Mississippi Noir

by Tom Franklin

  She didn’t know how long she stayed like that. It seemed like hours, days, but it didn’t matter. As long as she lay on Nana’s shoulder and felt her warm hand, she knew she was alive.

  But why was God punishing her? Why was God taking away all the people whom Jada loved? She was a good person; she loved her family; she worked hard for her students; she went to church. What more did God want from her? Didn’t she deserve to be happy and loved? In this storm, she needed to be like those mothers in the tornadoes who lay atop their most precious ones and save them. Couldn’t she save her world from total destruction? Wasn’t she doing it now, lying atop her Nana to keep her from flying away?

  But eventually Regina made her get up. Jada walked numbly over to the couch in the bedroom and lay down. She must have fallen asleep, because when she opened her eyes, it was dark outside and she knew what she had to do. Like a trickle of sunshine pushing a small space through a barrier of clouds, a light dawned on her. She did not have to be unhappy. She could fix this.

  With a kiss on her grandmother’s forehead and a quick prayer for her to keep living, Jada walked out of the house without saying a word to her sister or the nurse. She got in her car and drove the familiar trek up I-55 to Madison. She was going to Derek’s house to do what had to be done.

  * * *

  This time, she did not park in the driveway next door. Instead, she parked on the street two houses down from Derek’s. She knew on Wednesday nights he played tennis with some friends so he wouldn’t be home. It would just be Jada and his wife. It would be quick and easy. Jada would ring the doorbell, she would come to the door and let Jada in after Jada told her she had important information about Derek. She would be shocked, but Jada would do it. She would stop the loss of everything dear to her.

  It was spring and the sun was going down later and slower, it seemed. A faint glow painted the evening. Cars whirred by in the distance, but otherwise the neighborhood was oddly quiet, safely unaware of the storm of sounds gathering inside of Jada. She heard sobs and wails and pleas inside her head. She rang the doorbell, and for a brief moment the melody obscured the cries. But only for a brief moment. When she opened the door, smiling hospitably, they returned.

  “You need to know something, Mrs. Ross.” She spoke the woman’s name like a curse word. “Derek and I have been fucking for the past year.”

  Horror and disbelief wrestled across the woman’s puffy, glowing face. Jada had to admit that pregnancy was agreeing with her; she looked less ordinary. But her new mom’s glow did not dissuade Jada. Instead, it emboldened her. This woman and her baby were responsible for blowing down the walls of her happiness. That had to end. Tonight.

  Quickly, she pulled her pistol from her purse. It seemed light as a pencil. Maybe because she couldn’t feel anything on her person. She didn’t even feel the cool release of the trigger. She may not have known she had actually shot the woman if Jada hadn’t heard the loud pop and then another pop. Then a strange thing happened. All of her senses came back and she felt the gun, the warm mugginess of the night air against her back, and the hot splattering of blood across her bare arms and chest. She fell to the ground. Jada looked around, but no one was outside so she pushed the woman’s lifeless body farther into the foyer, out of immediate sight. Then she turned and walked out of the house, pulling the door closed with her now-crimson hands. She rubbed Nana’s necklace like a good luck stone.

  But she had just made her own luck. She had eliminated the source of her problems. There was no baby to keep Derek tied to his wife. They could be together, and she didn’t have to worry about losing him. It never occurred to her, even as she drove back to Nana’s with blood covering her steering wheel and the pearly white of her necklace, that she had just lost herself.

  MOST THINGS HAVEN’T WORKED OUT

  by William Boyle

  Holly Springs

  Back when I was fifteen there wasn’t much Mississippi outside Holly Springs. I’d never hopped a train or even met someone from the coast. I’d been to a football game in Oxford with Phael once and to a doctor in Olive Branch when a roach got stuck in my ear. I stayed with Grandma Oliver because my mom was dead and so was my dad, though I never knew him. He was from Memphis and that was where he died. Shot by cops while robbing a liquor store. That was the story anyway. My mom smoked too much and got lung cancer and it spread everywhere and she went fast.

