Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

by Tom Franklin

  “Can you babysit him a minute? I need a smoke.”

  “Go on.”

  Silas watched him hurry down the hall, and when he was sure the man was gone and wasn’t coming back, he slipped into the room. Larry lay with his eyes closed, turned toward the window, his bandaged chest rising and falling.

  Silas said, “Larry.”

  He shifted. Opened his eyes and peered up where Silas stood holding his hat.

  “Hey,” Silas said.

  Larry lay watching him. Then he opened his lips and said something, his voice so quiet Silas came forward, leaned in.

  “Do what, Larry?”

  “All this time,” he said, “she’s been dead?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.”

  “And all this time, you’ve been the one that dropped her off.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “All this time people thinking it was me.”

  “Look,” Silas said, “we can talk about that. We will. I got a lot to say to you. Hell of a lot, more than you know. But right now, it’s real important that we get this mess with that dead girl cleared up. The Rutherford girl. They think you confessed to it. But we both know you didn’t do it.”

  “How you know I didn’t do it, Silas?”

  “Same way I know you didn’t shoot yourself.”

  “How? Cause you knew me for three months, twenty-five years ago? What makes you think you know anything about me now?”

  “Just tell me who shot you. I got a good idea that that person may be the one that killed her.”

  Outside, thunder. Larry turned toward the window.

  “You called me,” Silas said, that note of pleading in his voice, “right before you got shot. You said it was important. What was it you wanted to say?”

  “You never called back.”

  “I didn’t get your message in time.”

  “Those other times.”

  “I’m sorry about that. But-”

  “The thing,” Larry said, “that I wanted to tell you that first time, when you didn’t want to talk to me, was that I was sorry. About what I said, when Daddy made us fight.”

  “That’s okay, Larry. It was a long time ago.”

  “But now,” Larry said. “I don’t know what to think. Or even if I’m still sorry.”

  “Fine,” Silas said, “but do you know who it was that shot you? Why’d you call me?”

  “32?” Skip from the door. “What you doing?”

  “Nothing,” Silas said. He looked again at Larry, who’d turned back toward the window, shut his eyes. Silas waited a moment, then left the room and closed the door.

  “The chief just called,” Skip said, a puzzled look. “You off nights?”

  “Guess so.”

  “How come?” he asked. “What the hell?”

  Silas turned to go. “Long story,” he said.

  HE SAT AT a plastic table in a plastic chair in the back of the Chabot Bus, tracing his fingers up and down his Budweiser bottle wishing he had a glass. The mill crowd had gone home, loud, dirty, and he had the place to himself. He’d been wondering what you felt when you learned you’ve been robbed of twenty-five years of life, Larry like a convict exonerated by DNA evidence and Silas, the real criminal, caught at last.

  It was 11:00 P.M. The rain had quit. The bartender, Chip, a white dude with a goatee, sat on his stool behind the counter cutting limes into wedges and putting them in a bowl and fanning mosquitoes with his knife. He’d tended bar long enough to know when to let a man alone, bringing Silas a fresh beer when he needed and taking his empties and clinking them in the garbage can. Shannon, the police reporter, had called his cell phone again but he didn’t want to talk to her.

  Out the row of windows in front of him were more tables and chairs and, beyond, the gully overflowing with kudzu, trash caught in it like bugs in a spiderweb. Silas remembered riding the school bus as a boy, after they’d left the cabin on the Ott land and moved to Fulsom, how the landscape blurred beyond the windows as you rode, him on his way to school, baseball, his future. Maybe, before its recruitment to bar service, he’d ridden this very bus. Now look out. Nothing but a gully full of weeds and garbage. Everything frozen. Was that what childhood was, things rushing by out a window, the trees connected by motion, going too fast for him to notice consequences? If so, what was adulthood? The bus stopping? A man in his forties, slammed with his past, the kudzu moving faster than he was?

  “Hey, cop. Where’s your hat?”

  He looked up, ready to grumble he wanted to drink alone. But it was Irina, from White Trash Ave., standing with her hip cocked and a little snarly smile, her pale skin glistening from rain.

