“Now you’re speaking truth,” said Cecily Bob.

“You’re just the best lackey old Boss Authority ever had, ain’t you?” said Pop. “You’ve come a long way for a no-good bootlicker.”

Cecily Bob kicked my daddy again. Then he bent down and spoke right in my daddy’s ear.

“Maybe I get a little too excited with this here blade and you don’t make it there at all, how’s about that?” Cecily Bob chuckled and slipped a gag over Pop’s mouth. “Now that’s much better ain’t it? This here’s for your protection, Davey my boy. It’ll keep you from saying something that might get your throat slit.”

I was waiting any moment for Pop to wheel around and choke the man out with his ropes. You think being tied up could stop my daddy? No sir. I was waiting on him to spring to his feet and headbutt the man’s teeth in, or maybe wrap him up with his legs and snap his neck. But no, Pop just lay there. I couldn’t understand why. Pop wouldn’t so much as kick the man in the shins.

That’s when I realized it was because of me. Pop was lying there, not fighting back at all, to keep the men from finding me out. I wasn’t about to let Pop get kidnapped just because I showed up on the wrong durn day, no sir. I crouched in the loft, about to spring on Cecily Bob. I figured at the least I could bite a hole in his neck, give my daddy time enough to split that sucker in half.

But Pop shot me a look from where he lay on the ground. Our eyes met. His were fierce, and they issued out one single command: Don’t you move, Buddy boy. Remember, you promised. You gave your word.

My word. That’s something Pop held highly, I remembered that, as do all the best hustlers and Parsnit players. A person’s only as good as their word.

“You got to pay your debts so’s you can always have credit at the table,” Pop always said. “A man with no credit is a man with no game. Your word’s got to be your bond.”

“So what happens when the debt’s too high?” I asked him once. “Do you go to jail?”

“Nah, Buddy boy,” said Pop. “You’re forgetting the very biggest rule of Parsnit there is. You remember it?”

“Yessir.” I nodded.

“Tell it to me.”

I coughed. “The biggest rule of Parsnit is to make sure there ain’t any way for you to lose in the first place.”

“That’s my boy,” he said, mussing my hair.

I wasn’t hardly five years old and he was telling me this stuff. It was now so real to me it was like I had it deep under my fingernails. There was no way of getting it out of me. So I kept up in the loft and I made my word my bond and I didn’t leap out and wring Cecily Bob’s neck.