Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter: A Novel

by Tom Franklin

  Then knelt. Four-wheeler track. He studied its treads. There. Getting up. And there. Walking. There, there, there. In the print of the tire was a perfect circle at regular intervals, probably a nail the four-wheeler had run over. He had one more of French’s mold kits, didn’t he?

  An hour later he was sitting on the porch, sweating, waiting for the mold to dry and eating Marla’s hot dogs, when he saw something in the grass. Just a speck he’d missed from his other angles.

  Roach end of a joint, dewy, dirty, probably useless, but still.

  He tweezed it into an evidence bag and realized this alone was worth his morning. If Larry Ott smoked weed Silas would shoot his badge. Somebody else had been here. He laid the bagged roach alongside the twin bags of glass and circled the house again. At the chicken pen the birds all ran over to him.

  “Yall hungry, ain’t you,” he said, taking their clucking and muttering for hell yes, feed us, dipshit.

  He noticed the wheels on the back of the cage, frowned as he walked its width and turned and walked, the chickens shadowing him, its length. He toed the trailer hitch. Why would Larry want wheels on his pen? He looked out over the field and saw several brownish spots in the otherwise bright green weeds and wildflowers, each spot the size of the cage beside him. Walking, he imagined Larry tractoring the cage over the land, the chickens fluttering along inside. He paused at the dark spot farthest from the barn, where the weeds and grass were flattened into mud and speckled with shit and feathers, the square where the pen must have sat most recently. Coming back toward the barn, he saw that in the second spot a few sprigs were raising periscopes. In the next, the grass looked better and the shit had begun to smear away in rain and dew. Then more grass still and weeds full throttle, here and there a dot of blue salvia or goldenrod, his elongated shadow falling on the time read in grass. Within five or six days the field had recovered: you couldn’t tell the cage had ever been there.

  Back at the barn he stepped under the yellow tape and let himself in, taking a moment to gaze at the old tractor he’d sat on so long ago.

  He heard the chickens griping so he went along the wall where a scythe hung and other instruments he didn’t recognize, one a heavy iron spring coiled around an iron bar. The kind of thing the Rutherfords would hang on their den wall for decoration. He dipped his head into the coop, the chickens scattering out the door. For a moment he stood, puzzling over the twin feed sacks, one full of gray grainy pellets and the other dusty corn. Finally reckoning it was better to overfeed than underfeed, he poured a quarter sack of each onto the ground amid the trident tracks. The chickens began to peck up the feed, and Silas remembered how he and Larry had overturned logs to catch beetles and cockroaches and pushed them through the wire for the chickens to chase down and eat.

  In the barn, he looked in the tack room and saw an old chain saw and Larry’s fishing rods neatly laid over big nails in the wall, his tackle box in a corner moored to the floor in dusty spiderweb. He knelt and opened it and sifted through the lures and hooks, still clean, some familiar, smaller in his hand than they’d been those years back. He remembered fishing with Larry, the boy always talking, full of information about snakes or catfish or owlets or lawn mowers and dying for somebody to tell it to.

  Back at Larry’s house he blasted the window unit air conditioner. Wearing gloves, he spent a long time looking at the spines of books, the old titles and plots he remembered so well from Larry’s descriptions. In the kitchen he opened the refrigerator and it smelled sour. The case of Pabst. Several bottles of Coke and a few Styrofoam containers from the Piggly Wiggly grocery store. He got a Coke and used a Jesus refrigerator magnet to open its lid and drank it as he opened one kitchen drawer after another. Forks, spoons, knives. He got on a chair and looked in the high cabinets, many of which had become reservoirs for old mail. Catalogs, circulars, newspapers, flyers. Silas took a stack down and blew the dust off its top and looked for the date. June 11, 1988. Another stack was from the early 1980s. One was a stack of monster magazines, Eerie and Creepy, and one about horror movies, called Fangoria. He remembered reading some of these with Larry. He got down and moved his chair and looked in another cabinet, moving each stack to check behind it. The lower cabinets offered more mail except for one, which held cleaning supplies.

