Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

by Tom Franklin

Larry hesitated. “I wish you’d wait till you got home to do that.” He looked at his feet.

  Folding one of the papers in half, Wallace began to dribble in crushed green bud. “How come?” Without looking up.

  “I just don’t need any trouble. With the law.”

  “Man with your rep? Scared of a little Mary J. Wanna? Shit. Fuck the law, Larry. You see em anywhere? Nothing out here but us dropouts and them buzzards. But we can go inside, it makes you more comfortable.”

  Rolling the paper between his fingers, he glanced at Larry and winked, then licked the edge of the paper and then put the whole thing in his mouth and brought out a bent white joint. The first one Larry had ever seen. The boy dropped his half-smoked cigarette and toed it out and with his Bic lit the joint and took a deep toke, holding it, and extended it toward Larry.

  “No thanks.”

  “You sure, hoss?” Breath still held, smoke in his teeth. “It’s good shit from that nigger over in Chabot. Call him M &M. You know him?”

  “No,” he said, but he did, from school. One of Silas’s teammates.

  Wallace blew a line of smoke into the air. “I always say, ‘M &M? You plain or peanut?’” He toked again then offered it to Larry. “You sure you sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  Wallace sat there, the smoke coiled around him. He looked out across the field. He seemed to have forgotten where he was, and for a while Larry rocked, bats fluttering over his view and crickets chirping in the monkey grass along the edge of the porch and his mother’s wind chime jingling, delicate notes too tender to be metal, more like soft bone on wire; he’d always thought the chime sounded like a skeleton playing a guitar, and for a time they sat together on the porch and watched the sun scald the sky red and the trees black.

  DECEMBER 24, WEDNESDAY, after work. He hadn’t seen Wallace in a few weeks. In the morning-Christmas one of only four holidays he took each year-he planned to ride over to River Acres and give his mother the presents he’d gotten her at Wal-Mart, a new nightgown, a chicken-shaped pot with flowers in it, and a pair of slippers. He’d got a pair of slippers for the woman beside his mother, too, in all spending nearly an hour at the giant store, this one of his favorite evenings of the year.

  At home he built a fire in the fireplace and sat looking at the picture of his parents. Then he made a chicken-fried steak TV dinner and turned on the television and, eating, watched the Grinch steal Christmas again and bring it back. Then he watched his favorite holiday movie, A Christmas Story, and felt his eyes water when Ralphie’s father got him the BB gun. He drank the eggnog he’d bought at Wal-Mart and read awhile and fell asleep in his chair by the hearth.

  Something woke him around midnight, somebody on his porch. He sat up in the chair and the book fell off his chest and landed on the rug. Nobody had ever messed with him on this night, and he went to the window but saw no one. Quietly, not turning on the light, he opened the door and peered out through the screen into the cold night, the smoke of his breath sucked away by the wind, the chime playing fast, the rocking chair rocking by itself.

  Nothing.

  He was about to close the door, thinking it must have been a stick blown over the porch. But then he saw something in the chair. He pushed the screen door open and went over to where a shoe box sat in the wicker seat, tied shut with a frayed red ribbon.

  He looked around. Then took it inside and lowered himself into his chair by the fireplace and held the box. He shook it, put his ear to it. He untied the ribbon and lifted the lid and saw an old pistol, a.22 revolver, its checkering worn off and most of the blueing gone as well. Its wood grips were tight, though, and its sight intact. He picked it up and held it and saw oil on his hand. Somebody had cleaned it. Beneath it was a box of cartridges,.22 longs. Off to the side was a piece of white notebook paper folded in half. He opened it and read, “Merry Xmas, Larry, from Santa.”

  ON NEW YEAR’S Eve Wallace brought a bagful of bottle rockets and they were shooting them over the field.

  “Had me a visitor,” Larry said, watching the sky pop.

  “Oh you did?”

  “Left me something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Pistol. A nice.22.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it. Next time them fuckers comes messing with you, you shoot a few times in the air I bet that’ll scare em off.”

  “Thanks,” Larry said.

  “For what?”

