Page 9 of Havoc

I sat down on the concrete floor of that locker and went through every one, and it took me a little over two hours.

I didn't cry. I've thought about that a lot since.

She let me believe we were broke. She worked doubles at the Waffle House on College and came home smelling like grease and let me believe it, and I got a job at sixteen and gave her half of everything I ever made until I was twenty-four, and every single month for twenty-two years a check came from a town two hours south of us and she signed the back of it.

Four years of hospice. A hospital bed in the living room where the couch used to be. Morphine, and a lot of nights where she said things she didn't mean and a handful where she said things she did.

She never told me.

That's the part I can't put down. Not the money. She could have kept the money and told me his club still thought about him, and I'd have taken that and been grateful for it, and she knew I would have. She knew exactly what it would have been worth to me.

So there's a man in this town who wrote two hundred and sixty-four checks to my mother and never once wrote my name on anything.

I'm going to find out why.

The Cottonmouth Kings are three miles out on Route 9, and I don't intend to drive past them tonight.

I do it anyway.

Salvage yard first, lit up yellow, crushed cars stacked four high behind the fence. KINGS CUSTOM on the sign over the gate. Past the yard, the building sits low and long with every window burning and the lot full of bikes, and there's music coming out of it loud enough that I hear it through a closed window at forty miles an hour.

Somebody's out front with a broom.

I keep both hands on the wheel and my speed steady, and I go by without turning my head more than I need to, and my heart is going hard enough that I can feel it in my throat, and my hands are perfectly still.

That's been happening since April. The body panics and the rest of me watches it do it from somewhere off to the side.

His name is on a piece of paper inside that building.

I've seen a photograph of it. Seven signatures, and the sixth one is his, and he wrote the way he always wrote, too big, taking up more room than he was given.

He never rode a mile under that patch. He died three weeks before they made it real and they put him on the charter anyway, and his cut has been hanging on a wall in a stranger's house in New Orleans for twenty-two years while a stone in Baton Rouge says EMILE J. DOUCET and gives two dates and nothing else.

Not anymore.

That's the whole plan, and I've had nine days to make it better.

I drive to Rosalie. I find them. I tell them who I am and I make them look at that wall, and then I go get my father out of the ground and I put him where he was supposed to be. And while I'm standing there I ask a man named Storm to explain himself.

It isn't a good plan. I know what it is.

I know how a place like that works, too, because I was eleven, not stupid. I know what the women at that bar are, and I know what they aren't, and I know what it means when a man's name is on somebody's back. I know exactly how welcome I'm going to be.

None of it moves me one inch.

Here's what four years in that living room did: it took everything off me. The job went first, then the apartment, then the last two people who used to call. When she finally went, I stood in the kitchen at four in the morning and waited to feel like I'd lost something, and what I felt instead was the strangest lightness I've ever had in my life.

There is nothing left on this earth for anybody to take from me.

I'd genuinely like to watch somebody try.

The motel's on the north end, two rows of doors under a metal awning, VACANCY buzzing pink into the dark. Forty-two a night. Eleven more than the place in Gonzales and worth it for the lot around back where the road can't see the car.

The man at the desk doesn't look up from his phone long enough to be able to describe me later.

Room at the far end. I put the chain on and sit down on the edge of the bed with my boots still laced and look at the wall a while, and the air conditioner cycles on and rattles something loose in the housing and cycles off again.

Tomorrow.