Tom Franklin - Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“Say what?”

“Rattler,” she repeated. “Mailbox.”

“Was the flag up?”

“Ha-ha. Mail carrier reported it. It being, you know, in the box? That makes it a federal crime.”

“How you know that?”

“32,” she said. “You only been in that uniform two years. You know how long I been setting in this chair?”

“So it’s happened before?”

“You don’t even want to know. I’ll call Shannon.”

He signed off, glad Voncille would contact the police reporter. Anytime he got his picture or name in the paper, it raised his profile, which might boost his salary at evaluation time. Enough good PR he could be a black Buford Pusser, maybe run at sheriff himself in ten years.

He could head over to Larry’s house later, he thought, cranking the Jeep. But then he got a better idea and flipped his cell phone open.

“32,” Angie said. “You ain’t got another decomposing corpse, do you?”

“Hope not,” he said. “What’s going on?”

Not much, she reported. Wrapping up a one-car on 5, no injuries except the dead deer. Trooper had already split. Tab and the guy who’d hit the deer were field dressing it, planning to split the meat. “Tab say you want a tenderloin?”

“Angie,” he said. “You know Larry Ott?”

Her phone crackled. “Scary Larry?”

“Yeah. Feel like following a hunch?”

“May be, baby. Tell me more.”

“I need yall to run out there when you got a minute. Little dirt road in Chabot, off Campground Cemetery Road.”

“I know where he stays. How come?”

“Just when you got a minute. See if the place looks clean. It ain’t far from where yall at now.”

“Hang on,” she said.

He pulled to the edge of the highway and waited for a log truck, the Jeep shaking as the truck thundered past with its logs bouncing.

“Angie?”

“All right,” she said. “But 32?”

“Yeah?”

“This means you going to church with me on Sunday.”

“We’ll talk,” he said. “And save me that tenderloin.”

HE COULD COVER his jurisdiction one end to the other, Dump Road to the catfish farm, in fifteen minutes if he stuck his light on and hauled ass, like today, and soon he’d neared Fourteenth Avenue. Silas thought of it as White Trash Ave., a hilly red clay road with eight or ten houses and trailers clustered along the left side and Rutherford land on the right, fenced off and posted every fifty yards, an attempt to keep the rednecks from shooting deer and turkeys in the woods. Wildlife was good for the mill’s image. You rode through the pines braking for deer, sometimes fawns on clumsy legs, rare red foxes, bobcats, you almost forgot for a moment the trees were a crop.

He patrolled through here once or twice a week, different times, keeping his eye on an Airstream trailer out behind one of the houses, half blocked from the road by a shed. The way the trailer’s windows were boarded up, its door padlocked, made him think it might be a crystal meth lab but, without probable cause-a neighbor complaining, an explosion-he couldn’t check it out.

Every time he cruised past, the white residents frowned from chairs on their porches, thin tattooed bleach-blond women with babies on their laps, strained-looking grandmothers in housedresses smoking cigarettes, garbage in the yards, clotheslines with sheets lifting in the wind, sheer panties, nylons. In one yard was an old Chevy Vega, no hood, bitterweed growing through the engine block, windows broken, the trunk open-he’d seen a dog sitting in there once with its tongue out. Seen a goat on a rope, too, cast-off car parts speared by grass, fishing lures dripping from the power lines. An old camper shell used for a chicken coop and chickens and guinea hens running wild in the weeds. A duck in a kid’s wading pool. Kids revving four-wheelers in the deep grass. He didn’t know what it was about white folks and four-wheelers, but every damn house seemed to have one.

And the dogs.

Each place yielded half a dozen, rarely any known breed, mostly just Heinz 57s, a throng of unneutered, collarless barking mongrels waiting for his Jeep whenever he rounded the curve at the bottom of the hill, chasing him until the woods picked back up.

Here they came now, the whole furious, joyful tide of them, parting as he rode through, barking alongside the Jeep, three or four big dark ones loping along with bass voices, a few mediums and several small yappers. He saw the postal Jeep up ahead, newer model than his, nice paint job, parked to the side of the road in the shade, its flashers on. He knew the driver, a woman named Olivia. They’d met in the Chabot Bus and gone out a couple times, but she had two young boys. Silas wasn’t much for kids and she wasn’t much for a man who didn’t swoon over her children. On one of their dates they’d discussed White Trash Ave., which he’d confessed to calling it, and she’d told him it was the bane of her route, she refused to get out and deliver any package to those white folks’ doors because of the dogs. Instead, she’d blow her horn, which she knew pissed them off, and if nobody came, she’d just put a notification in the box, saying come to the post office. And why didn’t he like children?

Olivia was out of her vehicle now, standing with four other women, all white, one holding a baby. Shannon hadn’t gotten there yet. In the nearest yard, its grass to their knees, three boys, two crew cuts and a mullet, stood watching. One had a BB gun and another a plastic bow and arrow set.

Silas coasted to a stop and killed his engine, the dogs gathering at his door, one little biddy one that jumped so high it kept appearing in his window.

“Get down,” he said, fingering his Taser, which, like his pistol, he’d never used.

“Sellars,” a woman called, “get them damn dogs.”

The boy with the BB gun, shirtless, dirty face, came to the Jeep and started kicking at them, allowing Silas to push his door open. The boy with the mullet joined him and helped drive the dogs back.

“Hey, 32,” Olivia said.

“Hey, girl.” He approached the crowd, carrying his camera, the women looking him up and down, him touching the brim of his hat.

“Hey,” one young woman said. “I’m glad you here.” She wore cut-off jeans and a tank top over a sports bra. She was barefooted. Attractive. Maybe twenty-two, -three years old. Tattoos on both forearms and one peeking from the low neck of her tank and another, a green vine, tracing up out of her jeans. You couldn’t help but wonder where it started. “My name’s Irina Mott.”

“Hey, Mrs. Mott. 32 Jones.”

She tilted her head and squinted cutely in the sun. “Just Irina.”

“It’s her mailbox,” Olivia said.

“Her snake-of-the-month club arrived early,” said another young woman, pierced nose, black eyeliner.

“Yeah,” Irina said, “but I’d ordered a copperhead.”

Olivia pointed to the mailbox, askew on its post and the address flaking off. “I’m driving along, and I start to open it and the next thing I know it’s buzzing like a hornet’s nest. I open it a crack more and heard something whop the door from the inside and I closed it right back.”

Silas regarded the mailbox, then thumped its flag and heard the buzz start inside, like a tiny motor. “Can somebody get me a shovel?”

“Edward Reese,” a fat woman said to one of the boys watching from the yard. “Run get one, hear?”

He disappeared around the house, dogs following him, tails wagging.

“What time you last open it?” he asked Irina.

“Last night, bout dark. Put my phone bill in.”

“Yall got any idea who might’ve done this?” he asked.

The women frowning at one another, the one with the baby switching hips.