Mississippi Noir

by Tom Franklin

  “Cissy?”

  “I’m sorry, Cousin El—”

  “We hope you’ll look after her,” Graham Lee spoke up. “I’ll send money. You won’t be put out at all.”

  “You have lost your mind.” Rayford Drew backed away and stood at the front door. The thunder was beginning to taper off, but the rainfall continued to pour at a steady pace. He seemed more interested in the weather than the foolish ideas being revealed in the room.

  “And then what?” Elnora asked. She couldn’t stop herself. She had to know if they were both as naive and hopeful as the words tumbling from the young father’s mouth.

  “We’ll come for her,” Cissy said.

  “What did you tell me just this afternoon?” Elnora needed Cissy to see reason. She couldn’t let her make the mistake of walking away from her baby. “What did you say about Graham Lee?”

  “I know what I said—”

  “Say it again.”

  The two women stared. Then Cissy blurted out, “I was wrong! We’re a family. That’s all Graham Lee ever wanted. I want it too. Hattie should have her mama and her daddy.”

  “Stupid kids,” Rayford Drew said.

  “I take care of what’s mine!” Graham Lee’s cry woke Hattie. He wasted no time taking his child and holding her. “Hello there. Daddy’s sorry. Daddy’s gonna make it better. For you and for all of us.” He fixed his dove-gray eyes on Elnora. “You’ll help, won’t you? My family . . . they don’t understand. Cissy says you’ve always been good to her. Will you help us?”

  “Why did you take the baby again?” she asked. “You scared her real bad.”

  “It was the only way she’d come to me.” He looked at his child’s mother and smiled. “You know I’d never do anything to hurt you.”

  “But tearing up the photo?”

  “The photo? I didn’t do that. My mama saw it and she . . .” He frowned. “Look, will you help us or not? We can take her, but it’ll be easier to get on our feet without her. Least for a little while.”

  “Where are you going?” Rayford Drew turned from the rain to face them.

  “You gonna tell your brother?”

  The older man shook his head.

  Graham Lee snorted. “I don’t believe you. We’re going someplace safe. That’s all you need to know.”

  XI

  Elnora had just set little Hattie down for a nap on the wrought-iron bed in the front room when Ed Jenkins stopped at her door. The storm had delayed the Illinois Central schedule so he was stranded in Grenada for a couple of days. With a baby to care for, resolving their disagreement failed to become a priority. He had left word that he was staying at his mama’s over on Poplar Street and that was just fine with her.

  His somber expression had her prepared for anything. The storm had left debris everywhere. A toddler’s natural curiosity created mysteries and surprises where Elnora had never imagined. A simple task of cleaning up the backyard had become more involved with Hattie underfoot. One little girl had made Elnora’s reflexes quicker, sharper. So, whatever Ed had for her, Elnora was certain she could handle it without a flinch.

  He took his hat off as he crossed the threshold and pulled out a chair for her at the kitchen table. After she sat down, he did the same.

  “If you’re here to say goodbye—”

  “I’m here about the flooding,” he said. “Ain’t nobody told you?”

  “There was some flooding on the east side. I heard about that. It always floods there when we have a bad storm.”

  “That wasn’t just a storm. Tupelo had a twister.”

  “A twister?” She reared back. “Anybody hurt?”

  “Quite a few,” he said. “Nobody told you?”

  “I’ve been busy with Hattie—”

  “Thank God.” He sighed. The will that had been holding him together started to crumble. His mouth trembled. “I’m glad she was found.”

  “Ed, what it is? You dancing around your words. Just out with it.”

  “Two bodies were found in the Yalobusha River. Now that the rain’s stopped, the river is starting to go back down—”

  “The bodies.” She glanced toward the room where the little girl slept. “Whose bodies?”

  “They ain’t identified them yet—”

  “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t know,” she said. “You wouldn’t tell me if it weren’t fact.”

  He reached for her hands. “It’s fact. My uncle helped pull them out.”

  “He’s sure it was Cissy and Graham Lee.”

  “Yes.”

