Page 108 of Havoc

"So it's yours. And I ain't askin' you what's on it, 'cause you told a room full of men to leave it be and I've watched you not ask one question about that piece of paper for eight days.

"But you're gonna look at it. And when you do, I'd like you to remember that a boy from Bayou Chene is in the ground on account of that coat."

Then he went home to her.

I've had it in the bottom left drawer of this desk since Saturday, and I have not opened it.

Four days.

I ain't a coward. I want that understood, whatever else. I have walked into rooms with men in 'em who wanted me dead and I have buried a wife and two brothers and I sat in a kitchen in Bayou Chene at two in the mornin' and told a shrimper his boy was gone, and I did not once look at a wall while I did any of it.

But I have opened this drawer eleven times since Saturday and shut it eleven times.

There's two things in it.

The one on the bottom's a photograph and it's been in that drawer since two thousand thirteen and every man in this club knows it's there and not one of 'em has ever seen it, and it is going to stay right where it is tonight the same as every other night.

The other one's in a sandwich bag.

The lamp's the only light in this buildin' and the page comes out of the bag stiff and soft at the same time, which is a thing paper does when it's been folded a long while in somethin' leather.

Emile's hand. Uphill, too big, takin' up more room than he was given.

G.K. — SEPT '04

Three lines I don't care about. A hauler. Somethin' out of Beaumont. He kept a book like a man who'd been raised right and it makes my chest hurt to look at the handwriting of a fella who's been dead longer than he was ever my friend.

Then the fourth line.

14 SEPT — ARCENEAUX (R.) — 164,000 — REC'D BY —

And the hole where the fold went through.

And two letters after it.

A hundred and sixty-four thousand dollars.

Scourge put a hundred and sixty-four thousand dollars in my hand in a boat in October of two thousand four.

Not a check. Not a bag, nothin' that dramatic — he had it in a fish cooler under a bag of ice and he set it down between his boots and he said don't ask me and I did not ask him. Not that night, not that year, not one time in twenty-two years.

I asked him where and he said don't ask me and I let it lie, because he was the man who'd been with me since we were both nineteen and stupid, and because I had six men waitin' on me who'd said yes to somethin' I could not pay for, and because I wanted the money.

That's the honest one. I wanted the money and a question would've cost me it.

So I built a club with it.

Two letters.

There's men in this world who'd need more than two letters and I ain't one of 'em, because I know who was in that room in September of oh-four. There was seven of us fixin' to walk and three of theirs and a lawyer, and I could name every one of them right now in the order they sat, and there is exactly one man among the whole of them whose name ends the way that ends.

I've been sayin' it out loud in this room every New Year's for twenty-two years.

Second on the list.

Right before Emile.

Fourteenth of September.