Chapter 29
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
LENNOX
Four pounds of butter.
That's what's in my head standing in that lot and it will not get out of it. Four pounds, because he'd asked how much and Havoc had said how the hell would I know, Cricket, and he'd stood in a driveway in ninety-six degrees holding a gallon of milk and gone red to the ears telling me about it.
Deacon has his hat off. They all do. Havoc is down in the weeds with his hand under the back of that boy's head and he has not made a sound and he is not going to.
I don't go to him.
That's the last decision I make on my own for about twenty minutes, and it's the only right one I've made all day. He is on his knees in a fence gap with a dead child and I am the reason he is there, and whatever he needs in this exact minute it is not a woman standing over him.
So I stand ten feet off with a split lip and I let him have it.
"Two minutes," Raider says.
He's up on the low wall at the corner of the lot looking down Choctaw with his hand shading his eyes.
"Raider."
"Somebody's called it in by now. Somebody in one of them houses. We got two minutes and then we got sirens and then we got a boy in a parking lot and five men with no story."
"We ain't leavin' him," Warden says.
"I ain't said to leave him."
"Then say what you're sayin'."
"I'm sayin' we got two minutes to put him in somethin' and we ain't got a truck." Raider comes off the wall. "Deacon, can you carry him?"
"Yes."
"To where," Warden says. "Six blocks? In the open? On Choctaw?"
Nobody's got an answer.
And that's when the cars come in off South 13th.
Three of them.
Not police. Two black sedans and a gray one, and they come in through the broken gate at about ten miles an hour and they fan out across that lot in a way that takes about four seconds and puts one of them behind us.
Warden turns and puts himself in front of me without looking at me.
Doors open.
Six men get out and not one of them has a hand near anything, and they stand by their own cars and don't come any closer, and every one of them is somewhere between forty and sixty and dressed for an office.
The back door of the middle car opens last.
The man who gets out of it is small.
That's what I wasn't ready for. He's maybe five foot seven and he's built like a bird and he's got to be seventy, and he's wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt and slacks and old-man shoes, and he stops beside his own car and takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and touches it to his forehead, because it is ninety-nine degrees.
He looks at the boy in the fence gap for a long moment.
Then he says, "Ah."
"Nobody is coming."
That's the first thing he says to us, and he says it in a voice you'd use to tell somebody the kitchen closes at nine.
"There were four calls to the parish in the last eleven minutes, and there will not be a car. That's the first thing I want understood, because it will change how you listen to the rest of it." He puts the handkerchief away. "My name is Rémy Arceneaux."
Nobody says anything.
"You are the Cottonmouth Kings' Sergeant at Arms." To Warden. "You are the Road Captain." To Raider. "I know the Chaplain by reputation." He looks at Deacon and does something that's almost courteous.
Then he finds Havoc, who has come up out of the weeds and is standing there with dirt on both knees and nothing on his face.
"And you are the one who paid my nephew eighteen thousand dollars in a gas station."
"Yeah."
"That was very stupid."
"It was."
"Well." Rémy nods. "At least we can begin from an agreed position."
They bring Lucien out through the dock doors.
Two of the office men have got him by the arms and he's on his own feet and there's blood down the front of that good shirt from his eyebrow and he is talking before he's clear of the building.
"Uncle — Rémy, listen to me, this is not — these people burned—"
"Ferme ta bouche."
Lucien shuts his mouth.
"You emptied a room on Prytania that I told you in two thousand nine you were never to open.
" Rémy has not raised his voice and he does not raise it now.
"You sold the contents. You sold a rifle that belonged to a man I owed, and you sold a pair of gloves I would have liked to keep, and then you discovered that something was missing from an inventory you had no business taking, and rather than come to me you spent four months and a great deal of money trying to put it back before I noticed.
"You called in a debt that is mine. You did it in my name. You put men in another parish and you burned a business and you shot a bar full of people, over a coat, to conceal a theft from your own family.
"And then you took a woman."
"She came—"
"I know what she did." Rémy looks at me for the first time.
"She telephoned you and negotiated three terms and you agreed to all three and had no intention of honoring any of them, which is the part I find genuinely embarrassing.
Not the stealing. The stealing is ordinary.
It's the lying to a woman who came to you honestly that I'll have to think about. "
Lucien starts to say something.
Rémy takes a pistol out from under his own untucked shirt at the small of his back, and he shoots his nephew once through the chest, and he puts it back.
Nobody moves.
The sound goes out flat across that lot and off the back of the furniture store and away over the shotgun houses, and about a hundred yards off a dog starts up and doesn't stop.
Lucien is on the ground.
