Mississippi Noir

by Tom Franklin

  But you didn’t text back, at least not right away, and soon I stopped looking at my phone like a girl, because I found Keith, staking the spot for tomorrow’s game, and we started drinking from that bottle of Aristocrat tucked under his arm like a baby doll.

  We couldn’t put up the tent till nine so we were tossing those loose tentpoles like batons, like girls swinging batons. We were swinging them like baseball bats. The ping of the fiberglass on cement, on everything.

  Everything was like a bright, spangled blur. My blood was pounding. Like I said, I wished I hadn’t started drinking right then.

  §

  At my desk, trying for concentration, I wasn’t thinking that much about the blue stick exactly, my palm touching once, twice, my stomach.

  WHERE R U, your text said.

  I texted you back, but you never replied.

  This won’t happen, I said to myself, but I wasn’t even sure what it meant.

  I knew I wouldn’t have that baby. But I wasn’t sure the way it would play out.

  Until you came calling.

  §

  Prowling the campus, Keith loud in my ear beside me, I kept talking about you. About how I’d seen you in church and you were just like the country lass nursing the baby calf who was like my grandma and all good women everywhere, and now I’d defiled you and myself in the eyes of God and all that. Except hadn’t she said it was for the girl to save us boys? I couldn’t make all the pieces fit.

  Keith would have none of it anyway, and never liked church talk. He shoved me hard and told me to stop being a pussy. Then he told me how he saw you sneak out of our room that very morning wearing my shirt like you owned me, or some such badge of domination.

  My shirt, I said, because I hadn’t realized.

  And that’s how I came to thinking I hadn’t defiled you, you had defiled yourself, your jeans off so fast our first date, and this dawn striding out of my room in my shirt, my own shirt.

  And for that, you must be taught a lesson.

  Well, that is how I thought.

  But I paid no attention to the piteous appeal,

  But I beat her more and more,

  Till all around where the poor girl lay

  Was in a bloody gore.

  I had it in my mind that I would retrieve you and we would walk once more in Bailey Woods, like we had that magic night three weeks before when you sealed your fate with me, girl.

  But I had no other plan, on account of I could barely walk and had lost Keith some time ago, left him in the shadow of Vaught-Hem knocking out parking-lot lights with his tentpole.

  That last pole he struck, it looked like something surged through him.

  When he fell onto the cement, his knees knocked together, like a cartoon. On the ground, stuttering, he was a slug-struck bird.

  So I pushed on. I couldn’t remember at first which house was yours, even though I’d been there mere hours before.

  They all had white pillars, you see.

  But I still had that tentpole, it felt like a saber.

  Show me your blue stick, I’ll raise you a saber.

  §

  It was so late. I’d fallen asleep, my arm still stuck in my phys sci textbook.

  You can’t hide, you said, standing in my doorway. And I thought it was a joke, you with the tentpole in your hand, the way you grasped it, caveman, club.

  I didn’t tell you no when you asked me to come with you. But I did not yet know what was in your heart.

  We didn’t walk far, you intent on mad circles, swinging that tentpole into trash cans, trees, whatever came in your way.

  You said, I know I’m drunk, but I wanna show you something.

  And I thought, Is this going to be it? Will this be how it goes?

  When we came under one of the streetlamps, you looked at me, your face shadowed. You said, Is that my shirt, girl?

  §

  You were more beautiful than ever that night. Your face angel-lit under all the streetlamps.

  That’s why it happened, if you want to know.

  We tramped across campus, all the sculptures and statues of important men. You didn’t seem afraid of me, despite all the noise that came from me, my mouth uncontrollable, and my arms too.

  Watching you take that errant tentpole from my hand and twirl it like a baton, like you were a twirler, and weren’t you? The way you wielded your weapons, after all. Blue stick, love’s arrow, that warm spot between your legs.

  And where did we end up anyway, roaming the campus near and far, the great bronze hands of the mentor instructing her flock in the rose garden?

  Finally landing back where we began, at the foot of Sorority Row long after midnight.

  All those white pillars, there must’ve been a hundred of them, all gleaming in the moon, and on the pond that lay there, silver and shimmery like a mirror laid flat.

  Oh God, don’t you see I had no choice?

  §

  When I took the pole from you, everything turned. But I had to, don’t you see?

  Return my sword, girly, you said, your voice gone high and strange. And you yanked it so hard, I fell back.

  You may ask me how I knew you were going to raise high that tentpole. But I never didn’t know.

  Except I do wish I could have stopped you.

  §

  It was the two things at once, you see. It was you holding the pole and you wearing the shirt.

  You could spin and flip it in ways that seemed miraculous. All while wearing my shirt, fluorescent-green and too big for you by half, dragged over your head like you owned it. Or me.

  Under the shirt, your belly, the thing inside it—well, I thought of that too.

  I know you! I said, shouting now. I know your kind! Because you’d pretended to be a country girl who never heard a word of sin, a girl who would make me—make me—behave. And be good.

  I never met a country girl, and it turned out you were from Batesville.

  My, oh, that tentpole in my hand felt like it swung itself, swinging with such a whirring sound and the terrible, suctiony thunk as it hit your pretty, perfect head.

