Epilogue
STORM
The last one out is always me, and it has been for twenty-two years.
Eleven o'clock on a Wednesday and the lot's empty except for my truck and a bike belongin' to a boy sleepin' upstairs who ain't supposed to be sleepin' upstairs, and the contractor's trailer sittin' out by the burnt fence with a magnet sign on the side of it that says a company name out of Metairie.
They poured the new slab today. It's better concrete than the old slab. I stood out there at four o'clock and watched a man run a power trowel over it and I could not make myself go any closer than about thirty feet.
Six weeks and the east bay'll be up.
It'll be a good shop. That's the part I ain't said to anybody. It's gonna be a better shop than the one my hands built, and every man who walks into it is gonna know who paid for it, and in about two years there won't be one of 'em left who remembers what the old one looked like.
That's how it works. That's exactly how it's supposed to work, and Rémy Arceneaux has been doin' it since before I was ridin'.
Havoc gave me the page on Saturday.
He came out to the shop door after everybody'd gone home and stood there a minute and then he took it out of his shirt, folded up in a sandwich bag he'd got from somewhere, and held it out.
"It's hers," I said.
"She says it's the club's."
"Then it's yours. You're the one who—"
"Storm." He put it in my hand. "I can't read the name on it. She can't read the name on it. Blitz'll have it inside a week if anybody gives him a reason and you know it.
"So it's yours. And I ain't askin' you what's on it, 'cause you told a room full of men to leave it be and I've watched you not ask one question about that piece of paper for eight days.
"But you're gonna look at it. And when you do, I'd like you to remember that a boy from Bayou Chene is in the ground on account of that coat."
Then he went home to her.
I've had it in the bottom left drawer of this desk since Saturday, and I have not opened it.
Four days.
I ain't a coward. I want that understood, whatever else.
I have walked into rooms with men in 'em who wanted me dead and I have buried a wife and two brothers and I sat in a kitchen in Bayou Chene at two in the mornin' and told a shrimper his boy was gone, and I did not once look at a wall while I did any of it.
But I have opened this drawer eleven times since Saturday and shut it eleven times.
There's two things in it.
The one on the bottom's a photograph and it's been in that drawer since two thousand thirteen and every man in this club knows it's there and not one of 'em has ever seen it, and it is going to stay right where it is tonight the same as every other night.
The other one's in a sandwich bag.
The lamp's the only light in this buildin' and the page comes out of the bag stiff and soft at the same time, which is a thing paper does when it's been folded a long while in somethin' leather.
Emile's hand. Uphill, too big, takin' up more room than he was given.
G.K. — SEPT '04
Three lines I don't care about. A hauler. Somethin' out of Beaumont. He kept a book like a man who'd been raised right and it makes my chest hurt to look at the handwriting of a fella who's been dead longer than he was ever my friend.
Then the fourth line.
14 SEPT — ARCENEAUX (R.) — 164,000 — REC'D BY —
And the hole where the fold went through.
And two letters after it.
A hundred and sixty-four thousand dollars.
Scourge put a hundred and sixty-four thousand dollars in my hand in a boat in October of two thousand four.
Not a check. Not a bag, nothin' that dramatic — he had it in a fish cooler under a bag of ice and he set it down between his boots and he said don't ask me and I did not ask him. Not that night, not that year, not one time in twenty-two years.
I asked him where and he said don't ask me and I let it lie, because he was the man who'd been with me since we were both nineteen and stupid, and because I had six men waitin' on me who'd said yes to somethin' I could not pay for, and because I wanted the money.
That's the honest one. I wanted the money and a question would've cost me it.
So I built a club with it.
Two letters.
There's men in this world who'd need more than two letters and I ain't one of 'em, because I know who was in that room in September of oh-four.
There was seven of us fixin' to walk and three of theirs and a lawyer, and I could name every one of them right now in the order they sat, and there is exactly one man among the whole of them whose name ends the way that ends.
I've been sayin' it out loud in this room every New Year's for twenty-two years.
