Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

by Tom Franklin

  The three rode in the sheriff’s car, Larry in the backseat, caged off from the front, no handles on the doors, to the spot in the woods where he’d dropped her off, the sheriff asking Larry did he see any tracks that would verify a car had been waiting. Did he see a cigarette butt? A rubber? Anything to help prove Larry wasn’t lying? No, no, no, no. Well, the sheriff said, hadn’t Larry worried about leaving a young girl alone in the woods? What kind of a gentleman would do that? Out of answers, Larry was led back to the car.

  Cindy’s friends were asked to volunteer information about her, who she might’ve left with, where she could’ve gone, but nobody knew anything, everyone swearing she wasn’t seeing anybody. Meanwhile, deputies looked for Cindy in Carl’s woods, pulled by hounds, kicking through leaves, wading the creek, searching other parts of the county as well, dragging lakes, interviewing Larry over and over, sending out bulletins, nailing up posters. Larry never returned to school, the weeks stretching into months, and when even the most fervent optimists were beginning to doubt she’d run away, after Silas had left for Oxford, Larry spent his hours in his room, reading. His father switched from beer to whiskey and drank more and more, starting earlier in the day as his business dwindled, fewer and fewer customers each month until the cars that trickled in were the cars of strangers, strangers who found a disheveled drunk sitting in the office smoking cigarettes, a man who’d stopped talking to his son period and quit telling stories. Larry’s mother stopped going to church and stayed home, minding her chickens, often standing in the pen gazing into space or at the kitchen sink in her yellow gloves, hands sunk in gray dishwater, looking out the window. Their lives had stopped, frozen, as if in a picture, and the days were nothing more than empty squares on a calendar. In the evening the three of them would find themselves at the table over a quiet meal no one tasted, or before the television as if painted there, the baseball game the only light in the room, its commentators’ voices and the cracks of bats and cheers the only sound, that and the clink of Carl’s ice.

  Larry wouldn’t remember, almost a year later, whose idea it was, his going to the army. But because Cindy’s body had never been recovered, because no trace had been found, not a hair, a spot of blood, a thread from her short skirt, and despite most of the county’s belief that he’d raped and killed her, Larry had been allowed to board the bus in Fulsom, his mother receding in the window as he sat with his duffle bag and crew cut and rode across the bottom of the state away from Fulsom then north to Hattiesburg for basic training. The army recruiter had informed his commander of his situation and all agreed, should evidence occur, that he would be returned to stand trial. They’d keep their eye on him.

  In the bus he saw his face reflected in the window and reached up, took off his glasses. He looked thinner without them and left them on the seat when he arrived at Camp Shelby.

  There, he found that the anonymity of army life fit him, basic training where he lost twenty pounds, the bland food, the busy hours. When assignment time came, a sergeant asked him what his talents were and Larry said he didn’t have any. The man asked, well, what did his daddy do. Larry said, “He’s a mechanic.” The sergeant wrote something on a form and mumbled, “If it’s good enough for him, son, it’s good enough for you.” Which was how Larry found himself in the motor pool among engine blocks hanging from chains and upraised hoods and good-natured city boys with cigarettes in their uniform pockets. Larry smiled at their jokes but kept to himself, in his bunk, in the mess hall, alone over his clean work station handling wrenches, ratchets, screwdrivers, and pliers that felt and weighed the same as his father’s had, that smelled and gleamed the same, his year-long apprenticeship as a mechanic in this army barracks where Jeeps and trucks came in an endless line, Private First Class Larry Ott, Serial Number US 53241315, not so disinclined as his father had claimed, emerging a certified mechanic. With his duffle and a shopping bag filled with paperbacks, thinner in his uniform, he was transferred to Jackson, Mississippi, this new part of his life seeming not so much like another chapter in a novel as a different dream in the same night’s sleep.

