Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (5 page)

“Shit,” he said. Then said, “Sorry,” noticing the kids.

He eased the shovel up again, Irina still clinging to his arm. The snake struck and he pinned its neck against the edge of the box and then yanked it out and flung it on the ground where it coiled to a pile, inflating and deflating and its tail a blur and rattle rising.

“Yall watch out now,” he said, the dogs closing in. “And try to get them dogs back.”

“Shoot it,” one of the boys said as he and the others began to kick the dogs away.

“No need for that.” He moved the spade to its neck, its body wrapping itself up the pole. Pinning the head, he put his heel on the shovel and pressed it against the pavement and sawed at its head until it hung by a shred of skin, the body flopping and writhing, rattle still buzzing.

“Is it dead?” a boy asked.

“Yeah. But yall be careful.” Suddenly he heard Larry’s voice when he said, “That head’ll still kill you. Them fangs is like needles.”

“Can I have the rattles?” the mullet boy asked.

Silas looked at the women.

“Fine with me,” the fat one said. “His birthday’s next month.” She winked to let him know it was a joke, and he bent to work cutting the dry cartilage off with the shovel and kicked it out of the snake’s range. The boy picked it up and smelled it, then ran off shaking it, the other boys and the dogs following.

With the shovel, Silas scooped the diamondback, two feet long and heavy, still moving a little, and carried it across the road and flung it over the bobwire fence into the woods. Olivia left, declining to take the wet envelope, but Silas stayed around, getting statements awhile, making notes, thinking Shannon might come yet, trying not to flirt too much with Irina. He found himself telling the story about the time he tried to run over a snake, big brown cottonmouth with yellow stripes on it. In that very Jeep yonder. This after he’d just got back down here from Oxford.

“Oxford,” Irina said.

“Hush,” Marsha said, “and let him finish.”

“You can’t just roll over no snake and go on,” Silas said, tipping back his hat, “cause that’ll just make em mad. You gotta back over it and spin your tires if you want to kill it.” That’s what he was trying to do, he said, braking in the middle of the road, backing up, trying to stop on it. When he had its tail under his back driver-side tire, the snake biting the rubber, he popped the clutch. But instead of spinning out dead, the moccasin spun up, alive, into his wheel well. Silas drove forward leaning out with the door open, waiting for it to drop, to fall out from under his Jeep. “It never did,” he said.

“Shit,” Irina said. “What happened?”

“It died up in there. In the rocker panel. Smelled bad for two months. Hottest part of the summer. Sometime,” he said, “driving along, I swear I can still smell it.”

The women were smiling.

“Served you right,” Irina said.

When he glanced at his watch his smile left. He’d have to hurry to make it back to Chabot for the five-thirty shift change. He couldn’t miss it again. Miss Voncille’s hair was at stake.

“Ladies,” he said, touching the brim of his hat, presenting Irina with one of the cards he’d paid for himself. “Call if yall remember anything else.”

“Oh we will,” Irina said.

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER
he stood on the road in front of the railroad tracks in the orange vest and his sunglasses, so sweaty his hat was heavy, his uniform a shade darker where it stuck to his belly. To his left the mill grumbled and droned and saws screamed out like people burning in a fire. He blew his whistle and held up his hands for both lanes of cars to stop, then stepped off the hot pavement and waved on the line of pickups waiting to leave the mill yard, dirty men with hard-hat hair lighting cigarettes in their air-conditioned cabs, some heading over to the Chabot Bus for a beer, which Silas wouldn’t mind doing himself.

His cell phone began to buzz. He wasn’t supposed to answer during the shift change and stood fanning the trucks on, the drivers in cars on the highway glaring at him as if he’d chosen to be out here screwing up their day, as if this had been his life’s goal, the reason he’d destroyed his arm pitching college baseball and joined the navy and then, discharged, gone to the police academy in Tupelo and spent ten years babysitting students at Ole Miss, breaking up frat parties, manning the gate at football games, giving DUIs, years of preparation to come ruin their day. He’d thought this job would be different.
Constable,
the Internet ad had said,
of a hamlet.
He’d had to look up
constable
and
hamlet,
but he liked both words and the job had promised police work, flexible hours, a vehicle.

More horns blared and he waved harder, each driver creeping his truck over the raised tracks. To further complicate things—a loud whistle from the north—here came the two-thirty freight train from Meridian, forty-five minutes late, rounding the curve under its storm of smoke and slowing as it readied to stop and be loaded with logs and poles. Blowing his whistle, Silas stepped in front of an oncoming truck, a big Ford F-250, with his hand up, and the driver, who happened to be the mill foreman, slammed on his brakes then rolled down his window.