  Grandma Oliver was taller than me and carried around an oxygen tank and smoked Pyramids and sometimes wore a Harley-Davidson bandanna across her forehead. I didn’t get along great with her or her husband, who wasn’t my real grandfather. His name was Jefferson, and he was Grandma Oliver’s third husband. Her first one had died of a heart attack when he was thirty-two. Her second one, my real grandfather, had killed himself in the bathroom with a razor. You could still see darkness on the tiles around the tub. All the rooms at Grandma Oliver’s had something like that. If it wasn’t blood, it was a ghost feeling. The house was painted traffic-cone orange and it glowed like an electric burner. Kids made fun of me for that orange. When I wasn’t in school, and even on some days when I was supposed to be in school, I spent all my time at the library. In the summer, I was at the library all day. I read books and watched a lot of movies. They had a little booth with a TV and headphones and you could watch a movie if no one was waiting. No one was ever waiting. Most people only came for the computers.

  One day this lady came in and put on a presentation. It was right as I was getting to the naked part of The Terminator. The lady who did the presentation was called Miss Mary. She had this red curly hair and these freckles. She was maybe twenty-three or twenty-four. Her presentation was on birds. I saw it was going on out of the corner of my eye at first, but then I went over. Only two other kids were there for the presentation, and they were much younger than me. Miss Mary stopped what she was doing and smiled at me. “Welcome,” she said. “What’s your name?”

  I told her it was Jalen.

  “Jalen, you like birds?”

  “I guess. Crows. Hummingbirds too. I’ve been to that Hummingbird Festival.”

  “That’s where I work now, the place that holds the festival. The Audubon Center. I just moved here from New York.”

  I nodded and sat down on the floor and crossed my legs. I’d seen New York in movies. I wanted to live there. I wasn’t thinking that New York was a big state. I was just thinking that she was from the city and that she rode in taxis and ate hot dogs on the street with a napkin balanced on her palm and that she took elevators up to the tops of tall buildings. I wanted to ask her why Mississippi, but she started showing us pictures of other birds. She leaned over, and I could see down her shirt. All that roundness. I wanted to kiss her freckles.

  When she was done with the presentation and packing up, I asked her if I could help and she let me carry her box of binders out to the parking lot. Her car was yellow, the windshield webby with shatter. She had a red scrunchie on the rearview mirror and Obama bumper stickers. She thanked me for carrying the box and put it in the trunk. “It was nice meeting you,” she said. “Someday you should come out to Audubon and I’ll show you around. When the festival’s not going on out there, it’s so peaceful. We can watch the hummingbirds in the garden behind the Davis House. And I’ll take you out on the Gator.”

  “Can we do that tomorrow?” I asked.

  She didn’t even hesitate. “Absolutely,” she said. I was so glad to know that she’d meant it, that she hadn’t just been saying it. I was so used to people just saying things.

  “What time should I come there?”

  “How’s ten sound?”

  I nodded. “Good. You miss New York?”

  “I like it here.”

  “Will you stay?”

  “I hope so.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, and I turned back to the library.

  Miss Mary offered me a ride, but I told her I lived right up the block even though I lived almost two miles down Route 7 and ha
d to walk all the way on the shoulder and would’ve killed for a ride. I just didn’t want her to see Grandma Oliver’s house. And Jefferson was always sitting out on the porch with a cooler of Bud and some scratch-offs. I didn’t want her to see that either.

  * * *

  Holly Springs was full of sirens. Phael’s great-uncle had been shot in his car the week before right off the square downtown and the cops seemed to be running around even more than usual. I walked home thinking about Miss Mary. I wondered where she stayed. I wondered what kind of food she ate. I pictured her reading at night in gym shorts with no top on.

  Grandma Oliver was on me right when I walked in the door. She wanted me to mow the lawn. I wanted to slam her head through the kitchen window. The way she spoke to me. Like I was a dumb slobbering dog. She didn’t even know me. Didn’t know I liked books and movies. I didn’t say anything. Just took off my shirt and went out and pushed the mower around for two hours. I drank from the spigot near the old garden shed and cars honked as they passed on the road, not because they knew us, but because the orange of the house made people want to honk at it. I was sick of horns.

