Atlanta Noir

by Tayari Jones

  Fern, asleep in front of the TV, woke when I hit the mute button. On the phone with the 911 operator, I repeated my neighbor’s story, though by the time I reached a person I was wondering why I bothered. “I’m sure she’s off her medication,” I said. “Y’all know her. Joy Markham. You’re over here arresting her every other week. She’s probably hallucinating.”

  Fern rubbed the heels of her hands into her eyes. “Demons! Maybe she got one in a trap.” She giggled, then shouted toward the receiver in my hand, “Tell ’em to bring a straightjacket!”

  To the operator I said, “She asked me to call, so it’s possible she’s looking for a ride to the psych ward. She doesn’t usually like the police.”

  “A man!” Fern said once I’d hung up, thrilled with anything Miss Joy did. Fern was one of those slim, boobless girls who could rock a super-short haircut, big round eyes and delicate skin always dewy and flushed as if she were near tears. But Fern was not a crier. “Maybe he’ll knock her in the head and make her sane.”

  I’d felt slightly less freaked out by Miss Joy ever since Fern moved in. She made monitoring the whole crazy situation next door a little more like entertainment. I peered out through the tiniest crack I could make in the blind. At first I didn’t see her anywhere and expected her warped, haggard face to pop into the window. Ten minutes later when I looked again, I thought I spotted her trudging up her own driveway in her usual flatfooted waddle, head down, as if only returning from her day’s wanderings.

  “I think she went home. Guess he wasn’t too scary.”

  * * *

  On certain days I loved my neighborhood, only a few miles from downtown but practically in a forest. Every yard had trees of some sort, dogwoods and crepe myrtle, the backyards laced together over their fences in towering mature oak, sweetgum, maple, pine, made denser with an overgrowth of honeysuckle and English ivy. After dark we’d be serenaded by choruses of owls; by day we might see wild turkeys or deer in threes or fours just trotting by. My house had a screened porch that looked out on the dense green of the backyard, where I liked to sip coffee in the morning while huge woodpeckers swooped like pterodactyls from trunk to trunk and quick, shy forest hawks darted through the understory, whipping up a chitter of squirrels. I could walk to East Atlanta Village, a faintly divey bohemian punk-hipster crossroad with good bars and coffee shops and burger joints, like the one that now employed me, even a crack-in-the-wall bookstore. For some reason, perhaps the smallness of the houses, or the perception of crime, the property values had never taken off the way they had in nearby neighborhoods like Ormewood Park or Kirkwood, which was how I could afford to buy there in the first place.

  Of course that was before Dekalb County shut down five elementary schools at once and I lost my job teaching third grade, started cobbling together temp jobs and then waiting tables just to pay the mortgage and utilities. Fern saved me, frankly, by moving in, paying half. I hated the idea of a roommate, and Fern in particular was a little rough for my tastes, turning my lovely screened porch into an ashtray for two packs a day, before I even got around to considering how she made a living, which was, no kidding, as a lingerie model. And not the Victoria’s Secret kind—I mean Naughty Girls on Cheshire Bridge Road, where her usual shift started at eleven a.m. Who is that guy, exactly, who needs to jerk off to lingerie on his lunch hour? You’d think having the body of a late-blooming fourteen-year-old might prove an impediment to that line of work. But no, quite the niche market.

  We’d been friends as kids, that way-back kind of friendship that sinks in deep enough to shock you when you grow up and find out how little you have in common. But Fern had good qualities: she was impossible to irritate, and in a related way, since I found it hard to be in a bad mood around someone I couldn’t irritate, she had a talent for reminding me to have fun sometimes. So the whole roommate adventure had been less bad, so far, than expected. I’d warned her in advance about Miss Joy—the reason I couldn’t sell my house, the reason I was stuck here forever—kind of hoping to scare her off even though I needed her. But my stories only got her more interested.

