Page 56 of Havoc

The steps go down off the front of that building in three concrete slabs with a crack running through the middle one, and I sit on the bottom slab with the box beside me and my elbows on my knees and I look at a parking lot full of motorcycles for a long time.

I'm not crying. I want that on the record too.

I've been unable to cry since about the second year of my mother's illness. It's not strength. It's a machine with a part missing. Everything gets in and nothing comes out and I sit there on that step running about a hundred and thirty and nothing at all comes up.

The door opens behind me and I don't turn around.

A bottle comes into the corner of my vision.

"It's cold," the woman says. "That's about the most I can tell you about it."

She sits down on the step above me with her own bottle and her elbows on her knees, mirror of me, and doesn't say anything for a while.

Late thirties, maybe. Dark hair up off her neck. She's got the rag still hanging out of her back pocket and she is in absolutely no hurry.

"Junie," she says.

"Lennox."

"I know it. Whole buildin' knows it now." She drinks. "You want the truth or you want the nice version?"

"Truth."

"Figured." She sets the bottle down on the step. "Storm walkin' out is the worst thing that could've happened in there."

"He didn't say a word."

"That's what I mean." She turns her head. "Honey, if he'd hollered at you, you'd be fine. A man hollers, he's still in the room. Storm ain't hollered at anybody in nine years, and I've watched him take a man's patch off him at that table with a voice like he was orderin' breakfast.

"He walked. That means whatever you said, he ain't got a place to put it, and that man has got a place to put everything."

The frogs are going in the ditch across the road.

"Now here's the rest," Junie says, "and I ain't dressin' it up, 'cause you look like a woman who's had about enough of that.

"There's three kinds of women in this world as far as that buildin' is concerned. There's ol’ ladies, and an ol’ lady wears her man's name on her back and it is not a joke and it is not a nickname and there ain't but four of 'em in this club. There's club whores, which is me, and I've been one for eight years and I'll tell you flat I'd do it again. And there's everybody else, which is women who come around for a weekend and go home.

"You ain't any of the three."

"I noticed."

"No, listen to me." She points with the bottle. "You ain't any of the three and that is not a small thing, that's a hole in a wall. Every rule that buildin's got is about which of them three you are and what a man's supposed to do about it, and you walked in there and you ain't got a category. You know what men do with a thing that ain't got a category?"

"Nothing?"

"They fight about it," Junie says. "For a long time. And they get real ugly while they're doin' it."

The door goes again, and a second woman comes down and drops onto the step next to Junie with a bag of something.

"Okay," she says. "So."

"Gigi."

"Hi." She looks at me sideways. Twenty-seven, maybe. Dark curls and about four rings on. "That was the single most insane thing I have ever seen in my entire life and I've been here three years."

"Gigi."

"I'm being supportive."