Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

eight

SILAS JUST BEAT the lunch rush and got a corner booth. He put his hat off to the side and waited, gazing out the window at the high crumbling courthouse across the street, its arched windows and columns, at the white lawyers in suits walking down one side of the long concrete steps and the families of the black folks they would convict or acquit walking down the other. The diner door opened and a group of white ladies came in, all taking at once. Silas usually avoided this place-his mother had waited these tables for more than twenty years, bringing his supper from here so often he’d grown to hate the food. But today the diner held a comfort. Maybe it was the closest he could get to Alice Jones, dead so long with her secrets. And his.

A young waitress with enormous breasts and blue eyeliner arrived with pitchers of iced tea in each hand. “What’s up, 32 Jones? Sweet or un?”

“Sweet, please, ma’am,” he said, turning one of the glasses on the table upright so she could fill it, trying to remember her name.

“I seen you was in the paper,” she said. “That article about M &M.”

“You did, huh?” He’d forgotten the Beacon Light came out today. No mention of the rattlesnake in the mailbox, then. With dead bodies and missing girls, must not be news enough. Because it was a weekly paper, the news about Larry being shot wouldn’t be printed for a while.

“Um hm,” she said. “You ready to order yet?”

He said he was waiting for Angie and, still trying to remember the waitress’s name, afraid to stare at her chest, where her name tag was, he opened his phone. The girl was gone by then, her next table. Nobody had called. Silas shut the phone and sipped at his tea until the door opened and Angie came in. Even in her light blue uniform shirt and navy pants she looked good, her mouth to the side, her hair braided. He liked that she never wore makeup or did her nails. He got up and they kissed briefly, then slid into the booth, facing each other.

“You been busy?”

“Not long as you don’t call,” she said, taking one of the giant plastic menus from its rack. “What you hungry for?”

“Just this tea.”

She looked at him over the menu. “You ain’t still green from yesterday, are you?”

“Naw,” he said. “I eat two of Marla’s hot dogs earlier.”

“Lord, 32. You want me to call Tab and get him to bring our defibrillator?”

The waitress came and topped off his glass.

“Hey, Shaniqua,” Angie said.

“Hey, girl. How you manage to finally get this man come eat in here?”

“You know he do everything I tell him.”

Silas, who’d been staring out the window, glanced at them and smiled. “Thanks, Shaniqua.”

Angie ordered a hamburger with everything. Oh, and fries-mustard on the side-and a Diet Coke.

“What you so glum for?” she asked when the waitress left. “Paper ain’t call you 31 again did it?”

“Naw.”

“Then what?”

“Just thinking about Larry Ott.”

“You been to see him?”

“Naw.”

“He ever wake up?”

“Not last I heard. I been over at his place all morning. Roy wants me to handle this one while he works on that missing girl.”

“Tab thinks he shot himself,” she said.

“Roy thinks so, too. Else he wouldn’t a put it off on me.”

“Them two ought to know.”

“Why now, though?” he asked. “After all this time, why shoot his self now?”

“Maybe he did take that girl.”

Silas was shaking his head. “Naw, I can’t see it.”

“Think about it,” she said. “If he kidnapped that first girl way back when, then maybe he got a taste for it. Maybe he’s been nabbing girls all along and getting away with it. Or else been holding off long as he can. But either way, he sees cute Tina Rutherford and goes all Hannibal Lecter on her. Then it’s all over the news and he realizes who it was, big rich family, and gets worried.” She made her hand a pistol and pointed it at her own chest. “Bang.”

“What if he didn’t take that first girl? In high school.”

“Maybe everybody thinking he did’s finally added up for him. All those years of nobody talking to him. You think he ever gets laid? Man with his rep? Maybe he finally snapped and said to himself, ‘All right, if they gone treat me this way then where’s the nearest girl?’ ”

Shaking his head. “I just don’t think he’s got it in him.”

“How you know?”

Silas took a breath. Then he said it. “Cause I used to be friends with him.”

Shaniqua appeared with the food but Angie didn’t seem to notice.

“You welcome,” Shaniqua said, leaving.

“What you mean, friends?”

“A long time ago. When I was fourteen years old…” He hesitated, looked out the window again, people and cars passing in front of the big white building devoted to the law, three floors of it.

“32?”

