Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter: A Novel

by Tom Franklin

  Alice held her coat, didn’t even put it on. For a moment Silas glared at both Larry and his mother. Then he stepped back.

  “You’ve never minded,” Larry’s mother said to Alice, looking hard at her, “using other people’s things.”

  Then she pressed the accelerator and left them holding their coats in Larry’s side mirror.

  In a moment his mother touched his knee. “Larry.”

  He looked at her. “Ma’am?”

  “Roll up your window,” she said. “It’s freezing.”

  THEY WERE NEVER there again, Silas and his mother. And now Larry and his father, who’d had little to say before, rode the miles of dirt road and two-lane blacktop without a word, just the radio’s agricultural report and the heater blowing on their feet.

  He understood that Carl liked most everyone except him. From an early bout of stuttering, through a sickly, asthmatic childhood, through hay fever and allergies, frequent bloody noses and a nervous stomach, glasses he kept breaking, he’d inched into the shambling, stoop-shouldered pudginess of the dead uncles on his mother’s side, uncles reduced to the frames of their boxed photographs now, whom Carl wouldn’t have on the walls. One uncle, Colin, had visited when Larry was five or six years old. At supper the first night Uncle Colin had announced he was a vegetarian. Seeing his father gape, Larry assumed that word, whatever it meant, meant something awful. “Not steak?” his father asked. “Nope.” “Pork chops?” “Never.” His father shaking his head. “Surely chicken?” “Rarely,” the smiling uncle said, “which doesn’t mean rare. Oh,” he went on, picking at his cornbread, “I’ll eat me a piece of fish once in a while. Tilapia. Nice mahimahi.” Carl by this point had put down his fork and knife and glared at his wife, as if she were to blame for the crime against nature sitting at their table.

  Also, Uncle Colin was the only person Larry had ever seen wear a seat belt, as they rode to church (where he would refuse the communion saltine and grape juice). The seat belt irked his father more than Uncle Colin’s not eating meat, because, though his father never said it, Larry knew he considered seat belts cowardly. Larry had become an expert at reading his father’s disapproval, sidelong looks, his low sighs, how he’d shut his eyes and shake his head at the idiocy of something. Or someone.

  “Yall look just alike,” Larry’s mother said at dinner on Uncle Colin’s last night, looking from her brother to her son.

  Larry saw that Carl was sawing at his venison.

  “My little doppelgänger,” Colin said.

  Carl looked up. “What’d you say? Your little what?”

  Uncle Colin tried to explain that he hadn’t just referred to his sexual organ, but Carl had had enough and left the table.

  “Doppelgänger,” he said, glancing at Larry.

  Rather than his father’s tall, pitcher’s physique and blond curls and dark skin and green eyes, Larry got Uncle Colin and his mother’s olive skin and straight brown hair and brown eyes with long lashes which, attractive on women, made Larry and Uncle Colin soft and feminine, seat belt users who ate tilapia.

  In addition, Larry was mechanically disinclined, his father’s expression. He could never remember whether counterclockwise loosened a bolt or what socket a nut took, which battery cable was positive. When he was younger, his father had used this disinclination as a reason not to let him visit the shop, saying he might get hurt or ring off a bolt, and so, for all those Saturdays, all those years, Larry stayed home.

  Until his twelfth birthday, when his mother finally convinced Carl to give Larry another chance, and so, anxious, afraid, in old jeans and a stained T-shirt, Larry accompanied Carl to Ottomotive on a warm Saturday. He swept and cleaned and did everything Carl told him to and more. He liked the shop’s rich, metallic smell, the way oil and dust caked on the floor in crud you had to scrape off with a long-handled blade, a thing he enjoyed for the progress you witnessed, the satisfaction of driving the blade under the moist scabbery and shucking it away. He also liked cleaning the heavy steel wrenches and screwdrivers, the various pliers and channel locks and ball-peen hammers, the quarter- and half-inch ratchet and socket sets, the graceful long extensions and his favorite socket, the wiggler. He loved wiping them dry on red cotton shop rags and placing them in a row and sliding the oily-smooth drawers shut. He liked lifting cars by pumping the hand jack and letting them down by flipping the lever, the hydraulic hiss. He liked rolling creepers over the floor like large, flat skateboards to stand them against the back wall, liked how the drop lights hung from their orange cords, liked using GoJo to clean his hands.

