Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (9 page)

In the living room they stared at the floor. The blood had dried to the color of molasses and the room had an unpleasant tang. French picked up the pistol by its barrel—it left a smear of blood—and examined it, ejected the cylinder. “Twenty-two,” he said. “Fired once.” He turned it. “Serial number’s bout rubbed off.” He replaced it and stood. “Sheriff Lolly took Ott’s gun privileges away. After his daddy got killed. He ain’t even supposed to have any firearms at all.”

“Took em away how?”

“Just did it.”

They went to the gun cabinet in the hall, gazed down at its stacks of old magazines on the green lining. French opened the drawer at the bottom, more mail. “Maybe Ott moonlit as a postman.”

“Where’d they go?” Silas asked. “All the guns?”

“County auctioned em off, I expect.”

“So where’d he get that pistol?”

“If it was his? Pawnshop. Gun show. It’s a old model, could’ve had a dozen owners. I’ll run a trace, but it’ll be a dead end.”

He fished his camera from his pocket.

“Bullet entry was straight in,” he said, clicking through the pictures, Silas moving to see. Shots of Larry’s pale face, obscured by the oxygen mask. The chief did a miniature slide show, shots of Larry on a table in his mechanic’s uniform, bloodied at the chest. Larry’s shirt being scissored off, an IV going into his arm, close-ups of the wound, tear marks and blackened skin.

“My guess?” French said. “Self-inflicted.”

More shots, his pants being cut off, his egg-white legs, people in scrubs and masks, the keys and wallet, cell phone, money fanned out, close-up of Larry’s driver’s license.

“Could’ve surprised a crackhead,” Silas said.

“Maybe.” French still studying the pictures. “But he still had his wallet on him. And see the burns here? On his shirt, skin. That indicates a close-range shot, inches, probably.”

He left Silas at the table and walked over to the television, an ancient mahogany cabinet model with an actual knob you turned. He looked behind the console.

“I believe our victim here’s the last resident in Mississippi without a remote control. Or cable.” He walked to the window and fingered the flat wire that ran from the back of the TV out the window, up to the antenna. “No answering machine. Ain’t got a computer, either.”

“So?”

“Unusual fellow. A frozen in the 1960s kind of character. For instance,” he said, “you ever go in his shop? It’s old-timey shit. Turns his rotors by hand. No power tools. Uses a hand jack. Go in Koen’s up the road yonder and he’s got air ratchets, uses compressors and computers and shit. Engine light comes on, power window stops working, fuel injectors clogged, replace the fucking computer. That’s all they do now. Just take one computer chip out and put another one in. It’s all computers now.”

“Larry Ott don’t need to upgrade if he ain’t got any business.”

They stood looking.

Silas said, “Maybe he can’t get cable out here.”

“He could get a fucking dish.”

“Guess he reads books instead.”

“Reads books.”

They stood looking over the room.

“Chief,” Silas said. “Maybe you right.” He crossed to a shelf and picked up something he hadn’t seen yet, a DIRECTV brochure that listed the advantages and channels.

French came over beside him and touched the spine of one of the books with his gloved knuckle. “Into horror and shit. It’s a lot more of these in that first bedroom. More in all the bedrooms but the parents’. More books I bet you than in the rest of the county combined. Including the library.”

French went down the hall but Silas remained for a moment. He remembered this book, could see it in Larry’s hands as Larry described the plot. For a moment the two boys were out in the woods, walking, carrying their rifles.

Silas found French in Larry’s parents’ bedroom, the CI opening drawers. He stopped at the one piled with a woman’s clothes. “Cept for that front room this place don’t look no different than it did when I was last here last week. My guess is he ain’t touched this particular room since his momma went to the home.”

“Ain’t nothing weird about that.”

“I didn’t say it was weird. My stepsister’s mother died and she won’t let nobody go in her room except for her. Sometimes she stays in there singing Boz Scaggs songs, so don’t get me started on weird.”

Back in the kitchen French opened the refrigerator.

“Here’s something,” he said.

Silas looked past him, a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer among the eggs and containers of fast food. One can missing.

“Larry’s been a nondrinker his whole life. His daddy died in a drunkdriving accident.”

“Maybe he started.”

“Maybe.”

French went to the table and examined the surface, then took a towel from the top of the kit and spread it out and began to poke around in the black leather satchel. It reminded Silas of an old-time country doctor’s bag, but bigger; he’d envied this kit, but when he requisitioned the town council for a less expensive set, they’d denied the request.