“When I was fourteen years old, me and my momma came to Amos from Chicago. On a bus.” From there he started to talk, things he’d never said out loud, how they’d ridden down from Joliet, how they moved into Carl Ott’s cabin, no water, no electricity, walking two miles to the nearest road, how Carl and Larry picked them up until Ina got wind of it and gave them those old coats, how the next day Silas’s mother came home in a Nova and never did say where she got it. He was still talking when Shaniqua passed by again and said, “If you ain’t gone eat that, Angie, somebody else will.”

Angie ignored her but started on the food, opening the mustard packets and squeezing them onto her plate for her French fries, chewing her hamburger slowly, sipping her Diet Coke through a straw as Silas told how, at first, he’d been shocked how quiet the woods seemed compared to Chicago, no crowds, car horns, sirens, no el train clacking by. But in the woods, if you stopped, if you grew still, you’d hear a whole new set of sounds, wind rasping through silhouetted leaves and the cries and chatter of blue jays and brown thrashers and redbirds and sparrows, the calling of crows and hawks, squirrels barking, frogs burping, the far baying of dogs, armadillos snorkeling through dead leaves and dozens of other noises he slowly learned to identify. He found he’d never seen real darkness, not in the city, but how, if you stood peeing off the cabin porch on a moonless night, or took a walk through the woods where the treetops stitched out the stars, you could almost forget you were there, you felt invisible. Country dark, his mother called it.

“I didn’t like it at first,” he said, “being down here. But after a while, after I’d got me that rifle from Larry, and after I started playing baseball, I felt like I belonged here. It’s part of why I came back, after all that time. I’d never forgot this place.”

Shaniqua came and stood over them with her pitchers. “More sweet?” she asked Silas. He nodded and she filled it. “You want another DC?” she asked Angie.

“No, thanks.”

Silas was looking back out the window, rubbing the brim of his hat. He told her about Carl and the fight with Larry as she slowly stopped eating. “After that,” he said, “me and Momma moved. To Fulsom. She’d done saved enough money for a house trailer. I went to Fulsom Middle and didn’t see Larry again till high school. By then I was playing baseball. Everybody calling me 32. Name in the paper all the time. And Larry Ott, he was just a hick that nobody liked.”

“How come?”

“He was weird. Lived so far out in the country he didn’t have any friends. Never came to ball games, didn’t go to the junior prom. Always reading his books. He used to bring stuff to school, snakes he’d catch, trying to make people notice him. I remember one time, Halloween, must’ve been junior year. He come to school with this monster mask.”

Silas hadn’t thought of this in years. It was a zombie mask with fake hair and rotting skin, made of heavy plastic and red with gore, as realistic as anything anybody had ever seen, like a real severed head. “I can see it plain as day right now,” he said. When Larry had shown up in homeroom wearing it, kids flocked him. Silas saw him by the gym, as pretty girls, cheerleaders, passed it head to head trying it on. When dumbstruck Larry got it back and pulled it over his own face again, it must’ve smelled like Love’s Baby Soft Perfume and Suave shampoo and Certs. Then another group of girls was calling Larry over. Could they see his mask, try it on? Would he bring it to the Fulsom First Baptist Church Haunted House that night? Wear it in one of the rooms?

Of course he would.

Silas had practice that afternoon, and afterward, he and M &M and other teammates rode in the back of somebody’s pickup truck over to the abandoned house on Highway 5. Larry was already there, wearing a white sheet with a hole scissored for his head, beaming. When he gave Silas an awkward wave, Silas turned his back. For the next three hours Larry had his own room in the haunted house, a room dizzy with strobe lights and littered with fake body parts, shrieks from speakers hidden among bales of hay. People streamed through all night, groups of teenagers, boys pushing at one another, couples, some with terrified children. Silas, aloof, watching it while sneaking beers from the back of the truck, keeping an eye on Larry, thinking that tonight Larry must’ve felt almost normal.

At midnight, the end, Larry came out of the house, pulling off his mask, his face red from heat, his hair plastered to his skull. He stood, waiting to be noticed, congratulated on his performance, maybe, welcomed by the group, given a beer. Cindy Walker was there, too-

“Who?” Angie broke in.

“The girl,” he said, annoyed he’d brought her up, “who went missing.”

She watched him.

“Anyway,” he went on, “when Larry come out of the haunted house, we all just kind of pretended not to see him. All of us.”

