Mississippi Noir Read online

  “Well, I tried to invite you to come, but I guess you were out on your little Peeping Tom mission already. Moonface got in a fight near the end of the match.”

  “What?” I said, remembering his black eye.

  “Yep. He was sitting on the front-row bleacher nearest Nicole, not being shy at all about why he was there. But she wasn’t being too shy about it neither.”

  “What’s new?” I said.

  “Yeah yeah. But then her dad caught on to what was happening, and he wasn’t having it.”

  “Huh.”

  “He must of been on something like this stuff you got here, because as soon as the time ran out on the clock and everyone stood up to cheer, he hopped down from his bench a few rows up and clocked Moonface upside the head.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “It was a pretty good hit. For a sucker punch, I mean. It took everyone a minute to realize what was going on, but then everyone stepped aside and it was just Moonface and Richmond going at it in front of Nicole and the whole lot of them.”

  “What happened then?” I asked, seeing the village lights through the pines.

  “Well, people were trying to pull them apart, and Richmond called him a kite or something. Moonface just let go of his collar, then took off for his truck and left before anyone could stop him.”

  By this point we neared the edge of the trees, and quietly made our way over to Moonface’s shack. We took spots behind the back window, and leaned in as close we comfortably could.

  Oh my God, John mouthed.

  Nicole stood naked by the radio holding the picture frame, illuminated only by two recently lit white candles nearby. The flickering glow washed over her so that no one part was ever fully revealed, like an apparition.

  “Which one is you?” she asked Moonface, still examining the photograph. He lay on the sofa, naked as well. His scars patterned his whole body.

  “Which do you think?” he answered, the edges of his eyes creasing.

  She squinted and held the picture closer to her face, then half-smiled as if figuring out some small puzzle.

  “You were very beautiful,” she said.

  There was a squeal of tires and a roar of gears shifting too quickly. Everyone looked in the direction of the incoming din.

  “You should go,” Moonface said, standing up and grabbing his clothes.

  Nicole didn’t say anything, only put the photo down. Headlights raised into view.

  “No,” she finally said.

  “Stay inside. They will see you,” Moonface said slowly, briefly eyeing the window.

  “I don’t care. That’s all they do. They just see me,” she told him offhand, walking toward the pile of her uniform.

  I motioned back toward the woods to John, but he shook his head.

  “Are you crazy?” he whispered, still trained on Nicole’s body.

  A pair of beat-up, jangling cars rushed toward the house, their doors opening before they fully parked. Four men leaped out of the vehicles, a couple of them clutching bats. A roughed-up man near the front cocked a pistol.

  “Cohen, you kike, get your ugly ass out here!” he shouted.

  A couple lights turned on in neighboring houses. Moonface looked at Nicole one more time, his eyes crinkling again as she slipped on her skirt, and he walked outside. I tugged at John’s shoulder and dragged him into the woods, and we huddled behind a tree trunk.

  “Shalom,” Moonface said, exiting his home.

  “Where is she?” Richmond demanded.

  “Inside,” Moonface said.

  A small breeze passed through the trees, around us, through the village. Richmond swayed slightly, as if he were only a pine sapling.

  “What’s she doing in there?” Richmond said.

  “Celebrating our win,” Moonface said. “Go team.”

  “Fuck you,” Richmond spat, advancing toward him. The group followed, and I saw John’s stepfather was among the posse. I couldn’t bring myself to look to John next to me.

  I realized I still held the near-empty mason jar. Years later I am unsure of my logic, I hope that it was for the right reason, although a part of my mind croaks otherwise, but I threw the glass through the woods at the window. It crashed through the pane, knocking over the two candles nearby, and rolled out of sight. John patted me on the shoulder like I accomplished something heroic, but there was something distant in his gaze, as if he had seen into me, farther into myself than I could see on my own, and it worried him.

  The men out front jumped at the noise. Nicole peered through the window into the woods, directly toward us, but we were in the forest, and the sky didn’t shine on us, so we were hidden. Moonface took the distraction to swing at Richmond, connecting with his jaw and causing him to drop his pistol while, behind them, a trace of smoke twirled out the window near the curtains. Nicole glanced to her side and withdrew from the window, and I never saw her again.

