Mississippi Noir

by Tom Franklin

  Nobody said anything, until finally a student in the back row asked, “Which one was Daisy?”

  I don’t have a Daisy Buchanan problem anymore. I have Beth, my wife, who shares my bed and my life. I have a job where every day is, if not an adventure, at least interesting. I’m not rich, far from it, but I don’t need to be. Don’t want to be. I have a family. A career. Through the books I read, I can visit any place or any time, and, to paraphrase my pal Atticus, I’m able to step into an infinite number of other people’s shoes.

  * * *

  Week nine and we’re down two more fingers. Week ten and it’s two more, making seven fingers total. Five are pinkies. One’s a ring finger. Britney is missing the middle finger on her right hand now, in addition to the pinky on her left. I’ve started pretending not to notice, because there’s no profit in calling attention to something that everyone with eyes can plainly see. We drag our chairs into a circle, as we always do when it’s time to workshop their stories, and discuss two student manuscripts. One chronicles spring break aboard a cruise ship. Most of the story depicts a beer-pong tournament. The story ends with the sentence, It was the best spring break ever!

  “Does anyone else feel that ping-pong maybe isn’t enough conflict?” asks Brian.

  “I agree,” Britney says. She lowers her voice and says to the writer, “You’re sort of wasting our time here.”

  “Now hold on,” I say. Britney is right, of course, but this isn’t the diplomatic workshop environment I’ve been fostering. I look around at my group of gauze-wearers and fight back a moment of nausea. “We should at least consider the possibility that Bruce has minimized conflict for some larger narrative purpose.”

  “No,” Bruce jumps in, “I just wrote it for fun.” He’s a business major, one of the ten-fingered. I shoot him a look, because the author isn’t supposed to talk during his own workshop. It’s a cardinal rule. “It doesn’t have any deep meaning or anything,” he continues, ignoring my glance and further undercutting my pedagogical position. “I’m not trying to be Hemingway.”

  “Well, that’s obvious,” Britney says. “I mean—” She catches my eye and stops talking. For the next ten minutes, we discuss the story’s descriptions of the ship’s stateroom, the swimming pool, the grand atrium, the food served at the buffet, the vast sea.

  In the second story, a fourteen-year-old girl living in a strict household with deeply religious parents lies to her mother about kissing a boy, and when her mother finds out, she has the girl’s favorite backyard tree cut down branch by branch. Sap spills everywhere. The story is a big hit. The word symbol gets said a lot in our discussion. It isn’t lost on me that only a handful of weeks ago, these same students refused to admit that the beer in Hemingway’s story could symbolize anything.

  Everyone has lots to say, and class nearly runs over. This is exactly the sort of student-centered learning that a teacher is supposed to dream about, but as I watch my students file out of the room, still chatting, I wonder just what it is that’s being learned.

  * * *

  What I didn’t tell my class at Penn State all those years ago, what I’ve never told anyone, is that Jessica, my college girlfriend, had been eight weeks pregnant when I left America. It was cowardly of me—I knew it then, know it now—but I was a college junior, just twenty years old, and practically a kid myself. I left her some money and refused to talk to her until it was done.

  And it really was an awfully simple operation.

  * * *

  In bed that night, I tell Beth about the growing finger tally. She only knew about the first one. Between the postpartum hormones and lack of sleep, she didn’t need anything else upsetting her.

  “Where do you think they all are?” she asks.

  “What—the fingers?” The lights are off. It’s eleven p.m. Through the baby monitor, ocean waves crash softly onto shore. “I really don’t know.” I rub the base of her neck awhile in the dark. “I want my students to develop a deeper understanding of the human condition. But not at the expense of their fingers.”

  Pillow talk is rare these days. One of us will be up with Twain before long, and most nights Beth and I race toward sleep as if the first one to get there wins a night alone in a motel with free HBO.

  “Do you remember that movie?” she says. “The one where the eccentric but devoted English professor gives his blasé students a renewed zest for life?” When we first started dating, we watched movies together all the time in theaters and on sofas.

