Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
LENNOX
Eleven stitches in my left forearm, and the woman who does them is about my age and has a Sharpie behind her ear and does not ask me one question.
"Bar fight?"
"Something like that."
"Mm." She ties off. "Keep it dry for four days. There's a man out in that hallway with no eyebrows who's told me twice you're with him."
"That's not—"
"Honey, I know," she says. "He's told everybody in this building he's with everybody."
The waiting room on the second floor holds about thirty people, and by two in the morning there are forty in it.
Nobody from the club sits down.
That's the first thing I notice and I don't understand it until later.
There are chairs, and there are men who have been on their feet since eleven o'clock, and not one of them takes one.
Warden stands at the end of the hall with his back to a wall where he can see both doors.
Tyrant stands. Raider stands out by the elevators.
Deacon holds up an entire corner of the room by himself with his arms crossed and his chin down.
Cricket sits, because Cricket has been made to sit by a nurse.
He's got his left forearm wrapped from wrist to elbow and a burn on the back of that hand they've done something to that's shiny, and every single person who comes through that waiting room gets shown it.
"It's second degree," he tells a woman waiting on her husband's gallbladder. "They said second. Third is when you can't feel it and I can feel it, so."
"Well, bless you."
"I pulled two people out."
"I heard that."
"Did you?"
"Everybody in here's heard it, baby."
He sits back, satisfied, and about ninety seconds later, he's up showing it to a security guard.
I watch a room full of terrifying men let a twenty-one-year-old boy do this for four straight hours, and not one of them tells him to stop.
Around three, Ransom comes down from surgery and stands in the middle of the room with his rings off and starts counting.
Not for anybody. That's what's awful about it. He does it out loud with his hands going like he's got an adding machine in front of him and there's nobody standing in front of him at all.
"The shop's gone. Whole east bay, the lift, both compressors.
The office is gone and the paper in it's gone and that's eleven years of Marisol's filing.
" He's looking at a spot on the wall. "Yard's a total loss on the east side and the fence is down two hundred feet and we can't claim any of it, 'cause the adjuster comes out and sees accelerant on a scrapyard owned by a motorcycle club and there ain't a company in this state that writes that check.
"Fang's got no front wall. That's four weeks minimum and no income while it's shut and Junie's got eleven people on that schedule.
"Marisol's got smoke in her lungs at sixty-one and her insurance is through us, which means it's through nothin'.
"And that boy up there's got a hole in him."
He stops.
"Six months," he says. "That's what it took to take six months off this club, and it cost them a truck and one man they left at the gate."
"Ransom." Deacon, from the corner.
"I'm doin' the numbers."
"You're doin' 'em out loud in a room with civilians in it."
Ransom looks around the waiting room like he's just arrived in it.
Then he puts his rings back on, one at a time, and goes and stands by the window.
At four in the morning, Deacon asks the nurse if he can go up.
She says two at a time and he says he only needs one and he's back down in eleven minutes.
Somebody asks him how the boy is.
"Sleepin'."
"You say somethin' over him?"
"I did."
"He hear it?"
"Don't matter if he did," Deacon says, and sits down for the first time all night, and puts both hands flat on his knees and looks at the floor.
Gigi arrives at four-thirty.
She comes through those doors with her hair wet and her shirt inside out and she is already crying before she's got the room in focus, and Junie catches her about six feet in.
"He's all right. Gigi. Gigi, look at me, he's all right, it went through him."
"I wasn't there—"
"You weren't supposed to be there."
"I switched—"
"You switched three days ago 'cause I asked you to." Junie's got her by both arms. "You listen to me. I put you on Friday. That's mine. Don't you dare stand in this hospital and make that yours."
Gigi's whole face is ruined.
She hangs onto Junie and cries and cries and I stand there against a wall with eleven stitches in my arm and I think, she's twenty-seven and she's never seen anything like this before, and I go and get her a cup of water out of the machine, and she takes it with both hands and says thank you and can't look at me.
I don't think about it again for a long time either.
Marisol's family gets there at five.
A husband, and two daughters in their thirties, and one of the daughters has brought her own kids because it's five in the morning and there was nobody to leave them with. Boy about nine, girl about six. The girl's got a pillow with a pillowcase on it that has horses.
They come through the door and every man in that room turns.
And Storm crosses the floor to meet them.
I have watched that man for twelve days, and I have never seen him move the way he moves now.
He gets the husband by the hand and the shoulder both and he says something too low for me to hear, and the husband's face comes apart, and Storm stands there and holds him up in the middle of a hospital waiting room with a room full of people watching.
Then he goes down on his heels in front of the little girl with the horse pillow.
I don't hear what he says.
She nods at him. Then she says something back, and he listens to all of it, and then he stands up and puts his hand on top of her head one time and walks away down the hall.
Havoc has been in the stairwell doorway for two hours.
Not in the room. Not out of it. In the doorway, with his back against the frame, where he can see everybody and where nobody has to walk past him to get anywhere.
Nobody has spoken to him since we got here.
That's not true. Deacon put a hand on his shoulder. Cricket showed him the arm. But those are the two who'd do it for a dog on the roadside, and in four hours not one other man in that club has said a word to him, and he's stood there and taken it and not once tried to make anybody.
Storm comes back down the hall at ten past five and stops in front of him.
I'm eight feet away.
I want to say I didn't listen. I listened to every word.
