Atlanta Noir

by Tayari Jones

  “What’s going on?” she says.

  “Bunny Bone,” Blur says, “Teddy just got knocked the fuck out.”

  Other dudes don’t pay her much attention. A couple of up-nods. They’re talking about how sorry the Braves are going to be this year, or cursing about something else. One dude, Birdie, on his cell phone, says, “Man, fuck the United Way.”

  The new dude with Bunny must be about six feet nine inches up in the air. “Too Tall,” Blur says, nodding. Bunny must have bribed a ride from the dude, ’cause Bunny can’t drive.

  Joyce says, “You know this guy?”

  “Naw. He’s too tall, though.” Blur likes getting in that joke, ’cause he’s short, for a man. Like Prince, he realizes. How’s the weather down there?

  “This here is James,” Bunny says. Both wearing the same kind of outfit—navy-blue T-shirt, gray work pants, and gray-coated blunt-toed boots. Blur thinks, I must look like I’m on vacation in my flip-flops and shorts. Baggy shorts. Dingy T-shirt. Bunny Bone works concrete. Has a loud whiny voice like everything is an outrage. This here is James, came out like she’s yelling at a referee.

  “Gimme two,” she says.

  Blur grabs two OEs from the cooler behind Joyce. Passes them to Bunny, who drops some dollars on the picnic table where Joyce works the cash box. Blur’s phone gurgles in his pocket. It’s Uncle Card calling. He’s been gone, but not for yard work ’cause his trailer’s still here. A woman, Blur suspects. “Is it raining there?”

  “Not yet,” Blur says. “Clouding up, though. Heavy air.”

  Card says. “You got the lock?”

  “When you getting back?”

  “On my way,” he says. Which doesn’t tell Blur much. How much time he has to get a lock. He looks at the beer cans and pony bottles still on the ground. Card expects the yard clean, and he cashes in the cans. Trash bags full are stored on the back porch until there’s enough worth selling.

  Blur tells Joyce about the call, that he already looked in the kitchen. She gets up and walks around the front of the house—Blur can’t fathom why Card hasn’t done something about the way it looks, like paint it, or pay Blur to paint it, because its gray shingle siding is ugly and some of it’s broken off along the bottom, showing tar paper. The cage is a chain-link cube with a flat tin roof to the right of the house, where Card stores his broken mowers and old lawn furniture. Junky. But Card didn’t say to move anything in there.

  Joyce says, “Maybe he got a new truck or riding mower.”

  People do steal, so the lock is for something of value, Blur guesses. Card keeps his good stuff on the trailer, locked all the time even when on a job, because somebody once stole a lawn edger when he was cutting somebody else’s grass. If it’s a new truck, then what about the old one, which is a vintage Ford, blue with silver flecks, chrome recessed rims, and fat blackwalls? Blur hopes he didn’t trade it. Blur could buy it on time, maybe. But Card can’t drive home two trucks. Either way, Blur has to get a lock.

  Joyce says, “Better clean up the yard first. Then go buy one. I’d let you take my car but you just got out of jail and you already don’t have a license, Blur. Better hurry up, I guess.”

  Bagging cans, Blur frowns at Joyce when she puts on another Prince CD. He feels already saturated with Prince music, and figures it’ll just make Joyce cry even while she snaps her fingers to the beat. But she smiles, starts singing along to “Do Me, Baby.” Bunny Bone, sitting at the picnic table with Too Tall, Joyce, and Wheatbread, starts a story about a beggar on the MARTA train, somebody selling toiletries, but Wheatbread interrupts her: “Did he have any mouthwash, Bunny? Your breath smells like fish guts.”

  “Go to hell, Wheatbread,” she says. “You think you some kind of comedian, but you ain’t. All you is is a half-breed sissy. I don’t know why you open your mouth. Anything you say is bound to be confusing.”

  Funny, coming from Bunny. But her irritating voice, crossed with Prince’s high-pitched singing, makes Blur think, Why can’t Bunny Bone be dead now and not Prince?

  “I’m not a sissy,” says Wheatbread. He looks at Joyce. “You know I’m not.”

  A lot of people laugh.

  “That’s right, Whitebread,” Blur says.

  Wheatbread is up fast before Joyce can grab him. He clutches Blur’s T-shirt at the neck and stares down at him, his fist tight under Blur’s chin.

