That’s How I Roll

Later on, I told her I was a man who’d studied science all my life but it didn’t require a deep knowledge of genetics to see where Patsy had taken her looks from. I could tell she knew I wasn’t slick-talking, just telling the truth in a polite way.

“You’ll always be welcome here, Esau,” Kay told me at the end of the evening. “You and Tory come on back anytime you get tired of eating your own cooking.”

“I can cook,” Tory-boy immediately piped up.

“Oh, I’m sure of that,” Lansdale’s wife said, as she reached out and patted Tory-boy’s forearm. “I don’t imagine there’s much you couldn’t do if you put your mind to it.”

It was right there that I learned the difference between just having good manners and having genuine class.

acquired some of my knowledge late. But after working for a time, I came to understand that everything in life always boils down to principles.

Principles come in two forms.

Some you can never change, like a scientific principle that had proved itself, over and over again. That reliability test: x always causes y.

It’s the “always” that makes it science.

The scientific principle for making a bomb is as logical as not scratching a poison ivy rash. All you need is a container that isn’t strong enough to hold whatever you put inside of it. The stronger the container, the stronger that inside force has to be.

Another scientific principle is that accuracy will defeat firepower. One truly skilled sniper could wipe out a whole gang, provided he had good enough cover and plenty of time. A tiny dash of poison in a cup of coffee could take down a man powerful enough to bend a crowbar in his bare hands.

But inside that principle there’s another one, which you can’t see. No matter how powerful the explosive or how potent the poison, they’re absolutely worthless without a direct-delivery system.

You want to kill a powerful man with poisoned coffee, you have to get him to drink that coffee.

The other type of principles are those a man chooses to live by. No man can change scientific principles, but any man can change his own.

How else could there be traitors?

ansdale had made himself an enemy. He didn’t know who it was—although I suspect he had an idea—but he knew someone was committed to his death.

“It came out of nowhere,” he told me. “The box I was sitting on slid just a tiny bit, the side of my face felt this little bee-sting … and then I heard the crack of the rifle. I dropped and rolled behind some rocks, but it was another few seconds before I realized I was bleeding. Whoever he was, he didn’t miss by much.”

“You were in Grant’s Tomb?”

“That’s right,” he said. “Now, how would you guess something like that, Esau?”

So that’s why he wanted to meet, I thought to myself. Part of me was saddened that he might think such a thing. I had been a guest in his home, and I was sure he knew how much that had meant to me.

I promised nothing but truth in this record, so, even though it shames me to admit it, another part of me was offended. If I’d been sitting behind that sniper’s scope, I wouldn’t have missed.

But all I said out loud was “That box you were sitting on, sliding a little like it did, that probably saved your life. You said you didn’t hear the sound of the shot until after you felt it kiss the side of your face. That means it was fired from a long distance—half a mile, minimum. There’s no shortage of mountains around here, but they’re all covered with leafy trees, especially this time of year. That’s how I figured it had to be Grant’s Tomb—where else could a sniper get a clean shot at you from that far away?”

That calmed him down right away. I could see it on his face as he followed the trail I had reasoned out.

The trail actually started about fifty or sixty years ago, depending on who you ask.

A big-time strip miner named Silas Grant had a vision come to him. Lots of folks have visions, but Silas Grant had piled up enough coal money to actually chase his vision down.

Gold, that was his vision. A vein of gold so thick it would take you a day just to walk across it. So much gold that it made the Mother Lode look like her baby.

Silas Grant spent his whole fortune trying to find that gold he saw in his vision. He bought up hundreds of acres, set up his mining operation, and built a whole little town around it. Years and years went by. Folks said the workers dug down so deep they could feel the heat of Hell.

But Silas Grant died without ever extracting anything but tons of rock so worthless that he even lost money having it hauled away. That’s why the folks around here call that spot Grant’s Tomb—Silas Grant was a man who worked himself to death digging his own grave.

When he died, that property was about all he left behind. There wasn’t any reasonable use for it—just to fill it in and level the ground would cost a thousand times more than the land was worth.

His family was rendered poor. Well, poor by the standards they were all used to. That made them so bitter that they didn’t even bother to put on the kind of funeral folks would expect from people of their standing.

For years, the ground stood fallow. The whole mining town ghosted out. All that remained was a bunch of rickety old buildings, a couple of looted trailers, and some heavy equipment that was rust-shut forever.

When Lansdale went and bought the whole site from Grant’s family, they thought he was Heaven-sent. He probably hadn’t paid all that much, but it was enough for them to leave here and start over someplace else. Someplace where they weren’t known.

Nobody knew what Lansdale wanted that place for, but it was no secret that he held meetings down there.

“So …” That was just Lansdale, thinking out loud. I kept quiet. I waited in that quiet because I knew he’d ask me questions when he got done with whatever he was thinking through in his head. That had happened so often that I’d come to expect it.

“So it could only be one of two things, then,” he finally spoke out loud.

I nodded. When he didn’t say anything else, I knew he was waiting for me to spell it out.

“Somebody’s camped up there permanent,” I said. “Built himself a hide he could live in for months, if he had to. All he’d need was restocking—supplies, food, batteries for his phone and radio, maybe stuff to read. And he’d have to be the kind of man who could handle being alone.”

Lansdale nodded. Then he held up two fingers, like making a “V” sign.

There was no sugarcoating the other possibility, so I just said, “Or one of your men is taking someone else’s money.”

“Or just plain talks too much,” Lansdale said. He shifted his body a little, and looked at me real close. “So that’s three possibilities, Esau. If you were a gambling man, which horse would you put your money on?”

“Those last two, you’re splitting the same hair.”

“The same? Come on. There’s a million miles between a man who will sell you out if the price is right and a man who can’t keep his fool mouth shut when he gets liquored up … especially around a woman.”

“Still no difference, really.”

“Meaning, if he isn’t camped up there permanent, that sniper had to know I’d be out there that day he took his shot. So, a traitor or a drunk, it still comes out the same?”

“The reason the sniper was in place doesn’t much matter—if he’d’ve hit you, you’d be just as dead.”

“I’m trying to be cold-blooded about this,” he said, “but I just can’t see any of my men selling me out. Or even talking out of turn.”

“That’s what doctors call a ‘rule-out.’ One of the football players from the high school takes one of those helmet-to-helmet hits. Knocks him unconscious. Even if he comes to on his own, even if he gets up and walks over to the bench, even if he says he wants to go back in, they’ll still carry him over to the ER.

“That’s why they perform all those tests—CAT scans and other stuff like that. They have to rule out brain damage. Some concussions, the brain actually bounces back and forth against the inside of the skull. You send that kid back to play too soon, he could end up talking like some of those old boxers do.