Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

nine

WHEN HE WAS thirty-one years old, not long after he’d taken his mother to River Acres and ten years before Tina Rutherford would vanish, Larry began to notice things amiss in the barn. Those were days when Ina Ott was more alert, her Alzheimer’s in its earlier stages, Larry visiting her each night on his way home from work, longer on weekends, a silent black lady in the other bed snoring gently or gazing out the window. His mother would always ask if he’d had any customers and he’d say, “Oh, one or two.” Then she’d ask about her ladies and he’d tell her about Eleanor Roosevelt. “Laid a big speckled egg this morning.”

When he noticed that somebody had been sneaking in the barn while he was at work, he told her this, too, how one evening he found the back door ajar, and another the pitchfork down from its nail. She was alarmed and said he should lock the doors; it was probably some boy out for adventure. “A barn is a wondrous place to children,” she said, and he agreed, remembering the boy he’d been there, the boy he’d been then.

The benefit-she would have said blessing-of her Alzheimer’s was that the first swath of history gone from her memory was the incident with Cindy Walker and its long-reaching aftermath. To Larry’s mother, reclining in her chair by her bed, none of this had happened and bore no connection to the mischief Larry described, the barn’s woodbox left open in the tack room, the bags of chicken feed overturned, the chain saw moved, Carl’s tackle box a jumbled mess where Larry always kept it neat, lures and sinkers missing, the rods hung askew. To avoid alarming her, he didn’t tell his mother how the rooster was missing when he came home one evening, his old bicycle another time. Instead, he described the small, bare footprints in the dirt around the back of the barn. On another visit he told her how, that morning, in place of driving to work, he’d parked his truck in the barn, hidden from outside, and waited in the hayloft, reading a novel, leaving out how odd if felt, being someplace not the shop, worrying that today might be the day a car stopped by, and then, at about ten o’clock, how he heard someone tromping over the dry dead leaves behind the barn. Larry descended the ladder and hid in a stall in the room near the back door. He had his old zombie mask and pulled it on. Presently the door screaked open and a ruff of blond hair eased in. He was filthy and brown as an egg and Larry smiled in the mask. He let the boy get fully in-cut-off blue jeans and no shirt or shoes, carrying a bent stick-waited to allow his small eyes to adjust to the darkness, before he stepped out from behind the stall with his arms raised and his fingers claws and yelled, “Argh!”

The boy rose from the ground as if ejected and yelped and turned in midair and landed and ran slap into the door and got up almost before he fell and was gone. Still smiling, Larry pulled the hot mask off and tossed the stick out and opened the barn’s big bay doors and drove through them and closed them behind him and left the mask in its spot in his closet and went to work.

“That should fix him,” his mother said, smiling, coleslaw on her chin. “Did you hear that, Doris,” Ina told the tiny, palsied black woman in the next bed, but the woman continued to gaze out the window.

“Poor thing,” his mother whispered. “She’s forgotten her name.”

Because of Larry’s past the women who shared her room were forever the furthest gone, those who wouldn’t be aware that a perhaps-murderer visited, those with no family, no one to complain.

And as the years pass, the black women pass, too. To Larry’s count four had died in their sleep as Ina lived on, waiting for him to come, losing an hour at a time the days and weeks and months of her memory, until she, too, had forgotten her name and Larry’s as well, the chickens last to go, and then even they were gone and now the ever-thinner woman he visited on Saturdays lay waiting to die without knowing it, alongside yet another black woman who also lay waiting, without knowing it, to die.

TEN YEARS AFTER Larry had frightened him from the barn, the boy came back. It was a Friday after work, November, Larry reading on his porch still in his uniform, sweaty but not dirty, the shirt untucked, his shoes beside the front door, another habit left over from his mother, who’d never allowed work shoes in her house.

He’d already eaten, his usual KFC meal of two breasts, no wing, double mashed potatoes with gravy and a biscuit, and was on his second Coke, which he brought home from the shop in the yellow plastic crates that used to be wood. The night had been set to unreel like any other in his life: read, watch TV, take a shower, go to bed, read more until he fell asleep. Get up in the morning, shave, dress in a clean uniform shirt but, because it would be Saturday, blue jeans instead of his regular pants, then go to work. In the evening he’d ride out and see his mother, bring fresh flowers and the photo album, hope she remembered him, if not just sit there with her, him staring into the same space she did, wondering what she saw. He had his cell phone in his pocket now, as always, in case she called, but the calls had been so rare lately he knew that any one might be the last, that she might slip off into that space where she stared, go for good to whatever she kept watching.

