Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (22 page)

He waited for Silas to smile. “Reporter?”

“Naw, it’s been plenty of them, but that wasn’t what you wanted, was it?”

“No.”

“This fellow, didn’t say who he was. Just asked if Larry—used his first name—had ever woke up.”

“What’d he look like?”

“Marlon, that was the other guy, he said he was early twenties, skinny, white. Said he was, what was the word he used? Oh, he said he was ‘kinda stringy-looking.’”

“Thanks,” Silas said. He glanced behind him. “Yall got cameras in here? Maybe a video of him?”

“Supposed to. But it’s been broke awhile. They tell me it’s in the budget to get it fixed, but you know how budgets work. Get money for one thing, takes it from another.”

“Got that right,” Silas said.

When he went by Larry’s that afternoon, a new deputy and a plainclothes officer from the C.I.B. were in the house going through Larry’s papers. Both men came out and watched him feed the chickens as if it were an exhibition. Each day was different at Larry’s, different lawmen, French there the next afternoon, shaking his head at the farmer constable.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

Flinging in the feed. “What you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

Silas just shrugged and went to get the eggs. He looked out at French, regarding him from the other side of the wire, and told him about the stringy-looking man. French said without more than that, the tape, say, or an ID, it sounded like a dead end. “Stringy-looking?” he said. “Hell, that’s practically a goddamn demographic in southeast Mississippi.”

The next day, when Silas drove out, he found the house and barn deserted, Sheriff’s Department seals on all doors, including the barn’s, warning intruders that this was a crime scene.

“How am I supposed to feed yall?” Silas asked out loud. “Or get them eggs?”

No answer from the chickens, gathered across the wire, waiting, clucking, scratching. They seemed used to him, all right, looking at him their sideways way, and he was beginning to think he could tell them apart.

He drove that evening to Wal-Mart and bought two bags of chicken feed and put them in the back of his Jeep and was out there that night slinging in the moonlight. He filled an old milk jug with water from the spigot at the back of Larry’s house and sloshed it over in a bowl so they could drink. The egg dilemma was still unsolved.

Fuzzy days found him asleep in the Jeep while speeders went unabated on the highway below. The Jeep took longer and longer to crank. One day he swung by the auto shop at the mill and the mechanic opened the hood and whistled. “If this thing was a horse we’d a done shot it,” he said. He told Silas to bring it in early next week and leave it a few days, he’d see if he could order parts from the salvage yard. “Carburetors,” he said nostalgically.

After his evening patrol, Silas would roil semiconscious in his sweaty sheets waiting for the alarm to buzz so he could go the hospital and watch Larry sleep. One night he sat dozing in his guard chair and woke himself by snoring. He blinked and looked down the hall and saw a stringy-looking shadow standing watching him. Then it was gone. He rose and ran past the other rooms to the end where the hall was empty. Somebody down past a Coke machine moved and Silas said, “Wait,” and began to run down the hall.

He turned the corner and nothing. More halls. Door to stairs. He eased a bit farther along the hall, then turned and went back to Larry’s room, shaking his head, wondering if he’d made it all up.

The rest of the night he stayed awake.

NOW, MONDAY, HE
finished the traffic. Yawning, he hoped Mrs. Ott was still having a good day at the nursing home.

In City Hall, Voncille was on the phone, solitaire on her computer. He laid his hat and sunglasses on his desk among the day’s scattered paperwork and got his coffee cup and filled it at the water fountain and drank it so fast it made his neck hurt.

“That was Shannon from the paper,” Voncille said when she hung up, rolling her chair over to hand him a message. “Said she wants to talk to you about your trifecta, as she called it. Reckon she figures it’d make for a good feature story. What an outstanding constable you are.”

“Right. I’m headed over to River Acres.”

“What for?”

“See Mrs. Ott.”

“Larry’s mother?”

“Yeah.”

“Well. You look like you ain’t slept in a month,” she said. “But I’m glad you finally stopped by. If you don’t go out and write some tickets, the mayor’s gone have your head.”

AT FIVE-THIRTY, AT
River Acres, he climbed out of the Jeep, which continued to run as it had been doing lately, like a stutterer.

