Page 100 of Havoc

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.