Alabama Noir

by Don Noble

  That first meeting had been eight months ago, though it seemed much longer. Now she was in the cab of his truck, their guitars stowed in hardshell cases in the bed, where they'd put them after playing at the bar on Fairview, and she wondered, not for the first time, if names could be destiny. Another dark thought. She knew their source, but that never made them go away.

  They were headed again to the place they'd ended up that first night, Oakwood Cemetery, at the top of the hill where Hank was buried next to French pilots killed in training at Maxwell airbase during World War II. She remembered now, because she couldn't not, the feel of the cold marble slab against her ass as they fucked over Hank at four in the morning. Even as she heard the slap of his body against hers she realized he knew what a younger man didn't, that every stroke of his dick was a stroke against death, a futile one. Afterward, when they pulled their jeans back on, she told him about the French pilots, and that the French word for orgasm meant little death. "So did you die?" he asked. "Many times over," she answered. What she didn't say was that she'd been dying, many times over, for years.

  When the light changed, he pulled off Fairview and onto Perry Street. He'd once joked about their moving into one of the big houses there, maybe next to the governor's mansion, when he sold a song that ended up a hit. She noticed he'd talked about his success, not hers. So far, none of their group had sold anything to a Nashville publisher, which is why he'd said they should call themselves Songwriters Anonymous.

  He reached toward the dash and turned off the Steve Young song, "Montgomery in the Rain," that had been playing. Hi, as she often called himbecause she didn't want to disparage Hank's true namehad claimed Young was Hank's heir. After the silence between them had replaced the music, he said, "You don't have to do this."

  Her first thought wasn't about his pleading tone, nor about the sound of too much whiskey mixed in his syllables, but rather how horribly predictable and unoriginal he sounded. He'd never allow such a line into one of his songs. That he thought he knew what she wanted did not surprise her. She'd counted on it. She had her ways of handling him, not the least of which, this night, was singing her harmonies off-key on every song, and that was a hard thing for her to do, took great effort, and he knew that too.

  "I don't understand why you did it. On 'Seven Bridges Road' you sounded like you'd never sung it before, never even heard it, when you know it backward and forward. Hell, you even know the road it's about, know it like absolutely nobody else does, I'd say."

  "Fuck you for that last remark. Just fuck you." They were passing the governor's mansion now, heading up the hill to the bridges over I-85, which came to its end a mile farther down. "And I keep telling you, the song's about a mythical road. That's the only reason I can sing it at all."

  "How many bridges does Woodley Road have south of town?" he said.

  "Seven."

  "And where was Steve Young living when he wrote the song?"

  "Here."

  "You even knew the man whose backseat Young was riding in when he started writing the song." He stopped talking, appeared to swallow against a dry throat, then opened and drank from the flask between his legs. "Let me tell you something else." His voice began to shake now, not out of anger, she knew, but fear, afraid like a child, because that's what he was, had always been, no matter how many men he'd beaten. She'd need to hear enough of both fear and anger in his voice before the night was over.

  He took another drink. "You say you can only sing that song because it's mythical. That's bullshit. You live on that road, the real one, the one you can't leave. Instead of you trying to break up with me at Hank's gravebecause that's what you want, that's what you were telling me with all your shit harmonies, that's what I been feeling from youwhy don't we just go to your dead husband's grave, the one you killed, and you can try breaking up with me there? How 'bout that?"

  "Fuck you, Hi. Just take me to where we're going, and then you can do whatever else you want."

  "Take you where you died up under me?"

  "That's right. Where I died over and over."

  "How often do you die? Every time you think of him?"

  "Yes, and every time I think about how he died."

  They were headed downhill now, still on Perry, about to cross Dexter where parades and protesters marched their way to the capitol on Goat Hill, where politicians had once sent boys off to slaughter for reasons they little understood and where the politicians were still no better than the rutting animals that once grazed on its slopes.

  "You say how he died. You mean how you killed him, don't you? Just how drunk were you that night?"

