Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (23 page)

On the infield tapping his cleats with his glove to knock off dirt, he’d watch Cindy leave after the eighth inning, walk off away from town, but always look back.

Then the time where he went five for five (including a triple) and dove and caught a liner up the middle to end the game. His teammates swarmed him and carried him off the field and from his perch he saw Cindy at her usual spot, smoking, and smiled at her. She smiled back.

She’d stayed till the end.

He skipped his shower and slipped away and followed her still in his dirty uniform and caught up and walked along the rural road with her, carrying his cap and glove, a few houses back against the trees, the two of them stepping around mailboxes in the weeds and hurrying when dogs boiled out from beneath a porch to bark at them.

“You see that catch?”

“You seen me there, didn’t you?”

“You like baseball?”

“No.”

“For a girl don’t like baseball, you sure come to a lot of games.”

“Maybe it ain’t the games I come to see.”

He looked down. Grass stains on his pants, infield dirt. “They put me at short even though I’m a leftie. Coach say I got a chance for a scholarship to Ole Miss.”

“You lucky.”

“Might go all the way, he say. Say if I focus. Keep my mind off distractions.”

“That what I am?”

Yeah, he wanted to say. She was thin with small bright blue eyes that had a kind of beaming intensity, especially when she frowned at him. She had freckles tiny as sand on her nose and throat and bare shoulders, her hair blond and curly and cinched back. Even sweaty she smelled good. Her breasts were little things under her top; he kept trying not to look at them. She had a concave figure, walking with a little hook to her, her belly in, as if waiting to absorb a blow. Today she wore sandals, and he liked her white freckled feet and red toenails.

“You from Chicago?”

He said he was.

“What’s it like up there?”

“It’s cool.” He told her about Wrigley Field, the Cubs, Bull Durham on first, Ryno on second, Bowa at short, and the Penguin, Ron Cey, on third. Bobby Dernier in center. Silas and his friends skipping school to catch home runs on the street outside the stadium, the time he’d nearly got hit by a cab going after a bouncing ball, and then his fantastic catch on the sidewalk, dodging parking meters and diving and landing in the grassy median with a group of white people watching from Murphy’s Bar, the old man who came out and traded him four tickets for the ball. They’d gone the next day, him and three buddies, sitting in the sun in the bleachers. They got a drunk man to buy them beer, buying him one in return, Silas knowing as he watched the acrobatics on the field that he’d found his calling.

“What else,” Cindy said, “that ain’t about baseball?”

He told her how the snow sometimes covered cars entirely, and about his neighborhood, how the old black men would gather in the back alley around a fire in the trash drum and pass a bottle of Jim Beam and tell stories, outdoing each other, he told her about hopping the turnstiles and catching the el train, going to blues bars where the musicians smoked weed in the alley between sets, the endless honking traffic, freezing Lake Michigan glittering under the lights and buildings blocking the sky. Chicago pizza was the best, a thick pie of it, and burritos were as big as your head.

“They got shows, ain’t they?” she asked.

“Like movie shows?”

“No.” She puckered and frowned but kept walking. “Like Broadway. Plays.”

“Yeah.” He remembered seeing their titles in the
Chicago Tribune.
Sunday mornings lying on the rug waiting for Oliver to finish with the sports pages. “My momma went one time,” he told Cindy, “for her birthday. Saw
The Wiz.
”

“That’s what I want,” she said.

“You mean be a actress?”

“No. To be able to see them shows. You can’t see shit here.”

“You could be a actress,” he said. “You pretty enough.”

She gave him a sad smile like he was a simple child. She went on talking, though, said how she couldn’t wait to get the hell out of Mississippi, away from Cecil and her mouse of a mother, and as they walked along the road, no houses now, a field with cows following them along the other side of the fence and his cleats clicking on the pavement, a passing car slowed and the white man behind the wheel glared out his window.

“You okay?” he called to Cindy. “That boy bothering you?”

“Mind your own business, doofus,” she said and flipped him off. He sped away shaking his head.

“Hey,” Silas said, looking back. “I best go.”

“Suit yourself.”

He kept walking alongside her.

“Your stepdaddy like it you walking with a black boy?”

“What you think? He’s ignorant as a damn weed. Won’t even try to get a job. Say he hurt his back at the mill.”

