Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter: A Novel

by Tom Franklin

  Still watching him. “Who ever accused you of being smart?”

  He smiled.

  “But Larry took her out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why’d she go? If he was such a loser?”

  Her radio squawked and Tab came on, wreck over on 201.

  “Shit.” She rose with her drink. “Sorry, baby. I hate to leave cause this is the most you have ever talked.”

  She leaned to kiss his head. “We gone finish this conversation,” she said and hurried out, the ambulance pulling to the curb, lights flashing.

  Shaniqua came to the table. “Yall talking about Scary Larry?”

  He looked up. “Yeah.”

  She began collecting dishes. “My momma went to school with him. She say that boy used to always have snakes in his pocket.”

  SILAS TOOK OFF his hat as he passed through the hospital’s electric doors and stopped at the information desk and asked where he could find Larry Ott. The red-vested volunteer, an old white man with eyebrows thick as mustaches, put on a pair of glasses and frowned at his computer screen.

  “Are you family?” he asked, then gave a half smile to let Silas know he didn’t have to answer, it was a joke. “I’m Jon Davidson,” he said, offering Silas his hand. “Jon,” he said, “without an h.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “You’re Constable Jones, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Read about you in the paper here.” He handed Silas a copy of the Beacon Light, folded to the story. Silas glanced at it. “Body Found” the title read. The story was brief, just the facts, burning car, etc. Silas given credit as the officer who found the body but all the quotes were, as usual, from French.

  “Ah, here we go,” Davidson said, scrolling down on his computer. “He’s still in the intensive care unit. Second floor, left out of the elevator. Visiting hours for there are three to five, but they’ll make an exception for you.” He winked. “Just tell the nurse on duty you’re famous.”

  Silas thanked him and went past the gift shop to the elevator, then turned around and came back.

  “Has anybody else been to see him?”

  The volunteer took off his glasses and tapped his nose. “Let’s see. I’m on duty noon to six, five days a week. But no. Nobody else I know of. You want me to ask the other volunteers?”

  “If you don’t mind,” he said. “And if anybody does come by, could you get their names? Let me know?”

  “You got it.”

  He scrawled his cell number on a business card and rode the elevator to the next floor. He pushed through a glass door that said INTENSIVE CARE. The nurses’ station was quiet, one black lady in green scrubs tapping at her computer. Behind her he heard, on a monitor, labored breathing. The walls were glass, and through them he could see several beds, most empty.

  “Hello,” he said, approaching the desk.

  She glanced up. “Good afternoon. Can I help you?”

  He tapped his hat on his thigh. “I’m here to see about Larry Ott.”

  She took off a pair of eyeglasses and appraised him.

  “How is he?” he asked.

  “Well, he made it through surgery last night but he’s still unconscious. The doctor should be back at four to check him, but he’s stable right now.”

  “Can I see him?”

  She rose. “Just for a minute.”

  He followed her and saw she’d been playing solitaire on her computer.

  Larry was alone in the unit, several other dark beds around, him in the center, connected to the heart monitor and ventilator and an IV rack. He was shirtless and pale, his chest bandaged with drainage tubes down both sides. He had more tubes going into his nose and mouth, taped over his skin.

  “It’s amazing he’s still alive,” the nurse said. “When he came in, there hadn’t been time to get him over to Hattiesburg, where they’re better equipped to deal with gunshot wounds. The doctors did the best they could, but…” She didn’t finish the thought.

  “You think he’ll pull through?”

  “I couldn’t say,” she said. “But he was clinically dead twice during his operations.”

  “Operations?”

  “Yes. The surgeon removed the bullet, and we gave him six units of blood. The bullet missed his heart by the breadth of a hair, Dr. Milton said. But then, not long after we got him back here, he suffered a minor heart attack from the stress and went back into the O.R.”

  This close, Silas saw lines of gray in Larry’s hair. The stubble on his chin around the tape was gray, too. There were wet tracks out of his eyes, down the dry skin of his face.

