That’s How I Roll: A Novel by Andrew Vachss Page B

you
better
learn it.
    iss Webb was almost enough to make me believe there were angels on earth. She was the library lady, just out of the community college, not even twenty years old. Probably the only woman the County Library could find for the money it could pay.
    It wasn’t much of a library, and it was a few miles from where we lived, too. At first, I couldn’t get over there but every once in a while. Then the school-bus driver started dropping me off at the library in the morning instead of taking me the rest of the way to school.
    I realized that couldn’t have been good luck—I knew there was no such thing, not for someone like me. And, sure enough, I found out later that Miss Webb had talked to him. There wasn’t any point sending me to school when I was way smarter than the teachers. Besides that, some of the kids at school were as cruel as torture itself, and I couldn’t waste any of my mind-time on fixing them—I had to devote every second to coming up with a way to kill the Beast.
    I’d read and study at the library every day. All the books I ever asked for were science books—could be anything from physics to botany. Miss Webb never could have guessed what I was trying the hardest to learn from all that work.
    The bus driver would pick me up in the afternoon and take me to where we lived. I think he must have been sweet on Miss Webb. It was for damn sure that nobody was paying him to carry me andmy chair all the way to the door, both ways, like he did all during the week.
    I wished I had a way to show my appreciation for that, besides just thanking him each time—that was nothing but common politeness.
    I think the driver maybe even knew that. Because, when I asked him if I could know his whole name, he just said, “Charles Trammel, son. I mostly go by ‘Charley,’ but that there’s my proper Christian name.” I don’t think he would have said all that if he couldn’t tell that I felt bound to repay his kindness in some way.
    Everybody at the school knew all about me spending my days at the library. But nobody ever said a thing about it. Who would they tell?
    iss Webb was the first girl I ever gave a Valentine card to. The only one ever, to be truthful about it.
    She knew I could never bring books home—the Beast would tear them up just to be doing it. But I could bring the things she baked, and the big bottle of milk she always had for me, too, as long as me and Tory-boy could make them disappear quick enough. We got real good at that.
    Miss Webb never tried to get me to read anything special; she just left me on my own. But she could get books I wanted just by ordering them from bigger libraries. I loved her for doing that even more than I loved her for feeding me and Tory-boy the way she did.
    You are what you do. So I was able to love Miss Webb just for being herself.
    I was a little ashamed of that feeling. I know I should have been wishing that Mr. Trammel and Miss Webb would get married, but I just couldn’t make myself do that.
    I’m not even going to lie and say I tried.
    ’ve had this sense of balance inside me ever since I can remember, but I didn’t really feel it kick in until I found science. It was like a holy spirit, the way it beckoned me.
    Preachers will say they “got the call.” I don’t know how it was for them—or even if they’re being truthful when they make that claim. But for me, there could be no doubt. Science called: loud, hard, and sharp. A bright-white light calling, “You come this way, boy!”
    Igniting something that had been inside me all the time, as congenital as my disease.
    That does happen; I know it for a fact. Homer LaRue is the finest fiddle player there is, even if you’ll never hear him on the radio. Folks say he just picked up an old fiddle one day and made it sing. Every year, people would come back from Branson and swear they hadn’t seen anything to compare to him. And Homer LaRue never had a lesson in his life.
    Folks say the music