Chapter 30
CHAPTER THIRTY
HAVOC
Eight days.
That's how long it takes to bury a prospect, because a coroner in East Baton Rouge Parish has got a caseload and doesn't care whose boy it is.
Ransom drove down there four times. Ransom, who has got a treasurer's job and a hole in his club's income and about nine hundred things to do, put on a clean shirt four separate mornings and sat in a county office and was polite to people until they gave us a date.
Thursday the club voted on Rémy Arceneaux's offer.
Seven to two, and both the no votes said afterward they'd have changed 'em if it would've done any good, and Ransom read the terms out in a voice like a man readin' his own diagnosis, and Storm said all in favor and every hand that went up went up slowly.
The contractor was in that yard Monday morning at seven. There's a new lift comin' Friday.
Nobody in that club has said one word about it since.
* * *
His daddy is a man named Ovide Guidry and he's got a shrimp boat out of Bayou Chene and hands like a set of tools.
He comes up the shell road on Saturday in a truck with a boat hitch still on it and he gets out and he stands in that lot in a suit that don't fit him anymore, and Storm goes across the gravel and the two of them shake hands and stand there a while.
I'm the one who was supposed to go tell him.
Storm wouldn't let me. He went himself, that same night, drove down there at two in the morning and sat in a man's kitchen until daylight, and when he came back he didn't tell any of us one thing about it.
Ovide Guidry looks at me for about six seconds in that parkin' lot.
Then he puts out his hand.
"You the one he talked about," he says.
I take it and I can't say anything.
"Every Sunday," he says. "Havoc this, Havoc that. The boy never could shut his mouth."
He lets go and goes on inside.
* * *
The clubhouse holds about a hundred and there's a hundred and forty in it.
Every patch in the parish. Two charters from up around Alexandria that I've met twice.
Marisol in a chair by the door with a tank beside her and her husband standin' behind it with both hands on the back of it.
The kid from the shop floor who came out behind Cricket with a shirt over his face, nineteen years old, and he has not been able to look at anybody all week.
Junie's behind the bar and she ain't pouring anything. She's just standing where she stands.
Blitz is in a chair by the pool table with a cane he does not need, holding court.
"—no, see, that's the thing, that's what nobody understands, they don't give you the bullet. They keep it. I asked twice."
"Why would you want it?"
"'Cause it was in me, Tyrant. It was inside me."
"You want a lot of things that were inside you?"
"That is a disgusting thing to say at a funeral."
"It ain't a funeral yet."
"It's funeral-adjacent," Blitz says, and Tyrant almost laughs and catches it, and then the two of them sit there not looking at each other.
That's the whole week in one exchange, near about. Everybody talkin' too loud and too fast about nothin', and then it goes quiet for two seconds and everybody has to start again.
At three o'clock, Storm comes out of the hall and stands in the middle of that room, and it don't take four seconds.
"Chapel."
Then he says the thing nobody's ever heard him say.
"All of you."
A hundred and forty people do not fit in that room.
They get about thirty in, and the rest fill the hall and the doorway and stand up on chairs in the main room to see through it, and Ovide Guidry gets a seat at the table because Storm puts him in one, and Marisol's chair gets rolled to the doorway where she can see.
Lennox stands at the back wall with Junie.
I want that down. She didn't ask to come in and nobody asked her to.
She come in with Junie and stood at the back and put her hand on that wall and stayed there, and there ain't a man in this club now who'd have said a word about it, and that is a thing that happened in eleven days that I still can't measure.
The charter's on the wall behind Storm in a frame with a chip out of the glass.
On the table in front of him there's a cut.
Brand new. Never worn. Bottom rocker says LOUISIANA and the top says COTTONMOUTH KINGS and the center's the crowned snake, and Tyrant had it made in Lafayette on Monday and drove down and got it himself and would not let anybody pay him for the gas.
"Alton Guidry," Storm says.
Half that room doesn't know the name.
