Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
HAVOC
She's standin' in the middle of that lot with her hands goin' and she don't turn around when I come out.
"Don't," she says.
"Ain't sayin' anything."
"Good."
So I don't. I stand there about four feet behind her with sixteen bikes and my whole life in a building behind me, and she gets it under control on her own the way she does everything, and it takes a while, and I let it.
"He knew my birthday," she says finally.
"I heard."
"He knew my middle name, Havoc."
"I know it."
"And he told me to leave town."
"Yeah."
She wipes her face with the back of her wrist, once, hard, like she's mad at it. Then she picks the shoebox up off the concrete step and holds it against her chest with both arms.
"Take me home," she says.
Not back. Not out of here.
I don't say anything about it. I open her door.
* * *
Storm calls church at eight the next mornin'.
Not that night. That's the first thing that's wrong. Twenty-two years and I have never once known that man to leave a thing sittin' overnight, and he did, and every man who walks into that room at eight o'clock knows it.
He's already in the chair when we come in. Same clothes as last night. He ain't slept and he ain't hidin' that he ain't slept.
Ransom doesn't sit down.
"Fore we start," he says. "Safe's eighteen short."
The room turns.
"Went in it at six-forty this mornin' for the pawn shop money Prez authorized Thursday.
Counted it twice and then I got Tyrant out of bed to count it a third time.
" His rings are off and lined up in front of him and he ain't looked at me one time.
"Duplessis's eleven from Friday and seven under it.
Gone. Carpet was flat and the door was shut and it was locked when I got there.
"Four men got that combination."
Tyrant's got the book open.
"Nothin' in it," he says. "No draw, no note, no page. Whoever took it didn't write it."
Deacon puts both hands on the table.
Nobody says a word for about four seconds, and I sit there in a room I've sat in twice a week for fifteen years and understand that if I let those four seconds turn into six, three men at this table are going to start lookin' at each other.
"I took it," I say.
Warden shuts his eyes.
That's the only thing anybody does for a while. Blitz has gone white around the mouth. Raider's leant back with one arm over the chair next to him and he's lookin' at the ceilin'.
"Say the rest," Storm says.
"Sunday mornin'. Eighteen thousand, out of the floor safe, and I didn't write it because there wasn't anywhere to write it that wasn't worse.
" My hands are flat on the table. I put 'em there on purpose this time.
"Four o'clock Sunday I met Lucien Arceneaux at a Chevron off the interstate in Gonzales and I put it in his hand for nine more days on the clock.
"He called me Friday. Not you. Me, on my phone, and he give me seventy-two hours to bring him her and the item or he starts sendin' his own people into this parish, and I bought him off with club money and I did not put it to this table."
"Alone," Warden says.
"Alone."
"You met that man alone."
"Yeah."
"And he took it." Ransom's got both hands flat now. "Eighteen thousand dollars against a twenty-two-year balance nobody's ever been able to name, and he took it in a gas station parkin' lot with no paper and no witness and no accountin' to his own house."
"He did."
"You understand what that means."
"I understood it when he said where," I say. "That's why I offered it."
Ransom sits back.
He looks at me for a long moment, and there's somethin' underneath his face that ain't anger, and it's worse.
"Boy," he says. "You just made yourself a partner to a man who's stealin' from Rémy Arceneaux. There ain't no un-doin' that. He's got a receipt on you now and it's got your face on it."
"That's the money," Storm says. "That's a separate matter and we'll come to it.
"Now the woman."
Tyrant's already turnin' pages.
"Fore anybody talks," he says, "I want it read, because half this table's about to argue somethin' that's already been decided by men who're dead.
" He finds it and puts his finger on it.
"Article four. Been in the book since oh-four and it come out of the Gallow Kings' book before that, word for word.
"A patched brother's claim descends to his old lady and to his sons. A brother's daughter holds no claim upon the club, its property, or its charter."
Nobody says anything.
"That's the law," Tyrant says. "I didn't write it and I don't like sayin' it out loud in this room this mornin', and I'd thank every one of you to notice I read it instead of quotin' it, 'cause I ain't got it memorized and I don't want it."
"Then say what you mean," Deacon says.
"I mean her daddy's name bein' on that wall don't give her one thing. Not by our own book. It's the whole argument half of y'all are fixin' to make and it ain't got legs."
"Say it plain, Tyrant."
"I am sayin' it plain—"
"No, you ain't." Deacon's voice comes up about two notches, which from him is a shout. "Say it the way it is. Say if she was his son we'd already be votin' on the other thing."
The room goes.
"Would we?" Deacon looks around the table. "Any man here want to tell me that's not so? If a twenty-eight-year-old fella come through that door last night and pointed at that wall and said Doucet, would we be sittin' here readin' out of a book at him?"
Warden doesn't say anything.
Raider brings his chair down onto four legs.
"No," he says. "We'd have had him prospectin' by Wednesday."
"That's right."
"Don't matter," Tyrant says. "It's the book."
"It matters."
