Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (28 page)

Silas was scrabbling under the house, his left arm numb and useless, he could feel his heart pushing out blood. Overhead, the front door slammed and Stringfellow thundered over the floor still yelling about his dog. Silas crawled past pipes in the muck and more beer cans and toward the light at the other end, stink of sewage, came out the same time Stringfellow leaped from the back door holding a long revolver. He didn’t see Silas behind him on the ground aiming his shivering pistol with his right arm. He fired and missed and fired again. The young man screamed and fell but got up holding his thigh and limping away, shooting blindly, a window shattering, echo of aluminum siding. Then he made the pine trees at the edge of the yard, through the bobwire, and was gone.

Silas lay breathing hard, fighting to stay awake. His mouth so dry. He looked at his arm and saw how bad he was bleeding. Saw a jag of bone, mud and straw in the wound. He set his pistol down and tried to tear off his shirt for a bandage but his strength was gone. He looked behind him under the house, past the mound of dead dog, saw his Taser flattened in the muck, saw his Jeep’s tires. He pulled himself up and stood against the siding.

He remembered his cell phone but couldn’t find it.

The door was open, hip level, no steps. He lay backward in it and pulled his legs inside. Holding his hurt arm, which looked like hamburger meat, he got to his knees, rising in air that smelled of cordite, using the wall to prop himself up, the room blurred. No telephone, just a cordless base on the end table. He clutched his arm, warm blood running through his fingers. He lurched across the floor and fell over a table, upsetting an aquarium, glass breaking, a rattlesnake’s dry buzz filling the room. He rolled onto his back and saw the snake slide over the carpet. Saw the monster mask looking down from its shelf. He wanted to get up but couldn’t let his hurt arm go. He was freezing. The snake crawling by his head.

fifteen

A
FTER BREAKFAST, THE
deputy watching as he ate, saying no, French wasn’t back yet, Larry asked the nurse to put
Night Shift
in his hand and spent the afternoon wandering through the familiar stories, difficult as it was to hold the book and turn pages with one tired hand. The words were harder to see, too, from this angle, and it occurred to him that he’d been holding books farther and farther away from his eyes these last years, that he needed reading glasses. When he got out he’d make an appointment to see an eye doctor.

In the afternoon he called the deputy back in. “Yall said he’d come this evening,” Larry said. “I got something he’ll want to hear.”

“It’s been an incident,” the deputy, Skip, said. “He’s out investigating a crime scene. He might be a while.”

“What you mean?”

“We had an officer hurt.”

“Hurt?”

“Yeah. That black fellow kept coming in here? One watched you on night shift?”

“Silas Jones?”

“Yeah.”

“What about him?”

“He went to see a fellow and the fellow sicced a pit bull on him and took some shots at him.”

Larry knew the answer before he asked, “Was the fellow, was his name Wallace Stringfellow?”

Skip looked at him. “Shit. It’s on TV already?”

“No.”

The deputy watched him a moment longer.

“Is he okay?”

“Don’t know. He’s down in surgery now, what I’m told. Dog took a big chunk of him. Chief French and the sheriff and them, they out at Stringfellow’s house now.”

“Is it any way I can talk to Chief French? It’s important. It’s about Wallace Stringfellow.”

Skip said wait and went in the hall. A moment later he came back with his radio and Larry heard French’s voice crackle over it. Skip held it up for him to use. “Talk when I mash the button.”

“Chief French?”

Background noise, other radios. Men talking. “Yeah, go ahead.”

“This is Larry Ott. In the hospital?”

Static. “Go ahead.”

“I been waiting to tell you, I think it was Wallace Stringfellow shot me. Took that girl, too.”

“How you know that?”

He started telling it, Skip holding the radio with his mouth slowly opening as Larry talked, how Wallace knew of the cabin where they found the girl, his last visit, how Larry had recognized his eyes behind the mask when the fellow shot him, the voice that had asked him to die.

“Mask?” French asked. “Describe it.”

Larry did, leaning up, his back sweaty. “Is Silas okay?”

More static. “I got to go,” French said. “Thanks for the information. I’ll be there when I can.”

