Mississippi Noir

by Tom Franklin

  Babb was soaked through and through. The trailer door slammed. He walked back to the patrol car. Been easier working with them cows.

  * * *

  “You ever think about killing someone?” Shelby asked.

  “Hell no,” I said. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Shelby’s shoulder pressed against the passenger window of my truck. She was still in her cheap sunglasses, chewing gum, blowing big loud bubbles.

  “You know,” she said, “that your life would be better if someone wasn’t on the planet?”

  “You want to kill your momma for being a pain in the ass?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “What are you saying then?”

  “I’m just talking, Hunter,” she said. “Can’t we just talk awhile?”

  “I’m taking you home.”

  “’Cause the law showed up at your mom’s house?”

  “She told them I didn’t have a phone,” I said. “She lied for me. She lied for you. And Johnny Law interrupted her afternoon television. That’s all she cares to do until I get home for supper. She said the law said I didn’t have permission to give you a ride.”

  “You drove me because I said I’d talk to Lyndsay Redwine.”

  “I got you here, didn’t I? Shit.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Drop me off then. Right over fuckin’ there.”

  “There?” I said. “That’s nowhere. That’s just an old couch on the road.”

  “I need to rest.”

  “I’m driving you home.”

  “Shit,” she said. “I don’t even know where the hell that is.”

  Shelby grabbed the door handle and acted like she was about jump out. And I figured she was just about crazy enough to do it. I slowed onto the gravel shoulder.

  My truck pipes growled as she opened the door wide. I revved the engine. She didn’t move. She just sat there watching the wipers slap the hell out of the rain. She stared straight ahead, thinking on something.

  “What you got in that toolbox?”

  “Flowers,” I said. “What do you think?”

  “You got a wrench?”

  “Yeah, I got a wrench.”

  “Give it to me.”

  I left the motor running, walked out into the rain, and grabbed a wrench from my Husky toolbox. I looked at her hard as I handed it over in case she had it in her mind to go and hit someone with it.

  “What?” she said. “Can’t a girl just go and fix her dang house?” She blew a huge pink bubble and it exploded like a shot.

  “I guess.”

  “And Hunter?” she said. “Pick me up for school tomorrow. Little earlier than usual. I got somethin’ to do.”

  “You want me to get arrested?”

  “Will you do it?”

  I nodded.

  She got out and went over to the wet, ragged sofa as I turned the Chevy around and rolled down my window. Shelby was a trip in her sunglasses, taking a seat on that old sofa in the rain. She acted like she owned all of Paris and that the hamlet was her living room.

  “You really introduce me to Lyndsay Redwine?” I said.

  Shelby smiled back and crossed her legs. She had a phone in one hand and a big-ass wrench in the other. “Just pick me up,” she said. “Okay?”

  * * *

  Randy had come in late the night before, racing up from Calhoun County where’d he’d been out with his stupid buddies spotlighting deer. He was red-faced and sweating, wearing an old Carhartt jacket over his T-shirt, when he’d asked Shelby to step outside. He had something he wanted to show her.

  She knew her damn bitch momma had called him. She’d told him what she’d said.

  “Why you want to upset her like that?” Randy said. “Your momma was crying and blubbering so much, I could barely make out her words.”

  Shelby just stood there in his headlights, arms crossed over her small chest, in their front yard. Randy opened up the tailgate to his truck and dragged out a dead deer.

  “Sometimes a young girl believes things, imagines things that never been there,” he said. “Way it works when you’re a kid. But you spread them things onto your momma, and your momma calls me up, that’s when you need to consider your actions. Brother Davis was sayin’ last Sunday . . .’’ Using his winch, Randy hoisted the doe by the back legs over a tree branch.

  “Brother Davis is a cross-eyed hypocrite.”

  “You need to think on what you’re sayin’ and doin’, Shelby,” Randy replied, shuffling back to his truck and cracking open another Busch from his cooler, Adam’s apple working while he swallowed most of it.

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his bloody hand, and set down the beer on the tailgate. His stomach swelled over the top of his pants. The back of his neck was reddish-brown and hadn’t been shaved in a while.

