Page 55 of Havoc

He looks at me for a long time.

Whatever I was expecting, it isn't there. There's no shock in it. That's the thing I keep coming back to. Every man in this room is looking at that wall like the floor moved, and the one man who founded the club and built the frame and reads the names every New Year's is looking at me, and there is nothing on his face at all except something underneath it that is very old and very tired.

His hand comes off the chair.

He straightens up. He turns around, and he walks the length of that room past nine men who get out of his way without being asked, and he goes out the door I came in and he doesn't shut it.

We all stand there and listen to his boots go down the hall.

Then a screen door somewhere at the back of the building bangs once.

Then nothing.

* * *

Nobody speaks for what has to be fifteen seconds.

I stand in the middle of a room I have been trying to get into for nine days, with my arm still half up, and it turns out the thing I did not plan for is this one. I planned for them to throw me out. I planned for them to call me a liar. I planned, God help me, for one of them to say we've been waiting for you.

I did not plan for a man to look at me like that and leave.

"Well," says the heavyset one at the table.

He says it to the room.

Nobody answers him.

And I stand there and look at my father's name in a frame with a chip out of the corner of the glass — and Cricket was right, it's a terrible frame, the miters don't meet on the bottom left and there's a gap in it you could put a dime through — and that's the thing that finally gets me.

Not the men. Not the door. Not Storm's back going down the hall.

A bad corner joint in a piece of cypress.

Because somebody sat down twenty-two years ago and built it himself instead of paying eleven dollars to have it done in town, and he wasn't any good at it, and he did it anyway, and then he hung it on a wall and stood in front of it every year and read the names out loud.

Six of them the same.

And one of them slower.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

LENNOX

Somebody has to move first, and it turns out to be me.

I put my arm down. I pick up the shoebox off the corner of the table where I set it without any memory of setting it, and I walk out of that room past nine men. Havoc says my name once behind me and I keep going.

The hallway is eleven steps long. I count them.

The main room is worse than the chapel was, because the chapel had nine men in it who were shocked and this has forty people in it who have had eight minutes to talk. Nobody's talking now. The jukebox is between songs and I walk out through that whole place in the kind of silence you could put your hand on.

At the pool table Cricket stands up.

He does it all the way this time. Nobody else moves and he stands up anyway, twenty-one years old, chair scraping, and he doesn't say anything and he doesn't come toward me, he just stands there and lets me see him do it.

I get outside before anything in my face happens.

* * *