Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

ten

WAS IT MONDAY yet? He’d barely slept the week before, and now Silas couldn’t stop yawning even though the mill roared and drummed behind him like an angry city. Each passing face in its tinted glass regarded the constable with ire, this tall black man standing shadowed in his hat in the road with a whistle in his teeth, pickup trucks bumping over the railroad tracks and away from the mill while impatient cars and SUVs inched forward.

A week ago he’d found Tina Rutherford’s body under Larry Ott’s cabin and been in all the local papers and a few national ones, his picture this time, snapped by the police reporter as Silas stood by the cabin, watching agents from the Criminal Investigation Bureau in Jackson carry the body bag out. The article said that he’d been investigating Larry’s Ott’s shooting, a possible suicide attempt, and happened across the old cabin.

He’d have been a hero if he’d found her alive.

“You what?” French had asked, on the radio.

Panting, “I think it’s her, Roy.”

“Don’t touch a thing,” French ordered, “and don’t tell a soul. Just set up your perimeter and wait.”

He and the sheriff arrived sharing a four-wheeler not long after, search warrant in hand, prying the lock off the cabin door and moving the bed aside, French saying he’d walked this land himself, twice, both times missing the cabin, camouflaged as it was by kudzu. How in the world had Silas found it?

“Just lucky,” he’d lied.

The cabin was illuminated that night by harsh floodlights on tripods, heavy orange extension cords leading outside to where portable generators had been trailered in by four-wheelers. French filmed the two forensics experts from the C.I.B., wearing Tyvek suits and respirators, as they dug into the floor using entrenching tools to move the soft dirt. Half an hour later one raised his head and gave French a thumbs-up.

Standing in the corner by the stove, Silas had no way to catalog his emotions as what he’d been smelling for a while bubbled up out of his throat and he fled the house, out the door through the vines and ivy spot-lit and drawn back like curtains. The coroner and two deputies and the sheriff stood outside smoking and talking quietly. Silas gave them a weak nod as he lurched into the night, past where the lights could find him, and retched until his eyes burned and his gut hurt.

Later he went back in. Hand over his nose and mouth, he forced himself to look down at what they were discussing, photographing. She’d been thrown in naked on her stomach, he could tell, he could see part of her spine but not, thank God, what would have been her face. What he saw was not even a girl anymore, instead something from one of Larry’s horror books, black and melted-looking and dissolved. What drove Silas back out of the house the second time was not her spine with dirt in its intricate lines or her shoulder blades bound in strands of flesh or the matted green hair where skin from her skull had loosened, but the wrist one of the C.I.B. agents lifted in his heavy rubber glove, her small bony hand with its fingers cupped, showing French’s camera the nails that still bore chipped red polish, and, loose on one of the fingers, her class ring.

Now, his arms up to halt the trucks, Silas’s cell phone began to ring. It always did during traffic duty. Anything official came over his radio, phone calls were personal.

Fuck it, he thought. He dug out his cell.

“Officer Jones?”

“You got him.”

“This Brenda.”

“Who?”

“Up at River Acres? Nursing home?”

It was hard to hear for the traffic and he stuck a finger in his opposite ear.

“Hey,” he said. “I can’t talk now.”

“You wanted to know when Mrs. Ott was having a good day?”

“Yeah?”

“She having one now.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll get over there soon as I can.”

“You best hurry,” she was saying as he hung up.

THE MILL HAD shut down for Tina Rutherford’s funeral. Hell, Chabot had. Black ribbons on the office and store doors, a long line of cars from the Baptist church following the hearse over the highway, Silas directing traffic for that, too, his post at the crossroads of 102 and 11, the four-way stop in his jurisdiction where the procession might get broken up by log trucks, shadows of birds flickering over the road, his uniform pressed and his hat over his heart as cars trolled by with their lights on, him standing, as he had not in years, at navy attention. The windows of the Rutherford limousine were tinted and he couldn’t see the girl’s parents, just a pair of white hands on the steering wheel. And after what must’ve been a hundred vehicles had rolled by, he’d driven to the church and sat in his Jeep, unable to go inside. Later he caboosed the procession to a graveyard miles out in the country, whites only buried there, lovely landscaped grounds shaded by live oaks with Spanish moss slanted in the wind like beards of dead generals. Nothing like the wooded cemetery where Alice Jones lay under her little rock on the side of a hill eaten up with kudzu, the plastic flowers blown over and strewn by the wind. During the Rutherford girl’s burial, a high bright sun and two tiny airplanes crossing the sky, he’d stood at the edge of trees, away from the grief-French had been the one to tell Rutherford his daughter was dead, and for that Silas had been grateful-while the white people near the open grave and the black ones surrounding them at a distance sang “Amazing Grace” accompanied by bagpipes and while Larry Ott lay in his coma, belted to his hospital bed, a deputy posted by the door.

