They had my whole medical history there, and they could see I’d never had a seizure before. The doctors were puzzled, but doctors never admit that, so they kept at it for a long time before they said I was “stabilized,” but I’d have to go over to the state hospital for more tests pretty soon.

Tory-boy probably thought his “brothers” would understand, once he explained why he’d missed the big meeting.

aybe someday he’ll find another club that will want him to join.

The one he used to be in is gone, and I don’t think there’ll be another one taking its place, not around here. I can’t see them trying to start up a new operation in the same town where seventy-nine of them were all inside a concrete building—Tory-boy said they called it “The Bunker”—when a series of sequential explosions turned the whole thing into a giant incinerator.

Every one of them cremated, like they told Tory-boy they were going to do to the Jews someday.

he very next day—a Wednesday, it was—Tory-boy and I went for a long ride, all the way to the state capital. The people I make things for told me where I could find a needle artist who’d know better than to remember things. His shop was always closed on Wednesdays anyway.

That man knew his work. He turned Tory-boy’s swastika into a big butterfly. A black butterfly, outlined in red, with just a touch of gold beneath.

Tory-boy never flinched all the time the needle was working on him. He never feels pain in his body.

All his pain is in his blood.

o now you know. You know the only crime I ever got caught clean for was by accident. I don’t mean I didn’t intend it; I just mean I never imagined the kind of investigation it would launch. How could I know the FBI had an informant planted in with those Nazi people? That’s how they knew every single person who was supposed to be in that cement tomb. And that’s how they knew who wasn’t there when their man got blown to bits.

And they only knew that much because plenty of folks had seen Tory-boy around after the concrete oven had done its job—there were no bodies inside that anyone could hope to identify.

So, when they came out to the house after that, they came in force. The only way to save the dogs was to tell Tory-boy to let them pass. Otherwise, the men wearing all that body armor would have had their chance to use those machine guns and other toys they couldn’t wait to play with. Tory-boy would have tried to stop them, and their gunning down his dogs would’ve turned him into a monster worse than anything those men had ever imagined.

Once they got inside the house, they surprised me by acting so polite. But I was a match for them in that department. I knew Tory-boy would be anxious, what with all those people and cars around, but I never let it show.

They told me what they already knew, and I didn’t blink. But once they showed me their own agent’s field reports, once I did the math and worked out the dates, I saw there wasn’t but one way to save Tory-boy.

knew that the Feds had their own courts, but that didn’t concern me. Once we had the deal worked out, I knew I wouldn’t be gone more than a week or two before being sent back home. That’s how long it would take for me to plead guilty.

I had to make sure I took that plea in front of people who didn’t know me. The way the law works is, you can plead guilty all you want, but it’s a jury gets to set the penalty.

I couldn’t be sure that local folks would look all that unfavorably on me killing all those Nazis. It wasn’t like you could find a lot of liberals around here, but I couldn’t imagine any of them shaving their heads, or wearing those silly costumes. Those Nazis might be all white, but they were still all strangers.

But of all the things that separated us, I think it’s music that would create the widest chasm. Around here, people respect music. I don’t mean “today’s hits” or that video garbage—once you’re in our hearts, we never forget you. So, even if WWVA isn’t the king of radio anymore, Hank Williams is never going to give up his throne.

Lansdale never said, and I never asked, but I felt I knew why he named his little nightingale “Patsy,” too.

All those White Power people did with their music was make a lot of noise. It wasn’t just that nobody from around here bought their CDs; nobody from around here would want anyone to think their music was our music.

So my own people might not want to sentence me to death, but outsiders didn’t speak our language, and I knew that confessing to all the other murders I’d committed would guarantee I’d get what I wanted.

hadn’t known the Feds had a plant in with those Nazis, but it didn’t matter. I knew the truth, deep inside myself. I was—I don’t know any other word for it—jealous. I should have been satisfied that, no matter what, I’d never lose Tory-boy’s love. I should have been pleased that he’d shown he was a lot smarter than I’d given him credit for. I knew that because he didn’t tell me about those skinheads until he’d already joined up; Tory-boy had known exactly what I would have said if he’d asked me first.

