Page 76 of Havoc

"Your daddy didn't get killed by New Orleans." He looks at the dirt. "He got killed by the Gallow Kings, and he got killed because I asked him to leave with me."

The frogs are going.

"Summer of oh-four, I decided I was out. Fourteen years in that club and it had gone somewhere I wasn't goin', and I sat in a boat with Scourge for two hours one afternoon and we worked out that a man don't leave a club like that by himself. You leave alone, you're a problem they solve. You leave with numbers, you're a thing they got to negotiate with.

"So I went and got numbers."

He turns the hat around.

"Emile was the last one I asked and the hardest one, 'cause he had the most to lose. He kept the Gallow Kings' book. He knew every dollar those men had ever moved and every man they'd moved it for, and there ain't a club on this earth lets that walk out the door.

"He knew it. He said it to me. He said, Storm, I'm the one thing in this club that can't quit."

The porch board creaks under me.

"And I kept at him," Storm says. "Four times over about six weeks. Sat in his kitchen in Baton Rouge with a woman makin' coffee in the next room and a girl's drawings up on the icebox, and I told him he was a better man than the outfit he was in, and I told him we'd have somethin' clean, and I told him he'd sleep at night.

"And on the twenty-ninth of September he said yes."

Everything in me has stopped.

"Sixth of October a fella walked a dog on the levee road out past Erwinville," he says, "and there was a truck sittin' there with the door open and the dome light burnt out, and your daddy was in it, and he'd been there most of two days."

I put both hands flat on the boards.

"They didn't hide it," Storm says. "That's how I know it was them. They didn't take the truck and they didn't take his wallet and they left him on a road that a hundred people drive, and that's not a robbery, that's a notice, and it was addressed to me and every man who'd said yes to me, and every one of us read it.

"Charter got signed on the twenty-sixth of October. Twenty days after we buried him. And I put his name on it sixth in line where it would've gone, and I have stood in front of that paper every New Year's for twenty-two years and read it out loud, and there ain't a man in that buildin' ever asked me why, 'cause they think it's honor."

He finally looks up at me.

"It ain't honor," Storm says. "It's a receipt."

I can't say anything for a while.

He waits. He doesn't fill it and he doesn't touch me and he doesn't get up, and I sit on a step above a fifty-two-year-old man in a yard in the dark and my whole chest is a fist.

"The money," I finally say.

"There wasn't anything else."

"Twenty-two years, Storm."

"Twenty-two years and one month." He puts the hat down on the step. "November of oh-four I drove to Baton Rouge and I sat in your mother's kitchen where I'd sat in his, and I told her what I've told you, and I told her I'd send what I could every month till one of us died, and I asked her for one thing.

"I asked her not to bring you back to Rosalie. Not for a funeral, not for a visit, not ever."

"Why."

"'Cause the Gallow Kings knew Emile Doucet had a wife." His voice doesn't change. It hasn't changed once. "They didn't know he had a daughter. Man kept a picture in his wallet and never said a name out loud in that clubhouse one time in six years, and I know that for a fact, 'cause I asked every man who came out with me and not one of 'em could tell me if you existed.

"So I asked her to keep it that way. And she did. And she took the money and she never told you where it come from, and I have hated her for it and been grateful to her for it, some days both inside an hour."

"You could have written one line."

"One line with my name on it in a house in Baton Rouge is a piece of paper that says this girl is connected to Storm." He shakes his head slowly. "You want me to say I got it wrong. I might have. I've had twenty-two years to think about it and I still can't get it to come out any other way, and I'd like to, 'cause I'd rather have been wrong than have been right about what those men would do."

He doesn't cry.