Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

That guy on the four-wheeler? With the pillowcase. Wasn’t that his name? Didn’t Larry once say a good way to carry snakes was in a pillowcase?

“You best get on,” he said. “To your party. You ain’t gone be fit to drive, you keep drinking.”

“You want to come?”

“Me? The Chabot constable? You sure you want me there? I can have a dampening effect for certain kinds of partying.”

She was sipping her beer, using her tongue on the lip of the bottle. “I see your point.”

Instead, after a few more beers, more shots of tequila, they took his Jeep to her house. She had the place alone, Marsha and her baby gone to her mother’s for the week, Evelyn at the party. The roads were slick with rain and he drove carefully. She said it was cool riding drunk with a cop; you didn’t have to worry about a DUI. In her yard they waded through the muddy dogs and he put his hand on the wall beside her door for balance as she felt under the mat for her keys. Inside, she clicked on the light and a room appeared and he made his way to the sofa while she went to get more beers. Place was clean enough, baby toys around, a lava lamp churling on the end table, drapes open to the night. He put his fingers to his head to stop its spinning, thinking, What are you doing, 32 Jones? You got to get out of here.

She came back with two Bud Lights and sat beside him, handed him a bottle, put hers on the coffee table and her feet in his lap. “Remove these, Officer,” she said. Her boots. He got up and worked the first one off slowly and pulled at her little sock, her toes wiggling to help, her toenails red when the sock slipped free, her foot a good kind of musky. He let his gaze drift up her legs past her knees to where he saw red panties under her skirt, another tattoo (an apple with a bite out of it) high on her inner thigh. She was watching him with a sleepy smile. He started to work the second boot off and lost his balance, his momentum taking him to the door where he caught its handle. She giggled and shook her foot at him. Get back over here. He held the doorknob, looked out the window where a car passed slowly, its lights on dim. He thought how he was leaving fingerprints on the knob, on the beer bottle, too, her cowboy boots. Plus a witness just now out of sight, around the curve in the dark. He thought of Larry in his bed, thought of Angie in hers. What the hell was he doing?

“I got to go,” he said.

thirteen

LARRY WAS FLICKING through channels on cable television, thinking of his mailbox. Over the years he’d repaired it half a dozen times, mornings as he left for work discovering it by the highway, askew on its post or the whole thing knocked down and splayed in the mud, sometimes magazines fluttering over the road like chickens on the loose. Once the box and post missing altogether. He knew about this, how teenagers rode along, hanging out car windows with baseball bats. Knowing it happened to others should’ve been a comfort, but as he’d driven on to his shop those days, he’d noticed other mailboxes still standing and known that he alone had been targeted.

He was tired. Even though all he’d been doing was sleeping, he’d never been so tired.

He was tired of buying mailboxes.

He was sitting up, holding the remote control, the lights of his room dim. Outside, tall black clouds had so walled out the sky that night had come early, but now that the lightning had been unleashed, so much, so often, the world seemed weirdly strobe-lit, at odds with itself, day and night battling for dominion like God and the devil. His television remained clear through it all, unlike his set at home, where bad weather fuzzed the picture. He stopped on a Christopher Lee Dracula film from the early 1970s. By his count he had sixty-six channels. This was cable. Not DIRECTV. DIRECTV had even more channels. Wallace had said that.

Wallace.

He was tired of having only three channels.

He aimed the remote up and switched to a talk show. Then Bonanza. Then news. A sitcom he didn’t know. An old Jerry Lewis film. He thought of Silas again and felt his ears heat and something unfamiliar baking in his chest. He thought of Cindy. He changed the channel to where a man and a woman were selling jewelry. People out there buying it, calling on the phone. His chest hurt when he remembered Silas’s face as a boy, Cindy’s as a girl. The television flashed a man standing at an easel giving an art lesson. Larry closed his eyes and it was summer, 1979, the morning he’d brought paper and colored pencils to the woods along with his rifle. He and Silas spread the supplies out over a patch of bare ground and lay side by side and began to draw comic books, Larry’s about one of his stock superheroes, a standard plot. More interesting, Larry stealing looks, were Silas’s pages. His characters were strangely drawn, out of proportion but interesting, elongated heads and large hands and feet. No background to any scene. Just panels with people in them. He was doing a Frankenstein-like comic, a mad scientist bringing a corpse to life, and Larry noticed in a dialogue caption that his assistant’s name was Ergo. Larry said it to himself. He liked it for a name. He pushed his paper aside and rolled over, flexing his hand. Silas stayed working. “Hey,” Larry had said. “How you pronounce that guy’s name?” Pointing with his red pencil to Ergo. “Igor,” Silas had said.

Larry opened his eyes, worried his heart might push through the staples keeping his flesh shut. The sky cracked outside. How long he’d waited on his porch, in his living room with its three channels, its puttering fire, how long he’d waited in his shop, in his father’s old office chair, rereading the same books, how he’d driven from one spot to the other in his father’s truck, this his life, waiting for Silas and Cindy to return, while Silas roamed the world in his cleats. And Cindy probably buried somewhere only Cecil knew. He changed channels. People singing. Soap operas. More news. Commercials. Baseball highlights. He saw Silas on the infield, cocky, acrobatic, firing a white blur to first, frozen over second base, caught in the act of throwing. He saw himself before his date with Cindy, remembered his smile in the bathroom mirror, his father’s story about Cecil falling off the rope, the three of them laughing, their last good night. His window flickered. He saw himself the day of their date, talking to Cindy in the smoking area, Silas watching them from the field, saw Silas and his friends at the haunted house, saw Cindy there, they’d been together then but nobody knew, and neither offered him as much as a glance, turning their backs on him as he left with his mask. The mask. Wallace. He clicked the remote, his wrist sore, cartoons, not Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck but some new Japanese-looking thing, something he’d missed, something else he’d missed. Click. Another western. Click. News. Iraq. Commercials. Click. A show about a serial killer and the serial killer who imitated him. The remote sweaty in his hand. Weather, tennis, men, women, children, dogs, airplanes, the president waving, a televangelist asking for money with his eyes tight in prayer, click, a king cobra rising with its hood fanned and the camera panning to show its eyeglass design. So many channels. He pressed the button again. Close-up of a mosquito among the hairs of an arm, its needle sunk in the rippling skin.

On local Channel Five, he paused on a familiar scene, this hospital, an angle from the parking lot, daylight. Then his own face at sixteen, his eleventh-grade yearbook photo. He pressed a button on the remote and a reporter was saying, “…recovering from a possibly self-inflected gunshot wound to the chest in Fulsom General Hospital.” The scene changed to a grainy shot of ambulance drivers hurrying a body bag over a parking lot, flashing police lights, and then a picture of a lovely, smiling girl. “Ott is a suspect in the abduction, rape, and brutal murder of nineteen- year-old University of Mississippi junior Tina Rutherford, whose body was discovered buried beneath an abandoned building on Ott’s property in rural Gerald County, Mississippi. Police investigators won’t comment on the story, but a deputy is presently stationed outside Ott’s hospital room.”

Larry sat breathing, his chest sore. The rain fell harder and the window had gone very dark until lightning lit the streaking panes. He looked to the door.

“Excuse me,” he called to the deputy outside. He had to call four times before the man-he’d read SKIP HOLLIDAY on his name tag-got up and peered in, a frown.

“Yeah?”

“Can I talk to Roy French, please?”

The deputy regarded him. “You change your mind?”

“Tell him,” Larry said, “that I remembered something.”

“Well, he’s gone. Won’t be back till tomorrow. Is it somebody else you want to talk to? Sheriff?”

“No. I’ll wait for French.”