  “Oh fuck,” Blur says to himself, perplexed by what is happening, by Wheatbread’s pond-green eyes, pink face, and yellow teeth, by whatever Joyce is saying—something sort of soothing under Bunny Bone’s hoot of a taunt, which is like an off-sounding high note on an electric guitar. Blur got through all the time in jail without getting hit, stabbed, choked. He squinches his eyes tight behind his black-rimmed glasses.

  “Don’t fight, don’t fight,” Joyce is saying.

  “Oh yeahhh!” Bunny Bone wails.

  “You made a mistake?” Wheatbread asks.

  “No. I don’t know,” Blur says. “What did I say?”

  Wheatbread lets him go. Pats Blur on the head, like he’s a child. Blur lugs the bag of empties he’s collected to stack with the others on the back porch. He can see the yellowed clock above the stove and figures he has time to spray roaches out of the kitchen at least, so he does. It takes his mind off what just happened with Wheatbread. He sprays the sulk away. Then he moves on through the house, the living room where his bed is a black sagging couch, Joyce’s room girled up with purple and pink curtains and bedspread, and Card’s room, as tidy as a monk’s, white sheets tucked neatly and folded back over a gray blanket. Army man.

  In the bathroom, spraying the cabinet under the sink where Lysol and Clorox are kept, then the medicine chest crowded with old Band-Aids, ointments, and out-of-date medicines, Blur hears Card’s truck pull into the driveway. Fuck, that was way fast. The truck has four chrome exhaust pipes and sounds like a big-chested predator. Blur has long wanted that truck. The bathroom window looks out on the caged area where Card wants a lock. What the hell does Card want to lock in there?

  Blur hustles the insecticide canister to the back porch, blasts poison on the floor there, then gets the combination lock out of the kitchen drawer. On the way around to the truck he rotates the dial, hoping to hit upon the numbers to spring the lock. He finds the crowd of drinkers surrounding Card’s truck. Wind is strong enough to move people’s pant legs. Bunny’s high, grating voice sings, “Goddamn, Card, you done got a fucking dog!” Which is why Blur’s been hearing barking since he came outside.

  “What’s her name?” Joyce asks.

  “That’s a boy,” Bunny says. “Look at the sack on that sucker.”

  “Oops,” Joyce says.

  “Name’s Prince,” Card says.

  Blur can’t get a good view of it. He can see a large black tail whipping back and forth. Not a pit bull tail; he’s afraid of pit bulls. A pink-eyed pit bull once chased him onto the roof of a car. Come to think of it, Bunny Bone reminds him of that dog. Too many pit bulls in the neighborhood already.

  Wheatbread says, “That’s a big-ass puppy, bruh.”

  Card turns to see Blur. Card is smiling big, his gray-speckled mutton chops arched back with his cheeks, his bald head full of furrows. “You got the lock? Gonna put him in the cage.”

  Blur puts the combination lock in his pocket. Better to have no lock than a useless one, he figures. “Not yet. Ain’t really had time. You got back too fast.”

  “Jesus. Well, you got time now, Blur?”

  “How am I supposed to get a lock, anyway? I need some money. I need a ride. What the fuck kinda dog that is?” Blur stares now at the dog’s wide black face, alien amber eyes.

  “It’s a cane corso. Best guard dog on the market.”

  “Connie? Never heard of it,” Bunny Bone says.

  Something else for Blur to take care of. Feeding it. Shoveling up shit.

  “Not Prince,” Joyce says.

  “Why not?” Card asks.

  “’Cause,” she says
.

  “It can be a dog’s name too,” Card says, annoyed. He clips a wide blue leash to the silver pinch-chain around the dog’s thick neck, and lets it leap down from the truck’s open tailgate. It has stopped barking. It walks the leash around Card’s legs, and after Card steps out, it moves toward Wheatbread and Too Tall, who both step behind Bunny. Bunny sidesteps it, and it goes toward Joyce.

  “Oh, it is just a puppy,” Joyce says. She’s tentative, but puts her knuckles to its head. “God, it’s big, Card. How much bigger will it get?”

  “A little bit. About five months old now.”

  Birdie, the guy who hates the United Way, appears beside Blur. He spits on the grass and says, “Got a damn killer there, them brindle stripes,” and walks back to the picnic table side of the house. He turns and yells, “Put motherfuckers in y’all’s mortuary. Blue Brothers get lots of business.”

