Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter: A Novel

by Tom Franklin

  “You seen their titties?” Larry asked.

  “Shit,” Ken said, “pussies, too.”

  “We go all the time,” David said, swooshing past. “Me and Ken going Friday night, too, ain’t we.”

  “Hell yeah.”

  Larry clenched the chains. “Yall think I could go sometime?” he asked, moving his neck to see David behind him, beside him, above.

  David and Ken, swinging opposite trajectories, like a pair of legs running, had to struggle to make eye contact.

  “My brother ain’t gone take you,” Ken said and David laughed, like what a stupid question.

  “It’s one way you might could go,” David said, and even though Larry saw him cast an evil look at Ken, he couldn’t help biting.

  “How?”

  “You got to join our club.”

  “Yeah,” said Ken.

  “How do I join?”

  A moment passed, the boys swinging.

  “You got to call Jackie ‘Monkey Lips,’ “ David said. “To her face.”

  A bell rang up at the school and the teachers began to grind out their cigarettes.

  “Watch this,” David said, kicking his legs harder, so hard, going so high, the chains in his fists slackened on his upswing and he bounced hard in the rubber seat and swung back and the chains snapped again and as he flew forward he leapt from the swing, seat flapping in his wake, and sailed a long time over the ground—his shirt flying up and his arms out, feet dangling—and landed dangerously close to where the black girls, headed back to school, were giggling about something.

  They jumped and screamed as David skidded and dusted them with playground sand.

  “Boy, you crazy,” one said, brushing sand from her backside, almost laughing.

  “He go break his neck,” another said.

  Up at the school, the teachers had paused before going in, watching.

  Before Larry knew it Ken had sailed out, snapping his chains, flapping the swing, airborne, the girls backing up as he landed fancy, doing a somersault and rolling to his feet with his hands out like, “Ta-da.”

  “Them white boys crazy,” another girl shrieked, the group moving farther away, but everybody, David, Ken, the girls, the teachers, looking at Larry, as he kicked his legs harder and harder, getting ready. He thought that if he did a good one, better than anybody else, they might let him go to the drive-in, he imagined telling his daddy about it, Where you going boy? To the drive-in movie with my friends, in a car.

  He went back, kicked, up, kick, back, the girls waiting, Ken and David watching. He thought if he could land in the center of them, scatter them, what a story it would make, he thought of going inside with Ken and David who’d tell everybody how far Larry Ott flew and how he sailed like a missile into the nigger girls.

  He’d jump the next time, as a couple of teachers went into the upstairs door, Larry swinging back, needing more altitude, now the black girls turning, Larry forward, kicking, thinking, Wait, but then the second bell rang and a teacher waved her arm, come on in, as the playground began to empty.

  When he jumped only Ken saw, David having given up, too, and Larry sailed out, his legs running, arms behind him.

  He yelled, “Monkey Lips!” and landed on the wrong foot and half-ran, half fell to a hard stop, tumbling in his own dust, winding up on his stomach with his breath knocked out, rolling over, opening his eyes to the high white sky latticed with leaves. The face that appeared above him, a moment later, was Jackie’s. He was aware of how quiet the playground had become with everybody inside, how far his yell had carried. Ken and David had stopped and were looking back.

  “What you call me?” Jackie asked.

  He couldn’t catch his breath. He couldn’t answer.

  “Tell me, white boy.”

  He opened his mouth.

  But she’d turned. She walked away, through her friends who were putting their hands on her back, casting their furious eyes back at Larry. Ken and David hurried off, not even looking at him. Larry pushed up on his elbows, lungs on fire, tears stinging the rims of his eyes, sorry for saying it, seeing the door open at the end of the building and Mrs. Tally, a black teacher, coming out, meeting the girls, just as Ken and David went inside.

  “You know what that white boy call Jackie?” one said.

  Mrs. Tally knelt in front of Jackie and said something, then sent her and the other girls inside. Larry was on his knees when she came over, her legs blocking the school from his view.