And that tattoo.

I would have killed them all for that alone. Killed them because I wanted them dead.

If I could have turned my hate into explosives, there wouldn’t be any of them left, anywhere.

hat’s how I ended up here, telling my true story. I don’t know when anyone will read it—it could be pretty soon; it could be decades.

If it turns out that I’m never betrayed, the final timing is all up to Miss Webb. I’d taught Tory-boy to mind her just like he did me. We were holding hands, Miss Webb and me, when I told him that for the first time.

And if Miss Webb—if Evangeline—was my … my woman, that was enough. Tory-boy always minded his big brother, so it made perfect sense to him that he had to mind his sister-in-law. He might not know about legalities, but my Tory-boy knew me. And he knew I’d made my choice.

here were some complications involved in order for them all to get together and give me the assurances I needed. But they managed it.

When everyone turned their cards faceup, the hands looked like this: the State could clear dozens of unsolved killings on their books with the statements I was going to make when I pleaded guilty, but it would be a federal jury that would pronounce the sentence.

The deal was fair all around. The Feds wanted some things. The local DA had his own list. And there was something I wanted, too. It would take years for them to execute me, and I had to be near Tory-boy—as near as I could get—until it happened.

When everybody knew their role, the Feds read me a list of agents who’d been murdered within my reach. I picked a bomb that had been planted in the car of an FBI agent who worked way north of here.

In fact, that’s where they started. They had this big map loaded onto the computer, so it could project on a huge screen. Our house was in the center of that map, and they had different-colored circles around it.

Concentric circles, like when you throw a rock into a pond. Whenever they moved the circles away from our house, the readout in miles would show in a corner of the screen.

The map was dotted with black “X” marks. One for every murdered agent whose killer had never been found.

When they first activated the screen, sure enough, a black “X” popped up where that Nazi bunker had been.

I hadn’t known I was signing my own confession when I blew up that bunker. But it wouldn’t have stopped me if I had.

What did shock me a little was seeing another black “X” where that motorcycle gang had set up their hangar so many years ago.

I guess about the only place the Feds didn’t have their hooks in around where I lived was with the local bosses. Or maybe they did; if they were still alive and undercover, they wouldn’t have shown up on the map.

hat’s how I ended up here. Coming home while I waited to die was my choice, and I was intractable on that score.

I couldn’t risk waiting for the needle anyplace other than close to home. I had to make sure they kept me in a place where Tory-boy could visit.

I had to be in a place where I could still get messages out when I needed to. A place where I could still do business.

And maybe, if the prison was as open to cash-money deals as the men who’ve been here say, maybe even a chance to kiss my Evangeline goodbye.

will keep my end of the bargain. Lansdale and Judakowski, they’re both gone now. That doesn’t change a thing.

Judakowski was one killing I’d never confessed to. It happened just before they caught me, but I’d still had a number of opportunities to meet with the new boss of his gang.

“Lou Money” was what he went by—I didn’t know if that was his real name, and it didn’t matter to me. Didn’t matter to me that some even say he was the one who’d put Judakowski on the spot. Lou Money knows better himself. I made sure he knew. I told him every detail, and I knew he had his own sources inside the local cops, so he could find out for himself that I’d told him the truth.

That was very important to me, that Lou Money knew I told the truth. That was because I told him the truth of how Judakowski had been killed, but I lied about the reason. What I told Lou Money was that Judakowski had broken his word to me, and Tory-boy almost got himself in deep trouble as a result. I couldn’t have something like that ever happen.

Lou Money was a very understanding man. He’d make a good boss.

o Judakowski’s gone. And Lansdale’s not around anymore, either. He died in a fire. The way I heard it, he was doing some business with a man who lived in a trailer, way outside of town. They were still talking out in the yard when the trailer just blazed up. Everyone started running away. Then one of the trailer’s windows broke out and they could hear a woman screaming inside.

