Page 16 of Havoc

He drives my car with one wrist over the top of the wheel, which is a thing my father did, and I hate him a little for it in a way that has nothing to do with anything. The other hand stays on his thigh. He hasn't touched the radio. He hasn't touched the vents. He got in, moved the seat, and started driving, and that's the whole inventory of what he's done since the parking lot.

There are seventeen dollars in my wallet and a phone in my back pocket he hasn't asked for.

That's the part I can't work out. He hasn't taken the phone. Anybody who does this for a living takes the phone first, and he looked right at me put it in my pocket and said nothing, and I've been sitting here for six miles trying to decide whether it means he's careless or whether it means something worse.

My heart's been going since the ice machine. It's still going. Ninety, maybe a hundred, hammering in the side of my neck where I can feel it against my collar, and my hands are folded on the lid of my mother's shoebox and they're perfectly steady, and the two facts sit next to each other and refuse to have anything to do with one another.

That's been the arrangement since April. The body does what it wants. I watch it from across the room.

"What's in the box?"

First thing he's said in six miles.

"Receipts."

"Receipts."

"You want to look?"

He doesn't answer, so I lift the lid off and hold it toward him with both hands, and inside there are four hundred pieces of paper rubber-banded into bundles of twelve and nothing else in the world.

He glances over. Half a second, maybe less. Then back at the road.

"Put it away."

"You don't want to check?"

"You'd have to be a special kind of stupid to hand me a box you had something in."

"That's an interesting way to decide things."

"Works out."

I put the lid back on.

Nine more miles of nothing. The cypress goes by black on both sides and the headlights make a tunnel out of it, and once a possum comes into the low beams and he brakes for it, which I find myself filing away and then resenting that I filed it.

"Havoc," I say.

His eyes come off the road.

"That's what he called you. On the phone. The kid."

"That's right."

"It's not a name."

"It's the one I got."

"It's a job description." I turn my head and look at the side of his face. "There's a difference between a name somebody gave you and a name somebody assigned you, and I know which one that is, and so do you."

He doesn't say anything.

The white line comes and goes under the car.

"What's the other one?" I say.

"There ain't another one."