Silas had asked that French let him have the midnight-to-six shift there. He wasn’t a deputy but it was in French’s power to use him. “Fine by me,” the CI had said. “Long as you can stay awake. Nobody else wants it, and we short-handed as it is. But I’m curious.”

“I need the money,” Silas said. Just one damn lie after another.

“Yeah right.”

Silas figured French thought he just craved more limelight, didn’t want to give up the case, wanted to stay in the loop. Which was partially true, and which also helped explain why Silas had gone by Larry’s house every day since he’d found the girl. The first day the deputy stationed there was sitting on the porch in Larry’s rocking chair with his feet crossed reading one of Larry’s books. Silas parked behind his cruiser and got out and nodded.

“What you up to, 32?”

“Feed the man’s chickens.”

The deputy followed him back and into the barn and watched Silas sling corn into the pen, the chickens pecking it up, Silas wondering if they’d think he’d gone over the edge if he fired up Larry’s tractor and pulled the cage to a fresh square of grass.

“I could do that,” the deputy said. “Save you running all the way out here.”

“I don’t mind.”

“You ought to collect the eggs, too. With no rooster in there they just gone rot.”

“You want em?”

“God almighty no. I bring home eggs from Scary Larry? My wife’d thow em at me.”

“You could probably sell em on eBay,” Silas said. “Or one of them serial killer Web sites.”

The deputy toed the lawn mower wheels. “What’s these here for?”

Silas explained as he filled the water tire and shooed the setting hens aside and collected half a dozen dry, brown, shit-speckled eggs, and carried them back to his Jeep. He began taking them to Marla at The Hub, who said she was glad to have them, eggs was eggs.

Nights he sat in a folding chair outside Larry’s door, a tall thermos of coffee and one of Marla’s greasy sacks by his feet, the overhead lights dim, Silas squeaking around on the chair and trying to convince himself of why he was here. He’d brought Night Shift from his office, and because his ass hurt walked the hospital hall reading the stories he never had as a kid.

They’d put Larry in a room at the end of a hall to keep gawkers away, Silas having to stand up a few times each shift to warn off shufflers, old men in robes clinging to their portable IV racks, or nurses from other floors and, once, a hugely pregnant woman in a robe and hospital flip-flops who told him she was in labor.

Silas said, “You a long way from the delivery room.”

Trying to look past him, Larry’s door cracked. “They said walk around.” She pushed her hands into the small of her back. “Try to get this little bastard kick-started.”

Larry was now a suspect-the suspect-in Tina Rutherford’s murder, and Silas had given French his tire molds and the evidence bags with the broken glass and roach in them. Larry’s keys, too. The newspapers and television stations following the story had dug up the scant facts on the Cindy Walker case, as well, how a quarter of a century earlier Larry had picked her up for a date and, hours later, come home without her. A new road had been slashed into Larry’s land and the cabin dismantled, the earth beneath it excavated, French hoping that the Walker girl’s bones might be recovered as well, closing that case. But despite the fact that no more bones had been found, reporters and newscasters were speculating that Larry Ott had attempted suicide because of what he’d done to Tina Rutherford and possibly Cindy Walker and, who knew, maybe other girls. There’d been one from Mobile missing for eleven years. Another from Memphis. Maybe these two-and, who knew, others-were buried somewhere on the last acres Larry Ott had refused to sell to the lumber mill.

Under orders not to talk to reporters, Silas didn’t tell Voncille about moonlighting as Larry’s guard, knowing she’d peer at him over her glasses, worry he might fall asleep at the wheel and ram his Jeep into a log truck. He imagined her saying he couldn’t burn his candle at both ends, or, for his own good, telling Mayor Mo.

But Angie was Silas’s main problem. Aside from being worried about him herself, she said she’d gotten so used to him staying over she had trouble sleeping without his long arms and legs all up in her space, not to mention his other long thing. They slept on their left sides, spooning, his left arm under her neck and reaching around so he could cup her right breast, his right arm over her side, cupping her left breast. He loved feeling her heart beat through it. He hadn’t seen her since their lunch at the diner, and knew he was using his guard duty as an excuse to avoid finishing their conversation. She called on his cell each night as she lay in bed and talked in his ear, detailing her day of wrecks and heart attacks, of Tab, an old hippie, ranting against the war in Iraq. She had one sister over there in a base east of Baghdad, working in the pharmacy. Oh, and her other sister was pregnant again, by a different man. She told him the movies she’d watched, how much she liked the pastor at her church. She was on nights Saturday and Sunday, so Silas promised to take Monday night off and knew he’d have to tell her something and worried it might be the truth. The rest of it. He’d avoided it so long himself it sometimes didn’t even seem real, what had happened in 1982. He wondered how it would feel to tell her everything, say who he really was, and he worried that if he did, she might start to see him differently.

