Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

Silas looked back toward his mound, the tree. “I bet I can throw seventy, eighty miles a hour,” he said.

“Yeah,” Larry said. “It looked real fast from here.”

“What you reading?”

Larry held the book up. Its cover showed a human hand with eyes in the palm and on the fingers. Some of the hand and fingers were wrapped in gauze like a mummy.

Silas said. “Is it scary?”

Larry told him about “The Mangler,” describing in great detail the scene when the detectives go to visit the girl who cuts her finger on the laundry machine. If the detectives’ far-fetched theory is accurate, a freakish confluence of events caused the machine nicknamed “the Mangler” to become possessed by a demon. The last piece in the puzzle, Larry told Silas, is the blood of a virgin. So the cops finally ask the girl: “Are you a virgin?” “I’m saving myself for my husband,” she tells them. By then it’s too late, and the Mangler is coming for them all.

Silas frowned. “What’s a virgin?”

“Somebody that hadn’t ever had intercourse.”

“Intercourse? You mean somebody ain’t never been fucked?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me another one.” Silas said. By now they were walking, the rifle strapped to Larry’s back, Silas grinding his baseball into his palm.

He told about “Jerusalem’s Lot” and told how it was a precursor to King’s novel Salem’s Lot.

“That’s the one I was reading that first day I met you. When we picked yall up. You remember?”

“I don’t remember no book.”

Larry shrugged.

“Where we going anyway?” Silas asked. “I don’t want to go to your house.”

They were in the woods a quarter mile from Larry’s barn, skirting it and heading toward the Walker place.

“I want to show you something,” Larry said. “Somebody.”

“Who?”

“You’ll see.”

“A girl?”

“A real pretty one.”

“Who is she?”

“Our closest neighbor,” Larry said. “Her stepdaddy, Cecil, he’s a funny man, always doing crazy things.”

“Crazy how?”

Larry stopped, Silas behind him, and began to tell about the New Year’s Eve a couple of years before when the Walkers had come over and Carl had brought a bunch of fireworks. Trying to pause when his father did, Larry told how the mothers were in the house talking and cooking a chicken and Larry, Cindy, Carl, and Cecil were outside with the fireworks. Both men were drunk and it was one of the happiest memories Larry had, yellow and red smoke bombs, Roman candles, even Cindy, usually so aloof, laughing as Cecil goofed off and held his fizzing bottle rockets in his hand, one or two exploding before he threw them, which had everybody laughing as he shook his hand, burnt black and smoking. He had a bundle sticking out of his coat pocket, fuse ends up, and he’d quick-draw them and light them and fling them out. Carl wasn’t shooting, just watching from the porch steps with his beer and cigarette.

Cecil lit another with a kitchen match and let it sizzle. Cindy was a few feet away, fourteen years old and with pigtails, squatting in blue jeans and a sweater beside her Coke bottle holding a cigarette lighter to a rocket of her own.

“Hey, Cin,” Cecil said, and when she looked up he flicked the lit bottle rocket at her.

She shrieked and jumped aside as it zipped past her and blew up in the field.

“Cecil you mean,” she said as he quick-drew another and lit it, flicking it at her.

“Dance!” he yelled, like a gunslinger shooting at her feet.

“You gone deafen that girl,” Carl called. “Or blind her one.”

Larry stepped back, behind Cecil, and watched as he lit another and let it fly at her.

This time it did hit her as she ran away from him, out into the darkness. It exploded against her back and she screamed, Carl starting down off the steps and Larry heading out to see if she was okay. In a panic, glancing back toward the house, Cecil dropped his match. Cindy was crying and the women came out onto the porch just in time to see that she was fine; it had bounced off her and exploded in the grass.

But the match Cecil dropped had landed in his coat pocket where the bottle rockets were, him so drunk he just looked around and said, “Something’s burning.”

“It’s your coat, Cecil,” Larry said, pointing.

Cecil raised his arm and looked down as the first bottle rocket hissed out of his pocket into the air, bang. Then another. He flung his arm back and yelled as another flew out, and another, his coat ablaze now, the sound Larry heard his father laughing as Cecil began to run, yelling, beating at his coat and more rockets taking off. Then Cindy was laughing and Larry was and even the women, Shelia covering her mouth with both hands as Cecil wrenched off the coat still spraying its fireworks and began to stomp it, laughing himself now, falling, Larry laughing now, telling it.

But not Silas.

Larry had heard Carl tell the story before and have the men at his shop howling, Cecil hardest of all, in stitches, nodding that yep, it was true, he’d burnt up his own damn coat, plus got in Dutch with the old lady, but Silas never broke a smile.

“Sound more mean than crazy,” he said. “I don’t know if I want to go see a man like that.”

Larry tugged his sleeve. “Come on.”

As they got closer to the edge of the woods that bordered the Walker property, Larry put a finger to his lips and knelt and began to creep. Behind, Silas did the same. They were coming up an incline and just before the house came in sight Larry lay flat on his belly. Silas hesitated, as if he didn’t want to mess up his clothes, but finally lay alongside Larry and together they peered out of the woods. Fifty yards away, the Walker house was a dirty, uneven rectangle with a series of ill-planned additions covered in black tar paper curling at the edges. Between two of the rooms was a rudimentary deck and here was where Cindy often sunbathed.

Today, though, Cecil stood on the deck with Carl himself.

“That’s your daddy,” Silas said. “What’s he doing there?”

Larry had no idea.

Carl was smoking a cigarette and talking the way he did at his shop and drinking a bottle of beer, Cecil listening. He had sawyered in the mill until he hurt his back and now he got a small disability, which he used for beer and cigarettes.

“Let’s go,” Larry whispered. He began to slide back.

“Hang on.” Silas grabbed his arm. “We snuck this far. Maybe that girl’ll come out.”

They waited, huddled on the ground. Larry caught a word now and again as they matched each other beer for beer and seemed fairly drunk when Cindy finally burst out onto the deck.

Larry froze in the leaves.

They watched as Cindy stood on the porch wrapped in a small towel with another one turbaned on her head. She was arguing with Cecil, one arm waving in the air and the other clenching her towel at her chest.

She raised her voice. “Momma said I could go!”

Her mother, Larry knew, worked evenings at the tie factory over in east Fulsom.

“What you say her name was?” Silas whispered. “I seen her at school.”

“Cindy.”

She was getting madder on the deck, raising her voice.

Cecil leaned over and nudged Carl and reached out and tugged at Cindy’s towel. She slapped Cecil’s hand but he held on and pulled harder, Carl laughing, rising from his seat on the steps to stand leaning against the rail, a better view, more cleavage, half her bosom showing.

“Cecil!” Cindy shrieked. “Let go! I’ll tell Momma!”

He murmured something, clinging to the towel. He winked at Carl who was scratching his cheek and taking a long pull from his beer, Cindy’s towel inching up her thigh and down her chest as she slapped at Cecil’s hand.