Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
LENNOX
Sunday he's gone before eight and I have the house and the heat and one day left.
Monday. He said it out loud on a dock with his feet in the water and he didn't dress it up, and I've been carrying it since like something in a back pocket that keeps catching on things.
I make the bed. I wash the two plates. I sit on the porch with my heel up and the shoebox open on my knees and go through the checks again, which I have done eleven times now and which produces nothing new, and around eleven o'clock I hear a truck coming up the shell road.
It's not his car.
I'm off the porch and around the side of the house with my back against the propane tank before it's out of the trees, and I stand there with my heart going and my hands doing nothing, and it occurs to me while I'm crouched behind a propane tank that this is a very stupid place to hide from anybody who has ever seen a propane tank.
The truck door opens.
"Ma'am?"
A boy's voice. It cracks in the middle of the word.
"Ma'am, I got groceries."
He is about twenty-one years old and he is holding two plastic bags and a gallon of milk and he is wearing a leather vest with no patches on the front of it except one that says PROSPECT, and he is sweating through the whole of it.
"You can come out," he says to the yard in general. "I ain't — I mean I'm not anybody. He sent me."
I come out from behind the tank.
He looks at me and then immediately looks at the ground beside me, which I understand is a thing he's been taught.
"Cricket," he says.
"That's a name?"
"It's the one they gave me." He shifts both bags to one hand and puts the other out, then pulls it back, then puts it out again. "Sorry. Ain't sure if I'm — nobody said what the rules were."
I shake his hand. He nearly drops the milk.
"There's butter in there," he says.
"What?"
"Butter. He said get butter." Cricket looks down into the bag like it might have changed. "He called at seven this mornin' and said go to the Winn-Dixie and get butter and whatever else looks like food, and I said how much butter, and he said—"
He stops.
"He said what?"
"He said, how the hell would I know, Cricket. So I got four."
I make him come inside because it is ninety-six degrees and he has been standing in a driveway holding a gallon of milk for four minutes.
He won't sit down.
He puts the groceries away himself — asks me where things go, and I don't know, so we guess together and put the coffee in with the wrenches — and then he stands at the end of the counter with his hands behind his back like a soldier and won't take a glass of water until I've already poured it.
"Do you always do what you're told this fast?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Why?"
"'Cause I want to be there." He says it plain. No angle on it at all. "Ninety-one days. Then it goes to a vote and if it goes right I get the rockers and then that's it, that's the rest of it, that's every day after that."
"And if it goes wrong?"
He looks at the floor.
"Then I go back to my daddy's boat," he says.
He talks the whole rest of the morning.
I don't have to work him. That's the part I'm not ready for. I had four different ways lined up to get information out of a twenty-one-year-old and I don't use one of them, because he empties himself out on the counter the second somebody asks him a question and looks like they want the answer.
He tells me Tyrant fined him thirty dollars over rags and then amended the book so he couldn't win the same way twice.
He tells me Deacon cooks on Sundays and won't cuss, not once, not ever, and that Blitz has been trying to break him for a year and a half.
He tells me Warden has never raised his voice at him and that this is somehow worse than if he had.
He tells me about a man called Mercy in the way you'd tell somebody about weather that hasn't come yet.
"He's real polite," Cricket says.
"That's what you've got?"
"That's what everybody's got, ma'am."
And I stand there in that kitchen with a dish towel in my hands and I think: this is a child.
He's twenty-one. He's got a father with a boat somewhere down in the basin who probably wanted something different for him, and he is standing in a stranger's house on a Sunday morning delivering butter for a man who broke a hole in his own hand on Friday, and he would walk into that water out there if somebody at that table pointed at it.
I stop working him about ten minutes before I stop wanting to.
"Can I ask you something?" I ask.
"Yes, ma'am."
"The room where y'all meet."
"Chapel."
"You been in it?"
"No, ma'am." He straightens up an inch. "Prospects don't go in.
Nobody goes in but patched. Not women, not old ladies, not anybody, not one time in twenty-two years.
" Then, quieter, and he glances at the window like the house might report him: "I looked in it once.
Door was open when Tyrant went for the mail and I stood in the hall about four seconds. "
"What's in it?"
"Table. Chairs. And there's a paper up on the wall behind where Prez sits, in a frame he made hisself, and the frame's bad." He says it like a man describing a cathedral. "That's the charter. That's the seven that started it."
"You know the names?"
"Everybody knows the names."
"Say them."
He does.
And it's the second time in a week that a man has stood in this kitchen and said my father's name out loud to me while I hold my face still, except this time it's a boy with sweat rings under his arms saying it like scripture, and when he gets to the sixth one he stops.
He doesn't stop long. Half a second.
But he stops.
"What," I say.
"Nothin'."
"Cricket."
"It ain't my place—"
"I'm asking you a question in a kitchen." I set the towel down. "Nobody's going to fine you for it."
He works on it for a while.
"Prez says 'em every New Year's," he says. "The whole room's quiet and he goes down the list and we say 'em back. I've heard it twice now." He turns the water glass around on the counter. "Six of 'em he says the same. Same voice, same speed, like a man readin' a list off a page.
"Then he gets to that one and he says it different."
The refrigerator hums.
"Different how?"
"Slower. And he don't look at the paper when he says it, he looks at the table." Cricket shrugs one shoulder, and he's already regretting the whole thing, I can see it happening. "It ain't anything. I just noticed 'cause I was new and I was watchin' everybody."
"Has anybody else ever said anything about it?"
"No ma'am."
"Not one man?"
"No ma'am. And I ain't gonna be the one." He picks the glass up and drinks the rest of it in one go, which is what he does instead of leaving. "Reckon I should get on. Told him I'd be back by one."
At the truck, he stops with his hand on the door.
"Ma'am?"
"Lennox."
"Lennox." He nods to himself, filing it, and I watch a twenty-one-year-old put my first name away somewhere he thinks he might need it. "Can I say a thing that ain't my business?"
"You've been saying things that aren't your business for two hours."
"Yes, ma'am." He grins, and it's gone. "He ain't right. Havoc. He ain't been right in about a week and everybody in that buildin' knows it and don't nobody say it out loud, and Friday he came in and stood at the bar for an hour and didn't drink the beer he got."
"Okay."
"I ain't sayin' it's you."
"You're a little bit saying it's me."
"No, ma'am." He opens the door and stands behind it. "I'm sayin' whatever it is, he's carryin' it by hisself, and that's how men get got. My daddy says you don't go in the water alone even when it's shallow. Especially when it's shallow."
Then he's red to the ears and he's in the truck and he's gone, and I stand in that drive in the heat with the dust hanging and four pounds of butter in a refrigerator behind me.
Storm says six of the names the same.
He gets to my father and he slows down and he looks at the table.
Twenty-two years of checks. A name on a wall in a frame a man built badly with his own hands. A room no woman has ever been in.
And a boy who noticed something nine grown men have decided not to.
I go back up on the porch and I sit down in the chair with my heel up and I look at the water for a long time, and somewhere in there it stops being a question of whether I tell him.
Monday's tomorrow.
He asked me what I chose here for, and I said ask me Monday, and I am going to be sitting in that chair when he comes up those steps tonight, and I am going to tell him every word of it.
And then he is going to have to decide what kind of man he is in front of ten people who already think they know.
I did that to him.
The heron comes back around six and stands in the shallows and doesn't move, and I sit there and let myself be sorry about it for one hour, and then I stop, because being sorry has never once gotten a single thing done.