Mississippi Noir Read online

  “Do you want a ride? Darna would probably give me the keys to the car,” I say as she starts to walk the four blocks to her duplex apartment.

  “Nah. It’s not so bad out tonight. Nice for a walk,” she answers. Haley twists her brown hair with her finger and marks a line on the asphalt with her foot. I stand at the top of the steps, looking at her, then glancing back over my shoulder at the blue hand.

  “When will you be back?” I ask.

  “When do you want me back?”

  I shrug my shoulders. “Don’t you know the answer to that?”

  Haley rolls her eyes and stuffs her hands into the pockets of her jeans. “Better see what your wife is doing,” she teases, and turns and skips down the road.

  I dread leaving the porch because there’s nowhere to hide inside. In our small house Darna’s squatty, wide frame sticks out from around every corner. I don’t remember the last time she looked pleasantly in my direction, and even if she did I’m not sure I’d recognize it. Now what’s left of her smiles and graces are reserved for the customers who sit and pay twenty dollars a session to listen to the good faith and promises of a white-trash psychic.

  I walk into the kitchen. On the stove is a pot of macaroni and cheese cooked sometime in the afternoon. I take my dinner into the back room of the house and lay down on the floor. A twelve-inch black-and-white TV with rabbit ears is my companion during the psychic hours and I seem to have worn a spot in the wooden floorboard where my body stretches out each night in between boxes of garage-sale bargains—pots and pans, flower vases, ugly ties, pillows, and various volumes of encyclopedias. I rest my head on a pile of large-woman blouses.

  The front door opens and closes periodically as Darna reads palms, tarot cards, the crystal ball, or anything else that might reveal to her exactly what it is the customers want to hear. She is a friendly fortune teller, promising the hope of wealth or love to the lonely souls living in houses like ours, living lives like ours. So little changes in this town that is nearly out of Mississippi, almost in Louisiana. We live in the perpetual in-between. But she sells what they want. Twenty dollars salvages hope for another day, until the mailman leaves a new stack of bills or the husband passes out on the porch or the fifteen-year-old daughter spends another night away from home. Darna fills the emptiness with bullshit, recycled every evening until midnight for a small, nonrefundable fee.

  * * *

  At six thirty in the morning, me and Wayne are waiting in the lobby of Labor Locators. The bald guy named Ed sits behind the glass and calls out job assignments to the early birds.

  About twenty-five of us are there in the “labor hall,” as Ed calls it. Mostly men but a handful of women. Black and white, young and old, big and little—a pot of blue-collar gumbo there for the picking, willing to work any job Ed can scare up. People are scattered, some sleeping, some pretending to read. Everyone has a Styrofoam cup of black coffee, the steam dancing up and away.

  “I hope that asshole don’t send us back to West,” Wayne mumbles to me. “That shit is killin’ me.”

  I nod in agreement because I too don’t care to be sent back. For the past five days we’ve been hauling sheetrock on the trucks that deliver supplies to building sites. sheetrock is four foot by eight foot and weighs about three Darnas a sheet, but breaks easy. There’s no other way to move it than putting one man on one end and one on the other and carrying it long-ways, then letting it fall gracefully into a neat stack. The works gets rough when there’s 150 a load, and by the time you get down to the last thirty or so your body is so fatigued and cramped that it’s all you can do to cup your hand and let the sheetrock rest there while you bend your body to support the weight and try not to drop your end, wasting somebody’s good money. When it’s over you wonder how you were able to survive until the bottom of the stack, drink a jug of water, then get in the truck and go get the next load.

  Ed looks up and sees us. There’s a grin on his face as he fingers us toward the window. “Back to West, boys,” he says.

  “Shit, Ed. Ain’t you got nothin’ else?” Wayne replies.

  “You wanna work or not?”

  “Fine,” Wayne says, and swipes our time cards off the counter. He cusses all the way out the door, the whole ride to West, and up to the time we’re on the interstate with the first load.