He told her how Larry stood in the floodlight for a long time. Figuring it out. The mask deflated under his arm. Finally he turned and walked down the dirt road toward the paved one. He paused at the road in his whipping sheet and waited, as if a car was coming though none was, waited a long time, and still no car came. Some of the seniors had forgotten him and were passing cigarettes and beers, but Silas watched as Larry finally crossed the road and walked into the parking lot. He stopped there, too, and took off his sheet and looked over the cars, as if selecting one to buy. He’d forgotten where he’d parked his mother’s Buick, that’s what he was doing now. In case anybody glanced over and happened to notice him and yell, “Hey, look! It’s Larry! Come back! Join the party!”

No one did, including Silas, including Cindy. And after Larry got in the car and lingered, its engine purring, Silas didn’t run after Larry as he slowly, slowly crackled through the parking lot, didn’t signal him over as he sat with his brights on, shining down the dirt driveway to where everybody looked away and kept talking, and Silas didn’t wave to him as Larry drove past them slowly, and they all watched his brake lights as they lingered through the trees, and lingered still, as if he might come back. When he was finally gone, Silas remembered, Cindy and everyone else, himself included, began to laugh.

Angle’s lips were over to the side and he knew she was thinking. “How long was it, from that night, till that girl, Cindy, went missing?”

“Couple months?”

He paused as Shaniqua appeared and cleared away Angie’s dishes. “You want more sweet?” she asked Silas.

“Naw, I’m good.”

“Thanks, girl,” Angie said. Then to Silas: “Did you ever go out with her?”

“Cindy?” Not meeting her eyes, turning his hat over on the table. Thinking Just tell her but instead shaking his head nope, saying, “Her stepdaddy was one of them white men any smart black boy would avoid, especially in Mississippi.”

Still watching him. “Who ever accused you of being smart?”

He smiled.

“But Larry took her out?”

“Yeah.”

“Why’d she go? If he was such a loser?”

Her radio squawked and Tab came on, wreck over on 201.

“Shit.” She rose with her drink. “Sorry, baby. I hate to leave cause this is the most you have ever talked.”

She leaned to kiss his head. “We gone finish this conversation,” she said and hurried out, the ambulance pulling to the curb, lights flashing.

Shaniqua came to the table. “Yall talking about Scary Larry?”

He looked up. “Yeah.”

She began collecting dishes. “My momma went to school with him. She say that boy used to always have snakes in his pocket.”

SILAS TOOK OFF his hat as he passed through the hospital’s electric doors and stopped at the information desk and asked where he could find Larry Ott. The red-vested volunteer, an old white man with eyebrows thick as mustaches, put on a pair of glasses and frowned at his computer screen.

“Are you family?” he asked, then gave a half smile to let Silas know he didn’t have to answer, it was a joke. “I’m Jon Davidson,” he said, offering Silas his hand. “Jon,” he said, “without an h.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“You’re Constable Jones, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Read about you in the paper here.” He handed Silas a copy of the Beacon Light, folded to the story. Silas glanced at it. “Body Found” the title read. The story was brief, just the facts, burning car, etc. Silas given credit as the officer who found the body but all the quotes were, as usual, from French.

“Ah, here we go,” Davidson said, scrolling down on his computer. “He’s still in the intensive care unit. Second floor, left out of the elevator. Visiting hours for there are three to five, but they’ll make an exception for you.” He winked. “Just tell the nurse on duty you’re famous.”

Silas thanked him and went past the gift shop to the elevator, then turned around and came back.

“Has anybody else been to see him?”

The volunteer took off his glasses and tapped his nose. “Let’s see. I’m on duty noon to six, five days a week. But no. Nobody else I know of. You want me to ask the other volunteers?”

“If you don’t mind,” he said. “And if anybody does come by, could you get their names? Let me know?”

“You got it.”

He scrawled his cell number on a business card and rode the elevator to the next floor. He pushed through a glass door that said INTENSIVE CARE. The nurses’ station was quiet, one black lady in green scrubs tapping at her computer. Behind her he heard, on a monitor, labored breathing. The walls were glass, and through them he could see several beds, most empty.

“Hello,” he said, approaching the desk.

She glanced up. “Good afternoon. Can I help you?”

He tapped his hat on his thigh. “I’m here to see about Larry Ott.”

She took off a pair of eyeglasses and appraised him.

“How is he?” he asked.

“Well, he made it through surgery last night but he’s still unconscious. The doctor should be back at four to check him, but he’s stable right now.”

