Page 51 of Havoc

"You want to say anything?" he asks.

"Not yet."

"Alright." He nods. "Then I'll say mine.

"I ain't Storm's dog. Anybody in that buildin' who thinks I run to him with things ain't been payin' attention, and I've sat on more than you'd believe for men who deserved it less than you do. But I have got exactly one job in this club and it's the door. Who comes in it, who goes out of it, and what walks in behind a man who ain't payin' attention.

"There is a woman in your house that ten men were sent to find. Every hour she's out there and this table don't know it, this club is exposed and every man in it is exposed and don't none of 'em know to duck."

"Nobody knows where she's at."

"Somebody always knows." Warden don't raise his voice. He's never raised his voice at me one time in fifteen years and that's the whole reason it works. "You've had nine days. That's more rope than I've give anybody. It's more than I'd have got.

"So here it is, and I want you to hear that it ain't a threat, 'cause a threat's a thing a man does when he's got a choice. This is the job.

"You bring it to the table in the mornin'. Or I do."

Somewhere back in the building somebody wins a hand and the whole room hollers about it.

"And Havoc." He steps out of my way. "You bring it yourself, you're a man who comes forward. I bring it, you're a man who got caught. Ain't the same room. Ain't the same vote."

* * *

Porch light's on when I get home.

Second time in three days, and I still ain't the one turnin' it on.

She's in the dock chair with her heel up on the rail and the shoebox closed on her lap and both hands flat on the lid of it, and she's been sittin' there long enough that the mosquitoes have quit botherin' with her.

I come up the steps and I don't sit down.

"It's Monday in two hours," she says.

"Yeah."

"You asked me a question on that dock."

"I did."

"Come sit down."

So I sit.

And she tells me.

She tells me about a shoebox in a storage locker on Airline Highway and two hundred and sixty-four checks. She tells me about a house on Prytania Street with a room on the second floor at the back nobody uses, and a wall in it with a boxer's robe and a rifle and two license plates and a cut hangin' fourth from the left with the rockers still on it.

She tells me about four hundred and twenty dollars, a shovel out of a hardware store in Gonzales, and the third water oak behind a bait shop nine miles up the road from where we're sittin'.

She tells me her father's name.

She says it out loud on my porch at ten o'clock on a Sunday night, and it is a name I have said in a room with a fire goin' every New Year's for fifteen years, and I have never one time in my life asked a single man in that buildin' who he was.

"Say it again," I say.

"Emile Doucet." Her voice does not move. "You know him as Tithe. It's the sixth name on the paper in that frame, and he's my father, and he's been in the ground in Baton Rouge under a stone with two dates on it since I was eleven years old.

"And your president has been sending my mother money since the November after he died and he has never once written my name on anything."