Mississippi Noir

by Tom Franklin

  “Look, you can pray in the car. Let’s just go.”

  * * *

  We drive without any music, just the wind sliced by my busted window. Pastor Jerry prays to Jesus. He prays with his hands lifted up, same as he does in youth group, in that soft, sincere voice, begging God for the safety of his sweet Kayla, his good daughter who stumbled off the path.

  “I know she doesn’t believe yet, Lord, but please let my faith be enough. Please let the faith of a parent get her through.”

  It’s pure TBN Joel Osteen horseshit, but you can tell Pastor Jerry actually means it. He asks for forgiveness for all kinds of stuff—for his failure as a dad, as a husband, all his own faults and shortcomings. Never once does he blame me.

  That hurts, you know? This guy was never anything but good to me and I have him begging Christ for his little girl’s life. Same daughter I fucked earlier tonight and who might get murdered because of me, same one who he doesn’t even hardly know, not really. Pastor Jerry never stole anything from me like Dillon, and he sure stuck around longer than my own dad when I was in trouble. I’ve done nothing but take from him. I’ve made a fool out of him.

  All the while Pastor Jerry prays.

  * * *

  We pull up to The Spot in my bashed car. Kroner’s leaning against his Mustang with his arms crossed like a gangster in a movie. A bit-off chunk of moon hangs in the sky half-hidden by clouds. Ty holds Kayla by her arms. He’s got sunglasses on even though it’s dark. When I get out, I slam the door like I’m a tough guy and the rest of the glass shatters out in shards. Pastor Jerry steps out gingerly over the glass.

  “Who the fuck is that guy?” asks Kroner.

  “That’s Kayla’s dad,” I say. “I had to get the money somewhere.”

  “We can do this real safe-like,” says Pastor Jerry. He holds out the money in a Walmart bag. “Everybody needs to keep real cool now. I don’t want any harm to come to anybody. Christ died for each and every one of you. Even if you don’t believe it.”

  “The fuck is he talking about?” says Kroner.

  “He’s a youth pastor,” I say.

  “Oh,” says Kroner. “I fucking hated youth group.”

  “Why?” asks Pastor Jerry.

  “The singing. I hate singing.”

  “Just give him the money,” I say.

  “Yeah, give me the money,” says Kroner.

  Pastor Jerry tosses him the bag. Kroner smiles.

  The whole time Kayla’s got her arms crossed over her tits. Blood’s dried all down her face. I can tell she’s chewing on the inside of her cheek; she does it whenever she’s mad. I’ve seen her chew herself till she bled out of her mouth before. Ty has his hands on her shoulders, those stupid sunglasses on. Her head barely comes up to his chest.

  “I told you not to fuck with me,” says Kroner. “I told you I was hard.” He grabs Kayla away from Ty and pulls her to him, twisting her arm behind her back, then yanks her head back by her hair. “See what I can do? See what I can do to your girl?” He licks Kayla’s neck. “I can do anything I want. I’m the hardest motherfucker in this whole city. Fuck Jackson. I’m the Lord of goddamned Madison County.”

  Kayla elbows Kroner in the stomach. With her free hand she pulls his knife out of his belt sheath, whirls, and slides the blade across his face. It’s quick, but awkward, like she was aiming for Kroner’s throat but didn’t know how to do it, like she had never really tried to hurt anyone before. She only gets Kroner’s ear. It half-hangs off his cheek, mutilated, dangling from a flap of skin.

  “You bitch! Jesus, my face!” Kroner reaches out to Ty, but the thug backs away like he doesn’t want any blood on him.

  “You beat me,” says Kayla. “You were going to rape me.”

  “Baby?” says Pastor Jerry.

  “You’re fucking dead,” says Kroner. He points to Ty. “Kill her.”

  “If you take one step closer I will cut your dick off.” She points the knife at Kroner. “I will cut it off and fuck him with it.”

  Ty takes his sunglasses off. His eyes are blue and scared. He looks down at Kayla, then back to Kroner.

  “You need to leave,” says Pastor Jerry. “I’m going to call an ambulance.”