  A couple of the men went at Moonface with their bats, and he was able to dodge the first few swings. The fire inside his house fanned across the room, up the drapes, accelerated by the liquor-soaked carpets. Moonface heard the roar and whipped around. John’s stepdad saw it as an opportunity to bring his bat across his back. It made a sound like striking a mattress, and Moonface groaned as he fell to one knee.

  “Nicole!” her father shouted.

  Moonface managed to roll over, and kicked John’s stepfather in the shins. He let out a yelp and fell backward as Moonface scrambled up toward the flames that seeped out the front door. Richmond felt around in the dirt like he’d lost a pair of glasses while the other men stepped backward slowly.

  Two things happened near simultaneously; John and I still disagree on the exact order. He remembers Richmond finding his pistol and shooting Moonface in the back, causing him to spin around and tumble into the burning trailer. But I know what I saw—you don’t misremember when a moment burrows into your memory, they’re always there to recall as they were preserved:

  Richmond shot and missed, the bullet hitting the doorframe. Moonface did spin around, but only to look at Richmond one final time. The sides of his eyes furrowed as in his photograph, and he leaped inside.

  I heard the distant cry of sirens while the neighboring families started racing toward the giant fire, although it was clear there was nothing else to be done. Richmond steadied himself on the hood of his car, repeating his daughter’s name to no one. I remembered the remaining jars of moonshine in the kitchen, and was about to grab John when he beat me to it.

  “We’ve got to get the fuck out of here,” he said.

  I nodded, and we raced through the trees back toward our homes. A few seconds later, I heard a great roar from the fire and, for a moment, our path shone brightly ahead of us before darkening again to a dull glow.

  * * *

  The next morning, I hid the menorah under the cinder-block risers of my house and feigned ignorance of the previous night’s tragedy.

  “That poor girl,” my mother said after getting off the phone with her gossiping friends. “She was so pretty. It must have been terrible trapped in there with that monster of a man.”

  The story warped even more within the week, in part due to John’s near-constant retelling of his account to our classmates, and soon, Richmond was fleshed out for the story. Richmond the brave, doting father, who tried to save his rebellious daughter from the leering, deformed cafeteria worker from foreign lands. He defended her honor at the homecoming football game, and Moonface—the name caught on—then kidnapped her at gunpoint, forcing her to drive them to his lair in a final, desperate attempt to have her. The two foes grappled outside the house, Richmond wrestling the gun from Moonface’s hands and mortally wounding him before the creature fled into the house. He then torched the place from the inside. If he couldn’t have her, then no one could. We were nowhere to be found in the story.

  To solidify the legend, it was rumored that the emergency crews couldn’t find any trace of bodies in the smoldering wreckag
e, as if Moonface and Nicole burnt away in the heat completely. Years later, when I finally could bring myself to investigate this bit of the story, I found information scarce, records lost, graves forgotten, and I couldn’t confirm or deny this addition to Moonface’s legacy.

  * * *

  I’m much older now, I’ve more or less kicked drinking, and I love a woman who loves me in kind, despite this story, the true one, which I have also told her. She is not as beautiful as Nicole, she quit school the same year I did, never cheered for a game in her life, but she is full of wonder, and that’s almost the same. On many days, that’s even better.

  I am nothing like Moonface, but I wish I was. There is very little light from the night sky where we live now, it’s all washed away in the muddy glow of the nearby city. Sometimes, while we make love to each other in the dark, I look down at my body to find it lit in patches from streetlamps through our window blinds. I imagine these illuminations are scars from my youth, from the things I am powerless to understand. I look at the menorah resting on my bookshelf while I imagine myself Moonface, and my hurt is not hidden like those around me. I never have to explain the past to anyone ever again. Everyone will see it etched into my skin, but they won’t realize what it’s doing to them until it’s done.

