Page 39 of Havoc

"You hit a door frame."

"Man's door frame. He was in front of it." He turns his head then and looks at me straight on for the first time since I came out here. "He'd paid. All of it, counted it out on his own rail, and we were square and he knew we were square, and I put him up against his own house anyway. There's a kid in there. She heard it."

I don't say anything.

"Fifteen years," he says. "A man pays, nothin' happens to him. That's the arrangement, that's the whole business. If it ain't true then I'm just some fella hurtin' people, and there's a hundred of them between here and Houston who'll do it for less than I cost."

"So why'd you do it?"

"Don't know."

"You keep saying that."

"'Cause I keep not knowin'." He pulls the hand back and looks at it. "You want the honest thing, it's been happenin' since the parkin' lot. I do somethin' and then I'm standin' there after lookin' at it like I watched somebody else do it. Told a man in New Orleans a story today I built out of nothin' while my mouth was already movin'. Lied to Storm on my own back steps and it came out smooth as anything. Lied to Warden this mornin' and he knew it and told me so."

Wind comes up off the water and turns the leaves over.

"I've been the same man for fifteen years," he says. "Everybody in that buildin' can tell you what I'll do in a room before I walk in it. Nine days now I couldn't tell you myself."

He says all of it looking at his own taped hand.

Not at me. It doesn't occur to him to say it at me — that's the part that gets under my ribs and stays there. He isn't confessing to a woman. He's a man who has run out of floor and has said it out loud in a direction because the alternative was saying it into the dark.

"Six days," I say.

"Yeah."

"Since the parking lot."

He goes still.

And I watch him arrive at it about four seconds after I did, and I watch him decide not to say it, and the frogs come up loud out of the black.

Here's what I want on the record, because I've been keeping a record my whole life and it has never once helped me.

He does not touch me.

He sits in that chair with his taped hand on his knee and he does not stand up, does not lean, does not put a single thing in the air between us. Two nights ago in the road he came off the ground and away from me so fast it moved the air, and he has not been within three feet of me since without there being a reason made of gauze or a doorway.

I've been in a room with a man who wanted something. I know what that room feels like.

This is not that room, and it's the reason I do what I do next.

"Havoc."

"Yeah."

"Look at me."

He does.

"I want you to hear all of it before you say anything, because I'm going to say it once and then I'm going to be very embarrassed for a while." My heart is going about a hundred and thirty and my voice is flat as a table, and I have never been so grateful for this stupid broken body in my life. "I've been in your house six days. You took me out of a parking lot. I'm not confused about any of that and I'm not going to sit here later and tell you I was."

"Lennox—"

"I said all of it."

He shuts his mouth.