Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

by Tom Franklin

  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.”

  The driver clapped his hands. His breath leaked out in a thin white line. “Boy, do what your momma says.”

  “Silas.”

  But he was dug in. “I ain’t riding up there,” he said. He didn’t dare risk a look at his mother and sat enduring her embarrassment as they watched him.

  Finally he heard Alice say, fake mirth in her voice, “Well, we from up at Chicago. I reckon this Mississippi cold ain’t cold to him.”

  Before he closed his door, the driver said, “Now if you get too cold, boy, just bang on the window.”

  He sat against the back and pulled the suitcase and his backpack against him as Charles drove the truck onto the empty road. He considered jumping out when the white man slowed to turn. His teeth began to clatter and the truck bounced. He stole a look over his shoulder and saw his mother as far over the long bench seat as she could be, against the door. He could tell from the way Charles’s hand moved, pointing at things, that he was talking.

  Silas knew what the bus driver wanted with his mother, and he thought how he, Silas, was in a way an impediment. Without him here, she could do whatever she needed to, without witness, to get through this cold night, to get wherever she was going. He knew his mother was beautiful.

  He thought about jumping out again, the next time they slowed to turn. He’d heard a train whistle a moment before and thought he could ride the rails back north, like the old men who used to gather in the alleys in their neighborhood would tell about, a fifty-five-gallon oil drum with a fire in it and the men speaking fondly of the world seen from a boxcar, drawn by in a never-ending, living mural you tipped your can of malt liquor to.

  It was almost ten-thirty now, and Silas hugged himself tighter. They came to a traffic light and the truck stopped all the way. Silas looked left, past the backpack he’d been using to block the wind, and saw a line of neon signs. Surely a motel in there among them. He looked to the right where streetlights led down a lonely road.

  And yet this was the way they were turning. Up ahead the road was dark. He leaned up and looked at his mother’s profile as she smiled, listening, to the bus driver who had one hand on the steering wheel and the other flapping, some story his mother was supposed to laugh at. And Silas knew without looking at her that she would, because it was polite and she lived in a world where she had to be polite all the time.

  It was a world he wanted no part of. He wanted no part of her. He was already up, backpack in hand, and over the sideboard and gone. He’d catch that northbound and hobo it all the way home. He ran back toward the lights as behind him Charles’s brake lights came on. He turned right between two dark buildings and ran down this alley and over a dark street toward another with a few streetlights. He crouched in an alley behind a garbage can as Charles’s truck slowly rolled by, then the white man and Silas’s mother were out and yelling, his mother’s voice so panicked he nearly rose toward it, but instead he turned and plugged his ears with his fingers and ran down the alley.

  He didn’t know if ten minutes had passed or an hour, had no idea how far he’d gone, and was starting to feel panicky when someone pulled him behind a pair of metal garbage cans, his backpack stripped away and his coat wrenched off, somebody’s hand in his pants pockets, taking his pocketknife, his forty cents. He tried to yell but another hand clamped over his mouth and somebody was pulling his Nikes off. He fought and bit the hand and when it sprang away he began to yell. In a moment Charles was there, pulling one thief away while another ran down the alley. The one Charles had by the shirtsleeve was a black boy not much older than Silas.

  “Let me go, motherfucker,” he said to Charles and snatched his arm so hard the sleeve came off and he was gone down the alley, the bus driver left holding the sleeve like a dead wind sock.

  “You okay, baby?” His mother was hugging him. She pushed him away and looked at him. “Did he hurt you?”

  Silas shook his head. He was beginning to understand that it was over, he was going to be all right, a few lights coming on in the high decrepit apartment buildings.

  His mother and the bus driver pulled him up and helped him back to the pickup, waiting a few blocks away.

  “Dammit,” Charles said. Someone had stolen his hubcaps.

  “I’m so sorry, Charles,” his mother said.

  She reached and touched his wrist.

  They’d stolen Silas’s suitcase from the back of the truck, and his mother’s from inside. Got her coat, too, where she’d left it on the seat. By some miracle she still had her purse, their money. His mother climbed in the middle and Silas sat by the door, which was cold. Still, he pressed against it, shivering, his feet cold in his socks.

  “Lord,” his mother said to Charles, “the night we’ve give you.”

  “Well,” he said, “truth is yall ain’t going to find a motel room this late. They all full by now, the decent ones anyway.”

  “We might have to use one of the other ones, then,” his mother said.

  “Well,” Charles’s voice sounded thick, stifling a yawn, “maybe I could drive you.”

  Silas heard her protesting, but he was so tired he closed his eyes. When he opened them it was warmer, his socked feet dry under the heater, and he heard Alice talking again, her chatting no longer afraid, she was happy because Charles was driving them all the way to wherever they were going.

  Silas closed his eyes.

  Sometime later she shook him awake and put him out of the truck, saying to stand in the alcove at the bus station door, she’d be there in a minute. He did as she said, hurrying toward the door, still half-asleep. The concrete was ice to his feet and he clutched himself and shivered awake. He looked in the big window of the bus station, the lights dimmed, the ticket window closed. A large clock said it was almost 6:00 A.M. He looked back toward the truck, where his mother was standing at Charles’s window, talking to him.

