Page 35 of Havoc

"It means I broke the only piece of it that ain't rotten." He's looking straight out at the water and there's nothing on his face at all. "Fella owed eleven thousand. He had it. Counted it on his own porch rail and it was all there and he'd got it same as he said he would, and that's the whole arrangement — you pay and nothin' happens to you. That's what I sell. If a man pays and I put hands on him anyway then I ain't a message, I'm somebody who likes it."

"Did you like it?"

"No."

"Then why?"

"That's the part," he says.

His right hand comes up off his knee and turns over, and the knuckles are split across two of them and gone purple, and he looks at it the way you'd look at something you found in a drawer.

"I got a little girl callin' through a door for her daddy in my head," he says, "and I cannot tell you one reason it happened."

I can.

I could tell him in nine words and he'd hate me for it, so I don't.

"There's somethin' else," he says.

"I figured."

"Lucien Arceneaux called me at eleven forty this mornin'."

The frogs go on.

"He gave us seventy-two hours." He's still looking at the water. "You and the thing you took, at an address he'll send. After that he stops askin' and he starts sendin' his own people into this parish to find you. That's Monday."

"Monday."

"Monday."

I count it out. Friday night. Saturday, Sunday. Monday.

Sixty hours, near enough, and he's had eleven of them in his pocket already.

I set the shoebox down on the boards and I stand up, and my heel goes and I don't care.

"Eleven forty," I say.

"Lennox—"

"You've had it since eleven forty this morning. You went to work. You collected eleven thousand dollars. You put a man through a door and you drove nine miles home and you sat on this step and asked me about my foot."

"Yeah."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." He gets up. Slow, off the post, and he's a full head over me and he doesn't use one inch of it. "That's exactly what I did."

"Why?"

"'Cause I've been tryin' since noon to think of the arrangement of words that gets me from your porch step to the middle of it, and I ain't found it, and I've been standin' in the same spot in my own head all damn day."

"Then say it badly."

"I don't know how to⁠—"

"Say it badly, Havoc." My voice comes out of me like something tearing. "You think I need it pretty? Four months ago I sat in a room and watched my mother's mouth go and she couldn't get her own daughter's name out and I sat there and I waited for it. I have all the patience in the world for a man who says a thing badly. What I have got no patience left for at all is a man standing in front of me deciding what I can hold."