Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

by Tom Franklin

  “Larry?” His mother raised her eyebrows.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Now go get the mail.”

  HIS FATHER STILL drove him to school, long talkless rides they both endured. Neither had ever mentioned what had happened at the cabin, Larry’s fight with Silas. Carl had returned home later that evening, no apology, no mention of the rifle, come in the house as if he’d been working. Gone to the refrigerator, gotten a beer, and sat in front of the television watching baseball. They’d had supper that night, no one speaking beyond Carl saying the blessing his mother insisted on, “Bless this food, amen,” but gradually, the next day, the one after, their life together had resumed, Carl working, his mother cooking and cleaning, out volunteering for the church, Larry going to school.

  Riding now, he sat against the passenger door of the red Ford and looked out the window at the landscape of his life, a different landscape today, the trees and vines, the Walker house going by outside the window, its uneven porch, its tar-papered walls, the house in which his date moved, dressed, undressed, her pretty face reflected in the bathroom mirror.

  Soon Larry and his father were passing the cluttered houses near Fulsom, then his father’s shop, then through downtown, to the school where he said, “Bye, Daddy,” and got out, Carl saying, “Have a good one,” with his usual glance, Larry with his stack of books going off to homeroom.

  HE WAS A junior now, the high school still with more black students than white, but with a better ratio than the Chabot school, and so Larry, one of four white boys in his homeroom, against five black ones, felt safer. The girls were evenly divided.

  Slipping into his desk this morning, he couldn’t help but say to Ken, who sat behind him, “I’m going to the drive-in this weekend.”

  “By yourself?”

  David, a row over, snickered. “Naw, Kenny, he’ll have a date.” He made a fist of his hand and mimed masturbating. “Same date he has ever night.”

  “It’s Cindy Walker,” Larry said, and turned back to face the front of the room, their teacher coming in, telling the class to pipe down.

  “Horse shit,” Ken hissed to the back of his head. “She wouldn’t go out with you.”

  “Is, too,” Larry whispered over his shoulder.

  “Mr. Ott,” the teacher said, “is there something you want to share with the class?”

  All eyes settled on him and Larry said, “No, ma’am.”

  At break he walked past a classroom building and behind the gym, toward the baseball field. There were two sets of metal bleachers and one had been designated as a smoking area for students. Larry rarely came out here, usually spent his breaks alone in the gym, reading on a bench, but today was different. He knew Cindy smoked and hung out here with her friends in their acid-washed jeans and T-shirts. On the field the baseball team was practicing, and Larry saw Silas in the shortstop position, fielding hard-hit balls and flipping them effortlessly to the second baseman, Morton Morrisette. The double-play combo was locally famous, 32 Jones and M &M, two youngsters, the newspaper had said, you couldn’t get a ball between if you shot it out of a gun.

  Larry watched awhile, then spotted Cindy smoking in a cluster of white girls. He stepped out of the bleacher’s shadow and waved to her. She said something to her friends and walked over to him.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.” She sucked on her cigarette and dropped it between them. “What’s up?”

  “Just thought I’d tell you,” he said, “that The Amityville Horror is the movie at the drive-in.”

  “The what?”

  “Amityville Horror. It’s about a haunted house. I read all about it in a magazine. My momma, she would never let me see a horror show,” he said, “so you know what I told her?”

  Cindy was looking toward the baseball field. “What.”

  “That we were going to see The Long Riders. It’s about Jesse James.”

  “Who?”

  “He was an outlaw, in the old west?”

  “Oh.”

  They stood a moment.

  “Listen,” she said. “I gotta go.”

  “Wait. What time you want me to pick you up?”

  “Seven, I guess. The movie don’t start till dark.”

  “Okay,” he said, but she was walking off.

  Then she turned. “Larry?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can you get some beer?”

  “I guess so.”

  He stood a moment watching her go, then looked back toward the field, where Silas had been staring at the two of them. Larry lifted his hand to wave, hoping the black boy had seen him talking to Cindy, but then M &M said something behind his glove and Silas turned back just in time to shorthop a grounder.