“Can I see him?”

She rose. “Just for a minute.”

He followed her and saw she’d been playing solitaire on her computer.

Larry was alone in the unit, several other dark beds around, him in the center, connected to the heart monitor and ventilator and an IV rack. He was shirtless and pale, his chest bandaged with drainage tubes down both sides. He had more tubes going into his nose and mouth, taped over his skin.

“It’s amazing he’s still alive,” the nurse said. “When he came in, there hadn’t been time to get him over to Hattiesburg, where they’re better equipped to deal with gunshot wounds. The doctors did the best they could, but…” She didn’t finish the thought.

“You think he’ll pull through?”

“I couldn’t say,” she said. “But he was clinically dead twice during his operations.”

“Operations?”

“Yes. The surgeon removed the bullet, and we gave him six units of blood. The bullet missed his heart by the breadth of a hair, Dr. Milton said. But then, not long after we got him back here, he suffered a minor heart attack from the stress and went back into the O.R.”

This close, Silas saw lines of gray in Larry’s hair. The stubble on his chin around the tape was gray, too. There were wet tracks out of his eyes, down the dry skin of his face.

“Is he in a coma?”

“We can’t tell yet,” she said. “We’re sedating him with Diprivan.”

“When you think you might know more?”

“You’ll have to ask the doctor,” she said.

JURISDICTION, HE KNEW, meant more than geography. It meant responsibility. Somebody had to tell Mrs. Ott about Larry’s being shot, and, since French had pawned this case off on him, he got out of the Jeep and stood in the parking lot of River Acres, a nursing home he’d thus far only seen in passing, on his way somewhere else. Such places depressed him as they did, he supposed, everyone. He squared his hat on and took a breath. The building was a single-story brick structure with seedling pine trees growing out of the drainage gutters along the edge of the roof, which needed new shingles. There was a row of windows down the side of the home, many cracked and some opened and others with air conditioners hanging out, chugging, dripping to puddles beneath, propped with boards.

The front door was opened and a black man of Silas’s build sat inside smoking a cigarette and reading a NASCAR magazine. He wore a white uniform with yellow stains on the front. Silas recognized him-DUI arrest, a year ago-and nodded, wondering why the dude didn’t sit his chair outside, as it seemed hotter inside.

“Morning,” Silas said and removed his hat. “Where I go to see Mrs. Ott?”

Without looking up the man nodded down the hall and Silas thanked him and followed it to where he found a sliding glass window with nobody behind it. The odor of disinfectant didn’t cover the faint smell of urine. He leaned in the window, a desk with a crossword puzzle book and Oprah on a muted thirteen-inch television. He rang the buzzer and in a moment a heavy woman with big glasses came, in no hurry, from an adjacent door.

“Morning,” Silas said. “I’m Officer Jones from over at Chabot.”

The woman sat in the chair and looked up at him with amusement in her eyes. “I know who you are,” she said. Her nails were long and decorated with stars and he wondered how she punched the buttons on her phone. Her name tag said BRENDA. “You was up ahead of me in school,” she said. “I used to watch you play baseball.”

He smiled. “Long time ago.”

“You calling me old?”

His smiled widened. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“What you need up in here? Clyde done broke his probation again?”

“Not that I know of. I’m here to speak to a Mrs. Ott, if she’s able.”

The woman raised her eyebrows. “You can try if you want to. She had some strokes a few years ago, plus she got Alzheimer’s.”

“How bad?”

“Bad enough. Most times she ain’t know anybody. Can’t move her whole left half. Just be laying there. What you want to see her for? Her son in trouble?”

“Why you ask that?”

“Cause she tried to call him yesterday. She get her a good day once in a while. But he never came.”

“He come see her a lot?”

“Several times a week. Crazy man ax would I call him ever time she have a good day you know what I told him?”

“Told him no?”

“Told him hell no. I ain’t no answering service. She can call him her own self whenever she wants to.”

“Well, you might not have to worry about him again. Somebody shot him. That’s why I’m here,” he said.

HER ROOM WAS a double, two hospital beds with recliners beside each, TV on a rack high on the wall. In the far bed, by the window, an ancient black woman lay gazing outside. The room smelled like somebody had forgotten to change the bedpans. Mrs. Ott sat in her recliner watching him like he was a lamppost that had just walked in. Overhead, on the wall, a television played Wheel of Fortune.

