Here They Asked “Who”

Craig gets clapped on the shoulder — “look who’s back” — and nobody asks how it happened: “Here they didn’t ask ‘how.’ Here they asked ‘who.’” For three days he waited for a call from Jacob. “He’d hit when someone nodded; laughed when the others laughed; gone in first wherever it was beneath a captain to go.” There was a place inside him where he knew: “if anything happened, Jake would pull him out.” The phone stayed silent for three days. “It was a girl who’d pulled him out. With one call.” He understands the conclusion “as clearly as he understood the weight on a barbell: three years at Jacob’s side had been worth exactly nothing.”

The book gives Craig an inside point of view for exactly one page, and that is enough to see the mechanism: the sidekick (see “Trained Both Ways”) is held not only by fear but by faith in protection from above. When the protection doesn’t come, the loyalty doesn’t vanish — it looks for a new holder. The collar stayed on; the leash passed into other hands, and Craig is once again “half a step behind,” only now it is Priscilla standing behind him. The grievance of a man who was used and discarded is real; the danger is that it does not make him free — it makes him bought up by someone new.