  IT WAS THE slowest week of his life, clocks his enemy, their hands mocking him with their frozen minutes. Classes that took forever anyway somehow seemed longer now, and he’d lost all interest in reading. In the afternoons his mother picked him up and asked about his day. Fine, he would say. Did he talk to Cindy? No, ma’am. Why not?

  “Momma, stop asking me,” he said on Wednesday.

  “I just thought you’d talk about what yall were gonna do.”

  “We did Monday. I told you. We going to the movie.”

  “Is she excited?”

  She didn’t seem to be. He’d wave to her in the cafeteria and she’d nod or raise her chin, acting embarrassed.

  “I guess so.”

  “I remember my first date,” she said.

  “With Daddy?”

  She glanced at him. “No. It was with another man.” She talked about going fishing with him, how he baited her hook and nearly fell in the water he was so nervous. As his mother kept talking, Larry wondered if he should take Cindy fishing on their second date.

  Thursday at lunch he brought his orange tray with its fish sticks, green beans, and corn to the white boys’ table and sat a few feet down from the cluster that included Ken and David. Each table had a teacher at its end, to keep order, Mr. Robertson, the vocational agriculture teacher down at the far end with a fat boy named Fred whose father raised cattle. Larry sat where he could see Cindy across the heads of black boys and girls bent over their food, watched her eat, her hair pushed back by a band. Silas sat, as ever, with the baseball team and Coach Hytower.

  “Ott,” Ken called.

  Larry looked up and Ken motioned him over. Surprised and worried, he slid his tray down the table.

  “You got a rubber yet?” David asked.

  Larry shook his head.

  “Best place to get em,” David said, “is Chapman’s Drugs. Old man Chapman’ll sell em to you. He’ll sell you a Playboy, too.”

  “He will?” Larry asked.

  “What’s he need a rubber for?” another boy, Philip, asked.

  “Ott here’s got him a date Friday. Ain’t that right?”

  Larry nodded.

  “With who?”

  “Jackie,” somebody said, and the table laughed.

  Blushing, Larry was about to answer when Ken said, “Cindy Walker.”

  The boys’ heads all turned toward him.

  “She’s a slut,” one boy said.

  “How you know?” asked Ken.

  “How you think?”

  “I heard she likes niggers,” Philip said.

  “Yo momma likes niggers,” Larry said quietly. Before he’d thought.

  For a moment their table became the incredulous calm eye of the cafeteria’s hurricane, the boys looking from Larry to Philip, Larry aware of the lockblade knife in his back pocket. Then Ken laughed and held his palm out and Larry slapped it.

  “You a badass now?” Philip asked.

  “He got you,” somebody said.

  “What’s the movie?” Ken asked Larry, breaking the tension, and when he told them they began talking about it, how it was supposed to be bloody, even Philip talking, wanting, Larry imagined, to put being bested behind him. Larry looked at the corn on his tray, too happy to eat, a date
the next day and friends to tell about it. Across the cafeteria, Cindy got up with two of her pals and made their way through the crowded tables to the window where their trays were taken by thick black hands, then headed out to the smoking area.

  Outside, he found himself walking along a sidewalk with Ken and David, who took out his wallet.

  “Here,” he said, handing Larry a flat cellophane wrapper. It said TROJAN.

  Larry, who’d never seen a condom but knew what it was, took it, slippery inside the foil. “You don’t need it?”

  “Hell no, he don’t,” Ken said, and the three of them laughed, Larry removing his own wallet and putting it beside the twenty-dollar bill.

  HE HOVERED IN the kitchen, his father in the next room watching the news and drinking beer, his mother making cornbread behind him. He went down the hall past the gun cabinet and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and came back out, his father in his chair, and went back into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator and counted nine Budweisers. His mother, humming at the counter, glanced at him and smiled.

  “Be a gentleman,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “Do you know what that means?”

  “Be nice?”

  “Well, yes, but also stand up when she enters a room. Open doors for her. Hold her chair if yall go eat somewhere.”

