Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (4 page)

Silas felt clammy now as he drove. Since leaving he’d known Larry was ostracized, but it wasn’t until he’d returned to lower Mississippi that he heard everything that had happened.

He rolled the Jeep up behind a log truck and slowed, the rag stapled to the longest pole fluttering. Taillights were fine, tag good. He eased over in the opposite lane and mashed the accelerator and the Jeep backfired. Piece of shit.

He tooted his horn as he passed the truck, leaving clouds of ugly black smoke, and the driver blew his air horn back.

French was right that Ottomotive Repair hadn’t had a local customer—or any customer, really—since Larry’s father had died and Larry’d taken over. Silas could testify: in all the times he’d driven past on his way to Fulsom, he was yet to see anyone get their car fixed. Nobody but Larry there, that red Ford. Still, he showed up to work every day, waiting for somebody on his way to someplace else, somebody who didn’t know Larry’s reputation, to stop in for a tune-up or brake job, the bay door always raised and waiting, like something with its mouth open.

Larry was taller now, thinner. Silas hadn’t seen him close but his face looked thin, his lips tight. Used to be, his mouth always hung open, giving the impression he was slow. But he wasn’t. He was smart. Knew the weirdest shit. Once told Silas a king cobra could grow to over sixteen feet long and raise eight or nine of those feet into the air. Imagine it, he’d said. Like a giant swaying scaled plant from another time looking down at you right before you died.

Silas passed the Wal-Mart and then the arrowed sign to Fulsom’s business district. Soon the road bottlenecked down to a two-lane and the businesses became sparse, the sidewalks cracked, sprouting weeds, buildings posted, windows and doors boarded. He passed what used to be a post office. He passed a clothing store that had gone so long without customers it’d briefly become a vintage clothing store without changing stock. Building on his right was an ex–Radio Shack, windows busted or shot out and the roof fallen in so thoroughly the floor was shingled, the walls beginning to sag and buckle. The only businesses still open on this end were a cheap motel that catered to quickies and Mexican laborers and the garage he was approaching,
OTTOMOTIVE REPAIR
painted on the side in fading green letters.

Larry’s pickup, as French had said, wasn’t in its usual spot, the bay door closed. Silas slowed. He signaled and turned into the garage lot and came to a stop by the gas pumps, as if he wanted to fill up. This the closest he’d been to the shop since…well, he’d never been this close. The two antique pumps hadn’t worked in years, though, and looked like a pair of robots on a date. In raised, white-painted numbers on metal tape readouts were the prices when they’d last been used: .32 regular and .41 ethyl.

Silas switched the Jeep off, his eyes settling on the rectangle of dead grass by the shop where, except for a stint in the army, Larry had parked every day since he quit high school. The same truck. Driving the same miles to and from the same house. Same stop signs, stop lights. Nothing to show but dead grass.

Inside the shop, he knew, there was a red toolbox, a pump handle jack, creepers against the wall, drop lights hanging from the ceiling. Occasionally as he drove past, Silas had seen Larry leaning on his push broom watching cars. Silas would front his eyes as if he had someplace important to go. Other days Larry would have rolled his toolbox out on its casters so he could watch traffic as he wiped his wrenches and sockets with a shop rag. Sometimes he’d wave.

Nobody waved back. Nobody local anyway. But say you were from out of town, you were passing through with your brakes squealing, a bearing singing, a knock in the shocks, maybe. Say you’d been worried about breaking down when you saw the white cinder block shop, quaint, green-painted trim flaking off, the building itself the color of powder laundry detergent, maybe you’d slow down and pull in. You’d notice the gas pumps and smile (or frown) at the prices. You’d see no other customers and count yourself lucky, for by now Larry would be walking outside pulling a rag from his pocket, his name on his shirt. Short brown hair, cap pulled too low over his ears.

Lucky you.

But you wouldn’t know his reputation. That, in high school, a girl who lived up the road from Larry had gone to the drive-in movie with him and nobody had seen her again. It had been big news, locally. Her stepfather tried to have Larry arrested but no body was found and Larry never confessed.

Silas looked at his watch then sat a moment longer. He had known Cindy Walker, too. The missing girl. In a way, Larry had introduced them.

He glanced up the road.

Where the hell was Larry? Probably sitting at home, reading Stephen King. Maybe he finally took a day off. Or gave up.

