Atlanta Noir

by Tayari Jones

  “Well, don’t be scared. I’ll be gentle. At first.” Then he chuckled and sat on the side of the bed, began unbuttoning his shirt, and motioned for me to do the same. When I couldn’t convince my body to move, he stood up, caught me around the waist, and tossed me playfully onto the bed. “You want me to undress you?”

  Thrashing like a bug on its back, I struggled up off the soft mattress. I reached for my purse on the nightstand, removing the pretty picture and holding it up to his puzzled face.

  “Who’s that?” he asked.

  “My mother, Regina Owens.”

  He frowned. “Is that supposed to ring a bell?” He took another look, muttering her name slowly like the syllables tasted good in his mouth.

  “She lived over by Washington High? She said you took her to the prom.”

  Now his face changed from curious to suspicious. “Is this some kind of hustle? You and Angie running some kind of con?”

  “No, it’s not like that.”

  “Well, what’s it like? Do we have to stroll down memory lane before you give me what I paid for? See, this is why I don’t like girls who work without a pimp. No one to complain to when service is bad.”

  “I’m not a ho,” I said.

  “You’re one today.” Gracefully for a man so large, he was suddenly on his feet and standing between me and the door. His cologne smelled like matches. “Now get out of those clothes and give me what I paid for.”

  “You’re my father,” I said in a rush, like it was a magic password. And it worked. He sat back on the bed.

  “Get the hell out of here. Show me that picture again.”

  I gave him the pretty one.

  “What did you say her name was again?”

  “Regina.”

  “Oh yeah,” he said, absently scratching his hairy chest. “I knew her back before I was saved. Back when I was still living a life of sin. But we called her Caramel.”

  I shook my head. “You got her mixed up with somebody else. My mother was in high school when she knew you. She wanted to go to Spelman College.”

  He looked at the picture again and barked out a laugh. “That’s Caramel all right. She was mine for just a little while, that’s why I can’t hardly remember. How’s she doing these days?”

  Now was the time to hand him the second picture, yet I hesitated. When I’d taken the photo, Regina asked me to delete it, to wait until she could fix herself up, though I knew that she would never be fixed. She had tried to cover her face with her hands, which were dotted with sores, but she was too slow.

  My fingers on the photo hesitated. I took in the reverend, fatted like a calf and prosperous as Abraham. I couldn’t stand the idea of him seeing her ashen, slack-faced, and toothless, all the while mumbling her name. Regina’s ruined face was her own private business. I zipped the purse shut on my mother’s suffering.

  “She passed,” I told him.

  “Did she find the Lord before she went?”

  “She found the needle.”

  He looked at the crystal clock beside the bed. “Look, young lady. I’m not your daddy.” He lay back on a stack of six or seven lacy pillows. “I never dipped in the kitty. Not even to break them in; I let Branford take care of all of that.” He smiled at the memory.

  I plucked the pretty picture from his hand and slipped it into my jeans pocket. I thought about what Angie had said about leaving things alone and I figured that maybe she was right—but it was too late now. My sad story had just gotten sadder.

  “Come on, sweetheart,” the reverend said. “How long have you been in the family business? Come show ol’ Romie how your mama trained you up.”

  “Can you tell me anything else about her? What she was like?” My voice was soft like a sleepy child’s.

  He flashed what I knew was his pimp smile, the one he’d flashed at my mother so many years ago. It was a smile that said, I’ll take care of you, while at the same time saying, Don’t make me angry, and, Nobody loves you but me. He held out his hand and gripped me tight on my arm, jerking me down onto his bare chest, his arms closing around me like a gate.

  “Don’t be scared, little girl,” he breathed hot and wet into my ear. “I’m not your father but I can be your daddy.”

