Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

by Tom Franklin

  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.

  He rolled over.

  As he did each night before sleep, Larry prayed for his mother, that the following day might be a good one for her, that his cell phone might ring or that, if it was time, the Lord take her quietly. In her sleep. And that God would forgive him his sins and send him customers.

  AFTER WORK THE following Monday Larry sat on his porch not reading but waiting in his usual company of bats and birds and insects, the tinkling of his mother’s chime each time the earth breathed its wind. He was disappointed but not surprised when night stole the far trees and the fence across the road and then the road itself and finally the sky, Larry’s truck gone too in the dark and stars beginning to wink in the sky like nail holes in the roof of a barn.

  HE’D GIVEN UP on him by the time Wallace came back, two months later. Larry was reading when he raised his head at a buzzing over his land, the motor gnawing closer and closer and then the four-wheeler emerging where the trees broke, its bareheaded rider bouncing in the seat. He cut the engine as he approached Larry’s house and coasted to a stop, a cigarette dangling from his lips, a crumpled brown bag between his thighs.

  “Hidy, just Larry,” Wallace called, sitting astride the four-wheeler like a horse.

  Larry stood, one hand on the porch post, the other holding his book. “Hidy, Wallace.”

  The young man rolled a leg over the gas tank and dismounted as if he were a cowboy, wearing a baggy T-shirt and shorts that looked like they might be the same pair he’d worn for his last visit. He hiked them up and brought the paper bag with him, holding it by its bottom.

  “You surprised to see me?” he asked.

  “Little bit.”

  Wallace came onto the porch and set the bag by the post. He took a Pabst in a can from the bag and offered it to Larry.

  “No thank you.”

  “Well cheers then,” Wallace said, popping the tab and drinking.

  “So I don’t get me a dish after all?”

  “Would you believe,” Wallace said, his face contorted from the beer, “them DIRECTV bastards fired me?” He sat on the top step and leaned back against the post where he could look up at Larry, who moved his book and sat back down.

  Larry said, “So you been at the unemployment?”

  “Naw, painting houses. I do that sometime. What you reading now?”

  Larry told him.

  “Shit, that’s a movie, too. You ever seen it?”

  “Yeah,” Larry said. “Book’s better.”

  They sat for a while.

  “Larry,” Wallace said. “You don’t like me much, do you.”

  It surprised him. When he looked at Wallace he saw how acutely the boy was watching at him.

  “It’s okay,” Wallace said. “Not many folks do. All thank I’m weird. Why I quit school, got tired of em making fun of me.”

  Larry had begun to rock again. “It ain’t that I don’t like you, I just don’t know you.” Then he added, “I don’t get many visitors, neither.”

  “Why not? You a hell of a conversationalist. I figure you’d have folks over here day and night, telling em jokes, making em laugh. Serving em beers and seven and sevens and getting high as a giraffe’s pussy.”

  For the first time in longer than he cared to remember, Larry smiled in the presence of another person, and then his hand came up, the old habit, covering his mouth. He said, “Last visitor I had, apart from this DIRECTV fellow, was…well, a bunch of teenagers come through a few months ago, drunk. Bout one A.M. Drove by in a Ford Explorer, stopped out there”-pointing at the road-“started throwing beer bottles on my roof, yelling for me to come out.”

  “Did you?”

  He shook his head. Remembered how he’d stood looking through the parted drapes, chickens noisy behind the house, glad his mother didn’t have to be here for this. It had crossed his mind he wouldn’t use the telephone, even if they tried to come in.

  “It was one of em,” he said, “got out with a baseball bat.”

  “Shit.”

  “Stood there awhile. Big fellow.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “His friends was yelling for me to come out.” Calling him murderer, rapist, faggot, chickenshit. Nothing he hadn’t heard before, wouldn’t hear again. “Finally,” Larry said, “he took that bat and busted out my headlights.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Then my windshield.”

  “Ain’t you got a gun?”