But still the gnawing. What if some relation of the current missing girl, Tina Rutherford, dwelling on Larry’s reputation, had taken it upon himself to pay Larry a visit?

Look at you, 32 Jones, he thought. You done ignored the poor fucker all this time and now all the sudden you care?

“32?” The radio.

“Yeah, Miss Voncille?”

“You need to get over to Fourteenth and West. It’s a rattlesnake in somebody’s mailbox.”

“Say what?”

“Rattler,” she repeated. “Mailbox.”

“Was the flag up?”

“Ha-ha. Mail carrier reported it. It being, you know, in the box? That makes it a federal crime.”

“How you know that?”

“32,” she said. “You only been in that uniform two years. You know how long I been setting in this chair?”

“So it’s happened before?”

“You don’t even want to know. I’ll call Shannon.”

He signed off, glad Voncille would contact the police reporter. Anytime he got his picture or name in the paper, it raised his profile, which might boost his salary at evaluation time. Enough good PR he could be a black Buford Pusser, maybe run at sheriff himself in ten years.

He could head over to Larry’s house later, he thought, cranking the Jeep. But then he got a better idea and flipped his cell phone open.

“32,” Angie said. “You ain’t got another decomposing corpse, do you?”

“Hope not,” he said. “What’s going on?”

Not much, she reported. Wrapping up a one-car on 5, no injuries except the dead deer. Trooper had already split. Tab and the guy who’d hit the deer were field dressing it, planning to split the meat. “Tab say you want a tenderloin?”

“Angie,” he said. “You know Larry Ott?”

Her phone crackled. “Scary Larry?”

“Yeah. Feel like following a hunch?”

“May be, baby. Tell me more.”

“I need yall to run out there when you got a minute. Little dirt road in Chabot, off Campground Cemetery Road.”

“I know where he stays. How come?”

“Just when you got a minute. See if the place looks clean. It ain’t far from where yall at now.”

“Hang on,” she said.

He pulled to the edge of the highway and waited for a log truck, the Jeep shaking as the truck thundered past with its logs bouncing.

“Angie?”

“All right,” she said. “But 32?”

“Yeah?”

“This means you going to church with me on Sunday.”

“We’ll talk,” he said. “And save me that tenderloin.”

HE COULD COVER
his jurisdiction one end to the other, Dump Road to the catfish farm, in fifteen minutes if he stuck his light on and hauled ass, like today, and soon he’d neared Fourteenth Avenue. Silas thought of it as White Trash Ave., a hilly red clay road with eight or ten houses and trailers clustered along the left side and Rutherford land on the right, fenced off and posted every fifty yards, an attempt to keep the rednecks from shooting deer and turkeys in the woods. Wildlife was good for the mill’s image. You rode through the pines braking for deer, sometimes fawns on clumsy legs, rare red foxes, bobcats, you almost forgot for a moment the trees were a crop.

He patrolled through here once or twice a week, different times, keeping his eye on an Airstream trailer out behind one of the houses, half blocked from the road by a shed. The way the trailer’s windows were boarded up, its door padlocked, made him think it might be a crystal meth lab but, without probable cause—a neighbor complaining, an explosion—he couldn’t check it out.

Every time he cruised past, the white residents frowned from chairs on their porches, thin tattooed bleach-blond women with babies on their laps, strained-looking grandmothers in housedresses smoking cigarettes, garbage in the yards, clotheslines with sheets lifting in the wind, sheer panties, nylons. In one yard was an old Chevy Vega, no hood, bitterweed growing through the engine block, windows broken, the trunk open—he’d seen a dog sitting in there once with its tongue out. Seen a goat on a rope, too, castoff car parts speared by grass, fishing lures dripping from the power lines. An old camper shell used for a chicken coop and chickens and guinea hens running wild in the weeds. A duck in a kid’s wading pool. Kids revving four-wheelers in the deep grass. He didn’t know what it was about white folks and four-wheelers, but every damn house seemed to have one.

And the dogs.

Each place yielded half a dozen, rarely any known breed, mostly just Heinz 57s, a throng of unneutered, collarless barking mongrels waiting for his Jeep whenever he rounded the curve at the bottom of the hill, chasing him until the woods picked back up.

