Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter: A Novel

by Tom Franklin

  Later he went back in. Hand over his nose and mouth, he forced himself to look down at what they were discussing, photographing. She’d been thrown in naked on her stomach, he could tell, he could see part of her spine but not, thank God, what would have been her face. What he saw was not even a girl anymore, instead something from one of Larry’s horror books, black and melted-looking and dissolved. What drove Silas back out of the house the second time was not her spine with dirt in its intricate lines or her shoulder blades bound in strands of flesh or the matted green hair where skin from her skull had loosened, but the wrist one of the C.I.B. agents lifted in his heavy rubber glove, her small bony hand with its fingers cupped, showing French’s camera the nails that still bore chipped red polish, and, loose on one of the fingers, her class ring.

  Now, his arms up to halt the trucks, Silas’s cell phone began to ring. It always did during traffic duty. Anything official came over his radio, phone calls were personal.

  Fuck it, he thought. He dug out his cell.

  “Officer Jones?”

  “You got him.”

  “This Brenda.”

  “Who?”

  “Up at River Acres? Nursing home?”

  It was hard to hear for the traffic and he stuck a finger in his opposite ear.

  “Hey,” he said. “I can’t talk now.”

  “You wanted to know when Mrs. Ott was having a good day?”

  “Yeah?”

  “She having one now.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll get over there soon as I can.”

  “You best hurry,” she was saying as he hung up.

  THE MILL HAD shut down for Tina Rutherford’s funeral. Hell, Chabot had. Black ribbons on the office and store doors, a long line of cars from the Baptist church following the hearse over the highway, Silas directing traffic for that, too, his post at the crossroads of 102 and 11, the four-way stop in his jurisdiction where the procession might get broken up by log trucks, shadows of birds flickering over the road, his uniform pressed and his hat over his heart as cars trolled by with their lights on, him standing, as he had not in years, at navy attention. The windows of the Rutherford limousine were tinted and he couldn’t see the girl’s parents, just a pair of white hands on the steering wheel. And after what must’ve been a hundred vehicles had rolled by, he’d driven to the church and sat in his Jeep, unable to go inside. Later he caboosed the procession to a graveyard miles out in the country, whites only buried there, lovely landscaped grounds shaded by live oaks with Spanish moss slanted in the wind like beards of dead generals. Nothing like the wooded cemetery where Alice Jones lay under her little rock on the side of a hill eaten up with kudzu, the plastic flowers blown over and strewn by the wind. During the Rutherford girl’s burial, a high bright sun and two tiny airplanes crossing the sky, he’d stood at the edge of trees, away from the grief—French had been the one to tell Rutherford his daughter was dead, and for that Silas had been grateful—while the white people near the open grave and the black ones surrounding them at a distance sang “Amazing Grace” accompanied by bagpipes and while Larry Ott lay in his coma, belted to his hospital bed, a deputy posted by the door.

  Silas had asked that French let him have the midnight-to-six shift there. He wasn’t a deputy but it was in French’s power to use him. “Fine by me,” the CI had said. “Long as you can stay awake. Nobody else wants it, and we short-handed as it is. But I’m curious.”

  “I need the money,” Silas said. Just one damn lie after another.

  “Yeah right.”

  Silas figured French thought he just craved more limelight, didn’t want to give up the case, wanted to stay in the loop. Which was partially true, and which also helped explain why Silas had gone by Larry’s house every day since he’d found the girl. The first day the deputy stationed there was sitting on the porch in Larry’s rocking chair with his feet crossed reading one of Larry’s books. Silas parked behind his cruiser and got out and nodded.

  “What you up to, 32?”

  “Feed the man’s chickens.”

  The deputy followed him back and into the barn and watched Silas sling corn into the pen, the chickens pecking it up, Silas wondering if they’d think he’d gone over the edge if he fired up Larry’s tractor and pulled the cage to a fresh square of grass.