  Larry shook his head and Wallace sat there with his mouth open, as if he were unable to fathom gunlessness. “You ought to ride out to Wal-Mart, get you one of them single-shot twelve gauges they got on sale. Bout a buck eighty-nine. I could go with you.” He sipped his beer. “What they do then? Them fellows?”

  “Nothing. Left.”

  He didn’t tell Wallace the rest, that he hadn’t even minded, once they’d gone. Fixing the light? The windshield? It gave him something to do the next day. When he drove up to the parts house, the windshield like a net hanging in, Johnson behind the counter took his order and said, “Ain’t that your model Ford?” and Larry said it was and Johnson raised his eyebrows and went to the back, helped him carry the windshield wrapped in its brown paper to the bed of Larry’s truck without a word, just stared at the truck that looked like, well, somebody had taken a baseball bat to it.

  “Shit,” Wallace said, “bunch of rednecks tried that with me? I’d go out there with my aught six. Hey.”

  “What?”

  “How come you ain’t got a dog?”

  “I’m allergic.”

  “I got me a good one. Part pit bull, part Chow? Name John Wayne Gacy? You ain’t never seen a better watchdog. Hates niggers worse than anything.”

  “How come?”

  “Just smart I guess. One ever comes up in the yard, he bout goes crazy. You ever want to borry him, say the word. We can stake him out here and I dare anybody to come messing with you.”

  “That’s all right. It ain’t the black folks that messes with me.”

  Wallace finished his beer and crinkled the can and put it in the bag and got another. He sat awhile, drinking, smoking, then started talking about the dogs he’d had before John Wayne Gacy. “One was a little old white bitch named Trixie that got heartworms? Used to walk over the floor and just stop and stiffen up and fall over and lay there on her side awhile with her feet poking out.” He said it was funny as hell until the time she didn’t get back up. Another dog, big brown shaggy one called Pal, some collie somewhere back in his family tree, he was a car chaser, got flattened to a smear by a log truck. Well, Wallace had had, let’s see, five or six dogs killed on the road. Three shot, one by himself (biter), one caught in a trap, one that drunk antifreeze, another one bit by a cottonmouth. “Neck swoll up like a damn goiter.”

  “Where’d they all come from?”

  “Strays, most of em.” Wallace opened another beer. “Plus I had a slutty ole bitch named Georgia Pineapple? She had puppies bout twice a year so we had a endless stream. Till she died.”

  Larry didn’t want to ask.

  “Train hit her,” Wallace said. “Anyhow, she had this one litter up under the house one time? We had a busted gas line and didn’t know it, and that dog, she’d lay down there by that leak when it got hot and them damn pups was born by the pipe. Come out all deformed.” He was laughing. “One didn’t have no eyes. Nother one missing its tail. One had its paws all fucked up.”

  Larry was shaking his head. “What’d you do with em?”

  “Momma said get rid of em so I thew em in a pond. After that I got John Wayne Gacy off a Mexican
used to fight him. Come he had such a temper. He used to go out at night and catch armadillos and brang em in the yard, sometimes be two, three dead ones laying there in the morning. Just tore all to hell and back, look like old leather purses strung out over the dirt. Come Momma makes me keep him tied up. That’s something else we got in common, me and John Wayne Gacy.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t stand a damn armadillo. One of Momma’s boyfriends, pipefitter, he used to call em armored dildos. When I was a boy we used to catch em. Get em by the tail and swing em around. Punt em like footballs. Drown em. Now they say a armored dildo’ll give you leprosy.”

  “Wallace.” Larry ready to change the subject. “Tell me the truth.”

  “Long as I don’t incriminate myself.”

  “You never worked for DIRECTV, did you?”

  He grinned and drained the last of his last beer. “Okay, you got me. Truth is, I borrowed that van from Momma’s boyfriend. He’s the one installs them dishes. Give us ours for free. All the pay-per-view channels and ever thing.”

  “Did he know you borrowed it?”

