Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

forward he leapt from the swing, seat flapping in his wake, and sailed a long time over the ground-his shirt flying up and his arms out, feet dangling-and landed dangerously close to where the black girls, headed back to school, were giggling about something.

They jumped and screamed as David skidded and dusted them with playground sand.

“Boy, you crazy,” one said, brushing sand from her backside, almost laughing.

“He go break his neck,” another said.

Up at the school, the teachers had paused before going in, watching.

Before Larry knew it Ken had sailed out, snapping his chains, flapping the swing, airborne, the girls backing up as he landed fancy, doing a somersault and rolling to his feet with his hands out like, “Ta-da.”

“Them white boys crazy,” another girl shrieked, the group moving farther away, but everybody, David, Ken, the girls, the teachers, looking at Larry, as he kicked his legs harder and harder, getting ready. He thought that if he did a good one, better than anybody else, they might let him go to the drive-in, he imagined telling his daddy about it, Where you going boy? To the drive-in movie with my friends, in a car.

He went back, kicked, up, kick, back, the girls waiting, Ken and David watching. He thought if he could land in the center of them, scatter them, what a story it would make, he thought of going inside with Ken and David who’d tell everybody how far Larry Ott flew and how he sailed like a missile into the nigger girls.

He’d jump the next time, as a couple of teachers went into the upstairs door, Larry swinging back, needing more altitude, now the black girls turning, Larry forward, kicking, thinking, Wait, but then the second bell rang and a teacher waved her arm, come on in, as the playground began to empty.

When he jumped only Ken saw, David having given up, too, and Larry sailed out, his legs running, arms behind him.

He yelled, “Monkey Lips!” and landed on the wrong foot and half-ran, half fell to a hard stop, tumbling in his own dust, winding up on his stomach with his breath knocked out, rolling over, opening his eyes to the high white sky latticed with leaves. The face that appeared above him, a moment later, was Jackie’s. He was aware of how quiet the playground had become with everybody inside, how far his yell had carried. Ken and David had stopped and were looking back.

“What you call me?” Jackie asked.

He couldn’t catch his breath. He couldn’t answer.

“Tell me, white boy.”

He opened his mouth.

But she’d turned. She walked away, through her friends who were putting their hands on her back, casting their furious eyes back at Larry. Ken and David hurried off, not even looking at him. Larry pushed up on his elbows, lungs on fire, tears stinging the rims of his eyes, sorry for saying it, seeing the door open at the end of the building and Mrs. Tally, a black teacher, coming out, meeting the girls, just as Ken and David went inside.

“You know what that white boy call Jackie?” one said.

Mrs. Tally knelt in front of Jackie and said something, then sent her and the other girls inside. Larry was on his knees when she came over, her legs blocking the school from his view.

“Ain’t that girl got enough problems in this world without a white boy calling her that?” she asked.

He couldn’t look up. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not the one you need to say that to. You will apologize to Jackie.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I ought to call your daddy,” she said, walking away. “But what good would that do?”

He returned to his classroom where he, Ken, and David were the only white boys mixed in with two white girls, eight black boys, and nine black girls. Mrs. Smith, black, too, shook her head and pointed him to his desk and they finished their world history lesson.

After a time Mrs. Smith told them to read ahead and left the room. Larry, who hadn’t yet dared to look up, was focused on a paperback copy of The Shining on his desk when a heavy world history textbook suddenly hit him on the side of his head. He flinched as the book slid off his shoulder onto the floor, felt like his ear had been torn off, and he lowered his head into his arms, folded over his desk. The black girls and boys began to snicker.

“White boy,” a girl named Carolyn hissed. One of Jackie’s friends, heavyset and light-skinned. Mean.

He ignored her.

“White boy! Brang me that book.”

His head throbbed but he didn’t look up.

“White boy. YOU,” she called, and Larry felt all their eyes crawling over him. He heard Ken and David, across the room, begin to laugh, and then the white girls, both of them, giggled. The black boys were hooting, and then somebody else threw a book. Then somebody else. Larry kept his head on the desk, smelling his own sour breath in the pages of The Shining as more and more books pounded him. He knew somebody was posted at the window, where Mrs. Smith was outside, smoking and talking to another teacher.

Monkey Lips, he thought as more books pelted him. Monkey Lips, Monkey Lips, Monkey Lips. Then, Nigger nigger nigger nigger.

A desk leg screaked the floor and somebody slapped the back of his head. “Boy, you better answer me fore I whoop yo ass.”

“Whoop his ass, Carolyn,” a big black boy called.

Nigger nigger nigger nigger.

She grabbed his scalp, bunched his hair and squeezed it, pulled his head up, the laughter louder without the nest his arms had made. Some part of him hoped the white boys would rally for him, admire him for what he’d said, but they were laughing and pointing at him, as were the two white girls, and he knew this was not going to happen any more than the drive-in movie would.

Carolyn twisted his head harder, and Larry pushed at her arm but she had his hair and he told himself not to cry. Then she slammed his head down, hard, onto his desk. Everybody laughed so she did it again.

He stole a sideways look and saw her face. He’d never been that angry. He didn’t think he had the ability to summon such anger, or the right. With her other hand Carolyn grabbed his arm and twisted it so he fell out of his desk, The Shining landing beside him on the floor.

Still holding his arm, she put her foot on his neck and pushed.

“Carolyn!” somebody hissed. “Mrs. Smith coming.”

In a flash he was let go and black hands were grabbing books. He’d just pulled himself back into his desk when the teacher walked in, chewing a stick of gum, and said, “What’s all this noise?”

She looked over the room, everybody miraculously in their desks, focused on their world history books. When her eyes settled on Larry, she stopped.

“Lord, child,” she said. “You need to comb your hair. And why you so red?”

The class exploded into laughter as Larry sank his head back onto his desk.

EVEN TODAY, MORE than a year later, carrying his rifle through the woods, the memory shamed him. He’d gotten a belt whipping from his father that night-for tearing his clothes jumping out of the swing, Clothes I work hard to buy. He’d apologized to Jackie the following day, gone up to her and mumbled, “Sorry,” but she’d just walked away, leaving him alone.

Now, as he made his way toward the cabin where Silas and his mother were staying, the woods had begun to thin, and as he came to the edge of the field with his.22, he looked over the frozen turnrows and saw the dark elbow of smoke from the cabin’s stovepipe.

He knelt, a fallen log at the tree line like a wall, the bramble cross-stitching his face so they’d never see him from the windows. He knew the cabin, had been there before, had pushed open its door on leather hinges and peered into the dust and dark where fissures of light showed how poorly the logs were mortared. There’d been little else to see. A wooden table and a couple of single beds hunters had once used, a wash pot. The stove in the back corner with its iron door opened and its pipe a straight line to the roof, shored around the top with bent, blackened patches of aluminum. A woodbox coated in dust that held only dead cockroaches and rat droppings when he raised its lid.

He wondered now, watching the cabin, if Silas did his homework by firelight. You’d have to lug water from the creek on the other side of the field, where the trees resumed. Larry wondered if he could get closer, if he should circle the edge of the woods to the point nearest the house, six o’clock to his current high noon. From here was