Here they came now, the whole furious, joyful tide of them, parting as he rode through, barking alongside the Jeep, three or four big dark ones loping along with bass voices, a few mediums and several small yappers. He saw the postal Jeep up ahead, newer model than his, nice paint job, parked to the side of the road in the shade, its flashers on. He knew the driver, a woman named Olivia. They’d met in the Chabot Bus and gone out a couple times, but she had two young boys. Silas wasn’t much for kids and she wasn’t much for a man who didn’t swoon over her children. On one of their dates they’d discussed White Trash Ave., which he’d confessed to calling it, and she’d told him it was the bane of her route, she refused to get out and deliver any package to those white folks’ doors because of the dogs. Instead, she’d blow her horn, which she knew pissed them off, and if nobody came, she’d just put a notification in the box, saying come to the post office. And why didn’t he like children?

Olivia was out of her vehicle now, standing with four other women, all white, one holding a baby. Shannon hadn’t gotten there yet. In the nearest yard, its grass to their knees, three boys, two crew cuts and a mullet, stood watching. One had a BB gun and another a plastic bow and arrow set.

Silas coasted to a stop and killed his engine, the dogs gathering at his door, one little biddy one that jumped so high it kept appearing in his window.

“Get down,” he said, fingering his Taser, which, like his pistol, he’d never used.

“Sellars,” a woman called, “get them damn dogs.”

The boy with the BB gun, shirtless, dirty face, came to the Jeep and started kicking at them, allowing Silas to push his door open. The boy with the mullet joined him and helped drive the dogs back.

“Hey, 32,” Olivia said.

“Hey, girl.” He approached the crowd, carrying his camera, the women looking him up and down, him touching the brim of his hat.

“Hey,” one young woman said. “I’m glad you here.” She wore cut-off jeans and a tank top over a sports bra. She was barefooted. Attractive. Maybe twenty-two, -three years old. Tattoos on both forearms and one peeking from the low neck of her tank and another, a green vine, tracing up out of her jeans. You couldn’t help but wonder where it started. “My name’s Irina Mott.”

“Hey, Mrs. Mott. 32 Jones.”

She tilted her head and squinted cutely in the sun. “Just Irina.”

“It’s her mailbox,” Olivia said.

“Her snake-of-the-month club arrived early,” said another young woman, pierced nose, black eyeliner.

“Yeah,” Irina said, “but I’d ordered a copperhead.”

Olivia pointed to the mailbox, askew on its post and the address flaking off. “I’m driving along, and I start to open it and the next thing I know it’s buzzing like a hornet’s nest. I open it a crack more and heard something whop the door from the inside and I closed it right back.”

Silas regarded the mailbox, then thumped its flag and heard the buzz start inside, like a tiny motor. “Can somebody get me a shovel?”

“Edward Reese,” a fat woman said to one of the boys watching from the yard. “Run get one, hear?”

He disappeared around the house, dogs following him, tails wagging.

“What time you last open it?” he asked Irina.

“Last night, bout dark. Put my phone bill in.”

“Yall got any idea who might’ve done this?” he asked.

The women frowning at one another, the one with the baby switching hips.

“Ex-husband?” Silas prompted. “Angry boyfriend?”

“Hell, Officer,” Irina said. “It’s three of us divorced girls live here. And between us? How many candidates you reckon, Marsha?”

“Oh Lord. You got to narrow it down.”

“Angry’s one list,” Irina said. “Jealous is another. Then there’s the biggest list of all.”

“The crazy list,” Marsha said. “Not to mention the all-of-the-aboves.”

The boy came running up with the shovel and held it out, handle first.

“Thanks, son,” Silas said, glancing down the road. He thought about stalling for Shannon. “Yall ladies back up.”

“You ain’t got to tell us twice,” Marsha said.

Silas handed Olivia the camera and stood off to the side and with the spade end pulled the door open, the buzzing louder, sliding grit. The dogs were barking again.

“Careful,” Olivia said.

He moved and peered in, not getting too close, the women behind him, looking around his back. The snake had bunched itself up in the rear of the box, triangle head flattened and low, angry slits for eyes, its tongue flicking.

“Look,” Irina said. “It’s done pissed on my phone bill.”

“It stinks,” one of the boys said, trying to herd the dogs.

“Diamondback,” Silas said. Olivia handed him the camera and he made a few more pictures, then gave it back. Taking a breath, he eased the shovel in front of the box. The snake lunged and struck the metal and Irina screamed and when she grabbed his arm Silas jumped.