say something, when even a born fool would know it was the wrong time to say anything at all.
He’d put his sneer-question to me, but it was Lansdale who answered again, all the time keeping his voice as calm as if he’d been asked directions to the highway. “
“You know a lot about him, do you?” Judakowski said to Lansdale. Everyone knew he wasn’t talking about Eugene.
“I know what happened to the Lawrence boy,” Lansdale said. “You know, that dimwit the cops found with his spine snapped?”
“Tree fell on him, right?” Judakowski said.
“That’s what the coroner ruled,” Lansdale half-answered him. Smiling just a little bit now, like he and Judakowski were sharing a private joke.
I remembered that day. I don’t know how much money might have been bet. Or maybe the whole thing was nothing more than trying to show off for some girl. I’ve seen men die over less.
What had happened was that the Lawrence boy just walked up to me and dumped over my wheelchair. Same way the Beast used to.
Maybe Tory-boy still had a memory of that, or maybe he just couldn’t have anyone hurt me. I never asked him why he snatched the Lawrence boy up in his two hands, held him way up high, and broke him across his knee like a stick of dry kindling.
Everybody scattered as though they were running from a burning building.
I wasted a few precious minutes convincing Tory-boy he had to go back to our place and wait for me. He didn’t want to leave me out there all alone, and he couldn’t figure out how I could get home without him driving me. I knew he’d obey me, but I wouldn’t resort to that. I never let him see the urgency I was feeling, just stayed calm and reasonable, soothing him with my voice. He finally drove off.
Took me another hour to get people over there to drag the Lawrence boy into the right spot, close to that big dead-inside oak, then to loop chains around the tree and pull it down.
I paid well for that work. The men I called expected that, just as I expected them to forget they’d done it.
“That true?” Judakowski asked me. He didn’t like Lansdale knowing anything he didn’t know himself.
“I only know what people say,” I answered. “And you know how some people’ll say all kinds of things, just to be talking.”
I think Judakowski understood what I was telling him. In fact, I’m sure of it, because, instead of getting belligerent, he just said, “Your brother’s got some temper.”
“Tory doesn’t have any temper at all,” I told him. “He’s the same as any man—you act like you’re fixing to hurt his kin, he’s going to hurt you first.”
“What if he makes a mistake about that?” Judakowski said, watching me close, knowing he was baiting me about Tory-boy not being known for his intelligence.
I swallowed the bait and spit out the hook at the same time. “It might be he could do that,” I said, shaking my head a little, like the thought made me a little sad. “Wouldn’t change anything, though.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. If your brother were to make that kind of mistake, the man he makes the mistake on, might be he’d have kin, too.”
“I don’t believe there’s anyone around here who’d take it that way,” I brushed off the threat. “Folks know Tory-boy’s judgment might not be so good, so they always cut him some slack.”
“Is that right?” Judakowski said. It wasn’t a question, not with the sharp edge he put on it.
“They know me, too,” I went on, like Judakowski hadn’t spoken at all. “They know my brother would never hurt anyone out of meanness, so I’ve got a right to expect them not to blame him for making a mistake.”
“You do, huh?”
“Yes, I do. People know my brother, so that should guide their conduct. People know me, so that should guide their conduct as well. If anything ever was to happen to my brother, they know I wouldn’t have to be nearby to settle that score.”
“Hell, everybody knows that,” Lansdale said. Not to back me up, to push Judakowski away from crossing the line. Giving him an out.
I was never proved wrong on that.
didn’t spend any of the new money when it started coming in. Not at first. What I did, I invested it. First thing was to build myself a machine shop. We had to make the house easier for me to get into, and easier to move around in, too. For that, we needed all kinds of power tools to cut wood and metal.
But that wasn’t complicated work. Once I showed Tory-boy how, he could handle any of the tools. If I showed him a pattern, Tory-boy could cut it perfect.
My lab was another story entirely. I had some tools in there, too. Not for heavy work; just the opposite, in fact. The kind of work I couldn’t teach Tory-boy.
Even with the switch that would turn our satellite dish into a signal-sender for the string of blasting caps buried just under the surface out in the yard—buried so shallow you could see them sitting inside the clear Lexan box I built to house them—there was still the chance that enemies could get at us. That’s why the metal gates were wired. That’s why we had the dogs. That’s why …
I never underestimate people. What one man can build, another man can bypass. I didn’t need to stop enemies, I just needed to slow them down. They might get past everything I’d put in their way, but they couldn’t do that quickly enough to ever separate me and Tory-boy, or to stop us from getting down to our mine.
verybody around here knows something about mining. It’s part of our life, in our heritage forever, even though the only nearby mine had dried up years ago.
So when I told Tory-boy we were going to have our own mine—our secret mine—he got all excited and real quiet at the same time.
If I say it myself, I’ve got a microsurgeon’s hands. And my eyesight is so fine it’d put 20/20 to shame—I’d never needed glasses, even when I built some of my most tiny little devices.
I’d disliked working while lying out on the floor—I don’t feel completely safe unless I’m in my chair, I guess —but this time it was something that just had to be done.
And I had Tory-boy to protect me while I was doing it.
I’d have him lift me out of the chair and put me on the floor, facedown. Then I’d pull myself over to wherever I needed, so I could do the close-up work on the wood floor of our house.
You’ll find some kind of carpet or rugs in just about any house around here, but not in ours. We’d had Mr. Shane come over and lay in genuine wide pine flooring. He’s an old man now, retired on that little government check, but his hands still know what to do, and he was as glad for the cash as I expected he would be.
Or maybe what made him glad was me telling him he was the only one I’d even consider for the work I needed done. If he couldn’t oblige me, I’d understand, but it would be a deep disappointment, I didn’t mind saying.
I knew he’d tell people about the work he’d done on our house, but that didn’t matter. After all, I was a cripple, wasn’t I? Imprisoned in that wheelchair for life. It only made sense that I wouldn’t want to be sliding a wheelchair over rugs all the time.
My work was to undo some of Mr. Shane’s work. I was very slow and very careful about it. When I finally finished, you couldn’t see where three of the boards had been removed and then put back unless you got down there with a magnifying glass.
Tory-boy loved helping me with my work. And, this time, I wasn’t making up a task just to build up his confidence. I could never have moved those heavy boards myself without scratching them up bad, so I truly needed him.
