Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

For the past spring, whenever he’d been able to, Larry would race through the woods with this rifle, toward the cabin. Each time Silas would jump out with the.22, a good-natured ambush, Larry understanding that Silas would have been waiting for him no matter how long it took him to get there, the black boy always breaking into his big grin.

As it had grown warmer, as the school year had progressed, Silas had abandoned the coat and gloves from Larry and Larry saw he now wore better clothes, his mother (with her two jobs, a waitress in the Fulsom Diner and a cafeteria worker in the grocery store) buying them at the TG &Y. The boys would shoot their rifles, play mumblety-peg with Larry’s knife, play chase, war, cowboys and Indians, climb trees. With Silas on Larry’s bike, racing back and forth, doing wheelies, skidding, Larry ran along behind with his stick, looking for snakes sunning on the road. When they found one-a blacksnake, a hognose-Larry would pin its head to the dirt with the stick and grab the snake behind its neck, holding it as it wrapped itself around his wrist and shot out its tongue. Silas always kept his distance as Larry stuffed the snakes into the pillowcase he carried.

In April they began to fish in the creek on the other side of the cabin. In one of the rooms in their barn, Larry’s father had several rods and reels on nails on the wall, and a giant tackle box, and as long as he was careful, Larry was allowed to use the equipment.

As they walked, loaded down with rods and reels, the tackle box, their rifles, Silas asked if Larry was going out for baseball this year. Larry said he wasn’t, he’d never played, had never even considered it.

“How come?”

“I ain’t no good.”

At the creek’s widest point, he showed Silas how to bait a hook, throw the cork out, catch and clean a fish. How to use artificial bait, rubber worms, broke-back minnow, Snagless Sallys, silver spoons, plugs. But these were for bass, which were few in the creek and hard to catch, and so mostly they used corks and sinkers, for this was what the big gray catfish that sucked along the bottom of the creek preferred. Larry had tried to get Silas to take their first stringer of these fish home to his mother, several pounds, but Silas said he couldn’t.

“Why not?” Larry was sitting on the creek bank, watching his cork, the water roiling and bubbling as the fish pulled at the stringer. Silas, fascinated at what they’d hooked from the creek, raised the stringer to gape at the prehistoric faces, their wide mouths, flat heads.

“Why not?” Larry asked again.

“Momma. She say I ain’t supposed to play with you.”

“Why?”

Silas just shrugged. The catfish croaked, and Silas splashed them into the water. “What’s that?”

Larry smiled at him. “That’s how they talk.”

He pulled them up again.

“Careful of that long fin there,” Larry said. “It’ll stick you.”

Silas lowered his face to the catfish’s. “What you saying, Mr. Catfish?”

“Is it cause I’m white?” Larry asked.

“What?”

“Why your momma don’t want you to play with me?”

“I don’t know.”

“She didn’t tell you?”

“She just say, ‘Don’t you go near that boy.’ Made me promise I wouldn’t.”

“How come?”

“I done said I don’t know.”

Larry was puzzled. It had to be his color. What else could it be? He’d known his own father would disapprove. He would never tell Carl about the friendship, but wouldn’t it be different for Silas? Wouldn’t a black woman be happy her son had a white friend? They’d given them coats, a car. He’d assumed the anger that black folks felt was a reaction to white people’s attitude toward them. Yall started it. But if somebody white was willing to befriend somebody black, offer them gifts, even a place to live, shouldn’t the blacks be grateful?

“You ever tell her about that rifle?”

“Hell naw. I keep it hid.”

“How come?”

“Cause she’ll make me give it back.”

“I do need it back,” Larry said. “Fore my daddy goes looking for it. Here,” he said, offering his knife. “I’ll trade you this.”

“A knife for a gun?”

“Please?”

“Tell me one them stories,” Silas said.

He meant a Stephen King story. Larry had lent Silas books, but the black boy said he didn’t like reading, homework was enough. Weren’t lights in the cabin anyhow. Just an oil lamp and candles. A flashlight. Silas did, however, like to hear Larry describe the stories. Now he told about the one called “Trucks,” where a supernatural force has taken over all the trucks at an interstate exit (and presumably all over the world) and a bunch of people are trapped in a diner surrounded by murderous vehicles. Near the end the trucks start blowing their horns and one of the survivors recognizes that it’s Morse code.

Silas was threading a worm onto his treble hook. “What’s that?” Larry had described the dot-and-dash code, then told how the trucks were honking in Morse that somebody needed to fill them up with gas. The story ended with the people serving the trucks, taking turns filling them with gas, the guy telling the story looking up at two airplanes. “I hope to God,” he’d said, “that there are people in them.”

Silas had been watching the sky.

LARRY FINISHED THE grass just before noon, and for lunch his mother made him a potted meat and mayo sandwich with saltines on the side. He read a comic book at the table while he ate then drained his glass of Coke and thanked her and got his.33 from the gun cabinet in the hall and two boxes of cartridges and Stephen King’s short story collection Night Shift and, at the front door, called, “I’m going outside,” and let the screen door bang behind him, feeling her coming out behind him, watching him. As always, he headed toward Cindy’s house to throw her off, shoulder-strapped the Marlin and walked down along the road. Once around the bend he doubled back, went east.

Because Silas had started playing baseball at school, Larry worried that he was losing him. He’d invited him to his house once, and they’d played in the barn and Silas had cut the grass, but he knew the black boy wouldn’t do that again. Maybe he could take him back through the woods, toward Cindy’s house. She’d been his secret, but maybe it was time to share her.

Half an hour later he knelt at the edge of the woods, rifle unshouldered. From across the field he watched Silas standing on a pile of dirt he’d mounded behind the cabin. He looked back over his shoulder toward Larry, who ducked before he realized Silas was just checking an imaginary runner on first. Then he raised both his hands to his chest and kicked up one leg and fired a streak of gray toward the tree sixty feet away. Larry was impressed at the thwack the ball made when it bounced off the trunk and rolled back. Silas was already charging to scoop the baseball bare-handed out of the weeds and pretend to throw it back in Larry’s direction, as fluid a move as an Atlanta Brave on the television.

His mother’s car was nowhere in sight, which meant she was working. Around the cabin the field that had been so dead and gray in winter was now greening, butterflies doddering over the goldenrod and orb spiders centered in their webs like the pupils of eyes.

Back on the mound, Silas checked runners on first and second before he pitched and then he did it all again. Larry sat back against a tree and picked beggar’s lice off his socks and pants. He’d hear the thump the ball made then maybe a grunt or hoot from Silas but soon he’d opened Night Shift to one of his favorite stories, “The Mangler.”

When he looked up, Silas was standing over him, his chest rising and falling. “You spying?”

Larry closed his book. He saw the cat a few feet behind Silas and realized it had probably smelled him and come over, Silas following it.

“No.” Larry shrugged and got to his feet and looked down at the rifle. “I just come to see you but you was busy throwing.”

Silas watched him. He still held his baseball and Larry wondered did he steal it from school.