Second on the list.
Right before Emile.
Fourteenth of September.
He went in the ground on the eleventh of October and he'd been on that levee road since the sixth, and I have carried the sixth of October in my chest for twenty-two years like a stone in a boot, because I asked him four times and the fourth time he said yes.
The fourteenth of September is twenty-two days before the sixth of October.
And underneath it, in Emile's own hand, pressed down hard enough you can feel it on the back of the sheet:
SETTLED. NOT TO BOOK.
Settled.
He didn't write received. He didn't write loan nor advance nor nothin' a treasurer writes.
He wrote settled, which is a word a man uses about a thing that's finished, and then he wrote not to book, and then he took the only page of it and he sewed it into the linin' of his own coat with a heavy thread and stitches a quarter-inch long.
A man doesn't hide a page from his enemies. He hands that to a lawyer.
A man hides a page from the fellas he's sittin' with.
There's a place where a thought goes and I have got to the front door of it and I am standin' out on the porch of it, and I ain't goin' in tonight.
I want that written down somewhere, if anybody ever writes any of this down.
I'm fifty-two years old. I have run this club since I was thirty, and I have made every hard call there was to make in it, and tonight I sat in this office with a lamp on and I got to the edge of a thing and I stopped.
Because if I go in that door I have got to come back out of it, and the man who comes back out ain't gonna be able to sit at the head of that table on Sunday and look at nine men and a boy's coat on the wall.
Not this week.
Not the week we buried Alton Guidry.
So I fold it back along the creases that ain't split yet and I put it in the bag and I put the bag in the drawer on top of the photograph, and I shut the drawer.
Then I sit there for about ten minutes with my hand flat on the desk.
The number's still in my phone under the same three letters it's been under since two thousand seven.
SCG
Four months since he's been in this parish. Four months and eleven days, and I got a call from a pay phone in Tupelo in June that lasted ninety seconds and one text in July with no words in it, and that is the most any man alive has had of Scourge since the spring.
He picks up on the fifth ring.
There's road noise, or wind, or a fan. Somethin'.
"Well," he says. "It's late where you are."
"It's late where you are too."
"Is it." A pause. "How's the boy?"
"Which one?"
"The young one. Blitz." Another pause, shorter. "Heard about the other one. I'd have come for it."
"You'd have had to have a phone that works."
"I know it."
Out the window the trailer light's on over the contractor's job box.
"Tithe's coat came home," I say.
Nothin'.
I put the phone against my ear and I sit in a dark office and I listen to a man breathe on the other end of a line four states away or forty miles away, and I count it out, and I get to six.
Six seconds.
"There was a page sewed in the linin'," I say.
And here it is.
He doesn't ask what page.
That's all. That's the entire thing and there ain't anything else to it and I have known that man for thirty-three years.
A fella hears there was a page sewed in the linin' of a dead man's coat and he says what page.
Every time. Every man alive says what page, and they say it fast, and they say it before they've thought about sayin' it.
Scourge doesn't say anything at all.
When he finally does, his voice ain't changed one bit, and that's worse than if it had.
"I'm comin' home," he says.
"You don't have to."
"I'll be there Friday."
"Scourge—"
"Storm." Somethin' moves on his end of it. A door, maybe. "Put it somewhere safe till I get there. Don't let that computer boy near it."
Then he's gone.
I sit in this office a while longer with the phone face down on the desk.
Out past the window, there's a fresh slab and a burnt fence and a lot with sixteen bikes gone out of it, and up on the wall in the next room there's a bad frame I built with my own hands in oh-four with seven names in it and one more wrote underneath in ballpoint.
And two coats hangin' either side of it.
One of 'em belonged to a boy who swept this floor for fifteen months and never got told what he was worth.
The other one belonged to the last man on God's earth who'd have known what to say to me right now.
Friday.
He said he'd be here Friday, and I never told him one time where the page was at, and I never said what was on it either.
He's gonna ride four states to look at a piece of paper he ain't asked one question about.
I turn the lamp off.