Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter: A Novel Read online

  Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

  Tom Franklin

  For Jeff Franklin

  and

  in loving memory

  of

  Julie Fennelly Trudo

  M, I, crooked letter, crooked letter, I, crooked letter, crooked letter, I, humpback, humpback, I.

  —How southern children are taught to spell Mississippi

  Table of Contents

  Epigraph

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  Acknowledgments

  Also By Tom Franklin

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  one

  THE RUTHERFORD GIRL had been missing for eight days when Larry Ott returned home and found a monster waiting in his house.

  It’d stormed the night before over much of the Southeast, flash floods on the news, trees snapped in half and pictures of trailer homes twisted apart. Larry, forty-one years old and single, lived alone in rural Mississippi in his parents’ house, which was now his house, though he couldn’t bring himself to think of it that way. He acted more like a curator, keeping the rooms clean, answering the mail and paying bills, turning on the television at the right times and smiling with the laugh tracks, eating his McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken to what the networks presented him and then sitting on his front porch as the day bled out of the trees across the field and night settled in, each different, each the same.

  It was early September. That morning he’d stood on the porch, holding a cup of coffee, already sweating a little as he gazed out at the glistening front yard, his muddy driveway, the bobwire fence, the sodden green field beyond stabbed with thistle, goldenrod, blue salvia, and honeysuckle at the far edges, where the woods began. It was a mile to his nearest neighbor and another to the crossroads store, closed for years.

  At the edge of the porch several ferns hung from the eave, his mother’s wind chime lodged in one like a flung puppet. He set his coffee on the rail and went to disentangle the chime’s slender pipes from the leaves.

  Behind the house he rolled the barn doors open, a lawn mower wheel installed at the bottom of each. He removed the burnt sardine can from the tractor’s smokestack and hung the can on its nail on the wall and climbed on. In the metal seat he mashed the clutch with one foot and brake with the other and knocked the old Ford out of gear and turned the key. The tractor, like everything else, had been his father’s, a Model 8-N with its fenders and rounded hood painted gray but its engine and body fire-engine red. That red engine caught now and he revved it a few times as the air around his head blued with shreds of pleasant smoke. He backed out, raising the lift, bouncing in the seat as the tractor’s big wheels, each weighted with fifteen gallons of water, rolled over the land. The Ford parted the weeds and wildflowers and set off bumblebees and butterflies and soggy grasshoppers and dragonflies, which his mother used to call snake doctors. The tractor threw its long shadow toward the far fence and he turned and began to circle the field, the privet cut back along the bobwire, the trees tall and lush, the south end still shaded and dewy and cool. He bush-hogged twice a month from March to July, but when the fall wildflowers came he let them grow. Migrating hummingbirds passed through in September, hovering around the blue salvia, which they seemed to love, chasing one another away from the blooms.

  At the chicken pen he shifted into reverse and backed up, lowering the trailer hitch. He checked the sky shaking his head. More clouds shouldering over the far trees and rain on the air. In the tack room he ladled feed and corn into a plastic milk jug with the mouth widened, the brown pellets and dusty yellow corn giving its faint earthy odor. He added a little grit, too, crushed pebble, which helped the chickens digest. The original pen, which his father had built as a Mother’s Day gift somewhere back in Larry’s memory, had run twenty feet out for the length of the left side of the barn and adjoined a room inside that had been converted to a roost. The new pen was different. Larry had always felt bad that the hens lived their lives in the same tiny patch, dirt in dry weather and mud in wet, especially when the field surrounding his house, almost five acres, did nothing but grow weeds and lure bugs, and what a shame the chickens couldn’t feast. He’d tried letting a couple run free, experiments, hoping they’d stay close and use the barn to roost, but the first hen made for the far woods and got under the fence and was never seen again. The next a quick victim of a bobcat. He’d pondered it and finally constructed a scheme. On a summer weekend he’d built a head-high moveable cage with an open floor and attached a set of lawn mower wheels to the back end. He dismantled his father’s fence and made his own to fit against the outside door to the coop, so that when the chickens came out they came out in his cage. Each morning he latched an interior door and, weather permitting, used the tractor to pull the cage into the field, onto a different square of grass, so the chickens got fresh food—insects, vegetation—and the droppings they left didn’t spoil the grass but fertilized it. The chickens sure liked it, and their egg yokes had become nearly twice as yellow as they’d been before, and twice as good.

  He came outside with the feed. Storm clouds like a billowing mountain loomed over the northernmost trees, already the wind picking up, the chime singing from the porch. Better keep em in, he thought and went back in and turned the wooden latch and entered the coop, its odor of droppings and warm dust. He shut the door behind him, feathers settling around his shoes. Today four of the wary brown hens sat in their plywood boxes, deep in pine straw.

  “Good morning, ladies,” he said and turned on the faucet over the old tire, cut down the center like a donut sliced in half, and as it filled with water he ducked through the door into the cage with the nonsetting hens following like something caught in his wake, the tractor idling outside the wire. He flung the feed out of the jug, watching for a moment as they pecked it up with their robotic jerks, clucking, scratching, bobbing their heads among the speckled droppings and wet feathers. He ducked back into the coop and shooed the setting hens off and collected the brown eggs, flecked with feces, and set them in a bucket. “Have a good day, ladies,” he said, on his way out, turning the spigot off, latching the door, hanging the jug on its nail. “We’ll try to go out tomorrow.”

