Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“Well, I ain’t good at counseling,” French said, “but it strikes me it’s long past time the two of yall talked.” He picked up the restraints. “I got to put these back on for tonight. But I hope we’ll be able to get em off tomorrow. Once and for all.”

When he left, Larry lay amid his machines, thinking of Silas, how time packs new years over the old ones but how those old years are still in there, like the earliest, tightest rings centering a tree, the most hidden, enclosed in darkness and shielded from weather. But then a saw screams in and the tree topples and the circles are stricken by the sun and the sap glistens and the stump is laid open for the world to see.

Larry thought of Wallace, what he’d done to that poor girl, raping her, killing her, burying her in the dirt. Thinking what he, Larry, might have done to stop what happened, what he could’ve said, thinking in a way it was his fault, Wallace’s desires tangled and connected in his mind to what he thought Larry had done. Larry sending him home that night instead of understanding. If he was trying to emulate Larry, wasn’t it somehow Larry’s doing? His fault? And what if he’d told Silas what he knew when Silas had asked him? Would the outcome have been different? Wallace still alive, Silas with two working arms?

He was still trying to untangle it when his door was pushed open by the end of a rolling bed and two nurses wheeled in a sleeping black man, his left arm in a cast.

“You got a roommate,” a nurse said.

Silas.

sixteen

WHEN SILAS OPENED his eyes in the dark early hours of the morning, warm from drugs, he wasn’t surprised that he found himself flat on his back under a cast, by the hospital window. Beside him, Larry sat propped up in his bed, flicking through channels, not yet aware Silas was awake. For a moment Silas imagined it had always been like this, that they’d been normal brothers all the years of their rearing, both black or both white, sleeping side by side in matching twin beds. Instead here they were. Strangers. The sons of Carl Ott, injured, bandaged, like survivors of an explosion.

Except for the flickering TV, it was dark in the room, Skip still stationed by the door. Silas moved his heavy arm, suspended in traction over his chest, his fingers tingling, hot at the ends. In recovery they’d told him it would take a while, some hard rehab, those years of pitching, the damage he’d done then, and now this: his elbow not only broken but crushed, the tendons torn, muscles ripped, steel screws and pins holding it together. Yet he stood a chance of, eventually, getting most of the arm back, most of the control of his hand. Writing, things like that, would be the hardest. But he was lucky, he’d been told. Lucky Wallace had missed him with his.38 Special, having fired, in all, six times, hitting the dog once. “You got in a fight with a big-ass pit bull,” the ER doctor had said. “Judging from its bite radius, it’s amazing you’re alive.” “Yeah,” Silas had mumbled. “You should see the other dog.” He remembered Angie’s worried pucker in the ER lobby. He couldn’t tell if her sniffing was allergies or crying, but he was glad she was there, holding the hand that still worked.

After surgery, he’d asked the nurse to put him in with Larry Ott. She’d had to call French, and to Silas’s drowsy surprise, he’d okayed it.

Now Larry stopped his surfing on the late news, Channel 6, the cute redheaded anchor. She bid the listening world good day and led with what she called “a story of local violence and justice. Chabot Constable Silas Jones,” she reported, “nicknamed ‘32,’ while investigating a tip about a man who’d put a rattlesnake in a local woman’s mailbox, stumbled instead into a snake den himself.” Exterior shots of Wallace’s house-there was Silas’s Jeep-and then inside shots, the aquariums, that big-ass cottonmouth, the king snake, the rattler. “When Constable Jones attempted to question the suspect, now identified as Wallace Stringfellow, of Chabot, Stringfellow allegedly set loose his dog, a part pit bull, part Chow mix, on the police officer.” Stills of the dead dog lying in the mud, big as a hog, stills of bullet holes in the porch floor. “The officer was seriously injured and the dog killed when Stringfellow allegedly fired at the officer during the attack.”

What Silas remembered most vividly was that zombie mask. How different would their worlds have been if he’d followed Larry across the road toward his mother’s Buick way back when, that long-ago haunted house? What if he’d just reached out and took Larry’s shoulder, said, “Wait”?

The anchor was saying that Chabot Town Hall employee Voncille Bradford, unable to reach Constable Jones on her radio, notified the Gerald County Sheriff’s Department, who dispatched two cars to the scene. “Deputies found Jones unconscious in the house and bleeding seriously,” the anchor said. “There was also a three-foot-long diamondback rattlesnake near his leg. Deputies were able to subdue the snake without incident and Jones was taken by ambulance to Fulsom General Hospital, where he’s reportedly in stable condition.

“The house’s occupant, Wallace Stringfellow, fled into the woods and was pursued by deputies. After a brief gun battle, Stringfellow allegedly took his own life before deputies could apprehend him. No other injuries were reported.

“But here,” she said, her nostrils flaring the way Silas had always liked (he saw now because it reminded him of Angie), “is where the story takes a surprising turn. Deputies, searching Stringfellow’s property, discovered not only illegal drugs and drug paraphernalia but surprising evidence in another case.”

The television switched to French’s badly lit face, a hasty news conference outside Stringfellow’s house. “Searching Mr. Stringfellow’s residence,” French said, “we found a wallet that belonged to Tina Rutherford.”

“Rutherford is the Gerald County Ole Miss student,” the anchor filled in, “who, missing for nine days, was discovered by Constable Jones last week, brutally murdered and buried in a hunting cabin on the property of local business owner Larry Ott. Ott has been a suspect in the murder since.”

Back to French.

“We can’t comment on these findings yet-”

“Does this,” a reporter called, off camera, “clear Larry Ott?”

“As I say,” French repeated, “we can’t comment yet.”

“Not such a quiet rural community these days,” the anchor finished. “We’ll keep you updated as this story develops. And now to Afghanistan, where-”

Silas felt for the button that raised the top half of his bed. When he began to move, Larry muted the television.

“You’re a hero,” he said, watching Silas.

“Hey,” Silas said, better sitting up. “Ain’t we a pair?”

Larry looked back at the television and clicked the sound back on and began to surf channels again.

Silas lowered his chin and thought about how to say what he needed to say. He had no idea where to begin.

“Larry,” he said, “it’s something I need to tell you. Some things.”

Larry continued to click. “Go ahead.”

“Could you turn that TV off?”

Larry ignored him.

“Well”-Silas turning toward him-”seeing as you still attached to your bed, you ain’t got much choice but to listen.”

Which Larry did. Partway through, he muted the television. A few moments later he turned it off and the room was dark except for the watchful gray and green eyes of their machines. Talking, Silas could see how still Larry was as he heard about the picture of Alice holding him and about Silas’s visit to River Acres. He sat without moving until Silas stopped and it was the end, the end where the two lay now with their injuries side by side in a hospital, both of them silent, neither moving as the moon pushed the shadows of the room along the floor and walls with its soft yellow light. Silas felt flattened by the truth, or the telling of it, his lungs empty and raw and the spaces behind his eyes throbbing.

“We’re brothers,” he said.

“Half brothers.”

“Did you know?”

“No,” Larry said, then, “Yeah. Ever since yall got in our truck that morning, I knew something. Then when Momma give yall them coats…”