Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (15 page)

He’d imagined their date dozens of times. Pulling into the drive-in, paying five dollars for the car, rolling over the grounds, past the other people in their cars and trucks, past the posts where the speakers hung. David had told him you drove to the back two rows where you had the most privacy and detached your speaker and hung it on your window and climbed over the seat with your girl and got under a blanket—his brother had one, hidden under the seat with the beer—and you began to make out. When the time was right, when the girl was hot, her legs opening, you put your rubber on and…

Now that was all flying away, passing him by at sixty miles an hour on the highway toward Fulsom. She threw her empty can out the window and said, “You got the other one?”

“Cindy,” he said, giving her the beer. “I don’t want to do this. Can’t we just go to the movie?”

“Didn’t you hear me? Shit—” The beer exploded when she opened it. “Didn’t you hear what I said?”

“Yeah.”

Wiping her hand on the car seat. “Fuck a movie. You the only person in the world who can help me, Larry. God damn it. Please?”

“
CAN YOU FIND
your way back?” she asked, out of the car, bent to see him through the passenger window.

She’d driven past Fulsom, the four-lane back to a two, then turned down an unmarked county road and then onto a dirt road. A blacksnake had been crossing the gravel and she veered to run over it. He didn’t even try to stop her. She’d parked by another dirt road, no houses in sight. The trees high and green and filled with birds.

“I said, ‘Can you find your way back?’ ”

“Yeah.” Not looking at her.

“Just be at the road to my house at eleven o’clock, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Will you come?”

He nodded.

“Swear?”

“Yeah.”

“Swear to God, Larry.”

The steering wheel was still warm from her hands and the car stank of cigarette smoke and the seat was wet with beer. He’d have to leave the windows down so his mother wouldn’t smell it.

“I swear to God,” he said.

He pulled the car up and she stepped out of the way as he backed into the dirt road and turned around. She waved at him but he didn’t wave back, just clenched the steering wheel and nudged the gas pedal, the Buick bumping over the road, passing the blacksnake where it lay, leaving her in the woods in the gathering dark, watching her in the mirror as he drove away, watching her turn and begin to run—
run
—toward her boyfriend, waiting somewhere down that road.

LATER HE WOULD
do as she told him. Ride around alone. Take the Buick to the drive-in, park out of sight, and watch through tree limbs as the first feature ended, the movie family fleeing the house in Amityville and its devils, wait through the intermission, food advertisements, coming attractions, the radio playing songs he didn’t hear and describing weather he didn’t feel. He waited until the second feature began and then pulled with his lights off past the ticket booth, which, as she’d said, was empty. With the screen flickering over him, he eased the Buick past cars and trucks filled with men and women and boys and girls and past the metal poles with their speakers blaring and squawking, past popcorn boxes pushed by the wind, empty Coke cups rolling in his wake. He parked on the row second from the back, near the corner, shadowed from the moon by trees, lowered his window and unhooked his speaker and watched the people move on the screen.

The movie was half an hour in when a car backed out a row up and several slots down. In the light from the movie, he watched it become Ken’s father’s Ford Fairmont and realized they must have seen him drive in. Its parking lights on, the car rode to the end of the row and turned and began coming back toward him. As it neared the Buick, it slowed, then stopped and backed into the spot behind Larry. Its parking lights snapped off. From there, Ken and David, or Ken and his date, would be able to see that Larry was alone.

He reached beneath the seat for the blanket he’d brought. Quickly, he covered his open hand with it and held it up beside his shoulder as if it were a girl’s head, Cindy sitting very close. He watched his rearview mirror, unable to see the Ford’s interior. Maybe it wasn’t even them. But he knew it was. He sat, hoping they wouldn’t get out, even bent his arm as if she were leaning to whisper something in his ear. Maybe kiss him. When his biceps began to tire a few minutes later, he reached and pulled the armrest from the seat and rested his elbow there, barely aware of the movement on the screen.

In his mirror the Ford’s interior lit Ken and David’s faces as Ken opened the driver’s side door. He got out and stood. Maybe he was just going for popcorn. Still, Larry reached around, under the steering column, his wrist at a painful angle, and started the car. Ken was coming forward now, getting close, angling his head to see. Larry pulled the shifter down to drive and lurched away, steering with his left hand, straining to keep his right up, the blanket steady, as if he and Cindy had decided they’d had enough of the movie, leaving Ken standing in his empty spot.