When he nodded off in his chair he’d get up and pace the hospital hall. Sometimes go into Larry’s room, stare at him where he lay twined in among his machines and wires and tubes and cords. And the leather restraints on his wrists. He looked helpless and weak but was, Silas had been told, stable. His chest wound clear of infection, healing accordingly. Draining well but Larry still using a catheter, still on fluids.

But he was big news.

After the initial reports, before and after the funeral, the vans from Jackson, Meridian, Mobile, and even Memphis had camped out in the hospital lot, their satellites aimed at the sky, but now they were gone, this news fading as Larry slept and the world continued to supply new horrors, crashing planes, suicide bombers, kids shooting other kids. He supposed when-if-Larry ever regained consciousness, the parking lot would fill up again.

Each evening when he arrived, already yawning, he asked Skip, the deputy on evenings, if anybody had been by. French, the deputy reported. Old Lolly, the sheriff, once in a while. Doctors and nurses. Patients. Now and then a reporter.

“They feeding him through a tube,” Skip said. “You ask me, they ought to just let the cocksucker starve.”

Silas had unfastened Larry’s leather restraints the first night, like undoing a belt, but Skip told him the next evening that one of the shift nurses had complained and that the restraints were to remain on.

Sometimes when the nurses were gone Silas would stand over Larry and watch him, his IV machine flashing its faint lights and the heart monitor beeping or whistling, the ventilator inhaling, exhaling. He wondered how broken Larry was by the events of his life, how damaged. What would Silas tell him if he ever woke up? Sometimes he couldn’t help but wish he wouldn’t.

“Larry?” he would say.

No response.

“Larry?”

The second night as rain fell outside the window he glanced at the door. Then whispered, “I don’t know if you can hear me, Larry, but when you wake up it’s gone be bad.” He came around the bed and rolled up a stool and put his face near Larry’s and spoke directly in his ear. “Don’t tell em nothing, Larry, you hear? Hear? They gone try to get you to confess, but don’t say nothing, Larry. Hear? Nothing.”

On his way out of the hospital, somebody called, “Hey, Constable Jones?”

The information desk.

“Jon without an h.” Silas veered over and the old man handed him a Styrofoam cup of coffee.

“Thanks. I thought you was afternoons.”

“I fill in when they let me. Take my word for it, son. Don’t ever retire. You’re young, it ain’t enough hours in the day and you sleep through most of em anyways. But once you get to be my age, sleep’s a memory and you beg just to get to work for free.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“No, you won’t. Or when you do it’ll be too late.”

Silas yawned, checked his watch.

“You asked about anybody else coming to see Mr. Ott, didn’t you? Well, one of the other volunteers, he remembered it was somebody came by, not long after you did that first day. Before all this brouhaha. Reason he didn’t tell me sooner is that some of us are a tad on the senile side. If I could remember his name I’d tell you.”

He waited for Silas to smile. “Reporter?”

“Naw, it’s been plenty of them, but that wasn’t what you wanted, was it?”

“No.”

“This fellow, didn’t say who he was. Just asked if Larry-used his first name-had ever woke up.”

“What’d he look like?”

“Marlon, that was the other guy, he said he was early twenties, skinny, white. Said he was, what was the word he used? Oh, he said he was ‘kinda stringy-looking.’”

“Thanks,” Silas said. He glanced behind him. “Yall got cameras in here? Maybe a video of him?”

“Supposed to. But it’s been broke awhile. They tell me it’s in the budget to get it fixed, but you know how budgets work. Get money for one thing, takes it from another.”

“Got that right,” Silas said.

When he went by Larry’s that afternoon, a new deputy and a plainclothes officer from the C.I.B. were in the house going through Larry’s papers. Both men came out and watched him feed the chickens as if it were an exhibition. Each day was different at Larry’s, different lawmen, French there the next afternoon, shaking his head at the farmer constable.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

Flinging in the feed. “What you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

Silas just shrugged and went to get the eggs. He looked out at French, regarding him from the other side of the wire, and told him about the stringy-looking man. French said without more than that, the tape, say, or an ID, it sounded like a dead end. “Stringy-looking?” he said. “Hell, that’s practically a goddamn demographic in southeast Mississippi.”

The next day, when Silas drove out, he found the house and barn deserted, Sheriff’s Department seals on all doors, including the barn’s, warning intruders that this was a crime scene.

“How am I supposed to feed yall?” Silas asked out loud. “Or get them eggs?”

No answer from the chickens, gathered across the wire, waiting, clucking, scratching. They seemed used to him, all right, looking at him their sideways way, and he was beginning to think he could tell them apart.

He drove that evening to Wal-Mart and bought two bags of chicken feed and put them in the back of his Jeep and was out there that night slinging in the moonlight. He filled an old milk jug with water from the spigot at the back of Larry’s house and sloshed it over in a bowl so they could drink. The egg dilemma was still unsolved.

