Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin Read Free Book Online

ignored him and took off his hat and spat out the whistle so it hung at his chest on its string, fanned himself with the hat. His cell was buzzing again. Fuck it, he thought and dug it out. Mayor Mo wanted to fire him for talking on the phone, let him.
    “32?” It was Angie.
    “Yeah?”
    The phone crackled. “32,” she said again. “We at Larry Ott’s house like you said?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Oh my God,” she said.

three
    T HE FIRST THING he noticed was that they didn’t have coats. It was just after dawn in March 1979, a Monday, Larry’s father driving him to school and dragging a fume of blue exhaust behind his Ford pickup. The spring holidays had come and passed, but now a freakish cold snap had frozen the land, so frigid his mother’s chickens wouldn’t even leave the barn, the evergreens a blur outside the frosted truck window and him lost in yet another book. He was in eighth grade and obsessed with Stephen King and looked up from Salem’s Lot when his father braked.
    The pair of them was standing at the bend in the road by the store, a tall, thin black woman and her son, about Larry’s age, a rabbit of a boy he’d seen at school, a new kid. He wondered what they were doing here, this far out, before the store opened. Despite the cold the boy wore threadbare jeans and a white shirt and his mother a blue dress the wind curved over her figure. She wore a cloth around her hair, breath torn from her lips like tissues snatched from a box.
    His father passed without stopping, Larry turning his head to watch the boy and his mother peer at them from outside.
    Larry turned. “Daddy?”
    “Ah dern,” said his father, jabbing the brakes. He had to back up to meet them, then he leaned past Larry on the truck’s bench seat (an army blanket placed over it by his mother) and rattled the knob and they were in in a burst of freezing air that seemed to swirl even after the woman had shut the door. They were all forced together, Larry against the boy on one side and his father on the other, uncomfortable because he and his father almost never touched, awkward handshakes, whippings. For a moment the four sat as if catching their breath after a disaster, the truck idling. Larry could hear the boy’s teeth clacking.
    Then his father said, “Larry, thow a log on that dad-blame fire. Warm these folks up.”
    He turned the heater to HI and soon the black boy beside Larry had stopped shivering.
    “Alice,” said his father, pulling onto the road, “introduce these younguns.”
    “Larry,” the woman said, as if she knew him, “this is Silas. Silas, this is Larry.”
    Larry stuck out his calfskin glove. Silas’s slender brown hand was bare, and despite the quick soul shake it gave, Larry felt how cold his skin was. If he gave him one of his gloves, they could each have one warm hand. He wanted to do this, but how?
    They smelled like smoke, Silas and his mother, and Larry realized where they must live. His father owned over five hundred acres, much of it in the bottom-right corner of the county, and on the southeast end, a half a mile from the dirt road, if you knew where to look, was an old log hunting cabin centered along with a few trees in a field a few acres across, just a little bump on the land. Bare furnishings inside, dirt floor, no water or electricity. Heated by a woodstove. But when had they moved in? And by what arrangement?
    His father and the woman called Alice were talking about how cold it was.
    “Freeze my dad-blame can off,” his father said.
    “Mm hmm,” she said.
    “You ever seen the like?”
    “No, sir.”
    “Not even in Chicago?”
    She didn’t answer, and when the silence became awkward, his father turned the radio up and they listened to the weatherman saying it was cold. It was going to stay cold. Leave your tap water running tonight so your pipes wouldn’t freeze.
    Larry stole a look at the boy beside him and then pretended to read his book. He was terrified of black kids. The fall after