  “I could do that,” the deputy said. “Save you running all the way out here.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “You ought to collect the eggs, too. With no rooster in there they just gone rot.”

  “You want em?”

  “God almighty no. I bring home eggs from Scary Larry? My wife’d thow em at me.”

  “You could probably sell em on eBay,” Silas said. “Or one of them serial killer Web sites.”

  The deputy toed the lawn mower wheels. “What’s these here for?”

  Silas explained as he filled the water tire and shooed the setting hens aside and collected half a dozen dry, brown, shit-speckled eggs, and carried them back to his Jeep. He began taking them to Marla at The Hub, who said she was glad to have them, eggs was eggs.

  Nights he sat in a folding chair outside Larry’s door, a tall thermos of coffee and one of Marla’s greasy sacks by his feet, the overhead lights dim, Silas squeaking around on the chair and trying to convince himself of why he was here. He’d brought Night Shift from his office, and because his ass hurt walked the hospital hall reading the stories he never had as a kid.

  They’d put Larry in a room at the end of a hall to keep gawkers away, Silas having to stand up a few times each shift to warn off shufflers, old men in robes clinging to their portable IV racks, or nurses from other floors and, once, a hugely pregnant woman in a robe and hospital flip-flops who told him she was in labor.

  Silas said, “You a long way from the delivery room.”

  Trying to look past him, Larry’s door cracked. “They said walk around.” She pushed her hands into the small of her back. “Try to get this little bastard kick-started.”

  Larry was now a suspect—the suspect—in Tina Rutherford’s murder, and Silas had given French his tire molds and the evidence bags with the broken glass and roach in them. Larry’s keys, too. The newspapers and television stations following the story had dug up the scant facts on the Cindy Walker case, as well, how a quarter of a century earlier Larry had picked her up for a date and, hours later, come home without her. A new road had been slashed into Larry’s land and the cabin dismantled, the earth beneath it excavated, French hoping that the Walker girl’s bones might be recovered as well, closing that case. But despite the fact that no more bones had been found, reporters and newscasters were speculating that Larry Ott had attempted suicide because of what he’d done to Tina Rutherford and possibly Cindy Walker and, who knew, maybe other girls. There’d been one from Mobile missing for eleven years. Another from Memphis. Maybe these two—and, who knew, others—were buried somewhere on the last acres Larry Ott had refused to sell to the lumber mill.

  Under orders not to talk to reporters, Silas didn’t tell Voncille about moonlighting as Larry’s guard, knowing she’d peer at him over her glasses, worry he might fall asleep at the wheel and ram his Jeep into a log truck. He imagined her saying he couldn’t burn his candle at both ends, or, for his own good, telling Mayor Mo.

  But Angie was Silas’s main problem. Aside from being worried about him herself, she said she’d gotten so used to him staying over she had trouble sleeping without his long arms and legs all up in her space, not to mention his other long thing. They slept on their left sides, spooning, his left arm under her neck and reaching around so he could cup her right breast, his right arm over her side, cupping her left breast. He loved feeling her heart beat through it. He hadn’t seen her since their lunch at the diner, and knew he was using his guard duty as an excuse to avoid finishing their conversation. She called on his cell each night as she lay in bed and talked in his ear, detailing her day of wrecks and heart attacks, of Tab, an old hippie, ranting against the war in
Iraq. She had one sister over there in a base east of Baghdad, working in the pharmacy. Oh, and her other sister was pregnant again, by a different man. She told him the movies she’d watched, how much she liked the pastor at her church. She was on nights Saturday and Sunday, so Silas promised to take Monday night off and knew he’d have to tell her something and worried it might be the truth. The rest of it. He’d avoided it so long himself it sometimes didn’t even seem real, what had happened in 1982. He wondered how it would feel to tell her everything, say who he really was, and he worried that if he did, she might start to see him differently.