  Ty nods. He backs up a few steps with his hands in the air, like he’s being held up, then takes off running toward the woods.

  “My fucking ear,” moans Kroner. Blood leaks between his fingers and down his face. “You cut it off.”

  “Not all the way,” says Kayla.

  Pastor Jerry pulls a handkerchief out of his pocket. It’s the same one he’s always wiping his face with when he preaches. He kneels down next to Kroner and presses the handkerchief to the guy’s ear, as if to heal him. Kroner cries and cries.

  “I can’t fucking believe this,” says Kayla. “Get up, Dad.”

  Pastor Jerry shakes his head.

  “I said get up.”

  “No,” says Pastor Jerry. “Remember, There is more joy in Heaven over one sinner who repents than ninety-nine who need no repentance."

  “You can have that party without me,” says Kayla. “If you call an ambulance, the cops will come, and no fucking way I’m going to be around for that.” She turns to me. “Keys?”

  I look at her and there’s no love looking back. There’s something else in her eyes, a disappointment. Like I let her down. Like I couldn’t handle the situation and I had to go running to her daddy. Kayla finally sees me for what I really am: another goddamn phony Madison kid. Not like her. Kayla’s something different.

  I toss her the keys. Kayla tucks Kroner’s knife in her belt. She picks up the bag of money, gets in my car, and drives off down the dirt road toward the highway. I watch my car disappear into the darkness without me.

  Kroner whimpers on the ground. Pastor Jerry’s still holding him, rocking him back and forth, praying for him. They seem so close, like they’re related, like a father and son. The moonlight hits the shattered glass around them and the pieces glimmer. I feel like I belong there in the dirt with them, wounded and bleeding and maybe about to be healed. Pastor Jerry begins to sing a hymn, one I recognize from youth group. I would join in but I never bothered to learn the words.

  LOSING HER RELIGION

  by RaShell R. Smith-Spears

  Jackson

  it waznt a spirit took my stuff

  waz a man whose ego walked round like Rodan’s shadow

  waz a man faster n my innocence

  waz a lover

  i made too much room for

  —from Ntozake Shange,

  “Somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff”

  Jada Wallace wrapped her long bronze legs around her lover’s waist as he slammed her into the bedroom wall. Her tongue pushed desperately past his lips, seeking the flavor of his mouth. His hands were just as desperate; they ran up her back under her shirt, seeking the hooks of her bra. The release of her breasts was freeing and satisfying. He threw her down on the bed and straddled her waist. He jerked her shirt over her head after his lips found hers again and pressed painfully against them. With equal purpose and intensity, he unsnapped her jeans and yanked them down her legs along with the pink lace panties she had worn for him. She sat up and licked a trail down his stomach, following the path laid out by the soft, dark hair that started at his navel and disappeared into his shorts, while she opened his jeans. Apparently, she was moving too slowly because he pushed her back on the bed and yanked his own jeans off. Having discarded his shirt almost immediately after coming into the house, he now stood before her naked and beautiful. His creamy white skin looked so delicious she wanted to run her tongue all over it; she wanted to bite him everywhere. And she did. As he covered her body and entered her, she put her mouth over the skin of his shoulder and bit down. And as he rocked her hard and fast, flipping her on top of him, then throwing her back underneath him, she found different areas of his body to place her teeth: his neck, his broad chest, the inside of his arm, between his thumb and finger. Anywhere on
his body she could get access to, she marked her territory. She laid her claim to him just as his body inside of hers laid claim to her. She was his, all of her.

  “Whose is it!” he demanded.

  “Yours,” she gasped.

  “Who?” he growled. His face was red. A vein in his neck stood out.

  “Yours, Derek. Only yours.”

  With a thunderous growl, he took the ultimate claim of her. “God, I love you, Jada!”

  With that, she came.

  They lay beside one another, both spent and sweaty, holding hands. Jada could not believe how satisfied she was. Was it anyone’s right to feel that good?

  A slight buzzing sounded from the nightstand by her bed. Derek reached over and looked at his cell phone. Placing it back down, he sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed.

  “Where’re you going?” Jada asked.

  “Home.” He had already found and pulled on his jeans.