  But he loved best when the Coca-Cola truck had left six or seven or eight of the red and yellow wooden crates stacked by the machine, the empties gone and new bottles filled with Sprite, Mr. Pibb, Tab, Orange Nehi, and Coca-Colas, short and tall. Larry relished unlocking the big red machine, turning the odd cylinder of a key and the square lock springing out. When you spun this lock the entire red face of the machine hissed open and you were confronted with a kind of heaven. Long metal trays beaded with ice were tilted toward the slot where they fell to your waiting hand. The rush of freezing air, the sweet steel smell. The change box heavy with quarters and dimes and nickels. Taking bottles from the cases, he’d place each one in its rack, considering the order, taking care not to clink.

  He learned to keep out of sight for most of the day as Cecil Walker, their closest neighbor, and other men began to assemble for what was, to Larry, always a revelation: his father telling stories, something he never did at home. In the late afternoon, as more fellows got off from the mill, they began to arrive in their pickup trucks, sometimes with a knocking tie rod, sometimes a whine in their engine block, sometimes just to listen to Carl at his worktable, the men gathered three, four deep, watching the mechanic place a carburetor on a clean shop rag.

  Passing his bottle, Cecil would ask, “Carl, what was that you’s saying other day, about that crazy nigger—?”

  And Carl would chuckle while he selected a tiny screwdriver and start the story. Loosening the carburetor’s minute screws, he would tell how Devoid Chapman bought this little red used MG Midget in Meridian and was driving it home to Dump Road when, along about time he passes Ottomotive, its hood unlatches and flies open. Carl pointing with his screwdriver. “Right out yonder there. The car’s a convertible, top folded back. Did I mention that? And Devoid, he has him a Afro, size of a dang peach basket. One of them black power fist combs sticking out of it.

  “Now he’s got the top down cause he liked the way the wind friction felt against his hair, he said. And while he ain’t never confirmed it, that very nest of hair probably saved his life as that damn MG’s hood unsprang at fifty-five miles per hour there on the highway. I seen it happen. Swear to God.” Carl dropping the parts into a sieved pan and lowering the pan into a vat of ink-black, foul-smelling carburetor cleaner. “Hood peeled back, hit the rim of the windshield and bent and knocked ole Devoid right on the head, pop! The Midget spun out, lucky it was no other cars nearby, and Devoid luckier still to finally get it stopped there in a dust cloud.”

  Talking the whole time, raising the sieve from the cleaner and setting the pan over a clean shop rag to dry, pausing only if something went amiss at his fingertips, a spring stuck in some valve, say. Attending this need might take five seconds, ten, a minute. He might have to excuse his way through the men and get a tiny socket or a different pair of pliers or maybe talk to the screw, “What’s got you stuck?” or he might just grimace, but then, however long it took (never long), the problem solved, he’d go on as if he’d never stopped.

  “—got that MG stopped out in front there. Ole Devoid come staggering out fanning dust and holding his head a-yelling, ‘Call a got-dog am-bu-lance!’ Had a line of blood dripping off his nose. A cussing up and down the chart, got damn this and got damn that, son-of-a-bitching shit hell damn. Crazy nigger,” he’d say, laughing, “sold me the car on the spot, for two hundred dollars cash. I closed the hood and wired it shut and give him
a ride home in that very car, him hunched down the whole time, worried bout that hood. I asked him did he want a motorcycle helmet but he said no, it’d never fit over his hair.”

  All the men would be laughing and Cecil, drunk, a cigarette in his mouth and another behind his ear, laughing the hardest, would say, “You something else, Carl. Tell when you asked him about his name.”

  Carl bending low over the table, close to the carburetor. “Yeah, I did. Said one time, ‘Devoid. That’s a hell of a name. You know what it means?’ And he said, yeah, he’d looked it up. ‘Barren. Empty. A wasteland.’ In school said his nickname was ‘Nothing.’”