  At first, Joy Markham had been only the middle-aged woman next door whose name I didn’t know, who, in rare sightings, would not return a wave or a greeting. Head down, scowling, she shuffled up the street to a bus stop; sometime later, hours or days, she shuffled back home. I saw her so rarely that I often wondered if she’d gone away and left the place empty. The first sign of something amiss was the radio. It seemed to play at top volume in an open window facing my house, and it would play for sixteen to twenty hours straight, then go silent for six to ten hours, then start up again. Not wanting trouble, I said nothing, did nothing; the spells always ended after a couple weeks. Their regularity led me to assume she must be a drug addict, the noise related to her high. Various guys went in and out at these times, drug-addict pals, or maybe, I thought, my hydrant-shaped, middle-aged neighbor was a crack whore?

  Then, in the silent hours past midnight, she would come outside and make gruff barking sounds, louder than seemed human. The first time I connected that sound with a shadowy human form, I thought it must be a man wandering about under my bedroom window. Her vocalizations were accompanied by a vicious metallic banging that for a long time I couldn’t place, until I figured out she was slamming her wrought-iron security door with great force against its frame.

  This cacophony, I later decided, could only be meant to scare away the demons.

  Her yelling shifted into daylight hours, acquiring sounds like words, sometimes a cracked tune like singing, a preacherly gospel cadence. Who was she yelling at? Whoever it was, she was furious, calling out sin. If you weren’t accustomed to finding the language in it, it called to mind the recordings played at haunted houses: the pitch-shifting caterwaul of many voices, all monstrous. She took a great interest in raking her yard, and then she often moved into my sight line from a window, so that I could observe her twitching as if being bombarded by small birds, hollering back at voices only she could hear. Her attire on a good day was a crimson velvet housecoat and mule slippers; on a bad, it was a filmy nightgown, or a robe hanging open over bra and panties, or the gold-lamé halter she generally reserved for catching a bus—her going-out clothes—and accessorized with a waist-length orange wig falling precariously askew.

  Raking and hollering, she never picked up a leaf, only moved them into patterns: demon traps, I called them. She tied bedsheets onto the low branches of her trees, covered her windows in tinfoil. Her tone was generally angry, her words too garbled to decipher, but on certain days she was plainly afraid. Once she raked for nearly an hour while wearing a hooded sweatshirt backward, the hood up over her face. Often she went to catch a bus, wearing the halter if not three outfits and two different shoes; she’d return a day later pushing a grocery cart stolen from the Kroger and filled with all the porch decorations and mail she had collected along her route—thankfully, she seemed to prefer ransacking houses on streets other than her own. Trudging past my house to the corner bus stop, she kept herself quiet and orderly, but still, some drivers learned to not stop for her, and then we’d all hear about it, her howls of fury carrying for blocks.

  These spells, as regular as the radio, tended to conclude with the arrival of a cop or two, then many cops, then a dramatic screaming arrest. We in the neighborhood rarely knew where she was taken or why, the hospital or jail, for treatment or punishment, as she was prone to all manner of petty crime. Once or twice she’d been gone for months, but it was usually only weeks or, precisely, seventy-two hours: the time span of the psychiatric hold a neighbor could put into effect by taking an entire day to swear an affidavit under oath at the courthouse.

  I had called the cops once, and social services many times, and other neighbors must have done the same. We didn’t really confer. When she was bad, we all hid indoors, let her scream alone. In its more verbal phases, her shouting seemed directed at those of us who had called the cops, who were, apparently, trying to steal h
er house. “You got ten days to get out of this neighborhood!” she would screech at no one in particular. Lucky for me, she most often ignored the neighbors she shared a property line with and aimed for more distant offenders. “I know what you done! You run a whorehouse! You have sex with dogs!” On some days, she owned all our houses. We were all squatters on her property. “Call the cops on me!” she would snarl. “My house!” When particular neighbors incurred her wrath—like the elderly shut-ins across the street—she draped a heavy black blanket over their mailbox. Poor Mr. Norris, who hadn’t been seen outdoors in three years, would hobble on a cane down his driveway to remove it and return it to her yard.

  “Well, of course,” Fern said. “That mailbox was talking to her. The blanket keeps it quiet.”

  Usually Miss Joy ignored Fern as she did me. Once, sitting on her front step as Fern arrived home, she had called over asking for a light for her cigarette, pleasant enough until Fern claimed she had no matches, no lighter, and so sorry, no stove either.