LATER THAT NIGHT
Larry woke and heard French outside. He and the night shift deputy spoke in low tones, then French came in the room smelling of cigarettes and sweat, wearing a black T-shirt with a pistol on it pointing at Larry.
GUN CONTROL,
it said,
MEANS HITTING WHERE YOU AIM.
He had a large plastic bag with what looked like a severed head inside. Larry’s mask.

The chief set the mask on the other bed and then, gently, undid the restraint on his right wrist and came around the bed and did the same to the one on his left. He tossed them aside and sat on the other bed and took off his glasses, looking tired, and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“What a day,” he said. He reached for the mask and held it up for Larry to see, its eyes dead now, and black. “Can you identify this?”

“Yeah,” Larry said. “It’s mine.”

French tossed the bag back and folded his arms. Larry watched it, remembered ordering it, racing his bike to the mailbox every morning hoping for the box that was so big the mailman would have to lean it against the post.

“You’ll get it back,” French said, “but for now we got to keep it.”

“I don’t want it. Just throw it away.”

French’s radio blared and he mumbled something in it.

When he signed off, Larry said, “How’s Silas?”

“In recovery.”

“Will he be okay?”

“Looks like it. Don’t know if that arm of his’ll be any good. That damn pit bull bout tore it off.”

“John Wayne Gacy,” Larry said.

“What?”

“That’s the dog’s name.”

“
Was
his name.” French put his glasses back on and felt his back pocket for a pad and wrote that down. “Now what’s left of its head’s on its way to Jackson to get tested for rabies and its body’s on the way to the incinerator.”

“How’s Wallace?”

“Dead.”

“What happened?”

“Watch the news,” the chief said. “You’ll find out.”

Larry lay back.

“How would you characterize your relationship with him?” French asked. “With Wallace Stringfellow?”

“I thought he was my friend.”

“You got a strange taste in friends.”

“I don’t know if you noticed,” Larry said, “but I ain’t had a lot of options.”

French stopped writing but didn’t look up.

“You’ve been the only person inside my house since they come took Momma,” Larry said. “In a way, you were the closest thing I had to a friend till Wallace came.”

“Yeah, well. Can you tell me about him?”

Larry thought of the show about the serial killer and the killer who imitated him. He thought of how he used to catch snakes and bring them to school. He thought about the boy in his barn, the boy in church, that grown boy coming back a decade later in a stolen DIRECTV truck. He thought about Pabst beer and marijuana. The pistol, the only Christmas present he’d gotten in twenty-five years. “We were both lonesome,” he said. “I think that’s why he came to see me in the first place. I don’t think he had anybody to look up to, a daddy or uncle, and crazy as it sounds, he chose me.”

“You said he came seen you last, when?”

“Night before I got shot.”

“Said he said he’d done something?”

“Yeah, but he never told what. But I started to figure it might’ve been the Rutherford girl.”

“And how come you didn’t report this?”

“I tried to.”

“You called 32.”

“He came to see me,” Larry said. “Silas. After yall questioned me yesterday. All in a hurry, like he wasn’t supposed to be here. He said he knew I didn’t shoot myself or kill that girl. He wanted to know if I could tell him anything to help him figure out who really did it. I’d already started to put it together, that it must’ve been Wallace, that pistol, the cabin, but I didn’t tell Silas. I didn’t want to talk to him.”

“Well, I ain’t good at counseling,” French said, “but it strikes me it’s long past time the two of yall talked.” He picked up the restraints. “I got to put these back on for tonight. But I hope we’ll be able to get em off tomorrow. Once and for all.”

When he left, Larry lay amid his machines, thinking of Silas, how time packs new years over the old ones but how those old years are still in there, like the earliest, tightest rings centering a tree, the most hidden, enclosed in darkness and shielded from weather. But then a saw screams in and the tree topples and the circles are stricken by the sun and the sap glistens and the stump is laid open for the world to see.