  Each time he went home on furlough-Christmas, Thanksgiving-he found his parents both older and stranger, his mother forgetful of where the dustpan was, how the gas stove worked. Larry was somehow taller than the father who couldn’t seem to look at him, always out of the house, working, though his shop was as empty those days as it would be after Larry took it over, after Carl, who passed out every night in his chair by the television, finally ran his truck off the road into a field on his way home one summer’s evening and went through the windshield and broke his neck, the overturned truck barely damaged, still running perfectly when it was found. Larry was called in to his captain’s office near the end of his third year of service to hear the news. Honorably discharged, he was moved shortly thereafter back home where all agreed-the new sheriff, the chief investigator, and the lieutenant in charge of Larry’s unit-that he should care for his mother.

  In Chabot, Silas was still gone. And still no Cindy. She hadn’t returned, and no hunter, no lumberjack, had stumbled upon her bones, no hound had nosed them up. Cecil and Shelia Walker had moved, he didn’t know where, and the old house without them seemed to have given up, ended a brave stand, sagging with the relief of vacancy, weeds sprouting through the steps, privet over the windows and kudzu vines slithering around the porch posts. The NO TRESPASSING sign someone had nailed on the door had begun to fade.

  For years, after Larry had signed his mother into River Acres, he would wake each morning to the faraway growl of power saws cutting down trees on the acres he’d been forced to sell, the shriek of back-up alarms, the grumble of log trucks trundling the muddy ruts to deliver their quivering wet hardwood to the mill’s teeth. Soon the land he had walked as a boy, the trees he’d climbed, had been winnowed to three hundred acres, the land surrounding it clear-cut, replanted with loblolly pines that rose quickly toward the sky and would, he knew, be ready for harvest in another fifteen years. Days, he waited for customers, his shop more a tradition than a business. Evenings, on his porch or by his fire, he read. Nights he spent alone, seldom thinking of his mother’s old prayer, the one where she asked God to send him a special friend. Until it was answered.

  eight

  SILAS JUST BEAT the lunch rush and got a corner booth. He put his hat off to the side and waited, gazing out the window at the high crumbling courthouse across the street, its arched windows and columns, at the white lawyers in suits walking down one side of the long concrete steps and the families of the black folks they would convict or acquit walking down the other. The diner door opened and a group of white ladies came in, all taking at once. Silas usually avoided this place-his mother had waited these tables for more than twenty years, bringing his supper from here so often he’d grown to hate the food. But today the diner held a comfort. Maybe it was the closest he could get to Alice Jones, dead so long with her secrets. And his.

  A young waitress with enormous breasts and blue eyeliner arrived with pitchers of iced tea in each hand. “What’s up, 32 Jones? Sweet or un?”

  “Sweet, please, ma’am,” he said, turning one of the glasses on the table upright so she could fill it, trying to remember her name.

  “I seen you was in the paper,” she said. “That article about M &M.”

  “You did, huh?” He’d forgotten the Beacon Light came out today. No mention of the rattlesnake in the mailbox, then. With dead bodies and missing girls, must not be news enough. Because it was a weekly paper, the news about Larry being shot wouldn’t be printed for a while.

  “Um hm,” she said. “You ready to order yet?”

  He said he was waiting for Angie and, still trying to remember the waitress’s name, afraid to stare at her chest, where her name tag was, he opened his phone. The girl was gone by then, her next table. Nobody had called. Silas shut the phone and sipped at his tea until the door opened and Angie came in. Even in her light blue uniform shirt and navy pants she looked goo
d, her mouth to the side, her hair braided. He liked that she never wore makeup or did her nails. He got up and they kissed briefly, then slid into the booth, facing each other.

  “You been busy?”

  “Not long as you don’t call,” she said, taking one of the giant plastic menus from its rack. “What you hungry for?”

  “Just this tea.”

  She looked at him over the menu. “You ain’t still green from yesterday, are you?”

  “Naw,” he said. “I eat two of Marla’s hot dogs earlier.”

  “Lord, 32. You want me to call Tab and get him to bring our defibrillator?”

  The waitress came and topped off his glass.

  “Hey, Shaniqua,” Angie said.