  “Are we straight?”

  She was quiet. She just stared back at his big, dumb ass, showing she wasn’t scared of jack shit. She knew and her momma now knew too. Whether her momma believed it or not wasn’t Shelby’s damn problem.

  Randy pulled a buck knife from a leather sheath and walked to the doe swinging in the wind. There was lightning far off from their neighbors’ and a cold wind bringing in rain from down on the coast. Headlights shone on the dead animal.

  Shelby wanted to say more but only got out, “Can I go inside?”

  “Hold up,” Randy said. “Hold up. Listen. Haven’t I been good to you?”

  “That’s what you call it?” she asked, lifting up the sleeve of her T-shirt, fat finger bruises on her arms. “Goddamn you, you fat bastard. It ain’t right what you did. I didn’t want it.”

  Randy froze in the front yard, open-mouthed, doe swinging from the pecan, and slit that deer from anus to throat, the insides of the animal dropping down hard and bloody onto the dead grass.

  He studied the entrails that had fallen, picked up a cigarette, closing one eye as if to get better focus, and just nodded at her. “We straight?”

  Shelby ran into the house and slammed the door behind her.

  * * *

  “Shelby’s momma ain’t gonna file charges or nothing,” said Johnny Law, a.k.a. Deputy Babb.

  We sat in the cruiser together that night as it rained like hell outside us. I didn’t say nothing.

  “But she and her stepdaddy wanted me to talk to you,” Babb said. “They wanted you to understand the exact nature of what you done today. That girl is fourteen years old.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And she’s real impressionable,” Babb said. “You being a senior with a big, nice truck like that. I ain’t too old that I don’t recall what a young girl would do for an older boy. But your cousin sure as hell understands the consequences of her actions.”

  “This don’t have nothing to do with Rebecca.”

  “You don’t want to be changing diapers while trying to play ball,” Babb said. “That little girl is messed up in the head. Shelby would do anything for some attention. That’s why I’m talking to you like a man. Let you know all the things that come with spending time with a girl like that.”

  “Shelby’s just my friend,” I said. “She needed help.”

  Babb smiled. He had yellow, crooked teeth.

  “She didn’t want to go home.”

  “How come you went over to your cousin’s trailer?”

  “’Cause we didn’t have nowhere else to go,” I said. “It was raining.”

  “Y’all were together nearly four hours before she got home.”

  “We were riding around. Shelby likes to take the back roads.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. Babb just smiled bigger. He put a hand on my shoulder, leaned in, and said, “Keep it in your pants, Hunter. Don’t go throwing away your life on a little ol’ fat girl.”

  I didn’t answer. I just crawled out of the cruiser and walked back to my house and the supper my momma had laid out. Field peas, greens, and hamburger steak that had grown cold.

  Momma was back on t
he couch, laughing at something she’d seen on television.

  * * *

  The morning was bright and cold when Shelby removed the skirting around the front porch and crawled under the tin-roof house. She was quiet about it. All she needed was Randy to wake up from a twelve-pack coma and start asking a lot of questions.

  The house was old and slat-boarded, nothing but dirt and trash up underneath the floors. Running above her was a mess of old copper pipes and new PVC water lines. So many cracks and breaks in the bottom floor of the house, she could see the light inside bleeding through clear as day. It took her awhile but she soon found where the gas line ran up into the living room and then along the back of the house to the stove. Shelby reached for Hunter’s wrench in her back pocket and turned the screw in the pipe, letting the propane run free.

  She listed for a hiss, but didn’t hear a thing.

  The rotten egg smell didn’t come to her until she put the wrench back in her pocket.

  It took her twice as long to crawl backward into daylight, the back of her jeans and jacket covered in reddish dirt. She dusted herself off best she could and just started walking down the curved road toward what used to be Paris. The old general store was just a heap of boards and broken glass. The post office was an empty cinder-block building where they’d sometimes have a flea market on Saturday, selling old and useless things. Across the street was a volunteer fire station and a few trailers on a muddy, eroded hill.

