Page 65 of Havoc

He is terrible at this. He starts three times and stops twice and the whole thing comes out sideways and out of order and with long holes in it where he waits and I don't fill them.

"There was a store," he says. "Corner of Bienville and 41, ain't there anymore, it's a tire place now.

"My daddy'd take me in there Saturdays. I'd be, what. Six. Seven. And the fella behind the counter would come out from behind it when we walked in. Come out from behind it, every time, like we were somebody. He'd give me a Coke out of the cooler and he wouldn't take money for it. And my daddy'd get his cigarettes and whatever else, and about half the time the fella'd wave it off, and my daddy'd say now Ray, I can't do that, and Ray'd say you can, you can, and we'd walk out."

He stops.

"I was thirty-one years old," he says, "standin' in a man's kitchen in Vidalia, and he come out from behind his own counter at me. Same move. Exact same move. Came out toward me with his hands already up and a smile on and started offerin' me things.

"And I stood there and I thought about Ray and the Coke."

The heat is enormous. There's sweat running down the middle of my back and I don't move.

"My whole childhood," he says. "Every kind thing anybody in that town ever did for us. All of it was the same thing. That's what it was the whole time and I was twenty-five years late workin' it out."

"Havoc."

"Ain't finished."

"Okay."

"He knew." He says it flat. "That's what I got to say and then I'm done. My daddy knew exactly what it was and he liked it. He'd tell me. He'd say — " and here he does something with his voice, drops it, and it is the ugliest thing I have heard him do — "son, there ain't but two ways a man gets treated good in this world, and one of 'em you got to earn."

The candle gutters and comes back.

"I believed him," Havoc says. "That's the part. Not when I was six. Now. I'm thirty-six years old and there's a piece of me that has never once stopped believin' him, and I built a whole life on it, and it worked. Fifteen years it worked. Ain't a man in three parishes don't get out of my way.

"And then you asked me about a crown in a motel parkin' lot and you weren't scared of me and I ain't had a solid day since."

I don't say anything for a while.

There are eleven things I could say and every one of them is a repair job, and he hasn't asked me to repair anything, and my mother spent four years being told she looked good today.

So I ask him a question instead.

"How'd you get the name?"

He laughs. There's nothing in it.

"You want it?"

"I asked."

"Twenty-one. Prospectin'." He turns the beer bottle on the floor. "There was a fella out by Krotz Springs owed the club and wouldn't pay, and Storm sent three patched men and they come back with nothin', and I asked could I go.

"They laughed at me. Twenty-one, hundred and sixty pounds. Storm said go on then.

"So I went out there and I took the man's front door off the hinges. Whole door. Took me forty minutes with a pry bar and I did it while he watched from inside his own house, and when it come off I set it down on his porch and I said I'll be back Thursday and I left.

"Never touched him. Never went in. He paid Wednesday. Ransom came and got me the next day and drove me out there and made me put the door back on," he says. "It took us three hours. He didn't say one word the whole time. And when we got done he stood there and looked at it and he said, that's a hell of a thing you did, boy. Now you have to be him forever."

"And Havoc?"

"Blitz's daddy started it. He was just a patch then." He shrugs one shoulder in the dark. "It stuck. Everything sticks."

"What's the other one," I say.

He goes still.