  “Any more snakes in your box?” he asked her.

  “I been scared to open it. And them boys has got it staked out, hoping whoever it was’ll try again.” She’d streaked red into her blond hair. She wore a short denim skirt and red cowboy boots, wet too. A low-cut tank top that showed her tattoo. Was it a pot leaf? He was wary of looking too hard. She had a lot of plastic bracelets jangling on her wrist and a cigarette in her hand and red nail polish. “Had to carry my damn phone bill down to BellSouth to pay it. Can I join you?”

  He nodded to the empty chair next to him.

  “Hey, Chip,” she said. “Budweiser.”

  “You ready, 32?”

  “Sure. Both on my tab.”

  Silas pushed the chair out with his boot and she eased into it, a snake crawling in his own mailbox now, if Angie happened in. He’d half expected to find her here. They hadn’t talked since the night before, his interpreting her not calling as a point she was making. I’m disappointed in you. Well, who wasn’t?

  Irina leaned forward to look into his eyes, the low neck of her shirt inviting, the cups of a lacy black bra showing, its tiny straps. “You okay, Officer?”

  Chip’s arms appeared between them, two bottles. “Enjoy.”

  “Cheers,” she said, touching the neck of her bottle to Silas’s.

  He cheered her back and they sipped together, her putting her cigarette out in the ashtray.

  “What you doing?” she asked. “Getting drunk?”

  “Getting?”

  “I better catch up, then.” She ordered a shot of tequila, no salt, and when it came she downed it and set the glass on the table. “That’s better” she said, her eyes watering. “I was on my way to a party when I saw your little Jeep outside.”

  “It’s hard to miss.”

  “It’s cute. Hey,” she said, pushing at his arm with her knuckles, her bracelets rattling. “I got a tip for you.”

  “I’m off duty,” he said, “but go ahead. I can always use me a good tip.”

  Irina took another slug from her bottle and sank even lower on the table, her breasts resting on it.

  “Evelyn? She’s my other roommate? She was at work when you came over, so you didn’t meet her. But we got to talking the other night, the snake and all, and she gets all apologetic, something she hasn’t told us, how she used to go out with this weird guy. Before she moved in with us. So one night Ev goes over to his house, and they’re partying, you know, and this guy has all these guns. Pistols. A rifle in the corner.”

  “That’s your tip?”

  “Guns? Hell no. Ev’s fine with guns. She loves to shoot. But the other thing is, he also has all these live snakes. In aquariums. On shelves. The kitchen table. Right in his living room. He told her he collected em.”

  Silas watched her as she talked. Her pupils were dilated. Weed. Maybe pills.

  “So they start fooling around and she says it’s weird, you know. Necking, with snakes watching. How they don’t blink? So by then it’s getting too heavy, she tries to stop but he won’t. It starts getting ugly, she’s really scared. Now Evelyn’s second ex-husband, he gave her this little pistol. Single-shot. For her purse. She manages to get it out and threatens to shoot this guy if he doesn’t let her go. She said for the longest time he just looks at her, this weird smile, easing his hand
toward one of the pistols on his table, like daring her to shoot, and she thinks, God, she might really have to nail the son of a bitch. But finally he just calls her a cunt and tells her to get the fuck out.”

  “She make a complaint?”

  “Not really. Evelyn’s not, you know, the complaining type.”

  Some part Irina wasn’t telling him, drugs probably. Maybe this Evelyn had thought he’d flip on her if she reported him.

  Irina tapped a cigarette from her pack and he took her lighter and lit it. “She just barely got out of there. Had to call somebody on her cell phone. Come pick her up.”

  “So this guy. You think he mailed the snake?”

  “Maybe. She admitted she left her other place cause of him. He kept riding by. Calling.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Wallace. Wallace Stringfellow. Lives over on past the catfish farm.”

  He felt his pocket for a pen and scribbled the name on a napkin, stuffed it in his jeans pocket. It rang a dim bell. That guy on the four-wheeler? With the pillowcase. Wasn’t that his name? Didn’t Larry once say a good way to carry snakes was in a pillowcase?

  “You best get on,” he said. “To your party. You ain’t gone be fit to drive, you keep drinking.”