I watch it go through them. Grown men lookin' at each other. For fifteen months, that boy swept this floor and got fined for rags and hauled beer up out of the cellar, and there's forty patched men in this building who could not have told you what his mama called him.
"Prospect, this club, fifteen months." Storm's got both hands on the table. "Come to us off his daddy's boat. Ninety-one days out.
"There's a vote and it's the only one we're takin' today. All in favor of patchin' Alton Guidry into the Cottonmouth Kings, say it out loud, and say it so his father can hear you."
It ain't a show of hands.
It's forty men in a room and sixty in a hall and every one of them says aye at the same time and it goes off those walls like somethin' dropped.
Storm picks the cut up off the table and hands it across to Ovide Guidry, and Ovide holds it in both hands and puts his face down into it, and there is not one sound in that building for a long, long time.
Deacon says the words.
He does it standin' at the end of the table with no book in his hands, which I have never seen, and no notes, and he starts about four different ways before he gets one to take.
"I ain't gonna read anything," he says. "I had somethin' picked out and I've had it since Tuesday and I got up here and it's wrong. So I'm gonna tell y'all about a rag."
Somebody in the hall makes a sound.
"Tyrant fined that boy ten dollars for not carryin' a rag on his hip.
Rule fourteen. And Alton went and read the book, which nobody has ever done, and he found out it doesn't say a number, so he came in the next day carryin' four of 'em.
" Deacon's got his hands down at his sides.
"Four rags. And he made Tyrant read it out loud in front of the room, and Tyrant went home and amended the book that night so it couldn't happen twice.
"That's who he was. Y'all can laugh. Go on."
They do. It comes out of that room broken and about half of it turns into somethin' else halfway.
"He came out of a burnin' shop with Marisol on his hip and then he turned around and went back at it, and Warden had to throw him in the gravel to stop him, and he laid there and hollered I checked both rooms." Deacon's voice doesn't move.
"And every one of us has been sayin' that all week like it's a funny thing.
It ain't funny. He had checked both rooms. He was twenty-one years old and he went and checked both rooms in a buildin' that was comin' down, and then he was mad we wouldn't let him check again.
"That is the whole of it. That's every word I got about him.
"I ain't gonna stand up here and tell y'all he's someplace better, 'cause his daddy's sittin' right there and I ain't goin' to say that to a man in a suit that doesn't fit him.
"I'll say this instead, and it's the only thing I know for certain after eleven years of doin' this.
"He was ours. He didn't have the patch and it don't matter, he was ours from the first week and every man in this room knew it, and he died holdin' a gap he'd been put on so he'd be safe, and he never got told one time by any of us what he was worth."
He stops.
"So say it now," Deacon says. "Out loud, to each other, whoever's standin' next to you. Do it while everybody's still in the room."
And then he sits down.
They put Cricket's cut on the wall beside the charter.
Storm does it himself with two nails and a hammer out of the shop, in front of everybody, and he don't say anything while he's doing it and it takes him about a minute and a half and nobody in that room breathes right through any of it.
The club's newest dead man, hanging next to the paper that names its first.
Then Storm goes back to the table and picks up the second one.
Twenty-two years of humidity and a hole in the ground behind a bait shop and it still hangs right when you hold it up.
GALLOW KINGS. LOUISIANA. No crown on that serpent. And on the right chest, white thread gone yellow, sewn by hand by somebody who cared more about doin' it than doin' it well:
TITHE
"Emile Doucet," Storm says.
Ovide Guidry looks up. Ransom's got his rings off. Warden's standin' at the door where Warden stands.
"Sixth name on that charter. Signed for a club he never got to ride under, three weeks before he was supposed to patch over with the rest of us, and this coat has been on a wall in a room in New Orleans for twenty-two years and it come home in the back of a car eight days ago.
"I've read that name out loud in this room every New Year's since two thousand five and I ain't never once told a single one of you who he was. That's mine. I'll answer for it another day."
He turns around and hangs it on the third nail.
Charter in the middle. A dead prospect on one side and a dead treasurer on the other, and about eight inches between all three of them.
And then he does the thing nobody voted on.