  Elnora wanted to feel something. Her daughter was dead. Drowned in the Yalobusha River. Cissy’s baby would never get to know her mother. History would repeat itself. Life should have more to offer than the act of waiting for the next dose of trouble to arrive. Cissy and Graham Lee just wanted to go where they would be free to be a family. It was not right their dream would never be.

  “What can I do?”

  She shook her head. Hadn’t enough been done? She tried to pull free of his hand, but he refused to let go.

  “We can raise her together,” Ed said. “She’ll never have to know.”

  “I’ll know.”

  Elnora recognized the strength in his touch and the promises of family that she had never been able to fulfill for Cissy and herself. Her daughter had died never knowing the truth about their blood ties. Elnora’s breath caught at the possibility of more lies affecting her family. Hattie deserved better. Besides, Elnora knew for a fact that untruths had a way of troubling lives in unimaginable ways. She couldn’t help but think the loss of Cissy and Graham Lee were testimony to that.

  A faint murmur sounded from the front room. Ed released her hand, and she felt his steps close behind as she went to Hattie. The toddler’s embrace and watery smile filled Elnora with the firm belief that raising Hattie as blood was right, but no more lies would darken their future. Cissy always said that Elnora was good at fixing things. Elnora aimed to hold true to those words.

  MY DEAR, MY ONE TRUE LOVE

  by Lee Durkee

  Gulfport

  They have the most beautiful eyes, crazy women do, differing tints and gleams, true, but always that pinprick of wilding incandescence, the swamp gas rising. Oh, I have known crazy women with winter’s constellations in their eyes, with flying saucers, brooding lava fields, aurora borealis, and diaphanously pulsing fireflies I have chased with my kill jar across many a darkening field. To put it less romantically, I have fucked the bipolar crazy, the schizoid crazy, the posttraumatic crazy, the obsessive-compulsive crazy, the klepto crazy, the compulsive-liar crazy (especially the compulsive-lair crazy), and, on at least three separate occasions, the nymphomaniacal-multipersonality-sadistic crazy, and so on and so on (I promise); however—and this is important—it is not the madness that enchants but its symptomatic glow, that prick of purest torn-off wildly jagged piece of light I can detect now and then, never for long, usually toward dusk, like a different creature spying out from within the lover you thought you knew: this inner being furtive, crouched, wary, neither evil nor benign but uncomprehending, alien, dangerous with fear.

  When a man tells you he has known crazy women he should be able to roll up his sleeves, lower his pants, and part his hairline to show you the accompanying scars. If there are no scars, or few, or faint, then he is not a true lover of crazy women. And he cannot claim to have been lucky in avoiding such fissures because crazy women invariably attack at your weakest moments, when you are vomiting into a plant or narcotized in a recliner or submerged chemically, emotionally, or otherwise into a bathtub. And the more fragile the crazy woman, the more likely she is to employ others to pummel, stab, strangle, and plunge. Crazy women can summon willing accomplices from Parchman prison, from graveyards, Ouija boards, and tarot decks. Streetlights flicker as they walk under. Oh, I have known crazy women.

  We are all, of course, responsible for our own crazy lovers. Yes (as we’ve been lectured many times), it’s our own damn fault
. And it is. No one to blame but that morning mirror, however blood-speckled or webbed or slashed with obscene lipstick glyphs threatening to castrate you or throat-slit some foul bitch of the imagination you’ve supposedly been fucking on the side. We stare into these mirrors while touching the white seams of scars, remembering, remembering, at times even bringing the scar tissue to our tongues so as to taste that distant pain we apparently learned nothing from. And why do we refuse to learn? Why do we succumb to that lunar lure again and again? The sex, of course. Yes, sex with crazy women is a sleek, diabolical fairground ride rumored to have decapitated two teenagers just last week in Pascagoula. C’mon, we’ve all boarded that ride, haven’t we? We’ve all knowingly taken home the insane, haven’t we?—from the floating slot machines of Biloxi, from the C-scar strip bars lining our beaches? No? Well, then uncork, I say. Unless you are a small man or sleep very deeply then I highly recommend sex with crazy women because crazy-woman sex lasts forever. They embed themselves into your mind like earwigs so that decades later you will be able to savor vivid memories of crazy-woman sex, a montage of baffling rituals, sinister accoutrements, terrifying confessions, shattered furniture, and shocking cumcalls in which hitherto confined interior personalities emerge, one by one, like bats from an attic, and always, always, the unexplainable and indiscrete wounds. Oh, I have known crazy women.

