Page 103 of Havoc

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.

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."