  Comet

  by David James Poissant

  Stone Mountain

  The morning is cold and dark, and my father has brought me to the mountain to see the comet. This is February 1986, a Sunday. This is Georgia. People have gathered at the base of Stone Mountain, jacketed and hatted, mittened and earmuffed. They stand in line for bathrooms, for concessions, for tickets to the cable car. The cable car isn’t a car, but a big blue box that pulls people through the air on wires and up the mountain’s side. The cable car travels in minutes a distance that will take us an hour to cover on foot. My father doesn’t have money for the ride. He tells me it’s an honor to walk, that I won’t get this chance again for seventy-six years. By then, he says, my kneecaps will be gravel and he’ll be dead, so we might as well make the most of it. My father calls himself a realist, which I’ve learned means a person who sometimes doesn’t know what’s not okay to say in front of your ten-year-old son.

  “C’mon, buddy,” he says, and I trot to keep up.

  My father is not like other fathers, not like the fathers of my friends or the fathers who come to school on Dad Day and talk about their jobs. Those fathers are doctors and plumbers and lawyers. My father has no job. Other fathers dress in suits. They wear watches and ties. They carry briefcases with silver dials that spin and click when they lock. My father wears jean shorts and tank tops. He wears an Atlanta Braves baseball cap. He smokes, which Miss Gillespie says will give him lung cancer. My father says I’m too young to worry about cancer and that I can tell Miss Gillespie to mind her own goddamned business, which I can’t because that word’s not allowed in fourth grade.

  Everyone at the bottom of the mountain has come prepared. They carry thermoses and water bottles. Binoculars hang from their necks. Telescopes hang in bags from their shoulders. Nothing hangs from us and we have nothing to drink. My Hawks sweatshirt is the kangaroo kind, and I hide my hands in the pouch to keep warm. I wish I had a hat. I wish I had gloves. When the sun rises, we’ll be warm, but the goal is to get up the mountain before the sun is up, to see the comet in the jet-black sky.

  Miss Gillespie says we’re a lucky generation, that we’re young enough to see Halley’s twice if we don’t die from lung cancer first. (Miss Gillespie is also a realist.) Her mother died over winter break, which is why she’s all the time talking about death. My mother died two and a half years ago when a man ran his car into her car. She was wearing a seat belt, only sometimes seat belts don’t save lives. Sometimes the other car’s just going too fast. The man driving the other car died on impact. On impact was how the officer put it to my father on the phone. I know because I picked up the upstairs phone to listen in. I don’t do that anymore.

  My mother did not die on impact. At the hospital, a man in a white coat told us she’d pull through before he told us she hadn’t.

  Not long after this, my father started smoking. Then came the first tattoo. Later came the layoffs at work, the second tattoo, and the man in the jean jacket. Then came the women.

  Each woman hangs around a week, maybe two, then we never see her again. My father thinks I don’t know what they’re in his room doing, but I know. Aunt Susan calls them the Rockettes. As in, she’ll call the house and ask, “Are the Rockettes in town?” and I’m supposed to tell her whether a woman’s staying with us that week or not. Some weeks, I tell Aunt Susan the truth. Some weeks, I don’t. Aunt Susan was Mom’s sister, so she takes her job seriously. Her job, as she sees it, is to see that I don’t turn into my dad.

  Starting up the mountain, my father takes my hand, then drops it. Sometimes he forgets I’m ten, that I can make my own cereal, tie my own shoes, wait for the bus on our street by myself. Mornings, he’ll pour us bowls of Lucky Charms. He’ll put in more milk th
an I like, then ask, at the end, why I don’t drink the milk, which by then is electric blue because of all the marshmallows and the food coloring, which Miss Gillespie says causes cancer too, but which I don’t tell my father about because I like to keep my mornings quiet. So I’ll drink the milk, and my father’s arms will be huge with tattoos—dragons, knives, a snake encircling a skull—and my father will stub out his cigarette in an ashtray already full, and I’ll try not to cough so he won’t feel bad for how much the smoke burns my throat, my eyes, and I’ll ask him to maybe next time let me pour the milk, knowing next time he’ll forget. Mom never forgot.

  We walk, and I’m cold. The mountain is quiet and dark, and the people on it walk in dark and quiet ways. It’s like we’re on our way to church, but it’s too early for church, for church bells or for birds, plus Dad and I haven’t been to church since Mom died. There’s no moon in the sky, which Miss Gillespie calls the new moon, which I say makes no sense. My father says the new moon will make it easier to see the comet. I tell him he should have brought a flashlight. There are few lights on the mountain. My shins hit rocks. My sneakers catch on roots. He tells me to pick up my feet when I walk, another expression I say makes no sense.