  “We’re going to the movie,” he said.

  “Then pay for the movie. With that money Daddy gave you. Ask her if she wants popcorn and go get it for her. It’s romantic to share a bucket, but if she wants her own, that’s okay, too.”

  He slipped a can of beer into his pocket, nodding, keeping that side away from her as he edged out of the kitchen. His father sat sipping his beer in his socks-his work shoes on the porch by the door. In his room he hid the cold can under his bed then went past his father and back into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.

  She was buttering a pan. “What’s that movie yall are seeing?”

  He told her The Long Riders again and when she asked what it was about he told her again, keeping the impatience out of his voice and slipping another beer in his pocket.

  “Boy,” his father’s voice called.

  He stopped, cold in the door. “Sir?”

  “Bring me a beer.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, slipping the can from his pocket. When he came back out of the kitchen Carl was squatting in front of the console changing the channel. He set the can on the coffee table near his chair and turned.

  “Hey,” he said and Larry stopped.

  “Sir?”

  Carl was watching him. “Don’t give Cecil none of that money.”

  “I won’t, Daddy.”

  “You got any change, bring it back.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He snuck one more beer, knowing that was all he dare take, his thigh cold and a wet smear on his pocket.

  At supper Carl cut his roast into bites and Larry’s mother talked about their first dates, Larry barely chewing his rice and gravy.

  “Slow down,” she said. “You don’t want to be early. A girl hates that.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Carl asked for the potatoes and she passed them.

  “You remember that old tree, Carl?” she asked.

  “Tree?”

  “Oh you remember. It was before we got married. Over at the bluff?”

  “Yeah.” He was mixing his roast into his rice and gravy, adding in the carrots and potatoes, making a big stew of it all. “Old Man Collins’s land.”

  “That was his name. There was this tree,” his mother told Larry, “growing off the side of a bluff. What kind of tree was it, Carl?”

  “Live oak.”

  “Yes. You could see the roots all down the side of the bank, and below there was just this awful mess of briars, you remember, Carl?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “would’ve took a dern bulldozer to move it.”

  “That’s where Daddy and me used to go meet our friends, didn’t we, Carl? We’d build a bonfire and the boys would climb that old tree and swing off a rope they had up there, and we’d watch, all us girls.”

  “Your momma never would do it,” Carl said.

  “Well, it wouldn’t have been decent,” she said. “In a dress.”

  They ate for a while, his mother filling his tea glass even though it was nearly full.

  “You remember that time,” Carl said, “that I paid Cecil to swing off it, him drunk?”

  She said no.

  Larry watched his father.

  “Oh, maybe you wasn’t there then,” winking at Larry, “maybe I had me some other gal.”

  “Carl Ott.”

  Larry said, “What happened?”

  Carl pushed his plate away and stood up. He went to the refrigerator and got another beer, Larry nervous he would notice there were only five left. But Carl sat down and pulled his plate back and popped the tab.

  “What you did,” he said, “was scale that tree. It was two big old limbs up there, the one you’d stand on and the other one, higher, where we’d tied that rope. We had a big old knot in it that you held on to and a loop for your foot, and you’d stand on the one branch and catch your breath, and then bail off over that gully. Best time was night, you’d be out there flying around in the dark like a dang bat.”

  Larry imagined it, sailing out over the world, leaving your stomach back at the tree, weightless as you turned and turned, nearly stopping at the rope’s apex and swinging back where you grabbed the limb waiting like a hand.

  “Now your momma’s right bout that briar patch down there,” Carl said. “Black-tipped thorns big as a catfish fin. You’d be better off jumping in a pit of treble hooks. Poison ivy, too. Like something out of one of your funny books.

  “Now Cecil, he’s sacred of heights, right, don’t even like going up the steps on the school bus, and wouldn’t be caught dead in that tree. But the day I remember, it was six or eight of us boys out there and we’d been drinking beer and riding him all afternoon, calling him chicken, sissy, and finally bout dark I say, ‘Hey Cecil. I’ll give you a dollar if you go do it.’