  “Hey, girl. How you manage to finally get this man come eat in here?”

  “You know he do everything I tell him.”

  Silas, who’d been staring out the window, glanced at them and smiled. “Thanks, Shaniqua.”

  Angie ordered a hamburger with everything. Oh, and fries-mustard on the side-and a Diet Coke.

  “What you so glum for?” she asked when the waitress left. “Paper ain’t call you 31 again did it?”

  “Naw.”

  “Then what?”

  “Just thinking about Larry Ott.”

  “You been to see him?”

  “Naw.”

  “He ever wake up?”

  “Not last I heard. I been over at his place all morning. Roy wants me to handle this one while he works on that missing girl.”

  “Tab thinks he shot himself,” she said.

  “Roy thinks so, too. Else he wouldn’t a put it off on me.”

  “Them two ought to know.”

  “Why now, though?” he asked. “After all this time, why shoot his self now?”

  “Maybe he did take that girl.”

  Silas was shaking his head. “Naw, I can’t see it.”

  “Think about it,” she said. “If he kidnapped that first girl way back when, then maybe he got a taste for it. Maybe he’s been nabbing girls all along and getting away with it. Or else been holding off long as he can. But either way, he sees cute Tina Rutherford and goes all Hannibal Lecter on her. Then it’s all over the news and he realizes who it was, big rich family, and gets worried.” She made her hand a pistol and pointed it at her own chest. “Bang.”

  “What if he didn’t take that first girl? In high school.”

  “Maybe everybody thinking he did’s finally added up for him. All those years of nobody talking to him. You think he ever gets laid? Man with his rep? Maybe he finally snapped and said to himself, ‘All right, if they gone treat me this way then where’s the nearest girl?’ ”

  Shaking his head. “I just don’t think he’s got it in him.”

  “How you know?”

  Silas took a breath. Then he said it. “Cause I used to be friends with him.”

  Shaniqua appeared with the food but Angie didn’t seem to notice.

  “You welcome,” Shaniqua said, leaving.

  “What you mean, friends?”

  “A long time ago. When I was fourteen years old…” He hesitated, looked out the window again, people and cars passing in front of the big white building devoted to the law, three floors of it.

  “32?”

  “When I was fourteen years old, me and my momma came to Amos from Chicago. On a bus.” From there he started to talk, things he’d never said out loud, how they’d ridden down from Joliet, how they moved into Carl Ott’s cabin, no water, no electricity, walking two miles to the nearest road, how Carl and Larry picked them up until Ina got wind of it and gave them those old coats, how the next day Silas’s mother came home in a Nova and never did say where she got it. He was still talking when Shaniqua passed by again and said, “If you ain’t gone eat that, Angie, somebody else will.”

  Angie ignored her but started on the food, opening the mustard packets and squeezing them onto her plate for her French fries, chewing her hamburger slowly, sipping her Diet Coke through a straw as Silas told how, at first, he’d been shocked how quiet the woods seemed compared to Chicago, no crowds, car horns, sirens, no el train clacking by. But in the woods, if you stopped, if you grew still, you’d hear a whole new set of sounds, wind rasping through silhouetted leaves and the cries and chatter of blue jays and brown thrashers and redbirds and sparrows, the calling of crows and hawks, squirrels barking, frogs burping, the far baying of dogs, armadillos snorkeling through dead leaves and dozens of other noises he slowly learned to identify. He found he’d never seen real darkness, not in the city, but how, if you stood peeing off the cabin porch on a moonless night, or took a walk through the woods where the treetops stitched out the stars, you could almost forget you were there, you felt invisible. Country dark, his mother called it.

  “I didn’t like it at first,” he said, “being down here. But after a while, after I’d got me that rifle from Larry, and after I started playing baseball, I felt like I belonged here. It’s part of why I came back, after all that time. I’d never forgot this place.”

  Shaniqua came and stood over them with her pitchers. “More sweet?” she asked Silas. He nodded and she filled it. “You want another DC?” she asked Angie.

  “No, thanks.”