  “You something else,” Cecil would say, shaking his head. “Tell em about that dog, Carl,” and Carl would launch off into the funeral of so-and-so’s daddy where they was all standing around the grave out in the middle of nowhere, ten, fifteen miles to the nearest blacktop. “Somebody’s eulogizing the hell out of M. O. Walsh—that’s who it was—lying through his teeth telling what a gentleman he was, when from out behind us we hear a gunshot. Pop! Next thing we heard was a little ole dog go a-yipping and I bout bust out laughing when that got-dang dog come a shooting out the woods bleeding from the side. It run right through us all and through the tombstones a-yipping fore it went on down the road. I leaned over and said, ‘Fellows, when my time comes, I want me a three-dog salute.’ ”

  The men laughing, Cecil hardest of all. They’d have Coca-Colas or beer and jaws fat with tobacco. They’d spit and wipe their lips with the backs of their hands. Most in baseball caps. White T-shirts. All in steel-toed boots. The confluence of pickup trucks framed in the door and the two big electric fans pushing the hot air around and cigarette smoke curling high in the rafters like ghosts of bird nests, the men sniping from Cecil’s bottle, Carl drinking, too, and Larry, hidden, listening, the stories weaving his imagination and the sounds of his father’s voice into what must have been happiness, as his father’s hands lifted the rebuilt carburetor to its waiting car, a clean rag over the intake manifold, the giant hands with the care of a surgeon fitting a heart back into its chest, turning the screws and reattaching the fuel line and listening with his head cocked as the owner climbed into the driver’s seat with the door open and one leg out, gunning it on command while Carl regulated its gasoline flow and, at last, placed the air filter over the carburetor and tightened the wing nut as the engine raced and the air smelled of gasoline and Carl stood back, arms folded, nodding, the shadows of men behind him nodding, too, and Larry watching, from behind the Coke machine, Cecil saying, “Carl, tell that one about that old nigger used to preach on a stump—”

  Now, as he and his father bounced over Mississippi on the way to school, as they swung in and out of its shadows and rose and fell over its hills, Larry worried he’d lost the privilege of Ottomotive forever. They were pulling to the corner by the gymnasium where he got out. Before he closed the truck door each day, he’d say, “Bye, Daddy. Thanks for the ride.”

  “Have a good one,” his father would say, barely a glance.

  IN THE COMING days he’d see Silas across the playground, in his class as he passed on his way to the restroom. In the cafeteria Silas sat with a group of black boys, laughing with them, even talking now and again. A betrayal, to Larry. For hadn’t Silas been his doppelgänger? He’d see him out in the field by the trees, playing baseball, catching fly balls barehanded, his shoes, which looked too big for him, over by the chain-link fence.

  Then, one Sunday afternoon in late March, Larry’s mother off volunteering, his father at work (even on Sundays, coming home from church and putting on his uniform and grumbling about all the money they spent, how he had no choice but to work), Larry set off down the dirt road they lived on, his lockblade knife in his back pants pocket and carrying a Marlin .22 lever action, one of his father’s old guns. Since his tenth birthday, he’d carried a rifle with him in the woods. Some days he shot at birds and squirrels halfheartedly, rarely hitting anything, and if he did, just standing over it a minute, two, staring, and then leaving it lying, his feelings jumbled, somewhere between pride and guilt. But today he kept the safety on and carried the rifle yoked over his shoulder. Because the cold weather had lingered, he wore his thick camouflage coat, camouflage cap and pants, his fur-lined boots. He left no footprints in the frozen mud. Most days he would have gone east, along the dirt road, toward the Walker place. Cecil Walker lived there with his wife and his fifteen-year-old stepdaughter, Cindy, whom Larry hoped to glimpse. In summer he’d sneak around the house, through the woods, and watch as she’d stretch a towel out across the boards of their deck and take the sun wearing a bikini, flat on her back in a pair of huge dark glasses, one brown leg cocked up, then turning onto her belly, slipping a finger beneath the shoulder straps, one, the other, to lie on her breasts, Larry’s heart a bullfrog trying to spring out of his chest. On colder days she came outside to smoke, stretching the long cord of their telephone out the door, not talking loud enough for Larry to hear. She’d only said a handful of words to him, and some days, the days when Cecil would come outside and mess with her, telling her get off the phone, put out that cigarette, Larry imagined her coming to him for help, and some days, as she lay in the sun or smoked another Camel, he wished she’d see him where he hid, at the edge of the woods, watching.