  “Ain’t that girl got enough problems in this world without a white boy calling her that?” she asked.

  He couldn’t look up. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not the one you need to say that to. You will apologize to Jackie.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I ought to call your daddy,” she said, walking away. “But what good would that do?”

  He returned to his classroom where he, Ken, and David were the only white boys mixed in with two white girls, eight black boys, and nine black girls. Mrs. Smith, black, too, shook her head and pointed him to his desk and they finished their world history lesson.

  After a time Mrs. Smith told them to read ahead and left the room. Larry, who hadn’t yet dared to look up, was focused on a paperback copy of The Shining on his desk when a heavy world history textbook suddenly hit him on the side of his head. He flinched as the book slid off his shoulder onto the floor, felt like his ear had been torn off, and he lowered his head into his arms, folded over his desk. The black girls and boys began to snicker.

  “White boy,” a girl named Carolyn hissed. One of Jackie’s friends, heavyset and light-skinned. Mean.

  He ignored her.

  “White boy! Brang me that book.”

  His head throbbed but he didn’t look up.

  “White boy. YOU,” she called, and Larry felt all their eyes crawling over him. He heard Ken and David, across the room, begin to laugh, and then the white girls, both of them, giggled. The black boys were hooting, and then somebody else threw a book. Then somebody else. Larry kept his head on the desk, smelling his own sour breath in the pages of The Shining as more and more books pounded him. He knew somebody was posted at the window, where Mrs. Smith was outside, smoking and talking to another teacher.

  Monkey Lips, he thought as more books pelted him. Monkey Lips, Monkey Lips, Monkey Lips. Then, Nigger nigger nigger nigger.

  A desk leg screaked the floor and somebody slapped the back of his head. “Boy, you better answer me fore I whoop yo ass.”

  “Whoop his ass, Carolyn,” a big black boy called.

  Nigger nigger nigger nigger.

  She grabbed his scalp, bunched his hair and squeezed it, pulled his head up, the laughter louder without the nest his arms had made. Some part of him hoped the white boys would rally for him, admire him for what he’d said, but they were laughing and pointing at him, as were the two white girls, and he knew this was not going to happen any more than the drive-in movie would.

  Carolyn twisted his head harder, and Larry pushed at her arm but she had his hair and he told himself not to cry. Then she slammed his head down, hard, onto his desk. Everybody laughed so she did it again.

  He stole a sideways look and saw her face. He’d never been that angry. He didn’t think he had the ability to summon such anger, or the right. With her other hand Carolyn grabbed his arm and twisted it so he fell out of his desk, The Shining landing beside him on the floor.

  Still holding his arm, she put her foot on his neck and pushed.

  “Carolyn!” somebody hissed. “Mrs. Smith coming.”

  In a flash he was let go and black hands were grabbing books. He’d just pulled himself back into his desk when the teacher walked in, chewing a stick of gum, and said, “What’s all this noise?”

  She looked over the room, everybody miraculously in their desks, focused on their world history books. When her eyes settled on Larry, she stopped.

  “Lord, child,” she said. “You need to comb your hair. And why yo
u so red?”

  The class exploded into laughter as Larry sank his head back onto his desk.

  EVEN TODAY, MORE than a year later, carrying his rifle through the woods, the memory shamed him. He’d gotten a belt whipping from his father that night—for tearing his clothes jumping out of the swing, Clothes I work hard to buy. He’d apologized to Jackie the following day, gone up to her and mumbled, “Sorry,” but she’d just walked away, leaving him alone.

  Now, as he made his way toward the cabin where Silas and his mother were staying, the woods had begun to thin, and as he came to the edge of the field with his .22, he looked over the frozen turnrows and saw the dark elbow of smoke from the cabin’s stovepipe.