  Back inside the house he blew his nose and washed his hands and shaved at the bathroom mirror, the hall bathroom. He tapped the razor on the edge of the sink, the whiskers peppered around the drain more gray than black, and he knew if he stopped shaving his beard would be as gray as the beards his father used to grow during hunting seasons thirty, thirty-five years before. Larry had been chubby as a kid but now his face was lean, his brown hair short but choppy as he cut it himself, had been doing so even before his mother had gone into River Acres, a nursing home nowhere near a river and mostly full of blacks, both the attendants and attended. He’d have preferred somewhere better, but it was all he could afford. He splashed warm water on his cheeks and with a bath rag swiped his reflection into the steamy mirror.

  There he was. A mechanic, but only in theory. He operated a two-bay shop on Highway 11 North, the crumbling white concrete block building with green trim. He drove his father’s red Ford pickup, an early 1970s model with a board bed liner, a truck over thirty years old with only 56,000 miles and its original six-cylinder and, except for a few windshield
s and headlights, most of its factory parts. It had running boards and a toolbox on the back with his wrenches and sockets and ratchets inside, in case he got a road call. There was a gun rack in the back window that held his umbrella—you weren’t allowed to display firearms since 9/11. But even before that, because of his past, Larry hadn’t been allowed to own a gun.

  In his bedroom, piled with paperbacks, he put on his uniform cap then donned the green khaki pants and a matching cotton shirt with LARRY in an oval on his pocket, short sleeve this time of year. He wore black steel-toed work shoes, a habit of his father’s, also a mechanic. He fried half a pound of bacon and scrambled the morning’s eggs in the grease and opened a Coke and ate watching the news. The Rutherford girl still missing. Eleven boys dead in Baghdad. High school football scores.

  He detached his cell phone from its charger, no calls, then slipped it into his front pants pocket and picked up the novel he was reading and locked the door behind him and carefully descended the wet steps and squished over the grass to his truck. He got in, cranked the engine and reversed and headed out, raindrops already spattering his windshield. At the end of his long driveway he stopped at his mailbox, tilted on its post, a battered black shell with its door and red flag long wrenched off. He cranked down his window and reached inside. A package. He pulled it out, one of his book clubs. Several catalogs. The phone bill. He tossed the mail on the seat beside him, shifted into drive and pulled onto the highway. Soon he’d be at his garage cranking up the bay door, dragging the garbage can out, opening the big back doors and positioning the box fan there to circulate air. For a moment he’d stand in front by the gas pumps, watching for cars, hoping one of the Mexicans across at the motel would need a brake job or something. Then he’d go inside the office, prop open the door, flip the CLOSED sign to OPEN, get a Coke from the machine in the corner, and click the lid off in the bottle opener. He’d sit behind his desk where he could see the road through the window, a car or two every half hour. He’d open the low drawer on the left and prop his feet there and tear into the package, see which books-of-the-month these would be.

  BUT FOUR HOURS later he was on his way back home. He’d gotten a call on the cell phone. His mother was having a good day, she told him, and wondered might he bring lunch.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he’d said.

  In addition to lunch he wanted to get a photo album—one of the nurses, the nice one, had told him those helped jog her memory, kept more of her here, longer. If he hurried, he could get the album, go by Kentucky Fried Chicken, and be there before noon.

  He drove fast, unwise for him. The local police knew his truck and watched him closely, often parking near the railroad tracks he passed daily. He had few visitors, other than midnight teenagers banging by and turning around in his yard, hooting and throwing beer bottles or firecrackers. And Wallace Stringfellow of course, who was his only friend. But always unnerving were the occasional visits, like yesterday, of Gerald County chief investigator Roy French, search warrant in hand. “You understand, right,” French always said, tapping him on the chest with the paper. “I got to explore ever possibility. You’re what we call a person of interest.” Larry would nod and step aside without reading the warrant and let him in, sit on his front porch while French checked the drawers in the bedrooms, the laundry room by the kitchen, closets, the attic, on his hands and knees beaming his flashlight under the house, poking around in the barn, frightening the chickens. “You understand,” French usually repeated as he left.

  And Larry did understand. If he’d been missing a daughter, he would come here, too. He would go everywhere. He knew the worst thing must be the waiting, not being able to do anything, while your girl was lost in the woods or bound in somebody’s closet, hung from the bar with her own red brassiere.

  Sure he understood.

  He stopped in front of the porch and got out and left the truck door open. He never wore his seat belt; his folks had never worn theirs. He hurried up the steps and opened the screen door and held it with his foot as he found the key and turned the lock and stepped into the room and noticed an open shoe box on the table.

  His chest went cold. He turned and saw the monster’s face, knowing it immediately for the mask it was, that he’d owned since he was a kid, that his mother had hated, his father ridiculed, a gray zombie with bloody gashes and fuzzy patches of hair and one plastic eye that dangled from strands of gore. Whoever wore it now must have found the mask French never had, hidden in Larry’s closet.