  Larry had brought out two Coke bottles for the rockets, but Wallace would hold them by their sticks and light them, wait a moment as the fuse burned, and throw them, watch them lag and then take off and explode against the night.

  It reminded Larry of the New Year’s Eve the Walkers had come over with bottle rockets, and as he began to tell Wallace the story he remembered telling it to Silas, who hadn’t laughed, but now as Larry told it Wallace began to laugh as Larry imitated Cecil running and pounding his pocket.

  Later they sat on the porch in their coats, Larry rocking, Wallace on the steps drinking beer. He’d smoked tonight’s joint to a nub and reached down and smushed its end gently on the porch and put it in the Sucrets box and closed it and zipped it back up in his pocket. Once in a while he lit a firecracker and flicked it into the yard, the night grown so dark and starless Larry only saw him in these moments of fire, the ember of his cigarette, the joint, the night becoming its sounds as each night did, their voices, the squeak of Larry’s chair, the pop of Wallace’s beers opening, crickets, the skeleton playing guitar. Near midnight, Larry yawning, Wallace lit another firecracker with his cigarette and threw it into the yard and they sat waiting as the fuse hissed but that was all.

  “Dud,” he said.

  “LARRY?”

  Larry yawned, stretched. It was a month later, Wallace coming once or twice a week, drinking his beer, smoking his cigarettes and marijuana as the nights deepened.

  He said, “Tell me about that girl.”

  “Girl?”

  “You know. The one…?”

  “Oh.”

  “Did you do it?”

  “No,” Larry said.

  “You mind talking about it?”

  “Well, nobody’s asked me in a long time.”

  “If you had done it, would you tell me?”

  “I took her on a date is all.”

  “Oh. What happened? On the date? You get in her pants?”

  “Naw.”

  “How come?”

  “I just didn’t,” Larry said.

  “You ain’t queer, are you?”

  “No,” Larry said. “Not the way you mean, anyway.”

  “That’s good,” Wallace said. “I can’t stand a damn faggot.”

  WALLACE SAID, “YOU know what we ought to do sometime?”

  “What?”

  “Go out to that cabin you got.”

  “You found that, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I expect it’s about to fall in.”

  “Yeah. You know what I used to do?”

  “What?”

  “Play in it.”

  “It’s locked, ain’t it?”

  “Yeah. But it was a window you could prize open. Back window. Climbing in there with all the dust and spiderwebs. Seen a possum one time? Like to shit my pants and didn’t go back there for a month. I’d be scared to death, you know, sneaking in like that, thinking you in Scary Larry’s hunting cabin. Thinking is you crazy? But I was wondering, too, what if this is where he, you know, hid that girl.

  “I tried to find some place you might’ve hid her, but I never did find nothing, not even a dirty magazine or a old rubber.

  “I ought not be telling you this,” he said, “but I’m bout as high as a buzzard on laughing gas now and you know what? I used to imagine you’d find me playing in there and tie me up and keep me prisoner. But instead of killing me you’d just keep me out there and we’d get to be friends.”

  It was dark and Larry heard him creak open his Sucrets box and knew he was plucking out a r
oach, as he called it, saw the flash as he lit it with his Bic and took two more hits before he said, “Shit,” and flung it from his fingers into the yard where it pulsed a moment like a dying firefly.

  “You know what else?” he said. “I don’t care if you done it or not, took that girl. We’d still be friends if you did.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I wouldn’t mind, is all I’m saying. If you had a done it. If you’d a raped that girl. And killed her. Sometimes women can make you crazy can’t they? You ain’t got to tell me that.

  “But you can trust me, Larry. We friends, and a friend, a best friend, he wouldn’t never do you that way, wouldn’t never call the law on his friend, no matter what his friend done. You can trust your friend with whatever you done, that’s what it means to be friends.” He lit another cigarette. “So if you did kill her, I’d like to know’s all. How you done it. If you raped her.”

  “I didn’t,” he said.

  “Sometimes they like it, getting raped. They want you to do it. Carry em out to that cabin and thow em on the floor. Gag em. Start tearing off their clothes and hitting em a little bit, smacking em on they little white ass. Using a belt to strangle em, get on doggie-style and do em up the bunghole, show em who daddy is.”