"It's the book, Raider."
"Then the book's wrong," Deacon says. "And I've been sayin' words over men out of that book for eleven years and I'll say that too."
Nobody has an answer for it.
That's the part I want down. Nobody argues with him. Not one man at that table stands up and defends article four out loud, and not one man moves to strike it either, and it sits there in the middle of the room like somethin' dead on the road that everybody's drivin' around.
Storm doesn't say a word through any of it.
* * *
"Vote," Storm says.
"On what?" Warden asks.
"On whether this club hands that woman to Lucien Arceneaux. Yes or no. Nothin' else is on the table yet."
Warden goes first, because he always does.
"Yes."
The room makes a sound.
"Say why," Deacon says.
"'Cause I got one job." Warden's got both hands on the table and he's lookin' at the wood.
"I don't like it and I ain't gonna pretend I do.
But that woman has been in this parish eleven days and there's a man in New Orleans who knows she's here, and he knows it because our VP told him, and he has got eighteen thousand dollars of our money in his pocket and a reason to come get the rest.
"Every hour she's in Rosalie, this club is standin' in the open. Blitz's mama lives four miles from here. Deacon's got a sister. Junie sleeps over that bar.
"So yes. And I'll carry it, and I'll be the one puts her in the car, and I'll think about it the rest of my life. But yes."
"Yes," Tyrant says. "Same reasons. Plus the book."
"No," Raider says.
"No," says Deacon.
Blitz has got his hands under the table.
"No," he says, and his voice comes out about sixteen years old.
Ransom is quiet for a long moment.
"Abstain," he says. "And I want it wrote down that I hate it, Tyrant, put that in there too. Put Ransom abstained and said he hated it."
"I ain't writin' that."
"Write it."
He writes it.
Then everybody at that table looks down at the end of it, into the corner where the light don't get, and Mercy sits with his hands folded and his back against the wall.
"No, sir," he says.
Warden turns his head.
"Say again?"
"No, sir." Mercy hasn't moved. "I don't believe we ought to give her to him."
"You got a reason?"
"Yes, sir." He says it courteously, like a man answerin' about the weather. "If we give her to Lucien Arceneaux, then in about two weeks somebody's got to go to New Orleans and get her back, or else live with not gettin' her back. And I've been thinkin' on which one of those this table would pick."
Nobody asks him what he means.
I have sat at that table with that man for nine years and not one time has anybody asked him what he means.
Four no, two yes, one abstain, and mine.
"No," I say.
"Yours don't count," Tyrant says. "Not on this one. You're the interested party and it's in the book, article nine."
"Then it's four to two."
"It's four to two," Tyrant agrees, and doesn't sound happy about it. "And it needs the President, 'cause it's a standin' matter with an outside house."
Every man in that room turns to the top of the table.
Storm has not spoken since he said the word vote.
He's sittin' with his forearms on the wood and his hands loose and his head down about ten degrees, and he has been sittin' like that through Deacon and through Warden and through all of it, and when he finally lifts his chin his eyes are red the way a man's eyes go when he ain't slept and has not been cryin' and would like you to believe both.
"Abstain," Storm says.
The room does not make a sound.
Twenty-two years. I have sat at that table for fifteen of them and I have watched that man rule on a hundred things nobody wanted ruled on, and I have never one time — not once, not on a patch, not on a killin', not on a man's wife — heard him take himself out of a vote.
Tyrant's pen is up off the page.
"Prez—"
"I said abstain."
"Then it doesn't carry. Four to two ain't a decision without you, it's a—"
"Then it doesn't carry," Storm says.
* * *
I take my cut off.
Nobody's askin' me to. That's the reason to do it. I get it off my shoulders and I fold it once, the way you do, and I lean forward and put it in the middle of that table on the scarred wood where a photograph slid to a stop eleven days ago.
"I lied to this table for nine days," I say. "I lied to Warden in the lot on Friday and I lied to my President on my own back steps and I took eighteen thousand dollars out of a floor safe and put it in a man's hand in Gonzales.
"That ain't about her. Every one of them's mine and I did every one of 'em on purpose.
"So there it is."
I sit back.
And nothing happens.
Warden looks at it. Tyrant looks at it and doesn't write anything. Blitz has gone the color of a bedsheet and Deacon has his eyes shut and Raider is lookin' at me straight on with somethin' in his face I can't read at all.
Storm looks at it for a long time.
Then he stands up.
"Meetin's done," he says, and walks out, and he leaves it lyin' there.
Nobody takes it.
Nobody puts it back on me either.
Men file out past that table and every one of 'em looks at the thing sittin' in the middle of it, and Tyrant's the last one and he stops with his hand on the back of his chair, and he looks at me, and he opens his mouth and shuts it again.
Then he picks the cut up.
He folds it differently — proper, the way it goes in a locker — and he sets it on the shelf under the charter where the club keeps the two we've buried.
Not on me. Not off me.
"Till somebody says something different," Tyrant says, and goes out, and shuts the door behind him.