  I look up, and Halley’s is a smudge, a thumbprint caught in wet paint. I think this, then feel smart for thinking it. Figurative language, Miss Gillespie calls it. It’s a metaphor, or else it’s a simile. I can’t remember which uses like or as.

  It’s not a school night. Even if it were, my father would have brought me here. He says school is for people who think the answers to life’s questions can be found in books. When I ask him where he finds the answers to life’s questions, he takes me in his arms and says, “You.”

  The trail narrows, and we migrate in a herd. It’s not our first time up the mountain, Dad and me. When you live in Atlanta, the mountain is a tradition, a landmark.

  Stone Mountain, if you don’t know it, is a big, big rock. It’s rounded on top like the dome of an egg, and there’s a picture carved into its side. In the picture, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee ride into battle. The carving’s bigger than Mount Rushmore. Most people don’t know that. Most people don’t know it’s the biggest carving in the world. Some people don’t like the mountain on account of its history, how before it was a park the mountain was owned by a man in the Klan. It’s here the KKK burned their first cross. My father says that was a long time ago. Miss Gillespie says 1915 was practically yesterday. She says people who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. She says the park and its laser light show celebrate hate.

  Except, if the mountain is a place of hate, it’s also a place families gather in love.

  Stone Mountain, for me, is more than its light show or the cure for a long summer day. It’s the place my father proposed to my mom. It’s where I’m told I took my first steps. It’s where my mother brought us to watch fireworks the night before she died.

  Stone Mountain is the place my father takes me to fish and swim. I’ll swim, and my father will sit on a towel and smoke. He rolls his own cigarettes. He thinks I don’t notice when he pulls from the second baggie, the one the tobacco’s not in. And maybe a year ago I didn’t notice. Or maybe a year ago he wasn’t yet smoking weed and the man in the jean jacket wasn’t always at our door.

  We climb. On the trail, a girl whimpers. She wears one shoe. Her mother throws up her arms, cursing. A minute later, we pass a dad, red-faced and sweating. “Trevor,” he yells, “you just went to the bathroom!” The boy named Trevor lowers himself to the ground and cries into his mittens. My father puts his hand on my back and pushes me past Trevor, past the girl, up the mountain, and ahead of him.

  One good thing about my father is that, though he yells, he almost never yells at me. He used to. Before Mom died, Dad had a temper. I’d forget to wash my dinner plate or make my bed, and he would be in my room, screaming. After the accident, Dad was different. These days, dinner comes in Styrofoam containers, and neither of us make our beds. These days, Dad saves his shouting for the things he says matter, like who should be president or what gets taught in school. Instead of shouts, I get smoke and dust, ash in the ashtrays and garbage begging to be carried out. Twice a month, Aunt Susan drives down from Nashville with a bottle of Windex and a mop. She makes me shower, even if I showered the night before, then watches while I brush my teeth. The weekends Aunt Susan’s here, Dad doesn’t bring women home.

  Halfway up the mountain stands a shelter with picnic tables and benches, a lamppost, boulders smoothed by centuries of butts. My father finds a boulder, and we sit. This morning, he’s not dressed the way he’s usually dressed. He wears jeans and cowboy boots, a green jacket with brass buttons and what he calls fruit salad on the front. He looks like a soldier from a war from before I was born. I don’t know who the jacket belonged to, whether it was handed down or whether my father found it at Goodwill.

  From his jacket pocket, he removes his rolling papers and tobacco pouch. At home, he lets me roll cigarettes for him, or at least lick the paper, but not here, not when other grown-ups are around. Dad says I roll a mean cigarillo. By mean, he means good. Miss Gillespie calls this a Janus word, how a word can mean its opposite, the way in Hawaii they say Aloha both coming and going.

  Dad licks his cigarette. I ask if I can hold the lighter. He looks around, gives the Zippo wheel a spin, and the dark between our faces turns to flame. He hands me the lighter, which I hold while he touches one end of the cigarette to the wick.

