Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter: A Novel

by Tom Franklin

  “Yes, sir. Preciate the warning.”

  He watched the kid kick-start it and rev the engine. He gave a little salute and motored off, bumping along the side of the road, the pillowcase flapping. Silas stood shaking his head.

  THE JEEP TICKING in front of Larry’s house, Silas slipped off the lanyard with his badge and, to cool down, removed his uniform shirt, hung the lanyard back over his neck, and tied the shirt around his waist. He fanned his face with his hat walking over the field toward the trees, stooped under an old fence row, careful not to snag his T-shirt on the bobwire. He didn’t relish the thought of red bugs, ticks, mosquitoes, or snakes and kept a careful eye out as beggar’s lice stuck to his pants legs and briar barbs lodged in his shirt.

  What’s missing out of you, Silas?

  His mother had had to work two jobs plus clean houses to pay for the trailer home she’d bought in Fulsom. Back then he’d told himself she just wanted him out of the way. That was why she’d sent him off. Lying to himself even as he opened the letters she mailed him in Oxford, unfolding the limp five- and ten-dollar bills she sent each week so he could go to his classes and play baseball without having to get a job. He knew now she’d loved him despite his never writing her back, despite the trouble and fear he caused her, despite the thing missing out of him. He’d returned her love by rarely coming home, and when he did she’d doted over him, as if every meal was his last, or hers, straightened his paper napkin and laid another chicken leg on his plate and filled his milk glass or his iced tea so much he could barely stand it. He’d refused to see the truth, that she was starving from loneliness. In fact, he could barely look at her. All he could do was eat quickly and squirm away and go out into the night (driving her car) and find M&M and his other high school friends while she sat waiting for him to come home.

  Now, as he walked, slipping through leaves and vines and ivy and spiderwebs and arcs of briar, he noticed how different the land was, how quickly it could change, such a ragged jungle now, scarred with white deadfall, no longer the brief paradise two boys had had those years ago. He topped a hill and descended to the bottom of a hollow, stopped to rest by an old magnolia tree, black trunk so big it would be hard to reach his arms around, something familiar about its knots and whorls, good places for feet, hands. He looked up and saw two boys in the branches, one white, one black. He hurried on, ducking a fierce shuck of briar, soon saw another familiar magnolia, this one buffeted smooth at waist level by a boy’s old baseball. Using his hat to rake down the briars, he was breathing hard and nearly bumped into the wall of the cabin before he saw it.

  Smaller somehow, darker wood, more weathered. Vines and kudzu had nearly overtaken the place. It seemed the heart of some struggle, as if the vegetation were trying to claim the structure back into itself, pull it down, the earth suddenly an organic breathing mass underneath. Silas could almost feel the friction, hear the viscous grumble of digestion.

  In front he eased up the steps, soft as moss, the porch like a cave, vegetation on all sides and bees boiling out of white blooms, live vines constricting dead ones, hanging from the roof. An enormous gray moth cupped to the wall. Gently, he moved coils of ivy aside and peered through the snakehead kudzu leaves to where the front door was secured with a rusty padlock.

  He stepped backward and hooked his hat on a limb and pushed around the side of the cabin, a layer of wet leaves under his feet, the walls mummied in kudzu and constricted by hundreds of vines thick as chicken snakes. At the first window he angled his light through the dusty glass, probing the shapes of the headless single bed he’d slept on and the bed his mother had used, the table between them, the rusting iron hulk of a stove in the corner where they’d huddled for warmth in those first coatless days and nights.

  He tried the window and found it locked from inside. Looked like it hadn’t been opened in years. He wormed his way through the foliage along the side of the house and turned the corner to the back wall, that window locked, too, leaves tickling the top of his neck, spiderwebs with bug husks and the skeletons of leaves and twigs snagged in their lines. On the third wall he stopped and looked closely. Someone had raised this window. He could see where it had been forced up, the wooden runners lighter and splintered, one of the four panes of glass broken, pieces on the floor inside. An arm through, turning the rusty lock. He resisted lifting it, shone his light through the broken pane instead, a much clearer view without glass, the side of his once-bed, its mattress sagging in the middle, coils of rusty spring through the filthy cloth. On those first nights, his mother had slept with him, crossing the dirt floor in the darkness, her breath visible in the dim stove light, saying, “Slide over, son, fore we both freeze.”

