Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

steady, as if he and Cindy had decided they’d had enough of the movie, leaving Ken standing in his empty spot.

HE ARRIVED AT the road fifteen minutes before eleven, hoping to see the boyfriend. Maybe recognize his car. He had an idea it was an older fellow. Her mother worked a late shift in the tie factory on Fridays and wouldn’t be home until midnight, but, in case Miss Shelia got off early, he rode past their mailboxes and parked farther on, out of sight. He sat with the windows down, hoping the cigarette and beer smell had dissipated, watching for lights.

At eleven, he sat straight in his seat. They’d be along any minute now.

But at eleven-fifteen, no car. The half moon blackened the trees in front of it and rose yellow and cocked in the sky. No car at eleven-thirty. Maybe the boyfriend had dropped her off early. But wouldn’t Cindy want to sustain the illusion of her date with Larry? He cranked the car and, lights on low, drove slowly by the turnoff, expecting to see her standing by the mailboxes with her purse.

She wasn’t there. He drove by again and parked in his same spot, growing more worried.

At ten to midnight he got out of the car and stood at the edge of the highway and listened, trying to hear over the crickets and frogs. Looked in one direction, the other. Overhead, an airplane winked across the sky, the moon’s high cratered cheek centered in its spackling of stars. He stepped into the road to better see. Maybe they’d had an accident. How would he explain that to Cecil? To his father? Maybe, a dreadful thought, they already knew, the police having called.

At ten past twelve he began to hope he’d missed them somehow. Maybe the boyfriend had snuck in with his lights off, afraid Cecil might be lurking about. Larry cranked the Buick and clicked the headlights on low beam again and eased onto the pavement and turned off at the familiar dirt road that snaked past the Walker house and ended up, a mile farther, at Larry’s house. He drove, hoping Cindy might pop out of the trees, angry at him, Where the hell you been? I said eleven! Cecil’s gone kick my ass and yours, too. But no mad girl in his lights. Just the dusty diorama of trees hung with vines and slashed with leaves and the bobwire fence casing off the woods from the ditch.

He sat for five more minutes, fingers drumming the steering wheel. His own parents would likely be worried, too. He was more than an hour late. Because he’d never had a date, he didn’t know if they’d sit up and wait or what. He imagined his mother’s strained face. How had the date been? He turned the lights off and began to crunch over the gravel, the crickets as he passed silencing and then starting up after he’d gone. Maybe Cindy was someplace between the road and house. Maybe drunk and passed out. He slowed again, barely moving now, afraid of running her over.

Afraid of alerting Cecil, too. Maybe he’d have already passed out. Likely they were both there, him and Cindy, and Larry was working himself up for nothing. Certainly there was an explanation. Why did he have to make such a commotion out of this? He eased, lights off, closer to the house.

Finally, the last turn before the yard would open out. Fingers still drumming. He knew what he had to do. He had to go up and see if she was home safe.

When he rounded the curve the house was dark. He slowed, thinking about that. Were they all asleep? Wouldn’t they leave a light on for Cindy’s mother? She wasn’t home yet because he didn’t see her car. He touched the brakes and reached for the gear, about to shift into reverse, when Cecil appeared from the darkness like a torch ignited, filling his window with hot boozy breath and anger and sweaty arms.

“Where you been, you little fuck?”

His hands grabbing Larry’s neck, his shirt collar, Larry fighting the arms, the car lurching forward, his feet stabbing at the brakes. Cecil held on to him and he slammed the gear up into park just as he felt himself pulled out the window, the door lock caught in his belt loop, snapping off.

Cecil had him by the shirtfront, against the car.

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” Larry said, “I thought she was home.”

“Thought she was home?” He slung Larry around, into the dirt. “Why the fuck would she be home?”

“I let her out,” Larry said, scrabbling away.

But here Cecil came, straddling him now, both on the ground, Cecil growling, “Dropped her off where?” and Larry trying to speak but the man’s hands were around his neck and he might, he thought later, have been strangled if car lights-Miss Shelia, home from work-hadn’t suddenly found them there, wrestling in the dirt.

HALF AN HOUR later the sheriff arrived.

