Free Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin

didn’t think he had the ability to summon such anger, or the right. With her other hand Carolyn grabbed his arm and twisted it so he fell out of his desk, The Shining landing beside him on the floor.
    Still holding his arm, she put her foot on his neck and pushed.
    “Carolyn!” somebody hissed. “Mrs. Smith coming.”
    In a flash he was let go and black hands were grabbing books. He’d just pulled himself back into his desk when the teacher walked in, chewing a stick of gum, and said, “What’s all this noise?”
    She looked over the room, everybody miraculously in their desks, focused on their world history books. When her eyes settled on Larry, she stopped.
    “Lord, child,” she said. “You need to comb your hair. And why you so red?”
    The class exploded into laughter as Larry sank his head back onto his desk.
    EVEN TODAY, MORE than a year later, carrying his rifle through the woods, the memory shamed him. He’d gotten a belt whipping from his father that night—for tearing his clothes jumping out of the swing, Clothes I work hard to buy. He’d apologized to Jackie the following day, gone up to her and mumbled, “Sorry,” but she’d just walked away, leaving him alone.
    Now, as he made his way toward the cabin where Silas and his mother were staying, the woods had begun to thin, and as he came to the edge of the field with his .22, he looked over the frozen turnrows and saw the dark elbow of smoke from the cabin’s stovepipe.
    He knelt, a fallen log at the tree line like a wall, the bramble cross-stitching his face so they’d never see him from the windows. He knew the cabin, had been there before, had pushed open its door on leather hinges and peered into the dust and dark where fissures of light showed how poorly the logs were mortared. There’d been little else to see. A wooden table and a couple of single beds hunters had once used, a wash pot. The stove in the back corner with its iron door opened and its pipe a straight line to the roof, shored around the top with bent, blackened patches of aluminum. A woodbox coated in dust that held only dead cockroaches and rat droppings when he raised its lid.
    He wondered now, watching the cabin, if Silas did his homework by firelight. You’d have to lug water from the creek on the other side of the field, where the trees resumed. Larry wondered if he could get closer, if he should circle the edge of the woods to the point nearest the house, six o’clock to his current high noon. From here was about a hundred yards to there, all open field, just one white oak stricken against the sky like an explosion. Be better at night. They didn’t have a dog or he’d know it by now.
    “Hey,” said a voice behind him.
    He turned with the rifle. It was Silas, his arms full of limbs. Firewood.
    The black boy dropped the wood and raised his hands like a robber. For a moment that was how they stood, Silas in the coat Larry’s mother had given him and one of Larry’s old thermal caps his mother must’ve thought to put in the pocket.
    Silas opened his mouth. “You gone shoot me?”
    He moved the rifle. “No,” he said. “You scared me is all. Sneaking up like that.”
    “I ain’t sneak.” Silas lowered his hands.
    “Sorry,” Larry said. He put the .22 against a tree and hesitated, then came forward to shake Silas’s hand. His father’s habit. Silas hesitated, too, then, perhaps because they were alone in the woods, no school around them, they shook, Silas’s fingers again enveloped Larry’s glove.
    For a moment they looked at each other, then knelt together to pick up the wood. Larry stacked his limbs onto the top of the pile Silas held. Silas shrugged a thanks and stepped past Larry and went to the edge and stopped. He looked back over his shoulder.
    “What you doing out here?”
    “My daddy owns this land.” Larry turned to where the gun stood, barrel up, against the bark of a pine tree. “I was hunting.”
    “You kill anything?”
    He shook his