Another car, the woman behind the wheel turning as she passed to stare.

“You ever kissed a white girl?”

“Naw,” he said. “You ever kissed a black boy?”

“Sure,” taking his hand, leading him down the embankment and into a stand of trees.

From there, notes passed at school, their secret meeting place in the woods behind the baseball field. He was a virgin but she wasn’t, and on their blanket spread over the grass they became lovers and for the second half of his junior year he’d never been happier, a great season with an average just over .450 most of the time and a secret white girlfriend watching from the bleachers. A lot of people came, he knew, to see him, the sense he was going places, even old Carl Ott sometimes.

Cindy liked beer and Silas drank with her and they hid their relationship from everyone else, Silas not even telling M&M, knowing if anybody found out they’d have to give each other up. Slipping away from his friends, from hers, like the haunted house that Halloween, the one where Larry came and brought his mask, the two of them leaving separately but meeting later, in her mother’s car or in his mother’s, whoever could borrow one. Going to the drive-in, her driving and letting him off by the road, him sneaking through the trees to where she parked in the back corner, the thrill of being discovered a thing she seemed to like, Silas terrified but unable to resist the hot vacuum of her cigarette breath, click of their teeth, her soft tongue, her perfect breasts, the patch of secret hair in her jeans.

Once, as they lay on a blanket on the ground, Cindy told him she’d started liking him when he came out of the woods and stood up for her when Cecil was pulling off her towel.

“He does that kind of shit all the time,” she’d said. “Trying to see me without my clothes, come stumbling in the bathroom with his thing in his hand. Does when he’s drunk, acts like he don’t remember when he sobers up.”

“What about your momma?”

“How you tell your momma she married a slime? Sides, she always takes his side over mine. She, kind of, believes the worst about me. I always been trouble for her. I don’t guess I help none, cussing, smoking, messing with boys.”

“Messing,” he said. “That what we doing?”

“What else you gone call it?”

At school one day Silas walked up to her in the smoking area, and she said he’d slapped her. Cecil. Said she was a whore. Off fucking boys.

Standing all casual so nobody would notice them.

“Your momma let him do that? Slap you?”

“She wasn’t home. But now he won’t let me leave the house cept for school, says he’ll tell her I been trying to come on to him, like I ever would.”

“Your momma believe that?”

“If he said it she probably would. They’d throw me out.”

She’d always caught rides to school with her friend Tammy and now Cecil had decreed that Cindy had to come home right after school, that if Tammy couldn’t bring her, Cecil would come get her himself.

“I told him, ‘You ain’t even got a car, fool,’ but he said he’d get one if it meant keeping me away from—”

“Me,” Silas finished.

When he went home a few nights later, their trailer in Fulsom, his mother was waiting up in the dark living room, sitting rigid in a kitchen chair, her old tomcat, now half blind, purring in her lap.

“Silas,” she said.

“What?”

“Son, you got to stop with that white girl.”

He had no idea how she knew.

“Momma, what you mean?”

“Silas, don’t lie to me.”

“We just friends.”

“Son, nothing good ever come out of colors mixing.”

“Momma—”

“Such and suching like you doing would be dangerous enough in Chicago, but you in Mississippi now. Emmet Till,” she said, “was from Chicago.”

“You the one brought us down here.”

He went to the refrigerator and opened it and got out a carton of milk.

“Silas, baby,” getting up, holding the cat to her chest, “you all I got. And you all you got, too. Please tell me you gone stop. Please, son?”

He said he would. Promised he’d focus on his ball, work on his grades for that scholarship to Ole Miss. He didn’t mean it, though, knew he would keep seeing her, this girl who would fall asleep on their blanket in the woods, how her lips opened and he’d lean in and smell her breath, sweeter to him for the cigarettes and beer.

It was Cindy who’d said she had a plan to see him that last weekend. If he could get his mother’s car, she could outsmart Cecil. On Fridays Alice worked until seven at the diner, then came home and, tired from a twelve-hour shift, went to sleep in her chair by the television. Didn’t even eat. He took the car without asking.

NOW, IN PIZZA HUT,
the slice on his plate had gotten cold. The Braves had lost and a movie started and the waitress brought another pitcher of beer. He finished his and poured himself another, topped off Angie’s glass. She’d been watching him with her eyes growing narrower as he talked.