He takes the frame down off the wall.
Two hands, careful, and he sets it face up on the table and gets a pen out of his own shirt pocket and works the back of it off — and half this room comes up out of their chairs, because that is a twenty-two-year-old piece of paper and the man is opening the frame with his thumbnail.
He gets the glass off.
He looks at that sheet for a while.
Then he writes on it.
Under the sixth signature, in a hand about half the size, and it takes him maybe four seconds:
LENNOX DOUCET
"There ain't a bylaw for it," Storm says, to the room, without lookin' up.
"There ain't a vote and I ain't takin' one.
Article four says a daughter's got no claim on this club and article four's stayin' in that book till a table changes it, and I ain't the man to bring it, 'cause I'm the one read it out loud on Monday and hid behind it.
"So this ain't a claim. This is a name under her daddy's name on a piece of paper in my buildin' that I built the frame for, badly, in oh-four.
"Anybody wants to say somethin' about it, I'm right here."
He puts the glass back on.
Nobody says one word.
Tyrant reaches over, without bein' asked, and holds the frame square while Storm gets the backing on.
Lennox is against that back wall with both hands flat on it.
She don't come forward and she don't make a sound and she is lookin' at that frame like a woman lookin' at a thing through a window, and Junie has got an arm around her waist and is holding on to her with a fist in the side of her shirt.
Twenty-two years.
She came to Rosalie with four hundred dollars, a nineteen-dollar shovel, and a plan she knew was no good, to put a dead man's coat on a wall.
She's standin' eleven feet from it.
And there's a boy's leather hangin' three feet to the left of it who was alive when she got here.
Afterward, Storm comes and finds me by the shop door.
He's got somethin' folded over his arm and he doesn't hand it to me right away.
"Shelf ain't where that goes," he says.
"Storm—"
"Vote was Thursday. Ain't nobody told you 'cause I asked 'em not to.
" He puts it in my hands. "You took eighteen thousand dollars and you lied to me on your own back steps and you did it for eleven days, and I ain't forgot a minute of it, and you and me are gonna have a long conversation this winter that neither one of us is gonna enjoy.
"But I abstained. And a man who abstained doesn't get to hold a patch over somebody else's head.
"Put it on."
I put it on.
It doesn't feel like anything. I want to be honest about that. I stood in a hallway and put my cut back on eight days after a boy died in a fence gap holdin' a spot I let Warden give him, and it did not feel like one single thing.
Out in the lot at seven, Raider's loadin' saddlebags.
He's got both of 'em on and a bedroll, which he doesn't use for a run under three days.
"Where you goin'?"
"Storm's sendin' me."
"Where?"
"He didn't say and I didn't ask." Raider pulls the strap. "That's how he wanted it, so that's how it is."
"How long?"
"Long as it takes."
He gets on. And then he stops, with his hand on the throttle, and he looks off across that gravel lot toward the fence line — and there's a woman standin' out there by herself in the dark.
Gigi.
She's been out there since three o'clock.
She came with Junie and she got as far as the door and she has not been inside that building one time all afternoon, not for the vote and not for Deacon and not for the coats goin' up, and Lennox went out twice with a beer and both times come back in with it still full.
Grief takes people funny. Everybody said so.
Raider looks at her for about two seconds.
Then he pulls out onto the shell road and he's gone.
They're all gone by ten.
I go back down that hall by myself with the buildin' empty behind me and I stand in front of that wall for a while.
Charter in the middle in a bad frame. Emile Doucet on the right.
And on the left, a brand-new cut that ain't been worn one time and never will be, with a top rocker and a bottom rocker and a crowned snake in the middle, hangin' off two nails Storm drove into a wall with a shop hammer.
Ninety-one days.
There's a woman alive tonight and sleepin' in my house on the edge of the basin, and there is a twenty-one-year-old boy from Bayou Chene who is not, and I have been tryin' for eight days to find the arithmetic where those two things balance and I have not found it.
There ain't one.
I go on out and I turn the lights off behind me.