Fuzzy days found him asleep in the Jeep while speeders went unabated on the highway below. The Jeep took longer and longer to crank. One day he swung by the auto shop at the mill and the mechanic opened the hood and whistled. “If this thing was a horse we’d a done shot it,” he said. He told Silas to bring it in early next week and leave it a few days, he’d see if he could order parts from the salvage yard. “Carburetors,” he said nostalgically.

After his evening patrol, Silas would roil semiconscious in his sweaty sheets waiting for the alarm to buzz so he could go the hospital and watch Larry sleep. One night he sat dozing in his guard chair and woke himself by snoring. He blinked and looked down the hall and saw a stringy-looking shadow standing watching him. Then it was gone. He rose and ran past the other rooms to the end where the hall was empty. Somebody down past a Coke machine moved and Silas said, “Wait,” and began to run down the hall.

He turned the corner and nothing. More halls. Door to stairs. He eased a bit farther along the hall, then turned and went back to Larry’s room, shaking his head, wondering if he’d made it all up.

The rest of the night he stayed awake.

NOW, MONDAY, HE finished the traffic. Yawning, he hoped Mrs. Ott was still having a good day at the nursing home.

In City Hall, Voncille was on the phone, solitaire on her computer. He laid his hat and sunglasses on his desk among the day’s scattered paperwork and got his coffee cup and filled it at the water fountain and drank it so fast it made his neck hurt.

“That was Shannon from the paper,” Voncille said when she hung up, rolling her chair over to hand him a message. “Said she wants to talk to you about your trifecta, as she called it. Reckon she figures it’d make for a good feature story. What an outstanding constable you are.”

“Right. I’m headed over to River Acres.”

“What for?”

“See Mrs. Ott.”

“Larry’s mother?”

“Yeah.”

“Well. You look like you ain’t slept in a month,” she said. “But I’m glad you finally stopped by. If you don’t go out and write some tickets, the mayor’s gone have your head.”

AT FIVE-THIRTY, AT River Acres, he climbed out of the Jeep, which continued to run as it had been doing lately, like a stutterer.

Inside, Brenda was reading a magazine at her desk. “She tried to call her son on his cell phone,” she said, “and when nobody answered she started getting upset.”

He pictured the phone lighting up, rattling in the box in French’s office, vibrating the pictures and all the other evidence.

“How is she now?”

“Little calmer. Good thing about Alzheimer’s is they don’t stay mad long.”

He thanked her and said he remembered the way.

Entering the room he was hit by the stink of feces. Ina Ott lay flat on her back with her right hand fluttering, flies buzzing in the bright light through the window. The tiny black woman beside her was asleep.

“Mrs. Ott?” Silas took off his hat.

She looked up at him without recognition. “I’ve messed myself,” she said. “Where’s Larry?”

He saw the dark stain around the sheets at her crotch, her useless hand laying right in it.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I’ll get a nurse,” he said, glad to leave the room and its smell.

“Second shift’s coming on in half a hour,” Brenda told him, hardly looking up. “They’ll clean her.”

“How long’s she been laying like that?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You what?”

“Laying’s all she can do.”

“She ain’t got to lay in her own stink,” he said.

“You don’t smell so good yourself.”

“If her son come up and seen her like that what would yall do?”

“Last I heard he ain’t going nowhere.”

“This how yall treat folks?”

Brenda gave him a sharp look. “Nigger, don’t come up in here telling me how to do my job. We got forty-five old people here and we get to em best we can. Come in here all high and mighty just cause you got your picture in the paper?”

“Fuck this,” he said and went back down the hall.

He found a closet with clean sheets and a box of disposable wipes and snatched the sheets off the rack and put the wipes under his arms and went looking for an orderly.

A man standing by a broom pointed him down the hall and he pushed through a glass door in the back and found Clyde, leaning against the wall, smoking.

“You best come with me,” Silas said. “Now. Mrs. Ott done had a accident.”

“Chill out, bro,” he said. “I’m on my break.”

Silas got up in his face. “You go clean Mrs. Ott up right now or I’m gone take your sorry ass back to the jail.”

“For what?”

Silas plucked the cigarette from Clyde’s lips and threw it down and pushed the sheets and wipes into his arms. “I’ll think of something.”

He stood outside her door, just in sight of Clyde, making sure he treated her right.

“I’m sorry,” he heard her say. “I messed myself again.”

“It’s okay, Mrs. Ott. We getting you all clean now. It’s somebody out there to see you.”

“My son?”

“Naw, ain’t him. Somebody else.”

“It’s not true,” she said, “what they’re saying?”

Clyde came out wearing rubber gloves and carrying the soiled sheets and her nightgown in a plastic bag. “You happy now, motherfucker?” he said.

Ignoring him, Silas went in and she looked better, her bed raised and the smell nearly gone, the window opened.

“Mrs. Ott?”

She turned toward him where he stood holding his hat. Her good eye widened but otherwise she showed no surprise at a big strange black constable in her room.

“I’m Silas Jones, ma’am,” he said. “People call me 32.”