“I didn’t know,” Silas said, “it was gone be Larry that brought her.”

Angie said, “How’d she get him to bring her and drop her off?”

“Told him she was pregnant.”

“Was she?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

But that had scared Silas. What if she had been?

“We drove to a quiet spot,” he said, “and all we did was argue. I told her it wasn’t gone work and she started crying and saying yes it would, we ought to just run away for good. I said where and she said Chicago. I said why didn’t she go by herself, she wanted to go so bad. We went round and round, and finally I drove her back to the road led to her house. Larry was supposed to pick her up. We got there early, though, and she just slammed the car door and run off down that road, in the dark. I sat there thinking a minute, but wasn’t no way I could go after her. Not with Cecil there, drinking.

“When I got home, Momma, she was waiting on me. She could tell from my face where I’d been. Never even said anything. Just went to her room and closed the door. Did something I’d never seen her do, called in sick to work at the diner. I could tell, she’d had enough. Monday she went to see my coach, but everybody else was talking about Larry. How he took Cindy on a date and she never came back. And a month later, I was on my way north, up to Oxford High School, living in the coach’s basement.”

Angie watching him.

“To be honest,” he said, “I was glad to go. It was a whole lot better up there. Better field, school. They give you your cleats and equipment. Pretty soon I had me a girlfriend.” Whose name he couldn’t remember.

Angie said, “And Larry?”

Silas looked to where his hat would’ve been.

He said, “I forgot him. Him and Cindy both.”

“Forgot him?”

“It wasn’t hard. I was busy in Oxford, and Momma, in her letters, she never mentioned it.”

“You let him take the blame. All this time.”

“I thought she’d just run off. Thought she’d turn up sooner or later and it’d be okay.”

“For twenty-five years, you thought that?”

A pleading note in his voice. “Things ain’t so clear when they’re happening, Angie. You’re eighteen and playing ball and everything’s going your way. Then all of a sudden twenty-five years’ve passed and the person you look back and see’s a whole nother person. You don’t even recognize who you used to be. Wasn’t till I come back down here that I saw the mess I’d made.”

“So it was Cecil who killed her?”

“That’s my guess.”

“Where’s he now?”

“Dead. His wife, too.”

He moved his hand to the center of the table. He hoped she’d place hers on top of it, but she didn’t. He looked out the window where he could see their reflections, saw her watching him and focused on her profile, it was easier than looking at her eyes, seeing what she must be thinking.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I think it’d be better if Larry had died.”

“Better for you?”

“For him.”

“Yeah, but for you, too.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

“Look at me,” she said.

He did.

“I know this, 32 Jones,” she said. “You didn’t let him die, did you? Cause of you that man’s still alive, and when he wakes up, if he ever does, it’s gone be even worse for him. Just imagine that.”

“I have been.”

“Well then,” she said. “What you gone do?”

HE SLEPT LITTLE,
used to his night shift outside Larry’s room, and at six-thirty the next morning he eased out of bed and left Angie in a nightgown in the sheets, the first time she’d worn anything to bed. They hadn’t made love after dinner, neither in the mood, didn’t even try, just lay apart, not much more to say between them, her heart beating in her breast without him to hold it.

Outside, he closed the door and locked it, a bright September morning, sparrows shooting through her balcony with its hanging plants. He stood looking where she’d hung bird feeders, had a table and chairs set up. They’d spent many evenings out here, her serving his beer in glasses without him even asking her to, Al Green on the CD player.

He hung his badge around his neck and went down the stairs. On the road, he noticed the Jeep’s blinkers had stopped working and rolled down his window and hand-signaled onto Highway 5, opting for an early morning patrol of the eastern part of Rutherford’s land, cruising through the lines of loblolly pines, bumping over the washboard roads, letting himself in and out of gates with his big key ring. He was sweating by the time he got back to Chabot, around seven-thirty. He hand-signaled into the parking lot across from the mill and went up the steps and let himself into Town Hall, glad Voncille wasn’t there yet. He made coffee and fussed with some paperwork, checked his e-mail. At five to eight he went out, slipping the orange vest on, crossed the parking lot and directed traffic at the shift change. He saw Voncille arrive and tooted his whistle at her as she got out of her pickup.