When he heard the vehicle out on the highway a little over half a mile away, he paused in his reading, his finger marking the page, its nail surely the cleanest of any mechanic in Mississippi. The vehicle grew closer and soon he heard tires crunch over gravel and saw flashes of white through the trees bordering the right side of his yard. He looked down at his feet and wondered should he put on shoes-greeting a visitor in your bare feet seemed rude-but didn’t. Even though he was the only person on this road, someone coming to see him was unlikely. Maybe somebody lost. Or somebody with a few beer bottles or a bandolier of firecrackers. He set his Coke down on the concrete and put the book in his chair and stood up to wait.

It was a late-model van of the style UPS used, but trimmed in blue and labeled DIRECTV. The driver didn’t seem lost; in fact he waved, and rolled to a stop beside the road behind Larry’s Ford and turned the key off. For a moment the driver, sunglasses, dirty blond hair, sat behind the wheel, collecting things from the passenger seat, and opened the door and got out and slammed it and waved again as he walked up the hill toward Larry.

“Hidy there,” he said. “My name’s Wallace Stringfellow.” He was early twenties, Larry saw now, a bit under six feet, a goatee and scruff on his cheeks, bony, his untucked, wrinkled DIRECTV shirt a size or two large on him and long khaki shorts under it, ratty sneakers. There were a few Stringfellows in Fulsom but Larry didn’t know them.

“Good evening,” he replied. “What can I do for you?”

Wallace stuck out his hand, which was dirtier than Larry’s and small. For a moment Larry looked at it before he took it and found Wallace’s palm clammy. He could smell that he’d been drinking.

“Well,” he said, putting the clipboard under his arm to get a package of Marlboros out of the DIRECTV shirt pocket, “we on what us dish technicians call a installation drive? I was just out riding around, bout lost, and happened to see you ain’t got one. A dish.” He shook a smoke out and lit it and jutted his chin toward Larry’s roof. “That old-timey antenna? What you get, like three channels?”

“I appreciate your riding all the way out here,” Larry said, “but I don’t reckon I need it. Three channels are more than enough.”

“You can’t watch but one at a time, right,” Wallace said. “But look, you don’t know what’s out there. Something for every taste. Get you a dish, boom, your evenings are as full as you want em to be.” He pointed again. “I can screw her in right up there, they always look like a ear, I think, listening at the sky. You like cooking shows, boom, we got you covered. Murder shows? Crime investigation? Wrestling? It’s a whole channel devoted to that.”

“I appreciate you coming all the way out here,” Larry said, “but-”

“Here,” Wallace said, passing him one of the brochures.

Larry took it and unfolded it, a long list of channels. “There sure are a lot,” he said.

“You don’t know the half,” Wallace said. “I can get you a hundred twenty-something channels, won’t be a hundred a month. ESPN, HBO, Skinemax.”

Larry was shaking his head.

“What if I just set a spell, then?” Wallace asked. “Been a long one. I ain’t gone bite.”

“Yeah,” Larry said. “I’m sorry. I just don’t get that many visitors.”

Wallace followed him up the steps to the screen door and almost bumped him when Larry stopped.

“Why don’t we sit out here,” he said. “It’s cooler.”

“You the boss, hoss.”

Larry said, “I’ll be right back.”

He went in and looked at the clock. News would be on soon. Through the screen, Wallace was peering inside. “Nice place,” he said. “You get somebody to clean it for you?”

“No.”

Larry laid the brochure on the kitchen table and pulled a chair from beneath it and when he came back out Wallace had set the other brochures on the porch and used the clipboard to weigh them down. He put the cigarette in his lips and took the chair Larry offered, turned it around and sat with his elbows over the back.

Larry stood by the door. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“Now we talking. You got a seven and seven?”

“No, sorry.”

“Bourbon?”

“I got a Coke.”

“What you got to go with it?” Wallace smiled.

Larry looked inside, behind him. “I don’t have anything like that,” he said. “I don’t drink alcohol.”

“Not even a beer?”

“Sorry.”

“Just brang me a Co-Cola then.”

He nodded and went inside, got one from the refrigerator and unstuck a magnet-opener from the fridge door and pried its lid off and restuck the magnet and came back out. Wallace had turned his chair the right way and sat propped against the wall, his legs dangling.