“32?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She turned her head to regard him from another angle. Wedged between the beds, a small table held nothing but a worn-out Bible. Out the window, past the black woman still asleep and beyond the chain-link fence, cars on the highway. Her dying view.

“I may have met you,” she said. “But I’m forgetful.”

“Yes, ma’am. I come seen you once before, about your son. I used to be friends with him, a long time ago.”

“He’s okay, idn’t he?”

“Well,” he said.

“I called him but nobody answered.”

Silas looked down at his hat. Maybe this was why police wore hats, for the distraction they provided when you had to tell somebody their daughter had not only been strangled to death but beaten and raped first, or to tell a woman her son had not only been shot but maybe had shot himself, and that if he ever woke up he’d be charged with killing the girl.

“Well,” he said again.

“He didn’t have many friends,” Mrs. Ott said. When he looked up from his hat she was watching him.

“I came to ask you about my mother,” he said.

“What’s her name?”

“Alice Jones.”

“Who?”

He took the photograph of her from his wallet and showed it to her. Alice holding Larry as a baby. Silas realized that she must have been pregnant in the picture, though she didn’t show.

“Why, that’s my boy,” Mrs. Ott said. “And that was our maid, I can’t recall her name.”

“Alice,” he said.

“Yes. Alice Jones. But she had to leave.” Mrs. Ott lowered her voice but continued to look at the picture. “A nice colored girl, but loose. She got herself in a family way and wasn’t married. I don’t know what ever happened to her. What was her name?”

“Alice,” he said gently. “She died a while back. Had a heart attack in her sleep.”

She reached out to touch his hand, laid there on the side of her bed. “I’m so sorry.”

“Reason I came,” Silas said, “was to ask you if you know who her baby’s daddy was.”

“What’s your name again?”

“32.”

“That’s not a name. What did your mother call you?”

“Silas.”

“I remember you, Silas. You were Larry’s friend.”

“Yes, ma’am, I was.”

For a long time she watched him and he saw himself come and go in her eyes, she knew him then she didn’t. Then, for a moment, she did again.

“Silas?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“I’m frightened.”

“Of what?”

Shaking her head. “I can’t remember.”

They sat. The other old woman in the bed by the window shifted in her sleep and made a low noise.

He watched Mrs. Ott’s good eye brim, a tear collect and fall and fill one of her deep wrinkles and never emerge at the bottom. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Ott,” he said and saw he’d lost her, she was looking at him as if she’d never seen him.

“Clyde?” she said.

“No, ma’am. It’s Silas.”

“Who?”

He sat for a while longer, finally admitting that yes, he was Clyde. He let her ask about her chickens and he began to tell her how Eleanor Roosevelt kept trying to lay with no success and how Rosalynn Carter was getting fatter and Barbara Bush had lain two eggs in one night, and finally, as the chickens moved in their pen, smudges in her memory, she closed her eyes and began to sleep. He turned his fingers to free them of her brittle grip and took, from the sheets where it had fallen, the photograph. He fitted it in her good hand and rose and left her in the light from the door and went down the hall and outside to his Jeep.

HE WAS LATE for dinner with Angie, her turning her cheek to catch his kiss there and leaving him standing by her open apartment door as she descended the stairs toward her car. He wore jeans and a white button-down shirt. He’d left his hat, which she only liked if it came with the uniform.

She drove, unusual for them, a sign she was peeved. Ten minutes later, he sat across from her in a booth in the Fulsom Pizza Hut while the Braves lost on the television on the far wall.

“Baby,” he finally said over their medium supreme, “what is wrong?”

“What you mean?”

“You know what I mean. You all quiet.”

“Maybe cause I ain’t see you all week and you late and don’t even call? I put on my best jeans and you ain’t even say I look nice?”

“You look nice.”

She shook her head. “I know I do, you ain’t got to tell me. My point is, where are you?”

“I’m tired’s all.”

She lifted her pizza and took a bite and chewed slowly. “You know how I can tell when you lying, 32?”

He met her eyes. “How?”

“You start messing with that hat.”

He looked to the table, where the hat would’ve been, and saw his fingers, fiddling with air. He put his hand in his lap and had to smile. “When else did I lie?”

“Last week at the diner. When I asked if you ever dated that girl.”

Cindy Walker.

He glanced at the television. Braves changing pitchers. He was suddenly on the Fulsom City Park infield as Coach Hytower stood talking to his pitcher, and Silas, at short, was looking past them into the stands, where she always sat.

Angie put her pizza down. “Well?”

“Would you stay here a minute,” he said, starting to rise. “I got to get my hat.”

“Sit your lying ass down, 32, and talk to me.”