  “Are you talking about all movies?” I ask.

  She yawns. “Exactly. It’s a cinematic conceit.”

  Beth and I first met the year I moved to Mississippi. She’s literally a sexy librarian. She said she was drawn to my tattoos and my shaved head. She liked that I didn’t look like some crusty old professor. I feigned humility and told her I had no idea what she meant.

  She’s originally from Maben and graduated from Mississippi State before going on for a master’s degree in library science at Vanderbilt. She stuck around Nashville for a few years afterward, working at Belmont University before coming home when her mother became ill. She and I had only been dating a couple of months when her mother passed, but instead of returning to her life in Nashville she decided to stick around. I’ll always be grateful to her for that. A tenure-track job in my field is hard to come by, and I can’t just pick up and move. Now she’s a reference librarian here on campus—a good job in her field—and is halfway through the six months of unpaid leave that the college granted her.

  “I need some adults-only time,” she tells me the next morning. There are dark circles under our eyes. Twain was up every hour overnight. This has been happening too often lately—I thought we were past all that. But he won’t fall asleep unless he’s wrapped in a swaddle, and then he breaks out of the swaddle and goes nuts until he’s wrapped back in it. But he hates being in it. Over and over again, all night long. I can imagine Twain years from now, a middle-aged man still breaking out of his swaddle ten times a night.

  I e-mail my student Latoya to see if she’ll come to the house on Saturday so that Beth and I can put on fresh clothes and cologne and have a date. It will be our first time out together, just the two of us, since Twain was born. Latoya is one of the last ten-fingereds in my fiction-writing class. She’s an honor student double-majoring in English and French and strikes me as especially responsible. She arrives at the house missing a thumb, eager to tell me about the new story she’s working on.

  “Sort of O’Connor-esque,” she says, looking around our living room. It’s been overrun with the baby swing, baby mat, piles of laundry we haven’t had time to put away, all the books we read to Twain even though he can’t follow along yet. “It isn’t very redemptive, though,” she says. “I hope—”

  “Sweetie,” my wife says, “what happened to your thumb?”

  Latoya glances at me, then back at Beth. “It was a dumb accident, ma’am. Totally my fault.” She doesn’t elaborate until Beth is doing a last makeup check in the bathroom.

  “You know, the other kids are stupid,” Latoya whispers to me.

  I’m holding Twain, who finished nursing before Latoya arrived, and gently patting his back. “How do you mean?” I ask.

  She raises an eyebrow as if I’m being intentionally obtuse. “Fingers are pretty necessary. But two thumbs and only one space bar?” She shrugs. “You do the math.”

  I do the math. The math tells me I’d better start thinking about deans and tenure committees, about campus police, about uprooting my family and trying to find another academic job in a recession. The math tells me to believe that Latoya’s injury is the accident she says it is, and to tell her to eat whatever’s in the fridge and that we’ll be home by nine thirty for the baby’s next feeding.

  I hand Twain over to Latoya.

  “You have spit-up on your shirt, Dr. P.,” she tells me.

  But it’s only a little spit-up, not worth the time it takes to dig through the laundry bas
ket for another shirt. For bank robbers and new parents, every second counts.

  For the next two weeks, Beth and I talk about our two hours of chips and margaritas at the Rio Mexicana as if it were the daring adventure of a lifetime. It felt like it was.

  * * *

  The class before Thanksgiving, we’re discussing Britney’s second story. Her first one, workshopped early in the semester, was about a recent college grad who leaves Mississippi and struggles to find work in New York City. The main character carries around some kind of vague guilt because she left her steady boyfriend back home, and at the end of the story, she decides to leave New York, which she finds cold and unfriendly, and returns to him. Every semester I receive one or two of these stories, always written by bright young women who are far more ambivalent about breaking free of their families’ limited expectations of them than they’d ever acknowledge. These students want to convince the class, and therefore themselves, that their white-gown, hometown endings are happy and redemptive, not realizing that their stories are actually the tragic tales of unreliable narrators. Britney’s first story concluded with the words kiss the bride.