From behind him Brenda said loudly, “Miss Ina? This Officer Jones. He want to talk to you about your son.”

She looked at him vacantly.

“Call me if you need,” Brenda said, touching his arm. “I’ll be right out here.”

“Thanks.”

“Who are you?” Mrs. Ott asked, mild alarm in her voice, the left half of her face frozen, her mouth in a permanent frown. She looked past him where Brenda was examining her nails in the hall. The sight of her seemed to relieve Mrs. Ott.

Silas barely recognized her as the woman who’d given him and his mother coats so long ago. She wore a robe untied down the front and a gown beneath. She had no breasts to speak of and a neck thin as his wrist. He pulled a rolling stool over to her chair and sat, holding his hat, trying to slump so he wouldn’t seem so big. She’d watched him the whole time with something like suspicion in her eyes.

“Clyde,” she said. “Tell them others to stop.”

“I’m not Clyde, Miss Ina,” he said. “My name is 32. I used to know your boy, Larry.”

“Who?”

“Your son,” he said gently. “We were friends together, a long time ago. You give me a coat one time.”

“Clyde?” she said.

“No, ma’am. 32. My name is 32.”

“32?” She looked alarmed. “I’m much older than that.”

“No, ma’am. My real name is Silas.”

“How’s Eleanor Roosevelt?”

He frowned and glanced out at Brenda. “That’s one of her chickens,” she said.

“Oh.” Turning back to the old woman. “She’s fine, Mrs. Ott. All the chickens are fine. I fed em yesterday.”

“Rosalynn Carter’s the best layer.”

“I speck so.”

“But Ladybird Johnson’s prettiest.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Who are you?” she asked.

He told her again.

“Clyde?” she said.

He sat awhile longer, unable to convince her he wasn’t Clyde, then he said good-bye and rose. In the hall, he offered a card and asked would Brenda call him if Mrs. Ott had a good day. She said of course she would.

In the parking lot, shaded by a big pecan tree, he sat in the Jeep, elbow out the window, his hat on the seat beside him. The day he’d spent at the Ott house, so long ago, kept coming back to him. Catching lizards with Larry. That giant snake. Those chickens in the barn. At one point, as they’d assembled what Larry had called their herpetarium, a row of Mason jars full of wary reptiles, Silas had spotted a lawn mower, pushed under a low wooden rack.

“You get to cut the grass?” he’d asked.

“Get to?” Larry said. He set his jar down, the lizard inside watching him. “You mean have to.”

“I ain’t never cut none,” Silas said.

“You want to?”

They rolled the push mower out of the barn and into the sunlight and Larry showed him how to check the oil and gas and how to prime the pump, how to pull the cord to crank it. Then, yelling over the noise, Larry showed him how to adjust the motor speed and push the mower in rows, narrowing toward a center. Silas snatched the handle and said okay, his turn. He loved it, the buzz of the motor, hot fresh cut grass in the air, between his bare toes, wild onions sizzling on the frame, the bar vibrating in his fists and the occasional mangled stick flung from the vent. When he was a kid one time, Larry yelled, walking alongside Silas, Larry’s daddy was cutting grass and Larry watching and his daddy ran over a rock that shot like a bullet and bounced off Larry’s bare stomach and left a red imprint of itself. Larry’s daddy had laughed real hard. Even took a Polaroid and laughed every time he looked at it. You had to be careful of where you let the vent aim, was Larry’s point. You didn’t want to spray any rocks out toward any cars or toward people, see? Silas turned and left Larry standing and mowed rows and rows and kept mowing, loving the progress through the grass, the design he was making. It felt good, like combing his hair. Larry wandered to the front porch steps and picked up a book. He watched for a while, not even pretending to read, then abruptly dropped the book and ran into the yard and pushed Silas away and turned the mower off.

Silas shoved him back as the motor sputtered to a stop. “Don’t be pushing me.”

“Sorry,” Larry said as they looked at each other, Silas’s palms still vibrating.

“I don’t like nobody pushing me.”

“It’s just,” Larry said, “we ain’t got much time left.”

“I don’t care.” Silas cranked the mower again and began to push it. Larry watched for a while then went back to the porch and sat, his hands on his knees.

