wouldn’t never call the law on his friend, no matter what his friend done. You can trust your friend with whatever you done, that’s what it means to be friends.” He lit another cigarette. “So if you did kill her, I’d like to know’s all. How you done it. If you raped her.”
“I didn’t,” he said.
“Sometimes they like it, getting raped. They want you to do it. Carry em out to that cabin and thow em on the floor. Gag em. Start tearing off their clothes and hitting em a little bit, smacking em on they little white ass. Using a belt to strangle em, get on doggie-style and do em up the bunghole, show em who daddy is.”
“Wallace, I don’t like that talk.”
“You don’t ever thank about it? I used to listen to Momma and them fellows she was with. She liked em to smack her on the ass.”
Larry stood up and his knees popped. “I think it’s about time for me to get to bed. You’ve done got pretty drunk. And high, too, sounds like.”
“Wait-”
Larry passed him where he sat and moved along the porch in the familiar darkness and opened the door and reached inside and clicked on the switch and flooded the night with light, Wallace blinking, covering his eyes with one hand and his crotch with the other. But not before Larry saw the lump in his pants.
“Good night,” Larry said, looking away.
He went inside and closed the screen and fastened its hasp and shut the door. Locked it.
Outside, bright in the window, Wallace was up, adjusting his crotch, cupping his hands against the window to see inside.
“Larry,” he yelled. “Wait.”
“Go on home,” Larry called. “Drive careful and come back when you’re sober.”
“Just wait!”
“Good night.”
For a moment Wallace looked like he might cry, and then he slammed his forehead against the window. “Fuck you!” he said, then said it again, louder. “I know what you done. Know you raped that girl and killed her. Ever body’s right about you”-yelling now-“you crazy!”
He banged his head on the window again and kicked the wall. “You fucking freak,” he yelled, “I’m gone go tell the law on you right now, how you said you done it, killed that girl, told me ever thing-”
Larry unlocked the door and opened it and came onto the porch where Wallace was backing up. He fell pinwheeling off the steps and landed in the yard, still yelling. “You crazy!”
“I ain’t never hurt nobody in my life,” Larry said, “so you can just go on home!”
Wallace, still yelling, was running for his four-wheeler. He climbed on yelling all the while, illuminated in the porch light, kicking the starter until the motor sputtered to life. Then he got back off and crossed the yard to Larry’s pickup and kick at the headlights, missing once, kicking again, shattering the left one, the right, then clambering onto the truck’s hood and jumping on it, stomping in the windshield, yelling, “Fuck you! Fuck you, Scary Larry!”
Larry turned, went inside, where he watched until Wallace tired himself out and climbed down off the truck and got on the sputtering four-wheeler and flicked its headlamp on and gunned the engine, turning donuts in Larry’s grass, then sped away.
For a while Larry stood at the window, looking out at the night. Tomorrow he’d have to replace the windshield again. And the headlights. Pop out the dents in the hood.
AND HE DID, another windshield from the parts house, headlights, more lifted eyebrows from Johnson. Using a bathroom plunger to undent the hood, epoxying the rearview mirror back.
Wallace didn’t return after a week. A month. Larry grew worried and even got the phone book from its drawer and looked up Stringfellow. This was late February, the warmest winter in lower Mississippi in years, global warming, the newscaster thought. There were nine Stringfellows listed, but when he called the first a woman’s voice said, “Larry Ott?” before he’d told who he was. Alarmed, he hung up.
The phone rang again a moment later and a man said, “Why you calling us, you fucking freak?”
Larry said, “I’m sorry, it was a mistake.”
“You goddamn right it was. If you ever call this number again I’ll sic the law on you.”
He’d forgotten that people had caller ID and put the phone book away.
He waited during the day in his shop and at night on his porch. He’d pause while reading, lift his chin to listen for cars. When he visited his mother he wanted to tell her about Wallace, how God did work in His own time, healing Larry’s stuttering, his asthma, even sending him, at last, this friend. But his mother had forgotten the old prayer along with everything else, and so he just talked about her chickens.
When she was awake, the senile, skeletal black lady in the bed beside Ina would watch him with eyes narrowed by suspicion, but not because of Larry’s past, he figured, but his skin color, a woman close to ninety whose family had left her here, and Larry would wonder how many wrongs she’d endured from white people in her almost-century of living. Sometimes he thought of Alice Jones, of Silas, how Larry’s mother had given them coats but not a ride in her car. How what seemed like kindness could be the opposite.
In May in Wal-Mart on his grocery run he bought a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. A few nights later he opened one of the cans and tasted it, then poured it down the sink. Some evenings he took the pistol Wallace had given him from its box in its hiding place in his closet and loaded it and aimed at buzzards floating overhead, but he never fired it.
In June two customers stopped by the shop, one a plumbing salesman from Mobile on his way north with an overheated radiator and the other a black woman from Memphis with a battery that wouldn’t stay charged. He smirked at himself in the bathroom mirror the night he’d replaced the battery and thought that with all this business he should hire some help. If Wallace ever came back, he’d offer him a job on the condition the boy stop drinking and smoking so much and never on the job, train him to be a mechanic, start simple, oil changes, tire rotations, work up to brake jobs, tune-ups, rebuilding carburetors. Larry wouldn’t live forever, and the shop had to go to somebody, maybe it would keep Wallace on the straight and narrow.
Sitting on his porch one late July evening he remembered the church his mother would visit occasionally after the Chabot Baptist had become “uncomfortable” for her. The First Century Church, a group of Holy Rollers north of Fulsom, spoke in tongues and had faith healing services and asked its members to fast for three-day periods at certain times of the year. Larry never accompanied her to the fabricated metal building they used, understanding it was easier for a congregation to accept the mother of an accused killer than the killer himself, but, hungry for God, he would abstain from food when she did. He found the first skipped meals the hardest, the hunger a hollow ache. The longer he went without eating, though, the second day, the third, the pain would subside from an ache to the memory of an ache and finally to only the memory of a memory. Until you ate you didn’t know how hungry you were, how empty you’d become. Wallace’s visits had shown him that being lonesome was its own fast, that after going unnourished for so long, even the foulest bite could remind your body how much it needed to eat. That you could be starving and not even know it.
“Dear God,” he prayed at night. “Please forgive my sins, and send me some business. Give Momma a good day tomorrow or take her if it’s time. And help Wallace, God. Please.”
ten
WAS IT MONDAY yet? He’d barely slept the week before, and now Silas couldn’t stop yawning even though the mill roared and drummed behind him like an angry city. Each passing face in its tinted glass regarded the constable with ire, this tall black man standing shadowed in his hat in the road with a whistle in his teeth, pickup trucks bumping over the railroad tracks and away from the mill while impatient cars and SUVs inched forward.
A week ago he’d found Tina Rutherford’s body under Larry Ott’s cabin and been in all the local papers and a few national ones, his picture this time, snapped by the police reporter as Silas stood by the cabin, watching agents from the Criminal Investigation Bureau in Jackson carry the body bag out. The article said that he’d been investigating Larry’s Ott’s shooting, a possible suicide attempt, and happened across the old cabin.
He’d have been a hero if he’d found her alive.