  “Now? I thought she was going to be out all night with her friends.” Jada never called his wife by her name. It was hard to keep from calling her by other names.

  “Guess the night ended early for her.” He was buttoning his shirt, the dark blue button-down Jada had given him.

  “So it has to end early for us?”

  “Unfortunately,” he bent over and kissed her forehead, “yes.”

  Derek sat on the bed, his back to her, and put on his mahogany slip-ons.

  “I thought we had the whole night; I had things planned.” She ran her fingers down his back and pulled his shirt out of his pants waist. She slipped her hand underneath, against his warm skin.

  He stood up and stuffed his shirttail back into his pants. He gave her an exasperated look. “Jada, I gotta go. You know how this goes.”

  “Why? Why does it have to go this way? Why does she get every damn minute of your time?”

  “She’s my wife. You know that. I made promises to her. I told you I wasn’t looking to end my marriage when we first hooked up. I thought you understood that.”

  Jada rose up on her knees, letting the sheet fall away to reveal her naked body. “You made promises to me. Every time you bust a nut, you tellin’ me you love me. That’s a promise.”

  “C’mon. That’s just nuttin’ talk.” He looked at Jada’s body with longing.

  “You know you want this. You can have it . . . if you stay a little longer.”

  Derek leaned over to Jada, his knee on the bed and the other foot still on the floor. He grabbed one of Jada’s breasts and put it in his mouth. She threw her head back in pleasure—the physical pleasure of his tongue and the emotional pleasure of winning the battle. Jada didn’t beg men to stay—ever. It unnerved her that she begged now. But at least she had him; he was staying. His tongue traveled from her breast to her neck. Jada grabbed the back of his head, and guided him to her mouth. His tongue tasted like mint. She pulled him down on top of her, but he pushed back up.

  “I’ll see you at work on Monday.” He flicked her wet nipple and walked out of her bedroom after grabbing his cell phone.

  Jada pulled the cover over her cold, naked body and wondered how she’d gotten into this position in the first place and how she could get out of it.

  * * *

  Gray clouds held the sun hostage at 6:45 in the morning. The sun tried to break free of the rain clouds’ prison, glowing faintly on the horizon every so often as Jada sped up I-55 to Madison. She had left later than she intended which meant that she would probably be late all day. She tried not to take this as a bad omen, but the dreary cloud jailers seemed impossible to ignore. But sign or no sign, she would make her pilgrimage; she had made it every Sunday for the past month and would continue to do so until she had reached the nirvana she sought. The journey itself was a sanctifying ritual, working her into a passionate fervor. As she drove, she didn’t see the stores—Char, Chili’s, Target—that she had grown up with most of her life and which lined the sides of the interstate like silent sentinels. Instead she focused on her relationship with Derek, recounting what they had done and said the week before, smiling at the funny exchange they had on their way back from the pep rally for school-wide testing. She remembered the sex the night before, and a gentle shiver fell over her body. Already she felt sacred.

  By the time she pulled over into the driveway of the house next to the two-story brick Tudor, she was almost ready for prayer. She prepared by pushing aside the pocket New Testament and the small pistol she always carried in her purse, and in calming solitude, she pulled out, then applied her Red Revival lipstick. Gently rubbing the velvety color between her lips, she surveyed the house’s landscaping, checking whether any changes had been made since the last Sunday. Fresh straw had been laid on the flowerbed that held budding tulips. It seemed a few branches had been cut back from one of the two large trees in the neatly manicured lawn. Jada closed her eyes and imagined she had been working in the yard yesterday morning; she had laid the straw. Dressed in her bright green capris and a peach T-shirt, she had kneeled in front of the flowerbed and removed most of the old, graying straw, placing it in a pile behind her. She worked hard, stopping every now and then to pull up some newly sprouted weeds. It was important to remove ugly, unwanted weeds so that the beautiful could grow. The sun had come out and she had begun to sweat. She wiped her brow with the back of her wrist. One of her neighbors, an older white gentleman, called to her. She smiled and waved at him. Returning to her work, she didn’t even notice Derek walking out with a glass of lemonade and her straw hat. He startled her by placing the hat on her head. She smiled up at him and stood. They shared a long kiss before she took the glass from him and drank the lemonade. He took the glass back, slapped her butt, and walked back in their house.

