Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (6 page)

He learned to keep out of sight for most of the day as Cecil Walker, their closest neighbor, and other men began to assemble for what was, to Larry, always a revelation: his father telling stories, something he never did at home. In the late afternoon, as more fellows got off from the mill, they began to arrive in their pickup trucks, sometimes with a knocking tie rod, sometimes a whine in their engine block, sometimes just to listen to Carl at his worktable, the men gathered three, four deep, watching the mechanic place a carburetor on a clean shop rag.

Passing his bottle, Cecil would ask, “Carl, what was that you’s saying other day, about that crazy nigger—?”

And Carl would chuckle while he selected a tiny screwdriver and start the story. Loosening the carburetor’s minute screws, he would tell how Devoid Chapman bought this little red used MG Midget in Meridian and was driving it home to Dump Road when, along about time he passes Ottomotive, its hood unlatches and flies open. Carl pointing with his screwdriver. “Right out yonder there. The car’s a convertible, top folded back. Did I mention that? And Devoid, he has him a Afro, size of a dang peach basket. One of them black power fist combs sticking out of it.

“Now he’s got the top down cause he liked the way the wind friction felt against his hair, he said. And while he ain’t never confirmed it, that very nest of hair probably saved his life as that damn MG’s hood unsprang at fifty-five miles per hour there on the highway. I seen it happen. Swear to God.” Carl dropping the parts into a sieved pan and lowering the pan into a vat of ink-black, foul-smelling carburetor cleaner. “Hood peeled back, hit the rim of the windshield and bent and knocked ole Devoid right on the head, pop! The Midget spun out, lucky it was no other cars nearby, and Devoid luckier still to finally get it stopped there in a dust cloud.”

Talking the whole time, raising the sieve from the cleaner and setting the pan over a clean shop rag to dry, pausing only if something went amiss at his fingertips, a spring stuck in some valve, say. Attending this need might take five seconds, ten, a minute. He might have to excuse his way through the men and get a tiny socket or a different pair of pliers or maybe talk to the screw, “What’s got you stuck?” or he might just grimace, but then, however long it took (never long), the problem solved, he’d go on as if he’d never stopped.

“—got that MG stopped out in front there. Ole Devoid come staggering out fanning dust and holding his head a-yelling, ‘Call a got-dog am-bu-lance!’ Had a line of blood dripping off his nose. A cussing up and down the chart, got damn this and got damn that, son-of-a-bitching shit hell damn. Crazy nigger,” he’d say, laughing, “sold me the car on the spot, for two hundred dollars cash. I closed the hood and wired it shut and give him a ride home in that very car, him hunched down the whole time, worried bout that hood. I asked him did he want a motorcycle helmet but he said no, it’d never fit over his hair.”

All the men would be laughing and Cecil, drunk, a cigarette in his mouth and another behind his ear, laughing the hardest, would say, “You something else, Carl. Tell when you asked him about his name.”

Carl bending low over the table, close to the carburetor. “Yeah, I did. Said one time, ‘Devoid. That’s a hell of a name. You know what it means?’ And he said, yeah, he’d looked it up. ‘Barren. Empty. A wasteland.’ In school said his nickname was ‘Nothing.’”

“You something else,” Cecil would say, shaking his head. “Tell em about that dog, Carl,” and Carl would launch off into the funeral of so-and-so’s daddy where they was all standing around the grave out in the middle of nowhere, ten, fifteen miles to the nearest blacktop. “Somebody’s eulogizing the hell out of M. O. Walsh—that’s who it was—lying through his teeth telling what a gentleman he was, when from out behind us we hear a gunshot. Pop! Next thing we heard was a little ole dog go a-yipping and I bout bust out laughing when that got-dang dog come a shooting out the woods bleeding from the side. It run right through us all and through the tombstones a-yipping fore it went on down the road. I leaned over and said, ‘Fellows, when my time comes, I want me a
three
-dog salute.’ ”