“Thank you,” he said and drank most of the Coke in the first swallow. “What’s your name?”

“Larry.”

“Larry what?”

He hesitated. “Larry Ott.”

The name didn’t seem to register, Wallace polishing off his Coke and clinking the bottle back down. “Well, Mr. Ott-”

“Just Larry.”

“Well, just Larry, where’d you go to high school?”

“Fulsom.”

“Same as me. When’d you graduate?”

Larry shrugged. He didn’t want to say it but Wallace waited. “Never did.”

“How come?”

“I quit.”

“Me, too.” Wallace laughed. “How come you did?”

“Just did.”

“Me, too. Couple a dropouts ain’t we. Momma keeps saying get my GED and I reckon I might, one of these days.”

Larry stood a moment, not asking if his boss minded he drank when he drove a company van. Then went to his chair and moved the book and sat down.

“What you reading?” Wallace asked, finishing his cigarette.

He held the book up. Wallace dropped his Marlboro on the porch and toed it out. “I seen that movie. You get you a dish? You ain’t got to worry about reading.” He pecked another from the package and lit it and grinned through his smoke. “Say your name’s Larry Ott? Ain’t I heard of you?”

Larry glanced at him. “Not many folks around here that ain’t.”

“Wait.” Wallace grinning now. “You the one they say did away with that girl. Back in high school.”

Larry looked down at his feet, wished he’d put his shoes on.

“That’s how come you quit school, huh. Shit, boy,” Wallace said. “You famous.” He eased his chair down. “Or infamous.”

Larry stopped himself from correcting Wallace and fidgeted in his seat. He said, “You still want to sell me a dish?”

“Hell, hoss, I don’t care what you done. I’ll still sell you a dish, you want one. Sell you two or three, you want. All I gotta do is get on your roof there, find the clearest spot to the sky, screw her in, and then run your cable down. But all that can wait to Monday.”

“Monday?”

He dug his cell phone out of his pocket. “It’s after five-thirty in the P.M. and it’s Friday. My weekend has officially begun.”

“How bout that.” Larry stood up with him. “Have a good weekend, Wallace. I’ll see you Monday?”

“Sure as clockwork.”

He gathered his clipboard and brochures and hopped down off the porch and trotted across the yard. In the van, he waved again and Larry waved back, standing with one hand on the porch post and watched him crank the van and grind its gears looking for reverse. When he got it turned around he tooted the horn and it nearly stalled as he shifted and Larry watched him weave over the road and then picked up the chair and turned and went back inside, Wallace’s engine still growling through the trees.

That night as he lay in bed he thought of Wallace and smiled in the dark. That he’d been lied to didn’t bother him. He’d placed him as the boy who’d snuck into his barn those years before. Same face, just longer and scruffier. Same small eyes. Larry remembered how he’d jumped and he smiled again. Wallace didn’t seem dangerous, just curious. Larry hoped he hadn’t stolen the van, though, remembering the fishing lures, the missing rooster.

He rolled over.

As he did each night before sleep, Larry prayed for his mother, that the following day might be a good one for her, that his cell phone might ring or that, if it was time, the Lord take her quietly. In her sleep. And that God would forgive him his sins and send him customers.

AFTER WORK THE following Monday Larry sat on his porch not reading but waiting in his usual company of bats and birds and insects, the tinkling of his mother’s chime each time the earth breathed its wind. He was disappointed but not surprised when night stole the far trees and the fence across the road and then the road itself and finally the sky, Larry’s truck gone too in the dark and stars beginning to wink in the sky like nail holes in the roof of a barn.

HE’D GIVEN UP on him by the time Wallace came back, two months later. Larry was reading when he raised his head at a buzzing over his land, the motor gnawing closer and closer and then the four-wheeler emerging where the trees broke, its bareheaded rider bouncing in the seat. He cut the engine as he approached Larry’s house and coasted to a stop, a cigarette dangling from his lips, a crumpled brown bag between his thighs.

“Hidy, just Larry,” Wallace called, sitting astride the four-wheeler like a horse.

Larry stood, one hand on the porch post, the other holding his book. “Hidy, Wallace.”

The young man rolled a leg over the gas tank and dismounted as if he were a cowboy, wearing a baggy T-shirt and shorts that looked like they might be the same pair he’d worn for his last visit. He hiked them up and brought the paper bag with him, holding it by its bottom.

“You surprised to see me?” he asked.

