That’s How I Roll

Around here, survival isn’t some skill you learn—it’s in all our genes. Nobody needed to be told to step aside when they saw the Beast coming. But not everyone stepped fast enough.

“Hard” isn’t the same as “mean.” We’ve got all kinds here. Some of the finest, most honorable folks are also the kind you don’t want to interfere with. But they don’t give off signals like the Beast did, so a lot of mistakes get made. And people die.

Death is always here. Black lung takes longer than a methane-gas explosion, but they end the same way.

There’s always hunters in the woods. The ones hunting for food aren’t dangerous, but those hunting for fun sure can be.

Everyone keeps some kind of firearm around. Most carry a knife, others keep taped-up lead pipes in their trucks. There’s whole barns full of decomposing dynamite.

The only difference between one Friday night and another is that they’re not all fatal.

But when they are, if the dead man left kin, you know there’s going to be more than one funeral.

Going to prison is pretty common. Coming out a better person than when you went in, that’s never been done.

There’s rock slides. Floods, too. Those are natural phenomena. You live here, you expect them. But just because a man’s found under tons of rock, or floating in the river, doesn’t mean his death was due to natural causes.

Folks drink a lot. Wives get beaten something fierce. Some of those wives can shoot pretty good. And some of their husbands never think it can happen to them, even when they’re sleeping off a drunk.

Any old man who tells some story about how the town was once prosperous, people just think his brain’s gone soft.

I’m not saying that there isn’t good in the folks we have here, only that it isn’t appreciated like it might be in other places.

There’s supposed to be good and bad in everyone. Probably is. But here, it’s the bad in you that’s more often the most useful.

Like the difference between climate and weather. Most folks around here don’t view a killing as good or bad —just something that happens, like a flood or a fire.

That’s why a whole lot of bodies never get viewed at all.

or a man like me, this is a good part of the country to do my work. I don’t care what stupid book you read or what silly TV show you watch, it never so much as occurred to me to enjoy my work. No more than it would occur to me to work without getting paid.

I did take pride in the quality of my work, but I never deceived myself that every death at my hands was justified, never mind righteous or noble.

I never saw myself as … much of anything, really. I was a crippled, cornered rat, trying to protect my little brother with whatever I could use. In the process, I learned a lot of things. But I never did anything without testing it first.

Not everything I experimented with was a success. A lot of that was my own fault. I spent weeks putting together what looked like a pair of clamps. The top clamp had a pair of hollow steel tips on its upper side. And a spring that would discharge venom from the fangs as soon as they closed down.

I knew the width of a mature timber rattler’s fangs. I knew how a pit viper delivers its poison, and how deep its fangs would penetrate. I practiced on different slabs of meat. Naturally, full penetration was easiest on fat, harder on muscle, hardest of all on bone.

Collecting some of that venom was no problem. Tory-boy could move faster than any copperhead. After all, he’d been training to move fast ever since he could crawl. Besides, the snakes would usually freeze in position, because that’s how they got their prey to come close enough for them to strike—camouflage.

But after all that work creating what I thought would pass any autopsy test as an accidental snake bite, I discovered that the chances of someone actually dying from a bite were pretty remote. In fact, snake handling was such a common practice—mostly Pentecostal, but other sects did it as well—that it was even outlawed in some areas. Some of the handlers had been bitten dozens of times, and were none the worse for it. Timber-rattler neurotoxin was designed for varmints, not humans.

So, even with all that custom design work, the only time I ever used my invention was on a man with an impressive potbelly and a known habit of going hunting alone. He claimed to have invented a 12-gauge deer slug that was as accurate as any rifle bullet, and he wasn’t giving anyone a look until he got it patented.

He had another habit, too. I don’t know for a fact that this habit would have bothered Judakowski under other circumstances—it wasn’t cutting into his business. But one of Judakowski’s girlfriends had a little boy who the fat man was bothering in a real bad way.

“It has to be an accident,” Judakowski told me. He didn’t believe in warning people off like Lansdale did.

The man’s name was Jonah. I didn’t know if that was first or last. Or even why Judakowski thought knowing his name at all would be useful to me.

By the time they found that Jonah, all my work to mislead an autopsy turned out to be needless. The copperhead struck so perfectly that its fangs hit a prominent vein on his forearm, and the fat man must have stepped into a bear trap as he tried to run for help.

It’s not legal to trap bears, so, the way the cops figured it, whoever set that trap had gone back to check it, seen Jonah caught in it, and faded back into the forest.

They did the autopsy anyway, but they stopped just about as soon as they opened him up—his heart had blown its valves, probably from a combination of pain and fear. No need to look further. He could’ve also died from loss of blood, but “accidental” was the only possible entry on the death certificate.

Besides, by the time someone stumbled across what was left of him, he’d been out there over a month, and various creatures had sampled his flesh.

“Worth every penny,” Judakowski told me as he handed over the rest of the cash he owed me.

I thought it was worth that much to him because his girlfriend would be so pleased with how he’d handled her little boy’s problem without going near the police. But it wasn’t even two weeks later that she disappeared. Her and her little boy, too—vanished without a trace.

lowing up those White Power defectives who had tried to take Tory-boy from me wasn’t hard. With all the advance notice I got from him about their big meeting, I was able to drop over a dozen of my little black helicopters on the flat roof of their bunker. I had the position dialed in; I only flew them real early in the morning, when it was still dark; and they hardly made a sound.

It was the worst kind of luck that the FBI had a man planted inside one of those groups that had come there that night. Like I said, they never would have caught me otherwise.

Why would it have been anything else but bad luck? Bad luck had been in charge of our lives from the very beginning. Me and Tory-boy were born under the most evil sign there was.

Don’t read me that speech about “bad choices.” I had all kinds of bad in my life, way before I had any choices.

Put it this way: once I began, I never minded killing any more than I had ever minded dying. So, if it hadn’t have been for Tory-boy, there’s no evidence that I would have turned out any different than I did.

But if it wasn’t for Tory-boy, I wouldn’t ever have gotten caught, either.

They call us—me and the others locked up with me—they call us “condemned men.” Some snarl saying it, others sob.

Neither changes a thing.

I once had thoughts about what could have done that—what might have actually changed things? If I hadn’t been born bad, if I hadn’t seen things no child should, if … if I had been a normal man, could I have courted the woman I came to know as Evangeline? Could I have married her?

Those thoughts almost killed me. I had to make a pyramid of them and set fire to it. Because I don’t lie to myself. And I know what I was really thinking, underneath all those dream-thoughts. I was thinking, what if Tory- boy had never come along?