  Silas was looking back out the window, rubbing the brim of his hat. He told her about Carl and the fight with Larry as she slowly stopped eating. “After that,” he said, “me and Momma moved. To Fulsom. She’d done saved enough money for a house trailer. I went to Fulsom Middle and didn’t see Larry again till high school. By then I was playing baseball. Everybody calling me 32. Name in the paper all the time. And Larry Ott, he was just a hick that nobody liked.”

  “How come?”

  “He was weird. Lived so far out in the country he didn’t have any friends. Never came to ball games, didn’t go to the junior prom. Always reading his books. He used to bring stuff to school, snakes he’d catch, trying to make people notice him. I remember one time, Halloween, must’ve been junior year. He come to school with this monster mask.”

  Silas hadn’t thought of this in years. It was a zombie mask with fake hair and rotting skin, made of heavy plastic and red with gore, as realistic as anything anybody had ever seen, like a real severed head. “I can see it plain as day right now,” he said. When Larry had shown up in homeroom wearing it, kids flocked him. Silas saw him by the gym, as pretty girls, cheerleaders, passed it head to head trying it on. When dumbstruck Larry got it back and pulled it over his own face again, it must’ve smelled like Love’s Baby Soft Perfume and Suave shampoo and Certs. Then another group of girls was calling Larry over. Could they see his mask, try it on? Would he bring it to the Fulsom First Baptist Church Haunted House that night? Wear it in one of the rooms?

  Of course he would.

  Silas had practice that afternoon, and afterward, he and M &M and other teammates rode in the back of somebody’s pickup truck over to the abandoned house on Highway 5. Larry was already there, wearing a white sheet with a hole scissored for his head, beaming. When he gave Silas an awkward wave, Silas turned his back. For the next three hours Larry had his own room in the haunted house, a room dizzy with strobe lights and littered with fake body parts, shrieks from speakers hidden among bales of hay. People streamed through all night, groups of teenagers, boys pushing at one another, couples, some with terrified children. Silas, aloof, watching it while sneaking beers from the back of the truck, keeping an eye on Larry, thinking that tonight Larry must’ve felt almost normal.

  At midnight, the end, Larry came out of the house, pulling off his mask, his face red from heat, his hair plastered to his skull. He stood, waiting to be noticed, congratulated on his performance, maybe, welcomed by the group, given a beer. Cindy Walker was there, too-

  “Who?” Angie broke in.

  “The girl,” he said, annoyed he’d brought her up, “who went missing.”

  She watched him.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “when Larry come out of the haunted
house, we all just kind of pretended not to see him. All of us.”

  He told her how Larry stood in the floodlight for a long time. Figuring it out. The mask deflated under his arm. Finally he turned and walked down the dirt road toward the paved one. He paused at the road in his whipping sheet and waited, as if a car was coming though none was, waited a long time, and still no car came. Some of the seniors had forgotten him and were passing cigarettes and beers, but Silas watched as Larry finally crossed the road and walked into the parking lot. He stopped there, too, and took off his sheet and looked over the cars, as if selecting one to buy. He’d forgotten where he’d parked his mother’s Buick, that’s what he was doing now. In case anybody glanced over and happened to notice him and yell, “Hey, look! It’s Larry! Come back! Join the party!”

  No one did, including Silas, including Cindy. And after Larry got in the car and lingered, its engine purring, Silas didn’t run after Larry as he slowly, slowly crackled through the parking lot, didn’t signal him over as he sat with his brights on, shining down the dirt driveway to where everybody looked away and kept talking, and Silas didn’t wave to him as Larry drove past them slowly, and they all watched his brake lights as they lingered through the trees, and lingered still, as if he might come back. When he was finally gone, Silas remembered, Cindy and everyone else, himself included, began to laugh.

  Angle’s lips were over to the side and he knew she was thinking. “How long was it, from that night, till that girl, Cindy, went missing?”

  “Couple months?”

  He paused as Shaniqua appeared and cleared away Angie’s dishes. “You want more sweet?” she asked Silas.