  “Right,” Fern said to me, “like I’m giving the crazy lady fire.”

  After her next arrest, which she seemed to blame on us, she left us gifts. Fern and I watched her place the first package in the mailbox, then spent half a day prodding each other like frightened children to go look. Finally we went together, slinking up quick with gloves and a bag to scoop it into—good thinking, since at first glance what sat where our mail should appeared to be a petrified hunk of vomit. Back in the house, where we could deposit it on the washing machine and gingerly investigate, we determined it to be a piece of fried chicken from the Kroger deli.

  “She thinks we look hungry?” Fern said.

  “Well, you told her we don’t have a stove.”

  The next day, she left a straw purse stuffed with a damp washcloth, a plaid shirt, and a cigarette butt. “That’s because you wouldn’t give her fire,” I told Fern.

  Lately she’d been working on a neighborhood art installation, composed of all the junk in her house. Its key components were moldy shoes, besides other people’s once-cute porch decorations and their years-old stolen mail. She created meaningful-looking arrangements on certain lawns. Her yard equipment—two rakes and a shovel—she arranged in a line end to end, curb to curb, across the street in front of her house, redoing her work often since kindly joggers and bikers and dog-walkers who passed by were always pausing, perplexed, to move it out of the road.

  And like I said, Miss Joy really only became entertaining to me once I had Fern to share her with. On my own, she was worrying. Harmless, I called her, a so-far-accurate term, but hers was such an angry affliction, always expanding itself into new and unpredictable activities. Seemingly superstitious about property lines, she would not enter other yards, but she didn’t mind throwing trash into them, mine included, and I had no faith that on some night a demon wouldn’t tell her she’d best set a house or two on fire.

  On top of my general fear of What next? I was stuck, slowly being sucked into debt, foreclosure on the horizon. I needed a real job and seemed out of options in Atlanta. My brother, who had all kinds of connections in Philly, was forever sending me leads on jobs there, one so good I applied and had been called for an interview. But I did the math, and I simply couldn’t afford to move when I couldn’t sell my house. As long as Miss Joy lived next door, I could assume I’d never be able to. I couldn’t even rent it, since rentals were not in demand in East Atlanta, and if someone came by chance to look at it, Miss Joy was bound to be out there making haunted house sounds or broadcasting accusations of inappropriate relations with house pets.

  Every time seven cop cars converged on her house and carried her away screaming, I would think, Quick, now put the house on the market. But there was so much involved in selling a house, and no telling when she’d return.

  * * *

  Fern and I liked a bar in the Village called Mary’s, good karaoke every Tuesday. “Lesbians love me,” Fern liked to say, though it was pretty much all gay men in there. She once asked me to get up and sing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” with her as a duet—which happened, because I was super drunk. I didn’t remember it and hoped no one else did either. Fern’s usual was “Jolene.”

  “If we’re going out, you need to dress to impress,” she said, while pulling the world’s tiniest, trashiest dresses out of her closet—formerly my closet, of my spare bedroom, cleaned out for her with some difficulty—throwing them at me.

  “Mary’s is not out,” I argued. “There’s not a straight man in the place.”

  Fern opined otherwise, which is how we came to be perched on barstools wearing a couple of sausage casings, hers silver and mine gold. Many very hot, shiny men told us we were hot. Four drinks in, I was sobbing into my hands, because I hated waiting tables with a passion, because I was going to lose my house. Why had I bought a house in the first place? I was too young to own property. I’d gotten some inheritance money when my dad passed and thought it would be the sort of smart investment he’d approve of. Ha. I should have waited for a husband. I hadn’t known this before, but men were freaked out by a woman who owned a house.

  “I bet I can get you in at Naughty Girls,” Fern said. Taking my gasp of dismay for doubt, she added, “No worries about your weight! A lot of guys go for a little extra, and you’ve got some seriously excellent tits, sister.” I remained half-convinced the place was a strip club, though she insisted it was borderline legit, a deadly dull little room in which, by modeling, she helped awkward gentlemen pick out extremely expensive underwear for their girlfriends.