  “You want to come?”

  “Me? The Chabot constable? You sure you want me there? I can have a dampening effect for certain kinds of partying.”

  She was sipping her beer, using her tongue on the lip of the bottle. “I see your point.”

  Instead, after a few more beers, more shots of tequila, they took his Jeep to her house. She had the place alone, Marsha and her baby gone to her mother’s for the week, Evelyn at the party. The roads were slick with rain and he drove carefully. She said it was cool riding drunk with a cop; you didn’t have to worry about a DUI. In her yard they waded through the muddy dogs and he put his hand on the wall beside her door for balance as she felt under the mat for her keys. Inside, she clicked on the light and a room appeared and he made his way to the sofa while she went to get more beers. Place was clean enough, baby toys around, a lava lamp churling on the end table, drapes open to the night. He put his fingers to his head to stop its spinning, thinking, What are you doing, 32 Jones? You got to get out of here.

  She came back with two Bud Lights and sat beside him, handed him a bottle, put hers on the coffee table and her feet in his lap. “Remove these, Officer,” she said. Her boots. He got up and worked the first one off slowly and pulled at her little sock, her toes wiggling to help, her toenails red when the sock slipped free, her foot a good kind of musky. He let his gaze drift up her legs past her knees to where he saw red panties under her skirt, another tattoo (an apple with a bite out of it) high on her inner thigh. She was watching him with a sleepy smile. He started to work the second boot off and lost his balance, his momentum taking him to the door where he caught its handle. She giggled and shook her foot at him. Get back over here. He held the doorknob, looked out the window where a car passed slowly, its lights on dim. He thought how he was leaving fingerprints on the knob, on the beer bottle, too, her cowboy boots. Plus a witness just now out of sight, around the curve in the dark. He thought of Larry in his bed, thought of Angie in hers. What the hell was he doing?

  “I got to go,” he said.

  thirteen

  LARRY WAS FLICKING through channels on cable television, thinking of his mailbox. Over the years he’d repaired it half a dozen times, mornings as he left for work discovering it by the highway, askew on its post or the whole thing knocked down and splayed in the mud, sometimes magazines fluttering over the road like chickens on the loose. Once the box and post missing altogether. He knew about this, how teenagers rode along, hanging out car windows with baseball bats. Knowing it happened to others should’ve been a comfort, but as he’d driven on to his shop those days, he’d noticed other mailboxes still standing and known that he alone had been targeted.

  He was tired. Even though all he’d been doing was sleeping, he’d never been so tired.

  He was tired of buying mailboxes.

  He was sitting up, holding the remote control, the lights of his room dim. Outside, tall black clouds had so walled out the sky that night had come early, but now that the lightning had been unleashed, so much, so often, the world seemed weirdly strobe-lit, at odds with itself, day and night battling for dominion like God and the devil. His television remained clear through it all, unlike his set at home, where bad weather fuzzed the picture. He stopped on a Christopher Lee Dracula film from the early 1970s. By his count he had sixty-six channels. This was cable. Not DIRECTV. DIRECTV had even more channels. Wallace had said that.

  Wallace.

  He was tired of having only three channels.

  He aimed the remote up and switched to a talk show. Then Bonanza. Then news. A sitcom he didn’t know. An old Jerry Lewis film. He thought of Silas again and felt his ears heat and something unfamiliar baking in his chest. He thought of Cindy. He changed the channel to where a man and a woman were selling jewelry. People out there buying it, calling on the phone. His chest hurt when he remembered Silas’s face as a boy, Cindy’s as a girl. The television flashed a man standing at an easel giving an art lesson. Larry closed his eyes and it was summer, 1979, the morning he’d brought paper and colored pencils to the woods along with his rifle. He and Silas spread the supplies out over a patch of bare ground and lay side by side and began to draw comic books, Larry’s about one of his stock superheroes, a standard plot. More interesting, Larry stealing looks, were Silas’s pages. His characters were strangely drawn, out of proportion but interesting, elongated heads and large hands and feet. No background to any scene. Just panels with people in them. He was doing a Frankenstein-like comic, a mad scientist bringing a corpse to life, and Larry noticed in a dialogue caption that his assistant’s name was Ergo. Larry said it to himself. He liked it for a name. He pushed his paper aside and rolled over, flexing his hand. Silas stayed working. “Hey,” Larry had said. “How you pronounce that guy’s name?” Pointing with his red pencil to Ergo. “Igor,” Silas had said.