  “Wallace, I don’t like that talk.”

  “You don’t ever thank about it? I used to listen to Momma and them fellows she was with. She liked em to smack her on the ass.”

  Larry stood up and his knees popped. “I think it’s about time for me to get to bed. You’ve done got pretty drunk. And high, too, sounds like.”

  “Wait-”

  Larry passed him where he sat and moved along the porch in the familiar darkness and opened the door and reached inside and clicked on the switch and flooded the night with light, Wallace blinking, covering his eyes with one hand and his crotch with the other. But not before Larry saw the lump in his pants.

  “Good night,” Larry said, looking away.

  He went inside and closed the screen and fastened its hasp and shut the door. Locked it.

  Outside, bright in the window, Wallace was up, adjusting his crotch, cupping his hands against the window to see inside.

  “Larry,” he yelled. “Wait.”

  “Go on home,” Larry called. “Drive careful and come back when you’re sober.”

  “Just wait!”

  “Good night.”

  For a moment Wallace looked like he might cry, and then he slammed his forehead against the window. “Fuck you!” he said, then said it again, louder. “I know what you done. Know you raped that girl and killed her. Ever body’s right about you”-yelling now-“you crazy!”

  He banged his head on the window again and kicked the wall. “You fucking freak,” he yelled, “I’m gone go tell the law on you right now, how you said you done it, killed that girl, told me ever thing-”

  Larry unlocked the door and opened it and came onto the porch where Wallace was backing up. He fell pinwheeling off the steps and landed in the yard, still yelling. “You crazy!”

  “I ain’t never hurt nobody in my life,” Larry said, “so you can just go on home!”

  Wallace, still yelling, was running for his four-wheeler. He climbed on yelling all the while, illuminated in the porch light, kicking the starter until the motor sputtered to life. Then he got back off and crossed the yard to Larry’s pickup and kick at the headlights, missing once, kicking again, shattering the left one, the right, then clambering onto the truck’s hood and jumping on it, stomping in the windshield, yelling, “Fuck you! Fuck you, Scary Larry!”

  Larry turned, went inside, where he watched until Wallace tired himself out and climbed down off the truck and got on the sputtering four-wheeler and flicked its headlamp on and gunned the engine, turning donuts in Larry’s grass, then sped away.

  For a while Larry stood at the window, looking out at the night. Tomorrow he’d have to replace the windshield again. And the headlights. Pop out the dents in the hood.

  AND HE DID, another windshield from the parts house, headlights, more lifted eyebrows from Johnson. Using a bathroom plunger to undent the hood, epoxying the rearview mirror back.

  Wallace didn’t return after a week. A month. Larry grew worried and even got the phone book from its drawer and looked up Stringfellow. This was late February, the warmest winter in lower Mississippi in years, global warming, the newscaster thought. There were nine Stringfellows listed, but when he called the first a woman’s voice said, “Larry Ott?” before he’d told who he was. Alarmed, he hung up.

  The phone rang again a moment later and a man said, “Why you calling us, you fucking freak?”

  Larry said, “I’m sorry, it was a mistake.”

  “You goddamn right it was. If you ever call this number again I’ll sic the law on you.”

  He’d forgotten that people had caller ID and put the phone book away.

  He waited during the day in his shop and at night on his porch. He’d pause while reading, lift his chin to listen for cars. When he visited his mother he wanted to tell her about Wallace, how God did work in His own time, healing Larry’s stuttering, his asthma, even sending him, at last, this friend. But his mother had forgotten the old prayer along with everything else, and so he just talked about her chickens.

  When she was awake, the senile, skeletal black lady in the bed beside Ina would watch him with eyes narrowed by suspicion, but not because of Larry’s past, he figured, but his skin color, a woman close to ninety whose family had left her here, and Larry would wonder how many wrongs she’d endured from white people in her almost-century of living. Sometimes he thought of Alice Jones, of Silas, how Larry’s mother had given them coats but not a ride in her car. How what seemed like kindness could be the opposite.