  “I’m a teacher!” I declared. “I teach children. We learn things like . . . how to be good citizens.” This still felt somehow true, though I hadn’t been a teacher for a while and my future prospects in the city were zero. “I’m a role model!” I downed the rest of my cosmo. For some reason I was grinning like a deranged clown, sole weapon in my battle against hysteria.

  Fern shook her head. “Didn’t you always hate it, though? Embrace your freedom to be badass!” She leaned her forehead against mine. “You know, I’m considering giving up some inhibitions for Lent. I think you should too.”

  Me and Fern, we knew how to make a scene at Mary’s. She especially enjoyed giving the cold shoulder to women trying to buy her drinks while she tended to me, petting me in that way she did only in public, for effect. Lesbians didn’t register my existence, no matter what dress I wore. Fern had a line forming.

  To be clear, I wasn’t fully one of them, wanting her—my imagination lacked that limberness—but her attention was seductive. In moments like now I craved her energy, willed it to cross over through our skulls so I could yell, Fuck it all! and leap onto the stage, belt out some angry solo—no “Jolene” for me. Maybe “Cherry Bomb.”

  We ran out of money and left before midnight. It wasn’t drunk driving, Fern contended, if it was less than a mile, but as I slowed to turn into the driveway, a dark shape appeared at the left fender, a flash of gold in the headlights. Fern screamed.

  “Shit, you almost hit her!”

  “What? Who?”

  “I don’t know.” She peered behind us. “I think it’s Miss Joy.”

  As we parked and got out of the car under the security lights, I could see her lumpy shape pacing in the dark at the end of the drive. I was near enough to sober to feel relief that she was upright and moving. “The man!” she moaned. “He’s going to kill me! He’s over there, the murderer! Help me! Please help!”

  It was the same voice as the last such incident a few weeks before, and again hardly sounded like her, with its coherent words and higher pitch—some shifted phase of her illness, I presumed. Maybe an alternate personality. Over the years there had been a couple times she’d approached me with an almost bubbly friendliness, an in-her-right-mindness that was so extreme it seemed like a joke. “Hey there, honey,” she’d greeted from her porch one day, waving. “I’m Joy! How are you doing? It’s good to see you! I worry about you!”

  “Okay, we
’ll get some help,” I called out to her now, locking the car and rushing up the walk. Fern trailed behind, peering out toward the mailbox where Miss Joy sobbed, then over to the dark house next door.

  I was picking up the phone as she came in behind me. “Don’t call!” she hissed. “She didn’t say police. She wants our help. So let’s go. I want to see that hellhole.”

  “No. You can’t be serious.”

  Once, after a dozen cops had finally coaxed Miss Joy out from behind her ironwork door, Fern had pressed one for the scoop. With me they were never very forthcoming with the charges, but Fern had a knack for men with a little authority, and this one mentioned bad checks as a possibility, then added: “Y’all don’t even want to know what’s in that house.”

  He was right. I didn’t.

  “Besides,” Fern said now, “I want to try out my new friend.” From her silver handbag, the same she’d hung from the back of her barstool at Mary’s, she extracted an enormous black-barreled revolver, a Colt Python—not that I knew guns, but I knew this one. “Can you believe it? The gun from Heathers!” It was our favorite childhood movie.

  “Shit, Fern!” For a few weeks she’d been arguing we needed a gun, for the crime and all, saying that she could buy one from a client. But really she was less concerned with self-defense than with the accessory for her image. A gun offered the perfect hilarious ending to most of her workplace stories, which were rarely about being menaced—a bouncer kept the creeps in line—and more about whiny clients who complained without tipping enough, or her boss who wouldn’t give her prime hours or keep the bathroom clean. Can’t you picture it? Wouldn’t he just piss his pants? I’d told her I wasn’t sure I wanted a gun in the house, end of that discussion.

  “Relax,” she said, “it’s not loaded. I still have to get bullets, if you’ll let me. And learn how to shoot, I guess.” She struck a pose, aiming at the TV, the vase of daylilies on the dining table. Dropping it into her coat pocket, she went to the kitchen for the two longest knives in the block, one of which she handed to me. From the front closet, she pulled out the tool box. “Pocket the knife and hold this,” she instructed, giving me the hammer, while she hefted a pipe wrench. “Use the claw end. Go for his eyes.”