HE ARRIVED AT
the road fifteen minutes before eleven, hoping to see the boyfriend. Maybe recognize his car. He had an idea it was an older fellow. Her mother worked a late shift in the tie factory on Fridays and wouldn’t be home until midnight, but, in case Miss Shelia got off early, he rode past their mailboxes and parked farther on, out of sight. He sat with the windows down, hoping the cigarette and beer smell had dissipated, watching for lights.

At eleven, he sat straight in his seat. They’d be along any minute now.

But at eleven-fifteen, no car. The half moon blackened the trees in front of it and rose yellow and cocked in the sky. No car at eleven-thirty. Maybe the boyfriend had dropped her off early. But wouldn’t Cindy want to sustain the illusion of her date with Larry? He cranked the car and, lights on low, drove slowly by the turnoff, expecting to see her standing by the mailboxes with her purse.

She wasn’t there. He drove by again and parked in his same spot, growing more worried.

At ten to midnight he got out of the car and stood at the edge of the highway and listened, trying to hear over the crickets and frogs. Looked in one direction, the other. Overhead, an airplane winked across the sky, the moon’s high cratered cheek centered in its spackling of stars. He stepped into the road to better see. Maybe they’d had an accident. How would he explain that to Cecil? To his father? Maybe, a dreadful thought, they already knew, the police having called.

At ten past twelve he began to hope he’d missed them somehow. Maybe the boyfriend had snuck in with his lights off, afraid Cecil might be lurking about. Larry cranked the Buick and clicked the headlights on low beam again and eased onto the pavement and turned off at the familiar dirt road that snaked past the Walker house and ended up, a mile farther, at Larry’s house. He drove, hoping Cindy might pop out of the trees, angry at him,
Where the
hell you been? I said eleven! Cecil’s gone kick my ass and yours, too.
But no mad girl in his lights. Just the dusty diorama of trees hung with vines and slashed with leaves and the bobwire fence casing off the woods from the ditch.

He sat for five more minutes, fingers drumming the steering wheel. His own parents would likely be worried, too. He was more than an hour late. Because he’d never had a date, he didn’t know if they’d sit up and wait or what. He imagined his mother’s strained face. How had the date been? He turned the lights off and began to crunch over the gravel, the crickets as he passed silencing and then starting up after he’d gone. Maybe Cindy was someplace between the road and house. Maybe drunk and passed out. He slowed again, barely moving now, afraid of running her over.

Afraid of alerting Cecil, too. Maybe he’d have already passed out. Likely they were both there, him and Cindy, and Larry was working himself up for nothing. Certainly there was an explanation. Why did he have to make such a commotion out of this? He eased, lights off, closer to the house.

Finally, the last turn before the yard would open out. Fingers still drumming. He knew what he had to do. He had to go up and see if she was home safe.

When he rounded the curve the house was dark. He slowed, thinking about that. Were they all asleep? Wouldn’t they leave a light on for Cindy’s mother? She wasn’t home yet because he didn’t see her car. He touched the brakes and reached for the gear, about to shift into reverse, when Cecil appeared from the darkness like a torch ignited, filling his window with hot boozy breath and anger and sweaty arms.

“Where you been, you little fuck?”

His hands grabbing Larry’s neck, his shirt collar, Larry fighting the arms, the car lurching forward, his feet stabbing at the brakes. Cecil held on to him and he slammed the gear up into park just as he felt himself pulled out the window, the door lock caught in his belt loop, snapping off.

Cecil had him by the shirtfront, against the car.

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” Larry said, “I thought she was home.”

“Thought she was home?” He slung Larry around, into the dirt. “Why the fuck would she be home?”

“I let her out,” Larry said, scrabbling away.

But here Cecil came, straddling him now, both on the ground, Cecil growling, “Dropped her off where?” and Larry trying to speak but the man’s hands were around his neck and he might, he thought later, have been strangled if car lights—Miss Shelia, home from work—hadn’t suddenly found them there, wrestling in the dirt.

HALF AN HOUR
later the sheriff arrived.