  He went into the hall and stood over the gun cabinet. Sighing, he began sifting through the stacks of mail, circulars, and the book club catalogs, Field & Streams, Outdoor Lifes. A sticker with CARL OTT and his address affixed to each.

  Silas had gotten stiff, and when he tilted his neck to uncrink it, he noticed the attic trapdoor.

  He brought a chair from the kitchen and stood on it and pushed it open. With his flashlight, he climbed into the hot darkness that was a city of boxes. He sneezed. Spiderwebs in the high corners and light through a single window in the front. A string depended from the ceiling, and he pulled the light on. He sneezed again and unbuttoned the top of his shirt.

  In the boxes he found old land deeds, tax papers, letters yellowed and cracked. He scanned them, amazed how much there was to say about things so long gone, people so dead. He scanned the papers. Carl Ott had once owned over five hundred acres. According to these records, Larry had sold almost half of them, in parcels, through the last twenty years, to the Rutherford Lumber Company. No surprise there. Larry had no business, no income, and Rutherford was one land-buying son of a bitch.

  He began to look for lawyer bills but found none. An hour later he rose in the half-light and stretched his back and noticed a filing cabinet in the corner. He stepped over boxes he’d already searched and found the cabinet unlocked. The top drawer slid out with a creak of protest, showing manila file folders, each labeled. One held five search warrants, from French’s visits. Another held receipts for the nursing home where Ina Ott was. Another gas bills, power bills, house payments, recent income tax forms. He slid the one labeled PHONE out and set it aside.

  The bottom drawer held only a shoe box full of old photographs. He carried this and the phone file back to the trapdoor and lowered himself onto the chair and went to the kitchen and set it all on the table. His clothes were drenched and he went back into the living room and stood in front of the AC for several minutes. He pulled the gloves off, flapping his hands, then went back to the kitchen.

  At the table he opened the phone file and studied it. No long-distance calls. Not one. No 1-900 calls to girls who’d get you off. Just the flat local rate. But another set of bills—he frowned—was for a cell phone. French had the cell. The only calls listed were from a single number, which he copied into his notebook. Sometimes a call once a month, some months with no calls at all. He put the file back in order and closed it and pushed from the table and looked into the living room to where the bloodstain had turned dark on the wood.

  The shoe box next, the photographs. Most were from a Polaroid camera, in no order, just piled in. There were a few photo albums in the back bedroom, so these must be castoffs, duplicates. He took them one by one and glanced at them, teenage Larry drawing, reading, holding up fish. Silas went faster, noting how few showed Carl or Ina, and he knew without thinking that Ina had taken the pictures. Larry cutting grass, posing with a rifle, opening a G.I. Joe under a Christmas tree, standing in an Easter suit, holding a toad. Toddler Larry in the tub, on a tricycle, crying, aging in reverse the deeper Silas dug. One photo at the bottom showed baby Larry in a woman’s lap. The woman from the chest down, but with black hands. A maid, he thought. He found a few more, her dark arms bathing Larry in the sink, her hand putting in his pacifier, the woman never the point of the shot, in the pictures as a chair would be, or a table.

  Only one showed her face. And the thing that stunned Silas, the thing he couldn’t believe, was that this woman was his mother.

  WHEN SILAS WAS thirteen years old, his mother’s boyfriend, the one they’d been living with for almost seven years, had been arrested for assault with a deadly weapon. This was Joliet, south Chicago. Police officers kicked o
pen the door of their duplex and flung themselves in behind shotguns and riot shields and huge square pistols, Oliver, the boyfriend, down the hall and out the back door before Silas could move.

  It wasn’t a bad neighborhood, and this wasn’t normal the way it was for much of Chicago, especially the South Side. The three of them lived on a quiet, all-black street in an all-black neighborhood with Bradford pears planted along the curbs. There was shade, benches, a phone booth. Most everyone had a little backyard with little backyard dogs yapping under the fence bottoms. A lot of families had wading or above-ground pools, and one even had a duck that lived in their pool. It was nothing like Silas’s favorite show, Good Times, where the Evans family lived in the projects, confined to their apartment. Silas had never even seen the projects, might as well have been Mars to him. But he hadn’t seen many white people, either. It wasn’t until he and his mother came south that he encountered them.