“Little bit.”

Wallace came onto the porch and set the bag by the post. He took a Pabst in a can from the bag and offered it to Larry.

“No thank you.”

“Well cheers then,” Wallace said, popping the tab and drinking.

“So I don’t get me a dish after all?”

“Would you believe,” Wallace said, his face contorted from the beer, “them DIRECTV bastards fired me?” He sat on the top step and leaned back against the post where he could look up at Larry, who moved his book and sat back down.

Larry said, “So you been at the unemployment?”

“Naw, painting houses. I do that sometime. What you reading now?”

Larry told him.

“Shit, that’s a movie, too. You ever seen it?”

“Yeah,” Larry said. “Book’s better.”

They sat for a while.

“Larry,” Wallace said. “You don’t like me much, do you.”

It surprised him. When he looked at Wallace he saw how acutely the boy was watching at him.

“It’s okay,” Wallace said. “Not many folks do. All thank I’m weird. Why I quit school, got tired of em making fun of me.”

Larry had begun to rock again. “It ain’t that I don’t like you, I just don’t know you.” Then he added, “I don’t get many visitors, neither.”

“Why not? You a hell of a conversationalist. I figure you’d have folks over here day and night, telling em jokes, making em laugh. Serving em beers and seven and sevens and getting high as a giraffe’s pussy.”

For the first time in longer than he cared to remember, Larry smiled in the presence of another person, and then his hand came up, the old habit, covering his mouth. He said, “Last visitor I had, apart from this DIRECTV fellow, was…well, a bunch of teenagers come through a few months ago, drunk. Bout one A.M. Drove by in a Ford Explorer, stopped out there”-pointing at the road-“started throwing beer bottles on my roof, yelling for me to come out.”

“Did you?”

He shook his head. Remembered how he’d stood looking through the parted drapes, chickens noisy behind the house, glad his mother didn’t have to be here for this. It had crossed his mind he wouldn’t use the telephone, even if they tried to come in.

“It was one of em,” he said, “got out with a baseball bat.”

“Shit.”

“Stood there awhile. Big fellow.”

“What’d he do?”

“His friends was yelling for me to come out.” Calling him murderer, rapist, faggot, chickenshit. Nothing he hadn’t heard before, wouldn’t hear again. “Finally,” Larry said, “he took that bat and busted out my headlights.”

“Fuck.”

“Then my windshield.”

“Ain’t you got a gun?”

Larry shook his head and Wallace sat there with his mouth open, as if he were unable to fathom gunlessness. “You ought to ride out to Wal-Mart, get you one of them single-shot twelve gauges they got on sale. Bout a buck eighty-nine. I could go with you.” He sipped his beer. “What they do then? Them fellows?”

“Nothing. Left.”

He didn’t tell Wallace the rest, that he hadn’t even minded, once they’d gone. Fixing the light? The windshield? It gave him something to do the next day. When he drove up to the parts house, the windshield like a net hanging in, Johnson behind the counter took his order and said, “Ain’t that your model Ford?” and Larry said it was and Johnson raised his eyebrows and went to the back, helped him carry the windshield wrapped in its brown paper to the bed of Larry’s truck without a word, just stared at the truck that looked like, well, somebody had taken a baseball bat to it.

“Shit,” Wallace said, “bunch of rednecks tried that with me? I’d go out there with my aught six. Hey.”

“What?”

“How come you ain’t got a dog?”

“I’m allergic.”

“I got me a good one. Part pit bull, part Chow? Name John Wayne Gacy? You ain’t never seen a better watchdog. Hates niggers worse than anything.”

“How come?”

“Just smart I guess. One ever comes up in the yard, he bout goes crazy. You ever want to borry him, say the word. We can stake him out here and I dare anybody to come messing with you.”

“That’s all right. It ain’t the black folks that messes with me.”

Wallace finished his beer and crinkled the can and put it in the bag and got another. He sat awhile, drinking, smoking, then started talking about the dogs he’d had before John Wayne Gacy. “One was a little old white bitch named Trixie that got heartworms? Used to walk over the floor and just stop and stiffen up and fall over and lay there on her side awhile with her feet poking out.” He said it was funny as hell until the time she didn’t get back up. Another dog, big brown shaggy one called Pal, some collie somewhere back in his family tree, he was a car chaser, got flattened to a smear by a log truck. Well, Wallace had had, let’s see, five or six dogs killed on the road. Three shot, one by himself (biter), one caught in a trap, one that drunk antifreeze, another one bit by a cottonmouth. “Neck swoll up like a damn goiter.”