  “Come here, Prince,” Card says, jerking hard on the leash to turn the dog back to him.

  “Call it something else,” says Joyce, tearing up.

  “That’s already his name. I didn’t do it. Lots of dogs named Prince.”

  “Be original, then.”

  Card just looks at her, wraps the leash around his wrist. Blur ambles toward the cage, which will need to be cleaned out for that dog to have some roaming room. He looks around for a stick to slide between the latch handles, something to hold the dog in until Card decides to give him some money. He feels the weight of the lock he can’t work in his pocket. Anger springs up in Blur as he toes accumulated tree fall at the base of the chain links. Here he is, just out of jail and being told to lock something in. Thinks of himself as a dog now. Following Card’s orders, following jail guards’ orders. If he makes a move on his own, something like a pinch-collar clamps down, puts the squeeze on his fucking brain so that he’s like paralyzed, scared to move, scared to even think about moving lest somebody pinches some more. He picks up a sturdy short stick that might work to at least keep the gate from flapping open. It slips through the handles and stays snug, and despite his anger, this pleases Blur, meanly.

  Suddenly the dog barks again, Woofwoofwoofwoof! Loud. Thunder booms out of the sky. The dog lurches on the leash that Card holds hard with two hands, its big front paws rising as its hind paws drag a little in the grass. Pinch-collar don’t mean shit to that dog. Joyce, Bunny, and Wheatbread—everybody scatters back, and Blur can’t figure what the dog is crazy for. Maybe scared of thunder. Can hear it before anybody else. Then Blur sees the doctor on the road with the old beagle. Must think Poon is food or something. The doctor is looking worried at Card’s big dog, but Poon pays no attention, his head and tail high, with a little swagger in his walk. You can hear other dogs barking now in the distance. The whole dog neighborhood has gotten interested. Poon, dumb-ass, don’t even know he’s a tight grip from being mauled. Poon don’t even know it’s dangerous to be free out here. Every dog is dumb in some way or another, Blur thinks, and he is suddenly tired of what’s dumb. He thought Card was smart, but it’s dumb to buy a damn dog that needs to be fed and exercised and cleaned up after and kept from killing somebody. And the doctor, who ought to be smart, thinks it’s safe to walk a house pet around in this neighborhood. And after it kills Poon it’ll bite the doctor and eat a baby and it’ll be put down, and anything left living will still be dumb.

  “Holy shit!” shouts Bunny, laughing. “Doctor, you better get yourself a big stick or a rifle to walk with!”

  Then Blur feels dumb too, because he doesn’t know how to be free. He wonders what else in the world he could do to keep living. First time he’s wondered this. Not day-by-day stuff, but something where he could afford a three-hundred-dollar show ticket, hundred-dollar shoes, a truck, his own dog if he wanted one. He had thought getting out of jail was the future, but something else is. How long before Card is dead? Prince dead already and nobody saw that coming. Bobby “Blue” Bland been dead. He doesn’t like Card’s dog, which is death on a leash. Funny idea. Maybe he can move in with Teddy in that abandoned house down the road. Cut down trees with him until one falls wrong and puts Blur the fuck out too.

  Card wrestles the dog away from the road. “Shut up, now!” he fusses at the animal. “Blur, open the damn gate.”

  Too Tall follows behind Card as Blur pulls out the stick and swings open the gate. Card kicks Prince hard in the butt. The dog shivers against a dusty old mower set on cinder blocks, snuffs out his fury over Poon. “You just need to train it good, that’s all,” Too Tall says. “You got to show it who’s boss.”

  Blur closes the gate and puts the stick back in place. “Dog eat motherfucking dog,” Bunny says, like that’s not already obvious.

  “You all right, Doctor?” Joyce yells, wiping her eyes.

  The doctor raises his hand in thumbs-up, but looks skeptical. Blur calms a little as Prince explores the limits of the junked-up cage, and the others go back to the drinking side of the yard. Dark purple clouds break in the west and show a smear of yellow and red. Sunset. Looks like iodine on a giant dirty wound. The wind feels kind of scary on Blur’s bald scalp. He fingers the lock heavy in his pocket. The barking in the distance keeps on.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  Daniel Black is professor of African American Studies at Clark Atlanta University. He is also the author of several novels, including They Tell Me of a Home, Perfect Peace, The Coming, and Listen to the Lambs. Alice Walker said, “Perfect Peace is a spellbinding novel that kept me reading late into several nights . . . It is a gift to have so much passion, so much love, so much beautiful writing so flawlessly faithful to the language of ancestors . . .”