  “Is he in a coma?”

  “We can’t tell yet,” she said. “We’re sedating him with Diprivan.”

  “When you think you might know more?”

  “You’ll have to ask the doctor,” she said.

  JURISDICTION, HE KNEW, meant more than geography. It meant responsibility. Somebody had to tell Mrs. Ott about Larry’s being shot, and, since French had pawned this case off on him, he got out of the Jeep and stood in the parking lot of River Acres, a nursing home he’d thus far only seen in passing, on his way somewhere else. Such places depressed him as they did, he supposed, everyone. He squared his hat on and took a breath. The building was a single-story brick structure with seedling pine trees growing out of the drainage gutters along the edge of the roof, which needed new shingles. There was a row of windows down the side of the home, many cracked and some opened and others with air conditioners hanging out, chugging, dripping to puddles beneath, propped with boards.

  The front door was opened and a black man of Silas’s build sat inside smoking a cigarette and reading a NASCAR magazine. He wore a white uniform with yellow stains on the front. Silas recognized him—DUI arrest, a year ago—and nodded, wondering why the dude didn’t sit his chair outside, as it seemed hotter inside.

  “Morning,” Silas said and removed his hat. “Where I go to see Mrs. Ott?”

  Without looking up the man nodded down the hall and Silas thanked him and followed it to where he found a sliding glass window with nobody behind it. The odor of disinfectant didn’t cover the faint smell of urine. He leaned in the window, a desk with a crossword puzzle book and Oprah on a muted thirteen-inch television. He rang the buzzer and in a moment a heavy woman with big glasses came, in no hurry, from an adjacent door.

  “Morning,” Silas said. “I’m Officer Jones from over at Chabot.”

  The woman sat in the chair and looked up at him with amusement in her eyes. “I know who you are,” she said. Her nails were long and decorated with stars and he wondered how she punched the buttons on her phone. Her name tag said BRENDA. “You was up ahead of me in school,” she said. “I used to watch you play baseball.”

  He smiled. “Long time ago.”

  “You calling me old?”

  His smiled widened. “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “What you need up in here? Clyde done broke his probation again?”

  “Not that I know of. I’m here to speak to a Mrs. Ott, if she’s able.”

  The woman raised her eyebrows. “You can try if you want to. She had some strokes a few years ago, plus she got Alzheimer’s.”

  “How bad?”

  “Bad enough. Most times she ain’t know anybody. Can’t move her whole left half. Just be laying there. What you want to see her for? Her son in trouble?”

  “Why you ask that?”

  “Cause she tried to call him yesterday. She get her a good day once in a while. But he never came.”

  “He come see her a lot?”

  “Several times a week. Crazy man ax would I call him ever time she have a good day you know what I told him?”

  “Told him no?”

  “Told him hell no. I ain’t no answering service. She can call him her own self whenever she wants to.”

  “Well, you might not have to worry about him again. Somebody shot him. That’s why I’m here,” he said.

  HER ROOM WAS a
double, two hospital beds with recliners beside each, TV on a rack high on the wall. In the far bed, by the window, an ancient black woman lay gazing outside. The room smelled like somebody had forgotten to change the bedpans. Mrs. Ott sat in her recliner watching him like he was a lamppost that had just walked in. Overhead, on the wall, a television played Wheel of Fortune.

  From behind him Brenda said loudly, “Miss Ina? This Officer Jones. He want to talk to you about your son.”

  She looked at him vacantly.

  “Call me if you need,” Brenda said, touching his arm. “I’ll be right out here.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Who are you?” Mrs. Ott asked, mild alarm in her voice, the left half of her face frozen, her mouth in a permanent frown. She looked past him where Brenda was examining her nails in the hall. The sight of her seemed to relieve Mrs. Ott.

  Silas barely recognized her as the woman who’d given him and his mother coats so long ago. She wore a robe untied down the front and a gown beneath. She had no breasts to speak of and a neck thin as his wrist. He pulled a rolling stool over to her chair and sat, holding his hat, trying to slump so he wouldn’t seem so big. She’d watched him the whole time with something like suspicion in her eyes.