Before that, before Larry’s parents drove up in Carl’s truck, Miss Shelia, her hands shaking, had put on coffee. Larry sat centered on their threadbare sofa, his first time, some part of him realized, inside this house. It was low and dark, uneven floors. A small television with a rabbit ear antenna and the channel knob missing. Ashtrays with mounds of cigarette butts and a few framed class photos of Cindy on the wall. He tried not to look at them. Waiting for the Otts, Miss Shelia had busied herself sweeping the floor and collecting empty beer cans while Cecil sat across from Larry in a kitchen chair, glaring at him and smoking one cigarette after another. He’d switched from beer to coffee, Miss Shelia hissing, “You don’t want to be drunk when the law gets here.”

The sheriff, with an air of getting to the bottom of things, out of uniform and wearing no socks under his house shoes, sat by Larry, ignoring the parents, asking him, patiently,
exactly
what had happened. Said don’t leave nothing out. Larry told how she’d wanted to be dropped off in the woods, aware of the adults watching him. When he got to the part about the drive-in, he skipped using the blanket as her head and said he’d decided to leave during the second movie. Because he’d sworn not to, he didn’t mention her being pregnant. The sheriff put his hands on his knees and sat back. Teenagers, he said. Wasn’t no point in getting all worked up. She was probably out with some boy and would show up later that night. Was such behavior beyond the girl? No, her mother admitted, it wasn’t. Teenagers, the sheriff repeated. Well, why didn’t everybody just go on home. If she hadn’t come back by morning, give him a call, he’d look into it.

That seemed to satisfy everyone but Cecil, who stormed outside cursing, but when Larry stood to go the sheriff said, “What a minute, buddy.”

Larry stopped and felt the man reach into his back pocket and pull out his lockblade knife.

“All boys carry em,” Larry said.

“Well,” said the sheriff. “Let’s see what tomorrow brings.” He put the knife in his pocket.

Tomorrow did not bring Cindy home. Nor the next day or the one after that. Word got out that she had disappeared on a date with Larry, and then, Monday at school, Ken and David told about seeing Larry and Cindy screeching off. The sheriff was notified. Because Larry hadn’t told that part, his story seemed flawed, revised, and on Tuesday he found himself, along with his father, riding to the sheriff’s department for the first of many “talks.” Here, the sheriff growing stern, Carl angry, Larry confessed to how she said she’d been pregnant. Why hadn’t he said this the other night, the sheriff wanted to know. Because I swore I wouldn’t, he said.

The three rode in the sheriff’s car, Larry in the backseat, caged off from the front, no handles on the doors, to the spot in the woods where he’d dropped her off, the sheriff asking Larry did he see any tracks that would verify a car had been waiting. Did he see a cigarette butt? A rubber? Anything to help prove Larry wasn’t lying? No, no, no, no. Well, the sheriff said, hadn’t Larry worried about leaving a young girl alone in the woods? What kind of a gentleman would do that? Out of answers, Larry was led back to the car.

Cindy’s friends were asked to volunteer information about her, who she might’ve left with, where she could’ve gone, but nobody knew anything, everyone swearing she wasn’t seeing
anybody
. Meanwhile, deputies looked for Cindy in Carl’s woods, pulled by hounds, kicking through leaves, wading the creek, searching other parts of the county as well, dragging lakes, interviewing Larry over and over, sending out bulletins, nailing up posters. Larry never returned to school, the weeks stretching into months, and when even the most fervent optimists were beginning to doubt she’d run away, after Silas had left for Oxford, Larry spent his hours in his room, reading. His father switched from beer to whiskey and drank more and more, starting earlier in the day as his business dwindled, fewer and fewer customers each month until the cars that trickled in were the cars of strangers, strangers who found a disheveled drunk sitting in the office smoking cigarettes, a man who’d stopped talking to his son period and quit telling stories. Larry’s mother stopped going to church and stayed home, minding her chickens, often standing in the pen gazing into space or at the kitchen sink in her yellow gloves, hands sunk in gray dishwater, looking out the window. Their lives had stopped, frozen, as if in a picture, and the days were nothing more than empty squares on a calendar. In the evening the three of them would find themselves at the table over a quiet meal no one tasted, or before the television as if painted there, the baseball game the only light in the room, its commentators’ voices and the cracks of bats and cheers the only sound, that and the clink of Carl’s ice.