Page 99 of Havoc

The contractor was in that yard Monday morning at seven. There's a new lift comin' Friday.

Nobody in that club has said one word about it since.

* * *

His daddy is a man named Ovide Guidry and he's got a shrimp boat out of Bayou Chene and hands like a set of tools.

He comes up the shell road on Saturday in a truck with a boat hitch still on it and he gets out and he stands in that lot in a suit that don't fit him anymore, and Storm goes across the gravel and the two of them shake hands and stand there a while.

I'm the one who was supposed to go tell him.

Storm wouldn't let me. He went himself, that same night, drove down there at two in the morning and sat in a man's kitchen until daylight, and when he came back he didn't tell any of us one thing about it.

Ovide Guidry looks at me for about six seconds in that parkin' lot.

Then he puts out his hand.

"You the one he talked about," he says.

I take it and I can't say anything.

"Every Sunday," he says. "Havoc this, Havoc that. The boy never could shut his mouth."

He lets go and goes on inside.

* * *

The clubhouse holds about a hundred and there's a hundred and forty in it.

Every patch in the parish. Two charters from up around Alexandria that I've met twice. Marisol in a chair by the door with a tank beside her and her husband standin' behind it with both hands on the back of it. The kid from the shop floor who came out behind Cricket with a shirt over his face, nineteen years old, and he has not been able to look at anybody all week.

Junie's behind the bar and she ain't pouring anything. She's just standing where she stands.

Blitz is in a chair by the pool table with a cane he does not need, holding court.

"—no, see, that's the thing, that's what nobody understands, they don't give you the bullet. They keep it. I asked twice."

"Why would you want it?"

"'Cause it was in me, Tyrant. It was inside me."

"You want a lot of things that were inside you?"

"That is a disgusting thing to say at a funeral."

"It ain't a funeral yet."

"It's funeral-adjacent," Blitz says, and Tyrant almost laughs and catches it, and then the two of them sit there not looking at each other.

That's the whole week in one exchange, near about. Everybody talkin' too loud and too fast about nothin', and then it goes quiet for two seconds and everybody has to start again.

At three o'clock, Storm comes out of the hall and stands in the middle of that room, and it don't take four seconds.

"Chapel."

Then he says the thing nobody's ever heard him say.

"All of you."