Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
LENNOX
He sits down like a man being lowered.
Not into the chair — onto the top step, with his back against the post and one leg out straight, and he sets the envelope down on the boards beside him without looking at it. It's a bank envelope. It's fat. I don't ask.
The porch light's got every moth in the parish working it.
"How's the foot," he says.
"Don't."
"It's a question."
"It's a coward's question and you're not a coward, so don't."
His head goes back against the post.
For a while there's nothing but the frogs and the moths hitting the bulb, and I sit there with my mother's shoebox shut in my lap and I let him have it, because I've watched a person get to the edge of saying something enough times to know the sound of the run-up.
"I hurt a man today who paid me," he says.
"Okay."
"You don't know what that means."
"Then tell me what it means."
"It means I broke the only piece of it that ain't rotten.
" He's looking straight out at the water and there's nothing on his face at all.
"Fella owed eleven thousand. He had it. Counted it on his own porch rail and it was all there and he'd got it same as he said he would, and that's the whole arrangement — you pay and nothin' happens to you.
That's what I sell. If a man pays and I put hands on him anyway then I ain't a message, I'm somebody who likes it. "
"Did you like it?"
"No."
"Then why?"
"That's the part," he says.
His right hand comes up off his knee and turns over, and the knuckles are split across two of them and gone purple, and he looks at it the way you'd look at something you found in a drawer.
"I got a little girl callin' through a door for her daddy in my head," he says, "and I cannot tell you one reason it happened."
I can.
I could tell him in nine words and he'd hate me for it, so I don't.
"There's somethin' else," he says.
"I figured."
"Lucien Arceneaux called me at eleven forty this mornin'."
The frogs go on.
"He gave us seventy-two hours." He's still looking at the water. "You and the thing you took, at an address he'll send. After that he stops askin' and he starts sendin' his own people into this parish to find you. That's Monday."
"Monday."
"Monday."
I count it out. Friday night. Saturday, Sunday. Monday.
Sixty hours, near enough, and he's had eleven of them in his pocket already.
I set the shoebox down on the boards and I stand up, and my heel goes and I don't care.
"Eleven forty," I say.
"Lennox—"
"You've had it since eleven forty this morning. You went to work. You collected eleven thousand dollars. You put a man through a door and you drove nine miles home and you sat on this step and asked me about my foot."
"Yeah."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." He gets up. Slow, off the post, and he's a full head over me and he doesn't use one inch of it. "That's exactly what I did."
"Why?"
"'Cause I've been tryin' since noon to think of the arrangement of words that gets me from your porch step to the middle of it, and I ain't found it, and I've been standin' in the same spot in my own head all damn day."
"Then say it badly."
"I don't know how to—"
"Say it badly, Havoc." My voice comes out of me like something tearing.
"You think I need it pretty? Four months ago I sat in a room and watched my mother's mouth go and she couldn't get her own daughter's name out and I sat there and I waited for it.
I have all the patience in the world for a man who says a thing badly.
What I have got no patience left for at all is a man standing in front of me deciding what I can hold. "
The moths.
"I told him you stashed it," he says.
"What?"
"On the phone. He wanted a reason we hadn't brought you in and I gave him the true one, that you buried it before you got here and grabbin' you don't get it back.
" He says it flat, all the way through, and I watch it cost him.
"So now the man huntin' you knows the only thing keepin' you breathin', and he knows it because I put it in his ear.
That's what I did with my eleven hours."
I stand there on a ruined heel on a porch in the dark.
"That's why you hit him," I say.
"What?"
"The man who paid. That's why."
And his face does the thing it did in the road. The first sound comes out and there's nothing behind it.
Here's the part I need to be honest about, because I've thought about it a great deal since and I have never once been able to make it anybody's fault but mine.
I close the distance.
He doesn't. He's standing at the top of his own steps with his hands down and his back to a post and I have eight feet to cover and I cover all eight of them, and when I get there I take a fistful of his shirt in my right hand and I don't do anything with it.
His right hand is hanging down by his leg and it's wet, and it's been wet the whole time we've been standing out here, and I have been looking at his face.
"Your hand."
"It's nothin'."
Two knuckles opened and a third one gone soft-looking, blood down past the wrist bone, and he tells me it's nothing the way a man tells you the sky is blue.
"We're doing that later," I say.
"Alright."
"Say no," I say.
"Lennox."
"You've got one and you can use it. I did." My hand's shaking on his shirt, which is new, which is the first thing that's got through to the outside since February. "So say it."
He looks down at me for a long moment.
"No's the only word I got left," he says, "and I ain't gonna waste it lyin'."
I pull.
He comes off the post like the house pushed him.
The kitchen doorframe takes my shoulder blades and I put my mouth on his and he makes a sound into it that isn't anything a man decides to make.
Both his hands come up and stop. Wide open, an inch off me, hanging there.
"Put them on me," I say.
"Lennox—"
"I'm saying it out loud, and I'm not drunk, and nobody's got a hand on me but me. Put them on me."
He does.
And it's not gentle, and I don't want it to be.
He gets me up off the floor, and my back goes flat against the wall between the kitchen and the hall, and my legs get around him and the whole house moves with it, the same way that man's house moved this afternoon, and I think about that for exactly as long as it takes to stop thinking about anything.
His beard's rough on my throat. His hands are rougher. The rings drag, and one of them leaves something on my shirt, and neither of us stops.
I get his shirt over his head, and my nails go down his back, and he makes that sound again, deeper this time, into the side of my neck. Sweat on both of us, and it's still ninety degrees in this house at ten at night and the air conditioner is a joke somebody told in 1991.
"Look at me," I say.
He does. He gets his forehead against mine, and his eyes are open, and there's not one single thing hidden in them, not one, and that's worse than anything else that happens.
It's fast, and it's ugly, and both of us are furious the entire time, and none of it is aimed at each other.
Mine's aimed at a woman who buried her mother and then buried her father twice and walked four miles into a swamp because she couldn't sit still.
His is aimed at whatever's in there that he can't put a name to.
We take it out on each other because neither one of us can reach the actual thing.
At the end, he's got one hand flat on the wall by my head and his whole arm's shaking and he says my name once, and it comes out of him ruined.