Page 77 of Havoc

I want to put that down, because I keep expecting it and it doesn't come. There's nothing performed about any of this. He sits there with his hat on the step and his forearms on his knees and he tells me the worst thing he's ever done in a voice like a man reading a inventory, and the only thing in the whole twenty minutes that gives him away is that he cannot look at me for longer than about four seconds at a time.

"I'm sorry," he says. "That ain't worth anything and I know it. But nobody ever said it to you and somebody ought to."

"Say his name."

He looks up.

"You said 'your daddy' six times." My voice is doing something. "Say his name."

Storm's jaw goes.

"Emile," he says.

And it comes out of him nothing at all like it does on New Year's.

At the truck he stops with his hand on the door.

"Can I ask you somethin'?"

"Yes."

"That coat." He doesn't turn around. "Is it in that house?"

"It's on the kitchen table."

He stands there a long moment with his back to me and his hand on the handle of a truck door.

"Would you let me hold it?" he asks.

So I go inside past Havoc without saying anything and I come back out with my father's cut folded over both arms, and I hand it down to a man standing in a dirt yard in the dark.

He takes it like it weighs a great deal more than it does.

He doesn't unfold it. He doesn't look for the rockers or the name or the hole in the lining. He just stands there in his own headlights holding a dead man's coat against his chest with both hands, the way you'd hold something that had been handed to you at a hospital, and he does not make one sound.

Two minutes, maybe.

Then he gives it back, and he says thank you, and he gets in the truck and drives out of that yard, and I stand in the dirt holding my father and watch his taillights all the way to the trees.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

HAVOC

The days run out on a Tuesday.

Ain't a man in that club said the word out loud all week and every one of 'em knew the date. Warden put two men on the yard at night startin' Saturday without callin' a vote about it. Ransom moved money. Tyrant took the good ledgers home in a plastic tote and did not offer an explanation to anybody.

Nobody's spoken to me about my cut since Tyrant put it on the shelf.

They've spoken to me about everything else, though. That's the part I wasn't ready for. Warden asked me Sunday which end of the yard I wanted, and I told him, and he put me there, and neither of us said one word about the fact that a man without a patch ain't supposed to stand a line.

Tuesday I go up to the clubhouse at seven in the evenin' and Lennox goes to The Fang with Junie, because it's a Tuesday and Junie's got the bar and Lennox has got a job now whether anybody voted on that either.

I tell her to keep her phone on her.

She says yes, Eli, in the voice she uses when she's makin' fun of me, and I get about four miles down the road before I understand I should have looked at her longer.

At ten past eleven, the whole east side of the yard goes up.