Page 46 of Havoc

I make him come inside because it is ninety-six degrees and he has been standing in a driveway holding a gallon of milk for four minutes.

He won't sit down.

He puts the groceries away himself — asks me where things go, and I don't know, so we guess together and put the coffee in with the wrenches — and then he stands at the end of the counter with his hands behind his back like a soldier and won't take a glass of water until I've already poured it.

"Do you always do what you're told this fast?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Why?"

"'Cause I want to be there." He says it plain. No angle on it at all. "Ninety-one days. Then it goes to a vote and if it goes right I get the rockers and then that's it, that's the rest of it, that's every day after that."

"And if it goes wrong?"

He looks at the floor.

"Then I go back to my daddy's boat," he says.

He talks the whole rest of the morning.

I don't have to work him. That's the part I'm not ready for. I had four different ways lined up to get information out of a twenty-one-year-old and I don't use one of them, because he empties himself out on the counter the second somebody asks him a question and looks like they want the answer.

He tells me Tyrant fined him thirty dollars over rags and then amended the book so he couldn't win the same way twice. He tells me Deacon cooks on Sundays and won't cuss, not once, not ever, and that Blitz has been trying to break him for a year and a half. He tells me Warden has never raised his voice at him and that this is somehow worse than if he had.

He tells me about a man called Mercy in the way you'd tell somebody about weather that hasn't come yet.

"He's real polite," Cricket says.

"That's what you've got?"

"That's what everybody's got, ma'am."

And I stand there in that kitchen with a dish towel in my hands and I think: this is a child.

He's twenty-one. He's got a father with a boat somewhere down in the basin who probably wanted something different for him, and he is standing in a stranger's house on a Sunday morning delivering butter for a man who broke a hole in his own hand on Friday, and he would walk into that water out there if somebody at that table pointed at it.

I stop working him about ten minutes before I stop wanting to.

"Can I ask you something?" I ask.

"Yes, ma'am."

"The room where y'all meet."

"Chapel."

"You been in it?"

"No, ma'am." He straightens up an inch. "Prospects don't go in. Nobody goes in but patched. Not women, not old ladies, not anybody, not one time in twenty-two years." Then, quieter, and he glances at the window like the house might report him: "I looked in it once. Door was open when Tyrant went for the mail and I stood in the hall about four seconds."

"What's in it?"

"Table. Chairs. And there's a paper up on the wall behind where Prez sits, in a frame he made hisself, and the frame's bad." He says it like a man describing a cathedral. "That's the charter. That's the seven that started it."

"You know the names?"

"Everybody knows the names."