“Where’d they all come from?”

“Strays, most of em.” Wallace opened another beer. “Plus I had a slutty ole bitch named Georgia Pineapple? She had puppies bout twice a year so we had a endless stream. Till she died.”

Larry didn’t want to ask.

“Train hit her,” Wallace said. “Anyhow, she had this one litter up under the house one time? We had a busted gas line and didn’t know it, and that dog, she’d lay down there by that leak when it got hot and them damn pups was born by the pipe. Come out all deformed.” He was laughing. “One didn’t have no eyes. Nother one missing its tail. One had its paws all fucked up.”

Larry was shaking his head. “What’d you do with em?”

“Momma said get rid of em so I thew em in a pond. After that I got John Wayne Gacy off a Mexican used to fight him. Come he had such a temper. He used to go out at night and catch armadillos and brang em in the yard, sometimes be two, three dead ones laying there in the morning. Just tore all to hell and back, look like old leather purses strung out over the dirt. Come Momma makes me keep him tied up. That’s something else we got in common, me and John Wayne Gacy.”

“What?”

“I can’t stand a damn armadillo. One of Momma’s boyfriends, pipefitter, he used to call em armored dildos. When I was a boy we used to catch em. Get em by the tail and swing em around. Punt em like footballs. Drown em. Now they say a armored dildo’ll give you leprosy.”

“Wallace.” Larry ready to change the subject. “Tell me the truth.”

“Long as I don’t incriminate myself.”

“You never worked for DIRECTV, did you?”

He grinned and drained the last of his last beer. “Okay, you got me. Truth is, I borrowed that van from Momma’s boyfriend. He’s the one installs them dishes. Give us ours for free. All the pay-per-view channels and ever thing.”

“Did he know you borrowed it?”

“Hell no. Him and Momma went over to the dog track. He ever finds out I took it, be hell to pay, plus interest. Now speaking of dogs, that’s a badass one there,” Wallace said. “A damn greyhound? Fast as hell. You can get one after they retire it from racing? Keep em for pets? But you better be careful. You got a toddler around and it goes running by? That goddamn greyhound’ll chase it down like it’s that little electric rabbit and tear it apart.”

“How come you took the van? Why not just ride your four-wheeler?”

“Hell, man with your rep? I didn’t know if you might not cut me up and bury me out in the woods.” He was smiling. “Naw, I just figured it’d be a good way to, you know…”

“Test the water?”

“Yeah.”

They sat awhile longer. Wallace crinkled his can and put it in the bag with the others. “You sure you ain’t got nothing to drank?”

“Just a Coke.”

“Well. I best get going, then. Once I start dranking, I don’t like to stop.”

He stood, leaning on the post. “You know, Larry, if you want one, I can probably get my momma’s boyfriend to run out here, put you a dish up. Long as you promise not to say I was in his truck.”

“That’s all right.”

“Or I could bring John Wayne Gacy by. Tie him to your post here.”

“Preciate it, no.”

“YOU EVER BEEN MARRIED?” Wallace asked, his next visit.

He said he hadn’t.

“Got you a girl?”

“No.”

“What you do when the ole pecker gets ready?” He made a tight fist and held it up. “You ain’t one of them forty-year-old virgins, are you?”

“No,” Larry said. “I’m forty-one.”

Wallace laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard, smoke shooting from his nose and mouth.

“Hell,” he said, once he’d caught his breath. “I’m single, too. But it’s a ole gal over in Fulsom? I see her once in a while. Evelyn. One a them on-again, off-again situations.

“But I go up to Dentonville and paint houses with my uncle sometimes. It’s a nigger girl over there I’ll visit now and then. She’s a crackhead and she’ll suck you dry for twenty bucks, fuck your eyes crossed for thirty. Name’s Wanda something another. You drive, we can go over yonder, bust your cherry.”

“Preciate it, no.”

“That’s where I been.”

“Painting houses?”

“Yeah. Getting in trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Fighting in a bar.”

He’d brought a case of beer this time, bungee-corded to the back of his four-wheeler, and had gone through much of it, getting so drunk Larry had begun to worry. It was cooler, leaves in the air and scratching over the road, geese formations overhead pointing south. Larry sat wearing his uniform jacket and a cap, Wallace a sweatshirt with a hood he kept pulling on and then pushing back off. Long pants, frayed at the bottom. He had pictures of John Wayne Gacy the pit bull on his phone and showed them to Larry.

