Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
LENNOX
Somebody has to move first, and it turns out to be me.
I put my arm down. I pick up the shoebox off the corner of the table where I set it without any memory of setting it, and I walk out of that room past nine men. Havoc says my name once behind me and I keep going.
The hallway is eleven steps long. I count them.
The main room is worse than the chapel was, because the chapel had nine men in it who were shocked and this has forty people in it who have had eight minutes to talk.
Nobody's talking now. The jukebox is between songs and I walk out through that whole place in the kind of silence you could put your hand on.
At the pool table Cricket stands up.
He does it all the way this time. Nobody else moves and he stands up anyway, twenty-one years old, chair scraping, and he doesn't say anything and he doesn't come toward me, he just stands there and lets me see him do it.
I get outside before anything in my face happens.
* * *
The steps go down off the front of that building in three concrete slabs with a crack running through the middle one, and I sit on the bottom slab with the box beside me and my elbows on my knees and I look at a parking lot full of motorcycles for a long time.
I'm not crying. I want that on the record too.
I've been unable to cry since about the second year of my mother's illness. It's not strength. It's a machine with a part missing. Everything gets in and nothing comes out and I sit there on that step running about a hundred and thirty and nothing at all comes up.
The door opens behind me and I don't turn around.
A bottle comes into the corner of my vision.
"It's cold," the woman says. "That's about the most I can tell you about it."
She sits down on the step above me with her own bottle and her elbows on her knees, mirror of me, and doesn't say anything for a while.
Late thirties, maybe. Dark hair up off her neck. She's got the rag still hanging out of her back pocket and she is in absolutely no hurry.
"Junie," she says.
"Lennox."
"I know it. Whole buildin' knows it now." She drinks. "You want the truth or you want the nice version?"
"Truth."
"Figured." She sets the bottle down on the step. "Storm walkin' out is the worst thing that could've happened in there."
"He didn't say a word."
"That's what I mean." She turns her head. "Honey, if he'd hollered at you, you'd be fine. A man hollers, he's still in the room. Storm ain't hollered at anybody in nine years, and I've watched him take a man's patch off him at that table with a voice like he was orderin' breakfast.
"He walked. That means whatever you said, he ain't got a place to put it, and that man has got a place to put everything."
The frogs are going in the ditch across the road.
"Now here's the rest," Junie says, "and I ain't dressin' it up, 'cause you look like a woman who's had about enough of that.
"There's three kinds of women in this world as far as that buildin' is concerned. There's ol’ ladies, and an ol’ lady wears her man's name on her back and it is not a joke and it is not a nickname and there ain't but four of 'em in this club.
There's club whores, which is me, and I've been one for eight years and I'll tell you flat I'd do it again.
And there's everybody else, which is women who come around for a weekend and go home.
"You ain't any of the three."
"I noticed."
"No, listen to me." She points with the bottle.
"You ain't any of the three and that is not a small thing, that's a hole in a wall.
Every rule that buildin's got is about which of them three you are and what a man's supposed to do about it, and you walked in there and you ain't got a category.
You know what men do with a thing that ain't got a category? "
"Nothing?"
"They fight about it," Junie says. "For a long time. And they get real ugly while they're doin' it."
The door goes again, and a second woman comes down and drops onto the step next to Junie with a bag of something.
"Okay," she says. "So."
"Gigi."
"Hi." She looks at me sideways. Twenty-seven, maybe. Dark curls and about four rings on. "That was the single most insane thing I have ever seen in my entire life and I've been here three years."
"Gigi."
"I'm being supportive."
"That ain't supportive."
"It's supportive adjacent." She holds the bag out to me. It's pork rinds. "Here. You look like a woman who hasn't eaten."
I take one, because I don't know what else to do with my hands, and the two of them sit there and eat pork rinds on a step outside a clubhouse in the middle of the night and let me be a person for about four minutes.
"Blitz has thrown up," Gigi says.
"He has not."
"He went outside real fast is what I'm saying."
"That boy's twenty-four years old and he's been sayin' a dead man's name at New Year's since he was twenty-two." Junie shakes her head. "Give him a minute."
"I'm giving him a minute. I'm reporting the minute."
Junie laughs into her shoulder, no sound coming out, and Gigi looks pleased with herself, and for the space of about ninety seconds I sit on a concrete step in a place where everybody hates me and I feel almost all right.
Then the door opens a third time.
Both of them stand up.
"That's ours," Junie says, and takes the bag out of Gigi's hand, and the two of them go back up the steps past a heavyset man in his forties with gray in his beard, and Junie touches his arm on the way by and he says something to her too low for me to hear.
He sits down on the step beside me and takes about a minute to do it, and when he's settled he pulls a cigarette out and doesn't light it.
"Ransom," he says.
"I gathered."
"You gathered." He turns the cigarette over in his fingers. There's ink to the knuckles and the rings are off, all of them, sitting in his shirt pocket where I can see them. "Alright. I'm gonna say some things and you ain't got to say anything back."