Before that, before Larry’s parents drove up in Carl’s truck, Miss Shelia, her hands shaking, had put on coffee. Larry sat centered on their threadbare sofa, his first time, some part of him realized, inside this house. It was low and dark, uneven floors. A small television with a rabbit ear antenna and the channel knob missing. Ashtrays with mounds of cigarette butts and a few framed class photos of Cindy on the wall. He tried not to look at them. Waiting for the Otts, Miss Shelia had busied herself sweeping the floor and collecting empty beer cans while Cecil sat across from Larry in a kitchen chair, glaring at him and smoking one cigarette after another. He’d switched from beer to coffee, Miss Shelia hissing, “You don’t want to be drunk when the law gets here.”

The sheriff, with an air of getting to the bottom of things, out of uniform and wearing no socks under his house shoes, sat by Larry, ignoring the parents, asking him, patiently, exactly what had happened. Said don’t leave nothing out. Larry told how she’d wanted to be dropped off in the woods, aware of the adults watching him. When he got to the part about the drive-in, he skipped using the blanket as her head and said he’d decided to leave during the second movie. Because he’d sworn not to, he didn’t mention her being pregnant. The sheriff put his hands on his knees and sat back. Teenagers, he said. Wasn’t no point in getting all worked up. She was probably out with some boy and would show up later that night. Was such behavior beyond the girl? No, her mother admitted, it wasn’t. Teenagers, the sheriff repeated. Well, why didn’t everybody just go on home. If she hadn’t come back by morning, give him a call, he’d look into it.

That seemed to satisfy everyone but Cecil, who stormed outside cursing, but when Larry stood to go the sheriff said, “What a minute, buddy.”

Larry stopped and felt the man reach into his back pocket and pull out his lockblade knife.

“All boys carry em,” Larry said.

“Well,” said the sheriff. “Let’s see what tomorrow brings.” He put the knife in his pocket.

Tomorrow did not bring Cindy home. Nor the next day or the one after that. Word got out that she had disappeared on a date with Larry, and then, Monday at school, Ken and David told about seeing Larry and Cindy screeching off. The sheriff was notified. Because Larry hadn’t told that part, his story seemed flawed, revised, and on Tuesday he found himself, along with his father, riding to the sheriff’s department for the first of many “talks.” Here, the sheriff growing stern, Carl angry, Larry confessed to how she said she’d been pregnant. Why hadn’t he said this the other night, the sheriff wanted to know. Because I swore I wouldn’t, he said.

The three rode in the sheriff’s car, Larry in the backseat, caged off from the front, no handles on the doors, to the spot in the woods where he’d dropped her off, the sheriff asking Larry did he see any tracks that would verify a car had been waiting. Did he see a cigarette butt? A rubber? Anything to help prove Larry wasn’t lying? No, no, no, no. Well, the sheriff said, hadn’t Larry worried about leaving a young girl alone in the woods? What kind of a gentleman would do that? Out of answers, Larry was led back to the car.

Cindy’s friends were asked to volunteer information about her, who she might’ve left with, where she could’ve gone, but nobody knew anything, everyone swearing she wasn’t seeing anybody. Meanwhile, deputies looked for Cindy in Carl’s woods, pulled by hounds, kicking through leaves, wading the creek, searching other parts of the county as well, dragging lakes, interviewing Larry over and over, sending out bulletins, nailing up posters. Larry never returned to school, the weeks stretching into months, and when even the most fervent optimists were beginning to doubt she’d run away, after Silas had left for Oxford, Larry spent his hours in his room, reading. His father switched from beer to whiskey and drank more and more, starting earlier in the day as his business dwindled, fewer and fewer customers each month until the cars that trickled in were the cars of strangers, strangers who found a disheveled drunk sitting in the office smoking cigarettes, a man who’d stopped talking to his son period and quit telling stories. Larry’s mother stopped going to church and stayed home, minding her chickens, often standing in the pen gazing into space or at the kitchen sink in her yellow gloves, hands sunk in gray dishwater, looking out the window. Their lives had stopped, frozen, as if in a picture, and the days were nothing more than empty squares on a calendar. In the evening the three of them would find themselves at the table over a quiet meal no one tasted, or before the television as if painted there, the baseball game the only light in the room, its commentators’ voices and the cracks of bats and cheers the only sound, that and the clink of Carl’s ice.