  He knelt, a fallen log at the tree line like a wall, the bramble cross-stitching his face so they’d never see him from the windows. He knew the cabin, had been there before, had pushed open its door on leather hinges and peered into the dust and dark where fissures of light showed how poorly the logs were mortared. There’d been little else to see. A wooden table and a couple of single beds hunters had once used, a wash pot. The stove in the back corner with its iron door opened and its pipe a straight line to the roof, shored around the top with bent, blackened patches of aluminum. A woodbox coated in dust that held only dead cockroaches and rat droppings when he raised its lid.

  He wondered now, watching the cabin, if Silas did his homework by firelight. You’d have to lug water from the creek on the other side of the field, where the trees resumed. Larry wondered if he could get closer, if he should circle the edge of the woods to the point nearest the house, six o’clock to his current high noon. From here was about a hundred yards to there, all open field, just one white oak stricken against the sky like an explosion. Be better at night. They didn’t have a dog or he’d know it by now.

  “Hey,” said a voice behind him.

  He turned with the rifle. It was Silas, his arms full of limbs. Firewood.

  The black boy dropped the wood and raised his hands like a robber. For a moment that was how they stood, Silas in the coat Larry’s mother had given him and one of Larry’s old thermal caps his mother must’ve thought to put in the pocket.

  Silas opened his mouth. “You gone shoot me?”

  He moved the rifle. “No,” he said. “You scared me is all. Sneaking up like that.”

  “I ain’t sneak.” Silas lowered his hands.

  “Sorry,” Larry said. He put the .22 against a tree and hesitated, then came forward to shake Silas’s hand. His father’s habit. Silas hesitated, too, then, perhaps because they were alone in the woods, no school around them, they shook, Silas’s fingers again enveloped Larry’s glove.

  For a moment they looked at each other, then knelt together to pick up the wood. Larry stacked his limbs onto the top of the pile Silas held. Silas shrugged a thanks and stepped past Larry and went to the edge and stopped. He looked back over his shoulder.

  “What you doing out here?”

  “My daddy owns this land.” Larry turned to where the gun stood, barrel up, against the bark of a pine tree. “I was hunting.”

  “You kill anything?”

  He shook his head.

  “Cause I ain’t heard no shots.”

  “I’m hunting deer,” Larry said.

  “I had me a gun I could kill some of these squirrels. Let Momma fry em.”

  Larry reached for the .22.

  “You reckon I could borry that one?” Silas said. “I bet your daddy got twenty-five more ain’t he.”

  He did, he had several guns. Larry brought this one because it didn’t kick and wasn’t as loud as the others, twelve- and twenty-gauge shotguns or higher-caliber rifles.

  “How yall get to town now?” Larry asked.

  “Momma got a car.”

  “How’d she get it?”

  “I don’t know. How your daddy get his truck?”

  “Paid for it.”

  They stood. Silas looked toward the cabin then dropped the wood again and turned, pointed to the .22. “Let me shoot it.”

  Larry looked toward the house. “Won’t your momma hear?”

  “She workin.”

  “I thought she worked the early shift. Piggly Wiggly.”

  “She do. Then she work the late shift at the diner in Fulsom. Here go,” he said, stepping forward and taking the gun from Larry who never even tried to stop the black boy. “How you do it?” Silas asked.

  “It’s already one in the chamber,” Larry said. “All you got to do is cock it and shoot.”

  “How you shoot?”

  “You ain’t never shot?”

  “I ain’t never touch no gun,” Silas said. He held the rifle by its stock and forestock, as if it were a barbell without weights.

  Larry raised his arms and mimed how you’d aim the gun. “Which hand are you?”

  “Say what?”

  “Right-handed or left. I’m right.”

  “Left.”

  “So you’re opposite me. See that hammer there?” Larry pointed. “Cock it back.”

  Silas did, and Larry watched him raise the rifle to his right cheek. “Lay your face on the wood,” he said.

  “Cold,” Silas said.

  “Now close your left eye and look with your right down the barrel. See that little sight? Put that on whatever you want to hit.”

  Silas aimed at something across the field, closer to the cabin than Larry liked, and then shot and the echo slapped through the trees.

