Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
LENNOX
He comes up the steps at four in the afternoon in a black t-shirt and nothing over it.
I've been on that porch since eleven. I know what's wrong before he's off the bottom slab and I don't say anything, because there's nothing to say about it that he doesn't already know, and because a man walking toward you without a thing he's worn every day for fifteen years does not need it pointed out.
He sits down in the other chair.
"They ain't handin' you over," he says.
"Okay."
"They ain't decided anything either. Four to two and Storm abstained, and it don't carry without him, so there's no decision and there won't be one till he makes one." He puts his head back against the boards. "Which means you're safe in the way a thing's safe when nobody's got around to it yet."
"And the rest?"
"Rest of what?"
I look at his chest where the cut isn't.
"That's a separate matter," he says.
"Havoc."
"Tyrant put it on the shelf under the charter." His voice doesn't do anything. "That's where they keep the two we've buried. Said till somebody says something different, and then he went out and shut the door."
The heron's out there. It's always out there.
"So I ain't out," he says. "And I ain't in. And every man in that buildin' is gonna spend the next while workin' out how to talk to me, and I'd rather they threw me out clean. That's the honest thing. I'd rather they threw me out."
"I know."
"Do you."
"My mother took eleven months to die after the doctor said six." I put my feet down off the rail. "Nobody knew what to say to me for eleven months. Everybody at that church had a casserole ready for a funeral that wouldn't come. I'd have given anything for one person to just tell me the date."
He turns his head and looks at me.
"Yeah," he says. "That's it. That's the thing."
Neither of us cooks.
We eat the last of the bread standing up and I take the second-to-last beer and he takes the last one, and around nine the power flickers the way it does out here when something happens somewhere else, and it comes back and then at ten past it goes off and stays off.
"That's the whole road," he says from the window. "Ain't just us."
"How long?"
"Hour. Sometimes till mornin'."
There's no moon. That's what I hadn't understood about this place until tonight — with the porch light off and the kitchen dead and no other house within two miles, dark out here is a physical object. I put my hand in front of my face and there is nothing there.
He finds a flashlight and a candle and lights the candle and puts the flashlight down without turning it on.
We sit on the floor with our backs against the front of the couch because the chairs are stupid in the dark.
And somewhere in the second hour of it, with a candle going on the milk crate and the window unit dead and both of us sweating through everything we've got on, he starts talking.
He doesn't do it well.
He is terrible at this. He starts three times and stops twice and the whole thing comes out sideways and out of order and with long holes in it where he waits and I don't fill them.
"There was a store," he says. "Corner of Bienville and 41, ain't there anymore, it's a tire place now.
"My daddy'd take me in there Saturdays. I'd be, what.
Six. Seven. And the fella behind the counter would come out from behind it when we walked in.
Come out from behind it, every time, like we were somebody.
He'd give me a Coke out of the cooler and he wouldn't take money for it.
And my daddy'd get his cigarettes and whatever else, and about half the time the fella'd wave it off, and my daddy'd say now Ray, I can't do that, and Ray'd say you can, you can, and we'd walk out. "
He stops.
"I was thirty-one years old," he says, "standin' in a man's kitchen in Vidalia, and he come out from behind his own counter at me. Same move. Exact same move. Came out toward me with his hands already up and a smile on and started offerin' me things.
"And I stood there and I thought about Ray and the Coke."
The heat is enormous. There's sweat running down the middle of my back and I don't move.
"My whole childhood," he says. "Every kind thing anybody in that town ever did for us. All of it was the same thing. That's what it was the whole time and I was twenty-five years late workin' it out."
"Havoc."
"Ain't finished."
"Okay."
"He knew." He says it flat. "That's what I got to say and then I'm done.
My daddy knew exactly what it was and he liked it.
He'd tell me. He'd say — " and here he does something with his voice, drops it, and it is the ugliest thing I have heard him do — "son, there ain't but two ways a man gets treated good in this world, and one of 'em you got to earn. "
The candle gutters and comes back.
