Wild and Crooked

by Leah Thomas

  “Gus, you’re officially the best driver I know.”

  I jump. I thought Kalyn was sleeping. “Um. Thanks.”

  A minute passes.

  “Phil and my mom drive like action villains.”

  My laugh sounds more like a long wheeze. I almost swerve into another lane.

  “I take it back, I take it back! You suck, too!”

  “The Matrix. That’s what Phil says. He says you’re like, um, the girl . . .”

  “Trinity? Ha. I don’t wear leather. Sci-fi’s more my dad’s thing. Only, he doesn’t get to watch new movies in prison. I watch them and tell him about them.”

  “Oh.” I wipe my eyes, letting my knee guide us. “So. What’s his favorite movie?”

  “Gus, you don’t want to ask me about my dad. Stop being so damn nice.”

  “I’m not being . . . it’s not nice.”

  “Then what the hell would you call it?”

  “I have to think, I mean, I always thought . . .” Uncertain as I am, I’m not programmed to absorb a reality where Gary Spence didn’t kill my dad.

  The idea that Kalyn was raised in a totally different reality makes my heart shrink. And it bothers me, it really does, that Kalyn stands by her dad either way.

  “I’m just . . . ​trying to figure it out. How you love him so much even though you think, you believed, the same thing I believe.”

  She sighs. “The murder thing has just . . . ​always been there. I’ve known what Dad did. But to me he’s not a murderer. He’s my dad, who also murdered someone.”

  “And that makes him okay?”

  “Hell no. He’s not okay, locked up like a goddamn hamster. I’m not okay. And the way fucking Samsboro treats my grandma, my mom? That’s not okay. Strangers talk like it’s a sin for me to fucking exist—is that okay? The way your dad treated my dad, like shit on his shoe? Was that okay?”

  “My dad didn’t treat people like—like shit! He was a good person.”

  “Uh-huh. And how do you know that?”

  “Everyone says so!”

  “Everyone says so?” Her laugh is brittle. “Sorry, Gus, but you don’t know what kind of person your dad was. You know your dad less than I know mine.”

  “People loved James Ellis.” I think of those eternal eyes. “Every single person I’ve ever met has told me he was good.”

  “Think they could tell you anything different?” I shouldn’t look away from the road, but I do. For the first time ever, Kalyn looks a little pitying.

  I know what she’s not saying. There’s no way anyone can say anything awful about my poor, beautiful, dead father. Because clearly I don’t need to suffer more, right?

  “Fuck. I shouldn’t have said . . . you know what, Gus?” Kalyn undoes her seat belt. “Pull over. I’ll hitchhike home.”

  I blink stinging eyes. “No.”

  “Seriously, Gus. Let me out.”

  “I can’t let you hitchhike!” I blubber. “You might get picked up by a murderer!”

  Her response is a whimper. “Right, Gus.”

  We skate across a pothole puddle and hydroplane, weightless and terrified.

  Forbidden words leave me. “You know, um, s-some people think I shouldn’t have been born, too.”

  Kalyn puts a hand on my shoulder. “People suck, Gus.”

  “Yeah. But we don’t have to.”

  She lets her hand fall away. Her warmth remains.

  Seven mile-markers go by. The sky grows darker, threatening night instead of thunder. We’re surrounded by bluish fields of grass.

  “I knew it’d be all right.” She finishes the thought minutes later, as we pass a crooked mailbox with a tin rooster tacked atop it. “Riding with you. Even though it’s quiet. It’s kind of nice, when it’s just quiet.”

  Kalyn asks me to drop her off at the end of her driveway. “You’ve never seen this place after it rains. ‘Flooding’ doesn’t do it justice.”

  Kalyn waves to me and then Phil, parked too close to my bumper. If he leaves a scratch, Tamara will want his blood.

  Spence Salvage looks cleaner after the rain. The grass between the empty hulls is an almost glaring green. Years ago, Phil taught me about chloroplasts. Plants become greener as they collect water, opening up to the world right when most creatures close themselves off in shelters. Kalyn’s a lonely gray figure, walking down her driveway.

  It’s hard to imagine things being okay.