Rémy takes the handkerchief back out and wipes his hands, front and back, unhurried, the way a man does after handling something in a garden.
"That was owed to you," he says to Havoc. "I'd rather you had it from me than took it yourself, because if you had taken it I would have been required to do a great deal of work I do not want to do at sixty-eight years old."
And Havoc doesn't say anything.
I'm watching him. I have been watching him for eight minutes without stopping and I see the whole thing go across him — that he stood in that building forty minutes ago with sixteen inches of iron in his hand and he put it down, and he put it down for a reason, and now a small old man in a short-sleeved shirt has done it in three seconds as a courtesy, and taken even that away from him.
He doesn't get to have wanted it.
He doesn't get to have not wanted it either.
"Now," Rémy says. "The rest.
"Your club owes my family a balance you have never been given a figure for, which I have allowed because a debt with a number on it can be paid and I did not want it paid. That has been the arrangement for twenty-two years and it has suited both of us, whatever your treasurer believes.
"That arrangement is over."
"Say the new one," Warden says.
"The new one is that I am going to repair your shop."
The lot is quiet.
"I'll send a contractor Monday. The east bay, the lift, both compressors, the fence, and the front of your bar.
It will be finished in six weeks and it will be better than it was.
You will not receive an invoice." Rémy folds the handkerchief in half and then in half again.
"The woman with the smoke in her lungs, her bills go through my office.
There's a nurse at Our Lady who will make sure of it.
"You will pay nothing. Not a dollar. Ever."
Nobody says a word for about four seconds, and I stand in that lot and watch four grown men understand it one after another, and Ransom isn't even here and I can hear what he'd say.
"That's worse," Havoc says.
"Considerably," Rémy agrees. "I'm glad you got there quickly. Some men take a year."
"You'll own us."
"I own you now. What changes on Monday is that every man at your table will be able to see it, and stand in a building I paid for, and drink in a bar I put the front on, and not one of them will be able to point at a single thing and say that one's ours.
" He puts the handkerchief in his pocket.
"You'd have preferred a number. A number is a thing a man can work toward, and men who work toward things get proud, and proud men make telephone calls to gas stations.
"I don't want you proud. I want you comfortable."
Raider is the one who breaks.
"And if we tell you no?"
"Then I burn the rest of it this month and you rebuild it yourselves out of a coffee can, and in two years you're four men in a shed and I've lost a very useful salvage yard on a river corridor.
" Rémy shrugs one shoulder. "It's not a threat.
It's the other option and it's genuinely worse for both of us, and I would rather neither of us take it. "
"There ain't a vote in this parkin' lot," Warden says. "That goes to a table."
"Of course. Take it to your president. He'll understand it faster than any of you." Rémy looks toward the fence gap. "One more thing, and then I'll let you take that boy home.
"The coat is yours."
I hear myself say something. I don't know what.
"You have it, or she does, or it's in a hole somewhere.
I don't want it." Rémy's face has nothing on it at all.
"It was never mine. It was left with me a long time ago as a courtesy to a man who's dead, and I have kept it upstairs in a shut room for twenty-two years, and I did not once take it off the wall, and I want that understood too.
"Hang it up. You should. You'll want to have looked at it."
He turns to go and then he stops, and he comes across that lot toward me, and Warden moves and Rémy lifts two fingers off his own thigh and Warden stops.
He gets to about five feet away.
Up close he smells like drugstore aftershave and he has got the flattest eyes I have ever seen in a human head.
"Doucet," he says.
"Yes."
"You have his hands." He looks at them, and I have got them balled up at my sides and I don't unball them. "Not the face. The hands."
"Did you know him?"
"A little."
"How?"
Rémy considers me for a moment, and there is something behind his face that moves and settles and does not come out.
"He was the only honest man in that room," he says.
"What room?"
"Take your father home," Rémy Arceneaux says, and gets into the back of the middle car.
They leave a gray sedan.
That's the last thing. The men get into two of the three cars and they take Lucien with them and they take him in a way that tells me they have done it before, and the gray one stays where it is with the keys in it and the back seat laid flat.
Nobody in that lot wants to touch it.
Deacon carries him.
Six of us stand there in ninety-nine degrees and the biggest man in the Cottonmouth Kings picks a twenty-one-year-old prospect up off the weeds in a hurricane fence gap and carries him thirty feet across that lot in both arms, and Warden goes ahead and opens the door for him, and Havoc takes the helmet out of the weeds and carries that.
And I hold my father's coat in my head the entire time — folded over the back of a kitchen chair sixty-two miles away, where I left it, because I thought it didn't need me alive to get where it was going.
Everybody comes home. That's the deal I made.
I got the words right and the arithmetic wrong.