  In May in Wal-Mart on his grocery run he bought a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. A few nights later he opened one of the cans and tasted it, then poured it down the sink. Some evenings he took the pistol Wallace had given him from its box in its hiding place in his closet and loaded it and aimed at buzzards floating overhead, but he never fired it.

  In June two customers stopped by the shop, one a plumbing salesman from Mobile on his way north with an overheated radiator and the other a black woman from Memphis with a battery that wouldn’t stay charged. He smirked at himself in the bathroom mirror the night he’d replaced the battery and thought that with all this business he should hire some help. If Wallace ever came back, he’d offer him a job on the condition the boy stop drinking and smoking so much and never on the job, train him to be a mechanic, start simple, oil changes, tire rotations, work up to brake jobs, tune-ups, rebuilding carburetors. Larry wouldn’t live forever, and the shop had to go to somebody, maybe it would keep Wallace on the straight and narrow.

  Sitting on his porch one late July evening he remembered the church his mother would visit occasionally after the Chabot Baptist had become “uncomfortable” for her. The First Century Church, a group of Holy Rollers north of Fulsom, spoke in tongues and had faith healing services and asked its members to fast for three-day periods at certain times of the year. Larry never accompanied her to the fabricated metal building they used, understanding it was easier for a congregation to accept the mother of an accused killer than the killer himself, but, hungry for God, he would abstain from food when she did. He found the first skipped meals the hardest, the hunger a hollow ache. The longer he went without eating, though, the second day, the third, the pain would subside from an ache to the memory of an ache and finally to only the memory of a memory. Until you ate you didn’t know how hungry you were, how empty you’d become. Wallace’s visits had shown him that being lonesome was its own fast, that after going unnourished for so long, even the foulest bite could remind your body how much it needed to eat. That you could be starving and not even know it.

  “Dear God,” he prayed at night. “Please forgive my sins, and send me some business. Give Momma a good day tomorrow or take her if it’s time. And help Wallace, God.
Please.”

  ten

  WAS IT MONDAY yet? He’d barely slept the week before, and now Silas couldn’t stop yawning even though the mill roared and drummed behind him like an angry city. Each passing face in its tinted glass regarded the constable with ire, this tall black man standing shadowed in his hat in the road with a whistle in his teeth, pickup trucks bumping over the railroad tracks and away from the mill while impatient cars and SUVs inched forward.

  A week ago he’d found Tina Rutherford’s body under Larry Ott’s cabin and been in all the local papers and a few national ones, his picture this time, snapped by the police reporter as Silas stood by the cabin, watching agents from the Criminal Investigation Bureau in Jackson carry the body bag out. The article said that he’d been investigating Larry’s Ott’s shooting, a possible suicide attempt, and happened across the old cabin.

  He’d have been a hero if he’d found her alive.

  “You what?” French had asked, on the radio.

  Panting, “I think it’s her, Roy.”

  “Don’t touch a thing,” French ordered, “and don’t tell a soul. Just set up your perimeter and wait.”

  He and the sheriff arrived sharing a four-wheeler not long after, search warrant in hand, prying the lock off the cabin door and moving the bed aside, French saying he’d walked this land himself, twice, both times missing the cabin, camouflaged as it was by kudzu. How in the world had Silas found it?

  “Just lucky,” he’d lied.

  The cabin was illuminated that night by harsh floodlights on tripods, heavy orange extension cords leading outside to where portable generators had been trailered in by four-wheelers. French filmed the two forensics experts from the C.I.B., wearing Tyvek suits and respirators, as they dug into the floor using entrenching tools to move the soft dirt. Half an hour later one raised his head and gave French a thumbs-up.

  Standing in the corner by the stove, Silas had no way to catalog his emotions as what he’d been smelling for a while bubbled up out of his throat and he fled the house, out the door through the vines and ivy spot-lit and drawn back like curtains. The coroner and two deputies and the sheriff stood outside smoking and talking quietly. Silas gave them a weak nod as he lurched into the night, past where the lights could find him, and retched until his eyes burned and his gut hurt.