  “Hell no. Him and Momma went over to the dog track. He ever finds out I took it, be hell to pay, plus interest. Now speaking of dogs, that’s a badass one there,” Wallace said. “A damn greyhound? Fast as hell. You can get one after they retire it from racing? Keep em for pets? But you better be careful. You got a toddler around and it goes running by? That goddamn greyhound’ll chase it down like it’s that little electric rabbit and tear it apart.”

  “How come you took the van? Why not just ride your four-wheeler?”

  “Hell, man with your rep? I didn’t know if you might not cut me up and bury me out in the woods.” He was smiling. “Naw, I just figured it’d be a good way to, you know…”

  “Test the water?”

  “Yeah.”

  They sat awhile longer. Wallace crinkled his can and put it in the bag with the others. “You sure you ain’t got nothing to drank?”

  “Just a Coke.”

  “Well. I best get going, then. Once I start dranking, I don’t like to stop.”

  He stood, leaning on the post. “You know, Larry, if you want one, I can probably get my momma’s boyfriend to run out here, put you a dish up. Long as you promise not to say I was in his truck.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Or I could bring John Wayne Gacy by. Tie him to your post here.”

  “Preciate it, no.”

  “YOU EVER BEEN MARRIED?” Wallace asked, his next visit.

  He said he hadn’t.

  “Got you a girl?”

  “No.”

  “What you do when the ole pecker gets ready?” He made a tight fist and held it up. “You ain’t one of them forty-year-old virgins, are you?”

  “No,” Larry said. “I’m forty-one.”

  Wallace laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard, smoke shooting from his nose and mouth.

  “Hell,” he said, once he’d caught his breath. “I’m single, too. But it’s a ole gal over in Fulsom? I see her once in a while. Evelyn. One a them on-again, off-again situations.

  “But I go up to Dentonville and paint houses with my uncle sometimes. It’s a nigger girl over there I’ll visit now and then. She’s a crackhead and she’ll suck you dry for twenty bucks, fuck your eyes crossed for thirty. Name’s Wanda something another. You drive, we can go over yonder, bust your cherry.”

  “Preciate it, no.”

  “That’s where I been.”

  “Painting houses?”

  “Yeah. Getting in trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Fighting in a bar.”

  He’d brought a case of beer this time, bungee-corded to the back of his four-wheeler, and had gone through much of it, getting so drunk Larry had begun to worry. It was cooler, leaves in the air and scratching over the road, geese formations overhead pointing south. Larry sat wearing his uniform jacket and a cap, Wallace a sweatshirt with a hood he kept pulling on and then pushing back off. Long pants, frayed at the bottom. He had pictures of John Wayne Gacy the pit bull on his phone and showed them to Larry.

  “He’s mean-looking, all right.”

  “Boy you know it. My momma’s boyfriend? He keeps saying I ought to shoot him, but I always say, ‘Jonas? You shoot that damn dog it’s libel to just make him mad.’” He sipped his beer.

  “Wallace,” Larry said. “You was the boy I surprised that time, wasn’t you? In the barn?”

  He looked over his shoulder and grinned. “Yep. Guilty as charged. You bout scared me to death in that damn mask.”

  “I just didn’t want you getting hurt in that old barn.”

  “Well, it kept me away, that’s for sure. For about a week.”

  “You came back?”

  “To that barn? Hell no. But it’d take more than that to stop me from fishing in that creek over yonder. Even found your spot, Larry, that old five-gallon bucket you set on, seen a beat-up cork stuck out in the tree over yonder where you couldn’t get it back. I’d brang my rod and reel, pull me a purple worm through the same water you did, but I never did catch nothing, figured you’d done fished it dry.”

  “Naw, I didn’t fish it dry. It’s downstream from all the lumbering and it’s so full of silt there ain’t been nothing in it for years.”

  “I used to pull off my clothes and swim in it,” Wallace said. “Nekkid. You wanna know the first time I ever heard of you? It was at school. Fourth grade. All the kids talking about it, that creepy fellow that went there same as us, that sat in some of them very desks we was in, how you abducted that girl and done away with her.”

  “That’s what the kids said?”