French was rewinding a tape on his recorder/video camera, his head in a cowl of smoke. “You remember how to mold?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s some packets in my case. Hardener, too. Go get ever print you don’t know. Front and back.”

Silas carried the aerosol can of dirt hardener, three wooden frames, and three of the prepackaged molding kits outside. The kits were plastic bags of water, about the size of a bag of powdered sugar, with a smaller pack of cement inside you could feel sloshing around. He put the stuff on the porch and, with his light, began to examine the tracks of his Jeep, French’s Bronco. The rain had pretty much obliterated any other vehicles’ tracks. There were several footprints, full and partial. He ignored his own and Angie’s, but found one near the front of the walkway. He set the frame around it and got one of the bags from the porch. He pushed on it until he found the cement pack inside and squeezed with his thumbs, began to knead the bag, mixing the cement and water. Then he sprayed the mud with the hardener and tore open one end of the bag and began to pour it carefully over the footprint and then arranged the first frame. In the rear he found another set of footprints and repeated the operation.

When he came back in French had bagged the gun and was lifting prints.

“Here,” he said. “Label these.”

They spent nearly an hour cataloging the prints, French saying he imagined they were all Larry’s. Then the chief used distilled water and cotton balls to get blood samples but found no blood other than the big patch on the living room floor. And that on the pistol. Finally they went down the hall and out the back door and stood looking at the barn as the night screamed with its birds and frogs and bugs.

“You look in there?” French said, aiming his cigarette at the barn.

“Yeah. Got bushwhacked by a flock of hens.”

French snorted.

In the barn the chickens were making their noises. French probed the dark, dusty corners with his Maglite, looking for freshly disturbed dirt, loose boards, blood, hair, or the thing you’d only know once you saw it.

“Looks the same,” he said. He went in the feed room and opened the chicken roost door and aimed his light.

They looked awhile longer then went back out and lifted the heavy concrete molds and set them in French’s Bronco. Then the chief X’d the door with yellow tape, and they stood in the shadow of the barn, the CI emitting bursts of smoke that hung in the still air like sheets on a line. Silas thought he heard an owl somewhere and remembered Larry telling him you called baby owls “owlets.”

“Tomorrow,” French said, “I’m gone head up to Oxford. Talk to the sheriff. Interview some of the Rutherford girl’s friends. Boyfriend. Maybe a professor or two.” He dropped his cigarette and crushed it out with his foot, picked it up. “In the morning, after your traffic, why don’t you run back out here. Get a better look around. It’s probably more tracks you can get molds of. Just do a general walk-around. I think Ott has like three hundred acres left.”

“You think this might be connected with the Rutherford girl?”

“I ain’t ruling it out,” French said. “But you been wanting some real police work? Here’s your chance.”

They taped the back doors of the barn and the house and went around the side. On the front porch, Silas reached in to turn off the lights. Then he waited as French taped the door and locked it and tossed him Larry’s keys and cell phone. “Get these back when you’re done. And let me know if you find anything.”

“Right.”

“When he wakes up, we’ll go talk to him.”

In the yard, French hoisted his bag into the back of his Bronco. “Keep them other two mold kits,” he said. “You might need em tomorrow.”

“Okay. You want me to call Shannon?”

“Naw. She’ll find out soon enough.” He stretched. “I’m going home.”

SILAS PUT LARRY’S
stuff on the kitchen table of his trailer and laid his gun belt beside it, glad to be free of its weight. The handcuffs, flashlight, extra clips. He opened the refrigerator and drew a Budweiser from the nearly empty twelve-pack and got a glass from the drying rack by the sink. During his navy stint he’d drunk beer in several countries including England, where they drink it warm, or Belgium, where they have specialized glasses for each type, or Brazil, where the beer comes in giant bottles you split with your table mates, drinking from small glasses. He’d kept the latter habit here, but only in private. In the Bus, he drank from bottles because people would think a glass affected. He took the short water glass he liked and the bottle into the living room and set them on the coffee table. He sank back in the old sofa and pulled off his boots to let his socked feet breathe. He couldn’t afford a washer or dryer and usually took his clothes to Angie’s on the weekends.

He popped off the beer cap and filled the glass and drained it then poured the rest of the bottle in and put the empty on the coffee table and looked across the room to where his and Larry’s keys lay side by side. He finished the beer and got the last one from the fridge and went down the hall unbuttoning his shirt with one hand. In his room he sat on the bed, unmade, and looked at his nightstand, over which he’d thrown a white T-shirt.

