Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (21 page)

When she was awake, the senile, skeletal black lady in the bed beside Ina would watch him with eyes narrowed by suspicion, but not because of Larry’s past, he figured, but his skin color, a woman close to ninety whose family had left her here, and Larry would wonder how many wrongs she’d endured from white people in her almost-century of living. Sometimes he thought of Alice Jones, of Silas, how Larry’s mother had given them coats but not a ride in her car. How what seemed like kindness could be the opposite.

In May in Wal-Mart on his grocery run he bought a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. A few nights later he opened one of the cans and tasted it, then poured it down the sink. Some evenings he took the pistol Wallace had given him from its box in its hiding place in his closet and loaded it and aimed at buzzards floating overhead, but he never fired it.

In June two customers stopped by the shop, one a plumbing salesman from Mobile on his way north with an overheated radiator and the other a black woman from Memphis with a battery that wouldn’t stay charged. He smirked at himself in the bathroom mirror the night he’d replaced the battery and thought that with all this business he should hire some help. If Wallace ever came back, he’d offer him a job on the condition the boy stop drinking and smoking so much and never on the job, train him to be a mechanic, start simple, oil changes, tire rotations, work up to brake jobs, tune-ups, rebuilding carburetors. Larry wouldn’t live forever, and the shop had to go to somebody, maybe it would keep Wallace on the straight and narrow.

Sitting on his porch one late July evening he remembered the church his mother would visit occasionally after the Chabot Baptist had become “uncomfortable” for her. The First Century Church, a group of Holy Rollers north of Fulsom, spoke in tongues and had faith healing services and asked its members to fast for three-day periods at certain times of the year. Larry never accompanied her to the fabricated metal building they used, understanding it was easier for a congregation to accept the mother of an accused killer than the killer himself, but, hungry for God, he would abstain from food when she did. He found the first skipped meals the hardest, the hunger a hollow ache. The longer he went without eating, though, the second day, the third, the pain would subside from an ache to the memory of an ache and finally to only the memory of a memory. Until you ate you didn’t know how hungry you were, how empty you’d become. Wallace’s visits had shown him that being lonesome was its own fast, that after going unnourished for so long, even the foulest bite could remind your body how much it needed to eat. That you could be starving and not even know it.

“Dear God,” he prayed at night. “Please forgive my sins, and send me some business. Give Momma a good day tomorrow or take her if it’s time. And help Wallace, God. Please.”

ten

W
AS IT MONDAY
yet? He’d barely slept the week before, and now Silas couldn’t stop yawning even though the mill roared and drummed behind him like an angry city. Each passing face in its tinted glass regarded the constable with ire, this tall black man standing shadowed in his hat in the road with a whistle in his teeth, pickup trucks bumping over the railroad tracks and away from the mill while impatient cars and SUVs inched forward.

A week ago he’d found Tina Rutherford’s body under Larry Ott’s cabin and been in all the local papers and a few national ones, his picture this time, snapped by the police reporter as Silas stood by the cabin, watching agents from the Criminal Investigation Bureau in Jackson carry the body bag out. The article said that he’d been investigating Larry’s Ott’s shooting, a possible suicide attempt, and happened across the old cabin.

He’d have been a hero if he’d found her alive.

“You what?” French had asked, on the radio.

Panting, “I think it’s her, Roy.”

“Don’t touch a thing,” French ordered, “and don’t tell a soul. Just set up your perimeter and wait.”

He and the sheriff arrived sharing a four-wheeler not long after, search warrant in hand, prying the lock off the cabin door and moving the bed aside, French saying he’d walked this land himself, twice, both times missing the cabin, camouflaged as it was by kudzu. How in the world had Silas found it?

“Just lucky,” he’d lied.

The cabin was illuminated that night by harsh floodlights on tripods, heavy orange extension cords leading outside to where portable generators had been trailered in by four-wheelers. French filmed the two forensics experts from the C.I.B., wearing Tyvek suits and respirators, as they dug into the floor using entrenching tools to move the soft dirt. Half an hour later one raised his head and gave French a thumbs-up.

Standing in the corner by the stove, Silas had no way to catalog his emotions as what he’d been smelling for a while bubbled up out of his throat and he fled the house, out the door through the vines and ivy spot-lit and drawn back like curtains. The coroner and two deputies and the sheriff stood outside smoking and talking quietly. Silas gave them a weak nod as he lurched into the night, past where the lights could find him, and retched until his eyes burned and his gut hurt.

Later he went back in. Hand over his nose and mouth, he forced himself to look down at what they were discussing, photographing. She’d been thrown in naked on her stomach, he could tell, he could see part of her spine but not, thank God, what would have been her face. What he saw was not even a girl anymore, instead something from one of Larry’s horror books, black and melted-looking and dissolved. What drove Silas back out of the house the second time was not her spine with dirt in its intricate lines or her shoulder blades bound in strands of flesh or the matted green hair where skin from her skull had loosened, but the wrist one of the C.I.B. agents lifted in his heavy rubber glove, her small bony hand with its fingers cupped, showing French’s camera the nails that still bore chipped red polish, and, loose on one of the fingers, her class ring.