That stopped them dead in their tracks—the man they were doing business with, he was supposed to be living there alone. The woman was wrapped in flames, but they could still hear her screaming. When Lansdale heard “My baby!” he just spun around, wrapped his coat over his head, and charged into the trailer before any of his men could stop him.

It must have seemed like forever, but Lansdale finally burst out of the trailer, bringing some of the fire with him.

His men had been standing there with their own coats off, ready to beat out the flames. But they could see they were too late. The way it’s told, nothing was left of Lansdale but a burned-to-the-bone thing of disfigured horror.

There’d be no open-casket funeral for Lansdale, but the baby he went after was alive. The baby had some burned flesh, but they got him to the hospital in time to save him.

I heard they shipped him off to the Shriners, and he’s going to be as good as new, eventually. Folks say the Lord was watching over that baby. If that’s true, I guess Lansdale went out doing the Lord’s work. That’s about as squared-up as a man can get.

ow do I know all this? It’s not complicated. Lansdale wasn’t like Judakowski. Not only didn’t he think he could never be replaced, he had named his own successor a long time ago, and he made sure everyone knew it. Including me.

Coy came to see me on a visit. His name wasn’t on the list every Death Row inmate is supposed to file with the Warden’s office, but they never enforced any of those rules any too strictly with me.

Coy was still too young to carry himself like Lansdale, but I could see he was following clear footsteps, and he’d walk to the end of that road. Coming to visit me, that was sending a message. And taking a risk to do it. But I knew Lansdale would have expected nothing less.

All I really knew about Coy—he must have written down his last name to get inside for the visit, but he never told it to me—was that he was some kind of martial-arts expert. And the story people tell about that does sound embellished a bit.

The story was this: Lansdale was holding a sit-down at the bar he owned, The Blues ByYou. It pulls in a pretty rough crowd, but everybody knows you leave your attitude at the door.

Regulars knew the signals. Like if Chester Phillips took off the black pullover he always wore. Chester could sweep a few balls off the pool table into that pullover and grab both ends in one hand before you could blink. He had this spinning motion he’d do, which always ended with that loaded pullover striking someone. Whatever Chester hit with that move was going to break, and his preference was for heads.

Maybe the young man who walked in the door that night was looking to make a name for himself. Nobody had ever seen him before, but he must have known something about how things work. He walked right past Chester and over to Lansdale’s table.

It was Coy he wanted. He cursed him out every way you could imagine, going way over the line that people call “fighting words.”

Coy just ignored him. As long as the stranger didn’t put his hands on anyone, nobody was going to so much as acknowledge his presence.

All his challenge-talk finally got out of hand—he was making so much noise that Lansdale had to tell the young man to leave.

“You gonna throw me out, old man?” He must have been well past crazy to say something like that. Or his veins were running wild with meth courage. Maybe even both.

That’s when Coy stood up from the table. He wasn’t a bouncer or anything, but the other man had singled him out first, so he was the natural choice.

No sooner did Coy stand up than the hyped-up guy whipped out a push-button stiletto and snapped the blade to life.

Eugene folded his hands on top of the table. That should have told the young man something right there—you flash a knife in front of Eugene, you’re going to end up contributing to a blood bank the Red Cross never heard of. But Eugene was a surgeon, not a coroner. Folding his hands like he did, that was the same as telling the other man he was already as good as done.

The young man didn’t know Eugene, so he couldn’t read the smoke signal.

“Son,” Lansdale called over to him, “didn’t your daddy ever tell you not to bring a knife to a gunfight?”

The young man watched as Coy walked toward him, both hands held in front of him, palms up, like he was waiting for something to fall.

“I don’t see no gun,” the young man said as he slashed the air in front of him. He handled the knife like a man having an epileptic fit.

Coy just kept closing the distance, moving slow, like he was worried about that blade. The only person in the whole bar who might have believed that was the demented fool flashing it.

While he was still too far away for a knife to reach him, Coy shot out his left foot. There was a sound like plastic bubble-wrap popping and crackling at the same time. You didn’t need a medical license to know the knife-man’s kneecap was shattered.

Coy sure didn’t. He’d already turned around and was walking back to the table before the guy with the blade hit the floor.