Larry thought of Wallace, what he’d done to that poor girl, raping her, killing her, burying her in the dirt. Thinking what he, Larry, might have done to stop what happened, what he could’ve said, thinking in a way it
was
his fault, Wallace’s desires tangled and connected in his mind to what he thought Larry had done. Larry sending him home that night instead of understanding. If he was trying to emulate Larry, wasn’t it somehow Larry’s doing? His fault? And what if he’d told Silas what he knew when Silas had asked him? Would the outcome have been different? Wallace still alive, Silas with two working arms?

He was still trying to untangle it when his door was pushed open by the end of a rolling bed and two nurses wheeled in a sleeping black man, his left arm in a cast.

“You got a roommate,” a nurse said.

Silas.

sixteen

W
HEN SILAS OPENED
his eyes in the dark early hours of the morning, warm from drugs, he wasn’t surprised that he found himself flat on his back under a cast, by the hospital window. Beside him, Larry sat propped up in his bed, flicking through channels, not yet aware Silas was awake. For a moment Silas imagined it had always been like this, that they’d been normal brothers all the years of their rearing, both black or both white, sleeping side by side in matching twin beds. Instead here they were. Strangers. The sons of Carl Ott, injured, bandaged, like survivors of an explosion.

Except for the flickering TV, it was dark in the room, Skip still stationed by the door. Silas moved his heavy arm, suspended in traction over his chest, his fingers tingling, hot at the ends. In recovery they’d told him it would take a while, some hard rehab, those years of pitching, the damage he’d done then, and now this: his elbow not only broken but crushed, the tendons torn, muscles ripped, steel screws and pins holding it together. Yet he stood a chance of, eventually, getting most of the arm back, most of the control of his hand. Writing, things like that, would be the hardest. But he was lucky, he’d been told. Lucky Wallace had missed him with his .38 Special, having fired, in all, six times, hitting the dog once. “You got in a fight with a big-ass pit bull,” the ER doctor had said. “Judging from its bite radius, it’s amazing you’re alive.” “Yeah,” Silas had mumbled. “You should see the other dog.” He remembered Angie’s worried pucker in the ER lobby. He couldn’t tell if her sniffing was allergies or crying, but he was glad she was there, holding the hand that still worked.

After surgery, he’d asked the nurse to put him in with Larry Ott. She’d had to call French, and to Silas’s drowsy surprise, he’d okayed it.

Now Larry stopped his surfing on the late news, Channel 6, the cute redheaded anchor. She bid the listening world good day and led with what she called “a story of local violence and justice. Chabot Constable Silas Jones,” she reported, “nicknamed ‘32,’ while investigating a tip about a man who’d put a rattlesnake in a local woman’s mailbox, stumbled instead into a snake den himself.” Exterior shots of Wallace’s house—there was Silas’s Jeep—and then inside shots, the aquariums, that big-ass cottonmouth, the king snake, the rattler. “When Constable Jones attempted to question the suspect, now identified as Wallace Stringfellow, of Chabot, Stringfellow allegedly set loose his dog, a part pit bull, part Chow mix, on the police officer.” Stills of the dead dog lying in the mud, big as a hog, stills of bullet holes in the porch floor. “The officer was seriously injured and the dog killed when Stringfellow allegedly fired at the officer during the attack.”

What Silas remembered most vividly was that zombie mask. How different would their worlds have been if he’d followed Larry across the road toward his mother’s Buick way back when, that long-ago haunted house? What if he’d just reached out and took Larry’s shoulder, said, “Wait”?

The anchor was saying that Chabot Town Hall employee Voncille Bradford, unable to reach Constable Jones on her radio, notified the Gerald County Sheriff’s Department, who dispatched two cars to the scene. “Deputies found Jones unconscious in the house and bleeding seriously,” the anchor said. “There was also a three-foot-long diamondback rattlesnake near his leg. Deputies were able to subdue the snake without incident and Jones was taken by ambulance to Fulsom General Hospital, where he’s reportedly in stable condition.

“The house’s occupant, Wallace Stringfellow, fled into the woods and was pursued by deputies. After a brief gun battle, Stringfellow allegedly took his own life before deputies could apprehend him. No other injuries were reported.