  Oliver, his mother’s boyfriend, drove a delivery van. He was gone a lot. When he was home, he ignored Silas.

  Now the cops were bringing him back up the hall, handcuffed and scowling at the eight officers searching his house. Silas sat huddled on the sofa with his mother, who was sobbing, but he, Silas, felt no sorrow. His mother’s history with Oliver had shown him two things. One, men noticed Alice Jones. And two, when men look for women, the last thing they want in the bargain is a kid. At the time, Silas had no idea that the cops could place Oliver at the scene of a fight two nights before, where a man had been shot, and that they were about to find the weapon. Silas only knew that Oliver had made it plain that, if not for his mother, he, Silas, would be in the street.

  Now one of the cops said, “Bingo,” and produced a snub-nosed pistol from high in a kitchen cabinet, Alice’s face showing she’d had no idea it was there, Oliver’s showing disgust. Two of the cops pulled him to his feet and led him from the room yelling “Call a lawyer” to Silas’s mother as she covered her mouth with her hands.

  Within two days she’d put the house up for bail money. But as soon as he was on the street, not even out of sight of the courthouse, Oliver looked at Alice and said, “Have a yard sale and get whatever you can. It’s another warrant on me they didn’t find, some reason, and soon’s that one matches up, and it will, I’m back in for good.” He kissed Alice on the mouth and cupped her breast, there on the street, in front of Silas. “Good-bye,” he said, not even looking in the boy’s direction.

  And he was gone.

  Alice held the yard sale before anybody knew he’d left for good, and they got some cash together. By the time the sheriff’s department came with the outstanding warrant, Oliver was in Mexico or someplace and Silas and his mother were gone.

  On the bus, him leaning against her shoulder as she rocked to the rhythm of the big Greyhound, he’d asked, “Where we going, Momma?”

  “Down south,” she said.

  “How come?”

  “Cause I got people down there.”

  “My daddy?”

  “Hush, boy. No.”

  “Who then?”

  She elbowed him. “Don’t be asking so many questions. Read your magazine.”

  He opened the Sports Illustrated on his lap. But he wasn’t in the mood and looked instead out the window. He was glad to be leaving Chicago. If Oliver had spoken to him at all it was to order him to the corner store for cigarettes or to tell him get lost while he and Silas’s momma “he’d and she’d,” Silas going outside onto their tiny porch and looking up the road at a dozen or more tiny porches with people on them, big woman with arms saggy and loose as pillows, old men smoking cigars and pushing dominoes across a card table at one another, and dogs tied to porch rails. His mother sewed in a shirt factory, and Oliver drove his brown van. It wasn’t a bad spell of life, Silas would tell himself later. He always had hot food and his own room. TV. Laughing his head off at J.J. on Good Times, even Alice smiling, that big whole-face one Oliver could bring out when he imitated Flip Wilson. Silas went to a decent school and had friends there. Two streets over was a vacant lot where the boys played baseball. Silas had gotten his first glove for Christmas when he was nine; he’d outgrown it and gotten another last year.

  Now, south. Getting out of the Greyhound each time the bus huffed into another small town, stretching his arms and legs, each station different, the back of an auto mechanic’s shop once, a gas station next, then just a drizzly corner in Gladiola, Illinois, flat, flat Illinois splayed along the horizon out the bus window like a still photograph, silos and weird tall houses surrounded by stands of trees but otherwise an ocean of harvested wheat or corn, dead and dry and some broken stalks in casts of gray snow.

  Then, somehow, he’d slept through both Missouri and Arkansas, waking farther than he’d ever been from home. Next stop Memphis, loud clanging Beale Street as his mother goaded him along the bright morning (carrying a suitcase in each hand) and dragging her own two suitcases. The address she’d been given was a boarded-up building, condemned, and they stood looking up at it, wondering what to do as people stepped around them on their way wherever people went.

  “Where we going, Momma?” he asked. Back to the bus station, his mother said. It hadn’t been too far, had it? They could just walk. She thought she remembered the way.