The young man was shrieking like a bat using its sonar to hunt in the dark. The only word you could make out was “Hospital!”

Nobody in the bar looked his way. At the back table, everybody stayed quiet, waiting for Lansdale to speak.

“That better be a cell phone you’re reaching for,” Lansdale told the young man. “Use it to call a cab. And be sure to tell them you’ll be waiting on the sidewalk. Outside.”

One of the waitresses opened the door, then slid a chair in place to keep it open. Somehow, the guy dragged himself outside.

ansdale really died a hero, saving that baby like he did,” I told Coy that day he visited.

“Yeah, he did. Good thing we’d come in two cars. If we’d had to wait until Eugene was finished carving up that scumbag, the baby might not have made it.”

“Why would Eugene—?”

“Could’ve been because that miserable little piece of shit had told us he lived in that trailer alone. Could’ve been because he was such a foul weasel that he just walked away when that fire broke out—that had to be his woman who broke out the window, probably his baby, too.

“Could even have been that Eugene figured that slimeball was responsible for Mr. Lansdale’s death. Me, I never asked him.”

truly believed both Lou Money and Coy would keep the word their bosses had given me all those years ago. For different reasons, sure: Lansdale wasn’t a boss to Coy; he was family, and that means certain things would be expected of him. Whatever anyone expected of Lou Money didn’t matter—he wasn’t going to risk his whole operation being exposed over the little bit of it I was asking him to keep secret.

The reasons didn’t matter—both men’s word would stay as rock-hard as the men whose positions they had inherited.

I’m still relying on that, but I can’t see into the future.

hat wasn’t enough protection to satisfy me. Giving one man power isn’t a guarantee he’ll use it right.

So, if Tory-boy ever got a call from the one person I told him he could always trust, my little brother would go down to our mine. Then he’d finish it just the way I’d taught him. All he’d have to do was push a button.

That same person who I told Tory-boy he could always trust would mail out one final package. That one would have everything I had on each of the two operations.

I didn’t know what Lansdale’s son would do with that pile of information, but I had a pretty good idea.

’d set all that up way before I was handed another card to play. For this town, a trump ace.

No matter how I phrase this, it still comes down to trust. That’s a very complicated thing, trust. I’d felt obligated to kill Jackhammer Judakowski for what he’d done to Miss Jayne Dyson. And a big part of that obligation was that she had trusted me to do it.

Not in so many words, maybe. Even with the life she had to live, how could she have expected it to end as ugly as it did? No, the trust obligation came when she handed me a stick of dynamite late one night.

“I was going to be a secretary, Esau. Imagine that. Ah, it doesn’t matter, not now. See this? I bought this steno pad before I even enrolled in school. And I never wrote a single word in it. But I did bring it with me when I decided to come home, and now it’s about full up.

“It’s not one of those ‘little black books,’ but it holds the same information you’d expect to find in one, understand?”

“Why are you giving this to me, Jayne?”

“I’m not giving it to you, Esau. I’m asking you to hold it for me. Hold it in a safe place, a place only you know about.

“If you go first, I won’t need it. And, most likely, you won’t need it if I go before you. But if anything should happen to me—something bad, I mean; something deliberately done—the name of the man who caused it to happen will be in my steno pad. You’ll know what to do with it then, won’t you?”

“Yes” is all I said. But I knew I was taking on a debt with that one word. And I wasn’t lying when I told her, “I’d be proud, Jayne.”

o I’ve got even more than the records I kept on myself and my work. Judakowski is already finished; in fact, he was gone before I ever looked in Jayne’s steno pad. And now that steno pad was a weapon all by itself. It might not put anyone in jail, or get them killed, but it would sure teach certain people the high price of hypocrisy.

ike I said: trust. Who else but Miss Webb would I have left any of this with?

ut I wouldn’t have been able to sleep a single night if I hadn’t allowed for possibilities beyond the knowledge of any mortal man. So, if Miss Webb doesn’t show up in person to claim all three of her copies by a certain date, well, there’s two more copies. And those just go out by themselves.

