Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
LENNOX
Neither of us says anything for the whole nine miles and it isn't the bad kind.
There's a kind of quiet that's a wall and there's a kind that's a room, and this one is a room.
He drives with one wrist over the top of the wheel and the windows down and the night coming in hot off that water, and somewhere around the bridge he puts his right hand out palm up on the seat between us and doesn't look over.
I put mine in it.
That's the whole conversation for nine miles.
The house is exactly the way I left it.
The dishes I washed at six in the morning nine days ago are still in the rack. My duffel's against the wall in the back room with everything in it. There is a ring on the kitchen table in the dust where a salt shaker sat on a sheet of ledger paper.
He goes and stands at the sink with his back to me and turns the water on and doesn't put his hands in it.
"Say it," I say.
"Ain't got anything."
"Eli."
"I woke up," he says.
He turns the water off.
"I woke up at ten after twelve on top of a made bed with my boots on and this house was a different temperature.
" His hands are on the edge of that sink.
"And I went through it room to room and your bag was still there, which is how I knew you weren't runnin', which is how I knew what you'd done, and I stood in that kitchen and read four sentences eleven times.
"And the whole time I'm readin' 'em I'm thinkin' — she wrote this at a table. She sat down at my table with a pen and she wrote four sentences and she got 'em right, and then she folded it, and then she went and stood in that doorway and looked at me and left anyway."
"I did."
"How long'd you stand there?"
"I don't know."
"How long, Lennox?"
"A while," I say. "Long enough that if you'd rolled over I wouldn't have gone."
He puts his head down.
"I'm not going to apologize for it," I say.
"I want to be clear about that before you say anything else, because I know what you want and I can't give it to you.
I did the arithmetic at four o'clock in the morning in a hospital hallway with a six-year-old asleep on a horse pillow and a woman on oxygen and a boy with a tube in him, and the arithmetic came out one way, and it's still the same arithmetic tonight.
"I'd do it again on Thursday."
"I know you would."
"Then what—"
"That's the thing." He turns around. "That right there.
You'd do it again Thursday and I'd have done it Tuesday if I'd thought of it first, and there ain't a person alive who's gonna talk either one of us out of it, and that means for the whole rest of my life every time you're late comin' back from somewhere I'm gonna have about four minutes where I don't know. "
The refrigerator hums.
"Yes," I say. "That's true. That's the deal."
"I ain't complainin' about the deal."
"I know you're not."
"I'm tellin' you what it is," he says, "'cause somebody ought to say it out loud in this house one time."
We sit on the floor with our backs against the front of the couch because it's what we do now.
There's a boy dead. Neither of us has said his name since the parking lot on Choctaw and it's been sitting in this house for eight days like furniture we walk around.
"I keep doing this thing," I say.
"What thing?"
"I keep hearing him. In the driveway." My voice does something and I let it. "There's a truck coming down that shell road about eleven in the morning, it goes past to the Fontenots', and every single day it comes by and there's a half second where I think it's turning in."
Havoc doesn't say anything for a long time.
"He told his daddy about me," he says.
"What?"
"Ovide Guidry. In the lot on Saturday." He's got his forearms on his knees. "Man shook my hand and told me his boy talked about me every Sunday. Havoc this, Havoc that."
"Eli."
"I put him on that fence gap 'cause Warden gave him a job to keep him out of it.
That's what it was for. That was the whole point of the gap.
" He turns the bottle around on the floor.
"And I heard it happen. I've told you that.
I heard shootin' behind me and I put my head down and I ran the other way and I did it 'cause you were the other way, and I would do that again too, and there's the whole thing, Lennox.
There it is. Both of us'd do it all again and a boy's still in the ground in Bayou Chene. "
I put my hand flat on his back between the shoulder blades.
He lets me.
"Then we carry it," I say.
"That's the answer?"
"That's the only answer there's ever been to anything. I sat in a living room for four years waiting for a better one." My hand moves. "You carry it and you don't put it down and you don't let anybody tell you it balances, because it doesn't and it won't, and you get up on Tuesday anyway."
"That ain't much."
"No," I say. "It's what there is."
Around eleven he gets up and goes out to the bike and comes back in with something in his hand.
He stands in the middle of that kitchen with it and doesn't hand it over.
"Tyrant made the phone call to Lafayette on Monday morning," he says.
I don't understand.
"One for the boy's." He's looking at the thing in his hands. "And one for this. He told me Thursday. Said he wasn't gonna sit on the phone with a fella twice in one week and he'd figure out later whether either one of us wanted it."
He turns it over.
It's a patch. Rectangular, black, maybe four inches by nine, and the stitching is white and heavy and it says one word.
HAVOC
And underneath it, in smaller letters:
PROPERTY OF
I sit down.
Not because I'm swept away. Because my legs go, which is a different thing and I've had about enough of my body doing whatever it wants this month.
"I ain't gonna dress it up," he says. "I know what it says. It says property of and there's women in this state would throw a bottle at a man's head for puttin' it in front of 'em, and they'd be right to.
"So I'm gonna say what it means and you're gonna say no or yes."
"I know what it means."
"Lennox—"
"No, listen to me." I get up off that chair. "Sit down. Sit down, Eli, and let me do this part, because you've been building up to a speech for four days and I've been ready for this since I was eleven years old and you have no idea."