  Oh, my girl, my girl.

  The swirl-slap of the alcohol, gallons of it, suddenly cleared away, like the seas parting and receding like the old, bright-colored movie I watched with Gran every Easter my whole life till she died last year.

  I saw it then. I saw it. Like everything else fell away and you were praying in church, by the tallest window.

  Alas, it was now too late.

  §

  This is it, I thought.

  Yet I felt no danger.

  High above your head, that pole glinted under the streetlamp, swinging it like a mighty ax, a giant in a fairy tale.

  I felt a crashing in my brain. I think I saw stars. And I was hearing something like beads shaking inside my head, like in the woods, my brother showing me how to shake the cocoon we found in the branch.

  If the caterpillar is alive, it’s heavy, you hear a thud.

  If it’s dead, it’s light, and all you hear is a rattle.

  I wonder what you heard when you shook me, frat boy. Oxford boy. My beloved.

  Did you hear our baby rattle?

  Then I picked her up by her little white hand,

  And I swung her body around.

  I took her down to the riverside

  And threw her in to drown.

  §

  Remember how you fell?

  Landing on your knees with such an awful smack, the pond like a black hole behind you, the black hole spreading in my brain. Oh, how you looked up at me, your eyes shining.

  Please don’t, you said.

  But I saw what the pole had done, your temple sunk deep as a cave and your eye bulging.

  You didn’t know it yet, but you were nearly gone.

  §

  Your face, I watched you watch me, my head spinning so.

  It was that face I knew from the twelve times in your darkened room. The face that told me you had big visi
ons of life in your head, the way you were shivering, standing above me, that same lovely way of shivering you had each of the twelve times we did it before I died.

  I don’t remember falling, but the red covered my eyes and I could see nothing.

  Someone was crying.

  §

  They say the light goes out of the eyes when you pass, but it didn’t with Gran at Baptist Memorial and so not with you, my country girl.

  I saw the shining as I carried you from Sorority Row straight to the edge of Silver Pond.

  I saw it as I dropped you in the water, and my sword too, which was nothing but a tentpole, bent upon itself.

  I saw it long after you sunk to the shallow bottom, my shirt billowing, a bright lily pad, and your body making ring after ring after ring.

  §

  I wasn’t gone yet, but you were dragging me. Down that grassy slope I went, like a sleigh ride, the leaves curling and cutting my legs.

  I grabbed at you, clawing at your ankles, nails sunk deep, but you have near a hundred pounds and a foot of monster blood and bone on me.

  My hair knotted in your hand, I looked up at you and my head kept knock-knock-knocking on the ground, the blood coming wet and soft from the open hole in my head.

  He will come with nectar on his tongue.

  I guess I always knew that shabby-hatted man would prove true one day.

  But he will send your head spinning, seal you up in silver. Swallow you whole.

  §

  You were well under.

  There was stirring briefly, glugging bubbles. Once, your head came up, your eyes glassy, arms grabbing, wanly, the surface of the water. Then your head tilting backward, disappearing.

  Finally, you stopped.

  Then I went home.

  But I rolled and I tossed upon my bed,

  And no rest could I find,

  For the flames of Hell seemed all ’round me,

  And in my eyes would shine.

  I did find my bed, my ankles and shins slimed up from the pond, and my face speckled red as Raggedy Andy.

  I showered at three, no one heard. Then back to bed, a heave and horror in me, where I commenced crying.

  Before that, I’d never even noticed Silver Pond. But the next day, and the next, Silver Pond was all I could see, from wherever I stood.

  As there was no escaping it, I sought it out.

  I even lingered at your house, hand on one of the pillars, like a wedding cake, wondering, missing you.

  §

  In the water, I sunk. I felt the thing blooming at the top of my chest, spreading down and in. The thing was the darkness of you, and what we shared.

  My lungs swimming inside me, my heart growing small and raisin-like, I thought how it came to be.

  Might I have shrunk from my fate?

  But one can’t ponder such things too long.

  §

  Her sister threw my life away

  Without a thought of doubt.

  Her sister swore I was the man

  Who led her sister out.

  I might’ve got caught anyway, but your sister sealed the deal.

  He saw the stick and then he left the house filled with rage. That’s what the Briane girl told the police, as if she’d played no part.

  They were a fiery pair, she said, her voice excited, and now their fire has swallowed them both.

  What did she know of us, girl?

  For ours was a tender thing, deep down.

  But I would not mind dying

  If I thought t’would bring me rest

  From this burning, burning, burning hell

  That keeps burning in my breast.

  They talked about how I smiled when they put the cuffs on to take me to county and that’s not true.

  But I did tell them how I pictured you up there in heaven, halo fired up, having sweet tea with my grandma.

  How she said: A good girl to save us boys, each and every one.

  §

  Here comes that grapple hook again, swinging slow for me.

  I can hide among the floating ferns and duckweed.

  I won’t leave until it has me.

  From here I can see the white pillars.

  My, how they shine.