  “Clyde,” she said. “Tell them others to stop.”

  “I’m not Clyde, Miss Ina,” he said. “My name is 32. I used to know your boy, Larry.”

  “Who?”

  “Your son,” he said gently. “We were friends together, a long time ago. You give me a coat one time.”

  “Clyde?” she said.

  “No, ma’am. 32. My name is 32.”

  “32?” She looked alarmed. “I’m much older than that.”

  “No, ma’am. My real name is Silas.”

  “How’s Eleanor Roosevelt?”

  He frowned and glanced out at Brenda. “That’s one of her chickens,” she said.

  “Oh.” Turning back to the old woman. “She’s fine, Mrs. Ott. All the chickens are fine. I fed em yesterday.”

  “Rosalynn Carter’s the best layer.”

  “I speck so.”

  “But Ladybird Johnson’s prettiest.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  He told her again.

  “Clyde?” she said.

  He sat awhile longer, unable to convince her he wasn’t Clyde, then he said good-bye and rose. In the hall, he offered a card and asked would Brenda call him if Mrs. Ott had a good day. She said of course she would.

  In the parking lot, shaded by a big pecan tree, he sat in the Jeep, elbow out the window, his hat on the seat beside him. The day he’d spent at the Ott house, so long ago, kept coming back to him. Catching lizards with Larry. That giant snake. Those chickens in the barn. At one point, as they’d assembled what Larry had called their herpetarium, a row of Mason jars full of wary reptiles, Silas had spotted a lawn mower, pushed under a low wooden rack.

  “You get to cut the grass?” he’d asked.

  “Get to?” Larry said. He set his jar down, the lizard inside watching him. “You mean have to.”

  “I ain’t never cut none,” Silas said.

  “You want to?”

  They rolled the push mower out of the barn and into the sunlight and Larry showed him how to check the oil and gas and how to prime the pump, how to pull the cord to crank it. Then, yelling over the noise, Larry showed him how to adjust the motor speed and push the mower in rows, narrowing toward a center. Silas snatched the handle and said okay, his turn. He loved it, the buzz of the motor, hot fresh cut grass in the air, between his bare toes, wild onions sizzling on the frame, the bar vibrating in his fists and the occasional mangled stick flung from the vent. When he was a kid one time, Larry yelled, walking alongside Silas, Larry’s daddy was cutting grass and Larry watching and his daddy ran over a rock that shot like a bullet and bounced off Larry’s bare stomach and left a red imprint of itself. Larry’s daddy had laughed real hard. Even took a Polaroid and laughed every time he looked at it. You had to be careful of where you let the vent aim, was Larry’s point. You didn’t want to spray any rocks out toward any cars or toward people, see? Silas turned and left Larry standing and mowed rows and rows and kept mowing, loving the progress through the grass, the design he was making. It felt good, like combing his hair. Larry wandered to the front porch steps and picked up a book. He watched for a while, not even pretending to read, then abruptly dropped the book and ran into the yard and pushed Silas away and turned the mower off.

  Silas shoved him back as the motor sputtered to a stop. “Don’t be pushing me.”

  “Sorry,” Larry said as they looked at each other, Silas’s palms still vibrating.

  “I don’t like nobody pushing me.”

  “It’s just,” Larry said, “we ain’t got much time left.”

  “I don’t care.” Silas cranked the mower again and began to push it. Larry watched for a while then went back to the porch and sat, his hands on his knees.

  A moment later he was jumping and pointing. It was getting dark now, lightning bugs floating over the fields, and Silas had nearly finished. He saw headlights coming through the woods. He left the mower running and darted across the lawn kicking up grass. He leapt the fence and was gone into the woods. Behind him Larry ran to the mower, still puttering, and began to push it. The lights were Carl Ott’s, and he got out of his truck with a bag of ice and a brown sack. He was greasy from his day’s work but he looked over the yard and began to nod.