  KALYN

  SPENCE SALVAGE COVERS forty acres. That’s room for cars aplenty, especially if you don’t mind them rubbing elbows, scraping side mirrors against each other.

  The 1985 Taurus was impounded when the police pulled the body out of it. I know this. And even if most of the cars have been here for years, ever since the yard closed in ’92, most of them haven’t been here for actual decades.

  But it’s so dark, if I squint, these could all be coffin Tauruses.

  “Fuck.” I kick a puddle. The mud splashes high enough to fleck on my cheek.

  I reamed Gus for not knowing what kind of person his dad was. But lots of people met Rose Poplawski, and most had no clue she was me.

  Good thing Dad’s calling tonight. Sure, there were reasons to lie to the press. Maybe there were reasons to take the fall, even. But Dad didn’t just confess to the police; he confessed to us. I can put up with him lying to everyone else, but to Mom and me?

  “Fuck.” Another puddle meets my boot. I stop.

  Could this be the row? God knows I memorized the crime scene photos. But when your landmarks are cars that have shifted and vanished, well, angles are about as useful as belly buttons. And I hate thinking about angles.

  Gus looked worried when he dropped me off. I’ve never seen my home from his angle. This’d be a scary place if you came here after dark, like James Ellis did.

  When I reach the prefab, it’s only six p.m. or so. Mom’ll be pissed, because most weekdays I watch Grandma after school. There’s rebelling like a good Spence, and then there’s being a bad granddaughter.

  Grandma’s sitting at the kitchen table in semidarkness. The TV’s muted but flashing bright, but she’s facing the other way, still as the dead.

  “Grandma?” She tilts her head toward me. “Where’s Mom?”

  Grandma tucks a cigarette between her papery lips.

  “The hell? Quit that!” I’m a damn hypocrite. I reach for the cig, but Grandma finds the devil’s quicksilver in her blood and whips it away before I can nab it.

  “Small joys,” she scolds. “Small joys.”

  “Great. I’m the one who’s gonna get my ass roasted for it later. She at work?”

  The TV shines white during a commercial, and I finally see what Grandma’s up to. She’s pulled an old shoebox full of yellowed photographs from the shed and overturned it on the table. She’s using one unlucky photo as an ashtray, looks like, burning the face off a stranger.

  “What you doin’?”

  She takes a long drag and coughs like an engine. This time I’m quick enough to pluck the cigarette away. “You’ll burn the house down.”

  “Claire—”

  “Caught fire, yeah. So let’s you and me not.” I pull up a chair.

  The photos look like a whole lot of nothing. People have familiar Spence faces, but I don’t know my dead relatives. Here are barbecues and fishing trips, men and women posing with their bucks, grinning wide while deer bleed from the mouth.

  Grandma’s making piles of different people: there’s Grandpa Ernest, who Mom never even met, because he got pancreatic cancer when Dad was in junior high. There’s a pile for Uncle Rob, who committed suicide by car exhaust. A pile for Dad, too.

  “Help me?” Grandma pleads.

  I do my best. People like to joke about Spences dating each other, and honestly, I can’t promise they didn’t somewhere down the line because damned if we don’t all have the same nose, same angry eyes, same “I dare you” lines in our foreheads. For all that, there are a lot of smiles here, too. People in blu
e bell-bottoms, laughing clouds of smoke. Jolly, drunken Christmases in cramped spaces.

  What would all these people think of us?

  “Grandma, don’t you think it’s about time for bed?” An hour’s passed. I set down a picture of Dad sitting on an old sofa in the yard. A pretty girl leans against his armrest. Both of them are toasting tallboys. They look like kids.

  But Grandma is pressing the end of her cigarette into a picture again, this time very deliberately. She’s burning away the face of one of these familiar strangers, and by the time I snatch the photo from her, his face is completely gone.

  I can’t tell what kind of person he was, except that he was white and he had a prominent Adam’s apple. He’s wearing a denim jacket, and his arm is looped around a twelve-year-old Dad’s bare, bony shoulders.

  If Dad didn’t kill James Ellis, could it have been the work of another Spence?