  ___________

  1. “The Oxford Girl” is an English ballad with multiple lyrical variations dating back at least to the 1820s and possibly as far as the seventeenth century. This version comes from the John Quincy Wolf Folklore Collection at Lyon College. Return to text

  DIGITS

  by Michael Kardos

  Winston County

  The Monday after fall break, I welcome everybody back and ask if anyone went anyplace interesting. (Winston County isn’t so far from New Orleans to the southwest and the Alabama beaches to the southeast.) That’s when I notice Britney, in her usual seat, end of the second row, with a heap of gauze taped to her pinky. Or to where her pinky ought to be.

  “My family almost went to Dollywood but didn’t,” says Jason, my talker in the front row.

  “Britney?” I say.

  “Yes, sir?” she says.

  Britney is pretty in the predictable way that my students depict pretty in their short stories: blond hair, blue eyes, hell of a smile. Except nobody writes hell.

  “My God—what happened?”

  She looks around at her classmates, then back at me. “I had an accident over the weekend.” She could be explaining a rip in her knapsack. No wet eyes, no anything.

  She’s either being tough or is still in shock, so I let it go and start in on Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants.” This is a fiction-writing class, but I assign plenty of literature too, so they’ll have something to imitate besides stories about vampires. I can take or leave “Hills Like White Elephants,” probably I’ve just read it too many times, but it’s a useful story to teach setting and subtext, and I figure they ought know at least one Hemingway.

  As I explain how the conversation about beer in the story keys us in to a broader power struggle between the man and girl, I keep stealing glances at Britney. At that finger. At the absence of that finger. When class ends, I consider keeping her after, but what am I going to say? So I pack up and drive home, where my wife will be counting the seconds until she can steal a moment of peace. We have a three-month-old.

  * * *

  The rest of the week passes predictably: too little sleep, always running behind. Some laundry gets done. The baby becomes a week farther away from the moment of his birth, when he was just a squishy stranger. You can’t use a phrase like “squishy stranger” in Mississippi to describe your newborn, I’ve found. You can’t joke to your neighbors about the old dog crate in the garage alleviating your need for a babysitter. Not unless you don’t want any more casseroles.

  * * *

  The following Monday, the start of week seven of the semester, two more students walk into class missing their pinkies.

  “What the hell?” I ask, and they all look at me critically.

  “Accident,” says Jeremy, from the back row.

  “What about you?” I ask Brian, who sits front and center. His first writing assignment, in which the students described a farm from the perspective of a man whose wife had just died (but they weren’t allowed to mention the spouse or death), included a detail about the peeling paint on the barn’s walls. I knew right away he’d be one of my better writers. Specificity is everything.

  “One of those weird things,” he says.

  Outside our windows, huge pine trees with their million green needles are set against a sky as bright and blue as my son’s Fisher-Price whale bathtub. Back in New Jersey everything has stopped growing by now and the air is raw, but here the sun is finally a warm kiss instead of a branding iron, and winter is still a lifetime away.

  “Guys,” I say—because y’all sounds inauthentic coming from my lips even after five years—“are you okay? I mean, talk to me.” Half of them stare down at their desks. The other half lo
ok at me as if I’m overreacting. But I’m teaching three other classes this semester (two freshman comp, one intro-to-literature), and in all of them the number of fingers corresponds exactly to ten times the number of students. “Just do me a favor,” I tell them. “Promise me you’ll all be extra careful, okay?”

  They smile. “Sure thing, Dr. P.,” one of them says from the middle row. Baseball cap. College T-shirt. Brandon? Austin? Halfway into the semester, and I still confuse my baseball-cap wearers.

  There’s a similar look that many of them have. A way of dressing, a way of talking and moving through their days.

  My students at Winston State, I have found, are almost uniformly gentle, kind, and Christian. Many are the first in their families to attend college. Most hail from tiny, tight-knit rural communities. They are totally secure in their beliefs about God and man and would rather not question the reassuring narratives that have gotten them this far. They have little use for nuance, don’t like to consider that Atticus Finch’s stubborn and naive refusal to see anything but the goodness in his dark-hearted neighbors nearly got his children murdered. Atticus Finch, flawed? Boy, they sure don’t like to consider that.

  So I push, but not too hard. Fifteen weeks is enough to open eyes but rarely very wide. Anyway, my objective is to make them better writers, not to muck with their lives or how they make sense of it. Yet writing isn’t ever divorced from life, and how someone can become more attuned to the possibilities of literature without becoming more attuned to the world itself, I have no idea.

  On the first day of the first class I ever taught—this was at Penn State—I was fishing for a text we’d all read before, something to forge a fast literary bond. I was working toward my PhD in twentieth-century American literature at the time, and in my class sat twenty-four freshman comp students who would rather have been anywhere else.

  Most of them had been assigned The Great Gatsby in high school, and some had even read it. I confessed to them that I’d once had my own Daisy Buchanan problem back when I was an undergrad. The young woman and I had dated all sophomore year, and then I went to England for a semester abroad. When I came back to the States, she was seeing a guy on the lacrosse team. It’d wrecked me for a while, until I started to understand that Jessica had represented beauty and love and lightness to my twenty-year-old self more than she’d ever actually embodied those things. “Does that make any sense?” I asked my class of freshman comp students. “Do you see what I’m saying?”