  GOD’S GONNA TROUBLE THE WATER

  by Dominiqua Dickey

  Grenada

  I

  Elnora Harden had just sat down on her back step to sort through a mess of mustard greens when the pounding started on her front door. Everybody in Boone Alley knew she kept the front bolted shut except for emergencies or business. Even then, she rarely answered it. With heavy, dark clouds rolling in, she wanted the greens cleaned, in the pot, and on the stove before the storm hit. This disturbance already had her on edge because it was interference. Dammit, Elnora hated interferences.

  “All right, shit,” she muttered under her breath.

  She dropped a dishtowel over the sorted pot of greens and put both it and the dirty, unpicked batch on the back porch out of the way of the potential downfall. The noise at her door hadn’t stopped by the time she reached it and her temper was beginning to match the tempo. She wiped her hands clean on her apron and yanked the door open. Curses waited on the tip of her tongue. They had to wait longer still because the front porch was empty.

  Elnora stepped outside. The slamming of the screen door echoed, but she paid it no mind. A lone figure walked down the alley toward Lake Street. In the waning sunlight, she made out a womanly shape with long hair pulled back into a single braid. Bits of white flapped at her waist while the rest of her outfit was dark green, similar to what the maids who worked at the big-time hotel on Main Street wore. The smart figure, shapely legs, and long braid—it didn’t take more than a second or two for Elnora to put those pieces together.

  “Cissy!” She cupped her hand to her mouth to give the shout extra power. “Cissy Shaw, get back here!”

  “Cousin El?” The younger woman spun on her low-heel shoes and hurried up the gravel-covered road to meet Elnora halfway. Tears stained her cheeks. She reached for Elnora’s hands. “I was so scared you weren’t home!”

  “You know better than anyone to come to the back.” She would have pulled free, but Cissy’s hold was strong. “Come on. They’re all at the window now. Let’s get inside ’fore it starts to pour and everybody gets wet trying to hear your business.”

  The trembling young woman let go once they were inside. Elnora claimed the rocking chair near the wood-burning stove. Cissy perched on the edge of the wrought-iron four-poster bed. The smell of dust and rain blew in through the open windows. Lace hand-me-down curtains fluttered, reminding Elnora that she was overdue for spring cleaning. She sighed. Yet another thing to break up her peace and quiet. Just like the quivering, sniffling mass on her bed.

  “All right there, Cissy.” Elnora took an unused handkerchief from her apron pocket and patted it into the other woman’s hands. “Banging on my door like that, you must want something more than to cry like a baby—”

  “That’s it!” Cissy cried out suddenly amid hiccups. “The baby! Cousin El, you got to help me. I ain’t got nobody else!”

  “What about the baby?” Elnora’s chest drew tight just putting the question to words. Cissy’s baby was the prettiest the colored folk of Grenada had seen in a good number of years. Skin as smooth as caramel, eyes dove gray like her foolish pappy’s, and chubby cheeks that made a body smile on their darkest day. At just a toddler, she was already everybody’s darling.

  “She gone!”

  When fresh tears threatened to halt the conversation, Elnora snatched the handkerchief and grabbed Cissy’s shoulders. “Dammit, girl! Stop this foolishness! Where is she?”

  “I don’t know where Hattie is.” She started to squirm. “Ow, that hurts.”

  Elnora took her time letting go. “What you mean you don’t know? You going to work or coming off shift?”

  “Coming off—”

  “Then you know where she is. Shit, Cissy.” Elnora rose from the chair and began to pace. She muttered a few more curses to set her breathing back to normal. “Clara has that baby—”

  “No, she ain’t! That’s what I’m telling—”

  “You ain’t tole me shit.”

  Cissy’s hands balled into fists, but she didn’t strike out. She moved to the open window and her fingers dug into the sill. “Aunty met me at the back steps of the Baldwin right after I clocked out. She and Hattie laid down for a nap. When she woke up, my baby was gone!”

  “Lord Jesus.” Elnora’s pacing came to a standstill. “Well, did she check Lee Ella’s? That woman can’t keep her hands off babies—”

  “Yes!”