  Her second story, turned in eleven weeks later, is set in a German concentration camp during World War II. When the Jews die, they become zombies that eat the flesh of the Nazi soldiers, who in turn become zombies that eat more Nazis, until there are no Nazis left—only a lot of zombies and a few very dazed Jews. In my five years at this college, it’s by far the most compelling story I’ve received. Her sentences dazzle. Her scenes bring her monstrous milieu to life. You can smell the flesh rotting. You can feel the hunger, the urgency of insatiable revenge. Rarely have I read horror that rang so true, and never in a student manuscript.

  “I thought it was just awful,” says Jenna, who is generally quiet and always pleasant.

  “Jenna,” I say.

  “But we’re supposed to be writing realistic fiction.” She looks at me. “Isn’t that right, Dr. P.?”

  Jenna is right. It says so on page two of the syllabus. Our mode is literary realism.

  I’m thinking about the proper response—something about knowing when to break the rules, or maybe quoting Flannery O’Connor, how writers are free to do anything they want as long as they can get away with it—when Jeremy, who’s down to eight fingers, laughs and shakes his head. “She’s earned the right, Jenna.” He’s looking at her perfect hands.

  * * *

  On the last day of the semester, we hold a class reading—always a nice, celebratory way for my students to hear a sampling of one another’s revisions. I bring doughnuts and apple juice to class. I know I should be feeling drained and bewildered because of all the missing fingers, but the truth is I’m elated, because Twain slept for five consecutive hours between one and six a.m. We think he’s finally worked out his swaddle problem.

  There’s time for each student to read two pages. Today we leave our desks in rows, and students go to the front of the room to read. I sit amongst the students in the third row, and listening to these introductory students read their own sentences, I find myself becoming misty-eyed. They’ve worked hard. They’re invested. Even Jenna, my realism cop. She stands at the front of the room holding the pages of her story with trembling hands, her eight fingers really gripping the page, her voice quavering . . . well, it isn’t great prose—she’ll never be a writer—but there are a couple of moments where surprising language and emotional intelligence meet, and everyone in the room sits up a little straighter.

  When class is nearly done, I return to the front of the room and tell everyone that I’ve enjoyed teaching them this semester, and I wish them all a happy and safe winter break. They file out of the room smiling and chatting with one another about travel plans and finals exams and end-of-semester parties. A couple of the baseball-cap guys come over to shake my hand, but our hands don’t fit together well.

  * * *

  I’ve driven past this apartment complex on the way to the dentist. Four two-story brick buildings, small windows, Soviet aesthetic. Even the holly bushes lining the foundation look utilitarian. On the stoop outside apartment 3 sit two guys with cigarettes in their fingers and beer cans at their feet. They both wear knit, button-down shirts, blue jeans, and leather shoes I wish I owned. They tilt their heads up at me as I approach the door and step between them.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Yes, sir,” one of them says.

  My torn jeans and black T-shirt, chosen to make me look youthful, only flag me as out-of-shape and underdressed. I often run my choice of outfits by Beth, but when I was leaving the house tonight, Twain was asleep in his crib and Beth had seized the opportunity to shower. She was humming to herself, some melody I didn’t recognize, and I left her alone.

  Now, I try to remember why I decided to come. Other than the portfolios I still have to grade, the semester is over. I don’t owe anybody anything. But after five years, this invitation is the first concrete bit of evidence that maybe I’ve had a lasting impact on my students. The first indication that despite our differences in age and geography and personal histories, we all expanded our sense of what it means to be a writer in the pursuit of truth and original expression.

  Or maybe this: parenting a newborn is a lonely business, and it’s nice to be invited to a party.

  I open the door, step inside, and scan the crowd. Undergrad parties haven’t changed much: too many people crammed into too small a space, a keg sitting in a barrel of ice, those oversized red plastic cups. Even the posters are the same as when I was in college—Bob Marley, Robert Plant—though the posters don’t match the music, with its electronic beats and autotuned vocals.