  Somebody had been inside, he saw now. There was a long smear over the floor. He imagined the intruder dragging his feet to erase his tracks. His pulse quickened as he fixed his beam beneath the bed. There it was, a shadow image of the bed cast in rumpled dirt, a place where someone had dug, he realized, a grave.

  nine

  WHEN HE WAS thirty-one years old, not long after he’d taken his mother to River Acres and ten years before Tina Rutherford would vanish, Larry began to notice things amiss in the barn. Those were days when Ina Ott was more alert, her Alzheimer’s in its earlier stages, Larry visiting her each night on his way home from work, longer on weekends, a silent black lady in the other bed snoring gently or gazing out the window. His mother would always ask if he’d had any customers and he’d say, “Oh, one or two.” Then she’d ask about her ladies and he’d tell her about Eleanor Roosevelt. “Laid a big speckled egg this morning.”

  When he noticed that somebody had been sneaking in the barn while he was at work, he told her this, too, how one evening he found the back door ajar, and another the pitchfork down from its nail. She was alarmed and said he should lock the doors; it was probably some boy out for adventure. “A barn is a wondrous place to children,” she said, and he agreed, remembering the boy he’d been there, the boy he’d been then.

  The benefit—she would have said blessing—of her Alzheimer’s was that the first swath of history gone from her memory was the incident with Cindy Walker and its long-reaching aftermath. To Larry’s mother, reclining in her chair by her bed, none of this had happened and bore no connection to the mischief Larry described, the barn’s woodbox left open in the tack room, the bags of chicken feed overturned, the chain saw moved, Carl’s tackle box a jumbled mess where Larry always kept it neat, lures and sinkers missing, the rods hung askew. To avoid alarming her, he didn’t tell his mother how the rooster was missing when he came home one evening, his old bicycle another time. Instead, he described the small, bare footprints in the dirt around the back of the barn. On another visit he told her how, that morning, in place of driving to work, he’d parked his truck in the barn, hidden from outside, and waited in the hayloft, reading a novel, leaving out how odd if felt, being someplace not the shop, worrying that today might be the day a car stopped by, and then, at about ten o’clock, how he heard someone tromping over the dry dead leaves behind the barn. Larry descended the ladder and hid in a stall in the room near the back door. He had his old zombie mask and pulled it on. Presently the door screaked open and a ruff of blond hair eased in. He was filthy and brown as an egg and Larry smiled in the mask. He let the boy get fully in—cut-off blue jeans and no shirt or shoes, carrying a bent stick—waited to allow his small eyes to adjust to the darkness, before he stepped out from behind the stall with his arms raised and his fingers claws and yelled, “Argh!”

  The boy rose from the ground as if ejected and yelped and turned in midair and landed and ran slap into the door and got up almost before he fell and was gone. Still smiling, Larry pulled the hot mask off and tossed the stick out and opened the barn’s big bay doors and drove through them and closed them behind him and left the mask in its spot in his closet and went to work.

  “That should fix him,” his mother said, smiling, coleslaw on her chin. “Did you hear that, Doris,” Ina tol
d the tiny, palsied black woman in the next bed, but the woman continued to gaze out the window.

  “Poor thing,” his mother whispered. “She’s forgotten her name.”

  Because of Larry’s past the women who shared her room were forever the furthest gone, those who wouldn’t be aware that a perhaps-murderer visited, those with no family, no one to complain.

  And as the years pass, the black women pass, too. To Larry’s count four had died in their sleep as Ina lived on, waiting for him to come, losing an hour at a time the days and weeks and months of her memory, until she, too, had forgotten her name and Larry’s as well, the chickens last to go, and then even they were gone and now the ever-thinner woman he visited on Saturdays lay waiting to die without knowing it, alongside yet another black woman who also lay waiting, without knowing it, to die.

  TEN YEARS AFTER Larry had frightened him from the barn, the boy came back. It was a Friday after work, November, Larry reading on his porch still in his uniform, sweaty but not dirty, the shirt untucked, his shoes beside the front door, another habit left over from his mother, who’d never allowed work shoes in her house.