WHEN SILAS PLAYED baseball, Cindy had come to games, smoking cigarettes and sitting in a miniskirt with her legs crossed on the high bleachers, her hair in a scrunchie. Sunglasses on. He knew she watched him and at some point he realized he was playing for her, swiping impossible line drives out of the air and short-hopping bullet grounders to flip to M &M on second or fling over to first for the out. Sometimes he felt invincible on the diamond, white people and black both watching him, taller now, up to six feet by the eleventh grade, growing so fast he still had stretch marks on his lower back. Daring that baseball to come anywhere near, willing it to, seeing it big as a basketball when he crouched at the plate, hitting for power to all fields so everybody played back, and then he’d bunt and most times there wouldn’t even be a throw, him standing on first before the third baseman or catcher barehanded the ball.

On the infield tapping his cleats with his glove to knock off dirt, he’d watch Cindy leave after the eighth inning, walk off away from town, but always look back.

Then the time where he went five for five (including a triple) and dove and caught a liner up the middle to end the game. His teammates swarmed him and carried him off the field and from his perch he saw Cindy at her usual spot, smoking, and smiled at her. She smiled back.

She’d stayed till the end.

He skipped his shower and slipped away and followed her still in his dirty uniform and caught up and walked along the rural road with her, carrying his cap and glove, a few houses back against the trees, the two of them stepping around mailboxes in the weeds and hurrying when dogs boiled out from beneath a porch to bark at them.

“You see that catch?”

“You seen me there, didn’t you?”

“You like baseball?”

“No.”

“For a girl don’t like baseball, you sure come to a lot of games.”

“Maybe it ain’t the games I come to see.”

He looked down. Grass stains on his pants, infield dirt. “They put me at short even though I’m a leftie. Coach say I got a chance for a scholarship to Ole Miss.”

“You lucky.”

“Might go all the way, he say. Say if I focus. Keep my mind off distractions.”

“That what I am?”

Yeah, he wanted to say. She was thin with small bright blue eyes that had a kind of beaming intensity, especially when she frowned at him. She had freckles tiny as sand on her nose and throat and bare shoulders, her hair blond and curly and cinched back. Even sweaty she smelled good. Her breasts were little things under her top; he kept trying not to look at them. She had a concave figure, walking with a little hook to her, her belly in, as if waiting to absorb a blow. Today she wore sandals, and he liked her white freckled feet and red toenails.

“You from Chicago?”

He said he was.

“What’s it like up there?”

“It’s cool.” He told her about Wrigley Field, the Cubs, Bull Durham on first, Ryno on second, Bowa at short, and the Penguin, Ron Cey, on third. Bobby Dernier in center. Silas and his friends skipping school to catch home runs on the street outside the stadium, the time he’d nearly got hit by a cab going after a bouncing ball, and then his fantastic catch on the sidewalk, dodging parking meters and diving and landing in the grassy median with a group of white people watching from Murphy’s Bar, the old man who came out and traded him four tickets for the ball. They’d gone the next day, him and three buddies, sitting in the sun in the bleachers. They got a drunk man to buy them beer, buying him one in return, Silas knowing as he watched the acrobatics on the field that he’d found his calling.

“What else,” Cindy said, “that ain’t about baseball?”

He told her how the snow sometimes covered cars entirely, and about his neighborhood, how the old black men would gather in the back alley around a fire in the trash drum and pass a bottle of Jim Beam and tell stories, outdoing each other, he told her about hopping the turnstiles and catching the el train, going to blues bars where the musicians smoked weed in the alley between sets, the endless honking traffic, freezing Lake Michigan glittering under the lights and buildings blocking the sky. Chicago pizza was the best, a thick pie of it, and burritos were as big as your head.

“They got shows, ain’t they?” she asked.

“Like movie shows?”

“No.” She puckered and frowned but kept walking. “Like Broadway. Plays.”

“Yeah.” He remembered seeing their titles in the Chicago Tribune. Sunday mornings lying on the rug waiting for Oliver to finish with the sports pages. “My momma went one time,” he told Cindy, “for her birthday. Saw The Wiz.”

“That’s what I want,” she said.

“You mean be a actress?”

“No. To be able to see them shows. You can’t see shit here.”

“You could be a actress,” he said. “You pretty enough.”

She gave him a sad smile like he was a simple child. She went on talking, though, said how she couldn’t wait to get the hell out of Mississippi, away from Cecil and her mouse of a mother, and as they walked along the road, no houses now, a field with cows following them along the other side of the fence and his cleats clicking on the pavement, a passing car slowed and the white man behind the wheel glared out his window.

“You okay?” he called to Cindy. “That boy bothering you?”

“Mind your own business, doofus,” she said and flipped him off. He sped away shaking his head.

“Hey,” Silas said, looking back. “I best go.”

“Suit yourself.”

He kept walking alongside her.

“Your stepdaddy like it you walking with a black boy?”

“What you think? He’s ignorant as a damn weed. Won’t even try to get a job. Say he hurt his back at the mill.”

Another car, the woman behind the wheel turning as she passed to stare.

“You ever kissed a white girl?”

“Naw,” he said. “You ever kissed a black boy?”

“Sure,” taking his hand, leading him down the embankment and into a stand of trees.