“You could’ve let me through,” he said. “Shit, 32, I’m going fishing.”

Silas bit down on his whistle as the train approached, its shadow casting him in a moment of shade.

“God damn it,” the foreman said and leaned on his horn.

Silas ignored him and took off his hat and spat out the whistle so it hung at his chest on its string, fanned himself with the hat. His cell was buzzing again. Fuck it, he thought and dug it out. Mayor Mo wanted to fire him for talking on the phone, let him.

“32?” It was Angie.

“Yeah?”

The phone crackled. “32,” she said again. “We at Larry Ott’s house like you said?”

“Yeah?”

“Oh my God,” she said.

three

T
HE FIRST THING
he noticed was that they didn’t have coats. It was just after dawn in March 1979, a Monday, Larry’s father driving him to school and dragging a fume of blue exhaust behind his Ford pickup. The spring holidays had come and passed, but now a freakish cold snap had frozen the land, so frigid his mother’s chickens wouldn’t even leave the barn, the evergreens a blur outside the frosted truck window and him lost in yet another book. He was in eighth grade and obsessed with Stephen King and looked up from
Salem’s Lot
when his father braked.

The pair of them was standing at the bend in the road by the store, a tall, thin black woman and her son, about Larry’s age, a rabbit of a boy he’d seen at school, a new kid. He wondered what they were doing here, this far out, before the store opened. Despite the cold the boy wore threadbare jeans and a white shirt and his mother a blue dress the wind curved over her figure. She wore a cloth around her hair, breath torn from her lips like tissues snatched from a box.

His father passed without stopping, Larry turning his head to watch the boy and his mother peer at them from outside.

Larry turned. “Daddy?”

“Ah dern,” said his father, jabbing the brakes. He had to back up to meet them, then he leaned past Larry on the truck’s bench seat (an army blanket placed over it by his mother) and rattled the knob and they were in in a burst of freezing air that seemed to swirl even after the woman had shut the door. They were all forced together, Larry against the boy on one side and his father on the other, uncomfortable because he and his father almost never touched, awkward handshakes, whippings. For a moment the four sat as if catching their breath after a disaster, the truck idling. Larry could hear the boy’s teeth clacking.

Then his father said, “Larry, thow a log on that dad-blame fire. Warm these folks up.”

He turned the heater to
HI
and soon the black boy beside Larry had stopped shivering.

“Alice,” said his father, pulling onto the road, “introduce these younguns.”

“Larry,” the woman said, as if she knew him, “this is Silas. Silas, this is Larry.”

Larry stuck out his calfskin glove. Silas’s slender brown hand was bare, and despite the quick soul shake it gave, Larry felt how cold his skin was. If he gave him one of his gloves, they could each have one warm hand. He wanted to do this, but how?

They smelled like smoke, Silas and his mother, and Larry realized where they must live. His father owned over five hundred acres, much of it in the bottom-right corner of the county, and on the southeast end, a half a mile from the dirt road, if you knew where to look, was an old log hunting cabin centered along with a few trees in a field a few acres across, just a little bump on the land. Bare furnishings inside, dirt floor, no water or electricity. Heated by a woodstove. But when had they moved in? And by what arrangement?

His father and the woman called Alice were talking about how cold it was.

“Freeze my dad-blame can off,” his father said.

“Mm hmm,” she said.

“You ever seen the like?”

“No, sir.”

“Not even in Chicago?”

She didn’t answer, and when the silence became awkward, his father turned the radio up and they listened to the weatherman saying it was cold. It was going to stay cold. Leave your tap water running tonight so your pipes wouldn’t freeze.

Larry stole a look at the boy beside him and then pretended to read his book. He was terrified of black kids. The fall after the summer he turned eleven he had entered the seventh grade. Recent redistricting of county schools had removed him from the public school in Fulsom and forced him to go to the Chabot school, where 80 percent of the student population (and a lot of the teachers and the vice principal) were black, mostly kids of the men who worked in the mill or cut trees or drove log trucks. Everything Larry couldn’t do—spike a volleyball, throw a football or catch one, field a grounder, fire a dodgeball—these black boys could. Did. They manipulated balls as if by magic, basketballs swishing impossibly, baseballs swiped out of the air, fierceeyed boys hurling and curving through their lives as smoothly as boomerangs. None read, though, or understood Larry’s love for books. Now he glanced over and saw Silas’s lips tense and his eyes moving across Larry’s page.