  I ate a bologna sandwich with pickles when I was done and then went into my room and read a library copy of Books of Blood until I could feel my eyes getting weaker. I couldn’t wait to be out at Audubon with Miss Mary. I wanted sleep to pass without actually having to sleep. I wanted the future.

  * * *

  The walk to Audubon was twice as long as the walk to the library. I had to go way out on 7 past Rust College and then make a left on 311. It was so hot the sweat had thickened all over me. I was wearing my red basketball shorts and a tank top, but I couldn’t even feel the air on my skin. My socks squished in my sneakers. Across from Rust was an abandoned building. I stopped to drink a Great Value citrus soda I’d brought with me. I wiped my head with the back of my hand. A cop buzzed by with his windows open and gave me a long look from behind his dickhead sunglasses. I didn’t wave. I knew that waving was the wrong thing. Phael taught me that. He told me they were just waiting for an excuse to shoot me.

  The second part of the walk was the worst because the shoulder shriveled up on 311. Cars and trucks swerved out over the double-yellows to avoid me. Sweat stung my eyes. I’d finished my soda and hadn’t brought any water. My lips stuck to my teeth.

  When I finally made it to Audubon, it was almost eleven and Miss Mary was waiting outside the visitor’s center for me. “You walk all this way?” she said.

  I nodded.

  “You should’ve told me you needed a ride. Come in and have some water.”

  She brought me inside and put ice in a plastic cup from Corky’s and filled it to the edge with tap water. I took it and drank half in one long slurp. Some of the water spilled out of the side of my mouth and down the front of my shirt. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “You didn’t bring any water?”

  “Just a soda.”

  “Let’s go out on the back porch,” she said. “You rest awhile.”

  The back porch was screened in. We sat in reclining chairs at a long oak table with paint splashes on it. Eight feeders hung from the eaves of the roof right outside the screen. Hummingbirds skittered in to drink sugar water. Trees spread out in their greenness beyond the feeders. I drank more water and took a few deep breaths.

  “Are you okay?” Miss Mary asked.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re here. I’ll give you a ride home later, don’t worry.” Then she told me some things about hummingbirds, about their little hearts, about how fast their wings beat, about mixing the sugar and water and boiling it and letting it cool before putting it in the feeders.

  “Beautiful, aren’t they?” Miss Mary said.

  I wanted to know how high they went. I wanted to know if no one put their feeders out what would happen. I wanted to know how they knew to come here to the festival. I wanted to put my hand on Miss Mary’s leg. I just sat there and finished my water.

  “Were you born in Holly Springs?” Miss Mary asked.

  I said yes.

  “I told you I’m from New York. People think New York and they think the city. But it’s a huge state. I’m from the Hudson Valley. Everyone asks me if I have culture shock. I don’t think so. I like it here.”

  “You got family back there?”

  “My family’s gone.”

  “My mom and dad are dead. I live with my grandma.”

  “Sweetie, I’m sorry.”

  “Your family dead?”

  She paused and looked out at the fluttering hummingbirds. “My dad is. My mom’s just gone.”

  “Is anyone else here today?” I asked.

  “Three other people work here. Landry is the director. He’s at a conference in Jackson. Willa is the native plant specialist, but she took the day off for a horse thing in Memphis. And then there’s Jimmy, the groundskeeper-slash-maintenance guy. I think he’s got jury duty.” She stood up. “You bring lunch? I have a peanut butter and banana sandwich. We can split it.”

  “Ma’am, that’s okay.”

  “You must be hungry.” She disappeared into the kitchen and came back out with half a sandwich wrapped in a paper towel.

  I unfolded the paper towel and looked at it. The crust on the bread was thick and the bread was flecked with seeds. The peanut butter was crunchy-looking. I was used to Great Value white bread and peanut butter, the same peanut butter Grandma Oliver put in the mousetraps. I took a bite.