"I believed him," Havoc says. "That's the part. Not when I was six. Now. I'm thirty-six years old and there's a piece of me that has never once stopped believin' him, and I built a whole life on it, and it worked. Fifteen years it worked. Ain't a man in three parishes don't get out of my way.
"And then you asked me about a crown in a motel parkin' lot and you weren't scared of me and I ain't had a solid day since."
I don't say anything for a while.
There are eleven things I could say and every one of them is a repair job, and he hasn't asked me to repair anything, and my mother spent four years being told she looked good today.
So I ask him a question instead.
"How'd you get the name?"
He laughs. There's nothing in it.
"You want it?"
"I asked."
"Twenty-one. Prospectin'." He turns the beer bottle on the floor. "There was a fella out by Krotz Springs owed the club and wouldn't pay, and Storm sent three patched men and they come back with nothin', and I asked could I go.
"They laughed at me. Twenty-one, hundred and sixty pounds. Storm said go on then.
"So I went out there and I took the man's front door off the hinges. Whole door. Took me forty minutes with a pry bar and I did it while he watched from inside his own house, and when it come off I set it down on his porch and I said I'll be back Thursday and I left.
"Never touched him. Never went in. He paid Wednesday.
Ransom came and got me the next day and drove me out there and made me put the door back on," he says.
"It took us three hours. He didn't say one word the whole time.
And when we got done he stood there and looked at it and he said, that's a hell of a thing you did, boy. Now you have to be him forever."
"And Havoc?"
"Blitz's daddy started it. He was just a patch then." He shrugs one shoulder in the dark. "It stuck. Everything sticks."
"What's the other one," I say.
He goes still.
"You said there wasn't another one. In the car, the first night." My heart is going and I keep my voice where it is. "You said not for you."
"I did."
"Is that still true?"
The window unit is dead and the house makes the sounds a house makes when it's cooling and there's nothing else in the world but a candle on a milk crate and the two of us on a floor.
"Elias," he says.
Just that. Nothing around it, no story, no explanation, and it comes out of him like a man setting something down that he's been carrying with both arms.
"Elias," I say.
"On the paper. My mama called me Eli."
"Where is she?"
"Two thousand one." He clears his throat. "Ain't nobody said either one out loud since."
Twenty-five years.
I sit on a floor in the dark and do the arithmetic on that, and I have to put both hands flat on the boards.
"Say it again," he says.
And his voice does something on the second word that I will think about for the rest of my life.
"Eli," I say.
* * *
The candle sits on a milk crate. Its flame is a single slice of orange in a black room.
The house ticks. The wood cools, popping in the still air.
Frogs call from the basin outside, layer after layer of sound.
The power went out maybe an hour ago. The windows are open and there is no breeze, only a warm, wet weight.
I’m on the floor. The rug is a worn red thing, thin enough to feel the boards beneath.
It stops a foot from the walls, but there are no walls in the way. The room is mostly empty, a crate and a rug and two people.
Eli sits across from me. His back is to the window, so the candle lights him from the front. The thorn work across his chest covers his shoulders in a dark tangle. Rings sit on his fingers, catching the flame. He is shirtless. Sweat glistens on his collarbones.
He hasn’t said a word since we came in. But earlier he put his patch on the table in the clubhouse.
He laid it flat in front of his brothers, and he told them his real name.
Then he brought me here, to this empty house, and he told me to say it.
I said it. He asked me to say it again. I did.
The second time, his chest caved in, a slow exhale.
I have said it five times now. Each time is a small earthquake inside him.
I say it again. "Elias."
His jaw tightens. A muscle in his shoulder jumps.
He draws a breath that catches in the middle.
He reaches across the space between us and takes my hand.
His palm is hot, a dry rough weight. He brings my knuckles to his mouth and presses a kiss there, without pulling his eyes from mine.
The rings along his fingers grind against my skin. He holds on.
He pulls me toward him by my hand, an unhurried tug. I rise to my knees and he rises to his, so we are face to face. The heat from his body rolls against me. He puts his other hand on the side of my neck. His thumb rests on the scar. He leaves it there, a warm pressure.