Page 52 of Havoc

The frogs.

I sit on my own porch in the dark next to a woman I have lied to two men and a table about, and I finally understand that I have not only been keepin' a secret for nine days.

I've been keepin' the wrong one.

"Get your boots," I say.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

LENNOX

Nine miles and he doesn't say one word.

He drives my car with both hands on the wheel and the windows down because the air conditioner has never worked properly, and the night comes in hot and full of the smell of that water, and I sit with the shoebox on my lap and my hands on the lid and I rehearse.

Ten sentences. I have had them since a Waffle House parking lot outside Sorrento at two in the morning nine days ago. I've said them in a shower and to a windshield and once, badly, to a heron.

My name is Lennox Doucet.

The sixth signature on your charter belongs to my father.

I run them the whole nine miles and they hold together right up until the gate.

The lot is full.

Sunday night, and there must be sixteen bikes in it and a truck with the tailgate down and two men sitting on it with beers, and every window in the building is throwing yellow out onto the gravel and the music is coming through the wall the way it did the first night I drove past.

The two on the tailgate stand up when the headlights hit them.

Havoc kills the engine.

"You don't have to do it tonight," he says.

"Yes, I do."

"They're gonna⁠—"

"I know what they're going to do." My voice comes out level and I have never in my life been more grateful for this broken thing my body does. "You've had nine days to be brave about this and you used all of them. I've had one hour. Let's go before I catch up to myself."

He looks at me.

Then he gets out and comes around and opens my door, which I don't ask him to do and which I let him, and I get out of my own car in a parking lot full of men in a place I have been driving toward since Wednesday, and my heel goes under me on the gravel and he does not put a hand out and I love him for it a little.

The room stops.

Not all at once. It goes in a wave from the door inward, the way a wave goes — the two men behind us first, then the pool table, then the bar, and by the time I'm eight feet inside the building there is a jukebox playing to forty people who are not making any sound at all.

I count them without meaning to. Six women. Over twenty men. A boy in the corner with a fan of cards frozen halfway to the table.

Cricket's face does something I'll think about for a long time afterward. He half stands. Then he looks around at everybody else not standing and he sits back down and puts the cards face down on the felt, and he keeps his eyes on me the whole rest of the way across that floor.

Behind the bar there's a woman with a rag in her hand who has stopped wiping and hasn't put it down, and beside her a younger one with dark curls who is looking straight at Havoc with something in her face like arithmetic.

The redheaded one with the ledger is on his feet.

"Havoc."

"Get Storm."