  However, when I say I have known crazy women, I do not mean to say that I have always known the extent of just how crazy they were (prior to their arrests, etc.). Quite the opposite, I have a long history of underestimating the craziness of crazy women, and because of this shortcoming, let us call it, I have had, many times over, to swear them off entirely, to go cold turkey on crazy women, but it appears I command an eerie capacity for denial, and of course on some level, more mundane, I must be crazy myself. After all, no man is completely sane after his fourth crazy woman. Crazy women lay eggs into your ears, and if you’re not good at deciding whether women are crazy, or gauging how crazy they actually are, or if you’re just game about giving murkily beautiful women the benefit of the doubt, then you end up considering some strange and spooky theories on life. Creaking doors open into pink bedrooms piled high with the predatory eyes of stuffed animals. Crazy women tend to describe these haunted bedrooms to you vividly. They entice you into having sex within the confines of these supposed realities, the domed ceiling painted lasciviously with hovering goddesses and guardian angels and wild-haired prophets, and for a while the two of you live together in that space-time vacuum conceived during some childhood trauma involving an unleashed adolescent brother or a drunken stepfather or so-called uncle. Inside this hallucinatory mansion, you throw a bunch of dishes at each other or murder one of the neighborhood dogs, you explain things to cops or thank them profusely, and life goes on in this manner until someone gets led away in handcuffs or we find ourselves late at night once again shoveling away under the Mississippi stars, my dear, my one true love.

  HERO

  by Michael Farris Smith

  Magnolia

  Hero and his dog Spur stare down the tracks, mimics of one another in the summer sun. Hero’s ribs can be counted from a block away and he’s clotheless except for sneakers and cutoffs. Spur’s thin face hangs on his neck and his coat is mud-colored and matted. Both underfed, both with hollow faces, four eyes staring down the tracks anxious for God knows what.

  “Dumb-ass,” Wayne grumbles as the Ford clatters past Hero. “He’s got as much sense as a brick.” Wayne turns right at the first street past the tracks. At the third house on the left he pulls into the dirt driveway. I live in the house next door.

  Living on the tracks in Magnolia has never been that bad. I can deal with the rumbles and whistles that seem like some strange heartbeat of small-town south Mississippi. It’s living across the tracks. Only the tax assessor’s office and the mailman acknowledge us. All the business buildings have that long-moved-out-of look, with boards nailed across busted windows and spiderwebs that look like nets swinging from the corners of abandoned entrances. The large wooden houses are grand but have paint chipping so bad that after a strong wind it looks like snow has fallen across the yards. Kids steal bikes because theirs were stolen. The neighborhood is filled with abandoned cars, teenage moms, dirt lawns, and makes people say, “I bet a long time ago this used to be such a nice neighborhood,” as they ride by with their windows up and doors locked and air conditioners blowing.

  “Son of a bitch,” Wayne says as he gets out of the truck and slams the door shut. His muscles flex through the thin T-shirt he wears to work nearly every day. I get out and we stand there looking at Hero and the dog, still glaring down the railroad tracks as if the drive-in movie was on the other end. “Hero! Get the hell away from there, boy!”

  “He’s all right, Wayne. Won’t be a train until later on,” I say as I walk behind the truck on my way home.

  “I ain’t worried about no train. Wish one would hit his ass.”

  I keep walking, too tired to listen to any more of Wayne’s rumblings. I’ve suffered ten hours of it already today. I feel heavy, drained from a day in the sun. I climb the concrete steps of my house and sit down on the porch in a recliner I picked up out of somebody’s garbage one day, and watch Hero and Spur.

