Page 87 of Havoc

"Yeah." He looks at me for a long moment. "Storm's in the office."

Nine men come in behind me, and nobody asks them to.

That's not a thing that happens. Storm's office ain't chapel, it ain't got a table in it, it's a room with a desk and a filing cabinet and a window that doesn't open. But they come in behind me anyway, Warden and Ransom and Tyrant and Deacon and Raider and Mercy and two of the shop boys standin' in the hall, and it fills up, and Storm sits behind that desk and lets it.

"Say it," he says.

And here's the thing.

I have never asked anybody for anything in my life.

Not one time. Not for money, not for help, not for a ride, and I'd like to say it's pride and it ain't. It's simpler and it's worse. You ask a man for somethin' and he can say no, and if he says no, you've handed him a thing about yourself he didn't have before, and my daddy taught me at about seven years old that a man doesn't do that. A man makes it so people offer.

So I've spent fifteen years bein' a thing people offer to.

I stand in the middle of that office with nine men behind me and my chest full of somethin' I cannot swallow around, and it takes me about four seconds to get it out.

"I'm askin'," I say.

Nobody moves.

"Lucien Arceneaux is meetin' her somewhere in Baton Rouge this afternoon and I don't know where and I can't find out by myself." My voice ain't doin' what I want it to. I keep goin'. "She traded herself for this club. All of it. The yard, the bar, and me, by name, she put me in it by name, and she did it at six-forty this mornin' while I was asleep in my own bed with my boots on.

"I can't get her by myself. I ain't got the men and I ain't got the phones and I ain't got the⁠—"

I stop.

"I'm askin' this table," I say. "I know I ain't got a right to. I'm askin' anyway."

Storm looks at me for a long while.

He's aged about four years since Sunday. That's not a figure of speech. There's somethin' gone out of the middle of his face and it ain't come back.

"No," he says.

The room don't make a sound.

"Say why," Deacon says, from the door.

"I'll say it once and then it's done." Storm puts both hands flat on the desk. "There's a boy upstairs at Our Lady with a tube in his side. There's a sixty-one-year-old woman on oxygen down the hall from him. We got no shop, no bar, no fence, and no insurance, and we are goin' to be eatin' our own savings by Christmas.

"That's what one night cost.

"You want me to send what's left of this club into a parking lot in East Baton Rouge Parish, sixty miles off our own ground, against a New Orleans house — for a woman who ain't club, ain't property, and who walked out of that house this mornin' on her own two feet because she decided to."

"She's Tithe's daughter," Raider says.

"I know whose daughter she is." Somethin' comes up in his voice and goes back down. "I have known whose daughter she is since before any man in this room could ride a bicycle.

"And the book says she ain't got a claim, and I read that book out loud on Monday and I abstained instead of strikin' it, and that's mine and I'll carry it. But I ain't sendin' men who got families over a thing I already ruled I wasn't strong enough to rule on."

"Then rule now," Deacon says.

"I'm rulin' now." Storm stands. "The club doesn't ride for this."

I go out through the yard and Deacon says my name once behind me and I don't turn around.

Warden catches me at the gate.