“But here,” she said, her nostrils flaring the way Silas had always liked (he saw now because it reminded him of Angie), “is where the story takes a surprising turn. Deputies, searching Stringfellow’s property, discovered not only illegal drugs and drug paraphernalia but surprising evidence in another case.”

The television switched to French’s badly lit face, a hasty news conference outside Stringfellow’s house. “Searching Mr. Stringfellow’s residence,” French said, “we found a wallet that belonged to Tina Rutherford.”

“Rutherford is the Gerald County Ole Miss student,” the anchor filled in, “who, missing for nine days, was discovered by Constable Jones last week, brutally murdered and buried in a hunting cabin on the property of local business owner Larry Ott. Ott has been a suspect in the murder since.”

Back to French.

“We can’t comment on these findings yet—”

“Does this,” a reporter called, off camera, “clear Larry Ott?”

“As I say,” French repeated, “we can’t comment yet.”

“Not such a quiet rural community these days,” the anchor finished. “We’ll keep you updated as this story develops. And now to Afghanistan, where—”

Silas felt for the button that raised the top half of his bed. When he began to move, Larry muted the television.

“You’re a hero,” he said, watching Silas.

“Hey,” Silas said, better sitting up. “Ain’t we a pair?”

Larry looked back at the television and clicked the sound back on and began to surf channels again.

Silas lowered his chin and thought about how to say what he needed to say. He had no idea where to begin.

“Larry,” he said, “it’s something I need to tell you. Some
things.
”

Larry continued to click. “Go ahead.”

“Could you turn that TV off?”

Larry ignored him.

“Well”—Silas turning toward him—”seeing as you still attached to your bed, you ain’t got much choice but to listen.”

Which Larry did. Partway through, he muted the television. A few moments later he turned it off and the room was dark except for the watchful gray and green eyes of their machines. Talking, Silas could see how still Larry was as he heard about the picture of Alice holding him and about Silas’s visit to River Acres. He sat without moving until Silas stopped and it was the end, the end where the two lay now with their injuries side by side in a hospital, both of them silent, neither moving as the moon pushed the shadows of the room along the floor and walls with its soft yellow light. Silas felt flattened by the truth, or the telling of it, his lungs empty and raw and the spaces behind his eyes throbbing.

“We’re brothers,” he said.

“Half brothers.”

“Did you know?”

“No,” Larry said, then, “Yeah. Ever since yall got in our truck that morning, I knew something. Then when Momma give yall them coats…”

Silas remembering Larry’s breezy mother, so different from now, saying how Alice should have no trouble accepting the coats because she’d never minded using other people’s things.

“He wished you’d been the white one,” Larry said.

Silas thinking how Mrs. Ott had driven away and Silas had put on his coat and zipped it to his neck and buried his hands in the pockets, which were lined with fur. But his mother had continued to stand in the freezing air, holding the coat she’d been given, looking at it. “Ain’t you gone put it on, Momma?” he’d asked as they started to walk, her carrying the long gray coat as if someone had handed her a dead child. At some point Alice slipped one arm and then the other into the coat’s sleeves, she buttoned its buttons, starting at the top. Silas had followed her, still not seeing what an emblem of defeat, shame, loss, hopelessness, the coat was. With such gaps in his understanding, he saw very clearly how the boy he’d been had grown to be the man he was.

“You think it was better,” Larry said, “living with him?”

“No,” Silas admitted. “I speck it wasn’t.” Then he said, “It wasn’t easy without one, either. I used to wish I was you, all that land, all them guns. That warm house, that barn.”

“Bet you don’t wish it now,” Larry said.

Silas didn’t know how to answer but it didn’t matter. Larry was thumbing his buzzer.

The nurse walked into the room. “Yes?”

“How much trouble would it be,” Larry asked her, “to move me to another room?”

She blinked and then closed her mouth. “You. You want to change rooms?”

“Yeah. Please start whatever paperwork you have to. I’ll pay whatever extra it costs. I just want my own room. Please.”

“Well, he’s out tomorrow,” the nurse said, nodding to Silas, “he’ll be gone before we could move you. But if you want me to go to the trouble of starting the paperwork—”

“I do,” he said.