“He’s mean-looking, all right.”

“Boy you know it. My momma’s boyfriend? He keeps saying I ought to shoot him, but I always say, ‘Jonas? You shoot that damn dog it’s libel to just make him mad.’” He sipped his beer.

“Wallace,” Larry said. “You was the boy I surprised that time, wasn’t you? In the barn?”

He looked over his shoulder and grinned. “Yep. Guilty as charged. You bout scared me to death in that damn mask.”

“I just didn’t want you getting hurt in that old barn.”

“Well, it kept me away, that’s for sure. For about a week.”

“You came back?”

“To that barn? Hell no. But it’d take more than that to stop me from fishing in that creek over yonder. Even found your spot, Larry, that old five-gallon bucket you set on, seen a beat-up cork stuck out in the tree over yonder where you couldn’t get it back. I’d brang my rod and reel, pull me a purple worm through the same water you did, but I never did catch nothing, figured you’d done fished it dry.”

“Naw, I didn’t fish it dry. It’s downstream from all the lumbering and it’s so full of silt there ain’t been nothing in it for years.”

“I used to pull off my clothes and swim in it,” Wallace said. “Nekkid. You wanna know the first time I ever heard of you? It was at school. Fourth grade. All the kids talking about it, that creepy fellow that went there same as us, that sat in some of them very desks we was in, how you abducted that girl and done away with her.”

“That’s what the kids said?”

“Some of em. The teachers, they’d all say, ‘Yall just forget about him. Just let him alone, he might be dangerous. Don’t go bothering him.’” Wallace grinned. “So here I am, bothering you, right?”

“You ain’t bothering me.”

“Well, I never was much good at doing what they tell you at school, anyway. It was one teacher, though, liked you. Mrs. McIntyre? Taught English and art. She used to tell us what a good drawer you was. She’d show us your pictures. One of a little truck, which she said was a perfect example of prespective.”

“Perspective,” Larry said.

“But the first time I ever seen you?” Wallace went on. “Was at church. Bout eleven years ago? Up at Dentonville? The Second Baptist? My momma’s boyfriend lived up there.”

“The DIRECTV fellow?”

“Hell no. This one was a machinist. He’d come fetch us for the weekends. That fat sumbitch-I can’t even remember his name now-he didn’t go to church but Momma always did, no matter where the man she’s seeing lived she’d haul my sleepy ass off the couch and borry his car and drag me to whichever church it was, Baptist she could find it but we’d try a Methodist, too, in a pinch. Anything but a nigger church. Or the Catholics. I always liked the Methodists best, though, cause you’d get out quicker.

“Anyway,” he said, “I’s out front fore the preaching, talking to some boys my age, little younger, and one of em goes, ‘You thank he’ll come back?’

“ ‘He better not,’ another one says.

“ ‘Thank who will?’ I asked em.

“ ‘Scary Larry,’ first boy said. ‘You know who that is?’

“I said I shore did; we went to the same school, me and him. In Chabot, Mississippi.

“ ‘No you ain’t,’ he said.

“‘How the fuck you know?’ I said and they was all impressed I cussed right there on the church porch.

“Bout then one of their mommas stuck her head out the door and said we better get on in, the singing was fixing to start. So we all went in and they sat with their mommas and daddies but I took me a seat right there in the back. My momma, she didn’t care I sat with her or not, long as I was quiet.

“And sure enough, they’d just launched into the first song, and I hear the door open real quiet-like and shut and look over and there you are. I knowed it was you right off even though I hadn’t ever seen you. Way you come in. Way you wouldn’t look at nobody looking back at you. You’s wearing a suit and a tie. Sat across the aisle, in the back row like me. Other folks recognized you, too, turning their heads and whispering, and I could tell they didn’t like you being there and I thought you was smart, coming in late like that.” He paused to tap his ash onto the porch and said, “I watched you the whole time, way you stood up and sung the songs, knew all the words, sat down and listened to the preacher, following his Bible verses in your Bible, closing your eyes in the prayer. And I knew you’d leave fore anybody else did, and sure enough, right after the last amen you was up and out.

“I was right behind you. Went out the door and seen you walking off real fast holding your Bible and I yelled, ‘Hey!’ at you but you never even looked back. Just about run to that red pickup, same one setting right yonder.” Wallace leaned forward. “You remember that?”