  Something clicked behind him, and the bus station door opened. A white woman with a giant ring of keys looked out. She wore a blue uniform like a police officer and a cigarette hung from her lip.

  “Good Lord, child,” she said. “Get in here before you freeze to death.”

  He came in as she flipped a row of switches that lit the ceiling a section at a time.

  “You by yourself?” the woman asked, walking. “Come on.” Her name tag said CLARA.

  “No,” he said, following her over the cold white tile. “My mom’ll be here in a minute.”

  “No, ma’am,” she corrected. “Where is she?”

  “She coming.”

  Clara smiled at him and stubbed out her cigarette in a standing ashtray. “You from up north?”

  “Yeah.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Chicago.”

  “I can tell. You don’t talk like the colored boys around here.”

  By the time Alice came in, a few minutes later, Clara had given Silas some hot chocolate in a Styrofoam cup and even found a pair of unclaimed sneakers from the lost and found. His mother talked to Clara, now behind the ticket counter, then came over to him where he sat in a chair by the radiator.

  “Momma-”

  “Silas don’t talk to me.”

  He followed her outside into the cold and down a street toward a diner. Inside it was hot and bright with gleaming Formica tables, and for a moment he felt giddy. He smelled coffee and b
acon frying. They slid into a corner booth and he wiggled his toes in his roomy new shoes while his mother flapped open a giant laminated menu. Their waitress, a young white girl, arrived with coffee for his mother. She ordered Silas bacon and eggs with grits and toast with jelly and orange juice but said the coffee was fine for her. While they waited she looked out the window and never once spoke. Soon his steaming food arrived, but she didn’t watch him eat, continued to stare out the window where clandestine dawn had arrived and figures in coats began to pass the window and cars blare by as his mother held her cup with both hands and sipped.

  The waitress brought Silas more jelly and refilled Alice’s coffee.

  “If yall ain’t too busy,” his mother asked, “can we just set for a while, till our bus come?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the girl said. “Just let me know if yall need anything else.”

  When she left he said, “Momma?”

  She didn’t look at him.

  “Momma?”

  “What?”

  “Ain’t you hungry?”

  Now she looked. “What’s missing out of you, Silas?” She looked hard. “You ain’t seen it that bad. I know. I know cause I have seen it that bad. But you. Up till now you had it easier than I ever did. But now I see what kind of man it’s made you, I don’t know if maybe I didn’t do you a disservice.”

  He wouldn’t look at her.

  “I’m done fighting you so I’ll tell you what I’m gone do. This here is Fulsom, Mississippi, not far from where I grew up. I’m taking the bus here to a town called Chabot. It ain’t far. From there I’ve got to walk, or catch a ride. To a place I know. It won’t be much, at first. But it’ll get better, soon as I get me a job. If you want to come, you’re going to be a very different boy. Is that clear?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Silas?”

  The waitress appeared with a second plate, two eggs, over easy, four link sausages, grits, and a cat-head biscuit. She moved Silas’s plate to set the new one between them.

  Alice looked up to the girl’s face. “Miss? This ain’t ours.”

  The steam from this and other food had frizzed the girl’s hair. “Somebody else sent it back,” she said. “That old grump in the corner. He never even touched it. If yall don’t want it, I’ll have to throw it away.”

  “Thank you,” his mother said.

  “Enjoy,” the girl said and was gone.

  “Silas,” his mother said.

  “What?”

  “Would you do me a favor?”

  “What?”

  “Would you go find a booth and let me set alone with my breakfast?”

  “But, Momma.”

  “Go, now,” she said. “If the place gets busy, you can come back.”

  He slid out of the booth and found an empty one a few behind her and watched her head move as she ate, slowly. The diner never did fill up, and he looked for the old grump who’d sent his food back and saw no one who wasn’t already eating.

  He and his mother sat separated the rest of the time until she rose and he followed her and she paid their bill and he stood by the door as she went back to her table and left a dollar tip. Then she asked the girl something and waited as she brought out a paper. A job application.

  Hugging himself, Silas followed her into the morning and up the street to the bus that took them five miles east through more trees than he had ever seen to Chabot where he beheld for the first time the lumber mill he now saw daily. An old man in an ancient pickup with a cracked dash and a pair of vise grips for a window knob gave them a ride and dropped them off by the store at a bend in the road called Amos. His mother went inside and Silas followed her up and down the aisles as she bought a few things and paid, agreeing with the fat white counterman that yes, it was very cold for this time of year. From there they walked, carrying a paper sack each, without coats and Silas in his overlarge shoes, for two miles along a dirt road. He was shivering by the time they stepped over an old chain and headed down what seemed little more than a path, trees high on both sides and blocking the clouds. When they came to the hunting cabin in the middle of the field surrounded by woods, Alice Jones spoke her first words to her son since the diner.

  “Find some wood,” she said.

  TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER, his head full of the past, here in Larry Ott’s kitchen, Silas stared at the photograph of his mother. Because they’d lost their things on the trip from Chicago, this was the first picture of her he’d seen in decades, her light skin, hair drawn back in a scarf. The smile she wore was the one she used around white people, not the one he remembered when she was genuinely happy, where every part of her face moved and not just her lips, how her eyes wrinkled, her hairline went back, how you saw every gleaming white tooth, the kind of smile he’d seen fewer and fewer times the older she got. But this plastic smile, the photograph, was better than no picture at all.

  His cell buzzed and he jumped.

  “You still on for lunch?” Angie asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s wrong, baby? Your voice sounds funny.”

  “Nothing,” he said, staring at his mother’s face. “I’ll see you in a bit.”

  He closed the phone and, glancing around the kitchen, stuck the picture in his shirt pocket, vaguely aware he was stealing evidence from a crime scene. He stood, covered in sweat, feeling like somebody was watching him. But who would care that he kept one picture? The only ghosts here knew the secrets already.

  seven

  IT WAS 1982. Larry sat up in bed and rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked out the window where a fence cut across his view of the cornfield and beyond that the line of trees. His life had changed. He got out of bed and dressed quickly and in the bathroom looked at his face in the mirror. He came down the hall with his hair wet and sat and watched as his mother mashed his eggs with a fork the way he liked them and salted and peppered them and set the plate between his fork and paper napkin.

  “Thanks.”

  “Daddy’s already said the blessing.”

  A paper napkin in his uniform collar, his father sat at the head of the table, leaning back with his head turned so he could see the news. When a commercial came on Carl turned his attention back to his plate of eggs, grits, and bacon. He added salt.

  “Where’s the mail?” he asked.

  Larry hadn’t even thought of it. “I forgot,” he said.

  “Larry,” his mother said. “Did you tell Daddy?”

  His father paused chewing his bacon but didn’t look at Larry. “Tell Daddy what?”

  “Larry’s asked Cindy on a date.”

  Now he looked. “I’ll be damn.”

  “Carl.”

  “Sorry.”

  His mother sat beside him and blew into her coffee mug. “Tell us how you asked her.”

  “I just done it,” Larry mumbled, though the opposite was true.

  The day before, he’d been walking past the Walker place with his rifle, same as a thousand other times. Their car was gone, so he was surprised when Cindy walked out of the house, almost as if she’d been waiting on him. She wore cut-off jeans and a T-shirt and suddenly, as he stood there grateful for the rifle that gave his hands something to do, she was talking to him.

  “You like movies?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Movies.”

  “You ever go?”

  “We seen Star Wars. And Smokey and the Bandit. In Meridian.”

  “You ever go to that drive-in theater they got?”

  He hadn’t. It was off on a lonely two-lane, twenty minutes toward Hattiesburg, and only showed movies rated R. He remembered Ken and David talking about it on the playground years earlier. Now they went each weekend on double dates with their girlfriends, smuggling in beer, marijuana joints, making out with the girls.

  “We could go,” Cindy said.

  “We could?”

  “Can you get a car?”

  If he had to steal one he could. “Yeah.”

  And
so, standing in the middle of the road, he’d been asked out on a date.

  “Friday night?” Cindy had said.

  “Friday night,” he’d said.

  “I’ll be dern,” said his father.

  His mother leaned over and refilled his cup. “Idn’t that something, Carl?”

  But the news had come back on and his father was watching again, sipping his coffee.

  Larry shot his mother a plaintive glance, and she was up and around the table with her coffeepot, blocking his father’s view and leaning down eye to eye. “He needs to use my car, Carl,” she said. “I told him ask you.”

  He’d drawn back from her but his face relaxed in a kind way, like after Larry had cut the grass without being told. “If he asks me his self,” Carl said, “I reckon he can use it.”

  His mother leaned back and nodded to Larry.

  “Can I?” he asked.

  “Can you what?”

  “Please borry Momma’s car Friday night for a date with Cindy to the drive-in?” He was immediately sorry he’d given that detail.

  “To the what?” his mother said. “I don’t-”

  Carl tried not to grin. “That where they show bosoms?”

  “Carl-”

  “Not always, Daddy.” Larry had begun to blush. “This time it’s a western. About the James gang. Name of it’s The Long Riders.”

  “Long Riders,” his father said. “What’s it rated?”

  Larry looked into his plate. “R.”

  “Carl-”

  “A Jesse James picture, complete with bosoms.”

  “Carl!”

  He was almost smiling and humor kindled his eyes. “They had em back then, too, Ina, I’m pretty sure they did. Yeah, boy,” he told Larry, “you can go. Take the Buick. It’s got a bigger backseat.”

  “Carl Ott, you stop!”

  “Ina the boy’s sixteen ain’t he? Hell,” he said, “I’ll even pay.” He produced his wallet and drew a twenty-dollar bill. He flattened it on the table and slid it over to Larry’s place mat.

  He could have slid a thousand-dollar bill and Larry wouldn’t have been more surprised. For a moment he couldn’t imagine what to say.