Why did I do it? Because I was meant to. Because that’s why I had been allowed to live. This was the whole of the affair in one simple statement.
Memory, of course, can be a dodgy thing: why else would my recall of the Benton Boys—and how Old Man Moss had brought their reign of terror to an end—have lain dormant for so long (forty years, to be exact), right up until that moment I saw what I’d at first taken to be a man—but quickly realized was not—ascending the tower crane just beyond our encampment?
The obvious answer is that a lot can happen in forty years. A man could go from being an innocent kid in Benton, Washington (population one-hundred and seventeen) to a scary homeless dude in Seattle—Belltown, to be precise—just as I had. But there’s another answer, too, one we don’t talk abo