He did. He remembered Wallace, saw in his face now that same boy’s face. The boy who’d followed him out, called “Hey” in a way he’d not heard before, not angry but curious, a boy with small eyes and stringy hair and ears that stuck out, a scruffy kid in clothes not quite nice enough for church, who’d been sitting alone during the service, opposite him in the back, fidgeting, sneaking looks at him. Because of that boy, more than anything else, he hadn’t returned.

“Well,” Wallace said, “it was a long time ago. We went back to that church next week? But you didn’t come. Them boys said if you had? Somebody was gone write you a letter saying you wasn’t welcome in their ‘fine Methodist church.’”

“I guess not,” Larry said. “You can’t blame em.”

“Naw,” Wallace said. “But fuck em anyway.”

Then he said, “Trouble with beer? You can drank it all night and it don’t do nothing but make you piss. But I got something else,” he said, patting the zippered pocket of his short pants, “that’ll get my head right.” He unzipped the pocket and pulled a Sucrets tin out and laid it reverently across his knees, pressed together, opened the tin and removed a plastic Baggie and a bent pad of rolling papers.

Larry hesitated. “I wish you’d wait till you got home to do that.” He looked at his feet.

Folding one of the papers in half, Wallace began to dribble in crushed green bud. “How come?” Without looking up.

“I just don’t need any trouble. With the law.”

“Man with your rep? Scared of a little Mary J. Wanna? Shit. Fuck the law, Larry. You see em anywhere? Nothing out here but us dropouts and them buzzards. But we can go inside, it makes you more comfortable.”

Rolling the paper between his fingers, he glanced at Larry and winked, then licked the edge of the paper and then put the whole thing in his mouth and brought out a bent white joint. The first one Larry had ever seen. The boy dropped his half-smoked cigarette and toed it out and with his Bic lit the joint and took a deep toke, holding it, and extended it toward Larry.

“No thanks.”

“You sure, hoss?” Breath still held, smoke in his teeth. “It’s good shit from that nigger over in Chabot. Call him M &M. You know him?”

“No,” he said, but he did, from school. One of Silas’s teammates.

Wallace blew a line of smoke into the air. “I always say, ‘M &M? You plain or peanut?’” He toked again then offered it to Larry. “You sure you sure?”

“Yeah.”

Wallace sat there, the smoke coiled around him. He looked out across the field. He seemed to have forgotten where he was, and for a while Larry rocked, bats fluttering over his view and crickets chirping in the monkey grass along the edge of the porch and his mother’s wind chime jingling, delicate notes too tender to be metal, more like soft bone on wire; he’d always thought the chime sounded like a skeleton playing a guitar, and for a time they sat together on the porch and watched the sun scald the sky red and the trees black.

DECEMBER 24, WEDNESDAY, after work. He hadn’t seen Wallace in a few weeks. In the morning-Christmas one of only four holidays he took each year-he planned to ride over to River Acres and give his mother the presents he’d gotten her at Wal-Mart, a new nightgown, a chicken-shaped pot with flowers in it, and a pair of slippers. He’d got a pair of slippers for the woman beside his mother, too, in all spending nearly an hour at the giant store, this one of his favorite evenings of the year.

At home he built a fire in the fireplace and sat looking at the picture of his parents. Then he made a chicken-fried steak TV dinner and turned on the television and, eating, watched the Grinch steal Christmas again and bring it back. Then he watched his favorite holiday movie, A Christmas Story, and felt his eyes water when Ralphie’s father got him the BB gun. He drank the eggnog he’d bought at Wal-Mart and read awhile and fell asleep in his chair by the hearth.

Something woke him around midnight, somebody on his porch. He sat up in the chair and the book fell off his chest and landed on the rug. Nobody had ever messed with him on this night, and he went to the window but saw no one. Quietly, not turning on the light, he opened the door and peered out through the screen into the cold night, the smoke of his breath sucked away by the wind, the chime playing fast, the rocking chair rocking by itself.

Nothing.

He was about to close the door, thinking it must have been a stick blown over the porch. But then he saw something in the chair. He pushed the screen door open and went over to where a shoe box sat in the wicker seat, tied shut with a frayed red ribbon.