"Okay."
"I was twenty-two in oh-four." He looks out at the lot.
"Prospect. Bottom of everything. I swept that floor and I fetched beer and I did not go in that chapel one time until the March after, and I want you to understand that means I don't know anything.
Whatever you come here to find out, I ain't got it. I was a kid holdin' a broom."
"Okay."
"But I knew him."
Everything in my chest goes very still.
"Not well. Not like Storm did, not like Scourge did." He's still looking at the lot. "But he come around that shop maybe a dozen times that summer and I was the one they hollered at to get coffee, so I got the coffee, and he was the only one of 'em who ever said thank you to me for it."
I don't say anything, because if I say anything it will come out wrong.
"He was funny," Ransom says.
"He—"
"Real funny. Not mean funny, which is what most men in this life are.
He had a way of takin' the air out of a room when two fellas were about to go at each other.
I watched him do it to Storm twice and don't nobody do that to Storm.
" He turns the cigarette. "And he could count.
Lord, he could count. I've got his job now, you know that?
Same chair. I've had it fourteen years, and I have heard four separate men tell me I'm good at it, and every one of 'em said it like they were comparin' me to somethin'. "
He finally looks over at me.
"And he talked about you."
The parking lot goes soft at the edges and I put my hand flat on the concrete.
"I didn't know it was you," he says. "I want to be straight about that.
He never said a name that I recall, or if he did I was twenty-two and I wasn't listenin' to nothin' that wasn't about me.
But he had a girl and he said so, and there was a Saturday he come in wound up about somethin' and Storm asked him what was eatin' him and he said—"
Ransom stops.
He works on it for a second.
"He said his girl had beat every boy in her grade at long division and the teacher had called about it," he says, "and he could not decide whether to be proud or to go up there and fight somebody."
There is a sound in the ditch. Frogs and something moving in the water.
"That's true?" I say.
"I ain't got any reason to make it up."
"People make things up all the time for—"
"Not me." He puts the cigarette in his mouth unlit and takes it back out. "Girl, I got a daughter I ain't spoke to since she was twelve years old. I send her money every month and it gets cashed every month and that's the whole of it. Nineteen now.
"I don't make things up about people's fathers."
* * *
He's gone maybe ten minutes when Storm comes around the side of the building.
He doesn't come from the door. He comes around from the back, out of the dark by the fence line, and he stops about eight feet away with his hands down and doesn't come any closer.
I stand up.
My heel goes and I stand up anyway.
"Twenty-two years," I say.
"I know how long it was."
"Two hundred and sixty-four checks. I've got them in that box, and I've counted them eleven times."
"Two hundred and sixty-five." He says it without any weight on it at all. "One didn't clear in oh-nine. Bank's fault. I wrote another one."
Everything in me goes out like a light and comes back.
"You knew I existed."
"Yes."
"You knew my name."
"Lennox Marie," Storm says. "Born the twelfth of March. He carried a picture of you in the front of his wallet where the money's supposed to go and he'd take the money out from behind it and hand it to a man and put the wallet back in his pocket and never once move that picture."
The gravel. The frogs. Forty people inside a building thirty feet away.
"Then why?" I ask, and my voice cracks straight down the middle of it and I let it. "Why send money to my mother for twenty-two years and never one word? Not a letter. Not a card. Not one line on the bottom of one check that said his name out loud to me. I was eleven. I would have taken anything."
Storm stands in the dark with his hands at his sides.
"Because a word would've told somebody you existed," he says.
I don't understand it.
I don't understand it and he can see that I don't, and he does not explain it, and that is the moment I stop being angry at this man and start being afraid of him.
"Go home," he says.
"I don't have one."
"Then get out of Rosalie." He turns to go. "Tonight. Take that boy's car and drive north and don't stop in this parish and don't call anybody and don't come back here. There ain't a thing for you in this town and there ain't a man in that buildin' who can keep you if there was."
"No."
He stops.
"I said no." I'm shaking now, all of it, the whole thing coming up out of wherever it has been for four months, and my voice is doing something I have no control over and I keep going anyway.
"You sent my mother money for twenty-two years so you wouldn't have to look at me.
You put his name on a wall so you wouldn't have to say what happened to him.
And now you've had eleven minutes to look at me and you want me gone by morning.
"I dug him out of a room in New Orleans, Storm. He's in the ground behind a bait shop nine miles up that road and I'm the only person alive who knows which tree.
"So I'm going to go get him. And then I'm going to bring him in that building and put him on that wall under his own name.
"And you can be standing there when I do it or you can be somewhere else. I don't care anymore which."
Storm doesn't move for a long moment.
Then he walks off into the dark by the fence and I don't hear him go, not one step of it, and I stand there in a parking lot with my hands shaking and my heel screaming and forty people behind a wall, and I have never in my life felt so completely by myself.
Behind me the door opens.
I know it's him from the sound the boards make.