  “It ain’t loud,” Silas said. He lowered the rifle and peered toward where he’d fired.

  “That’s how come I like it.”

  “Can I shoot it again?”

  “Go on.”

  “How many bullets you got?”

  “Cartridges. This one shoots cartridges. Twenty-two longs.”

  “It shoot twenty-two times?”

  Larry had to smile. “No, this gun’s a .22 caliber. It shoots long or short cartridges. I got longs today.”

  “How many you got?”

  “Enough.”

  Silas raised it again and sighted down the barrel and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

  “Work the lever,” Larry said, miming.

  Silas levered the rifle and his head snapped when the spent hull flew out of the side.

  “Now see how it’s cocked? It’s ready to shoot again, so be careful.”

  Holding the rifle with a kind of reverence, Silas bent to retrieve the hull.

  “It’s hot,” Larry said, but Silas picked it up with his fingers and then cupped it in his palm.

  “What you do with these?”

  Larry shrugged. “Throw em away.”

  Silas put the cartridge to his nose. “It smell good.”

  “Gunpowder.”

  “Gunpowder.”

  They watched each other.

  Then Silas raised the rifle again and panned it over the field, past the house, all the way back around to Larry, and held it on him. For a moment Larry saw into the perfect O of the barrel and followed it to Silas’s opened eye and went numb.

  “Now we even,” Silas said.

  Then he moved the gun, continued his pan until he stopped on a pine tree and shot. He levered the rifle and this time caught the ejected hull. It clinked against the other in his palm. He put them both in his coat pocket, and it struck Larry with a wave of sadness, a boy saving the hulls as something valuable.

  “Go on keep it,” Larry blurted. “The rifle.”

  Silas when he smiled displayed an array of handsome teeth. “For real?”

  It was the first time Larry had seen him smile. “I got to get it back, though. Pretty soon, okay? Promise?”

  “I’ll just shoot me a few these squirrels,” Silas said. He sighted something high in a tree. “You got the bullets? The cartridges?”

  Larry unzipped his coat pocket and brought out both of the small white boxes and held them out to the black boy. Silas took them reverently and transferred them to his own coat pocket. Larry showed him how t
o load it and gave him pointers about aiming and shooting, the same lessons his father had given him. By the time he finished telling Silas how to clean the rifle, the sky outside the woods had reddened and the limbs were darker and the smoke from the cabin had quit.

  “Oh man,” Silas said, grabbing all the wood he could gather in one hand, gun in the other. “That fire go out my momma kill me dead.”

  With sticks pointing in every direction he raced toward the sun, and only when Larry could no longer discern the rifle barrel from sticks of firewood did he himself turn and walk back into the forest where night had already begun to gather its folds. He felt welcomed by it and full of air. The last thing he did was pull at the fingers of his gloves, removing the left one, the right, and erect a stick the shape of a Y in the cold mulch beneath the leaves. On each peg he left a glove.

  four

  BAD,” ANGIE’S VOICE said of Larry Ott’s condition. They’d arrived, she reported, on scene to find him lying on his back in a puddle of blood. Single gunshot wound to the chest, pistol in his hand.

  He could hear the siren. “He gone make it?”

  “Don’t know yet.” Breathless.

  “Was anybody else there? Sign of a fight?”

  “We ain’t see nobody and the place ain’t look like no struggle. We left his gun on the floor.”

  Silas switched ears with his cell phone. In his headlights the slick blacktop two-lane ribboned up and down the razed hills like film unspooling, the Jeep riding the land.

  “Anything else?” he asked.

  “Not that we noticed. We was kinda busy, though.”

  “I know you was, sweetie. Thanks for going.”

  “You coming to the hospital?” she asked, and he knew she’d hang around if she could, maybe get a coffee with him in the cafeteria.

  “Naw, I’m going on over to Lar—to Ott’s, get a look around.”

  “See you tonight at the Bus?”

  “Might be hard.”

  “Damn, I hope so.”

  He laughed. “It ain’t no telling how late I’ll be out there.”