  Miss Mary started telling me other things about herself. She said she hadn’t traveled much, but she’d spent some time in Florida. She had a distant cousin in Fort Myers who owned a bar. She said she was reading the Game of Thrones books and she wanted to go to France and she drove to Oxford last week to get milk at Brown’s Dairy and had gotten interested in birds after college.

  I didn’t really have a life to tell her about. I wanted to make things up but that seemed like the wrong thing to do. I told her I liked whatever for music. I told her I watched movies at the library and that I liked horror books, but I didn’t remember the names of the ones I’d read. I told her I went to Oxford once for a football game against LSU and I couldn’t ever forget the people with chandeliers up in their tailgate tents.

  She laughed and said, “Let’s go out on the Gator.”

  * * *

  We drove out to the far parts of the property on the Gator, and Miss Mary showed me an old sharecropper house where vultures tucked themselves into the darkness behind the broken windows. Across from that, down a scrubby dirt trail, was a slave cemetery that was really just a small patch of markers and mounds. The markers were thin stone slabs without any writing. Brightness settled on the graves from gaps in the nearby stand of trees. “It always makes me sad to think of what they must’ve gone through,” Miss Mary said, patting me on the shoulder.

  Next she took me to Sharecropper’s Pond, where a beaver was trying to build a dam with a tree he’d gnawed down. She said they had a motion-detection camera set up on the other side of the pond to catch the beaver and the cranes and whatever else in action. One of her favorite things was to watch the footage when she came to work in the morning. “I didn’t have anything like this in New York,” she said.

  “I went fishing with Phael once,” I said.

  “Who’s Phael?”

  “He’s my friend. He’s afraid of eating poison by mistake.”

  “Like getting poisoned?”

  “Like eating something that no one knows is poisoned. We didn’t eat any of the fish we caught. We just left them with the hooks in their mouths on a picnic table.”

  “That’s sad.”

  “I didn’t hate those fish though. I liked them. I felt sorry about it.”

  Miss Mary was wearing a droopy backpack and she took out a canteen of water and a pair of binoculars. She shared the water with me; she really didn’t mind my lips on the canteen. I liked having my mouth where her mouth had been. Sh
e showed me how to focus the binoculars and I looked up at the sky and the tops of trees. I saw some little birds she said were chimney swifts.

  We sat down on the grass and passed the canteen back and forth.

  When we were done, she screwed the cap back on and we took the Gator over to a blind where a telescope was set up. A boom box was chained to the wall and Miss Mary turned on the radio to a Memphis station.

  I looked through the telescope and I saw everything close up through the glass. Birds and mud and flowers and bushes and dry things and the ground where the sun had baked it hard. I aimed the telescope at the sky and focused in on the brightness.

  Probably about forty minutes passed, and I was still looking through the telescope. Miss Mary wasn’t getting sick of it. She wasn’t complaining. She was just sitting there, looking peaceful. Eventually I stepped away from the telescope and sat next to her. “I got lost looking,” I said.

  “You don’t have to apologize,” she said. “I was just taking in the day. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? I came from some bad things back in New York. I’m trying to be positive. I’ve been doing yoga. I’ve been trying not to let negative energy influence me.”

  “I wish I had a telescope or a pair of binoculars,” I said. “I’d look at things all day.”

  Miss Mary opened up her backpack and took out the pair of binoculars she’d used at the pond. “Here. Take these.”

  “Ma’am, I couldn’t.”

  “Take them. I got them cheap. I have another pair. Plus, we have about twenty pairs back at the visitor’s center for camp.”

  I took the binoculars and hung them around my neck and then glassed the treeline beyond the trail we were near. “I see a bird with a red head,” I said.

  “That’s a woodpecker.”

  I examined the woodpecker closely, the way he kissed the bark. “Why do you like me?” I asked. “I mean, why do you like hanging out with me?”

  Miss Mary didn’t look startled or anything. “I guess I see something in you. Something I recognize. Some loneliness. I think we’re kindred spirits. I believe in that kind of thing, I do. Like maybe you were my son in another life. Like maybe I sang you to sleep.”