He glanced at his watch. Eleven
P.M.
Maybe he’d call Angie, say he was too beat to meet her. He filled his glass and drank then set it and the bottle on the floor and lay back and pulled the T-shirt from his nightstand and looked at the answering machine. The light was blinking. He reached over and pressed
PLAY.

“Silas?”

He sat up.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Larry Ott’s voice said. “I know you’re busy, but please call me back when you can, even if it’s late. It’s Monday morning, and I’m at the shop.” As Silas listened, he gazed across the shag carpet that had been here when he’d bought the place and that he kept meaning to rip up. In the closet, behind his two extra uniforms, where he wouldn’t have to look at it, was the Marlin lever-action .22 rifle.

Larry recited his shop number, slowly, as if he were giving the code to disarm a bomb. Then he said, “Please call back, even if it’s late. It’s kind of important, but I don’t want to say it over the phone. Thank you.”

Call back, even if it’s late.

Well, it was late, wasn’t it, Larry. Too late.

five

L
ARRY WOKE BEFORE
his mother knocked. It was a Saturday, the first day of summer, school out and three long months of freedom ahead of him. He dressed quickly in the clothes he’d chosen the night before, an old T-shirt and blue jeans with the knees out, perfect for getting dirty. He stuck his lockblade knife in his back pocket and tied his sneakers and was down the hall and out the front door before anyone saw him. He hopped onto his bicycle where he’d leaned it by the porch and kicked away pedaling. He flew down the driveway through the trees, dodging puddles and watching for snakes. He passed the Walker place, Cecil on the porch with a cup of coffee and a cigarette that he raised. Larry waved back and kept going, skidding to a stop before the mailboxes, theirs and the Walkers’. Without dismounting he opened the little door and pulled out the letters and circulars; he got Cecil’s, too, glancing at it. Where Larry sometimes had mail, comic books or magazines, things he’d ordered, Cindy Walker never did. The Walkers usually only got junk.

Cecil was gone when he rode back by and he left their circulars on the porch. At home he laid his father’s mail on the kitchen table and took his seat. In a moment the back door closed and his mother came in the kitchen with several eggs in her apron.

“You scared me,” she said.

“Sorry.”

She began to lay the eggs on the counter and noticed the mail. “Did your funny books come?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Maybe Monday.”

Because it was warm, she was barefoot. She lit a match and touched it to the burner and a flame bloomed to life, smell of natural gas, piped from the big metal tank in the backyard, filled once a month by a truck.

“How was your breathing last night?” she asked, rinsing the eggs.

“Fine. Good.”

“Good.” She was opening drawers, lighting another burner. “You want fried?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Something banged in the back of the house and they exchanged a look. Then the television clicked on and the newscaster’s voice grew louder as Carl raised the volume, part of his morning ritual, watching the news and reading the mail while he ate.

A moment later he came into the kitchen tucking his green short-sleeved uniform shirt into his blue jeans, another sign of Saturday—the rest of the week he wore matching green pants. He often grumbled about having to work on Saturday, but Larry knew he preferred it to being here. And on any other Saturday Larry would have been anxious to go with him.

But not today.

“Good morning, Daddy,” he said, once a commercial came on, the television visible only from Carl’s end of the table.

His father was spreading the mail in front of him. “Morning.”

His mother appeared at Carl’s elbow with a ceramic coffeepot and poured his cup full.

“Thank you.” He reached for the sugar and poured a huge amount in.

She lingered at his elbow. “Honey?”

He sipped and noticed them both looking at him, the usual Saturday ritual, the two of them teaming up on him, asking without words if Larry would be able to go to the shop today.

Today, though, Larry was relieved when his father looked back at the letter in his hand and said, “Got a busy one, Ina. Two transmissions and a carburetor. He won’t do nothing but get in the way.”

Behind them, the frying pan on the stove began to sizzle.

“Okay, Daddy,” Larry said.

“Maybe next week,” said his mother. One thing Carl had made clear long ago, to both of them, was that no meant hell no from the get-go.

In a moment his mother set Larry’s eggs before him and he salted them and ate them quickly and his bacon, too. When he finished he felt his father’s eyes on his plate and said, “Can I be excused?”

“What you tell your momma?”

“Enjoyed it.”

“Go on.”

He went down the hall toward his room but heard his father call, “Hey, boy?”

He hurried back. “Yes, sir?”

“You stay outside today. Cut the grass.”