From there, notes passed at school, their secret meeting place in the woods behind the baseball field. He was a virgin but she wasn’t, and on their blanket spread over the grass they became lovers and for the second half of his junior year he’d never been happier, a great season with an average just over.450 most of the time and a secret white girlfriend watching from the bleachers. A lot of people came, he knew, to see him, the sense he was going places, even old Carl Ott sometimes.

Cindy liked beer and Silas drank with her and they hid their relationship from everyone else, Silas not even telling M &M, knowing if anybody found out they’d have to give each other up. Slipping away from his friends, from hers, like the haunted house that Halloween, the one where Larry came and brought his mask, the two of them leaving separately but meeting later, in her mother’s car or in his mother’s, whoever could borrow one. Going to the drive-in, her driving and letting him off by the road, him sneaking through the trees to where she parked in the back corner, the thrill of being discovered a thing she seemed to like, Silas terrified but unable to resist the hot vacuum of her cigarette breath, click of their teeth, her soft tongue, her perfect breasts, the patch of secret hair in her jeans.

Once, as they lay on a blanket on the ground, Cindy told him she’d started liking him when he came out of the woods and stood up for her when Cecil was pulling off her towel.

“He does that kind of shit all the time,” she’d said. “Trying to see me without my clothes, come stumbling in the bathroom with his thing in his hand. Does when he’s drunk, acts like he don’t remember when he sobers up.”

“What about your momma?”

“How you tell your momma she married a slime? Sides, she always takes his side over mine. She, kind of, believes the worst about me. I always been trouble for her. I don’t guess I help none, cussing, smoking, messing with boys.”

“Messing,” he said. “That what we doing?”

“What else you gone call it?”

At school one day Silas walked up to her in the smoking area, and she said he’d slapped her. Cecil. Said she was a whore. Off fucking boys.

Standing all casual so nobody would notice them.

“Your momma let him do that? Slap you?”

“She wasn’t home. But now he won’t let me leave the house cept for school, says he’ll tell her I been trying to come on to him, like I ever would.”

“Your momma believe that?”

“If he said it she probably would. They’d throw me out.”

She’d always caught rides to school with her friend Tammy and now Cecil had decreed that Cindy had to come home right after school, that if Tammy couldn’t bring her, Cecil would come get her himself.

“I told him, ‘You ain’t even got a car, fool,’ but he said he’d get one if it meant keeping me away from-”

“Me,” Silas finished.

When he went home a few nights later, their trailer in Fulsom, his mother was waiting up in the dark living room, sitting rigid in a kitchen chair, her old tomcat, now half blind, purring in her lap.

“Silas,” she said.

“What?”

“Son, you got to stop with that white girl.”

He had no idea how she knew.

“Momma, what you mean?”

“Silas, don’t lie to me.”

“We just friends.”

“Son, nothing good ever come out of colors mixing.”

“Momma-”

“Such and suching like you doing would be dangerous enough in Chicago, but you in Mississippi now. Emmet Till,” she said, “was from Chicago.”

“You the one brought us down here.”

He went to the refrigerator and opened it and got out a carton of milk.

“Silas, baby,” getting up, holding the cat to her chest, “you all I got. And you all you got, too. Please tell me you gone stop. Please, son?”

He said he would. Promised he’d focus on his ball, work on his grades for that scholarship to Ole Miss. He didn’t mean it, though, knew he would keep seeing her, this girl who would fall asleep on their blanket in the woods, how her lips opened and he’d lean in and smell her breath, sweeter to him for the cigarettes and beer.

It was Cindy who’d said she had a plan to see him that last weekend. If he could get his mother’s car, she could outsmart Cecil. On Fridays Alice worked until seven at the diner, then came home and, tired from a twelve-hour shift, went to sleep in her chair by the television. Didn’t even eat. He took the car without asking.

NOW, IN PIZZA HUT, the slice on his plate had gotten cold. The Braves had lost and a movie started and the waitress brought another pitcher of beer. He finished his and poured himself another, topped off Angie’s glass. She’d been watching him with her eyes growing narrower as he talked.

“I didn’t know,” Silas said, “it was gone be Larry that brought her.”

Angie said, “How’d she get him to bring her and drop her off?”

“Told him she was pregnant.”

“Was she?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

But that had scared Silas. What if she had been?

“We drove to a quiet spot,” he said, “and all we did was argue. I told her it wasn’t gone work and she started crying and saying yes it would, we ought to just run away for good. I said where and she said Chicago. I said why didn’t she go by herself, she wanted to go so bad. We went round and round, and finally I drove her back to the road led to her house. Larry was supposed to pick her up. We got there early, though, and she just slammed the car door and run off down that road, in the dark. I sat there thinking a minute, but wasn’t no way I could go after her. Not with Cecil there, drinking.