Inside, Brenda was reading a magazine at her desk. “She tried to call her son on his cell phone,” she said, “and when nobody answered she started getting upset.”

He pictured the phone lighting up, rattling in the box in French’s office, vibrating the pictures and all the other evidence.

“How is she now?”

“Little calmer. Good thing about Alzheimer’s is they don’t stay mad long.”

He thanked her and said he remembered the way.

Entering the room he was hit by the stink of feces. Ina Ott lay flat on her back with her right hand fluttering, flies buzzing in the bright light through the window. The tiny black woman beside her was asleep.

“Mrs. Ott?” Silas took off his hat.

She looked up at him without recognition. “I’ve messed myself,” she said. “Where’s Larry?”

He saw the dark stain around the sheets at her crotch, her useless hand laying right in it.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I’ll get a nurse,” he said, glad to leave the room and its smell.

“Second shift’s coming on in half a hour,” Brenda told him, hardly looking up. “They’ll clean her.”

“How long’s she been laying like that?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You what?”

“Laying’s all she can do.”

“She ain’t got to lay in her own stink,” he said.

“You don’t smell so good yourself.”

“If her son come up and seen her like that what would yall do?”

“Last I heard he ain’t going nowhere.”

“This how yall treat folks?”

Brenda gave him a sharp look. “Nigger, don’t come up in here telling me how to do my job. We got forty-five old people here and we get to em best we can. Come in here all high and mighty just cause you got your picture in the paper?”

“Fuck this,” he said and went back down the hall.

He found a closet with clean sheets and a box of disposable wipes and snatched the sheets off the rack and put the wipes under his arms and went looking for an orderly.

A man standing by a broom pointed him down the hall and he pushed through a glass door in the back and found Clyde, leaning against the wall, smoking.

“You best come with me,” Silas said. “Now. Mrs. Ott done had a accident.”

“Chill out, bro,” he said. “I’m on my break.”

Silas got up in his face. “You go clean Mrs. Ott up right now or I’m gone take your sorry ass back to the jail.”

“For what?”

Silas plucked the cigarette from Clyde’s lips and threw it down and pushed the sheets and wipes into his arms. “I’ll think of something.”

He stood outside her door, just in sight of Clyde, making sure he treated her right.

“I’m sorry,” he heard her say. “I messed myself again.”

“It’s okay, Mrs. Ott. We getting you all clean now. It’s somebody out there to see you.”

“My son?”

“Naw, ain’t him. Somebody else.”

“It’s not true,” she said, “what they’re saying?”

Clyde came out wearing rubber gloves and carrying the soiled sheets and her nightgown in a plastic bag. “You happy now, motherfucker?” he said.

Ignoring him, Silas went in and she looked better, her bed raised and the smell nearly gone, the window opened.

“Mrs. Ott?”

She turned toward him where he stood holding his hat. Her good eye widened but otherwise she showed no surprise at a big strange black constable in her room.

“I’m Silas Jones, ma’am,” he said. “People call me 32.”

“32?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She turned her head to regard him from another angle. Wedged between the beds, a small table held nothing but a worn-out Bible. Out the window, past the black woman still asleep and beyond the chain-link fence, cars on the highway. Her dying view.

“I may have met you,” she said. “But I’m forgetful.”

“Yes, ma’am. I come seen you once before, about your son. I used to be friends with him, a long time ago.”

“He’s okay, idn’t he?”

“Well,” he said.

“I called him but nobody answered.”

Silas looked down at his hat. Maybe this was why police wore hats, for the distraction they provided when you had to tell somebody their daughter had not only been strangled to death but beaten and raped first, or to tell a woman her son had not only been shot but maybe had shot himself, and that if he ever woke up he’d be charged with killing the girl.

“Well,” he said again.

“He didn’t have many friends,” Mrs. Ott said. When he looked up from his hat she was watching him.

“I came to ask you about my mother,” he said.

“What’s her name?”

“Alice Jones.”

“Who?”

He took the photograph of her from his wallet and showed it to her. Alice holding Larry as a baby. Silas realized that she must have been pregnant in the picture, though she didn’t show.

“Why, that’s my boy,” Mrs. Ott said. “And that was our maid, I can’t recall her name.”

“Alice,” he said.

