Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (14 page)

She was buttering a pan. “What’s that movie yall are seeing?”

He told her
The Long Riders
again and when she asked what it was about he told her again, keeping the impatience out of his voice and slipping another beer in his pocket.

“Boy,” his father’s voice called.

He stopped, cold in the door. “Sir?”

“Bring me a beer.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, slipping the can from his pocket. When he came back out of the kitchen Carl was squatting in front of the console changing the channel. He set the can on the coffee table near his chair and turned.

“Hey,” he said and Larry stopped.

“Sir?”

Carl was watching him. “Don’t give Cecil none of that money.”

“I won’t, Daddy.”

“You got any change, bring it back.”

“Yes, sir.”

He snuck one more beer, knowing that was all he dare take, his thigh cold and a wet smear on his pocket.

At supper Carl cut his roast into bites and Larry’s mother talked about their first dates, Larry barely chewing his rice and gravy.

“Slow down,” she said. “You don’t want to be early. A girl hates that.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Carl asked for the potatoes and she passed them.

“You remember that old tree, Carl?” she asked.

“Tree?”

“Oh you remember. It was before we got married. Over at the bluff?”

“Yeah.” He was mixing his roast into his rice and gravy, adding in the carrots and potatoes, making a big stew of it all. “Old Man Collins’s land.”

“That was his name. There was this tree,” his mother told Larry, “growing off the side of a bluff. What kind of tree was it, Carl?”

“Live oak.”

“Yes. You could see the roots all down the side of the bank, and below there was just this awful mess of briars, you remember, Carl?”

“Yeah,” he said, “would’ve took a dern bulldozer to move it.”

“That’s where Daddy and me used to go meet our friends, didn’t we, Carl? We’d build a bonfire and the boys would climb that old tree and swing off a rope they had up there, and we’d watch, all us girls.”

“Your momma never would do it,” Carl said.

“Well, it wouldn’t have been decent,” she said. “In a dress.”

They ate for a while, his mother filling his tea glass even though it was nearly full.

“You remember that time,” Carl said, “that I paid Cecil to swing off it, him drunk?”

She said no.

Larry watched his father.

“Oh, maybe you wasn’t there then,” winking at Larry, “maybe I had me some other gal.”

“Carl Ott.”

Larry said, “What happened?”

Carl pushed his plate away and stood up. He went to the refrigerator and got another beer, Larry nervous he would notice there were only five left. But Carl sat down and pulled his plate back and popped the tab.

“What you did,” he said, “was scale that tree. It was two big old limbs up there, the one you’d stand on and the other one, higher, where we’d tied that rope. We had a big old knot in it that you held on to and a loop for your foot, and you’d stand on the one branch and catch your breath, and then bail off over that gully. Best time was night, you’d be out there flying around in the dark like a dang bat.”

Larry imagined it, sailing out over the world, leaving your stomach back at the tree, weightless as you turned and turned, nearly stopping at the rope’s apex and swinging back where you grabbed the limb waiting like a hand.

“Now your momma’s right bout that briar patch down there,” Carl said. “Black-tipped thorns big as a catfish fin. You’d be better off jumping in a pit of treble hooks. Poison ivy, too. Like something out of one of your funny books.

“Now Cecil, he’s sacred of heights, right, don’t even like going up the steps on the school bus, and wouldn’t be caught dead in that tree. But the day I remember, it was six or eight of us boys out there and we’d been drinking beer and riding him all afternoon, calling him chicken, sissy, and finally bout dark I say, ‘Hey Cecil. I’ll give you a dollar if you go do it.’

“Cecil, he looks up that big old tree trunk and says, ‘That ain’t worth no so-and-so dollar.’

“‘Okay then,’ another fellow says, ‘make it two.’

“Cecil, he’s drinking his beer, says, ‘Boys, it’s some things can’t be bought. I’ll do it for three.’ ”

His father smiling telling it. “He makes us take the money out so he can see it. Ain’t wearing nothing but cut-off blue jeans, no shirt, no shoes, his whole family poor as niggers. Ever summer when school let out his momma’d cut off his long britches for short ones and save his shoes for one of his brothers. Went barefoot in summer, we all did, back then, feet so tough you could saw on em for a while with your knife before you felt it.