  “Some of em. The teachers, they’d all say, ‘Yall just forget about him. Just let him alone, he might be dangerous. Don’t go bothering him.’” Wallace grinned. “So here I am, bothering you, right?”

  “You ain’t bothering me.”

  “Well, I never was much good at doing what they tell you at school, anyway. It was one teacher, though, liked you. Mrs. McIntyre? Taught English and art. She used to tell us what a good drawer you was. She’d show us your pictures. One of a little truck, which she said was a perfect example of prespective.”

  “Perspective,” Larry said.

  “But the first time I ever seen you?” Wallace went on. “Was at church. Bout eleven years ago? Up at Dentonville? The Second Baptist? My momma’s boyfriend lived up there.”

  “The DIRECTV fellow?”

  “Hell no. This one was a machinist. He’d come fetch us for the weekends. That fat sumbitch-I can’t even remember his name now-he didn’t go to church but Momma always did, no matter where the man she’s seeing lived she’d haul my sleepy ass off the couch and borry his car and drag me to whichever church it was, Baptist she could find it but we’d try a Methodist, too, in a pinch. Anything but a nigger church. Or the Catholics. I always liked the Methodists best, though, cause you’d get out quicker.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I’s out front fore the preaching, talking to some boys my age, little younger, and one of em goes, ‘You thank he’ll come back?’

  “ ‘He better not,’ another one says.

  “ ‘Thank who will?’ I asked em.

  “ ‘Scary Larry,’ first boy said. ‘You know who that is?’

  “I said I shore did; we went to the same school, me and him. In Chabot, Mississippi.

  “ ‘No you ain’t,’ he said.

  “‘How the fuck you know?’ I said and they was all impressed I cussed right there on the church porch.

  “Bout then one of their mommas stuck her head out the door and said we better get on in, the singing was fixing to start. So we all went in and they sat with their mommas and daddies but I took me a seat right there in the back. My momma, she didn’t care I sat with her or not, long as I was quiet.

  “And sure enough, they’d just launched into the first song, and I hear the door open real quiet-like and shut
and look over and there you are. I knowed it was you right off even though I hadn’t ever seen you. Way you come in. Way you wouldn’t look at nobody looking back at you. You’s wearing a suit and a tie. Sat across the aisle, in the back row like me. Other folks recognized you, too, turning their heads and whispering, and I could tell they didn’t like you being there and I thought you was smart, coming in late like that.” He paused to tap his ash onto the porch and said, “I watched you the whole time, way you stood up and sung the songs, knew all the words, sat down and listened to the preacher, following his Bible verses in your Bible, closing your eyes in the prayer. And I knew you’d leave fore anybody else did, and sure enough, right after the last amen you was up and out.

  “I was right behind you. Went out the door and seen you walking off real fast holding your Bible and I yelled, ‘Hey!’ at you but you never even looked back. Just about run to that red pickup, same one setting right yonder.” Wallace leaned forward. “You remember that?”

  He did. He remembered Wallace, saw in his face now that same boy’s face. The boy who’d followed him out, called “Hey” in a way he’d not heard before, not angry but curious, a boy with small eyes and stringy hair and ears that stuck out, a scruffy kid in clothes not quite nice enough for church, who’d been sitting alone during the service, opposite him in the back, fidgeting, sneaking looks at him. Because of that boy, more than anything else, he hadn’t returned.

  “Well,” Wallace said, “it was a long time ago. We went back to that church next week? But you didn’t come. Them boys said if you had? Somebody was gone write you a letter saying you wasn’t welcome in their ‘fine Methodist church.’”

  “I guess not,” Larry said. “You can’t blame em.”

  “Naw,” Wallace said. “But fuck em anyway.”

  Then he said, “Trouble with beer? You can drank it all night and it don’t do nothing but make you piss. But I got something else,” he said, patting the zippered pocket of his short pants, “that’ll get my head right.” He unzipped the pocket and pulled a Sucrets tin out and laid it reverently across his knees, pressed together, opened the tin and removed a plastic Baggie and a bent pad of rolling papers.