  Larry opened his eyes, worried his heart might push through the staples keeping his flesh shut. The sky cracked outside. How long he’d waited on his porch, in his living room with its three channels, its puttering fire, how long he’d waited in his shop, in his father’s old office chair, rereading the same books, how he’d driven from one spot to the other in his father’s truck, this his life, waiting for Silas and Cindy to return, while Silas roamed the world in his cleats. And Cindy probably buried somewhere only Cecil knew. He changed channels. People singing. Soap operas. More news. Commercials. Baseball highlights. He saw Silas on the infield, cocky, acrobatic, firing a white blur to first, frozen over second base, caught in the act of throwing. He saw himself before his date with Cindy, remembered his smile in the bathroom mirror, his father’s story about Cecil falling off the rope, the three of them laughing, their last good night. His window flickered. He saw himself the day of their date, talking to Cindy in the smoking area, Silas watching them from the field, saw Silas and his friends at the haunted house, saw Cindy there, they’d been together then but nobody knew, and neither offered him as much as a glance, turning their backs on him as he left with his mask. The mask. Wallace. He clicked the remote, his wrist sore, cartoons, not Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck but some new Japanese-looking thing, something he’d missed, something else he’d missed. Click. Another western. Click. News. Iraq. Commercials. Click. A show about a serial killer and the serial killer who imitated him. The remote sweaty in his hand. Weather, tennis, men, women, children, dogs, airplanes, the president waving, a televangelist asking for money with his eyes tight in prayer, click, a king cobra rising with its hood fanned and the camera panning to show its eyeglass design. So many channels. He pressed the button again. Close-up of a mosquito among the hairs of an arm, its needle sunk in the rippling skin.

  On local Channel Five, he paused on a familiar scene, this hospital, an an
gle from the parking lot, daylight. Then his own face at sixteen, his eleventh-grade yearbook photo. He pressed a button on the remote and a reporter was saying, “…recovering from a possibly self-inflected gunshot wound to the chest in Fulsom General Hospital.” The scene changed to a grainy shot of ambulance drivers hurrying a body bag over a parking lot, flashing police lights, and then a picture of a lovely, smiling girl. “Ott is a suspect in the abduction, rape, and brutal murder of nineteen-year-old University of Mississippi junior Tina Rutherford, whose body was discovered buried beneath an abandoned building on Ott’s property in rural Gerald County, Mississippi. Police investigators won’t comment on the story, but a deputy is presently stationed outside Ott’s hospital room.”

  Larry sat breathing, his chest sore. The rain fell harder and the window had gone very dark until lightning lit the streaking panes. He looked to the door.

  “Excuse me,” he called to the deputy outside. He had to call four times before the man-he’d read SKIP HOLLIDAY on his name tag-got up and peered in, a frown.

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I talk to Roy French, please?”

  The deputy regarded him. “You change your mind?”

  “Tell him,” Larry said, “that I remembered something.”

  “Well, he’s gone. Won’t be back till tomorrow. Is it somebody else you want to talk to? Sheriff?”

  “No. I’ll wait for French.”

  The deputy nodded and left.

  Larry was going to tell what he knew. Until today, he’d have preferred Silas. But now he would tell French how, a few nights after the Rutherford girl had vanished, he’d opened his eyes and sat up in bed, awake for no reason. He’d reached for his clock and held it out to see the time. Three-fifteen A.M. Risen from bed in his pajamas, he’d gone down the hall closing his robe, standing in his living room. For a moment he considered his pistol, but then he unlocked his front door and went out without it. Wallace was sitting on his steps smoking, his back to Larry, head down, looking very small in the dark. The moon was low but still cast Larry’s truck shadow in its light and, beside it, a sedan parked in the yard.