  “Nice work,” he says, and I flip the lighter closed.

  A woman on a bench watches us. She gives me a look. It’s a look I’m used to getting these past couple of years, a look that asks, Honey, are you okay? And I want to tell her to go away. I want to tell the woman on the bench to leave us alone, that yes, my father smokes too much, that he curses, but he doesn’t curse at me, that yes, his teeth are yellow, his hair greasy beneath his baseball cap, that his clothes are dirty, yes, but that he always makes sure I’m clean and have clean clothes. That while he may look like the father in movies with bad fathers in them, my father hugs me, feeds me, listens, never hits. That he lets me play his records. That he takes me to the zoo to see Willie B. That at night he reads me the funny pages, and when I ask, he tells me stories about Mom. And so what if he reads with a cigarette in his hand. So what if there’s a halo of white around his nose. So what if some nights his eyes go watery, and he’ll rise, midsentence, and walk out of the room. Or if some nights he’ll keep me out too late. Or if last winter I got sick because Dad forgot a bill and for a week we had no heat.

  But mostly I want to tell the woman on the bench that this is my father. I am his son. Where she sees danger, worry, I see love.

  Of course, I can’t say any of this, so I stick out my tongue.

  The woman’s eyes widen. If I thought I could give her the finger without my father noticing, I would.

  Then the woman is up and coming toward us. She’s standing at our feet. She’s tall. Her jacket is blue and puffy. On the front, in block letters, the jacket’s stamped, Land’s End.

  “Sir,” she says, addressing my father.

  My father takes his time addressing her. He sucks on his cigarette, exhales, and sets the cigarette, still smoldering, on the rock beside him. He runs his palms the length of his pant legs, then looks up.

  “Sir,” the woman in the Land’s End jacket says, “is this your son?”

  My father looks me up and down like he can’t make up his mind. “I reckon I’ll claim him,” he says.

  The woman isn’t sure what to make of this. She’s lost the swagger she walked over with. Her hands leave her hips and cross her chest, and standing like that, she looks like the man in the jean jacket, how he stands in our doorway, arms crossed, and shouts. My boy’s home, my father will say, and most nights this stops the shouting. One night, the man in the jean jacket did not stop shouting. The next day, when I got home from school, my father’s arm was in a sling.

&nbs
p; “Your son—” the woman says, and it’s like she’s so angry she can’t find the words. I’ve seen this too. I see it every other weekend when my aunt walks through the door. It’s the face of my mother, except that the face is otherworldly in its anger, furious in a way my mother never was in life. Each time I see it, I wish my aunt didn’t look so much like Mom.

  The woman in the Land’s End jacket is all but shaking. “Your son stuck his”—and here her voice drops to a whisper—“he stuck his tongue out at me.”

  My father’s eyebrows lift in what looks like genuine befuddlement. “Well,” he says to the woman, “what on earth did you do to deserve that?”

  At this, the woman’s eyes roll in their sockets. Her arms uncross then recross her chest. My father plucks his cigarette from the rock beside him and brings it to his lips.

  “You, sir,” the woman says, “you ought to have your son taken away from you.”

  “I’m going to stop you right there,” my father says. He stands, and he and the woman are eye and eye. And my father doesn’t have to say anything more. The woman’s eyes narrow, but soon she about-faces and marches back to her bench where she takes the hand of a boy about my age. The boy wears a jacket that matches his mom’s, and his hair is hair-sprayed into place. His pant cuffs are tucked into his socks, and his Nikes look new.

  I watch the mother pull the boy up the mountain away from us, and I wonder, not for the first time since the accident, what it would be like to be a boy like that, to have a mother like that. My mother would have been a mother like that.

  The women Dad brings home are nothing like my mom. They wear too much makeup or no makeup at all. They use words I’ve only ever heard men say. Some of the women are nice to me. One took me out for ice cream. She bought me chocolate, which I don’t like, but I ate the ice cream anyway. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Her name was Claire, and my father talked about her like she might be my new mom. She had a pretty smile and smelled like maple syrup. She didn’t stick around for long. The nice ones never do.