Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LENNOX
His hand is worse now than it was before.
Two knuckles opened to the bone and a third one flapped, and there's grit in all of it, and he sits down in the dock chair when I tell him to and puts it out over the arm and looks off at the water while I work like a man having a tooth done.
The kit's still in the trunk of my car. I get it. I get the bottle of water too, and I pour it over the whole hand first, and he doesn't make a sound, and the runoff comes off the arm of the chair pink onto the boards.
"You need stitches in this one."
"No."
"That's not an opinion, it's a hole."
"Then tape it."
"I'm going to tape it and it's going to open again the first thing you do tomorrow, and then you'll have a hole with dirt in it, in August, in a swamp." I hold the alcohol up. "This is going to hurt."
"Go on."
It hurts. His whole arm locks and the chair creaks and he keeps looking at the water.
Two nights ago he was on his knees in the road doing this for me and I sat there hanging onto the roof of my own car and counting to twenty, and neither one of us says anything about it, and both of us know.
"Who was it?"
"Nobody."
"Somebody's face did this."
"Door frame did it."
I stop.
"You hit a door frame."
"Man's door frame. He was in front of it.
" He turns his head then and looks at me straight on for the first time since I came out here.
"He'd paid. All of it, counted it out on his own rail, and we were square and he knew we were square, and I put him up against his own house anyway. There's a kid in there. She heard it."
I don't say anything.
"Fifteen years," he says. "A man pays, nothin' happens to him. That's the arrangement, that's the whole business. If it ain't true then I'm just some fella hurtin' people, and there's a hundred of them between here and Houston who'll do it for less than I cost."
"So why'd you do it?"
"Don't know."
"You keep saying that."
"'Cause I keep not knowin'." He pulls the hand back and looks at it.
"You want the honest thing, it's been happenin' since the parkin' lot.
I do somethin' and then I'm standin' there after lookin' at it like I watched somebody else do it.
Told a man in New Orleans a story today I built out of nothin' while my mouth was already movin'.
Lied to Storm on my own back steps and it came out smooth as anything.
Lied to Warden this mornin' and he knew it and told me so. "
Wind comes up off the water and turns the leaves over.
"I've been the same man for fifteen years," he says. "Everybody in that buildin' can tell you what I'll do in a room before I walk in it. Nine days now I couldn't tell you myself."
He says all of it looking at his own taped hand.
Not at me. It doesn't occur to him to say it at me — that's the part that gets under my ribs and stays there. He isn't confessing to a woman. He's a man who has run out of floor and has said it out loud in a direction because the alternative was saying it into the dark.
"Six days," I say.
"Yeah."
"Since the parking lot."
He goes still.
And I watch him arrive at it about four seconds after I did, and I watch him decide not to say it, and the frogs come up loud out of the black.
Here's what I want on the record, because I've been keeping a record my whole life and it has never once helped me.
He does not touch me.
He sits in that chair with his taped hand on his knee and he does not stand up, does not lean, does not put a single thing in the air between us.
Two nights ago in the road he came off the ground and away from me so fast it moved the air, and he has not been within three feet of me since without there being a reason made of gauze or a doorway.
I've been in a room with a man who wanted something. I know what that room feels like.
This is not that room, and it's the reason I do what I do next.
"Havoc."
"Yeah."
"Look at me."
He does.
"I want you to hear all of it before you say anything, because I'm going to say it once and then I'm going to be very embarrassed for a while.
" My heart is going about a hundred and thirty and my voice is flat as a table, and I have never been so grateful for this stupid broken body in my life.
"I've been in your house six days. You took me out of a parking lot.
I'm not confused about any of that and I'm not going to sit here later and tell you I was. "
"Lennox—"
"I said all of it."
He shuts his mouth.
"Nobody has touched me since April. Nobody.
My mother died on a Tuesday and after the funeral I stood in a kitchen and shook forty people's hands and that's the last time anybody put a hand on me on purpose until you crouched down in a road and took my boot off.
" The wind again. "So some of this is that.