  He’d already eaten, his usual KFC meal of two breasts, no wing, double mashed potatoes with gravy and a biscuit, and was on his second Coke, which he brought home from the shop in the yellow plastic crates that used to be wood. The night had been set to unreel like any other in his life: read, watch TV, take a shower, go to bed, read more until he fell asleep. Get up in the morning, shave, dress in a clean uniform shirt but, because it would be Saturday, blue jeans instead of his regular pants, then go to work. In the evening he’d ride out and see his mother, bring fresh flowers and the photo album, hope she remembered him, if not just sit there with her, him staring into the same space she did, wondering what she saw. He had his cell phone in his pocket now, as always, in case she called, but the calls had been so rare lately he knew that any one might be the last, that she might slip off into that space where she stared, go for good to whatever she kept watching.

  When he heard the vehicle out on the highway a little over half a mile away, he paused in his reading, his finger marking the page, its nail surely the cleanest of any mechanic in Mississippi. The vehicle grew closer and soon he heard tires crunch over gravel and saw flashes of white through the trees bordering the right side of his yard. He looked down at his feet and wondered should he put on shoes—greeting a visitor in your bare feet seemed rude—but didn’t. Even though he was the only person on this road, someone coming to see him was unlikely. Maybe somebody lost. Or somebody with a few beer bottles or a bandolier of firecrackers. He set his Coke down on the concrete and put the book in his chair and stood up to wait.

  It was a late-model van of the style UPS used, but trimmed in blue and labeled DIRECTV. The driver didn’t seem lost; in fact he waved, and rolled to a stop beside the road behind Larry’s Ford and turned the key off. For a moment the driver, sunglasses, dirty blond hair, sat behind the wheel, collecting things from the passenger seat, and opened the door and got out and slammed it and waved again as he walked up the hill toward Larry.

  “Hidy there,” he said. “My name’s Wallace Stringfellow.” He was early twenties, Larry saw now, a bit under six feet, a goatee and scruff on his cheeks, bony, his untucked, wrinkled DIRECTV shirt a size or two large on him and long khaki shorts under it, ratty sneakers. There were a few Stringfellows in Fulsom but Larry didn’t know them.

  “Good evening,” he replied. “What can I do for you?”

  Wallace stuck out his hand, which was dirtier than Larry’s and small. For a moment Larry looked at it before he took it and found Wallace’s palm clammy. He could smell that he’d been drinking.

  “Well,” he said, putting the clipboard under his arm to get a package of Marlboros out of the DIRECTV shirt pocket, “we on what us dish technicians call a installation drive? I was just out riding around, bout lost, and happened to see you ain’t got one. A dish.” He shook a smoke out and lit it and jutted his chin toward Larry’s roof. “That old-timey antenna? What you get, like three channels?”

  “I appreciate your riding all the way out here,” Larry said, “but I don’t reckon I need it. Three channels are more than enough.”

  “You can’t watch but one at a time, right,” Wallace said. “But look, you don’t know what’s out there. Something for every taste. Get you a dish, boom, your evenings are as full as you want em to be.” He pointed again. “I can screw her in right up there, they always look like a ear, I think, listening at the sky. You like cooking shows, boom, we got you covered. Murder shows? Crime investigation? Wrestling? It’s a whole channel devoted to that.”

  “I appreciate you coming all the way out here,” Larry said, “but—”

  “Here,” Wallace said, passing him one of the brochures.

  Larry took it and unfolded it, a long list of channels. “There sure are a lot,” he said.

  “You don’t know the half,” Wallace said. “I can get you a hundred twenty-something channels, won’t be a hundred a month. ESPN, HBO, Skinemax.”

  Larry was shaking his head.

  “What if I just set a spell, then?” Wallace asked. “Been a long one. I ain’t gone bite.”

  “Yeah,” Larry said. “I’m sorry. I just don’t get that many visitors.”

  Wallace followed him up the steps to the screen door and almost bumped him when Larry stopped.

  “Why don’t we sit out here,” he said. “It’s cooler.”