He looked around. Then took it inside and lowered himself into his chair by the fireplace and held the box. He shook it, put his ear to it. He untied the ribbon and lifted the lid and saw an old pistol, a.22 revolver, its checkering worn off and most of the blueing gone as well. Its wood grips were tight, though, and its sight intact. He picked it up and held it and saw oil on his hand. Somebody had cleaned it. Beneath it was a box of cartridges,.22 longs. Off to the side was a piece of white notebook paper folded in half. He opened it and read, “Merry Xmas, Larry, from Santa.”

ON NEW YEAR’S Eve Wallace brought a bagful of bottle rockets and they were shooting them over the field.

“Had me a visitor,” Larry said, watching the sky pop.

“Oh you did?”

“Left me something.”

“What’s that?”

“Pistol. A nice.22.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear it. Next time them fuckers comes messing with you, you shoot a few times in the air I bet that’ll scare em off.”

“Thanks,” Larry said.

“For what?”

Larry had brought out two Coke bottles for the rockets, but Wallace would hold them by their sticks and light them, wait a moment as the fuse burned, and throw them, watch them lag and then take off and explode against the night.

It reminded Larry of the New Year’s Eve the Walkers had come over with bottle rockets, and as he began to tell Wallace the story he remembered telling it to Silas, who hadn’t laughed, but now as Larry told it Wallace began to laugh as Larry imitated Cecil running and pounding his pocket.

Later they sat on the porch in their coats, Larry rocking, Wallace on the steps drinking beer. He’d smoked tonight’s joint to a nub and reached down and smushed its end gently on the porch and put it in the Sucrets box and closed it and zipped it back up in his pocket. Once in a while he lit a firecracker and flicked it into the yard, the night grown so dark and starless Larry only saw him in these moments of fire, the ember of his cigarette, the joint, the night becoming its sounds as each night did, their voices, the squeak of Larry’s chair, the pop of Wallace’s beers opening, crickets, the skeleton playing guitar. Near midnight, Larry yawning, Wallace lit another firecracker with his cigarette and threw it into the yard and they sat waiting as the fuse hissed but that was all.

“Dud,” he said.

“LARRY?”

Larry yawned, stretched. It was a month later, Wallace coming once or twice a week, drinking his beer, smoking his cigarettes and marijuana as the nights deepened.

He said, “Tell me about that girl.”

“Girl?”

“You know. The one…?”

“Oh.”

“Did you do it?”

“No,” Larry said.

“You mind talking about it?”

“Well, nobody’s asked me in a long time.”

“If you had done it, would you tell me?”

“I took her on a date is all.”

“Oh. What happened? On the date? You get in her pants?”

“Naw.”

“How come?”

“I just didn’t,” Larry said.

“You ain’t queer, are you?”

“No,” Larry said. “Not the way you mean, anyway.”

“That’s good,” Wallace said. “I can’t stand a damn faggot.”

WALLACE SAID, “YOU know what we ought to do sometime?”

“What?”

“Go out to that cabin you got.”

“You found that, too?”

“Yeah.”

“I expect it’s about to fall in.”

“Yeah. You know what I used to do?”

“What?”

“Play in it.”

“It’s locked, ain’t it?”

“Yeah. But it was a window you could prize open. Back window. Climbing in there with all the dust and spiderwebs. Seen a possum one time? Like to shit my pants and didn’t go back there for a month. I’d be scared to death, you know, sneaking in like that, thinking you in Scary Larry’s hunting cabin. Thinking is you crazy? But I was wondering, too, what if this is where he, you know, hid that girl.

“I tried to find some place you might’ve hid her, but I never did find nothing, not even a dirty magazine or a old rubber.

“I ought not be telling you this,” he said, “but I’m bout as high as a buzzard on laughing gas now and you know what? I used to imagine you’d find me playing in there and tie me up and keep me prisoner. But instead of killing me you’d just keep me out there and we’d get to be friends.”

It was dark and Larry heard him creak open his Sucrets box and knew he was plucking out a roach, as he called it, saw the flash as he lit it with his Bic and took two more hits before he said, “Shit,” and flung it from his fingers into the yard where it pulsed a moment like a dying firefly.

“You know what else?” he said. “I don’t care if you done it or not, took that girl. We’d still be friends if you did.”

“I didn’t.”

“I wouldn’t mind, is all I’m saying. If you had a done it. If you’d a raped that girl. And killed her. Sometimes women can make you crazy can’t they? You ain’t got to tell me that.

“But you can trust me, Larry. We friends, and a friend, a best friend, he wouldn’t never do you that way, 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.”