He sits down.
"I know what a property patch is," I say.
"I knew before you did. I was in a Gallow Kings clubhouse in a folding chair with a Coke when I was nine years old and there was a woman named Dot who wore my father's friend's name on her back and she used to do my hair while the men were in the back room, and I watched every single thing that happened in that place and I understood most of it by the time I was ten.
"So don't hand me that and tell me what it says. I can read.
"Here's what it means. It means I stop being a woman who's around and start being a woman who's his, in a way that thirty men have to publicly agree to and can't take back.
It means if anybody in three parishes puts a hand on me the entire club is obligated, whether they like me or not, whether they voted for me or not.
It means when there's a room I'm not allowed in — and there's going to be, article four is still in that book — I'm on the other side of that door with a name on my back instead of nothing. "
"That ain't all it means."
"No. It means I belong to you." I'm standing over him with my hands at my sides. "In front of everybody. Out loud. In a way I can't quietly walk out of at four in the morning with a note on a table, which we both know is the part you actually want.
"And it means the day I decide I'm done, I take it off in front of the same people who watched me put it on, and that is a public thing and it will cost me and it will cost you, and that's the price and it's supposed to be."
The window unit kicks on.
"Say the rest," he says.
"The rest is that nobody has ever wanted me in a way that had a cost." My voice goes and I let it go.
"My mother took twenty-two years of money from a man to keep me invisible.
My father kept me in the front of his wallet where nobody would look.
Every single person who ever loved me did it in private, Eli, because I was the thing they were protecting, and I have spent my entire life being carefully not mentioned.
"And you're standing in a kitchen holding four inches of leather that says my name goes on the outside."
He's got both hands on his knees and he isn't moving at all.
"Ask me," I say.
"Lennox Doucet." He stands up. "Will you wear my name?"
"Yes."
* * *
It's slow, and it's warm, and there is not one thing left in this house that either of us is running from.
That's the difference and it's everything. The doorway in the front hall was a fight and the bed was a confession, and this is a Saturday night in a house on the edge of a basin with the windows open and the frogs going and nobody in the world who needs anything from us until morning.
He takes his time.
He takes so much time I say something ugly to him about it and he laughs against my collarbone and takes more, and I get my hands in his hair and tell him exactly what I want in words my mother would have gone to confession about, and he does all of it, and he is not in a hurry about one single part.
There's a mark on my hip from a countertop nine days ago that's gone yellow at the edges. He finds it with his thumb and stays there.
"Eli."
"Yeah."
"Don't stop doing that."
"Wasn't fixin' to."
Somewhere in the middle of it I get my hand around the back of his neck and pull him up so he's looking at me, and I hold him there, and neither of us says anything for about four seconds.
"Say it," I say.
"Say what?"
"You know what."
He puts his forehead against mine.
"I love you," he says. "I ain't said that to anybody since I was fifteen years old and I ain't sure I got it right then."
"You got it right."
"How do you know?"
"Because you said it in a house with nothing in it," I say, "to a woman with nothing left, and neither one of us has got a single reason to be lying."
Afterward he falls asleep on his back with one arm over his eyes and the other one under my neck, and I lie there in ninety degrees with my hand flat on his chest counting it go, and there is a piece of black leather with white stitching sitting on the kitchen table nine feet away.
* * *
Sunday morning, I open the refrigerator for the milk.
Four pounds of butter.
Four one-pound boxes stacked two by two on the middle shelf where a twenty-one-year-old boy put them himself on a Sunday morning three weeks ago because a man on a telephone said how the hell would I know, Cricket.
I stand there with my hand on that door for a long time.
The milk's gone over. The bread's green. The eggs I threw out the day I left because I knew I wasn't coming back and I couldn't stand the idea of them going bad in a house with nobody in it.
The butter's fine. Butter keeps.
I could throw it out. That's a thing a person does. It's been three weeks and nobody would know and nobody would ask and it would be the sensible thing.
Havoc comes in behind me, barefoot, and stops.
He doesn't say anything.
He stands there in a doorway in his own kitchen and looks at four boxes of butter on a middle shelf, and I hear him breathe out through his nose, once, hard.
"Leave it," he says.
"I'm not throwing it out."
"I know you ain't."
"I'm going to use it." I shut the door. "All four. I'm going to make something with every single box and I'm going to do it here, and when the last one's gone I'll get more, and that's what we're doing."
He comes and stands behind me and puts both arms around me and his chin on the top of my head, and we stand in a kitchen on the edge of a swamp in the middle of the morning with the heat already coming up through the floor.
"Junie wants me Thursday through Sunday," I say. "At the bar. The front wall's supposed to be done in six weeks, and she says she needs somebody on the well who can do more than pour beer."
"You told her yes?"
"I told her Thursday through Sunday and I want Mondays off, and she said nobody works Mondays and I said good."
"That's a job."
"That's a job."
"In Rosalie," he says.
"In Rosalie."
His arms tighten up.
"Say the thing," I say. "Go on. You've been holding it since the parish line."
"I chose here," Havoc says, into my hair, and I can hear that he's smiling and I don't have to turn around to check.
"Don't be smug. It's my line."
"It's a good line."
"It was a great line," I say. "I said it on a dock. There was a heron."