Page 104 of Havoc

"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."