Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
HAVOC
Four in the mornin' behind a bait shop and there ain't a light on for two miles.
She counts the trees off the fence post out loud.
One. Two. Three. Then she paces it off from the post the same way she did in the dark three weeks back with a nineteen-dollar shovel, and she gets down on her knees in the wet and puts both hands flat on the ground like she's checkin' whether it's warm.
"Here."
I dig.
She wants to and I don't let her, and it's the only argument we have all night and I win it because her heel opened again on the walk in and there's blood in the sock and both of us know it.
Ground's exactly what she said. Turns to soup at about a foot and a half. Every shovelful comes up heavier than the last and the water comes in behind it faster than I can take it out, and the mosquitoes find us in the first two minutes and stay for all forty.
She holds the flashlight and don't say a word.
At two feet the blade hits something that gives instead of stopping.
Two contractor bags and a blue tarp, and the tarp's held with about nine wraps of duct tape she put on herself, and the whole thing comes up out of that hole with a sound I ain't ever going to forget.
She takes it before I've got it clear.
Down on her knees in the mud with it across her thighs, and she gets the tape off with her fingernails because neither of us thought to bring a knife, and she peels the tarp back and then the first bag and then the second one.
And there it is.
Black leather gone gray across the shoulders.
Twenty-two years old and it's been in a room in New Orleans and in a canvas bag and in the ground behind a bait shop and it smells like all three, and the top rocker says GALLOW KINGS and the bottom one says LOUISIANA, and there's a serpent between 'em with no crown on it.
Right chest, over the heart. Hand-stitched, white thread, gone yellow.
TITHE
She holds it up off her legs with both arms out straight, like a woman handing something to somebody who ain't there.
Then she brings it in against her chest and puts her face down into it.
I stand in a hole with a shovel and I look at the trees.
She doesn't cry long. Thirty seconds, maybe.
Then she sits back on her heels in the mud and wipes her face with a forearm that's got more mud on it than her face does, and she starts goin' through it.
Pockets first. Both outside, then the inside one on the left.
"Nothing," she says.
"You expected somethin'?"
"I've been imagining a letter for nine days. I know there isn't a letter. I've been imagining one anyway." She turns it over. "There's nothing in a man's pockets after twenty-two years in a stranger's house. Somebody went through this the day they took it off him."
She's got it flat across her knees now and she runs her hand down the front of the left panel.
Stops.
Does it again.
"That's not right."
"What."
"Feel it." She holds it out and takes my hand and puts it where hers was. "There. Left side, under the pocket. The right side's soft and that side isn't."
She's right. There's somethin' flat in the lining that goes about four inches by six and don't move when you push at it.
I get the flashlight down on it.
The stitching along the bottom hem of that panel don't match the rest. Whole cut's machine-sewn — even, tight, factory work from before either of us was born.
The bottom four inches of that left panel has been opened and closed again by hand, with a heavier thread, in stitches a quarter-inch long and crooked as a fence line.
Somebody did it in a hurry.
Somebody did it in a hurry and they weren't any good at it, and then they hung it back up.
"Do you have a knife now," she says.
"In the car."
She's already up.
We do it on the hood with the dome light on and the doors open and the mosquitoes comin' in.
I get the point of the knife under the first hand-stitch and it gives easy, twenty-two years of humidity in that thread, and I go along the whole four inches and the panel opens up like a mouth.
She puts two fingers in and brings it out.
One sheet of paper. Folded in four. Ledger paper, the green-and-buff kind with the printed columns, and it's gone the color of tea and it's soft as cloth at the folds and it's about to come apart in her hands.
She opens it on the hood one fold at a time.
"That's his writing," she says.
"You sure?"
"He wrote my name on the back of every school photograph I ever had." Her voice ain't doing anything. "Yes."
Here's what's on it, and I've read it eleven times since.
Top left, in a hand that runs uphill and takes up too much room: G.K. — SEPT '04.
Then the columns.
Three entries above the one that matters and I couldn't tell you what any of 'em are, four figures each, somethin' about a hauler and somethin' about Beaumont.
Then, on the fourth line down:
14 SEPT — ARCENEAUX (R.) — 164,000 — REC'D BY —
And that's where it quits.
The sheet was folded in four and it sat folded in a leather lining in Louisiana for twenty-two years, and the crease has done what a crease does.
Went soft, went brown, went through. There's a split in the paper right along that fold and the split runs straight through the receiving line, and where the name was there's a hole about the size of a grain of rice with the paper curled back from it on both sides.
What's left is the tail end.