Which meant
Don’t read all day.

“Yes, sir.”

He went down the hall and picked up the paper sack of trash, heavy with last night’s beer bottles, and carried it outside and put it in the back of his father’s truck, where Carl would throw it in his trash can at the shop.

HE WAS LUGGING
the push mower out of the barn when Carl drove past in the red Ford and slowed to a stop, lowering his window.

“Don’t run over no sticks with that mower,” he called. “I just sharpened the blade.”

“Yes, sir.”

He waved as his father drove away, then turned to face their three-acre yard, the house centered in it and the barn back by the trees. Half a day’s work, at least.

“Dern,” he whispered.

Might as well get it done with. That way he could salvage the second half of the day and not get in trouble. He added gas to the mower and checked the oil. It cranked on his first pull and he began to push it along the edge of the driveway, shooting grass, small rocks, and mangled sticks out the side, glad again that school was over. Next year he’d go to Fulsom, the only public high school in the county.

As he pushed the mower, he thought how Alice’s car must have come from Carl, but Larry knew not to say more about it. He’d failed Carl before by not understanding that the black woman and her son had been their secret. He should have known that men do not discuss with their wives (or mothers) the business that is their own.

Since he’d given Silas his .22, he now carried a Model 94 lever-action .33 that, of all their guns, most closely resembled the .22. Though his mother couldn’t have named a difference if you’d lain the rifles side by side, his father would have noticed if Larry began to carry a gun without a lever, a pump shotgun, or one of the single-shot or automatic rifles.

For the past spring, whenever he’d been able to, Larry would race through the woods with this rifle, toward the cabin. Each time Silas would jump out with the .22, a good-natured ambush, Larry understanding that Silas would have been waiting for him no matter how long it took him to get there, the black boy always breaking into his big grin.

As it had grown warmer, as the school year had progressed, Silas had abandoned the coat and gloves from Larry and Larry saw he now wore better clothes, his mother (with her two jobs, a waitress in the Fulsom Diner and a cafeteria worker in the grocery store) buying them at the TG&Y. The boys would shoot their rifles, play mumblety-peg with Larry’s knife, play chase, war, cowboys and Indians, climb trees. With Silas on Larry’s bike, racing back and forth, doing wheelies, skidding, Larry ran along behind with his stick, looking for snakes sunning on the road. When they found one—a blacksnake, a hognose—Larry would pin its head to the dirt with the stick and grab the snake behind its neck, holding it as it wrapped itself around his wrist and shot out its tongue. Silas always kept his distance as Larry stuffed the snakes into the pillowcase he carried.

In April they began to fish in the creek on the other side of the cabin. In one of the rooms in their barn, Larry’s father had several rods and reels on nails on the wall, and a giant tackle box, and as long as he was careful, Larry was allowed to use the equipment.

As they walked, loaded down with rods and reels, the tackle box, their rifles, Silas asked if Larry was going out for baseball this year. Larry said he wasn’t, he’d never played, had never even considered it.

“How come?”

“I ain’t no good.”

At the creek’s widest point, he showed Silas how to bait a hook, throw the cork out, catch and clean a fish. How to use artificial bait, rubber worms, broke-back minnow, Snagless Sallys, silver spoons, plugs. But these were for bass, which were few in the creek and hard to catch, and so mostly they used corks and sinkers, for this was what the big gray catfish that sucked along the bottom of the creek preferred. Larry had tried to get Silas to take their first stringer of these fish home to his mother, several pounds, but Silas said he couldn’t.

“Why not?” Larry was sitting on the creek bank, watching his cork, the water roiling and bubbling as the fish pulled at the stringer. Silas, fascinated at what they’d hooked from the creek, raised the stringer to gape at the prehistoric faces, their wide mouths, flat heads.

“Why not?” Larry asked again.

“Momma. She say I ain’t supposed to play with you.”

“Why?”

Silas just shrugged. The catfish croaked, and Silas splashed them into the water. “What’s that?”

Larry smiled at him. “That’s how they talk.”

He pulled them up again.

“Careful of that long fin there,” Larry said. “It’ll stick you.”

Silas lowered his face to the catfish’s. “What you saying, Mr. Catfish?”

“Is it cause I’m white?” Larry asked.

“What?”

“Why your momma don’t want you to play with me?”

“I don’t know.”

“She didn’t tell you?”

“She just say, ‘Don’t you go near that boy.’ Made me promise I wouldn’t.”

“How come?”