  “Grandma, who is this? Why are you erasing him?” I look down, and she’s blacked out at least five faces. I can’t be certain, but the Adam’s apple tells me it’s the same guy, erased five times. “Who was this? An uncle? A brother?”

  But she’s not listening. Instead, she’s eyeing the TV.

  When I follow her gaze, I see Dad again, but now it’s his mug shot.

  “There’s Gary,” Grandma coos. When she’s not looking, I scoop up all the photos marred by cigarette burns and tuck them into my lap.

  A news anchor in a cheap-nails-red blazer fakes a look of concern.

  I unmute the TV.

  “. . . ​developments of an unexpected nature. Earlier this week, we broke the news that Gary Spence, the thirty-seven-year-old man convicted of the first-degree murder of Samsboro teen James Ellis almost two decades ago, may be exonerated by new DNA evidence.”

  The screen switches to footage of a black woman in a pantsuit standing on the steps of a courthouse. A caption scrolling along the screen reads Arlene Atkins, IFA Attorney: “Gary Spence could go free.”

  The anchor continues: “Due to pressure from the Innocence Fighters Association, a nonprofit that has successfully exonerated more than thirty people since its inception in 1995, the prosecution is expected to agree to a retrial.”

  Arlene Atkins smiles. “Mr. Spence has been wrongfully convicted. If he’s not back in court by Christmas, there’s no justice in Kentucky.”

  It’s going to be some phone call in twenty minutes, tell you what.

  “Despite the support of IFA advocates, on a local level these developments are cause for controversy.”

  Now we’re looking at downtown Samsboro, all the tiny businesses along Main Street. There’s the ice cream place, the cinema, a diner, a real estate office, and a dive bar, too.

  “Here in Samsboro, home of the Munch-O Mills cereal factory, the memory of James Ellis’s murder remains painful.”

  The camera refocuses on a storefront. Hanging in the window is a large poster picturing younger versions of Gus and his mom, and some pumpkins. Gus is in a wheelchair.

  Who’s “innocent”? the poster reads. KEEP SPENCES BEHIND FENCES.

  The camera switches to an old man whose nostril hairs tickle his upper lip.

  “Andrew Lewis, owner of Lew’s Hardware and former coach of the Samsboro Eagles, has set a precedent for many downtown businesses by protesting the retrial.”

  “You go ahead,” Andrew Lewis spits. “You go ahead and ask anybody in town, and they’ll tell you.” He scowls and points at the camera. “They’ll tell you what I’m telling you. That family’s got a reputation. Spence confessed to the murder. And I’m not talking in no police interrogation. In court, on live TV, that monster confessed. Said, ‘Yeah, killed the running back, so what?’ Just because he’s feeling cowardly now doesn’t mean we should set him free. Can James Ellis go free? No. I taught those boys in high school, so I know: Gary Spence is right where he belongs. Spences behind fences!”

  I’m reeling, but we’re back at the news desk. “Many citizens have strong opinions about the original trial. We here at WKZ News have received dozens of calls from listeners shocked and, in some cases, disturbed by the news. We would like to hear more from our listeners. Does Gary Spence really deserve the benefit of the doubt?”

  It’s a public trial already, I guess. I wonder if Gus is seeing this.

  GUS

  THE TV IS blaring. All the other lights are off.

  I’ve never been good at tiptoeing. I set my cane against the wall and the keys back in the bowl. I’m dying for a glass of water, but more than that, I’m dying to get the next part over with. I’ll be scolded and coddled and then it’ll be over. When Phil pulled up behind me, he saluted but didn’t step outside. He can’t take this medicine for me.

  “Mom . . . ? Tam?”

  Mom’s lying on the couch, almost exactly where I left her.

  When I step into the living room, she looks at me and right past me at the same time. I was ready to face her anger, ready to argue my case despite feeling aching and wet and as old as the universe, but this silence is something else.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  “Hey.” There’s a commercial break happening, but Mom’s eyes remain glued to the screen. She’s clutching a yearbook in her hands; I can tell from the dog-earing that it’s Dad’s from junior year, one she often pulls from the office. “How was school?”

  Does she really think that I went to school? “Um. How was your day?”

  She doesn’t look at me.

  “Where’s T-Tam?”