  When he nodded off in his chair he’d get up and pace the hospital hall. Sometimes go into Larry’s room, stare at him where he lay twined in among his machines and wires and tubes and cords. And the leather restraints on his wrists. He looked helpless and weak but was, Silas had been told, stable. His chest wound clear of infection, healing accordingly. Draining well but Larry still using a catheter, still on fluids.

  But he was big news.

  After the initial reports, before and after the funeral, the vans from Jackson, Meridian, Mobile, and even Memphis had camped out in the hospital lot, their satellites aimed at the sky, but now they were gone, this news fading as Larry slept and the world continued to supply new horrors, crashing planes, suicide bombers, kids shooting other kids. He supposed when—if—Larry ever regained consciousness, the parking lot would fill up again.

  Each evening when he arrived, already yawning, he asked Skip, the deputy on evenings, if anybody had been by. French, the deputy reported. Old Lolly, the sheriff, once in a while. Doctors and nurses. Patients. Now and then a reporter.

  “They feeding him through a tube,” Skip said. “You ask me, they ought to just let the cocksucker starve.”

  Silas had unfastened Larry’s leather restraints the first night, like undoing a belt, but Skip told him the next evening that one of the shift nurses had complained and that the restraints were to remain on.

  Sometimes when the nurses were gone Silas would stand over Larry and watch him, his IV machine flashing its faint lights and the heart monitor beeping or whistling, the ventilator inhaling, exhaling. He wondered how broken Larry was by the events of his life, how damaged. What would Silas tell him if he ever woke up? Sometimes he couldn’t help but wish he wouldn’t.

  “Larry?” he would say.

  No response.

  “Larry?”

  The second night as rain fell outside the window he glanced at the door. Then whispered, “I don’t know if you can hear me, Larry, but when you wake up it’s gone be bad.” He came around the bed and rolled up a stool and put his face near Larry’s and spoke directly in his ear. “Don’t tell em nothing, Larry, you hear? Hear? They gone try to get you to confess, but don’t say nothing, Larry. Hear? Nothing.”

  On his way out of the hospital, somebody called, “Hey, Constable Jones?”

  The information desk.

  “Jon without an h.” Silas veered over and the old man handed him a Styrofoam cup of coffee.

  “Thanks. I thought you was afternoons.”

  “I fill in when they let me. Take my word for it, son. Don’t ever retire. You’re young, it ain’t enough hours in the day and you sleep through most of em anyways. But once you get to be my age, sleep’s a memory and you beg just to get to work for free.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “No, you won’t. Or when you do it’ll be too late.”

  Silas yawned, checked his watch.

  “You asked about anybody else coming to see Mr. Ott, didn’t you? Well, one of the other volunteers, he remembered it was somebody came by, not long after you did that first day. Before all this brouhaha. Reason he didn’t tell me sooner is that some of us are a tad on the senile side. If I could remember his name I’d tell you.”

  He waited for Silas to smile. “Reporter?”

  “Naw, it’s been plenty of them, but that wasn’t what you wanted, was it?”

  “No.”

  “This fellow, didn’t say who he was. Just asked if Larry—used his first name—had ever woke up.”

  “What’d he look like?”

  “Marlon, that was the other guy, he said he was early twenties, skinny, white. Said he was, what was the word he used? Oh, he said he was ‘kinda stringy-looking.’”

  “Thanks,” Silas said. He glanced behind him. “Yall got cameras in here? Maybe a video of him?”

  “Supposed to. But it’s been broke awhile. They tell me it’s in the budget to get it fixed, but you know how budgets work. Get money for one thing, takes it from another.”

  “Got that right,” Silas said.

  When he went by Larry’s that afternoon, a new deputy and a plainclothes officer from the C.I.B. were in the house going through Larry’s papers. Both men came out and watched him feed the chickens as if it were an exhibition. Each day was different at Larry’s, different lawmen, French there the next afternoon, shaking his head at the farmer constable.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  Flinging in the feed. “What you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Silas just shrugged and went to get the eggs. He looked out at French, regarding him from the other side of the wire, and told him about the stringy-looking man. French said without more than that, the tape, say, or an ID, it sounded like a dead end. “Stringy-looking?” he said. “Hell, that’s practically a goddamn demographic in southeast Mississippi.”