A moment later he was jumping and pointing. It was getting dark now, lightning bugs floating over the fields, and Silas had nearly finished. He saw headlights coming through the woods. He left the mower running and darted across the lawn kicking up grass. He leapt the fence and was gone into the woods. Behind him Larry ran to the mower, still puttering, and began to push it. The lights were Carl Ott’s, and he got out of his truck with a bag of ice and a brown sack. He was greasy from his day’s work but he looked over the yard and began to nod.

“Good work, boy,” he called to Larry.

Silas knew this because he’d crept back through the cornfield. Mr. Ott said something else now, something Silas couldn’t hear, and then walked inside. Larry turned and pulled the mower toward the barn, looking over to where Silas had run, staring, it seemed, directly at him.

Good work, boy.

Silas remembered it. He had felt, at that moment, most acutely in his life, the absence of a father. He’d walked home that night, through the darkening woods, aware that all this land-over five hundred acres, Larry had said-was theirs, which meant it was Larry’s, or would be. And Silas, who had nothing, looked up to where the sky had been, now he couldn’t even see the tops of trees as night peeled down along the vines. He started to run, afraid, not of the darkness coming, but of the anger scratching in his ribs.

When he got home, his mother’s car was there. Inside, his Styrofoam box from the diner sat on the small wooden table between their beds where they ate each night, a carton of chocolate milk beside it. His mother still wore her uniform, her hairnet. Her cat was on her lap as she sat on the end of her bed.

“Boy, where you been?”

“Out in the woods.”

“Out in the woods, Silas? After dark?”

“Sorry, Momma,” he said, the lie coming easily. “I got lost.”

For a moment, rubbing that cat’s neck, she’d watched him, wondering perhaps whether to believe him or not, maybe too tired not to believe it, because what she’d said, finally, was, “Eat your supper. It’s already cold. And the milk’s done got warm.”

Now he cranked the Jeep. He backed out of his parking space. So he’d had a father all along, and not some deadbeat black man who’d knocked up Alice Jones and left, but a white man who’d slept with his maid and then sent her off to Chicago when she got with child.

His windows down, he cruised the highway among the log trucks and SUVs, heading back toward the Ott property. He wondered, leaving the city limits, traffic more sparse, if that old cabin was still there.

When he turned onto Campground Cemetery, he saw a four-wheeler riding in the center of the road. He came up behind it, the thing going about forty miles an hour, and flicked on his headlights. The boy on it, white, skinny, looked behind him and tossed a can into the weeds and waved him around, but Silas stuck his arm out the window and pointed him off the road.

The kid was sitting on it with his leg over the gas tank lighting a cigarette when Silas got out and walked up. When he saw Silas’s uniform and gun belt he straightened on the seat. “Hidy there,” he said.

Silas said, “You ain’t supposed to have that thing on the road.”

The kid looked up at him.

“You got a driver’s license?”

“You a game warden?”

“Chabot constable. Where’s your license?”

“Must’ve left it home. You’re 32 Jones. I heard of you. What’s a constable?”

“Police officer. What’s your name?”

“Wallace Stringfellow.”

“You live out here, Wallace?”

He cocked a thumb behind him. “Few miles yonder ways.”

“You hadn’t been drinking, have you?”

“No, sir, Officer.”

“You didn’t throw a beer in the weeds back there?”

He shook his head.

“You mean if I went back there I wouldn’t find a can with your fingerprints on it?”

“You might would. I probably threw lots of em out, always been a litterbug, but never when I was riding.”

Silas noticed a dirty pillowcase stuffed back in the cage behind the seat and wondered should he look inside it. Wondered for a moment would it have eye holes, though in truth today’s racism seemed less organized than when he’d been a boy. He said, “You carrying a gun?”

“No, sir.”

“You ride out here a lot?”

“Sometimes.”

“This is Rutherford land, most of it, and if you’re on it you’re trespassing.”

“You mean it’s against the law just to ride?”

“If the land’s posted, it is. And fenced off.”

“Well, you learn something ever day. I appreciate you telling me.”

“Where you going?”

“Nowheres in particular. Just enjoying the weather.”

Silas watched him but he was thinking of the hunting cabin. “Well,” he said, “I’ll let you off with a warning this time. But you ride that thing on the side of the road all the way home, hear, and if I see you on the highway again, drinking or not, I’m gone write you a ticket. Or worse.”

“Yes, sir. Preciate the warning.”

He watched the kid kick-start it and rev the engine. He gave a little salute and motored off, bumping along the side of the road, the pillowcase flapping. Silas stood shaking his head.

