Page 34 of Havoc

Half a mile down the road I pull over on the shoulder and sit there with the engine runnin'.

There's blood on the knuckles of my right hand. Not his. Mine, off the door frame, and I don't remember hittin' the door frame.

Seventy-two hours.

I look at my own hand for a while in the light comin' sideways through the cane, and I can't get it to mean anything.

The porch light's on when I get to the house, which it never is, because I never put it on.

She's in the dock chair with her foot up on the rail and the boot off and my aspirin bottle sittin' on the arm, and she's got the shoebox open in her lap and one of the bundles out, and she shuts it when the headlight swings across her.

I come up the steps.

She looks at my hand.

Then up at my face, and back at the hand, and she does something with her mouth that ain't a question.

"It's mine," I say.

"I can see whose it is."

I go past her and get the door open and stand there holdin' it with my back to her, because the kitchen light's on in there and it's four feet away and I cannot make my legs do the rest of it.

"Havoc."

"Yeah."

"Come sit down," she says.

CHAPTER TWELVE

LENNOX

He sits down like a man being lowered.

Not into the chair — onto the top step, with his back against the post and one leg out straight, and he sets the envelope down on the boards beside him without looking at it. It's a bank envelope. It's fat. I don't ask.

The porch light's got every moth in the parish working it.

"How's the foot," he says.

"Don't."

"It's a question."

"It's a coward's question and you're not a coward, so don't."

His head goes back against the post.

For a while there's nothing but the frogs and the moths hitting the bulb, and I sit there with my mother's shoebox shut in my lap and I let him have it, because I've watched a person get to the edge of saying something enough times to know the sound of the run-up.

"I hurt a man today who paid me," he says.

"Okay."

"You don't know what that means."

"Then tell me what it means."