Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

should lock the doors; it was probably some boy out for adventure. “A barn is a wondrous place to children,” she said, and he agreed, remembering the boy he’d been there, the boy he’d been then.

The benefit-she would have said blessing-of her Alzheimer’s was that the first swath of history gone from her memory was the incident with Cindy Walker and its long-reaching aftermath. To Larry’s mother, reclining in her chair by her bed, none of this had happened and bore no connection to the mischief Larry described, the barn’s woodbox left open in the tack room, the bags of chicken feed overturned, the chain saw moved, Carl’s tackle box a jumbled mess where Larry always kept it neat, lures and sinkers missing, the rods hung askew. To avoid alarming her, he didn’t tell his mother how the rooster was missing when he came home one evening, his old bicycle another time. Instead, he described the small, bare footprints in the dirt around the back of the barn. On another visit he told her how, that morning, in place of driving to work, he’d parked his truck in the barn, hidden from outside, and waited in the hayloft, reading a novel, leaving out how odd if felt, being someplace not the shop, worrying that today might be the day a car stopped by, and then, at about ten o’clock, how he heard someone tromping over the dry dead leaves behind the barn. Larry descended the ladder and hid in a stall in the room near the back door. He had his old zombie mask and pulled it on. Presently the door screaked open and a ruff of blond hair eased in. He was filthy and brown as an egg and Larry smiled in the mask. He let the boy get fully in- cut-off blue jeans and no shirt or shoes, carrying a bent stick-waited to allow his small eyes to adjust to the darkness, before he stepped out from behind the stall with his arms raised and his fingers claws and yelled, “Argh!”

The boy rose from the ground as if ejected and yelped and turned in midair and landed and ran slap into the door and got up almost before he fell and was gone. Still smiling, Larry pulled the hot mask off and tossed the stick out and opened the barn’s big bay doors and drove through them and closed them behind him and left the mask in its spot in his closet and went to work.

“That should fix him,” his mother said, smiling, coleslaw on her chin. “Did you hear that, Doris,” Ina told the tiny, palsied black woman in the next bed, but the woman continued to gaze out the window.

“Poor thing,” his mother whispered. “She’s forgotten her name.”

Because of Larry’s past the women who shared her room were forever the furthest gone, those who wouldn’t be aware that a perhaps-murderer visited, those with no family, no one to complain.

And as the years pass, the black women pass, too. To Larry’s count four had died in their sleep as Ina lived on, waiting for him to come, losing an hour at a time the days and weeks and months of her memory, until she, too, had forgotten her name and Larry’s as well, the chickens last to go, and then even they were gone and now the ever-thinner woman he visited on Saturdays lay waiting to die without knowing it, alongside yet another black woman who also lay waiting, without knowing it, to die.

TEN YEARS AFTER Larry had frightened him from the barn, the boy came back. It was a Friday after work, November, Larry reading on his porch still in his uniform, sweaty but not dirty, the shirt untucked, his shoes beside the front door, another habit left over from his mother, who’d never allowed work shoes in her house.

He’d already eaten, his usual KFC meal of two breasts, no wing, double mashed potatoes with gravy and a biscuit, and was on his second Coke, which he brought home from the shop in the yellow plastic crates that used to be wood. The night had been set to unreel like any other in his life: read, watch TV, take a shower, go to bed, read more until he fell asleep. Get up in the morning, shave, dress in a clean uniform shirt but, because it would be Saturday, blue jeans instead of his regular pants, then go to work. In the evening he’d ride out and see his mother, bring fresh flowers and the photo album, hope she remembered him, if not just sit there with her, him staring into the same space she did, wondering what she saw. He had his cell phone in his pocket now, as always, in case she called, but the calls had been so rare lately he knew that any one might be the last, that she might slip off into that space where she stared, go for good to whatever she kept watching.

