Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
LENNOX
Eleven hours is a long time in a house with nothing in it.
He's gone by nine. I hear the bike before I'm all the way awake and by the time I get to the front window there's dust hanging over the shell road and nothing else, and then it's me and the frogs and a heat that comes up through the floor by eleven and doesn't let go until dark.
So I search it properly this time.
Under the sink. Behind the tank of the toilet.
The kitchen drawers, all four, one of which holds sixty or seventy dollars in loose change and a set of allen wrenches.
No car keys. No spare to anything. He's got a coffee can up in the cabinet over the stove with about nine hundred dollars in it in twenties, sitting where a man leaves money when he doesn't think anybody's ever coming in his house.
And in the bedroom, in the drawer of the nightstand, under a folded shop rag, there's a pistol.
I stand there over it for a while.
Then I put the rag back the way it was and shut the drawer.
Here's the arithmetic, and I do it standing in a stranger's bedroom in my socks.
A woman walking out of a swamp with a stolen gun is a woman who has given every man who finds her a reason to do the worst thing first. It doesn't protect me.
It converts me. I go from a problem somebody has to think about into a problem somebody can solve.
The money I take. Two hundred, out of the middle, and I leave the rest at the same angle.
If I'm going to be a thief in this house, I'd rather be one on purpose.
Shell Road runs two miles to the blacktop, and the blacktop runs seven more to Route 9, and I've had all day to look at it on the folded map in his glovebox.
I go at four in the afternoon because I want the light.
That's the mistake. I know it's the mistake by the second mile.
August in this parish at four o'clock is a thing you can lean on.
The shell throws the heat straight back up into your face and there's no shade anywhere on that road because the trees are all standing in water twenty feet off either side, and by the time the drive's out of sight behind me my shirt's through and the salt's already coming up white on the strap of my bag.
Half a mile after that, the deerflies find me.
Nobody warns you about deerflies. They come in behind your ear and they take a piece out, an actual piece, and there's blood down the side of my neck by the third one and I'm swinging at the air like a crazy woman on an empty road in the middle of nowhere.
Two miles in, my heel goes.
I've got the wrong boots. I've had the wrong boots since Baton Rouge and I knew it and I did it anyway, and the back of my right heel is a wet mess inside the sock by the time I hit the blacktop, and I stand at that intersection with my hands on my knees breathing like something dying and look at seven miles of empty two-lane going off into the shimmer.
Two cars pass in forty minutes. Neither slows.
Four miles is where the light starts to change.
Four miles is where the road goes down close to the water on the left side and something moves in it that's bigger than a fish, and the frogs come up all at once the way they do, ten thousand of them, so loud it's like standing next to a machine.
Four miles is where I understand what I've done.
The mosquitoes come off that water in a column.
Not a few. It's like walking into wet cloth.
They're in my ears and my eyes and my mouth and I'm slapping at my own face with both hands and my heel is going and there's nine miles left and full dark in twenty minutes, and I have two hundred dollars and no phone and no water and I have not seen a house since I started walking.
I make it another quarter mile.
Then I sit down in the gravel on the shoulder because my legs quit asking.
The headlights come around the bend at eight fifty.
I know it's him before the car's close enough to be anything, because it's my own car, and I've been listening to that bad wheel bearing since Gonzales.
He passes me. Brakes. Backs up forty feet on the wrong side of the road and stops with the passenger window level with where I'm sitting.
Neither of us says anything for a while.
The frogs do all of it.
"Get in," he says.
"No."
"Lennox."
"I said no."
He puts it in park in the middle of a state road and gets out and comes around the front of the car through his own headlights, and I get up off the gravel because I am not going to be sitting down for this.
Standing up takes longer than I want it to.
"Nine miles," he says.
"I know how far it is."
"You'd have made four."
"I made four and a quarter."
"You'd have made four," he says again, "and then you'd have laid down in that ditch, and I want you to hear the rest of it.
There's a gator in that slough big enough I quit fishin' it in twenty-twenty.