"Two," Storm says.
Havoc doesn't say anything.
"Twenty-two years, I've buried two. Ricky in oh-eight and Pate in twenty-sixteen.
" Storm's voice is not raised. It is so far from raised that I have to hold my breath to get all of it.
"I sent both of 'em. I stood in that chapel and I made a call and I sent both those men where they went, and I have carried every hour of it, and I would carry it again, because that is what the chair is for.
"That boy upstairs, I didn't send."
The elevator dings somewhere and nobody gets off.
"Nine days you had," Storm says. "Nine days you sat in a room with ten men and let every one of us walk around blind. And then you went to Gonzales by yourself with our money and you handed a man a reason to think this club can be dealt with one fella at a time."
"Yes, sir."
"Don't."
"Storm—"
"Don't yes, sir me in a hospital." And there it is — one crack, half a second of it, and it's gone and his voice goes back flat and that's a hundred times worse than if he'd swung on him. "I abstained.
"I sat at the head of that table on Monday mornin' with a boy's whole life in front of me and I could not open my mouth, and I have run that club for twenty-two years and that is the first time I ever took my hands off the wheel.
"So I ain't got the standing to take your patch. Not this week." He turns to go. "You want to know how bad it is, that's how bad it is. There ain't a man in this buildin' clean enough to throw you out."
And he walks away.
Havoc stands in that doorway with his hands at his sides and does not move for eleven minutes.
I count them.
Here is the arithmetic and I do it standing against a wall at half past five in the morning.
Marisol has smoke in her lungs at sixty-one.
There's a boy of twenty-four with a hole through him.
There's a six-year-old asleep on a horse pillow in a plastic chair.
There's a building with no front wall and a shop with no roof and six months gone out of a club that has been running twenty-two years.
Every one of those things happened because a man on Prytania Street wants something and cannot have it.
And the thing he wants is sitting in a house on the edge of the basin, folded on a kitchen table, with a sheet of paper that came out of its lining.
And so am I.
There is exactly one thing in this world that makes all of it stop, and it is not a vote and it is not nine more days and it is not a hundred and sixty men on motorcycles.
It's me getting in a car.
He drives me home at seven and neither of us says anything and he falls asleep in his clothes on top of the bed at twenty past, which I have never once seen him do.
I sit on the edge of it for a while and watch him.
Thirty-six years old, and he looks about twelve, and there is a mark inked at the corner of his eye and about four days of nothing on his face, and I put my hand flat on his chest and count it going and then I take my hand back.
The number is in my phone. It has been in my phone since the eleventh of the month, six missed calls, area code 504.
I take the phone out to the porch.
He answers on the second ring like a man who has been holding it.
"Well," Lucien Arceneaux says. "Miss Doucet."
"You know my name."
"I've known your name for nine days. I make it my business to be thorough." Something moves on his end. A drawer, a chair. "I confess I did not expect to hear from you directly. This is very sensible of you."
"I want three things."
"You're not in a—"
"You've spent a hundred and eighty thousand dollars' worth of your uncle's goodwill on a leather coat, Mr. Arceneaux.
" My voice is completely level. It is going to be level for the rest of my life.
"You burned a scrapyard and shot a bar in a parish where you don't have a single friend, and you did it over an item your uncle doesn't know is missing, from a room he doesn't know you emptied.
"So yes. I want three things."
Silence for about four seconds.
"Say them," he says.
"The Cottonmouth Kings are finished. Tonight, permanently, in writing if you people do that. Nobody goes back to that yard. Nobody goes near that bar."
"And?"
"Nobody touches Havoc."
"Ah."
"Say it."
"Nobody touches your biker. Fine." I can hear the smile. "That's two."
"The third one is that I bring it to you myself and I bring it tomorrow, and if there is a single man waiting for me anywhere other than where you tell me, I put it in a fire. It's twenty-two-year-old paper and dry leather. It takes eleven seconds."
"You wouldn't."
"I dug it out of a hole behind a bait shop with my own hands and I would light it on the shoulder of the interstate," I say, "and then you'd have nothing at all to hand your uncle when he asks."
The frogs are going. The sun's coming up over the water and it's already ninety degrees.
"Baton Rouge," Lucien says. "There's a lot behind a shuttered furniture store on Choctaw. Four o'clock."
"Four o'clock."
"Miss Doucet." He pauses. "Your father would have negotiated exactly that way. I'm told he was very good."
He hangs up before I can ask him how he'd know.
I take the ledger page out of the lining envelope and I put it in the middle of the kitchen table under the salt shaker.
I don't take my father's cut. I take his name and I leave the rest of him folded on a chair, because whatever else happens, that coat is going on a wall in that building and it does not need me alive to do it.
The note takes forty minutes and it ends up being four sentences.
Eli —
Nobody dies over me. That's not noble, it's arithmetic, and you'd have done it Tuesday if you'd thought of it first.
The page on the table is worth more than I am and you know it, so don't be stupid about which one you go after.
I chose here. That hasn't changed.
— L.
I take his car keys off the hook and I stand in the doorway of that room for a long time, and he is asleep with one arm off the side of the bed and his boots still on, and I do not wake him up because if I wake him up I will not go.
The screen door has a spring on it.
I hold it the whole way shut with both hands and I ease it into the frame so it doesn't bang, and that is the last thing I do in that house.