  "Not as drunk as you now."

  "Drunk enough, then."

  She had been drunk, enough so that she could not deny it or let go of the fact, but angry too, more angry than drunk. She'd been playing a dive way down Woodley Road, past its miles of Spanish moss and seven bridges. Her husband knew how rough the place was, so he'd gone with her. He sometimes turned jealous, ended the night by accusing her of playing up to the men, wanting more ones and fives thrown into her open guitar case, implying a woman with a guitar in a place like that was no better than a stripper, and some strippers, he told her, would take it outside, burn their knees on the carpet inside a truck. Was jealousy a sin punishable by death? She didn't think so, but she had punished him, had killed him. A circle of red as bright as her anger hanging over them, her hands raised above ten and two, the impact slamming him against the door, and her husband's body twisted into an impossible shape, dead on arrival, and the child she hadn't known about would never arrive. All lost, lost as she was on Woodley Road and on Hank's lost highway, but she knew the destination she sought, a place a man named Hiram might take her.

  They were on Upper Wetumpka Road now, passing the backside of the police station and city court, and just on the other side of the station stood the main entrance to Oakwood, where the bodies of Confederate dead and Union prisoners lay.

  After he'd told her about his time in prison, first as a juvenile and later as an adult, he'd finally unburdened himself. A man inside Kilby would not leave him alone. Out in the yard others had crowded around the predator, knew what was coming. Hi joined the gathering, entered it with talk and laughter, and a sharpened piece of plastic, his first shiv, broke it off deep in the man's stomach, and edged away with the crowd, the body left lying on the ground in their wake. The story had not frightened her, had only drawn her closer to him.

  Just past the main entrance lay the graves of lost children, and beyond them the site where Hank's body had first lain before he'd been moved to another hilltop and French pilots dug up to make room, punished in death for one man's tortured fame and immortality.

  "Say my name," she said now into the silent cab, needing the reminder of who she was, her identity something older than her age. "Please, say it."

  "Why? You already know your name."

  "Don't be smart. Just say it."

  "Polly."

  "No. Say it. Say what I want to hear." He turned onto the narrow asphalt drive that led up to the dead. Then she said, more quietly, "Sing it." He would have to understand now, at least what she wanted to hear if not yet what she really wanted from him, what she knew he was capable of delivering.

  "Polly, pretty Polly," he sang and then began to hum the harrowed tune. "You want to end things with me the way the man ends things with Polly in the ballad? You want to kill me? That what you do to men? Because your breaking off with me will be my death. And why? Why do it? Aren't we good together, or have been? Can't we be again?"

  The pleading was back in his voice, which meant the kind of fear a child feels was showing itself again. She half expected him to whimper, and realized if she did hear it, that's when he would be at his most dangerous. He'd need to whimper.

  He stopped the truck at the end of the French graves, where the final pilot had not had to give up his rest in peace, like the others, to the teeth of a backhoe. Hiram lowered his window and cut the engine.
The hum of nighttime air filled the now-dark cab, a timeless song of crickets, a soft wind, distant frogs from the bank of the Alabama River, unseen but not far from them, down the far side of this hill they sat atop.

  "You're a child," she said. "And it's way too late for you to be a child at your age. Don't you know that much?"

  He surprised her by simply opening his door and stepping out of the truck. Then she heard him pulling his guitar case from the bed and dragging it over the side, as if something heavier than a guitar lay within.