Now, his arms up to halt the trucks, Silas’s cell phone began to ring. It always did during traffic duty. Anything official came over his radio, phone calls were personal.

Fuck it, he thought. He dug out his cell.

“Officer Jones?”

“You got him.”

“This Brenda.”

“Who?”

“Up at River Acres? Nursing home?”

It was hard to hear for the traffic and he stuck a finger in his opposite ear.

“Hey,” he said. “I can’t talk now.”

“You wanted to know when Mrs. Ott was having a good day?”

“Yeah?”

“She having one now.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll get over there soon as I can.”

“You best hurry,” she was saying as he hung up.

THE MILL HAD
shut down for Tina Rutherford’s funeral. Hell, Chabot had. Black ribbons on the office and store doors, a long line of cars from the Baptist church following the hearse over the highway, Silas directing traffic for that, too, his post at the crossroads of 102 and 11, the four-way stop in his jurisdiction where the procession might get broken up by log trucks, shadows of birds flickering over the road, his uniform pressed and his hat over his heart as cars trolled by with their lights on, him standing, as he had not in years, at navy attention. The windows of the Rutherford limousine were tinted and he couldn’t see the girl’s parents, just a pair of white hands on the steering wheel. And after what must’ve been a hundred vehicles had rolled by, he’d driven to the church and sat in his Jeep, unable to go inside. Later he caboosed the procession to a graveyard miles out in the country, whites only buried there, lovely landscaped grounds shaded by live oaks with Spanish moss slanted in the wind like beards of dead generals. Nothing like the wooded cemetery where Alice Jones lay under her little rock on the side of a hill eaten up with kudzu, the plastic flowers blown over and strewn by the wind. During the Rutherford girl’s burial, a high bright sun and two tiny airplanes crossing the sky, he’d stood at the edge of trees, away from the grief—French had been the one to tell Rutherford his daughter was dead, and for that Silas had been grateful—while the white people near the open grave and the black ones surrounding them at a distance sang “Amazing Grace” accompanied by bagpipes and while Larry Ott lay in his coma, belted to his hospital bed, a deputy posted by the door.

Silas had asked that French let him have the midnight-to-six shift there. He wasn’t a deputy but it was in French’s power to use him. “Fine by me,” the CI had said. “Long as you can stay awake. Nobody else wants it, and we short-handed as it is. But I’m curious.”

“I need the money,” Silas said. Just one damn lie after another.

“Yeah right.”

Silas figured French thought he just craved more limelight, didn’t want to give up the case, wanted to stay in the loop. Which was partially true, and which also helped explain why Silas had gone by Larry’s house every day since he’d found the girl. The first day the deputy stationed there was sitting on the porch in Larry’s rocking chair with his feet crossed reading one of Larry’s books. Silas parked behind his cruiser and got out and nodded.

“What you up to, 32?”

“Feed the man’s chickens.”

The deputy followed him back and into the barn and watched Silas sling corn into the pen, the chickens pecking it up, Silas wondering if they’d think he’d gone over the edge if he fired up Larry’s tractor and pulled the cage to a fresh square of grass.

“I could do that,” the deputy said. “Save you running all the way out here.”

“I don’t mind.”

“You ought to collect the eggs, too. With no rooster in there they just gone rot.”

“You want em?”

“God almighty no. I bring home eggs from Scary Larry? My wife’d thow em at me.”

“You could probably sell em on eBay,” Silas said. “Or one of them serial killer Web sites.”

The deputy toed the lawn mower wheels. “What’s these here for?”

Silas explained as he filled the water tire and shooed the setting hens aside and collected half a dozen dry, brown, shit-speckled eggs, and carried them back to his Jeep. He began taking them to Marla at The Hub, who said she was glad to have them, eggs was eggs.

Nights he sat in a folding chair outside Larry’s door, a tall thermos of coffee and one of Marla’s greasy sacks by his feet, the overhead lights dim, Silas squeaking around on the chair and trying to convince himself of why he was here. He’d brought
Night Shift
from his office, and because his ass hurt walked the hospital hall reading the stories he never had as a kid.

They’d put Larry in a room at the end of a hall to keep gawkers away, Silas having to stand up a few times each shift to warn off shufflers, old men in robes clinging to their portable IV racks, or nurses from other floors and, once, a hugely pregnant woman in a robe and hospital flip-flops who told him she was in labor.

Silas said, “You a long way from the delivery room.”

Trying to look past him, Larry’s door cracked. “They said walk around.” She pushed her hands into the small of her back. “Try to get this little bastard kick-started.”

