Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
LENNOX
The seat's back as far as it goes and he still doesn't fit in it.
He drives my car with one wrist over the top of the wheel, which is a thing my father did, and I hate him a little for it in a way that has nothing to do with anything.
The other hand stays on his thigh. He hasn't touched the radio.
He hasn't touched the vents. He got in, moved the seat, and started driving, and that's the whole inventory of what he's done since the parking lot.
There are seventeen dollars in my wallet and a phone in my back pocket he hasn't asked for.
That's the part I can't work out. He hasn't taken the phone.
Anybody who does this for a living takes the phone first, and he looked right at me put it in my pocket and said nothing, and I've been sitting here for six miles trying to decide whether it means he's careless or whether it means something worse.
My heart's been going since the ice machine.
It's still going. Ninety, maybe a hundred, hammering in the side of my neck where I can feel it against my collar, and my hands are folded on the lid of my mother's shoebox and they're perfectly steady, and the two facts sit next to each other and refuse to have anything to do with one another.
That's been the arrangement since April. The body does what it wants. I watch it from across the room.
"What's in the box?"
First thing he's said in six miles.
"Receipts."
"Receipts."
"You want to look?"
He doesn't answer, so I lift the lid off and hold it toward him with both hands, and inside there are four hundred pieces of paper rubber-banded into bundles of twelve and nothing else in the world.
He glances over. Half a second, maybe less. Then back at the road.
"Put it away."
"You don't want to check?"
"You'd have to be a special kind of stupid to hand me a box you had something in."
"That's an interesting way to decide things."
"Works out."
I put the lid back on.
Nine more miles of nothing. The cypress goes by black on both sides and the headlights make a tunnel out of it, and once a possum comes into the low beams and he brakes for it, which I find myself filing away and then resenting that I filed it.
"Havoc," I say.
His eyes come off the road.
"That's what he called you. On the phone. The kid."
"That's right."
"It's not a name."
"It's the one I got."
"It's a job description." I turn my head and look at the side of his face. "There's a difference between a name somebody gave you and a name somebody assigned you, and I know which one that is, and so do you."
He doesn't say anything.
The white line comes and goes under the car.
"What's the other one?" I say.
"There ain't another one."
"Everybody's got another one."
"Not for you."
Which is fine. It's fine. I've been told no by better men in worse rooms and it has never once slowed me down.
"Okay," I say. "Then here's what I'd like instead. I'd like you to tell me what happens at the end of tonight, because you've had ninety minutes to think about it and I've had nine days, and I'd bet the seventeen dollars in my purse that I've done more work on it than you have."
"Nothin' happens tonight."
"Something always happens tonight."
"Not tonight."
"See, that's not an answer, that's a man buying time.
You want to know how I know?" I shift in the seat so I'm facing him.
"Because if you had an answer you'd have given it to me in the parking lot.
It costs you nothing to tell a woman what's going to happen to her.
It's actually easier. Half of what you people do only works if the other person's already run the film in their head. "
"You people."
"Don't get delicate on me now."
Something moves at the corner of his mouth and is gone before I can call it anything.
We come up on the bridge over the bayou and the boards go under us in a run of hard flat sounds, six seconds of it, and then dirt again.
"You ain't scared," he says.
"I'm terrified."
He looks over.
"My pulse is about a hundred and ten and it has been since I saw you sitting on that wall and it hasn't come down.
" I hold up one hand, flat, in the light off the dash.
Nothing. Not a tremor in it. "It doesn't get to the outside anymore.
It stopped getting to the outside sometime around February and I don't expect it back.
So if you were counting on me to look how you're used to people looking, I'd let go of it, because we'll be here all night. "
He watches my hand.
He looks at it longer than a man should look at a hand while he's driving somebody else's car in the dark, and then his eyes go back to the road, and the wrist over the wheel comes down and both his hands go on it properly.
I've never in my life said any of that out loud to another person.
* * *
Route 9 comes up at the top of a slow rise and I know it before the sign, because the sky over the trees ahead of us has gone that dirty yellow that means sodium lights.
The salvage yard.
I sat in front of it twenty-four hours ago with my hands on this same wheel.
I can see it before we get there. Chain-link running off into the dark on the right, then the stacks, four cars high and crushed flat, throwing black bars of shadow across the gravel.
The gate. KINGS CUSTOM. And back behind it the long low building with every window lit and the lot full, and there must be fifteen bikes in it now.
He slows.
He does. He comes off the gas and the car drops down under fifty and I put my thumbnail into the side of my finger hard enough to feel it, because after everything, after nine days and a shovel and a wall in New Orleans, I am going to be delivered to the exact front door I have been driving toward since Wednesday, and I'm going to arrive in the passenger seat of my own car with a man's hand on the wheel.
I had a whole speech. It's ten sentences long and I've said it in the car and in the shower and out loud in a Waffle House parking lot at two in the morning.
His name is on your wall.
I get ready.
The turn comes level with my window.
And he doesn't take it.
The gate goes by and the light goes by and the sound of the music comes through the glass for about a second and a half and then it's behind us, and the road goes dark again, and my father's charter is hanging on a wall eleven hundred feet back and getting further away at fifty-five miles an hour.
In the side mirror the yellow shrinks to a smear and then to a dot and then the trees take it.
"You didn't call anybody," I say.
He doesn't answer.
"At the motel. You had your hand on the phone for a full minute and you didn't make a call, and now you've gone past your own gate at fifty-five with a woman in the car you were sent to collect.
" My voice is coming out even, which is another thing I don't control anymore.
"Nobody in that building knows my name."
Nothing. Both hands on the wheel.
"Which means one of two things." I turn back and look out the windshield, because I don't need to watch him for this part. "Either you're not very smart, and I've been in this car ninety minutes and you're not stupid.
"Or you've got a problem."
The road runs out ahead of us into the dark and there's nothing on either side of it but water.
"And if you've got a problem," I say, "then so do I, and I'd like to know its name before we get wherever we're going."