THE JEEP TICKING in front of Larry’s house, Silas slipped off the lanyard with his badge and, to cool down, removed his uniform shirt, hung the lanyard back over his neck, and tied the shirt around his waist. He fanned his face with his hat walking over the field toward the trees, stooped under an old fence row, careful not to snag his T-shirt on the bobwire. He didn’t relish the thought of red bugs, ticks, mosquitoes, or snakes and kept a careful eye out as beggar’s lice stuck to his pants legs and briar barbs lodged in his shirt.

What’s missing out of you, Silas?

His mother had had to work two jobs plus clean houses to pay for the trailer home she’d bought in Fulsom. Back then he’d told himself she just wanted him out of the way. That was why she’d sent him off. Lying to himself even as he opened the letters she mailed him in Oxford, unfolding the limp five- and ten-dollar bills she sent each week so he could go to his classes and play baseball without having to get a job. He knew now she’d loved him despite his never writing her back, despite the trouble and fear he caused her, despite the thing missing out of him. He’d returned her love by rarely coming home, and when he did she’d doted over him, as if every meal was his last, or hers, straightened his paper napkin and laid another chicken leg on his plate and filled his milk glass or his iced tea so much he could barely stand it. He’d refused to see the truth, that she was starving from loneliness. In fact, he could barely look at her. All he could do was eat quickly and squirm away and go out into the night (driving her car) and find M &M and his other high school friends while she sat waiting for him to come home.

Now, as he walked, slipping through leaves and vines and ivy and spiderwebs and arcs of briar, he noticed how different the land was, how quickly it could change, such a ragged jungle now, scarred with white deadfall, no longer the brief paradise two boys had had those years ago. He topped a hill and descended to the bottom of a hollow, stopped to rest by an old magnolia tree, black trunk so big it would be hard to reach his arms around, something familiar about its knots and whorls, good places for feet, hands. He looked up and saw two boys in the branches, one white, one black. He hurried on, ducking a fierce shuck of briar, soon saw another familiar magnolia, this one buffeted smooth at waist level by a boy’s old baseball. Using his hat to rake down the briars, he was breathing hard and nearly bumped into the wall of the cabin before he saw it.

Smaller somehow, darker wood, more weathered. Vines and kudzu had nearly overtaken the place. It seemed the heart of some struggle, as if the vegetation were trying to claim the structure back into itself, pull it down, the earth suddenly an organic breathing mass underneath. Silas could almost feel the friction, hear the viscous grumble of digestion.

In front he eased up the steps, soft as moss, the porch like a cave, vegetation on all sides and bees boiling out of white blooms, live vines constricting dead ones, hanging from the roof. An enormous gray moth cupped to the wall. Gently, he moved coils of ivy aside and peered through the snakehead kudzu leaves to where the front door was secured with a rusty padlock.

He stepped backward and hooked his hat on a limb and pushed around the side of the cabin, a layer of wet leaves under his feet, the walls mummied in kudzu and constricted by hundreds of vines thick as chicken snakes. At the first window he angled his light through the dusty glass, probing the shapes of the headless single bed he’d slept on and the bed his mother had used, the table between them, the rusting iron hulk of a stove in the corner where they’d huddled for warmth in those first coatless days and nights.

He tried the window and found it locked from inside. Looked like it hadn’t been opened in years. He wormed his way through the foliage along the side of the house and turned the corner to the back wall, that window locked, too, leaves tickling the top of his neck, spiderwebs with bug husks and the skeletons of leaves and twigs snagged in their lines. On the third wall he stopped and looked closely. Someone had raised this window. He could see where it had been forced up, the wooden runners lighter and splintered, one of the four panes of glass broken, pieces on the floor inside. An arm through, turning the rusty lock. He resisted lifting it, shone his light through the broken pane instead, a much clearer view without glass, the side of his once-bed, its mattress sagging in the middle, coils of rusty spring through the filthy cloth. On those first nights, his mother had slept with him, crossing the dirt floor in the darkness, her breath visible in the dim stove light, saying, “Slide over, son, fore we both freeze.”

Somebody had been inside, he saw now. There was a long smear over the floor. He imagined the intruder dragging his feet to erase his tracks. His pulse quickened as he fixed his beam beneath the bed. There it was, a shadow image of the bed cast in rumpled dirt, a place where someone had dug, he realized, a grave.