  She opened her door, closed it behind her, then walked around and closed his, watched the light inside the truck again dim and disappear. A three-quarter moon lit the white marble of the first of the two large, towering headstones, the grave on the left belonging to the first wife, who'd been determined to join her husband in death if she couldn't lie beside his wrecked body while it still had lifeand that's why his grave had been moved, easier to dig up Frenchmen than the dignified locals from wealthy families in order to make room for a headstrong ex-wife. Hank's stone and marble slab lay to the right, and a low, white marble border wall surrounded the plot's artificial turf, put down to prevent seekers from digging up pieces of hallowed ground. Beneath the moon the turf was subdued to a more natural, darker color. Hiram walked over to the marble bench, a dark figure but more than a shadow. He carried his guitar case, and then sat down, facing the stones. She slowly walked toward him, said his name, Hiram, quietly to herself, unsure why she now had that name on her tongue, felt as if maybe she were trying to conjure the spirit of something she couldn't truly give name to. She sat down beside him, close enough so that in the warm night she felt the heat from his body.

  He bent over, opened the case before him, and pulled out his guitar, a prewar Martin that had first been played before those pilots, with shouts or with silence, had met their deaths, most probably country or Appalachian songs echoing out of the guitar's sound hole in some 1930s honky-tonk, or maybe more than one murder ballad. There were so many to choose from, such an ancient and timeless form. He began to play a quiet melody out of single notes, his fingers moving across the fretboard, his palm hard against the neck. He played so slowly it took time before she recognized the bare melody of "Cold, Cold Heart." He always knew overplaying was senseless, could kill a song's beauty.

  "Why leave me now, why tonight?" he said as the melody disappeared into the dark reaches of two a.m.

  "It's the right time for me," she said, and didn't want to answer further, though she could have. But his knowing tonight was the ten-year mark of her husband's death wouldn't have been an explanation that made any sense to him as a cause for their end. Better to not offer him any explanation, leave him all the more frustrated.

  "Have I not treated you good?" he said quietly over the sound of a diminished D chord.

  "You have," she said, "mostly."

  "Maybe that's your problem with me. You're a woman who wants awful treatment. Be careful what you wish for. I can give it to you. But you know that, don't you?"

  At first she remained quiet, gave herself time to think, to judge the moment. "Yes," she said finally. "I do."

  "We didn't have to come here tonight. You wanted this, whatever this is. Like in that song you love, when the man takes Polly riding into the night, toward her death, she knows where he's taking her. He even tells her that her guess is about right, but it wasn't a guess. It's what she wanted."

  "That's one version," she said.

  "It's your version. Child that I am, as you say, I know you better than you think."

  "I don't think you do," she said, ready to push him now, goad him, play on his anger for the moment, later on his fears. She knew them, including one he'd never given voice to but was there, waiting for her to use.

  "I've seen pictures of you as a teenager," he said, "the ones you showed me where you're wearing all that black, the crazy hair, the black makeup and fingernails. You were all Goth. Death as pretend. Little death. You've been drawn to it all your life, like some drug you want. Killing your husband and baby was the closest you've come. It wasn't enough, was it? Just made you crave it more, thought it gave you all the more reason for wanting it. Fucking over a grave was foreplay for you."

  She waited to speak, bided her time, wanted to steel herself for all that would come. Then he began to play simple notes again, and she recognized the song she needed to hear but didn't realize it until she heard the title line in the melody as he played "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive." She could not look at him now, but she began, hesitantly. "That man in prison," she said, "the one who wouldn't leave you alone."

  He stopped playing. "What about him? Why bring him up now?" He looked toward the two headstones, appeared to read the engraved words, but she knew it was too dark for him to read them. He then began to sound two notes on the fretboard, the second note flat, the D string out of tune. He turned the tuning peg, tightening the string, hit the two notes again, waiting on her, she knew, looking for comfort inside the sound of the instrument.

  "It wasn't the way you told me, was it?" she said, ready now to push him beyond an irrevocable point. "He didn't force you. You wanted it, and kept wanting it."

  He tightened the string again, hit the note that now grew sharper, and sharper again with another turn of the peg, and he kept striking the note, the sound climbing.

  "You liked it. But you couldn't live with wanting a dick. That's why you killed him. So nobody would know."

