Page 8 of Havoc

I reach out and take it.

Fold it once, along the middle, and put it inside my cut where it sits flat against my chest — and I couldn't give you a reason for doin' it if you held a gun on me, and I don't spend one second lookin' for one.

CHAPTER THREE

LENNOX

The sign at the parish line has a bullet hole punched through the S.

ROSALIE. POP. 4,118. Somebody's been shooting at it for years, from the look of it. The hole has gone soft and orange at the edges, an old wound the metal healed around, and I slow down as I pass it without deciding to.

Nine miles back, there was a bait shop with a gravel lot and a dumpster and a stand of water oaks behind it.

I didn't slow down for that either. I made myself not.

Three nights ago, I stood under the third tree from the fence post with a shovel I bought in Gonzales for nineteen dollars, and I dug for forty minutes in ground that turned to soup at eighteen inches, and I put my father in it wrapped in two contractor bags and a blue tarp. Then I walked the distance off from the post twice and got back in the car and wrote nothing down.

Anybody would call that crazy. I'd call it crazy, if a woman told me she'd done it.

But I've had nine days to think of something better and I haven't, because there's a version of the next two weeks where somebody takes it off me, and if it's in the ground then it isn't on me, and a woman who's the only person alive who knows where a thing is buried is a woman who gets to keep talking.

So it stays under the tree.

* * *

The road runs straight through cypress on both sides, black water standing between the trunks, and the last of the light is going out of it while I drive.

He said it was pretty.

Ain't much to look at, is it, Lenny?

It's swamp.

It's the prettiest swamp in the state of Louisiana, and I'll thank you not to talk about it in front of company.

I was eleven. In the back seat with my knees up on the vinyl, watching the tops of the trees run backward and upside down through the rear window, and him driving with one wrist hooked over the wheel and his elbow out in the wind.

That's what I have. Pieces about that size. Nine or ten of them, worn smooth from twenty-two years of handling, and I have never once been able to build anything larger out of them no matter how long I've sat in the dark with them.

He was warm on Saturdays. The rest of the week he was somewhere else, even the times he was in the room, and I understood that about him before I had a word for it.

Every other weekend. That was the arrangement. Then one weekend in October there wasn't one, and my mother sat down on the end of my bed with her hands in her lap, and I already knew from her hands.

Town comes up on me faster than I want it to.

A feed store. Two churches inside a quarter mile of each other, which tells you something about a place. A Dollar General with the lights on and nobody in it. A bank on the corner of Main and Third with a drive-through and a sign out front giving the time and the temperature, eighty-one degrees at ten forty at night.

I pull into the lot across from it and sit there with the engine running.

ATCHAFALAYA STATE BANK & TRUST — ROSALIE, LA.

Same words that were printed on the top left corner of two hundred and sixty-four check stubs.

My mother kept everything, which surprised nobody in the world more than it surprised me. The woman threw out my school pictures. She threw out my grandmother's rings. She kept twenty-two years of paper in a locker on Airline Highway she paid nineteen dollars a month for and never mentioned, not one time, not in four years of dying.

I found the shoebox on the second day, underneath a garbage bag full of curtains.

Rubber-banded in bundles of twelve. Same amount every month. Same bank every month. Starting the November after he went in the ground and stopping in April, four months ago, because the woman cashing them stopped.