“Anyway, Cecil, he takes him another swig, he’s already drunk as Cooter Brown, pops his knuckles, looks like a demented Tarzan shinnying up the tree and straddling that lower limb, not looking down, bout ten feet off the ground but the bluff out there was probably twenty, twenty-five feet down, a good long fall.”

Carl paused and took a swallow of his beer. “Now I sidle up to one of the other fellows by the fire there and say, ‘Watch this,’ just about the time Cecil gets the rope in his hand. We can barely see him it’s so dark. Trying to stab his foot in that loop. You knew he was drunk otherwise he’d a never scaled that tree much less jump. But about then he lets out a whoop and bails right off that limb. He’s yelling his Tarzan yell but about halfway into it we hear it change and sort of trail off, all of us down there at the edge, looking out, trying to see. And what we see? The dang rope comes a-flapping back empty, without Cecil. We hear this scream out there in the dark then a crash, way the heck down in them briars. We all looking at each other with our mouths hanging open, thinking, we done killed Cecil.

“But about then the cussing starts, way down in the bottom, sounds like it’s about a half mile off. Son-of-a-blank and mother blanker and G. D. this and G. D. that—”

“Carl—” his mother said, trying not to smile.

“Well, by now we was all falling down on the ground we was laughing so hard, poor old Cecil, he didn’t even have him a layer of clothes to absorb the briar and thorns.

“And when he finally come climbing back up the bank bout twenty minutes later he looked like he’d been in a cage with a bobcat, welts ever where, cut all to pieces, bleeding, got a big ole knot on his head. We’d long since stopped making noise we’s laughing so hard, I couldn’t even catch my breath, red in the face, bout to choke, Cecil standing there in the firelight with briars sticking out of his hair, but then when he seen us laughing that fool starts to laugh himself, holding out his bloody palm for his money.”

His father was shaking his head and smiling, his mother laughing and Larry, too.

“Where’s that tree?” Larry said, thinking he might take Cindy. “Is the rope still there?”

Glancing at him, his father said, “Naw.”

“What happened to it?”

“They cut it down. Mill did.” He pushed his plate aside and rose from the table. “Enjoyed it,” he said, got another beer from the refrigerator, and went into the den.

Larry and his mother sat a moment, the television clicking on in the living room.

“You best go,” she said. “Don’t keep her waiting.”

HE GOT OUT
of the Buick at the Walker house, their car gone, which meant Cindy’s mother was at work. Cecil was waiting on the porch, smoking. He wore his usual greasy baseball cap and cut-off jeans and a dirty white T-shirt and no shoes.

“Hey, Cecil,” he said, crossing their yard, smiling thinking of him all tore up and bloody.

Cecil flicked his cigarette toward him. “Boy, it ain’t Cecil today ner ever again. It’s Mr. Walker now, got it?”

Larry stopped.

“I said you got it?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah what?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get over here,” Cecil said.

Larry crossed the yard, glancing at the windows of the little house, hoping Cindy might come out.

“Is it something wrong, Ce—” he said, nearing the porch, “—I mean, Mr. Walker?”

He stopped at the bottom step, hoping Cecil was joking, that any second that ignorant smile with its missing bottom tooth might break open, that he would elbow Larry and say, “I’m messing with you, Larry boy. You something else.”

But the fist that grabbed his shirtfront and pulled him up the stairs was as hard as a sledgehammer, this man no lacerated winking fool. Cecil spun him and pushed him face-first into the coarse wall, its ancient gray boards and their faintly sweet tickle in his nose. Something, a tear, blood, ran down his cheek. Cecil had one hand behind Larry’s neck and the other in the small of his back, his whiskers prickling his cheeks as he ground his face so close Larry could smell beer and cigarettes and the old meat in his teeth.

“If you so much as get a finger in her,” Cecil hissed, “I’ll cut your little pecker off myself.” And now the grip at his neck was gone, but before Larry could move the hand had grabbed his testicles.

Larry’s knees gave way but the hand was back at his neck, pressing him into the wall.

“You get me, sissy boy?”

Larry thought he might vomit. When Cecil moved his hand Larry collapsed. He heard shoes on the porch boards and tried to move.

“I said you get me? And if you say one word to your daddy—”

“Cecil!” It was Cindy, between them, pushing at her stepfather.