  Larry said, “What—”

  The man in the mask cut him off in a high voice. “Ever body knows what you did.” He raised a pistol.

  Larry opened his hands and stepped back as the man came toward him behind the pistol. “Wait,” he said.

  But he didn’t get to deny abducting the Rutherford girl last week, or Cindy Walker twenty-five years ago, because the man stepped closer and jammed the barrel against Larry’s chest, Larry for a moment seeing human eyes in the monster’s face, something familiar in there. Then he heard the shot.

  WHEN HE OPENED his eyes he lay on the floor looking at the ceiling. His ears were ringing. His belly was quivering in his shirt and he’d bit his lip. He turned his head, the monster smaller than he’d looked before, leaning against the wall by the door, unable to catch his breath. He wore white cotton gardening gloves and they were shaking, both the one with the pistol and the one without.

  “Die,” he croaked.

  Larry felt no pain, only blood, the heart that beat so rapidly pushing more and more out, bright red lungblood he could smell. Something was burning. He couldn’t move his left arm but with his right hand touched his chest, rising and falling, blood bubbling through his fingers and down his ribs in his shirt. He tasted copper on his tongue. He was cold and sleepy and very thirsty. He thought of his mother. His father. Of Cindy Walker standing in the woods.

  The man against the wall had sunk to his haunches, watching from behind the mask, eyes shimmering in the eye holes, and Larry felt a strange forgiveness for him because all monsters were misunderstood. The man moved the pistol from his right hand to the left and reached and touched the gory mask as if he’d forgot it was there and left another smudge of red, real among the paint, on its gray cheek. He wore old blue jeans frayed at the knees and socks stretched over his shoes and had a splotch of bright blood on his shirtsleeve.

  Larry’s head and face had filled with a rattlesnake’s buzz and he heard himself whisper something that sounded like silence.

  The man in the mask shook his head and moved the gun from one hand to the other, both gloves now stained red.

  “Die,” he said again.

  Okay with Larry.

  two

  SILAS JONES WAS his name but people called him 32, his baseball number, or Constable, his occupation. He was himself the sole law enforcement of Chabot, Mississippi, population give or take five hundred, driver of its ancient Jeep with its clip-on flashing light, licensed registrant of its three firearms and Taser, possessor of a badge he usually wore on a lanyard around his neck. Today, Tuesday, it lay on the seat beside him as he returned from afternoon patrol. On a back road shortcut toward the town, he glanced out his window and saw how full of buzzards the easterly sky had grown. There were dozens of them, dark smudges against darker clouds like World War II photographs he’d seen of flak exploding around bomber planes.

  He braked and downshifted and did a three-point turn and pulled onto a small dirt road. He looked for signs of a dog or deer hit by a car or four-wheeler and saw nothing except a box turtle on the pavement like a wet helmet. Might be something near the creek, a mile or so down the hill, hidden in the trees. He shifted into first and nosed the Jeep into the mud and slid and yawed over the road until he found its ruts. He let the steering wheel guide itself until the road curved around a bend in the woods and he began the slow process of braking in mud. When he’d stopped it was in front of an aluminum gate with a yellow POSTED: NO HUNTING sign, signature of the Rutherford
Lumber Company. The signs were everywhere in this part of the county (and the next)—the wealthy Rutherford family owned the mill in Chabot as well as thousands of acres for timber farming. Sometimes higher-ups, always white folks, got to hunt whitetail deer or turkeys on prime plots. But out here, these acres were mostly loblolly pines ready to be cut, orange slash-marks on some trees, red flags stapled onto others.

  Silas got out and his sunglasses fogged. He took them off and hung them in his collar and stretched and smelled the hot after-rain and listened to the shrieking blue jays, alone at the edge of a wall of woods, miles from anywhere. If he wanted, he could fire his .45 and nothing or nobody in the world would hear other than some deer or raccoons. Least of all Tina Rutherford, the nineteen-year-old college student, white girl, he was both hoping and hoping not to find under the cloud of buzzards. Daughter of the mill owner, she’d left home at the end of summer, headed back north to Oxford, to Ole Miss, where she was a junior. Two days had passed before her mother, worried, had phoned. When her roommates confirmed that she’d never arrived, a missing persons report had gone out. Now every cop in the state was looking, especially those around here: forget everything else and find this girl.

  Silas searched through a wad of keys for the one with a green tag and let himself in the gate and drove through and parked on the other side and closed the gate and locked it behind him.

  Back in the Jeep, he cranked down his window and floated through identical pine trees, tall wet bitterweed in the middle of the road wiping the hood like brushes at a carwash. Where the land slanted down the trees had angled their trunks gracefully like arms bent at the elbow. He bumped and slid along half hoping he’d get stuck. Since much of his work in his rural jurisdiction involved dirt roads, he kept requisitioning the Chabot town council for a new Bronco. Kept not getting it, too, stuck with this clunker that, in a past life, had been a mail truck—you could still see a faint US POSTAL on its little tailgate.