  Nobody remembers the last time Hero talked. He’s about eleven now, and he quit somewhere between five and six, though the date isn’t certain because Wayne and Doris either didn’t realize it or plain ignored it. There’s Wayne’s side of it, that Hero’s dumb and born that way, and Doris says little more than that except she swears one day Hero will snap out of it. And I have my own notions, listening to the crashing and tumbling that goes on in the house next to mine, the walls so thin I hear Wayne’s beer cans crush at night, and I grimace when he screams, “Goddamnit!” and Doris yells, “Wayne, stop it!” and the racket of a wrestling match follows complete with traveling furniture and flying pots.

  Over my shoulder a timer clicks and a buzz begins, and in the window behind me a blue neon hand shines with red letters that read, Darna’s Psychic Readings. The light comes on at six o’clock every evening and glows until midnight, signifying the doctor is in for the curious, confused, unoccupied minds of the city blocks surrounding us. The door opens and I know Darna’s behind me.

  “’Bout time. Where y’all been?” a slow, angry voice asks.

  “Workin’, Darna. Where else?” I say without turning around.

  “Where else my ass. You and Wayne ain’t been workin’ all this time. I’m open now so don’t sit on this porch long. I don’t want you running off business.” When she finishes she goes inside.

  “Guess you heard that,” a softer voice says.

  I turn around and there’s Haley. Her aqua tank top fits loose, race-car-red lipstick her only makeup. “Oh, hey. I didn’t know you were there.”

  “I was trying to be quiet. Darna scares me too.”

  “She doesn’t scare me. I just get tired of hearing it, that’s all. I swear to God. One day I’m outta here.”

  “Yeah, right,” Haley says. She’s Darna’s younger sister, but as different from Darna as a kitten from a bull. Her legs and arms show off a July brown and she’s skinny like me.

  “I am,” I say again. “One day.”

  “And go where and do what? Maybe you can join the circus.” She laughs and juggles imaginary bowling pins.

  “Go ahead and make fun, Haley. Just like Darna does. Never takes me serious.”

  “Stop it. You know I’m not like Darna. Just relax. You want a beer?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “You’ve got until I get back to quit pouting.” Haley goes inside and returns with Budweiser cans for each of us.

  “C’mon. Sit down,” I say, and get up to let her have the recliner. I unfold an aluminum chair that’s leaning against the wall. “You want in on the checker match?”

  “I might. Bet Hero puts it to you tonight.”

  “He’s not bad. I used to let him win but
I think it’s the other way around now. What’ve y’all been doing all day?” I ask her as she leans back in the recliner.

  “Nothin’ hardly. Darna carried me over to Hudson’s and I got some nail polish. Only ten cents a bottle. I got every color in the rainbow. See?” She holds her hands out and every fingernail is a different shade. “Wish I worked there instead of Rose’s. Bet they get better discounts.”

  I look up and Hero and Spur are making their way toward the porch. Two squirrels scamper down the oak tree by the road and like wayward lightning bolts run quick circles around Hero’s feet. Spur leaps back, but doesn’t bark. Hero bends down and puts out his hand and one of the squirrels runs up his arm and sits on his shoulder. The other plays between the two of them.

  “That is so weird,” Haley whispers.

  “A little Tarzan,” I answer. The first squirrel jumps off Hero and they scurry off. Hero and Spur resume their walk toward us. “C’mon, Hero. Haley doesn’t think I’m your checker equal.”

  Hero climbs the stairs and I grab a milk crate from the edge of the porch and place it between us. Under the crate is a box holding checkers and a board, more pink and gray than red and black. Hero folds his lanky legs Indian-style on one side of the crate and I sit in my aluminum chair on the other. Spur nestles next to Haley and she scratches the back of his neck.

  We play into the twilight. Hero smiles shyly when he wins and I see words forming in him so clearly that I feel I could reach down his throat and pull them out. Haley cheers for Hero, poking fun at my bad moves and slapping Hero on the back whenever I’m forced to crown him. It’s warm with Haley here—she laughs and flirts and I imagine this as our house, our porch.

  “I told you he was good,” she says whenever he gets me in a pinch. I laugh and tell Hero he’s just lucky.

  “Hero! Get your ass over here! Your momma’s got supper ready,” Wayne yells from next door. It’s nearly dark now. Hero scampers to his feet and he and Spur rush home, kicking up dust along the way. Haley is the next to go.