Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin Page A

bottle, Cecil would ask, “Carl, what was that you’s saying other day, about that crazy nigger—?”
    And Carl would chuckle while he selected a tiny screwdriver and start the story. Loosening the carburetor’s minute screws, he would tell how Devoid Chapman bought this little red used MG Midget in Meridian and was driving it home to Dump Road when, along about time he passes Ottomotive, its hood unlatches and flies open. Carl pointing with his screwdriver. “Right out yonder there. The car’s a convertible, top folded back. Did I mention that? And Devoid, he has him a Afro, size of a dang peach basket. One of them black power fist combs sticking out of it.
    “Now he’s got the top down cause he liked the way the wind friction felt against his hair, he said. And while he ain’t never confirmed it, that very nest of hair probably saved his life as that damn MG’s hood unsprang at fifty-five miles per hour there on the highway. I seen it happen. Swear to God.” Carl dropping the parts into a sieved pan and lowering the pan into a vat of ink-black, foul-smelling carburetor cleaner. “Hood peeled back, hit the rim of the windshield and bent and knocked ole Devoid right on the head, pop! The Midget spun out, lucky it was no other cars nearby, and Devoid luckier still to finally get it stopped there in a dust cloud.”
    Talking the whole time, raising the sieve from the cleaner and setting the pan over a clean shop rag to dry, pausing only if something went amiss at his fingertips, a spring stuck in some valve, say. Attending this need might take five seconds, ten, a minute. He might have to excuse his way through the men and get a tiny socket or a different pair of pliers or maybe talk to the screw, “What’s got you stuck?” or he might just grimace, but then, however long it took (never long), the problem solved, he’d go on as if he’d never stopped.
    “—got that MG stopped out in front there. Ole Devoid come staggering out fanning dust and holding his head a-yelling, ‘Call a got-dog am-bu-lance!’ Had a line of blood dripping off his nose. A cussing up and down the chart, got damn this and got damn that, son-of-a-bitching shit hell damn. Crazy nigger,” he’d say, laughing, “sold me the car on the spot, for two hundred dollars cash. I closed the hood and wired it shut and give him a ride home in that very car, him hunched down the whole time, worried bout that hood. I asked him did he want a motorcycle helmet but he said no, it’d never fit over his hair.”
    All the men would be laughing and Cecil, drunk, a cigarette in his mouth and another behind his ear, laughing the hardest, would say, “You something else, Carl. Tell when you asked him about his name.”
    Carl bending low over the table, close to the carburetor. “Yeah, I did. Said one time, ‘Devoid. That’s a hell of a name. You know what it means?’ And he said, yeah, he’d looked it up. ‘Barren. Empty. A wasteland.’ In school said his nickname was ‘Nothing.’”
    “You something else,” Cecil would say, shaking his head. “Tell em about that dog, Carl,” and Carl would launch off into the funeral of so-and-so’s daddy where they was all standing around the grave out in the middle of nowhere, ten, fifteen miles to the nearest blacktop. “Somebody’s eulogizing the hell out of M. O. Walsh—that’s who it was—lying through his teeth telling what a gentleman he was, when from out behind us we hear a gunshot. Pop! Next thing we heard was a little ole dog go a-yipping and I bout bust out laughing when that got-dang dog come a shooting out the woods bleeding from the side. It run right through us all and through the tombstones a-yipping fore it went on down the road. I leaned over and said, ‘Fellows, when my time comes, I want me a three -dog salute.’ ”
    The men laughing, Cecil hardest of all. They’d have Coca-Colas or beer and jaws fat with tobacco. They’d spit and wipe their lips with the backs of their hands.