“What grade you in?” Larry asked.

Silas looked at his mother.

“Tell him,” she said.

“Eighth,” he said.

“Me, too.”

In Fulsom his father dropped the boys off at school, Alice climbing out and then Silas, Larry aware how unusual, inappropriate, it was for black people to be getting out of a white man’s truck. As he slid across the seat Larry glanced back at his father, who faced the road. Silas had disappeared—probably as aware as Larry of the oddity of their situation—and Larry stepped past the woman called Alice, seeing for the first time, as she smiled at him, how lovely she was.

“Good-bye,” she said.

“Bye,” he mumbled and walked off with his books. He glanced back, once, and saw his father saying something, the woman shaking her head.

At lunch in the cafeteria he looked for Silas among the black boys who occupied the two center tables but didn’t see him. He had to be careful because if they caught him looking they’d beat him up later. As usual, he sat with his tray and milk a few feet down from a group of white boys. Once in a while they’d invite him over. Not today.

His mother picked him up that afternoon, as usual, and, as usual, quizzed him about his day. She seemed surprised about their morning passengers. She asked where they’d been standing.

“They didn’t have coats,” he said. “They were freezing.”

“Where do they live?” she asked.

He sensed he’d said too much already, though, and said he didn’t know. For the rest of the ride, his mother was quiet.

WHEREVER ALICE AND
Silas lived, they were there the next morning, same place, same time. His father pulled the truck over and the smell of woodsmoke blew into the cab with the icy wind and soon they all rode silently side by side. Larry opened
Salem’s Lot
and held it so that he was sure Silas would notice. It was the best part, where the girl came back as a vampire, floating there at Ben’s window.

Wednesday and Thursday passed, each day the colored people waiting, his mother picking him up in the afternoon and quizzing him on the morning trip. Did the woman seem friendly to his father? How did his father act? Was he stiff, the way he could be, was, most of the time? Or was he— “Why do you care?” Larry asked.

She didn’t answer.

“Well? Momma?”

“I don’t care,” she said. “I’m just curious about your day.”

“I think,” he said, worried he’d hurt her, “they live in that old place down in the southeast acreage.”

“Do they,” his mother said.

At supper that night he could tell something was wrong. She’d told Larry to feed the chickens when he’d already done it and his father had to be reminded to say the blessing. Now neither of his parents spoke as they sat around their dining table and passed squash and meat loaf. And just before she rose to gather their dishes, his mother announced that she would drive Larry to school the following day, in her car.

His father glanced at Larry. “How come, Ina?”

“Oh,” she said. “In the morning that gas man’s coming and I can’t talk to him. You’ve got to tell him to come every week, every week, and make sure he understands. Besides—” She took the dishes to the sink and returned to the table. “I’ve got some things to return at Bedsole’s.”

His father nodded, then looked at Larry before pushing back from the table and bending into the refrigerator for a Budweiser and opening it on the way to his chair to watch the news.

“Carl?” His mother set a pie plate down, a little hard.

“Enjoyed it,” he called back.

As Larry dried the plates his mother handed him, he understood that he had betrayed a trust between himself and his father, and the next morning, in his mother’s Buick, she turned at the bend in the road where Alice and Silas waited, shivering, holding on to each other. As his mother slowed, Larry saw Silas push away from Alice, just as he would have done. Her drawn face pretty despite how the cold made her lips tiny, her skin the color of coffee the way women drank it, her hair in a scarf but her eyes large and frightened.

“Honey,” said Larry’s mother, “roll your window down, please.”

Without looking away from the woman, Larry turned his window crank.

“Hello, Alice,” his mother called as the glass descended.

“Miss Ina,” Alice said. She stood very straight. Silas had stepped back, turned his face away.

Larry’s mother reached over the seat behind them and withdrew a paper grocery bag. From it she took two heavy winter coats, old ones from their hall closet, one of hers for Alice and one of Larry’s for Silas. “These should fit,” she said, funneling them out the window, Larry’s hands poking at the coats, warm from the car’s heater, from the heat of their closet before that and before that the heat of their bodies, now going out to the bare black fingers in the cold.

Alice held her coat, didn’t even put it on. For a moment Silas glared at both Larry and his mother. Then he stepped back.

“You’ve never minded,” Larry’s mother said to Alice, looking hard at her, “using other people’s things.”

Then she pressed the accelerator and left them holding their coats in Larry’s side mirror.

In a moment his mother touched his knee. “Larry.”

He looked at her. “Ma’am?”

“Roll up your window,” she said. “It’s freezing.”