“Yes. Alice Jones. But she had to leave.” Mrs. Ott lowered her voice but continued to look at the picture. “A nice colored girl, but loose. She got herself in a family way and wasn’t married. I don’t know what ever happened to her. What was her name?”

“Alice,” he said gently. “She died a while back. Had a heart attack in her sleep.”

She reached out to touch his hand, laid there on the side of her bed. “I’m so sorry.”

“Reason I came,” Silas said, “was to ask you if you know who her baby’s daddy was.”

“What’s your name again?”

“32.”

“That’s not a name. What did your mother call you?”

“Silas.”

“I remember you, Silas. You were Larry’s friend.”

“Yes, ma’am, I was.”

For a long time she watched him and he saw himself come and go in her eyes, she knew him then she didn’t. Then, for a moment, she did again.

“Silas?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“I’m frightened.”

“Of what?”

Shaking her head. “I can’t remember.”

They sat. The other old woman in the bed by the window shifted in her sleep and made a low noise.

He watched Mrs. Ott’s good eye brim, a tear collect and fall and fill one of her deep wrinkles and never emerge at the bottom. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Ott,” he said and saw he’d lost her, she was looking at him as if she’d never seen him.

“Clyde?” she said.

“No, ma’am. It’s Silas.”

“Who?”

He sat for a while longer, finally admitting that yes, he was Clyde. He let her ask about her chickens and he began to tell her how Eleanor Roosevelt kept trying to lay with no success and how Rosalynn Carter was getting fatter and Barbara Bush had lain two eggs in one night, and finally, as the chickens moved in their pen, smudges in her memory, she closed her eyes and began to sleep. He turned his fingers to free them of her brittle grip and took, from the sheets where it had fallen, the photograph. He fitted it in her good hand and rose and left her in the light from the door and went down the hall and outside to his Jeep.

HE WAS LATE
for dinner with Angie, her turning her cheek to catch his kiss there and leaving him standing by her open apartment door as she descended the stairs toward her car. He wore jeans and a white button-down shirt. He’d left his hat, which she only liked if it came with the uniform.

She drove, unusual for them, a sign she was peeved. Ten minutes later, he sat across from her in a booth in the Fulsom Pizza Hut while the Braves lost on the television on the far wall.

“Baby,” he finally said over their medium supreme, “what is wrong?”

“What you mean?”

“You know what I mean. You all quiet.”

“Maybe cause I ain’t see you all week and you late and don’t even call? I put on my best jeans and you ain’t even say I look nice?”

“You look nice.”

She shook her head. “I know I do, you ain’t got to tell
me.
My point is, where are you?”

“I’m tired’s all.”

She lifted her pizza and took a bite and chewed slowly. “You know how I can tell when you lying, 32?”

He met her eyes. “How?”

“You start messing with that hat.”

He looked to the table, where the hat would’ve been, and saw his fingers, fiddling with air. He put his hand in his lap and had to smile. “When else did I lie?”

“Last week at the diner. When I asked if you ever dated that girl.”

Cindy Walker.

He glanced at the television. Braves changing pitchers. He was suddenly on the Fulsom City Park infield as Coach Hytower stood talking to his pitcher, and Silas, at short, was looking past them into the stands, where she always sat.

Angie put her pizza down. “Well?”

“Would you stay here a minute,” he said, starting to rise. “I got to get my hat.”

“Sit your lying ass down, 32, and talk to me.”

WHEN SILAS PLAYED
baseball, Cindy had come to games, smoking cigarettes and sitting in a miniskirt with her legs crossed on the high bleachers, her hair in a scrunchie. Sunglasses on. He knew she watched him and at some point he realized he was playing for her, swiping impossible line drives out of the air and short-hopping bullet grounders to flip to M&M on second or fling over to first for the out. Sometimes he felt invincible on the diamond, white people and black both watching him, taller now, up to six feet by the eleventh grade, growing so fast he still had stretch marks on his lower back. Daring that baseball to come anywhere near, willing it to, seeing it big as a basketball when he crouched at the plate, hitting for power to all fields so everybody played back, and then he’d bunt and most times there wouldn’t even be a throw, him standing on first before the third baseman or catcher barehanded the ball.