  “Good work, boy,” he called to Larry.

  Silas knew this because he’d crept back through the cornfield. Mr. Ott said something else now, something Silas couldn’t hear, and then walked inside. Larry turned and pulled the mower toward the barn, looking over to where Silas had run, staring, it seemed, directly at him.

  Good work, boy.

  Silas remembered it. He had felt, at that moment, most acutely in his life, the absence of a father. He’d walked home that night, through the darkening woods, aware that all this land—over five hundred acres, Larry had said—was theirs, which meant it was Larry’s, or would be. And Silas, who had nothing, looked up to where the sky had been, now he couldn’t even see the tops of trees as night peeled down along the vines. He started to run, afraid, not of the darkness coming, but of the anger scratching in his ribs.

  When he got home, his mother’s car was there. Inside, his Styrofoam box from the diner sat on the small wooden table between their beds where they ate each night, a carton of chocolate milk beside it. His mother still wore her uniform, her hairnet. Her cat was on her lap as she sat on the end of her bed.

  “Boy, where you been?”

  “Out in the woods.”

  “Out in the woods, Silas? After dark?”

  “Sorry, Momma,” he said, the lie coming easily. “I got lost.”

  For a moment, rubbing that cat’s neck, she’d watched him, wondering perhaps whether to believe him or not, maybe too tired not to believe it, because what she’d said, finally, was, “Eat your supper. It’s already cold. And the milk’s done got warm.”

  Now he cranked the Jeep. He backed out of his parking space. So he’d had a father all along, and not some deadbeat black man who’d knocked up Alice Jones and left, but a white man who’d slept with his maid and then sent her off to Chicago when she got with child.

  His windows down, he cruised the highway among the log trucks and SUVs, heading back toward the Ott property. He wondered, leaving the city limits, traffic more sparse, if that old cabin was still there.

  When he turned onto Campground Cemetery, he saw a four-wheeler riding in the center of the road. He came up behind it, the thing going about forty miles an hour, and flicked on his headlights. The boy on it, white, skinny, looked behind him and tossed a can into the weeds and waved him around, but Silas stuck his arm out the window and pointed him off the road.

  The kid was sitting on it with his leg over the gas tank lighting a cigarette when Silas got out and walked
up. When he saw Silas’s uniform and gun belt he straightened on the seat. “Hidy there,” he said.

  Silas said, “You ain’t supposed to have that thing on the road.”

  The kid looked up at him.

  “You got a driver’s license?”

  “You a game warden?”

  “Chabot constable. Where’s your license?”

  “Must’ve left it home. You’re 32 Jones. I heard of you. What’s a constable?”

  “Police officer. What’s your name?”

  “Wallace Stringfellow.”

  “You live out here, Wallace?”

  He cocked a thumb behind him. “Few miles yonder ways.”

  “You hadn’t been drinking, have you?”

  “No, sir, Officer.”

  “You didn’t throw a beer in the weeds back there?”

  He shook his head.

  “You mean if I went back there I wouldn’t find a can with your fingerprints on it?”

  “You might would. I probably threw lots of em out, always been a litterbug, but never when I was riding.”

  Silas noticed a dirty pillowcase stuffed back in the cage behind the seat and wondered should he look inside it. Wondered for a moment would it have eye holes, though in truth today’s racism seemed less organized than when he’d been a boy. He said, “You carrying a gun?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You ride out here a lot?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “This is Rutherford land, most of it, and if you’re on it you’re trespassing.”

  “You mean it’s against the law just to ride?”

  “If the land’s posted, it is. And fenced off.”

  “Well, you learn something ever day. I appreciate you telling me.”

  “Where you going?”

  “Nowheres in particular. Just enjoying the weather.”

  Silas watched him but he was thinking of the hunting cabin. “Well,” he said, “I’ll let you off with a warning this time. But you ride that thing on the side of the road all the way home, hear, and if I see you on the highway again, drinking or not, I’m gone write you a ticket. Or worse.”