  “You the boss, hoss.”

  Larry said, “I’ll be right back.”

  He went in and looked at the clock. News would be on soon. Through the screen, Wallace was peering inside. “Nice place,” he said. “You get somebody to clean it for you?”

  “No.”

  Larry laid the brochure on the kitchen table and pulled a chair from beneath it and when he came back out Wallace had set the other brochures on the porch and used the clipboard to weigh them down. He put the cigarette in his lips and took the chair Larry offered, turned it around and sat with his elbows over the back.

  Larry stood by the door. “Can I get you something to drink?”

  “Now we talking. You got a seven and seven?”

  “No, sorry.”

  “Bourbon?”

  “I got a Coke.”

  “What you got to go with it?” Wallace smiled.

  Larry looked inside, behind him. “I don’t have anything like that,” he said. “I don’t drink alcohol.”

  “Not even a beer?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Just brang me a Co-Cola then.”

  He nodded and went inside, got one from the refrigerator and unstuck a magnet-opener from the fridge door and pried its lid off and restuck the magnet and came back out. Wallace had turned his chair the right way and sat propped against the wall, his legs dangling.

  “Thank you,” he said and drank most of the Coke in the first swallow. “What’s your name?”

  “Larry.”

  “Larry what?”

  He hesitated. “Larry Ott.”

  The name didn’t seem to register, Wallace polishing off his Coke and clinking the bottle back down. “Well, Mr. Ott—”

  “Just Larry.”

  “Well, just Larry, where’d you go to high school?”

  “Fulsom.”

  “Same as me. When’d you graduate?”

  Larry shrugged. He didn’t want to say it but Wallace waited. “Never did.”

  “How come?”

  “I quit.”

  “Me, too.” Wallace laughed. “How come you did?”

  “Just did.”

  “Me, too. Couple a dropouts ain’t we. Momma keeps saying get my GED and I reckon I might, one of these days.”

  Larry stood a moment, not asking if his boss minded he drank when he drove a company van. Then went to his chair and moved the book and sat down.

  “What you reading?” Wallace asked, finishing his cigarette.

  He held the book up. Wa
llace dropped his Marlboro on the porch and toed it out. “I seen that movie. You get you a dish? You ain’t got to worry about reading.” He pecked another from the package and lit it and grinned through his smoke. “Say your name’s Larry Ott? Ain’t I heard of you?”

  Larry glanced at him. “Not many folks around here that ain’t.”

  “Wait.” Wallace grinning now. “You the one they say did away with that girl. Back in high school.”

  Larry looked down at his feet, wished he’d put his shoes on.

  “That’s how come you quit school, huh. Shit, boy,” Wallace said. “You famous.” He eased his chair down. “Or infamous.”

  Larry stopped himself from correcting Wallace and fidgeted in his seat. He said, “You still want to sell me a dish?”

  “Hell, hoss, I don’t care what you done. I’ll still sell you a dish, you want one. Sell you two or three, you want. All I gotta do is get on your roof there, find the clearest spot to the sky, screw her in, and then run your cable down. But all that can wait to Monday.”

  “Monday?”

  He dug his cell phone out of his pocket. “It’s after five-thirty in the P.M. and it’s Friday. My weekend has officially begun.”

  “How bout that.” Larry stood up with him. “Have a good weekend, Wallace. I’ll see you Monday?”

  “Sure as clockwork.”

  He gathered his clipboard and brochures and hopped down off the porch and trotted across the yard. In the van, he waved again and Larry waved back, standing with one hand on the porch post and watched him crank the van and grind its gears looking for reverse. When he got it turned around he tooted the horn and it nearly stalled as he shifted and Larry watched him weave over the road and then picked up the chair and turned and went back inside, Wallace’s engine still growling through the trees.

  That night as he lay in bed he thought of Wallace and smiled in the dark. That he’d been lied to didn’t bother him. He’d placed him as the boy who’d snuck into his barn those years before. Same face, just longer and scruffier. Same small eyes. Larry remembered how he’d jumped and he smiled again. Wallace didn’t seem dangerous, just curious. Larry hoped he hadn’t stolen the van, though, remembering the fishing lures, the missing rooster.