There's men who run that road at night without their lights on and they ain't from the church.
And it is ninety-one degrees at nine o'clock at night and you have got no water on you, and you would have been dead of the heat before either one of those found you. "
"Then I'd have been dead from the heat."
"You—"
"You don't get to be angry about it." My voice comes up and it's the first time it has since April and it comes up loud.
"You don't. You took me out of a parking lot.
You put me in a house with no lock and no phone and no car, and then you went to work, and now you're standing in the road at nine o'clock at night explaining the danger to me like I'm a child who wandered off. "
"I'm—"
"I walked into a swamp on purpose. I did the numbers.
I knew what four miles was going to cost me and I paid it and I'd do it again on Thursday, and the only reason I'm sitting in this gravel is my boots, not my nerve.
" The blood's coming down my neck again and I wipe it with the back of my wrist. "So don't tell me what I'd have done.
You don't know one thing about what I'd do. "
He stands there in his own headlights with his hands down at his sides.
The bugs are going through the beams in a river.
"You're right," he says.
That stops me.
"Which part?"
"All of it." He says it flat. "I did take you out of a lot. I did put you in a house. And I ain't got a plan and you've known it since the first night, and I've let you stand there and say it to me twice now because it's true and I don't have anything to put next to it."
"Then let me go."
"Can't."
"Why?"
And that's the one that lands.
He opens his mouth and there's nothing behind it. I watch it happen. A man who has an answer gets the first sound out and then finds the words behind it, and he gets the first sound out and there's nothing there at all, and his hand comes up off his side and does something and goes back down.
"Don't know," he says.
"You don't know."
"No."
"That's it? That's the whole—"
"I said I don't know." Louder. And then quieter, and worse.
"Nine days ago I'd have made a phone call from that lot before the engine cooled.
I've made a hundred of 'em. And I sat there with my thumb on it and I could not do it, and I have gone over it every night since and I cannot tell you why, and I would very much like to be able to. "
The frogs.
"That's the most honest thing you've said to me," I say.
"It ain't worth much."
"No. It isn't."
He gets the first aid kit out of the trunk, which surprises me, because nothing else in his life suggests he'd own one.
I sit sideways in the passenger seat with the door open and both feet on the gravel and he crouches down in the road in front of me with the flashlight in his teeth.
He takes the boot off.
The sock comes with it and I make a sound I'd rather not have made and he doesn't say anything about it. He pours water over it from a bottle, and the alcohol goes on, and I put my hand flat on the roof of my own car and hold on and count to twenty.
He works with his head down. Big hands, and slow, and the rings catch the light.
Nobody's touched me since April.
I want to be clear about the order it happens in, because it matters. It isn't the man. It's the hands, and the fact that they're careful, and I have been so completely alone for four months that my whole body comes up off the floor of my chest to meet the first careful thing that's come near it.
He tapes the gauze and looks up.
And he's right there, close enough that I can see the mark inked at the corner of his eye, and something goes through his face that I haven't seen on it before — the first honest expression the man's had all night, and it isn't gentle at all.
His hand's still on my ankle.
Everything in me leans about an inch.
"No," I say.
He's gone before the word's finished.
Not a step. He comes up off the ground and back and he's four feet away with both hands open at his sides, and it happens so fast that the air moves, and it is the single most convincing thing anybody has done in front of me in a decade.
He turns and puts both hands on the roof of the car and stands there with his head down.
I can see his back going. Once, hard, and then he gets ahold of it.
"Get in," he says. "Please."
That word costs him something. I hear it cost him.
I get in.
He shuts my door for me, which I do not ask him to do, and walks around the front through the headlights, and we drive nine miles back in the dark without either one of us saying a word.
At the house he pulls the drive and cuts the engine and the frogs come in through the vents.
"Coffee can," he says.
"I took two hundred."
"I know what you took." He gets out. "Take the rest of it tomorrow if you want. It ain't the money keepin' you here and both of us know it."