The men laughing, Cecil hardest of all. They’d have Coca-Colas or beer and jaws fat with tobacco. They’d spit and wipe their lips with the backs of their hands. Most in baseball caps. White Tshirts. All in steel-toed boots. The confluence of pickup trucks framed in the door and the two big electric fans pushing the hot air around and cigarette smoke curling high in the rafters like ghosts of bird nests, the men sniping from Cecil’s bottle, Carl drinking, too, and Larry, hidden, listening, the stories weaving his imagination and the sounds of his father’s voice into what must have been happiness, as his father’s hands lifted the rebuilt carburetor to its waiting car, a clean rag over the intake manifold, the giant hands with the care of a surgeon fitting a heart back into its chest, turning the screws and reattaching the fuel line and listening with his head cocked as the owner climbed into the driver’s seat with the door open and one leg out, gunning it on command while Carl regulated its gasoline flow and, at last, placed the air filter over the carburetor and tightened the wing nut as the engine raced and the air smelled of gasoline and Carl stood back, arms folded, nodding, the shadows of men behind him nodding, too, and Larry watching, from behind the Coke machine, Cecil saying, “Carl, tell that one about that old nigger used to preach on a stump—”

Now, as he and his father bounced over Mississippi on the way to school, as they swung in and out of its shadows and rose and fell over its hills, Larry worried he’d lost the privilege of Ottomotive forever. They were pulling to the corner by the gymnasium where he got out. Before he closed the truck door each day, he’d say, “Bye, Daddy. Thanks for the ride.”

“Have a good one,” his father would say, barely a glance.

IN THE COMING
days he’d see Silas across the playground, in his class as he passed on his way to the restroom. In the cafeteria Silas sat with a group of black boys, laughing with them, even talking now and again. A betrayal, to Larry. For hadn’t Silas been his doppelgänger? He’d see him out in the field by the trees, playing baseball, catching fly balls barehanded, his shoes, which looked too big for him, over by the chain-link fence.

Then, one Sunday afternoon in late March, Larry’s mother off volunteering, his father at work (even on Sundays, coming home from church and putting on his uniform and grumbling about all the money they spent, how he had no choice but to work), Larry set off down the dirt road they lived on, his lockblade knife in his back pants pocket and carrying a Marlin .22 lever action, one of his father’s old guns. Since his tenth birthday, he’d carried a rifle with him in the woods. Some days he shot at birds and squirrels halfheartedly, rarely hitting anything, and if he did, just standing over it a minute, two, staring, and then leaving it lying, his feelings jumbled, somewhere between pride and guilt. But today he kept the safety on and carried the rifle yoked over his shoulder. Because the cold weather had lingered, he wore his thick camouflage coat, camouflage cap and pants, his fur-lined boots. He left no footprints in the frozen mud. Most days he would have gone east, along the dirt road, toward the Walker place. Cecil Walker lived there with his wife and his fifteen-year-old stepdaughter, Cindy, whom Larry hoped to glimpse. In summer he’d sneak around the house, through the woods, and watch as she’d stretch a towel out across the boards of their deck and take the sun wearing a bikini, flat on her back in a pair of huge dark glasses, one brown leg cocked up, then turning onto her belly, slipping a finger beneath the shoulder straps, one, the other, to lie on her breasts, Larry’s heart a bullfrog trying to spring out of his chest. On colder days she came outside to smoke, stretching the long cord of their telephone out the door, not talking loud enough for Larry to hear. She’d only said a handful of words to him, and some days, the days when Cecil would come outside and mess with her, telling her get off the phone, put out that cigarette, Larry imagined her coming to him for help, and some days, as she lay in the sun or smoked another Camel, he wished she’d see him where he hid, at the edge of the woods, watching.

But not today.

Today he went west, through the wire of a fence into the woods. At night sometimes in these cold stretches you’d hear noises like gunshots. It wasn’t until he’d come, once, to a tree snapped cleanly in half, that he realized the cold would break them. The young ones, the old. A tree enduring another freezing night suddenly explodes at its heart, its top half toppling and swinging down, scratching the land with a horrible creak, broken in half and turning like a hanged man.

Walking, he wondered if they still lived out there, Silas and his mother. He worked his way south, making little noise, and carefully descended the rocky berm and picked through a tangle of briars at the bottom and into deeper woods.

Having a black friend was an interesting idea, something he’d never considered. Since the redistricting he was around them constantly. The churches were still segregated if the schools weren’t, and sometimes Larry wondered why grown-ups made the kids mingle when they themselves didn’t. He remembered two years before, how, in the hall on his first day at the Chabot Middle School, a white boy had come up behind him and said, “Welcome to the jungle.”