He laughed, stepped over Larry on his way to the door. “Go on out with that one,” he said. “He ain’t gone do you no good tonight, you little whore.”

The screen door slammed.

Cindy tried to help him up but he shook his head and lay breathing.

“I’ll be right back,” she said.

His eyes were closed but he felt water—not even tears, just water—spilling over his cheekbones, dripping off his jaw and chin. He burped several times, the hot roast, it was everything he could do not to throw up. He heard them yelling inside.

Then the screen door screaked and slammed and she was back, pulling him to his feet. He was aware of her against him, her sweaty perfume and cigarettes.

“Can you walk?”

“Yeah.”

They went toward the car.

“He’s a son of a bitch,” Cindy said. “I hate his guts.”

He opened the door for her. She slipped in without saying thanks and he closed it and limped around the back of the car watching the house. He got in. She was looking out the window, across the road.

“It’s half a hour,” he said, “fore it gets dark.”

She didn’t answer.

“What you want to do first?”

“This,” Cindy said. “Scootch over.”

He slid toward her on the seat, surprised they’d kiss here and not at the drive-in, but instead she opened her door, got out, and ran around the car and climbed in the driver’s side.

Cecil came back out, lighting a cigarette.

“You get the beer?”

“Just two.”

“Shit. Well?”

He reached under the seat and handed her the first.

She took it and glanced at him. “It’s warm.”

“Sorry.”

When she popped the tab it spewed foam on her. “Shit,” she said, flinging beer off her fingers.

She cranked up the Buick and spun off, flipping out her middle finger to her stepfather, and Larry looked back to where Cecil had left his porch and was walking quickly toward them, even as they peeled away throwing gravel.

Cindy sipped the beer and grimaced. She clicked on the radio and began turning the dial, settling on a station playing the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.” She lowered her window and had trouble lighting her cigarette and then rolled it back up and lit the smoke and lowered the window again, accelerating over the dirt road, holding the beer in one hand and the cigarette in the other. She had on a short skirt that lifted in the wind and he could see far up her legs, her thighs slightly apart and brown from all her lying out. If Carl found out somebody else drove the car, Larry would be in trouble. Would Cecil tell? Was he right now walking over to their house?

“I better drive,” Larry said. “Do you even have your license?”

“Listen,” she said, “you got to do me a favor.”

“Okay,” he said.

She drove without looking at him, sipping the beer. “I need to get someplace else tonight,” she said. “Other than the movie.”

“What you mean? Where?”

She glanced at him, smoke from her lips pulled out the window. “That bastard’ll only let me out of the house with you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. He thinks I’m safe with you.”

“You are,” Larry said.

“I know. That’s why I need to go to Fulsom. I got to go see him.”

“Who?”

“My boyfriend.”

He moved his legs carefully, his balls still tender. “But—”

“Listen,” she said. “You have to help me. Nobody else will. That Cecil’s after me, and if I can’t go see my boyfriend, I’ll never get away from him.”

“But,” he said.

She slowed as they approached the highway and turned without looking or using her blinker. She was going the opposite way from the drive-in.

He didn’t know what to say. The nausea was subsiding but another thing was taking its place.

“Cindy,” he said. “Can’t we just have our date?”

“I’m gonna tell you something,” she said. “Something nobody else knows.”

“Okay.”

“Something you got to swear to God you won’t ever tell nobody. Okay?”

“Swear.”

“I swear.”

“To God.”

“To God.”

She threw her cigarette out the window.

“I’m gonna have a baby,” she said, drinking more beer.

He didn’t know what to say. “A what?”

“Baby. An itty-bitty baby. And if Cecil finds out, he’ll kill me.”

“Who’s the, you know, daddy?” he asked. “Your boyfriend?”

She looked at him. “I can’t say. If Cecil finds that out, he’ll kill him, too.”

“What you need me to do?”

“I’m going to meet him so we can talk. We got to make us a plan. You just ride around awhile, but don’t let nobody see you. Go on to the movie, but not till the second one starts. They stop taking admission then and you can drive on in and won’t nobody see I ain’t in the car with you. Park in the back. My boyfriend’ll drop me off at the road to my house. You can pick me up there at eleven and drive me home. That way Cecil won’t never know.”