Page 109 of Havoc

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.