Page 29 of Havoc

Four miles is where I understand what I've done.

The mosquitoes come off that water in a column. Not a few. It's like walking into wet cloth. They're in my ears and my eyes and my mouth and I'm slapping at my own face with both hands and my heel is going and there's nine miles left and full dark in twenty minutes, and I have two hundred dollars and no phone and no water and I have not seen a house since I started walking.

I make it another quarter mile.

Then I sit down in the gravel on the shoulder because my legs quit asking.

The headlights come around the bend at eight fifty.

I know it's him before the car's close enough to be anything, because it's my own car, and I've been listening to that bad wheel bearing since Gonzales.

He passes me. Brakes. Backs up forty feet on the wrong side of the road and stops with the passenger window level with where I'm sitting.

Neither of us says anything for a while.

The frogs do all of it.

"Get in," he says.

"No."

"Lennox."

"I said no."

He puts it in park in the middle of a state road and gets out and comes around the front of the car through his own headlights, and I get up off the gravel because I am not going to be sitting down for this.

Standing up takes longer than I want it to.

"Nine miles," he says.

"I know how far it is."

"You'd have made four."

"I made four and a quarter."

"You'd have made four," he says again, "and then you'd have laid down in that ditch, and I want you to hear the rest of it. There's a gator in that slough big enough I quit fishin' it in twenty-twenty. There's men who run that road at night without their lights on and they ain't from the church. And it is ninety-one degrees at nine o'clock at night and you have got no water on you, and you would have been dead of the heat before either one of those found you."

"Then I'd have been dead from the heat."

"You—"

"You don't get to be angry about it." My voice comes up and it's the first time it has since April and it comes up loud. "You don't. You took me out of a parking lot. You put me in a house with no lock and no phone and no car, and then you went to work, and now you're standing in the road at nine o'clock at night explaining the danger to me like I'm a child who wandered off."

"I'm—"

"I walked into a swamp on purpose. I did the numbers. I knew what four miles was going to cost me and I paid it and I'd do it again on Thursday, and the only reason I'm sitting in this gravel is my boots, not my nerve." The blood's coming down my neck again and I wipe it with the back of my wrist. "So don't tell me what I'd have done. You don't know one thing about what I'd do."

He stands there in his own headlights with his hands down at his sides.

The bugs are going through the beams in a river.

"You're right," he says.

That stops me.

"Which part?"