  We come home about the same time as the day before, and as we get to the railroad, Hero and Spur are there again zeroed down the tracks. We bump over the rails and Wayne yells, “Get the hell away from there I said!” Hero never looks up. “Guess the son of a bitch is deaf now too.”

  We get out of the truck and Wayne says, “You think Darna would give me a free reading?” I’m surprised because Wayne has never before alluded to Darna’s cosmic enterprise.

  “I guess. I don’t know. What for?”

  “Nothin’ really. How about asking her for me?”

  I open the front door and hear Darna yelling at the television. “Kick his ass! C’mon!”

  I say “Darna” three times before she answers, and she only does then because there’s a commercial.

  “Wayne wants to know if you’d give him a free reading.”

  “Ain’t nothing free.”

  “Shit, Darna, him and Doris have been living over there forever,” I say.

  She rearranges herself on her Aunt Martha’s hand-me-down love seat. Her nightgown rises and her fat legs are white like church candles.

  “Hell, I guess,” she answers, never taking her eyes off the television. “Tell him I ain’t giving him more than ten minutes though.”

  I yell out the screen door for Wayne to come in. Darna turns off the television and goes into her “reading” room.

  “In there,” I direct Wayne.

  Darna is lighting candles and closing blinds. In the center of the room is a card table covered with an orange tablecloth decorated with the silhouettes of black cats. Darna turns on a lamp in the corner that glows with a red lightbulb. I stand in the doorway curious, but she pushes me into the hallway and shuts the door in my face.

  They talk quietly. I press my ear against the door but can translate nothing. Darna does most of the talking. Wayne offers one- or two-word sentences when she pauses. Though interested, I’m also tired, and go into the kitchen for a beer. Before I’m halfway finished, the door opens and Wayne leaves, and Darna sits down again in front of the television.

  “So?” I say.

  “So what?” she answers.

  “What’d he want?”

  “You know I can’t tell that.”

  “C’mon, Darna. It’s just Wayne.”

  “I don’t care who it is. He’s a client and I ain’t telling,” she says.

  “Client-smient, Darna. It’s just Wayne.”

  “Same for everybody,” she says.

  I give up and walk to the back room. I stretch my thin body as long as it will go, straight out across the hardwood, visions of sheetrock dancing in my head, as I feel their weight even in relaxation, heavy on my shoulders. The exchange with Darna is the only one of the night, and long before the late news I’m fast asleep.

  The warning whistle and thunder roaring closer awaken me. It’s the early a.m. and a tremor grows in the ground. I go into the kitchen for some water. My mouth is dry and as I bend over the sink and guzzle from the faucet, the train whistle blows ceaselessly. I make my way to the porch and the whistle continues to scream as if the train were frightened of its own tracks, the sound of the weight thumping stronger and teeming with the whistle to blare and roar like an approaching war. I see the reason for its loud arrival when I look ahead: standing almost on the tracks are two shadows. They are side by side, ornaments of black in the night, when the train light hits them, and there’s Wayne with a firm grasp on the neck of Hero, Hero squirming up and down but being held in place by the strong, solid grip of his father.

  The light whiter on their faces and the whistle stronger and louder, the train rushes toward them, but Wayne won’t let the
m move. I yell but it’s lost in the train’s roar. It’s too late for the train to slow as the light grows wide on the ground around Wayne and Hero, spotlighting the boy’s struggle.

  Off the porch and I’m running toward the tracks. The ground bounces and I use it to spring forward with each step. I dash into the growing light and snatch Hero away from Wayne as he never hears me coming in all the noise. Hero stumbles and falls when I whip him around, and in the train’s light Wayne’s eyes are scattered. The muscles in his neck are bulging and it appears as though there is so much pressure in his head that his hairs might start popping off one by one. An instant after I yank Hero away, the engine blows past.

  The train light disappears from our faces but Wayne’s crazy eyes still show. He takes a step toward me, raises both fists over his head. “What the hell are you doing!” he screams over the clicking of the rails.

  “Jesus Christ! What am I doing?”