I want you to know I know it. I'm not going to pretend I've been swept away by anything, because I haven't, I'm thirty-three and I've been awake the whole time. "
"Alright."
"And the rest of it isn't that." I make myself keep looking at him. "The rest of it is you, and I've had six days to talk myself out of it and it hasn't taken, and I'm tired. I'm so tired of being careful. Careful is what I did for four years and it bought me a shoebox."
He hasn't moved.
"So I'm going to ask you a question," I say. "And you're going to answer it, and whatever the answer is, tomorrow we're both going to get up and go back to being whatever this is. Do you want me to go inside?"
The frogs.
"Say the question straight," he says.
"Do you want this."
"Yes."
No pause on it. Not a half second. It comes out of him the way something comes out that's been sitting behind a man's teeth for six days.
"Then get up," I say.
He gets up.
And the careful thing goes out of him somewhere between the chair and me, and I want that on the record too, because I saw it happen and I wanted it to.
We don't make it out of the doorway.
My back goes into the frame and the whole house takes it, and I think about the door frame he told me about eleven minutes ago and then I stop thinking about anything at all.
His mouth is on mine and his good hand is in my hair at the back and the taped one is at my hip, and neither of us is gentle, and neither of us was ever going to be.
He tastes like coffee gone cold.
Some sound comes out of me I've never made.
"Say it again," he says against my mouth. "Say it out loud, Lennox, I ain't—"
"Yes."
"Say the whole—"
"Yes. Now shut up."
The shirt goes over my head and my hands are hauling at his belt and I have never once in my life been this person, the one who wrecks a doorway with a man she's known nine days, and the whole time the honest part of me is standing off to the side taking notes and it's saying there you are.
He gets both hands under me and I'm up off the floor and against the frame with the wood cutting into my shoulder blades, and it hurts, and I don't say anything about it because I want to feel it tomorrow.
He says my name once and there's nothing left in it. No flat. No control. Nothing that man carries around in front of ten other men, gone, all of it, and what's underneath is so much rougher and so much younger than I was ready for.
Then it isn't a doorway anymore, it's a wall in a dark hallway, and it isn't slow, and neither of us pretends it's anything but what it is.
He holds on like a man going under.
I hold on harder.
Afterward we sit on the floor of the hallway with our backs against opposite walls and our legs tangled up in the middle because it isn't wide enough for two people to sit in it properly.
Neither one of us says a word for about four minutes.
There's a mosquito somewhere. The kitchen light is on around the corner and it throws a long yellow rectangle down the boards and it's the only light in the house.
His shirt's still on. That's what gets me. The whole thing happened and he never got his shirt all the way off, and it's hanging open with the cut over the top of it because he never took that off either.
He puts his head back against the wall and shuts his eyes.
"Well," I say.
"Yeah."
"That was a mistake."
"Yeah."
"I'm not sorry."
"Ain't asked you to be."
"I'm not going to be sorry tomorrow either. I want you to know that going in, because I know how men are on Tuesdays."
He laughs.
It's about half a second long and it comes out of him like something startled, and it's the first time I've heard it, and I have to look at the floor.
"Lennox."
"Don't."
"I got somethin' I have to say—"
"Then say it in the morning." I get up. I get my shirt off the floor and I put it on and my hands are not steady, finally, for the first time in four months, and I turn away so he can't see them. "Say it in the morning, Havoc. I mean it."
Because here's what I understand, standing in that hallway with my back to him and my heart going like a bird in a box:
Six days ago I could have told him.
I could have said my father's name is on your wall in a motel parking lot and been in that clubhouse by Wednesday, and whatever happened after, it would have happened to a stranger.
I can't do it now.
Not because I'm afraid of what he'd do.
Because now he'd have to choose, and I have just made it impossible for him to choose the way he's supposed to, and there is a man in New Orleans with a clock running and nine men in a building on Route 9 who don't know my name and one of them says my father's out loud every New Year's.
I did that. Twenty minutes ago, on purpose, with my eyes open.
"Goodnight," I say.
He doesn't answer, and I don't turn around, and I get all the way to the door of that empty little room before I hear him move.