Page 57 of Havoc

"That ain't supportive."

"It's supportive adjacent." She holds the bag out to me. It's pork rinds. "Here. You look like a woman who hasn't eaten."

I take one, because I don't know what else to do with my hands, and the two of them sit there and eat pork rinds on a step outside a clubhouse in the middle of the night and let me be a person for about four minutes.

"Blitz has thrown up," Gigi says.

"He has not."

"He went outside real fast is what I'm saying."

"That boy's twenty-four years old and he's been sayin' a dead man's name at New Year's since he was twenty-two." Junie shakes her head. "Give him a minute."

"I'm giving him a minute. I'm reporting the minute."

Junie laughs into her shoulder, no sound coming out, and Gigi looks pleased with herself, and for the space of about ninety seconds I sit on a concrete step in a place where everybody hates me and I feel almost all right.

Then the door opens a third time.

Both of them stand up.

"That's ours," Junie says, and takes the bag out of Gigi's hand, and the two of them go back up the steps past a heavyset man in his forties with gray in his beard, and Junie touches his arm on the way by and he says something to her too low for me to hear.

He sits down on the step beside me and takes about a minute to do it, and when he's settled he pulls a cigarette out and doesn't light it.

"Ransom," he says.

"I gathered."

"You gathered." He turns the cigarette over in his fingers. There's ink to the knuckles and the rings are off, all of them, sitting in his shirt pocket where I can see them. "Alright. I'm gonna say some things and you ain't got to say anything back."

"Okay."

"I was twenty-two in oh-four." He looks out at the lot. "Prospect. Bottom of everything. I swept that floor and I fetched beer and I did not go in that chapel one time until the March after, and I want you to understand that means I don't know anything. Whatever you come here to find out, I ain't got it. I was a kid holdin' a broom."

"Okay."

"But I knew him."

Everything in my chest goes very still.

"Not well. Not like Storm did, not like Scourge did." He's still looking at the lot. "But he come around that shop maybe a dozen times that summer and I was the one they hollered at to get coffee, so I got the coffee, and he was the only one of 'em who ever said thank you to me for it."

I don't say anything, because if I say anything it will come out wrong.

"He was funny," Ransom says.

"He—"

"Real funny. Not mean funny, which is what most men in this life are. He had a way of takin' the air out of a room when two fellas were about to go at each other. I watched him do it to Storm twice and don't nobody do that to Storm." He turns the cigarette. "And he could count. Lord, he could count. I've got his job now, you know that? Same chair. I've had it fourteen years, and I have heard four separate men tell me I'm good at it, and every one of 'em said it like they were comparin' me to somethin'."

He finally looks over at me.

"And he talked about you."

The parking lot goes soft at the edges and I put my hand flat on the concrete.

"I didn't know it was you," he says. "I want to be straight about that. He never said a name that I recall, or if he did I was twenty-two and I wasn't listenin' to nothin' that wasn't about me. But he had a girl and he said so, and there was a Saturday he come in wound up about somethin' and Storm asked him what was eatin' him and he said⁠—"