Page 53 of Havoc

"Brother." He says it low and fast, and he comes around the end of the bar. "Whatever this is, take it in the office. Take it out to the yard. Not here."

"Get Storm, Tyrant."

"You want to think about⁠—"

"He's already comin'," says a voice from the hall.

Storm fills a doorway the way a piece of furniture does.

Fifty-some, gray all the way through the beard, and he stands there in the hall entrance with a cup in his hand and looks at me for about four seconds without one thing happening on his face.

He doesn't ask who I am.

I have gone over that a hundred times since. He does not ask.

"Church," he says.

And the room comes apart. Men put drinks down. Somebody says now? and nobody answers him. They come off the wall and out of chairs and past me on both sides, close enough that I can smell the beer and the cigarettes and the leather, and not one of them looks at me directly and every single one of them sees me.

Nine of them go down that hall.

Havoc puts his hand flat between my shoulder blades. Not pushing. Just there.

"Walk," he says.

There is a door at the end of that hallway.

It's a plain door. That's what I want on the record, because I have been imagining it for nine days and I built something out of oak with a snake carved into it, and it's a hollow-core interior door out of a hardware store with a coat of brown paint going tacky in the humidity and a scuff at boot height where twenty-two years of men have kicked it open with their hands full.

I have been told twice this week that no woman has ever gone through it.

Havoc reaches past me and opens it.

And I go through.

The sound the room makes is not a sound.

Nine men are standing around a table and every one of them turns, and there is a half second where it hasn't registered yet, and then it does, and what happens is that all the air in that room stops moving.

The big blond one puts both hands on the back of a chair.

The one with the long dark hair — Warden, it has to be Warden, he's exactly what a boy with sweat rings under his arms described to me on a Sunday morning — comes up out of his seat so fast the chair goes back and hits the wall.

"Havoc."

"Sit down."

"You do not—" Warden's voice comes up and I watch him take it back down by force. "Twenty-two years. Twenty-two years, brother, and you walk her through that door without a word to any man in this room."

"Sit down, Warden."

"There is a rule⁠—"

"I know the rule." Havoc is still behind my shoulder. "Sit down and hear her, and then say anything you want to me. Anything. I'll stand for all of it."

Nobody sits down.

The redheaded one has his book against his chest like a man holding a lid on something. There's a heavyset one in his forties with gray at the temples who has both hands flat on the table. There's a young one with a phone in his hand that he has forgotten he is holding.