  He twisted the peg hard, the sound beyond sharp, and she heard the sudden, awful snap of the metal, bronze-wound string. It sprang from the neck, and he caught a broken end, pulled its other end from out of the body of the guitar and held the two ends of the heavy-gauge string in his closed, tightened hands. She knew what he now wielded, and her blood surged and then seemed to thin, and she felt as if she were being lifted higher, climbing her way toward something without effort. All she had to do was let him bear her, not fight.

  He raised his hands, the string taut between them, and in one motion threw it past her and toward Hank's grave where it landed on his engraved marble slab, rolled toward the far edge.

  She didn't speak at first, waited only to see if his anger would show itself, but he neither moved nor spoke.

  "You broke it on purpose," she said. "For no reason? Just to throw it away?"

  He took a slow breath, as if to mark the end of contemplation. "You know it wasn't like that. The man did me harm, like you can't imagine, unless you've suffered that and haven't told me. Have you suffered it?"

  "No," she said, "not that."

  "Then why claim what you just claimed to know about me?" He lowered his guitar into the case, sat upright again, his back rigid, as if he were bracing or preparing himself for something he expected from her. "You had a reason. I want to hear you say it."

  Now she felt afraid, not of what he might do, but afraid to articulate the lie she'd told herself, afraid to reveal some empty, unfillable place within her for him to judge.

  "You can't answer. It's all right." He placed his right arm over her shoulder, gently. "I know the reason, and I know where you want to go." He drew his arm higher, closer, pulled her toward him, intoning her name, and began to squeeze, his forearm now tight against the side of her neck, his bent elbow the spring-loaded hinge in a closing wedge. "I'm going to take you past where you want to go. Do you hear me? Are you prepared?" She felt his left hand upon her bare throat, felt his fingers tighten. She could not move her head, did not try. "Past it, and you'll awake with breath. Are you ready?"

  She could not answer with words, could only feel his hand closing, cutting off any form of utterance he might understand. All she could do was whimper.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  Ace Atkins was born in Troy, Alabama, in 1970 and attended high school and college in Auburn, where he played football. Atkins has been nominated for every major award in crime fiction, including the Edgar three times. He has written nine books in the Quinn Colson series an
d continued Robert B. Parker’s iconic Spenser character after Parker’s death in 2010, adding seven best-selling novels in that series. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his family.

  Marlin Barton lives in Montgomery. He has published three story collections: Pasture Art, Dancing by the River, and The Dry Well; and two novels: The Cross Garden and A Broken Thing. His stories have appeared in Prize Stories 1994: The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories 2010. He teaches in a program for juvenile offenders called Writing Our Stories, and he also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Converse College.

  D. Winston Brown was born at Holy Family Community Hospital in Ensley, Alabama, a neighborhood on the west side of Birmingham, and he grew up in nearby Bush Hills. He went on to graduate from Ramsay High School, and later from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has published both fiction and creative nonfiction. He now works in Florence, Alabama, but still lives and writes in Birmingham.

  Kirk Curnutt was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1964 but has lived in Montgomery, Alabama—the hometown of Zelda Fitzgerald—since 1993. He is the author of three novels: Breathing Out the Ghost, Dixie Noir, and Raising Aphrodite, as well as nonfiction studies of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, and the 1970s. Every day he travels the route outlined in his contribution to this volume while commuting to nearby Troy, Alabama.

  Tom Franklin, from Dickinson, Alabama, is the author of Poachers: Stories and three novels, Hell at the Breech, Smonk, and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller, the Willie Morris Prize for Southern Fiction, and the UK’s Gold Dagger Award. His most recent book is The Tilted World, cowritten with his wife, Beth Ann Fennelly. Franklin lives in Oxford, Mississippi, and teaches at Ole Miss.

  Anita Miller Garner, born in Coosa County, Alabama, is a descendant of Alabama pioneers. She attended Coosa County High School and the University of Alabama and is Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Alabama. Garner is the author of the story collection Undeniable Truths, and fiction editor at Mindbridge Press in Florence, Alabama.