Other white boys would speak to him on occasion, usually if they were alone with him, or passed him on the playground away from their friends. Larry hurried through the halls, not making eye contact because it was safer, his nose in his handkerchief or a book, the new kid who was never quite accepted. In groups, the white boys laughed at him though they’d sometimes let him tag along, the butt of jokes but grateful to be included. The black boys were aggressive to him, bumping him as he passed, knocking his books off his desk as if it were an accident, tripping him on his way to the bathroom.

In the seventh grade, near the end of the school year, he found himself swinging with a white boy named Ken on one side of him and another, David, on the other. Both their fathers worked in the mill and both were poorer than Larry—he knew this because they got free lunches. Swinging, Larry kicked his legs as he flew forward, going higher, higher, the classroom building up the hill from the playground, a gray two-story structure with second-story fire escapes where teachers, all black, stood smoking and laughing, out of earshot.

Below them to the right a clump of skinny black girls with Afros and short shorts were standing and sipping short Cokes from the machine in the gym and sharing a bag of Lays, not really watching the boys, just talking about whatever black girls talked about, once in a while breaking out in high, cackling laughter and cries of “You crazy!” that Ken would imitate so they couldn’t hear.

David said, “Them nigger girls sound like a bunch of monkeys,” in a low voice.

“You a nigger,” Ken snapped back, and Larry laughed.

“Yo momma is,” David said, the standard retort of the year.

“Yo daddy,” Ken said.

“Yo sister.”

“Yo brother,” and on until you got to the distant relatives, step-siblings, and great-aunts.

Ken grew bored with naming relatives and, swinging forward, pointed with his sneaker toward the black girls. “Look at Monkey Lips,” he said. This was their nickname for Jackie Simmons, a small dark-skinned girl with big teeth and lips. “She’s so dark you can’t see her at night less she smiles at you.”

Larry laughed and said, “Jackie Simian.”

“What?” Ken said.

“You see them big teefs in the dark,” David said in dialect, “you’ll thank it’s a drive-in movie you be watching.”

Going back and forth, whizzing past one another, the boys began to discuss the drive-in movie theater on Highway 21, Ken saying he’d seen a show called
Phantasm
there. Larry knew the movie from his magazines. It was about two brothers who broke into a funeral home. Ken was telling about this steel ball that flew around with a blade sticking out that would drill into your head and spray blood like a damn garden hose.

“When yall go?” he asked Ken, who said his older brother would sometimes take him and David with him and his girlfriend, let them sit in the front seat while his brother and his brother’s girlfriend necked in the back. Ken and David discussed other movies they’d seen,
Dawn of the Dead,
which Larry had also read about and was eager to see, where zombies tore people apart and ate them as they screamed, and one called
Animal House,
how John Belushi from
Saturday Night Live
scaled a ladder to spy on girls in a dorm room pillow fighting and taking their clothes off— “You seen their titties?” Larry asked.

“Shit,” Ken said, “pussies, too.”

“We go all the time,” David said, swooshing past. “Me and Ken going Friday night, too, ain’t we.”

“Hell yeah.”

Larry clenched the chains. “Yall think I could go sometime?” he asked, moving his neck to see David behind him, beside him, above.

David and Ken, swinging opposite trajectories, like a pair of legs running, had to struggle to make eye contact.

“My brother ain’t gone take you,” Ken said and David laughed, like what a stupid question.

“It’s one way you might could go,” David said, and even though Larry saw him cast an evil look at Ken, he couldn’t help biting.

“How?”

“You got to join our club.”

“Yeah,” said Ken.

“How do I join?”

A moment passed, the boys swinging.

“You got to call Jackie ‘Monkey Lips,’ “ David said. “To her face.”

A bell rang up at the school and the teachers began to grind out their cigarettes.

“Watch this,” David said, kicking his legs harder, so hard, going so high, the chains in his fists slackened on his upswing and he bounced hard in the rubber seat and swung back and the chains snapped again and as he flew forward he leapt from the swing, seat flapping in his wake, and sailed a long time over the ground—his shirt flying up and his arms out, feet dangling—and landed dangerously close to where the black girls, headed back to school, were giggling about something.