Page 64 of Havoc

LENNOX

He comes up the steps at four in the afternoon in a black t-shirt and nothing over it.

I've been on that porch since eleven. I know what's wrong before he's off the bottom slab and I don't say anything, because there's nothing to say about it that he doesn't already know, and because a man walking toward you without a thing he's worn every day for fifteen years does not need it pointed out.

He sits down in the other chair.

"They ain't handin' you over," he says.

"Okay."

"They ain't decided anything either. Four to two and Storm abstained, and it don't carry without him, so there's no decision and there won't be one till he makes one." He puts his head back against the boards. "Which means you're safe in the way a thing's safe when nobody's got around to it yet."

"And the rest?"

"Rest of what?"

I look at his chest where the cut isn't.

"That's a separate matter," he says.

"Havoc."

"Tyrant put it on the shelf under the charter." His voice doesn't do anything. "That's where they keep the two we've buried. Said till somebody says something different, and then he went out and shut the door."

The heron's out there. It's always out there.

"So I ain't out," he says. "And I ain't in. And every man in that buildin' is gonna spend the next while workin' out how to talk to me, and I'd rather they threw me out clean. That's the honest thing. I'd rather they threw me out."

"I know."

"Do you."

"My mother took eleven months to die after the doctor said six." I put my feet down off the rail. "Nobody knew what to say to me for eleven months. Everybody at that church had a casserole ready for a funeral that wouldn't come. I'd have given anything for one person to just tell me the date."

He turns his head and looks at me.

"Yeah," he says. "That's it. That's the thing."

Neither of us cooks.

We eat the last of the bread standing up and I take the second-to-last beer and he takes the last one, and around nine the power flickers the way it does out here when something happens somewhere else, and it comes back and then at ten past it goes off and stays off.

"That's the whole road," he says from the window. "Ain't just us."

"How long?"

"Hour. Sometimes till mornin'."

There's no moon. That's what I hadn't understood about this place until tonight — with the porch light off and the kitchen dead and no other house within two miles, dark out here is a physical object. I put my hand in front of my face and there is nothing there.

He finds a flashlight and a candle and lights the candle and puts the flashlight down without turning it on.

We sit on the floor with our backs against the front of the couch because the chairs are stupid in the dark.

And somewhere in the second hour of it, with a candle going on the milk crate and the window unit dead and both of us sweating through everything we've got on, he starts talking.

He doesn't do it well.