  Jada exhaled, willing the fantasy to become reality. She would speak it to the universe so that which she named, she could claim. She and Derek were meant for beautiful things. She had not known it when they first met two years earlier on her first day at the high school where they both taught, but a year later, after they hooked up a few times, it became overwhelmingly clear.

  “I want us to be together. God, I claim his love. I claim our love, in the name of Jesus,” she declared in the car sitting in the driveway next door to his house. “Please.”

  Just as she opened her eyes, Derek’s front door opened and his wife came outside. She is so ordinary, Jada thought. What does he see in her?

  Jada wasn’t sure when she started viewing her as a rival, but as she scrutinized her now, she couldn’t help but notice how uninteresting her wild curly brown hair and her pale, oval face were. The only thing that made her interesting was the olive undertone that hinted at her biracial heritage. She was thin and straight, like a boy. Derek said she played tennis in high school. Of course, that was fifteen years ago.

  Jada peered a little closer, noting that she was gaining weight; at five four, her widening hips made her look short and sloppy. She certainly was no match for Jada’s shapely five seven. Summing her up, Jada assessed that she was not very formidable competition.

  She got into her car and blew the horn. That was Jada’s cue to leave. Derek’s wife was calling him to come out so they could go to church. He probably wouldn’t have noticed Jada in the driveway, but she thought it better to leave.

  Driving back down I-55, she observed the city coming awake. More cars were on the road even if the parking lots of the stores on the side were still empty. She loved the look of the city, having grown up in it most of her life. She learned to drive on the wide, open curves near Tougaloo College, one of the city’s two historically black colleges. In Fondren, the artsy part of town, she and her high school boyfriend went on her first date to eat at Brent’s Drugs. At Jackson State University, the other HBCU, she fell in love with biology and decided she would share that love with other generations as a teacher. Now she taught at the same high school she had graduated from and she loved her job and her children. She had watched the city of Jackson progress and regress, d
ecay and rebound, and she loved every inch of it.

  Of course, her senior year, she thought she would be on the first plane soaring out of the state. A full scholarship to Jackson State and a summer teaching program between her junior and senior year ensured that she would not only remain for college, but that she would stay after graduation. God had jokes. Just when she thought she had everything figured out, He surprised her.

  Like Derek. Jada had never intended to fall in love with him. It had been all about the sex. Like it had been with the others. Since her freshman-year relationship ended badly with a boy who couldn’t commit if he were sewn to his girlfriend, she only entered relationships that promised to be beneficial to her financially or sexually. That meant three things to her: one, she was not interested in becoming emotionally involved, opting to see the men on a rotating basis. It also meant that she was perfectly okay with sleeping with a married man if she were attracted. Finally, it meant that she would only date white men. She entertained thoughts of sleeping with black men, but often, if they had any money, it was tied up in some plan for entrepreneurship or worse, some baby mama. White men could satisfy both her craving for the physical and the financial. Hooking up with Derek happened in a perfect storm: he was white, from a well-off family, her first married man, and he caught her when no other men were on her dating horizon.

  Jada zoomed down the interstate toward the Byram exit. The small city outside of Jackson had grown up almost overnight, much to the dismay of Jackson’s city leaders who wanted to consume Byram in its body. The town had been so rural when she was a little girl attending church. Her grandmother had moved her and her sister Regina to South Jackson when she was ten, but they had maintained membership in the town’s little country church. As she drove down quiet roads, lined on one side by a speckling of small, older houses, trailers, and the occasional new stone houses, and on the other side by fenced-in yards corralling horses and cows, a few cars joined her on their way to one of the many country churches. Jada marveled at how quickly things can change. One minute she was surrounded by the signs of city life with the stores, wide pavement, and multiple cars, and then, a few miles down the road, she was in the midst of rural life. One minute she was unattached and unconcerned about any man in her life, and then, a few weeks down the calendar, one man was all she could think about. She didn’t like it at all, but like the city leaders of Jackson, she was powerless to stop its progress.