Larry was now a suspect—
the
suspect—in Tina Rutherford’s murder, and Silas had given French his tire molds and the evidence bags with the broken glass and roach in them. Larry’s keys, too. The newspapers and television stations following the story had dug up the scant facts on the Cindy Walker case, as well, how a quarter of a century earlier Larry had picked her up for a date and, hours later, come home without her. A new road had been slashed into Larry’s land and the cabin dismantled, the earth beneath it excavated, French hoping that the Walker girl’s bones might be recovered as well, closing that case. But despite the fact that no more bones had been found, reporters and newscasters were speculating that Larry Ott had attempted suicide because of what he’d done to Tina Rutherford and possibly Cindy Walker and, who knew, maybe other girls. There’d been one from Mobile missing for eleven years. Another from Memphis. Maybe these two—and, who knew, others—were buried somewhere on the last acres Larry Ott had refused to sell to the lumber mill.

Under orders not to talk to reporters, Silas didn’t tell Voncille about moonlighting as Larry’s guard, knowing she’d peer at him over her glasses, worry he might fall asleep at the wheel and ram his Jeep into a log truck. He imagined her saying he couldn’t burn his candle at both ends, or, for his own good, telling Mayor Mo.

But Angie was Silas’s main problem. Aside from being worried about him herself, she said she’d gotten so used to him staying over she had trouble sleeping without his long arms and legs all up in her space, not to mention his other long thing. They slept on their left sides, spooning, his left arm under her neck and reaching around so he could cup her right breast, his right arm over her side, cupping her left breast. He loved feeling her heart beat through it. He hadn’t seen her since their lunch at the diner, and knew he was using his guard duty as an excuse to avoid finishing their conversation. She called on his cell each night as she lay in bed and talked in his ear, detailing her day of wrecks and heart attacks, of Tab, an old hippie, ranting against the war in Iraq. She had one sister over there in a base east of Baghdad, working in the pharmacy. Oh, and her other sister was pregnant again, by a different man. She told him the movies she’d watched, how much she liked the pastor at her church. She was on nights Saturday and Sunday, so Silas promised to take Monday night off and knew he’d have to tell her something and worried it might be the truth. The rest of it. He’d avoided it so long himself it sometimes didn’t even seem real, what had happened in 1982. He wondered how it would feel to tell her everything, say who he really was, and he worried that if he did, she might start to see him differently.

When he nodded off in his chair he’d get up and pace the hospital hall. Sometimes go into Larry’s room, stare at him where he lay twined in among his machines and wires and tubes and cords. And the leather restraints on his wrists. He looked helpless and weak but was, Silas had been told, stable. His chest wound clear of infection, healing accordingly. Draining well but Larry still using a catheter, still on fluids.

But he was big news.

After the initial reports, before and after the funeral, the vans from Jackson, Meridian, Mobile, and even Memphis had camped out in the hospital lot, their satellites aimed at the sky, but now they were gone, this news fading as Larry slept and the world continued to supply new horrors, crashing planes, suicide bombers, kids shooting other kids. He supposed when—if—Larry ever regained consciousness, the parking lot would fill up again.

Each evening when he arrived, already yawning, he asked Skip, the deputy on evenings, if anybody had been by. French, the deputy reported. Old Lolly, the sheriff, once in a while. Doctors and nurses. Patients. Now and then a reporter.

“They feeding him through a tube,” Skip said. “You ask me, they ought to just let the cocksucker starve.”

Silas had unfastened Larry’s leather restraints the first night, like undoing a belt, but Skip told him the next evening that one of the shift nurses had complained and that the restraints were to remain on.

Sometimes when the nurses were gone Silas would stand over Larry and watch him, his IV machine flashing its faint lights and the heart monitor beeping or whistling, the ventilator inhaling, exhaling. He wondered how broken Larry was by the events of his life, how damaged. What would Silas tell him if he ever woke up? Sometimes he couldn’t help but wish he wouldn’t.

“Larry?” he would say.

No response.

“Larry?”

The second night as rain fell outside the window he glanced at the door. Then whispered, “I don’t know if you can hear me, Larry, but when you wake up it’s gone be bad.” He came around the bed and rolled up a stool and put his face near Larry’s and spoke directly in his ear. “Don’t tell em nothing, Larry, you hear? Hear? They gone try to get you to confess, but don’t say nothing, Larry. Hear? Nothing.”

On his way out of the hospital, somebody called, “Hey, Constable Jones?”

The information desk.

“Jon without an
h
.” Silas veered over and the old man handed him a Styrofoam cup of coffee.

“Thanks. I thought you was afternoons.”

“I fill in when they let me. Take my word for it, son. Don’t ever retire. You’re young, it ain’t enough hours in the day and you sleep through most of em anyways. But once you get to be my age, sleep’s a memory and you beg just to get to work for free.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“No, you won’t. Or when you do it’ll be too late.”

Silas yawned, checked his watch.

“You asked about anybody else coming to see Mr. Ott, didn’t you? Well, one of the other volunteers, he remembered it was somebody came by, not long after you did that first day. Before all this brouhaha. Reason he didn’t tell me sooner is that some of us are a tad on the senile side. If I could remember his name I’d tell you.”