  But not today.

  Today he went west, through the wire of a fence into the woods. At night sometimes in these cold stretches you’d hear noises like gunshots. It wasn’t until he’d come, once, to a tree snapped cleanly in half, that he realized the cold would break them. The young ones, the old. A tree enduring another freezing night suddenly explodes at its heart, its top half toppling and swinging down, scratching the land with a horrible creak, broken in half and turning like a hanged man.

  Walking, he wondered if they still lived out there, Silas and his mother. He worked his way south, making little noise, and carefully descended the rocky berm and picked through a tangle of briars at the bottom and into deeper woods.

  Having a black friend was an interesting idea, something he’d never considered. Since the redistricting he was around them constantly. The churches were still segregated if the schools weren’t, and sometimes Larry wondered why grown-ups made the kids mingle when they themselves didn’t. He remembered two years before, how, in the hall on his first day at the Chabot Middle School, a white boy had come up behind him and said, “Welcome to the jungle.”

  Other white boys would speak to him on occasion, usually if they were alone with him, or passed him on the playground away from their friends. Larry hurried through the halls, not making eye contact because it was safer, his nose in his handkerchief or a book, the new kid who was never quite accepted. In groups, the white boys laughed at him though they’d sometimes let him tag along, the butt of jokes but grateful to be included. The black boys were aggressive to him, bumping him as he passed, knocking his books off his desk as if it were an accident, tripping him on his way to the bathroom.

  In the seventh grade, near the end of the school year, he found himself swinging with a white boy named Ken on one side of him and another, David, on the other. Both their fathers worked in the mill and both were poorer than Larry—he knew this because they got free lunches. Swinging, Larry kicked his legs as he flew forward, going higher, higher, the classroom building up the hill from the playground, a gray two-story structure with second-story fire escapes where teachers, all black, stood smoking and laughing, out of earshot.

  Below them to the right a clump of skinny black girls with Afros and short shorts were standing and sipping short Cokes from the machine in the gym and sharing a bag of Lays, not really watching the boys, just talking about whatever black girls talked about, once in a while breaking out in high, cackling laughter and cries of “You crazy!” that Ken would imitate so they couldn’t hear.

  David said, “Them nigger girls sound like a bunch of monkeys,” in a low voice.

  “You a nigger,” Ken snapped back, and Larry laughe
d.

  “Yo momma is,” David said, the standard retort of the year.

  “Yo daddy,” Ken said.

  “Yo sister.”

  “Yo brother,” and on until you got to the distant relatives, step-siblings, and great-aunts.

  Ken grew bored with naming relatives and, swinging forward, pointed with his sneaker toward the black girls. “Look at Monkey Lips,” he said. This was their nickname for Jackie Simmons, a small dark-skinned girl with big teeth and lips. “She’s so dark you can’t see her at night less she smiles at you.”

  Larry laughed and said, “Jackie Simian.”

  “What?” Ken said.

  “You see them big teefs in the dark,” David said in dialect, “you’ll thank it’s a drive-in movie you be watching.”

  Going back and forth, whizzing past one another, the boys began to discuss the drive-in movie theater on Highway 21, Ken saying he’d seen a show called Phantasm there. Larry knew the movie from his magazines. It was about two brothers who broke into a funeral home. Ken was telling about this steel ball that flew around with a blade sticking out that would drill into your head and spray blood like a damn garden hose.

  “When yall go?” he asked Ken, who said his older brother would sometimes take him and David with him and his girlfriend, let them sit in the front seat while his brother and his brother’s girlfriend necked in the back. Ken and David discussed other movies they’d seen, Dawn of the Dead, which Larry had also read about and was eager to see, where zombies tore people apart and ate them as they screamed, and one called Animal House, how John Belushi from Saturday Night Live scaled a ladder to spy on girls in a dorm room pillow fighting and taking their clothes off—