  He drops his hands and turns away from me, stomping toward his house. I go after him and he stops at the road and jerks around. I take a step back. The train is quieter now that the engine is down the tracks.

  “Goddamnit! What’s wrong with you!” he screams. I can only shake my head back and forth. “Shit! I’m out here trying to get him to talk and you butt your ass in and screw it up!”

  I stare at him.

  He’s so furious he’s doing a little dance and his fists are balled up. “What do you think? Hero! I’m trying to scare something out of him! Anything!”

  “My God, Wayne, it’s not the hiccups. You can’t get him to talk by making him think he’s about to die.”

  “How do you know? Are you a doctor? He ain’t never gonna say another word, your witch-ass wife said so!”

  “What?”

  Wayne raises his arm and points toward our house. “Today! I asked Darna if he was ever gonna talk again and she said no!”

  “Wayne, you know that nothing she says is—”

  “Just screw it. To hell with it all. I don’t give a shit if he ever says another word. He don’t do nothing but take up space,” he says, then storms toward his house, throws open the front door, and slams it behind him.

  I turn to look for Hero but he is gone, and in the lights of the street running parallel with the tracks is a skeleton kicking up its heels, trying to keep pace with the train. I walk back to my porch, sit in the recliner, and count cars passing by. I never get tired of the trains passing in the night.

  * * *

  When I come outside the next morning, the checkerboard is lying on the seat of the recliner. I pick it up and written across it in black magic marker is, I am gone. Feed Spur.

  Wayne bursts through his front door and yells, “C’mon, let’s go! If we get there early enough maybe we won’t have to haul sheetrock.”

  I fold the checkerboard and slide it under the recliner.

  For once, I’m happy to be assigned to sheetrock because it’s too exhausting of a job to spend your time talking, giving me time to think about Hero—where is he, what he’s doing, and what I’m going to do or say.

  On the ride home Wayne asks if I’ve seen him.

  “Not since last night,” I answer.

  “Little shit didn’t come home. You sure he didn’t sleep on your porch or something?”

  “I’m sure. I sat out there until late and then was out early.”

  “Just like his momma. Never know where the hell he is.”

  I sit on the front porch all night watching for Hero. Nobody has visited Darna by eleven o’clock and she turns off the hand, relieving the neon strain on my eyes. The moon is hidden by the clouds and everything is extra black. No sign of Hero.

  The next evening, Haley sits with me. Spur lies in the dirt next to the steps.

  “Two nights now,” I say.

  “I know it. Sad, ain’t it?”

  “What pisses me off is if Hero were to walk up, he’d ring his neck and call it tough love. His problem is, all he wants is something to hate. Without Hero around he doesn’t have a cause.”

  Haley gets up from the recliner and sits down with me on the edge of the porch. Our feet swing back and forth out of sync and our shoulders rub together.

  “What’s gonna happen to him?” Haley asks. Her voice is soft, like it arrived on a breeze. “You swear you don’t know where he is?”

  “All I know is what I showed you on the checkerboard. I swear. But my guess is, if he’s really gone, he probably hopped on a train sometime during the night.”

  Wayne’s front door opens and closes and he comes over to us. Spur shrinks when he walks up.

  “Where’s Darna?” he asks, and I point a finger toward the door. “Is she with somebody?”

  “Not now,” I answer.

  He goes inside and I hear the door to the reading room close. Haley hops from her seat and stands in front of me. In the blue neon she looks ghoulish and strange.

  “Why don’t we do something?” she asks, face full of adventure.

  “Like what?”

  “Like getting up and going after Hero, that’s what. A manhunt, the big chase, you know, something exciting.”

  “And do what if we find him, Haley? Bring him back here? Back here so Wayne can whip the shit out of him? Back here to this?” I say, holding my arms out wide, running my eyes across the landscape.

  “You know,” she says placing her hands on her hips, “this ain’t so bad to some people.”

  “No. But it is to others. I’m not so sure he’s worse off.”