When he heard the vehicle out on the highway a little over half a mile away, he paused in his reading, his finger marking the page, its nail surely the cleanest of any mechanic in Mississippi. The vehicle grew closer and soon he heard tires crunch over gravel and saw flashes of white through the trees bordering the right side of his yard. He looked down at his feet and wondered should he put on shoes-greeting a visitor in your bare feet seemed rude-but didn’t. Even though he was the only person on this road, someone coming to see him was unlikely. Maybe somebody lost. Or somebody with a few beer bottles or a bandolier of firecrackers. He set his Coke down on the concrete and put the book in his chair and stood up to wait.

It was a late-model van of the style UPS used, but trimmed in blue and labeled DIRECTV. The driver didn’t seem lost; in fact he waved, and rolled to a stop beside the road behind Larry’s Ford and turned the key off. For a moment the driver, sunglasses, dirty blond hair, sat behind the wheel, collecting things from the passenger seat, and opened the door and got out and slammed it and waved again as he walked up the hill toward Larry.

“Hidy there,” he said. “My name’s Wallace Stringfellow.” He was early twenties, Larry saw now, a bit under six feet, a goatee and scruff on his cheeks, bony, his untucked, wrinkled DIRECTV shirt a size or two large on him and long khaki shorts under it, ratty sneakers. There were a few Stringfellows in Fulsom but Larry didn’t know them.

“Good evening,” he replied. “What can I do for you?”

Wallace stuck out his hand, which was dirtier than Larry’s and small. For a moment Larry looked at it before he took it and found Wallace’s palm clammy. He could smell that he’d been drinking.

“Well,” he said, putting the clipboard under his arm to get a package of Marlboros out of the DIRECTV shirt pocket, “we on what us dish technicians call a installation drive? I was just out riding around, bout lost, and happened to see you ain’t got one. A dish.” He shook a smoke out and lit it and jutted his chin toward Larry’s roof. “That old-timey antenna? What you get, like three channels?”

“I appreciate your riding all the way out here,” Larry said, “but I don’t reckon I need it. Three channels are more than enough.”

“You can’t watch but one at a time, right,” Wallace said. “But look, you don’t know what’s out there. Something for every taste. Get you a dish, boom, your evenings are as full as you want em to be.” He pointed again. “I can screw her in right up there, they always look like a ear, I think, listening at the sky. You like cooking shows, boom, we got you covered. Murder shows? Crime investigation? Wrestling? It’s a whole channel devoted to that.”

“I appreciate you coming all the way out here,” Larry said, “but-”

“Here,” Wallace said, passing him one of the brochures.

Larry took it and unfolded it, a long list of channels. “There sure are a lot,” he said.

“You don’t know the half,” Wallace said. “I can get you a hundred twenty-something channels, won’t be a hundred a month. ESPN, HBO, Skinemax.”

Larry was shaking his head.

“What if I just set a spell, then?” Wallace asked. “Been a long one. I ain’t gone bite.”

“Yeah,” Larry said. “I’m sorry. I just don’t get that many visitors.”

Wallace followed him up the steps to the screen door and almost bumped him when Larry stopped.

“Why don’t we sit out here,” he said. “It’s cooler.”

“You the boss, hoss.”

Larry said, “I’ll be right back.”

He went in and looked at the clock. News would be on soon. Through the screen, Wallace was peering inside. “Nice place,” he said. “You get somebody to clean it for you?”

“No.”

Larry laid the brochure on the kitchen table and pulled a chair from beneath it and when he came back out Wallace had set the other brochures on the porch and used the clipboard to weigh them down. He put the cigarette in his lips and took the chair Larry offered, turned it around and sat with his elbows over the back.

Larry stood by the door. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“Now we talking. You got a seven and seven?”

“No, sorry.”

“Bourbon?”

“I got a Coke.”

“What you got to go with it?” Wallace smiled.

Larry looked inside, behind him. “I don’t have anything like that,” he said. “I don’t drink alcohol.”

“Not even a beer?”

“Sorry.”