If she goes where I told her to go, she’ll not only find the books, she’ll find a laptop computer, too. All she’d have to do is plug it in and turn it on. A screen would come up, with only two choices: SEND or DO *NOT* SEND.

Miss Webb knows, should she press that SEND link, my story, my true story, will be all over the world in minutes. I told her a long while back that I couldn’t tell the total truth without her name coming out—I cautioned her about that, more than once.

But she never wavered. That was the way she wanted it, too, she told me.

“I’ll make sure of it, Esau. I swear on my heart. I’ll make sure of every single thing, even if I have to go down in your mine with Tory-boy and hold his hand while he presses that button.”

hat’s the wonder of knowing the date of your own death in advance. I could leave in peace, because I had protected my baby brother all the way up to the time when he’d join me.

And I had people watching. People who knew they had to wait six months to hear from Miss Webb. If they didn’t get a DO *NOT* SEND message by then, they were going to launch my last bomb.

Over the years, I had gotten to be friends with two different Internet investigators. One’s out in the Mojave somewhere, the other’s in Norway. They both might be a little off-center, but they wouldn’t have to do any more with what I’d be putting in their hands than Tory-boy would if he ended up down in our mine.

Just push a button, and wait for the explosion.

don’t want to be associated with the other men in this place, not even in the minds of whoever might be reading this.

Yes, there’s some here that the State shouldn’t be killing. Why kill a man who heard voices inside his head commanding him, voices he couldn’t disobey? Why kill a man whose IQ is so low that he doesn’t even know where he is, or what’s waiting on him?

I feel sympathy for those men, but no kinship with them. I knew what I was doing when I did it, and the result was the one I’d intended.

So, if anyone’s reading this, they know there was more than enough good reasons for the State to take my life.

Some are here—on Death Row, I mean—only because they had lousy lawyers. One guy, he and his partner robbed a store. They took one of the clerks with them, to make sure nobody called the police until they set her free. Only that never happened.

The partner got a life sentence in exchange for telling the police where the girl’s body was hidden. The other one, the one that’s going to be executed, he didn’t get the same deal. Which is double-wrong, because the guy who got the break was the one who raped that girl before he shot her in the head. At least that’s what the man here says.

I do agree that what happened in that case was unfair. But I don’t think it should be fixed by giving the condemned man a life sentence. No, what I think is that his partner should be right here with him.

The mystical word on Death Row is “DNA.” There must be over a dozen men here who claim to be purely innocent. All it would take to set them free is this magic test.

I wonder if they actually believe that.

t was Miss Jayne Dyson who showed me that I wasn’t really dead below my waist. But it was Miss Webb who showed me that my heart wasn’t closed to everyone but Tory-boy, as I’d always believed.

That’s why, if you’re reading this, you get to hear me say what only one other living soul has ever heard.

I love you, Evangeline.

he guards have promised they’ll let me wheel myself into the Execution Chamber. We shook hands on that, and I believe they will keep their word.

I’ve come to think highly of some of them, and I think they regard me the same way. Not all of them, of course. The ones who tried to get me to give them something they could sell, they finally gave up. “No hard feelings,” they assured me. But even if they were telling the truth, they were only talking about their own feelings.

’ve been rotting long enough. I don’t need any more stays of execution. I only waited this long until I could be sure my last bomb was built, and that the detonator was in the right hands.

I’ve only got a little time left to me, no matter where I spend it.

This is where it ends. Me and this story, both.

I apologize to nobody on this earth. This is no plea for forgiveness. I know I don’t deserve forgiveness, and I’m not looking for any. I did the best I was capable of, and your judgments have no more meaning for me now than they ever did.

But there will be judgments; I’m convinced of that. I think about all the different people I’ve run across in my life. I think about them all the time. And what I think is that almost all of them should stop pointing their fingers and get themselves down to church. Fall down on their knees and pray.

Pray there is no God.

don’t know where I’m going after they wheel the gurney away with my lifeless body strapped to it. But one thing I know for sure. If there’s another place beyond this one, I’ll get there under my own power.

Don’t doubt me.

My name is Esau Till.