Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“How you think?”

“I heard she likes niggers,” Philip said.

“Yo momma likes niggers,” Larry said quietly. Before he’d thought.

For a moment their table became the incredulous calm eye of the cafeteria’s hurricane, the boys looking from Larry to Philip, Larry aware of the lockblade knife in his back pocket. Then Ken laughed and held his palm out and Larry slapped it.

“You a badass now?” Philip asked.

“He got you,” somebody said.

“What’s the movie?” Ken asked Larry, breaking the tension, and when he told them they began talking about it, how it was supposed to be bloody, even Philip talking, wanting, Larry imagined, to put being bested behind him. Larry looked at the corn on his tray, too happy to eat, a date the next day and friends to tell about it. Across the cafeteria, Cindy got up with two of her pals and made their way through the crowded tables to the window where their trays were taken by thick black hands, then headed out to the smoking area.

Outside, he found himself walking along a sidewalk with Ken and David, who took out his wallet.

“Here,” he said, handing Larry a flat cellophane wrapper. It said TROJAN.

Larry, who’d never seen a condom but knew what it was, took it, slippery inside the foil. “You don’t need it?”

“Hell no, he don’t,” Ken said, and the three of them laughed, Larry removing his own wallet and putting it beside the twenty-dollar bill.

HE HOVERED IN the kitchen, his father in the next room watching the news and drinking beer, his mother making cornbread behind him. He went down the hall past the gun cabinet and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and came back out, his father in his chair, and went back into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator and counted nine Budweisers. His mother, humming at the counter, glanced at him and smiled.

“Be a gentleman,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Do you know what that means?”

“Be nice?”

“Well, yes, but also stand up when she enters a room. Open doors for her. Hold her chair if yall go eat somewhere.”

“We’re going to the movie,” he said.

“Then pay for the movie. With that money Daddy gave you. Ask her if she wants popcorn and go get it for her. It’s romantic to share a bucket, but if she wants her own, that’s okay, too.”

He slipped a can of beer into his pocket, nodding, keeping that side away from her as he edged out of the kitchen. His father sat sipping his beer in his socks-his work shoes on the porch by the door. In his room he hid the cold can under his bed then went past his father and back into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.

She was buttering a pan. “What’s that movie yall are seeing?”

He told her The Long Riders again and when she asked what it was about he told her again, keeping the impatience out of his voice and slipping another beer in his pocket.

“Boy,” his father’s voice called.

He stopped, cold in the door. “Sir?”

“Bring me a beer.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, slipping the can from his pocket. When he came back out of the kitchen Carl was squatting in front of the console changing the channel. He set the can on the coffee table near his chair and turned.

“Hey,” he said and Larry stopped.

“Sir?”

Carl was watching him. “Don’t give Cecil none of that money.”

“I won’t, Daddy.”

“You got any change, bring it back.”

“Yes, sir.”

He snuck one more beer, knowing that was all he dare take, his thigh cold and a wet smear on his pocket.

At supper Carl cut his roast into bites and Larry’s mother talked about their first dates, Larry barely chewing his rice and gravy.

“Slow down,” she said. “You don’t want to be early. A girl hates that.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Carl asked for the potatoes and she passed them.

“You remember that old tree, Carl?” she asked.

“Tree?”

“Oh you remember. It was before we got married. Over at the bluff?”

“Yeah.” He was mixing his roast into his rice and gravy, adding in the carrots and potatoes, making a big stew of it all. “Old Man Collins’s land.”

“That was his name. There was this tree,” his mother told Larry, “growing off the side of a bluff. What kind of tree was it, Carl?”

“Live oak.”

“Yes. You could see the roots all down the side of the bank, and below there was just this awful mess of briars, you remember, Carl?”

“Yeah,” he said, “would’ve took a dern bulldozer to move it.”

“That’s where Daddy and me used to go meet our friends, didn’t we, Carl? We’d build a bonfire and the boys would climb that old tree and swing off a rope they had up there, and we’d watch, all us girls.”

“Your momma never would do it,” Carl said.

“Well, it wouldn’t have been decent,” she said. “In a dress.”

They ate for a while, his mother filling his tea glass even though it was nearly full.

“You remember that time,” Carl said, “that I paid Cecil to swing off it, him drunk?”

She said no.

Larry watched his father.

“Oh, maybe you wasn’t there then,” winking at Larry, “maybe I had me some other gal.”

“Carl Ott.”

Larry said, “What happened?”

Carl pushed his plate away and stood up. He went to the refrigerator and got another beer, Larry nervous he would notice there were only five left. But Carl sat down and pulled his plate back and popped the tab.

“What you did,” he said, “was scale that tree. It was two big old limbs up there, the one you’d stand on and the other one, higher, where we’d tied that rope. We had a big old knot in it that you held on to and a loop for your foot, and you’d stand on the one branch and catch your breath, and then bail off over that gully. Best time was night, you’d be out there flying around in the dark like a dang bat.”

Larry imagined it, sailing out over the world, leaving your stomach back at the tree, weightless as you turned and turned, nearly stopping at the rope’s apex and swinging back where you grabbed the limb waiting like a hand.

“Now your momma’s right bout that briar patch down there,” Carl said. “Black-tipped thorns big as a catfish fin. You’d be better off jumping in a pit of treble hooks. Poison ivy, too. Like something out of one of your funny books.

“Now Cecil, he’s sacred of heights, right, don’t even like going up the steps on the school bus, and wouldn’t be caught dead in that tree. But the day I remember, it was six or eight of us boys out there and we’d been drinking beer and riding him all afternoon, calling him chicken, sissy, and finally bout dark I say, ‘Hey Cecil. I’ll give you a dollar if you go do it.’

“Cecil, he looks up that big old tree trunk and says, ‘That ain’t worth no so-and-so dollar.’

“‘Okay then,’ another fellow says, ‘make it two.’

“Cecil, he’s drinking his beer, says, ‘Boys, it’s some things can’t be bought. I’ll do it for three.’ ”

His father smiling telling it. “He makes us take the money out so he can see it. Ain’t wearing nothing but cut-off blue jeans, no shirt, no shoes, his whole family poor as niggers. Ever summer when school let out his momma’d cut off his long britches for short ones and save his shoes for one of his brothers. Went barefoot in summer, we all did,