  Tananarive Due’s short story collection Ghost Summer won a British Fantasy Award in 2016. The novelist and screenwriter has also won an American Book Award and an NAACP Image Award. She lives in the Los Angeles area, but she spent three years in Atlanta while her mother was ill, where she served as a distinguished visiting scholar at Spelman College. During that time, she was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.

  Jim Grimsley has lived in Atlanta for over thirty years, having debuted his first play in the city in 1983. He is the author of a dozen books, including Winter Birds and Dream Boy. In 2005 he was awarded the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches at Emory University.

  Anthony Grooms has lived in Atlanta’s Inman Park neighborhood for nearly thirty years. When he isn’t teaching, he writes novels in his spider-ridden cellar. His novel Bombingham, set during the Birmingham civil rights movement, won both a Lillian Smith Book Award and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. His novel The Vain Conversation, about redemption for race crimes, will be published in 2018. For more information, go to anthonygrooms.com.

  Jennifer Harlow earned a BA in psychology from the University of Virginia. She has worked as a bookseller, radio deejay, lab assistant, and government investigator. She is the author of the F.R.E.A.K.S. Squad Investigation series, the Galilee Falls Trilogy, and the Iris Ballard series. She lives in Atlanta and is hard at work on her next book.

  John Holman is the author of Triangle Ray, Luminous Mysteries, and Squabble and Other Stories. His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Mississippi Review, and Oxford American, along with other journals and several anthologies. He is a Whiting Award recipient, and has taught at Georgia State University in Atlanta since 1993.

  Dallas Hudgens is a native of Atlanta and a graduate of Duluth High School and Georgia State University. He is the author of the novels Drive Like Hell and Season of Gene and the short story collection Wake Up, We’re Here. He is the founder of Relegation Books, a small press based in Washington, DC.

  Kenji Jasper wrote the best-selling novel Dark in Atlanta just after finishing his degree at Morehouse College. His articles for Creative Loafing, Upscale, and Rappages helped to take the careers of groups like Outkast, Goodie Mob, and Arrested Development national. His novel Cake, written under the pseudon
ym D, takes place on his college stomping grounds. Jasper’s next novel, Nostrand Avenue, will be published by Kensington Books in 2018. He lives in Los Angeles.

  Tayari Jones was born and raised in southwest Atlanta. A graduate of Spelman College, she is the author of three novels, including Silver Sparrow, an NEA Big Read selection. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the United States Artist Foundation. She is on the MFA faculty at Rutgers University–Newark.

  Sheri Joseph is the author of two novels, Where You Can Find Me and Stray, and a cycle of stories, Bear Me Safely Over. She has been awarded an NEA fellowship and the Grub Street National Book Prize in fiction, as well as numerous residency fellowships including MacDowell and Yaddo. She lives in Atlanta, where she teaches in the creative writing program at Georgia State University and serves as fiction editor of Five Points.

  Brandon Massey has lived in Atlanta since 1999. He is the author of several novels, including Dark Corner, The Other Brother, and Don’t Ever Tell. Visit www.brandonmassey.com for the latest news on his publications.

  Alesia Parker, a native Atlantan, is a happy chemist by day and closeted writer by night. She has honed her craft through various writing workshops in the Atlanta area over the past decade. Her story in this volume, “Ma’am,” is excerpted from her manuscript-in-progress, Always Watching. This is her first published story.

  David James Poissant is the author of The Heaven of Animals: Stories and winner of the GLCA New Writers Award and a Florida Book Award. He was long-listed for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His stories and essays have appeared in the Atlantic, Glimmer Train, the New York Times, Playboy, Ploughshares, and the Southern Review. He grew up in Gwinnett County, Georgia.

  Gillian Royes was born in Jamaica and furthered her education in the United States, completing a doctorate in communications at Emory University, where she initiated her love affair with Atlanta. She is the author of the cozy mystery novels in the Shadrack Myers series published by Simon & Schuster, and her film script Preciosa was recently shot in St. Croix. She is currently working on a film adaptation of her novel The Man Who Turned Both Cheeks.