Two letters after the hole.
g e
That's it. That's all of it. Everything before the g is gone.
Below it, in the same hand, pressed harder:
SETTLED. NOT TO BOOK.
And that's the last line on the page.
Lennox has both hands on the hood on either side of it.
"Fourteenth of September," she says.
"Yeah."
"He died on the fifth of October." She doesn't look up. "Three weeks."
* * *
Blitz has the sheet under a lamp with a magnifying glass off Tyrant's desk by nine that mornin' and there's six men standing in a half circle behind him.
Nobody says anything about me not havin' a cut on.
That's how it's been for two days. Nobody says anything about it and nobody stands quite where they used to stand, and Deacon has taken to puttin' a hand on my shoulder every time he goes past, which he has never done in eleven years and which is somehow the worst of all of it.
"Hundred sixty-four thousand," Ransom says. "In oh-four."
"That's a lot?" Blitz asks.
"Boy, in oh-four that's this whole yard. That's the buildin', the land, the first six bikes, and a lawyer for two years." Ransom's got his rings off. "That is not a payment. That's a stake."
"From the Arceneaux." Tyrant's got the book open to the front where the charter's copied out.
"Into somethin' that ain't in our book, 'cause I've read every page of oh-four twice since seven o'clock this mornin' and there ain't a hundred sixty-four thousand dollars anywhere in it. There ain't sixty-four thousand."
"It ain't our ledger," Warden says. "It's theirs. It's Gallow Kings paper."
"Then why's it in a Cottonmouth's linin'."
Nobody answers that.
"Not to book," Deacon reads over Blitz's shoulder. "Man wrote it down and then wrote down not to write it down."
"Which is why it's the only copy," Ransom says.
"Which is why somebody sewed it in a coat," Warden says.
Blitz has been on the receiving line for forty minutes and he is losin' his mind about it.
"It's two letters. Two! I can get an account off a routing string, I can get a name off a—"
"There ain't a routin' string."
"I know there's not a routing string, Tyrant, I'm saying that if there were—"
"Could be anything," Raider says from the door. "Ends in g-e. That's a hundred words."
"It's not a word, it's a name—"
"Then it's fifty names."
"George." Deacon's countin' on his fingers. "Paige. Rutledge. Savage. Legrange, there's Legranges all over Pointe Coupee—"
"It ain't a family name necessarily," Ransom says. "Man's writin' his own club's book. He'd have put down whatever he called the fella at the table."
The room goes still for about a second and a half.
Everybody thinks it at the same time and it's Blitz who says it, because it's always Blitz.
"Then somebody was there." He's turned all the way around in the chair. "Right? Somebody at that table in September of oh-four is still breathin' and he'd know who signed for a hundred and sixty-four thousand dollars, 'cause there wasn't but seven of 'em and two's dead and—"
"Blitz."
"—and Prez was there, and Scourge was there. Scourge would know. Scourge was there, he'd remember a—"
"Blitz."
Storm is in the doorway.
I don't know how long he's been in it.
Nobody heard him come down that hall, and I have been listenin' for that man's boots in that hall for fifteen years.
"Put it down," he says.
Blitz puts the magnifying glass down.
"Ain't nobody workin' on that page." Storm comes into the room.
He don't raise his voice and he don't come near the table.
"Not this mornin', not this week. Tyrant, shut the book.
Blitz, you don't run one number off that sheet — not an account, not a name, not a date, and if I find out you have, you and me are gonna have a different conversation than the one we're havin'. "
"Prez, it's a lead—"
"Twenty-two years." Storm's got both hands down at his sides. "Twenty-two years I've run this club and I have asked this table for damn near nothin'. I'm askin' now. Leave it be."
Nobody moves.
"Whose is it," Ransom says.
"It's the woman's."
"Storm—"
"It's her daddy's coat and it's her daddy's hand and it came out of her daddy's linin'." He looks at me for the first time. "Havoc. It goes with her. It doesn't stay in this buildin'."
Then he goes back down that hall, and this time I hear the boots the whole way.
Blitz is already talkin' before the screen door bangs.
Ransom tells him to shut his mouth and for once he does it.
And I stand there in a room with six men in it and a sheet of ledger paper on a desk under a lamp, and I take it up and fold it careful along the creases that ain't split yet and put it inside my shirt, and here is the thing I can't get past and won't be able to for a long while.
Storm didn't ask what was on the page.
He came down that hall and he stood in that doorway and he shut the whole room down inside of forty seconds, and not one time did that man ask a single soul what the sheet of paper said.