Larry wouldn’t remember, almost a year later, whose idea it was, his going to the army. But because Cindy’s body had never been recovered, because no trace had been found, not a hair, a spot of blood, a thread from her short skirt, and despite most of the county’s belief that he’d raped and killed her, Larry had been allowed to board the bus in Fulsom, his mother receding in the window as he sat with his duffle bag and crew cut and rode across the bottom of the state away from Fulsom then north to Hattiesburg for basic training. The army recruiter had informed his commander of his situation and all agreed, should evidence occur, that he would be returned to stand trial. They’d keep their eye on him.
In the bus he saw his face reflected in the window and reached up, took off his glasses. He looked thinner without them and left them on the seat when he arrived at Camp Shelby.
There, he found that the anonymity of army life fit him, basic training where he lost twenty pounds, the bland food, the busy hours. When assignment time came, a sergeant asked him what his talents were and Larry said he didn’t have any. The man asked, well, what did his daddy do. Larry said, “He’s a mechanic.” The sergeant wrote something on a form and mumbled, “If it’s good enough for him, son, it’s good enough for you.” Which was how Larry found himself in the motor pool among engine blocks hanging from chains and upraised hoods and good- natured city boys with cigarettes in their uniform pockets. Larry smiled at their jokes but kept to himself, in his bunk, in the mess hall, alone over his clean work station handling wrenches, ratchets, screwdrivers, and pliers that felt and weighed the same as his father’s had, that smelled and gleamed the same, his year-long apprenticeship as a mechanic in this army barracks where Jeeps and trucks came in an endless line, Private First Class Larry Ott, Serial Number US 53241315, not so disinclined as his father had claimed, emerging a certified mechanic. With his duffle and a shopping bag filled with paperbacks, thinner in his uniform, he was transferred to Jackson, Mississippi, this new part of his life seeming not so much like another chapter in a novel as a different dream in the same night’s sleep.
Each time he went home on furlough-Christmas, Thanksgiving-he found his parents both older and stranger, his mother forgetful of where the dustpan was, how the gas stove worked. Larry was somehow taller than the father who couldn’t seem to look at him, always out of the house, working, though his shop was as empty those days as it would be after Larry took it over, after Carl, who passed out every night in his chair by the television, finally ran his truck off the road into a field on his way home one summer’s evening and went through the windshield and broke his neck, the overturned truck barely damaged, still running perfectly when it was found. Larry was called in to his captain’s office near the end of his third year of service to hear the news. Honorably discharged, he was moved shortly thereafter back home where all agreed-the new sheriff, the chief investigator, and the lieutenant in charge of Larry’s unit-that he should care for his mother.
In Chabot, Silas was still gone. And still no Cindy. She hadn’t returned, and no hunter, no lumberjack, had stumbled upon her bones, no hound had nosed them up. Cecil and Shelia Walker had moved, he didn’t know where, and the old house without them seemed to have given up, ended a brave stand, sagging with the relief of vacancy, weeds sprouting through the steps, privet over the windows and kudzu vines slithering around the porch posts. The NO TRESPASSING sign someone had nailed on the door had begun to fade.
For years, after Larry had signed his mother into River Acres, he would wake each morning to the faraway growl of power saws cutting down trees on the acres he’d been forced to sell, the shriek of back-up alarms, the grumble of log trucks trundling the muddy ruts to deliver their quivering wet hardwood to the mill’s teeth. Soon the land he had walked as a boy, the trees he’d climbed, had been winnowed to three hundred acres, the land surrounding it clear-cut, replanted with loblolly pines that rose quickly toward the sky and would, he knew, be ready for harvest in another fifteen years. Days, he waited for customers, his shop more a tradition than a business. Evenings, on his porch or by his fire, he read. Nights he spent alone, seldom thinking of his mother’s old prayer, the one where she asked God to send him a special friend. Until it was answered.
eight
SILAS JUST BEAT the lunch rush and got a corner booth. He put his hat off to the side and waited, gazing out the window at the high crumbling courthouse across the street, its arched windows and columns, at the white lawyers in suits walking down one side of the long concrete steps and the families of the black folks they would convict or acquit walking down the other. The diner door opened and a group of white ladies came in, all taking at once. Silas usually avoided this place-his mother had waited these tables for more than twenty years, bringing his supper from here so often he’d grown to hate the food. But today the diner held a comfort. Maybe it was the closest he could get to Alice Jones, dead so long with her secrets. And his.
A young waitress with enormous breasts and blue eyeliner arrived with pitchers of iced tea in each hand. “What’s up, 32 Jones? Sweet or un?”
“Sweet, please, ma’am,” he said, turning one of the glasses on the table upright so she could fill it, trying to remember her name.
“I seen you was in the paper,” she said. “That article about M &M.”
“You did, huh?” He’d forgotten the
“Um hm,” she said. “You ready to order yet?”
He said he was waiting for Angie and, still trying to remember the waitress’s name, afraid to stare at her chest, where her name tag was, he opened his phone. The girl was gone by then, her next table. Nobody had called. Silas shut the phone and sipped at his tea until the door opened and Angie came in. Even in her light blue uniform shirt and navy pants she looked good, her mouth to the side, her hair braided. He liked that she never wore makeup or did her nails. He got up and they kissed briefly, then slid into the booth, facing each other.
“You been busy?”
“Not long as you don’t call,” she said, taking one of the giant plastic menus from its rack. “What you hungry for?”
“Just this tea.”
She looked at him over the menu. “You ain’t still green from yesterday, are you?”
“Naw,” he said. “I eat two of Marla’s hot dogs earlier.”
“Lord, 32. You want me to call Tab and get him to bring our defibrillator?”
The waitress came and topped off his glass.
“Hey, Shaniqua,” Angie said.
“Hey, girl. How you manage to finally get this man come eat in here?”
“You know he do everything I tell him.”
Silas, who’d been staring out the window, glanced at them and smiled. “Thanks, Shaniqua.”
Angie ordered a hamburger with everything. Oh, and fries-mustard on the side-and a Diet Coke.
“What you so glum for?” she asked when the waitress left. “Paper ain’t call you 31 again did it?”
“Naw.”
“Then what?”
“Just thinking about Larry Ott.”
“You been to see him?”
“Naw.”
“He ever wake up?”
“Not last I heard. I been over at his place all morning. Roy wants me to handle this one while he works on that missing girl.”
“Tab thinks he shot himself,” she said.
“Roy thinks so, too. Else he wouldn’t a put it off on me.”
“Them two ought to know.”
“Why now, though?” he asked. “After all this time, why shoot his self now?”
“Maybe he did take that girl.”
Silas was shaking his head. “Naw, I can’t see it.”
“Think about it,” she said. “If he kidnapped that first girl way back when, then maybe he got a taste for it.