  The excitement disappears from her face. “And what about you? Is this so bad to you?”

  I look at her and shake my head. “Not always, I don’t guess, but it seems it’s bad more times than not. I mean, there’s you. There was Hero. And there are nights when I’m on the porch with a beer, alone and watching the things that go on in the dark—the bugs in the streetlight, the cats milling around. That’s when I think things aren’t so bad. But I look up and down those rails and imagine the places they run to and . . . I don’t know. Don’t you ever think about somewhere else?”

  Crickets chirp softly, warming up for the night’s performance. Shouts of “Touchdown!” come from kids playing football in the street a block away. Haley looks at her fingernails and makes the colors dance by wiggling her fingers. “I just thought it’d be fun to go look for him,” she mumbles.

  The front door bursts open and Wayne roars out. “I knew you knew where he was!”

  I look around and Wayne pops me in the side of my head. I hop off the porch and he comes down and gets in my face.

  “You’d better take me to him right now and I ain’t joking around,” he says, pointing a dirty finger at my nose.

  “Christ, settle down.”

  “I ain’t slowing down. Darna’s cards said you know where Hero is, just like I thought.”

  I back up a step. “I don’t know where he is any more than you do. Darna’s cards are full of shit.”

  Wayne reaches out and grabs me by the arm, twisting and pinching my skin. “You’re coming with me and we’re going to get him.”

  “Wayne, he doesn’t know where he is,” Haley says.

  “You shut the hell up. Y’all both probably know. I’m gonna kick the shit out of all y’all when we find him.”

  Haley runs up the stairs into the house, yelling for Darna. Spur is up and barking, scraping at the dirt with his front paws. I try to shake loose from Wayne but lose my feet, and he drags me by the arm to the truck.

  “Get your ass up and get in.”

  “Wayne, I swear—”

  “Goddamnit, get in. You know Hero would run like hell if he saw just me. And don’t give me none of that I don’t know bullshit.”

  We climb in, Wayne cranks the truck, and we spin out of the driveway. As we pass in front of my house, Haley runs out the door and yells, “Wait! Wait!” but he never slows and I know it’s going to be a long night. He’ll be watching and hoping for Hero, and so will I.

  PART IV
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br />   Skipping Town

  PIT STOP

  by John M. Floyd

  State Highway 25

  Anna McDowell stood looking out the front window of the roadside gas station/minimart at the empty fields across the highway and the stand of pines beyond. Adrift on a sea of memories, she moved not a muscle, said not a word. Her nine-year-old daughter Deborah, obviously weary of both the view through the window and the delay in their schedule, stood at her side. Deborah turned every few seconds to stare at the closed door of the men’s room, which supposedly contained her five-year-old brother Charlie.

  “You think he fell in?” she asked.

  Anna said, her eyes still on the distant woods, “He’s okay. Be patient.”

  Deborah peered up at her mother’s face. “You look funny, Mom. What’s the deal?”

  “Nothing, honey. Just thinking.”

  “When are we supposed to get to Aunt Penny’s?”

  “Late this afternoon.” Anna turned to her daughter and smiled. Both children adored her husband’s sister, a fact that greatly pleased Anna, and every summer for the past few years Anna and the kids had driven up to Nashville (Franklin, actually) as soon as school was out, to spend a week at Penny’s house. Unmarried and childless, Penny happily smothered her only niece and nephew with attention and affection. The one bad part was the seven-hour drive to get there.

  Before Anna could say more, little Charlie McDowell emerged from the restroom and gave them both a What are we waiting for? look. Anna grabbed his still-soapy hand, gazed one last time at the trees across the road, and led her children back down past the shelves of candy bars and potato chips to the front door. Thirty seconds later the three of them were outside and headed for their minivan. The sky was overcast, the day breezy and blessedly cool for early June.

  Anna had just taken her keys from her purse when a short, skinny, greasy-haired man appeared from behind a parked car. One of his hands was out of sight in his pocket; the other he clamped around her right arm.