  “What about the rest of the alley? And over on Cherry? What about down on Union? Hattie ain’t one for wanderin’, but babies get curious. It wouldn’t be her fault.”

  “They checked. Ain’t nobody seen her. You got to help—”

  “I got to?” Elnora met Cissy’s pleading eyes with a hard stare. “Girl, what you really over here for?”

  “My baby gone.”

  “I know that. What else?” Elnora asked. She followed with a truth that her instincts confirmed: “You know who got her.”

  Silence hung there for a moment. In the distance, thunder tumbled. The old saying of God moving his furniture made Elnora wonder if He was angry about the remodeling project. Although the sound was distant, only a fool would dismiss the power behind those rumbles. The rain would hit hard. She was sure the storm was coming from the east. For sure, Grenada was in its path. Maybe the Delta too.

  “Cissy.” Elnora’s patience was near worn out.

  “I know,” the younger woman mumbled. Her gaze locked on the crooked pattern of the linoleum nailed to the floor. She began to trace the outlines of magnolia petals and leaves with her shoe until Elnora cleared her throat. This time, she spoke louder: “Yes’m, I know.”

  “Well, go get her back.”

  “I can’t.”

  Elnora sought comfort in her rocking chair. She hoped for additional relief from a pinch of snuff then remembered she’d thrown out the last tin a month ago. It was making her teeth yellow and her breath stink. At thirty-six, she still had a few good years left. She wasn’t about to let some damn tobacco age her and keep her from having fun.

  “What you come over here for?”

  “Help—”

  “Stop,” Elnora said, her willingness to listen to bullshit completely gone. “Truth, Cissy, or you can see yourself out the way you come in.”

  Cissy wasted no time returning to the wrought-iron bed where she’d spent a few nights in her youth. She looked ready to grab Elnora’s hands again, but hesitated. In that hesitation, her hands hung there in the space between them. Then she began to use her slender, work-roughened hands to plead her case, waving them around and molding shapes, ghostly images that reminded Elnora of a past she couldn’t escape.

  “You good at fixin’ things.”

&nb
sp; “Ain’t nothin’ I’m good at but fixin’ hair and a mess of greens. I have a pot waitin’ for me out back.”

  “Please, Cousin Elnora. Can’t nobody else help me with this.”

  It was the pleading that got to her. That and the look of desperation in brown eyes that were so much like hers.

  “Fine,” Elnora said. “Why did that white boy take your baby this time?”

  II

  The story hadn’t changed. At least not to Elnora’s estimation. Cissy and Graham Lee Donner had thought theirs was the big secret romance that no one knew about, but this was not actually the case. The boy was sprung the minute he’d set eyes on her. He’d come in place of his uncle to collect the rent, and Cissy, fifteen and just starting to smell herself, had handed over the money with a coy smile. Halfway down Newsome Alley, Graham Lee kept looking back. Elnora had been there, so she knew it for fact. Cissy, being young and incorrigible or maybe too much like her mama, had been unable to resist. Having released the right to voice disapproval or otherwise, Elnora had no choice but to watch some elements of history repeat itself.

  For five years, the two did the dance of push and pull. During that time, the baby came and Graham Lee wanted them under his roof, but he wasn’t man enough to stand up to his family. In Grenada, where the hell would they go anyway? But that didn’t stop the fool from snatching little Hattie every now and again, making sure his little gray-eyed twin knew her daddy and hoping Cissy would find a way to stay too. In the beginning, she’d stay a week or two, but since she started working at the Baldwin Hotel, Cissy didn’t want to take the risk. Besides, her aunt’s husband promised to put her and Hattie out if she missed paying her monthly share.

  The telling sickened Elnora. Twenty years ago, she made a hasty decision based on fear and shame. She saw no cause for either child to pay another day for that mistake.

  “You know you got a bed here,” she said quietly. They now stood in the kitchen. Elnora had finished with the greens while Cissy told her tale and prepared a ham for the oven. “Ain’t nobody here but me,” Elnora continued. “We get Hattie back and y’all move in here. Leave Clara and Josiah to themselves.”