Page 38 of Havoc

I stand there and I wait to feel somethin' about it, the way I waited on the shoulder of a road with blood on my hand, and it comes this time.

It ain't fear.

It's worse than fear, and I ain't got a word for it, and I'm thirty-six years old and there's a whole language for this that somebody was supposed to teach me and nobody did.

She comes out into the hall.

Got my shirt on. Hair down. Her foot's bad and she stands off it.

"Don't say anything nice to me," she says.

"Wasn’t gonna."

"Good." She stands there a second. "That was a mistake."

"Yeah."

"I'd do it again in about an hour."

"Yeah," I say.

She goes on into the back bedroom and doesn't shut the door all the way, and I stand in the hall in the dark for a long time and I do not hear the dresser move.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

LENNOX

His hand is worse now than it was before.

Two knuckles opened to the bone and a third one flapped, and there's grit in all of it, and he sits down in the dock chair when I tell him to and puts it out over the arm and looks off at the water while I work like a man having a tooth done.

The kit's still in the trunk of my car. I get it. I get the bottle of water too, and I pour it over the whole hand first, and he doesn't make a sound, and the runoff comes off the arm of the chair pink onto the boards.

"You need stitches in this one."

"No."

"That's not an opinion, it's a hole."

"Then tape it."

"I'm going to tape it and it's going to open again the first thing you do tomorrow, and then you'll have a hole with dirt in it, in August, in a swamp." I hold the alcohol up. "This is going to hurt."

"Go on."

It hurts. His whole arm locks and the chair creaks and he keeps looking at the water.

Two nights ago he was on his knees in the road doing this for me and I sat there hanging onto the roof of my own car and counting to twenty, and neither one of us says anything about it, and both of us know.

"Who was it?"

"Nobody."

"Somebody's face did this."

"Door frame did it."

I stop.