Tory-boy. Folks may have suspicioned, but I’d never allow them to turn that suspicion into truth out of my own mouth.
Maybe the Beast was scared they’d finally start looking for his wife’s body. Or … Well, I’ll never know why, but he got right up on the stand and insisted he was stone-cold sober the night it happened.
He
But all the while he was telling that pack of lies, he never stopped glaring at me. The whole courtroom could see those vile threats flash, as if someone was striking his flinty eyes with a piece of steel.
he State always has to go first, so the Beast had already heard Tory-boy and me tell the jury a different account entirely. But he stayed stuck to his story, as if he couldn’t get that seed I had planted out of his head.
Just like I could never get the seed he planted in Rory-Anne out of my body.
ith Rory-Anne dead, I was in charge. Before, even though me and Tory-boy each got Disability checks, they came to her—that’s how they do it with children. But Rory-Anne touched those checks just long enough to sign them over to the Beast.
Probably another reason he’d never killed us.
Or maybe he thought Rory-Anne would do it for him. She’d thrown knives at me more than once—it really drove her crazy whenever I would try to keep her off Tory-boy.
But even though the government considered me disabled, there wasn’t a soul in town who thought there was anything wrong with my mind. So, with the Beast and Rory-Anne gone, both checks came to me directly.
Maybe they bent a law a little bit to do that; I’m not exactly sure. I know they made me what they call an “emancipated minor” before the Beast was even put on trial. But they didn’t stop there; they made me Tory-boy’s legal guardian as well.
The judge said that was only right, seeing as I was the only family he had, what with my mother gone, my sister dead, and my father sure to be in prison for life … if he got lucky.
“The whole town knows you raised that child since he was born, Esau,” he said. Talking to me direct, not even glancing at that “Rural Services” lawyer who was supposed to be helping me. She was an outsider. We didn’t need any such people telling us how to take care of our own business.
“We’re all proud of the job you’ve done. Tory’s never been a bit of trouble to anyone. And, you know, some of those … slower ones, they can fall in with the wrong crowd. But this court is satisfied that if there’s one person he minds it’s you.”
That was true. Nobody ever did deny that. Not even the Beast.
knew the first thing we had to do was get some money. Magic be damned, that shack would always hold memories Tory-boy might not be able to deal with.
Getting money turned out to be easier than I thought. Once I started really concentrating on doing it, that is.
Every night, after Tory-boy fell asleep, I went back to science. Spina bifida isn’t so rare as you might think. Not everyone who’s born with it has to be in a wheelchair. It depends on what type you have.
Turns out, I had drawn the shortest straw. When the vertebrae don’t form correctly, a little sac filled with fluid extends through an opening in the spine. That’s called “myelomeningocele.” It can hit just about anywhere along your spine, so I guess it was lucky for me that it happened at the lowest point—because anything below that point is never going to work the way it should.
If Rory-Anne hadn’t been convinced they’d give her all kinds of drugs, I probably wouldn’t have been born in a hospital. That’s all that saved me. They even had to put a shunt in my head to drain the fluid buildup. I still have the scar from that, but that’s the only sign I carry. Above the waist, I mean.
I know they’d told Rory-Anne I was what they call an “at-risk” baby, but she never once brought me back to the hospital until that time she burned me and got scared.
Every time I came across something that said aftercare was critical for babies born with spina bifida, I wondered why the County had never sent anyone around to check. But then I remembered the Beast. If those social workers wanted to come and have a look at me, they’d need to bring the cops with them. I guess it wasn’t worth all that trouble. Not for someone like me, anyway.
So I grew up not being able to really use any part of my body from the end of my spine on down. I accepted that. Just like I accepted the jolts of pain that shot the length of my left leg all the way into my central nervous system.
I say “accepted,” but that came slow. The first time, I was about nine years old, and that pain blast filled me with terror. I thought I was dying. Worse, I thought of what would happen to Tory-boy without me to protect him.
But then it stopped.
It wasn’t until I started looking for ways to get more money for me and Tory-boy to be safe that I read about how some folks with the exact same disease I had could actually feel something below the waist, too.
That comforted me considerably. It confirmed what I knew in my own mind—what I had felt wasn’t this “phantom pain” thing some of the books talked about. It was as real as the disease itself.
I was thankful for that knowledge. I understood how things were always going to be. I knew if I couldn’t control my own mind, I’d never be able to control anything at all.
So my curse wasn’t unique like I’d once thought—others had my exact same condition. I had kin I’d never meet. Brothers and sisters who were sort of semi-paralyzed but could still feel pain, same as me. Born bad, both ways. As if we’d all been at the same table, all rolled the dice together. And thrown snake eyes.
But I didn’t want to “share” in some therapy group. I didn’t need advice on learning to “cope.” I had responsibilities. And now that I knew others with my condition could feel pain, I knew there was a way for me and Tory-boy both.
All I needed was the money to pay what it would cost.
Truth was, most of the time I hardly felt anything at all. And when that pain would spike, I’d just breathe real slow and think about how good a child Tory-boy was. I learned to drop so deep into that thought that when I opened my eyes the pain would be gone.
Dr. Harris never said a word when I kept telling him I needed more and more of those painkillers. All opiates are dose-related, so it was only natural that what blocked the pain would lose its power over time.
It wasn’t any problem at all for me to get a permanent scrip for heavier and heavier hits of OxyContin, with another for morphine-by-injection, and then still another for the Fentanyl transdermals, for when the terrible pain in my withered legs got so unbearable that I had to have some medication going constantly.
Dr. Harris didn’t even blink. No surprise there. That’s what folks said about him—he hated pain like it was his personal enemy. That shouldn’t be an unusual thing, but it is. There are plenty of doctors around here who’re so scared of the DEA that they wouldn’t give Vicodin to a man dying of bone cancer.
The pharmacist never raised an eyebrow at all the scrips I kept handing over. And if the Internet stores had any problem, they never told me about it.
The only pain all that stuff actually killed was the pain of poverty. The drugs brought in a steady supply of cash. People who wanted to get high could crush the OxyC into a powder and snort it, or pour it into a shot of whiskey. The Fentanyl could be boiled right out of the patches. And the morphine even came with its own supply of clean needles.
The way we worked it was like this: anyone who wanted drugs would leave the money in the mailbox at the end of our lane, then push the button inside the plastic box right underneath it. I built that box so the button would stay dry, no matter what the weather.
When I saw the light flash inside our place, I’d send Tory-boy to walk on down, pick up the cash, and bring it back to me.
I could always tell by the amount what was wanted, but some people left notes anyway. Whenever that