  Shelby kept walking, camo backpack over her shoulder, listening and looking for Hunter’s truck. She figured the house would be good and filled with gas in about an hour, filling those deep, dark places and far corners of that damn drafty old house. Her momma had gone to town. Her brother was already on the bus to school.

  She’d left Randy’s cigarettes and lighter right where he liked them. Right by his bed.

  LORD OF MADISON COUNTY

  by Jimmy Cajoleas

  Madison

  “Are y’all ready to worship?” says Pastor Jerry. He’s got his eyes shut, one arm raised high to Jesus in some weird half–Nazi salute. Frosted hair slicked back, bald spot barely showing. Graphic T-shirt that says, Lord’s Gym, and has Christ bench-pressing a cross on it. Cargo shorts that he still thinks are cool.

  I’m a little ways back in the youth room, chewing on a pen cap. The worship band kicks in; it’s all reverbed guitar and concert lights and the bullshit praise lyrics projected onto a screen behind them. You know, the songs that are the kind of crap you say to your girlfriend but it’s supposed to be about God? You alone are beautiful. You alone are my rock. You alone are my one and only. Oh Jesus, baby!

  Out in the crowd of youth-groupers are my customers. The girl with her hands up in the air, giggling, singing louder than anyone? That’s Theresa. Everyone thinks she’s weird, that maybe she’s one of God’s holy fools, but they all agree that she’s on fire with Jesus.

  Nah, she just popped a molly.

  Don’t get me wrong, Theresa loves Jesus. She says drugs just help the experience. She’s from Seattle, her parents are hippies, it’s a weird thing. But just look at that girl worship!

  And the bro with the mullet up front? The one who’s all glassy-eyed for the Lord? That’s Dennis. I smoked him up about fifteen minutes ago.

  I could go on. There’s Fran and Baskin and Hillary and Scottie. The youth group is about one hundred strong, and I sell to 30 percent of them.

  The praise song ends. The guitars ring out. Pastor Jerry speaks: “The Lord reigns over our city. Can you feel Him all around us? Can you feel Him in this very room? It’s good to feel the presence of the Lord. The peace that passeth all understanding. Do y’all feel the peace of the Lord?”

  Well, they’re feeling something, that’s for damn sure.

  “Amen,” I say.

  Pastor Jerry looks out to me and smiles. “Douglas, will you lead us in a word of prayer?”

  It’s funny. Pastor Jerry has no clue about me. In fact, he believes I’m his greatest success story. I’m fully converted, and Pastor Jerry was the one who did it. I bet that asshole gets a holy boner in his cargo shorts every time he thinks of me.

  Not to mention all the converts I brought. Once word got out I was dealing at youth group (they leave all the areas inside the church unlocked, so once you’re in, the place is an abandoned labyrinth of dark, closed-off rooms, perfect for private business), all sorts of riffraff started showing up. All of a sudden Pastor Jerry thinks I’m the Apostle Paul to a bunch of stoner kids.

  “Sure, Pastor Jerry,” I say. “Let us pray.”

  * * *

  I used to go to school at Parkside Prep, along with every other rich kid in Madison. I was an okay student, I went to class, whatever. My dad was long gone and my mom started dating this guy, Dillon, who was a total pothead. I caught him at it one day while Mom was at her tennis lesson. I threatened to tell her that Dillon’s been selling me weed for months unless he gave me the number for his dealer.

  So I went and met the guy, this white dude named Kroner. He had a shaved head and a nasty scar down his cheek, but he was a smooth guy, kind of soft, like everybody else in Madison. And I pitched him. You want an in at Parkside? It’s all rich kids with trust funds. They’ll buy anything to look cool.

  He said sure. It was that easy. He said, Sure, but if you fuck this up, if you fuck with my money, I will fucking kill you. I will kill you and your entire family. I will cut your mother’s lips off and staple them to my dick.

  And it was hard not to laugh. Just think about stapling something to your dick. That’s the stupidest shit I ever heard of in my life. Kroner was a fucking moron, and he was going to make me rich.