THEY WERE NEVER
there again, Silas and his mother. And now Larry and his father, who’d had little to say before, rode the miles of dirt road and two-lane blacktop without a word, just the radio’s agricultural report and the heater blowing on their feet.

He understood that Carl liked most everyone except him. From an early bout of stuttering, through a sickly, asthmatic childhood, through hay fever and allergies, frequent bloody noses and a nervous stomach, glasses he kept breaking, he’d inched into the shambling, stoop-shouldered pudginess of the dead uncles on his mother’s side, uncles reduced to the frames of their boxed photographs now, whom Carl wouldn’t have on the walls. One uncle, Colin, had visited when Larry was five or six years old. At supper the first night Uncle Colin had announced he was a vegetarian. Seeing his father gape, Larry assumed that word, whatever it meant, meant something awful. “Not steak?” his father asked. “Nope.” “Pork chops?” “Never.” His father shaking his head. “Surely chicken?” “Rarely,” the smiling uncle said, “which doesn’t mean rare. Oh,” he went on, picking at his cornbread, “I’ll eat me a piece of fish once in a while. Tilapia. Nice mahimahi.” Carl by this point had put down his fork and knife and glared at his wife, as if she were to blame for the crime against nature sitting at their table.

Also, Uncle Colin was the only person Larry had ever seen wear a seat belt, as they rode to church (where he would refuse the communion saltine and grape juice). The seat belt irked his father more than Uncle Colin’s not eating meat, because, though his father never said it, Larry knew he considered seat belts cowardly. Larry had become an expert at reading his father’s disapproval, sidelong looks, his low sighs, how he’d shut his eyes and shake his head at the idiocy of something. Or someone.

“Yall look just alike,” Larry’s mother said at dinner on Uncle Colin’s last night, looking from her brother to her son.

Larry saw that Carl was sawing at his venison.

“My little doppelgänger,” Colin said.

Carl looked up. “What’d you say? Your little what?”

Uncle Colin tried to explain that he hadn’t just referred to his sexual organ, but Carl had had enough and left the table.

“Doppelgänger,” he said, glancing at Larry.

Rather than his father’s tall, pitcher’s physique and blond curls and dark skin and green eyes, Larry got Uncle Colin and his mother’s olive skin and straight brown hair and brown eyes with long lashes which, attractive on women, made Larry and Uncle Colin soft and feminine, seat belt users who ate tilapia.

In addition, Larry was mechanically disinclined, his father’s expression. He could never remember whether counterclockwise loosened a bolt or what socket a nut took, which battery cable was positive. When he was younger, his father had used this disinclination as a reason not to let him visit the shop, saying he might get hurt or ring off a bolt, and so, for all those Saturdays, all those years, Larry stayed home.

Until his twelfth birthday, when his mother finally convinced Carl to give Larry another chance, and so, anxious, afraid, in old jeans and a stained T-shirt, Larry accompanied Carl to Ottomotive on a warm Saturday. He swept and cleaned and did everything Carl told him to and more. He liked the shop’s rich, metallic smell, the way oil and dust caked on the floor in crud you had to scrape off with a long-handled blade, a thing he enjoyed for the progress you witnessed, the satisfaction of driving the blade under the moist scabbery and shucking it away. He also liked cleaning the heavy steel wrenches and screwdrivers, the various pliers and channel locks and ball-peen hammers, the quarter-and half-inch ratchet and socket sets, the graceful long extensions and his favorite socket, the wiggler. He loved wiping them dry on red cotton shop rags and placing them in a row and sliding the oily-smooth drawers shut. He liked lifting cars by pumping the hand jack and letting them down by flipping the lever, the hydraulic hiss. He liked rolling creepers over the floor like large, flat skateboards to stand them against the back wall, liked how the drop lights hung from their orange cords, liked using GoJo to clean his hands.

But he loved best when the Coca-Cola truck had left six or seven or eight of the red and yellow wooden crates stacked by the machine, the empties gone and new bottles filled with Sprite, Mr. Pibb, Tab, Orange Nehi, and Coca-Colas, short and tall. Larry relished unlocking the big red machine, turning the odd cylinder of a key and the square lock springing out. When you spun this lock the entire red face of the machine hissed open and you were confronted with a kind of heaven. Long metal trays beaded with ice were tilted toward the slot where they fell to your waiting hand. The rush of freezing air, the sweet steel smell. The change box heavy with quarters and dimes and nickels. Taking bottles from the cases, he’d place each one in its rack, considering the order, taking care not to clink.