Page 90 of Havoc

They're all four wearin' theirs.

I'm in a black t-shirt with a sheet of ledger paper inside it.

Not one man in that lot says a word about it, and they don't look at my chest, and that is somehow the most decent thing anybody's done for me in twelve days.

Cricket's standin' at the back of the row with a helmet in both hands.

I didn't see him because he was behind Deacon, which is where a man that size goes when he doesn't want to be seen.

He's got the sleeve cut off his left arm and the bandage runnin' wrist to elbow and no eyebrows and about a day and a half of no sleep in his face.

"No," I say.

"Yes, sir."

"Cricket."

"I heard you." He doesn't move. "But prospects go where they're told, and ain't nobody told me to stay."

"I'm tellin' you."

"You ain't a patch this week," Cricket says.

The lot goes very still.

He knows what he said the second it's out of him. His whole face does a thing. But he doesn't take it back and he doesn't look at the ground, and he stands there twenty-one years old with a burned arm and a helmet in both hands and holds it.

Raider makes the hinge sound.

And it's Warden — Warden, who threw that boy six feet across a gravel lot at midnight and hollered at him in a voice I ain't heard in fifteen years — who says it.

"Let him ride."

* * *

Sixty-two miles.

We go up 190 and cross at the old bridge because the interstate at four o'clock is a parkin' lot from Prairieville north, and Raider takes point because Raider always takes point, and Deacon rides the back door with Cricket in front of him where he can see him.

Ninety-seven degrees on the bank sign in Gonzales.

Nobody's got anything to say and there ain't a way to say it anyway at sixty-five with the wind, and that's a mercy, because I've got about four hours of things in me and not one of 'em would come out right.

Somewhere past Saint Gabriel, the plants start.

That's what Baton Rouge is from the south — you come up through the cane and then it's forty miles of refinery, flare stacks and white tanks and steam going up in columns, pipe racks running over the road on concrete legs, and the whole thing smells like a struck match and money. Chain-link for miles. Signs about hard hats.

Then the batture and the river and the bridge, and the city.

Blitz's text comes in at three fifty-one and I feel the phone go in my pocket and I can't do a thing about it doin' seventy in the left lane.

We come off at Washington and pull into a shut-down car wash and I get it out.

BREC LOT CHOCTAW & S 13TH. BEHIND THE OLD FURNITURE PLACE. CAR OFF 3 MIN AGO

I turn it around and show Warden.

He reads it twice and hands it to Raider and Raider hands it to Deacon, and Mercy reads it over Deacon's arm without bein' handed anything and hands it back to me.