  As they struggled along, it was clear they’d overpacked, so she found a pawnshop on the corner, a tall white man in a bow tie behind the counter. While he flirted and opened the suitcases and removed her dishes and china, each piece wrapped in a bra or slip, as he lifted out the things his mother had spent her lifetime accumulating, Silas stepped away and looked along the shelves and cluttered rows at what people were willing to give up when the chips were down. Fishing rods, rifles, pistols, a dirt bike, television sets, record players. He looked at his mother where she was shaking her head at the low price all her things would bring.

  They got out of another bus later that night in Jackson, Mississippi. The driver, a heavy white man, helped Alice lug their last two suitcases to the curb. Downtown Jackson seemed quiet after Chicago and Memphis, quieter without the trains he’d grown up hearing and the sirens and car horns. It was 10:00 P.M., the streets deserted except for a few people lurking in shadows, passing bottles. Against the sky, two or three tall buildings and a silhouetted bridge over some cold river. The bus driver stood there in front of the bricks, sweating despite it being January, his blue uniform shirt untucked at the back. He took off his cap and put it back on.

  “Where you folks off to now?” he asked.

  “Just find a motel,” she said.

  He eyed her suitcase, the big one, part of a set taken from Oliver.

  “It ain’t no motels for a stretch,” the driver said. “Just your nicer hotels. The Edison Walthall, half a mile yonder ways.”

  “Nicer,” she said. “You mean won’t take black folks?”

  The man pulled at his blue Greyhound lapel. “No. I mean their rooms are real expensive. I sure couldn’t afford to stay there.”

  Alice looked up the street.

  “Tell you folks what,” he said. “I’m about to get off my shift here, and I got my truck parked over yonder. If yall can wait I’ll give you a lift.”

  “You ain’t got to do that,” Silas heard his mother say.

  “Ain’t no bother. Just don’t go nowhere, and I’ll be back directly.” He turned before going inside. “Why don’t yall wait in the door yonder. It’s no loitering after hours, but I’ll tell Wanda there.”

  “We be fine,” his mother said.

  The driver looked dubious but went on inside.

  It was cold, waiting.

  “We going with him?” Silas asked.

  She was looking up the deserted street. Across was a dry cleaners, closed, and beside that a bail bondsman. A white man watching them from the steps, smoking a cigarette. No restaurants in sight.

  “Momma,” he said.

  She was leaning, looking. She wore a blue coat and a scarf. A car drove past and the driver, a black man
, looked too long at them. Silas glanced back into the bus station where the heavy driver was writing something on a clipboard. He saw Silas and smiled.

  “Momma,” he said again. “Where we going?”

  “Silas,” she said, watching the road. “You shhh right now.”

  “Momma? We going with that white man?”

  “I said shhhhh.”

  “Momma—”

  She turned on him so quickly he never saw her hand. She’d hit him before, but not like this, out in the open. First thing he did was look to see if the driver had seen. If he had, he wasn’t looking now. Silas’s next instinct was to run. He turned to go but she had him by the wrist.

  “Don’t you dare run,” she said, “from the one person in this world who love you.”

  He snatched his arm away.

  “You don’t know where we going,” he said.

  He saw in her eyes that she was nearly crying. He knew he should stop but couldn’t. “I’m cold, Momma, I want to go back.”

  “Back to where?”

  “Home.”

  “Quit it,” she said, not looking at him.

  Then the bus driver’s pickup pulled up and the big man was out, wearing not his uniform jacket but a blue denim coat and a baseball cap with a red bird on it. A Cardinals fan. Bob Gibson.

  He’d left his flashers on and grunted, lifting her suitcase into the back. “You transporting rocks?” he asked.

  Alice’s smile trembled.

  “I’m Charles,” he said.

  Alice said her name and Silas’s.

  “Good to meet you, Silas.” Charles extended his hand.

  “Silas,” his mother said.

  Silas shook the man’s beefsteak of a hand while his mother went around and opened the side door and waited for him. Instead, avoiding her eyes, Silas threw his backpack over the truck rail and jumped in behind it.

  “Boy, it’s too cold to ride back there,” Charles said.

  “Silas,” his mother said, the half-coaxing, half-threatening tone. “Get up front.”