  “Cecil, he looks up that big old tree trunk and says, ‘That ain’t worth no so-and-so dollar.’

  “‘Okay then,’ another fellow says, ‘make it two.’

  “Cecil, he’s drinking his beer, says, ‘Boys, it’s some things can’t be bought. I’ll do it for three.’ ”

  His father smiling telling it. “He makes us take the money out so he can see it. Ain’t wearing nothing but cut-off blue jeans, no shirt, no shoes, his whole family poor as niggers. Ever summer when school let out his momma’d cut off his long britches for short ones and save his shoes for one of his brothers. Went barefoot in summer, we all did, back then, feet so tough you could saw on em for a while with your knife before you felt it.

  “Anyway, Cecil, he takes him another swig, he’s already drunk as Cooter Brown, pops his knuckles, looks like a demented Tarzan shinnying up the tree and straddling that lower limb, not looking down, bout ten feet off the ground but the bluff out there was probably twenty, twenty-five feet down, a good long fall.”

  Carl paused and took a swallow of his beer. “Now I sidle up to one of the other fellows by the fire there and say, ‘Watch this,’ just about the time Cecil gets the rope in his hand. We can barely see him it’s so dark. Trying to stab his foot in that loop. You knew he was drunk otherwise he’d a never scaled that tree much less jump. But about then he lets out a whoop and bails right off that limb. He’s yelling his Tarzan yell but about halfway into it we hear it change and sort of trail off, all of us down there at the edge, looking out, trying to see. And what we see? The dang rope comes a-flapping back empty, without Cecil. We hear this scream out there in the dark then a crash, way the heck down in them briars. We all looking at each other with our mouths hanging open, thinking, we done killed Cecil.

  “But about then the cussing starts, way down in the bottom, sounds like it’s about a half mile off
. Son-of-a-blank and mother blanker and G. D. this and G. D. that-”

  “Carl-” his mother said, trying not to smile.

  “Well, by now we was all falling down on the ground we was laughing so hard, poor old Cecil, he didn’t even have him a layer of clothes to absorb the briar and thorns.

  “And when he finally come climbing back up the bank bout twenty minutes later he looked like he’d been in a cage with a bobcat, welts ever where, cut all to pieces, bleeding, got a big ole knot on his head. We’d long since stopped making noise we’s laughing so hard, I couldn’t even catch my breath, red in the face, bout to choke, Cecil standing there in the firelight with briars sticking out of his hair, but then when he seen us laughing that fool starts to laugh himself, holding out his bloody palm for his money.”

  His father was shaking his head and smiling, his mother laughing and Larry, too.

  “Where’s that tree?” Larry said, thinking he might take Cindy. “Is the rope still there?”

  Glancing at him, his father said, “Naw.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “They cut it down. Mill did.” He pushed his plate aside and rose from the table. “Enjoyed it,” he said, got another beer from the refrigerator, and went into the den.

  Larry and his mother sat a moment, the television clicking on in the living room.

  “You best go,” she said. “Don’t keep her waiting.”

  HE GOT OUT of the Buick at the Walker house, their car gone, which meant Cindy’s mother was at work. Cecil was waiting on the porch, smoking. He wore his usual greasy baseball cap and cut-off jeans and a dirty white T-shirt and no shoes.

  “Hey, Cecil,” he said, crossing their yard, smiling thinking of him all tore up and bloody.

  Cecil flicked his cigarette toward him. “Boy, it ain’t Cecil today ner ever again. It’s Mr. Walker now, got it?”

  Larry stopped.

  “I said you got it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah what?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get over here,” Cecil said.

  Larry crossed the yard, glancing at the windows of the little house, hoping Cindy might come out.

  “Is it something wrong, Ce-” he said, nearing the porch, “-I mean, Mr. Walker?”

  He stopped at the bottom step, hoping Cecil was joking, that any second that ignorant smile with its missing bottom tooth might break open, that he would elbow Larry and say, “I’m messing with you, Larry boy. You something else.”