  “Around, probably,” Mom says after a long pause. “I don’t know.”

  “Mom. Are you okay?” I’m not used to being the one to ask that question. I feel guilty for that, for all of it, for leaving and everything that came before.

  I’m not sure if I feel guilty about seeing Kalyn.

  She doesn’t answer my question. I limp to the kitchen entrance. I can’t ask her how her abyss is. Not today.

  The wind is picking up again, and the rain really hasn’t quit yet; the grass looks more like a gray swishing ocean, and the Zen garden, with its sparse gingkoes and white stones, is an island in the tempest.

  I find Tam on the bench near the stone garden. Despite the chill she’s not shivering. I suppose it is a meditation garden, but seeing Tam so still has the opposite effect on me. Her stillness is as eerie as seeing a hummingbird rest in place.

  “Hey, kid,” she says. “Did you have a nice getaway?”

  “It wasn’t really a getaway,” I say truthfully. “I ran into people I knew.”

  “Man, small towns. Friends, I hope?”

  I think about telling her it was Kalyn. “Yeah and no,” I say, and it’s the truth.

  “You’re gonna need friends, I think.” Beads of rain drip from her baseball cap.

  I want to ask where her old friends are, but I think—no, I know—that part of living with her girlfriend in a small nowhere town means she doesn’t have a lot of close friends nearby. Lots of people like Tam, but not a whole lot of people are there for her. Back when she lived in the city, I bet it was different. But now . . .

  I take her hand and squeeze it. “What about you, Tam?”

  “Well, your mom’s my best friend. But I don’t think she can really be that for either of us right now.” She clears her throat. “You get dinner?”

  “Kind of. Did you?”

  “Not especially hungry. Why don’t you head on in?”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Oh, I will. Gimme a minute.” She smiles. “Who’s the mom here?”

  Something about her voice seems off, something about the way it cracks makes me tell her: “You are, Tam.”

  Before I head back inside, she squeezes me around the middle.

  I do as she says and sit down to pull off my muddy shoes on the porch.

  Inside, Mom’s fallen asleep in front of the television. I lean over to kiss her good night and notice that the yearbook and some of the tissues have slid from her lap.

  I lift Dad’s
yearbook off the floor. It’s fallen open to the last pages, the space reserved for autographs. Every square inch of paper is covered with scrawling cursive, bubble letters, and clumsy signatures. It’s a time capsule.

  I take it upstairs with me. The stairs are where they’ve always been even if they feel like they’re giving way. I glance out my window before collapsing onto my bed. Tam’s still out there, statuesque in the darkness, but now her head is in her hands.

  I rest the book on my knees, run my fingers across the letters. Usually I’d flip right to Dad’s signature, but now I’m thinking about his classmates. About Mom and Gary Spence. All the kids who existed near him.

  All these names, all these well-wishing empty words, and none of the writers knew what would happen just months later. Unless someone did know what was coming. Unless someone heard something, or saw something—­

  I wish I could leap to my feet. My finger freezes on the page. Lightning refuses to flash outside, despite the dramatic timing. The wind and rain have to be enough.

  The message isn’t long. The handwriting is messy and smeared:

  Jimmy my man! we did it! we survived the year. I won't say goodbye cause we're gonna hang out this summer, this is cheesy but it is good to finally know you man. come over to my place and we can shoot some potato guns. —GS

  If I were at the library, I’d know for certain. I could look up statements available to the public, find somewhere in the records a picture of Gary Spence’s handwriting.

  Or I can ask Kalyn.

  “Has it occurred to you, Gus, that this is precisely how your father got shot?”

  “We don’t know that,” I reply, shivering in the passenger seat of the Death Van. It’s almost impossible to make out the font on the Spence Salvage sign, backlit by the sunrise. “We don’t know anything. That’s why we’re here.”

  Phil sighs, but I think some portion of him loves the thrill. I’m clutching Dad’s yearbook in cold fingers. I’m grateful dawn is here, that these lines of vehicles on either side of us are looking less like a monstrous army and more like junk as the sky brightens. The rain left huge shining puddles in its wake. Kalyn was right to warn us, as even the indomitable Death Van is struggling to make headway here.