“I done said I don’t know.”

Larry was puzzled. It had to be his color. What else could it be? He’d known his own father would disapprove. He would never tell Carl about the friendship, but wouldn’t it be different for Silas? Wouldn’t a black woman be happy her son had a white friend? They’d given them coats, a car. He’d assumed the anger that black folks felt was a reaction to white people’s attitude toward them.
Yall started it.
But if somebody white was willing to befriend somebody black, offer them gifts, even a place to live, shouldn’t the blacks be grateful?

“You ever tell her about that rifle?”

“Hell naw. I keep it hid.”

“How come?”

“Cause she’ll make me give it back.”

“I do need it back,” Larry said. “Fore my daddy goes looking for it. Here,” he said, offering his knife. “I’ll trade you this.”

“A knife for a gun?”

“Please?”

“Tell me one them stories,” Silas said.

He meant a Stephen King story. Larry had lent Silas books, but the black boy said he didn’t like reading, homework was enough. Weren’t lights in the cabin anyhow. Just an oil lamp and candles. A flashlight. Silas did, however, like to hear Larry describe the stories. Now he told about the one called “Trucks,” where a supernatural force has taken over all the trucks at an interstate exit (and presumably all over the world) and a bunch of people are trapped in a diner surrounded by murderous vehicles. Near the end the trucks start blowing their horns and one of the survivors recognizes that it’s Morse code.

Silas was threading a worm onto his treble hook. “What’s that?” Larry had described the dot-and-dash code, then told how the trucks were honking in Morse that somebody needed to fill them up with gas. The story ended with the people serving the trucks, taking turns filling them with gas, the guy telling the story looking up at two airplanes. “I hope to God,” he’d said, “that there are people in them.”

Silas had been watching the sky.

LARRY FINISHED THE
grass just before noon, and for lunch his mother made him a potted meat and mayo sandwich with saltines on the side. He read a comic book at the table while he ate then drained his glass of Coke and thanked her and got his .33 from the gun cabinet in the hall and two boxes of cartridges and Stephen King’s short story collection
Night Shift
and, at the front door, called, “I’m going outside,” and let the screen door bang behind him, feeling her coming out behind him, watching him. As always, he headed toward Cindy’s house to throw her off, shoulder-strapped the Marlin and walked down along the road. Once around the bend he doubled back, went east.

Because Silas had started playing baseball at school, Larry worried that he was losing him. He’d invited him to his house once, and they’d played in the barn and Silas had cut the grass, but he knew the black boy wouldn’t do that again. Maybe he could take him back through the woods, toward Cindy’s house. She’d been his secret, but maybe it was time to share her.

Half an hour later he knelt at the edge of the woods, rifle unshouldered. From across the field he watched Silas standing on a pile of dirt he’d mounded behind the cabin. He looked back over his shoulder toward Larry, who ducked before he realized Silas was just checking an imaginary runner on first. Then he raised both his hands to his chest and kicked up one leg and fired a streak of gray toward the tree sixty feet away. Larry was impressed at the
thwack
the ball made when it bounced off the trunk and rolled back. Silas was already charging to scoop the baseball barehanded out of the weeds and pretend to throw it back in Larry’s direction, as fluid a move as an Atlanta Brave on the television.

His mother’s car was nowhere in sight, which meant she was working. Around the cabin the field that had been so dead and gray in winter was now greening, butterflies doddering over the goldenrod and orb spiders centered in their webs like the pupils of eyes.

Back on the mound, Silas checked runners on first and second before he pitched and then he did it all again. Larry sat back against a tree and picked beggar’s lice off his socks and pants. He’d hear the thump the ball made then maybe a grunt or hoot from Silas but soon he’d opened
Night Shift
to one of his favorite stories, “The Mangler.”

When he looked up, Silas was standing over him, his chest rising and falling. “You spying?”

Larry closed his book. He saw the cat a few feet behind Silas and realized it had probably smelled him and come over, Silas following it.

“No.” Larry shrugged and got to his feet and looked down at the rifle. “I just come to see you but you was busy throwing.”

Silas watched him. He still held his baseball and Larry wondered did he steal it from school.

Silas looked back toward his mound, the tree. “I bet I can throw seventy, eighty miles a hour,” he said.

“Yeah,” Larry said. “It looked real fast from here.”

“What you reading?”

Larry held the book up. Its cover showed a human hand with eyes in the palm and on the fingers. Some of the hand and fingers were wrapped in gauze like a mummy.