Page 36 of Havoc

The moths.

"I told him you stashed it," he says.

"What?"

"On the phone. He wanted a reason we hadn't brought you in and I gave him the true one, that you buried it before you got here and grabbin' you don't get it back." He says it flat, all the way through, and I watch it cost him. "So now the man huntin' you knows the only thing keepin' you breathin', and he knows it because I put it in his ear. That's what I did with my eleven hours."

I stand there on a ruined heel on a porch in the dark.

"That's why you hit him," I say.

"What?"

"The man who paid. That's why."

And his face does the thing it did in the road. The first sound comes out and there's nothing behind it.

Here's the part I need to be honest about, because I've thought about it a great deal since and I have never once been able to make it anybody's fault but mine.

I close the distance.

He doesn't. He's standing at the top of his own steps with his hands down and his back to a post and I have eight feet to cover and I cover all eight of them, and when I get there I take a fistful of his shirt in my right hand and I don't do anything with it.

His right hand is hanging down by his leg and it's wet, and it's been wet the whole time we've been standing out here, and I have been looking at his face.

"Your hand."

"It's nothin'."

Two knuckles opened and a third one gone soft-looking, blood down past the wrist bone, and he tells me it's nothing the way a man tells you the sky is blue.

"We're doing that later," I say.

"Alright."

"Say no," I say.

"Lennox."

"You've got one and you can use it. I did." My hand's shaking on his shirt, which is new, which is the first thing that's got through to the outside since February. "So say it."

He looks down at me for a long moment.

"No's the only word I got left," he says, "and I ain't gonna waste it lyin'."

I pull.

He comes off the post like the house pushed him.

The kitchen doorframe takes my shoulder blades and I put my mouth on his and he makes a sound into it that isn't anything a man decides to make.

Both his hands come up and stop. Wide open, an inch off me, hanging there.

"Put them on me," I say.

"Lennox—"

"I'm saying it out loud, and I'm not drunk, and nobody's got a hand on me but me. Put them on me."