  Everything went smooth at Parkside for a while. I was making all kinds of money. I was a hero. I got every kid the high they wanted. Even Kroner was impressed. All was golden until this fat fucker named Bill Widdleton did a line too many and had a seizure in Mrs. Bilson’s art class.

  I’d never seen a kid have a seizure before. It was like watching a computer reset. He made this weird stuttering noise first, his chin bobbing up and down like the picture when a DVD skips. In seconds he was flopping on the floor, foaming at the mouth, legs kicking. It was a thing to see.

  I shouldn’t have stayed to watch though. I should have run my ass to my locker and dumped everything I had in a toilet. Because the ambulance came, and then the cops arrived with the drug dogs.

  Even though my dad flew in for a week to pay off half the county, I got kicked out of school. I got a month in juvie. I got mandatory rehab and parole for a year. Mom took my car so I had to walk thirty minutes just to get home. Every shop and gas station I passed made me hate this bullshit town more and more.

  It’s all about the looks in Madison. Like how every store is made out of bricks. I mean everything, even the Walmart. It’s a city ordinance, I don’t know. You can’t tell if you’re at a bank or a gas station half the time. It’s like they fling up these cheap strip malls, throw a layer of bricks on them, and act like they’re going to last. When they won’t last at all. They’re just as disposable as everything else in this white-flight town.

  My first day at the new school, Kroner drove up in his Mustang with the tinted windows. He had his thug Ty in the passenger seat. Kroner told me if I didn’t make it up to him, if I didn’t sell enough to cover everything I’d lost him, he would cut my dick off and feed it to his dog.

  “You got a dog?” I said.

  “A big dog,” he said. “A Doberman.”

  “I figured you more for a dachshund kind of guy.”

  “A what?”

  “You know, a wiener dog.”

  Kroner didn’t think that was funny. His thug Ty—this big blonde-headed county boy, complete with cowboy boots and brass knuckles—stepped out of the car and beat the shit out of me. He took my wallet and my shoes. He kicked me so hard I shit my pants.

  There I was, crying my eyes out in a Walgreens parking lot, when I had my idea.

  I called
up Pineywood Baptist Church, the biggest church in Madison. It’s the one my mom and all her friends go to. They have the big church barbecues where everybody gets hammered and figures out who they’re going to cheat on their husbands with next. It’s a horrible church full of horrible people and everyone knows it.

  I asked to talk to the youth pastor. I didn’t know his name, I didn’t know a thing about him. His secretary said he wasn’t in, but I told her it was an emergency so she gave me his cell phone number.

  Bless his stupid heart, Pastor Jerry was there ten minutes after I called him. Picked me up at the Walgreens in his plum-colored Honda Element. Took me straight to his house and listened to my whole bullshit story: the bullying drug dealers, my desire to come clean, to have a fresh start. He had me say the sinner’s prayer, right then and there. Then he fed me dinner.

  After we ate, Pastor Jerry went to take a dump and left me in the living room with his daughter Kayla. She’s a freshman at Parkside. She’s gorgeous. I had no clue how I’d never noticed her before. She was watching fat people yell at each other on the TV. A big smiling family portrait hung over the mantelpiece: a four-year-old Kayla, Pastor Jerry, and a brown-haired beauty with gigantic tits who I guessed was Kayla’s mom.

  “So where’s your mom?” I asked.

  “She’s dead,” said Kayla.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I bet,” said Kayla, then she changed the channel. “Are you serious about all this Jesus shit?”

  “Nope,” I said.

  “I hate my dad.”

  “He’s a fucking tool, and he’s about to make me a hell of a lot of money.”

  Kayla smiled at me. I put my arm around her.

  * * *

  I come home from youth group with my backpack full of cash. Just three months in and I already got ten grand hidden in a Nike box up in my room. I overcharge like crazy but the kids are too rich to know the difference, or even to care. It feels good, knowing I got enough to pay Kroner back tonight. Then I can start making the real money.

  Mom sits at the dinner table in a purple dress that shows off her legs. Guess she and Dillon must have had a date night.