  A few kids eye me and turn away. Then Gina, who lives here, spots me, and her eyes widen. She shouts across the room—“Dr. P.!”—and weaves through the crowd to greet me, laying her hand on my arm. “You made it!”

  I smile. “Of course I did.”

  “What?”

  I have to lean in and talk directly into her ear. “Of course I did!” Her hair smells sweet and smoky, and I suppress a surge of jealousy toward every last person in the room.

  She takes a step back and sizes me up. “Hard to believe this is . . . you.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You look really—cool!”

  “I feel like an idiot. I like your bandanna.” It’s tie-dye, and covers her hair. She has some kind of flowery hippie shirt on.

  Her smile returns, and she grabs my hand. Hers is warm. “Get a beer and come on. A bunch of us are in the bedroom.”

  She leads me to the keg, then pulls me through the apartment, past the kitchen, and into a short hallway. Just as I’m becoming a little nervous—young woman, bedroom—she opens the door. More than a dozen people are in the room, drinking and talking. Gina announces to the room: “See? I told you he’d make it!”

  Then she’s gone again.

  “Dr. P.!” Brandon comes over, all smiles. He was one of the few kids who said almost nothing in class all semester, but here he seems relaxed and magnanimous. If I were his age, I’d want to be his friend. “We’re glad you came.” He clicks his plastic cup against mine, and the beer is cold and watery and wonderful. I haven’t had anything to drink since those two margaritas several weeks back, and the first sip of beer slides down my throat and shoots out to every part of my body.

  Gina reenters the room with three more of my students. Nearly the whole class is here now in this small bedroom. I’m touched. Wendy, not the best writer but a serious, earnest student with perfect mechanics, emerges from the hall bathroom. She totters—clearly drunk—into the bedroom behind the other students. She grins. “Hi, Dr. P.” The cup of beer is to my lips when I notice the gauze on her hand. It’s dark, blood-soaked. In her other hand she holds a large ball of tissues.

  “Wendy—” I begin, but she cuts me off.

  “It hurts,” she says, “but not as much as you want.” Another grin. “Are you going to do it tonight too?”

 
; Gina shuts the bedroom door, dampening the music, and I whirl around to face my class.

  “You’re a really good teacher, Dr. P.,” Brandon says. “You got us thinking.” The others nod. “Don’t you think it’s your turn now?”

  Gina steps over to the closet and reaches up to the top shelf. She pulls down a large black trash bag, from which she removes a stack of gauze, a roll of tape, a tube of antibiotic cream, and a branch lopper—same brand I use to prune the crape myrtles in my front yard.

  “The semester’s almost over,” she says, and smiles warmly. She returns to the closet, pushes aside some dresses and pants on hangers, and carefully drags out something heavy. It’s one of those capped glass urns you use to make sun tea. The urn is full of what looks like a streaming red ocean populated with little submarines.

  I turn and catch Britney’s dazzling blue gaze. Her blond hair is salon-perfect. She sits on the bed, legs crossed at the ankles. She’s wearing an off-the-shoulder black sweater and dark blue jeans with pink high heels. Her toenails are the same color as her shoes. Her hands rest on her lap. She has three fingers on her left hand and two on her right. “Just think of it as your final exam,” she says, smiling.

  The beer feels heavy and sour in my stomach. “You don’t understand,” I tell everyone. “I don’t need this.”

  “You mean because you once went to England? Because you have tattoos?” Britney shakes her head. “Come on, Dr. P.—you need it more than anyone.”

  “No, that isn’t—” My class is watching me, rapt. I try to put words together as beer sloshes over the edge of my cup, soaking my wrist. “It’s just . . . I have everything already.”

  A few of them are smiling the way you smile at an elderly relative who says the most darling things. Britney takes my beer cup from me and sets it gently on the bedside table.