“When I got home, Momma, she was waiting on me. She could tell from my face where I’d been. Never even said anything. Just went to her room and closed the door. Did something I’d never seen her do, called in sick to work at the diner. I could tell, she’d had enough. Monday she went to see my coach, but everybody else was talking about Larry. How he took Cindy on a date and she never came back. And a month later, I was on my way north, up to Oxford High School, living in the coach’s basement.”

Angie watching him.

“To be honest,” he said, “I was glad to go. It was a whole lot better up there. Better field, school. They give you your cleats and equipment. Pretty soon I had me a girlfriend.” Whose name he couldn’t remember.

Angie said, “And Larry?”

Silas looked to where his hat would’ve been.

He said, “I forgot him. Him and Cindy both.”

“Forgot him?”

“It wasn’t hard. I was busy in Oxford, and Momma, in her letters, she never mentioned it.”

“You let him take the blame. All this time.”

“I thought she’d just run off. Thought she’d turn up sooner or later and it’d be okay.”

“For twenty-five years, you thought that?”

A pleading note in his voice. “Things ain’t so clear when they’re happening, Angie. You’re eighteen and playing ball and everything’s going your way. Then all of a sudden twenty-five years’ve passed and the person you look back and see’s a whole nother person. You don’t even recognize who you used to be. Wasn’t till I come back down here that I saw the mess I’d made.”

“So it was Cecil who killed her?”

“That’s my guess.”

“Where’s he now?”

“Dead. His wife, too.”

He moved his hand to the center of the table. He hoped she’d place hers on top of it, but she didn’t. He looked out the window where he could see their reflections, saw her watching him and focused on her profile, it was easier than looking at her eyes, seeing what she must be thinking.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I think it’d be better if Larry had died.”

“Better for you?”

“For him.”

“Yeah, but for you, too.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

“Look at me,” she said.

He did.

“I know this, 32 Jones,” she said. “You didn’t let him die, did you? Cause of you that man’s still alive, and when he wakes up, if he ever does, it’s gone be even worse for him. Just imagine that.”

“I have been.”

“Well then,” she said. “What you gone do?”

HE SLEPT LITTLE, used to his night shift outside Larry’s room, and at six-thirty the next morning he eased out of bed and left Angie in a nightgown in the sheets, the first time she’d worn anything to bed. They hadn’t made love after dinner, neither in the mood, didn’t even try, just lay apart, not much more to say between them, her heart beating in her breast without him to hold it.

Outside, he closed the door and locked it, a bright September morning, sparrows shooting through her balcony with its hanging plants. He stood looking where she’d hung bird feeders, had a table and chairs set up. They’d spent many evenings out here, her serving his beer in glasses without him even asking her to, Al Green on the CD player.

He hung his badge around his neck and went down the stairs. On the road, he noticed the Jeep’s blinkers had stopped working and rolled down his window and hand-signaled onto Highway 5, opting for an early morning patrol of the eastern part of Rutherford’s land, cruising through the lines of loblolly pines, bumping over the washboard roads, letting himself in and out of gates with his big key ring. He was sweating by the time he got back to Chabot, around seven-thirty. He hand-signaled into the parking lot across from the mill and went up the steps and let himself into Town Hall, glad Voncille wasn’t there yet. He made coffee and fussed with some paperwork, checked his e-mail. At five to eight he went out, slipping the orange vest on, crossed the parking lot and directed traffic at the shift change. He saw Voncille arrive and tooted his whistle at her as she got out of her pickup.

He wasn’t hungry so he didn’t make his normal visit to The Hub. He drove to Larry’s house, caught between two log trucks much of the way, and slung a bowlful of feed in the chicken wire and watched the first ladies peck it up. He added water through the fence and looked in the door at the boxes where they roosted in pine straw and wondered how long it took eggs to go bad, how long before the sitting hens began to suspect that nothing good would come from all their work, just rotting shells.

He had no idea how long he’d been standing there when his radio squawked.

“Thanks for the coffee,” Voncille said.

He keyed it. “You’re welcome.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Shannon called again.”

“Yeah. I’ll talk to her.”

“Well, stop by and visit awhile,” she said. “If you got a minute.”

He hung up. Larry’s grass had grown high and weedy and Silas remembered how his fists had vibrated on the lawn mower’s handle, the shower of green grass out the side, Larry watching from his porch. He longed to cut it now, mow his way back to the boy he’d been and do it differently with Larry, go to the police and say, “She was with me.”

What’s missing out of you, Silas?

Courage, he thought.

No wonder he felt at ease among these damn chickens.

His cell buzzed and he dug it out of his pocket, walking back toward where he’d parked in the same spot each day, over his oil stain.

“Constable?”

“Yes,” he said.

“It’s Jon Davidson, at the hospital?”

“Hey, Jon with no h.”

“Thought you’d want to know,” he said. “Judging from the fact that the sheriff and Roy French just arrived and seemed like they was in a hurry, I’ll volunteer a guess that your Mr. Ott’s woke up.”