  The next day, when Silas drove out, he found the house and barn deserted, Sheriff’s Department seals on all doors, including the barn’s, warning intruders that this was a crime scene.

  “How am I supposed to feed yall?” Silas asked out loud. “Or get them eggs?”

  No answer from the chickens, gathered across the wire, waiting, clucking, scratching. They seemed used to him, all right, looking at him their sideways way, and he was beginning to think he could tell them apart.

  He drove that evening to Wal-Mart and bought two bags of chicken feed and put them in the back of his Jeep and was out there that night slinging in the moonlight. He filled an old milk jug with water from the spigot at the back of Larry’s house and sloshed it over in a bowl so they could drink. The egg dilemma was still unsolved.

  Fuzzy days found him asleep in the Jeep while speeders went unabated on the highway below. The Jeep took longer and longer to crank. One day he swung by the auto shop at the mill and the mechanic opened the hood and whistled. “If this thing was a horse we’d a done shot it,” he said. He told Silas to bring it in early next week and leave it a few days, he’d see if he could order parts from the salvage yard. “Carburetors,” he said nostalgically.

  After his evening patrol, Silas would roil semiconscious in his sweaty sheets waiting for the alarm to buzz so he could go the hospital and watch Larry sleep. One night he sat dozing in his guard chair and woke himself by snoring. He blinked and looked down the hall and saw a stringy-looking shadow standing watching him. Then it was gone. He rose and ran past the other rooms to the end where the hall was empty. Somebody down past a Coke machine moved and Silas said, “Wait,” and began to run down the hall.

  He turned the corner and nothing. More halls. Door to stairs. He eased a bit farther along the hall, then turned and went back to Larry’s room, shaking his head, wondering if he’d made it all up.

  The rest of the night he stayed awake.

  NOW, MONDAY, HE finished the traffic. Yawning, he hoped Mrs. Ott was still having a good day at the nursing home.

  In City Hall, Voncille was on the phone, solitaire on her computer. He laid his hat and sunglasses on his desk among the day’s scattered paperwork and got his coffee cup and filled it at the water fountain and drank it so fast it made his neck hurt.

  “That was Shannon from the paper,” Voncille said when she hung up, rolling her chair over to hand him a message. “Said she wants to talk to you about your trifecta, as she called it. Reckon she figures it’d make for a good
feature story. What an outstanding constable you are.”

  “Right. I’m headed over to River Acres.”

  “What for?”

  “See Mrs. Ott.”

  “Larry’s mother?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well. You look like you ain’t slept in a month,” she said. “But I’m glad you finally stopped by. If you don’t go out and write some tickets, the mayor’s gone have your head.”

  AT FIVE-THIRTY, AT River Acres, he climbed out of the Jeep, which continued to run as it had been doing lately, like a stutterer.

  Inside, Brenda was reading a magazine at her desk. “She tried to call her son on his cell phone,” she said, “and when nobody answered she started getting upset.”

  He pictured the phone lighting up, rattling in the box in French’s office, vibrating the pictures and all the other evidence.

  “How is she now?”

  “Little calmer. Good thing about Alzheimer’s is they don’t stay mad long.”

  He thanked her and said he remembered the way.

  Entering the room he was hit by the stink of feces. Ina Ott lay flat on her back with her right hand fluttering, flies buzzing in the bright light through the window. The tiny black woman beside her was asleep.

  “Mrs. Ott?” Silas took off his hat.

  She looked up at him without recognition. “I’ve messed myself,” she said. “Where’s Larry?”

  He saw the dark stain around the sheets at her crotch, her useless hand laying right in it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I’ll get a nurse,” he said, glad to leave the room and its smell.

  “Second shift’s coming on in half a hour,” Brenda told him, hardly looking up. “They’ll clean her.”