Mississippi Noir Read online

  I tell him I have to pee again and he pulls into a gas station, throws the truck into park so fast it lurches. In the bathroom, I wash my hands, my face. I look at myself in the mirror and think, Fuck you. Fuck you, you fuck-up. I think all my problems might be solved if I could look in the mirror and see my ugliness reflected back at me.

  As I’m purchasing a six-pack, my phone rings and I know it’s my mother so I don’t answer. I don’t even look. She’ll call again in twenty minutes or half an hour and ask what I’m doing, if I’m okay. She always wants to know if I’m okay, if I’m happy, which makes it impossible to talk to her.

  “Where are we going?” I ask, as coldly as possible.

  “I’m dropping you off at my father’s house,” he says. “You can spend the night there.”

  “Oh no, I’m not going there. I don’t know your father.”

  “You’ll be fine,” he says. “It’s safe there.”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “I have to find this woman.”

  “I know, that’s why we’re here. We have to find her so let’s find her.”

  “You don’t understand,” he says.

  “You’re right, I don’t, so explain it to me.”

  I open a beer and he takes it out of my hand. I open another. I tell him I am not, under any circumstances, going to sit and watch TV with some old man I don’t know. An old man he hates and doesn’t talk to. I had forgotten that his father even lived here. I tell him to take me to a hotel but he doesn’t take me to his father’s house or to a hotel. He takes me to a bar. We get out and I follow him inside. It’s not the kind of place we frequent—a fancy wine bar with too many mirrors, where I feel underdressed and greasy. The Office Depot girl wouldn’t be here.

  I sit next to him on a barstool and he orders his usual: a Budweiser and a shot of Jameson. I order a gin martini, dirty. The olives are pierced with a long wooden stick, dangerous, and I eat them carefully, one at a time, and remember that there are pleasures in life; sometimes they’re so small they shouldn’t compensate for all of the shit, but they do. They really do. Once the olives are gone, I look up hotel reviews on my phone even though I know where I want to stay: the Hard Rock. There are young, good-looking people there and they let people bring their dogs.

  “Hey, babe,” he says. “Hey, love.” I don’t look at him. Other women may do their best to be nice and accommodating, but I try to be as unlikable as possible, test men too soon and expect them to love me for it. The right one will, I imagine, though I’ve been through enough to know that the right one doesn’t exist, this perfect man who will be whole yet malleable, who will allow me to be as ugly as I want.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, I’m in a hotel room by myself: two beds, a large bathroom with an array of soaps and lotions, everything perfectly beige. It’s on the fourteenth floor overlooking the Gulf and I stand in the window and try to make out the barrier islands: Cat Island, Ship, Horn, some other one I forget. In ’69, Camille split Ship Island in two: east and west. I used to go to West Ship with another of my exes.

  It’s not the first time I’ve waited for Jimmy in a hotel room. I’ve given up so much to be with him and some of these things are for the best. He has taught me sex without love, a Buddhist’s degree of unattachment. He’s taught me that I can only rely on myself and it’s a good lesson, one I needed to learn. He also taught me to drive a stick shift and put cream cheese on sandwiches, an appreciation of Westerns. Everyone leaves something behind; there are so many things I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t had all of them, every one.

  I know Jimmy’ll show up in the morning when it’s time to check out and it’ll be done: the picture taken, cash in hand, an inexplicably large amount unaccounted for. I call room service and order a bacon cheeseburger with fries and a vanilla milkshake and eat everything including most of the condiments in their fat little jars. Then I lie in bed and watch the most boring thing I can find on TV—old women selling garish jewelry and elastic-waist pantsuits—and the longer I watch, the more I begin to imagine a world in which these things might appeal to me.

  I call my mother; I can’t help it. She always answers, even if she’s with her priest or in the movie theater.

  “Hello?” she says. “Who’s this?”

  “Mom? Are you there?”

  “I was asleep,” she says. “I fell asleep. What time is it?”

  “Eight o’clock.” I don’t know why I called her but I do it constantly, against my will. More often even than she calls me. I call her because she is there, because she loves me, and because one day she’ll die and I won’t know how to live in a world without her in it. I don’t even know how to live in this one.

  When we hang up, I look at my phone: three minutes and twenty-seven seconds. It seemed like so much longer.

  * * *

  Sometime during the night, he comes in. I pretend to sleep as he takes off his clothes and gets into bed. He puts a cold hand under my shirt, pinches my nipple.

  “Tell me,” I say, swatting his hand. “What happened?”

  “I got it.”

  “Where’s my camera?”

  “On the dresser.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “It was nothing,” he says. “It was easy.”

  “Okay, but what’d you do? What happened?” I ask, knowing I’ll never know what happened. I’ll never know what he does when I’m not with him. When I’m alone I don’t do anything the least bit interesting. He tugs at my panties and I help him, kick them to the end of the bed. I run my hand over his prickly head because it’s what I like best about him. But once I’m safe inside my apartment, I won’t answer his calls or listen to his voice mails. I’ll watch him through the peephole until he goes away and if he acts crazy I’ll document his behavior and get a restraining order. I’ll tell Farrell, the apartment manager, to keep a lookout and she’ll be happy to be given this assignment—she loves a purpose, someone she might yell at as she hobbles around the parking lot on her crutches. I’ll even move if I have to, to Texas or North Carolina, somewhere far enough away that he won’t bother to find me unless a bad man calls and offers him money, and he’s the only bad man I can say for sure I know because this is not my life. It isn’t the one, I tell myself, as I wrap my legs around him as tightly as possible.

  BOY AND GIRL GAMES LIKE COUPLING

  by Jamie Paige

  Lauderdale County

  Glen meets me at the overpass over Pine Forest Road, just after sunset. She’s wearing a pink tank top and a pair of jeans. I’m sitting on top of a cinder block by the guardrail. There’s one for her too. She puts her handbag down and sits next to me.

  We’ve been together for six months. I didn’t know we were together, but she says so, and it’s too much trouble to fuss. I had known of Glen since second grade, but we had never talked. Then one day she and her boyfriend Terry got into a fight in homeroom. I watched the whole thing from my desk in the back of the room. Glen broke up with Terry and spent the rest of the day crying. That afternoon, I saw her walking home from school, about a mile from her parents’ house. I knew that Terry usually drove her home, so I pulled my truck next to her on the shoulder and rolled down the window. Her cheeks were flushed, and she was panting.

  “Want a ride?” I said to her. She spent a minute looking me over like she was trying to place me, then she opened the door and climbed in.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “I could have run you over just as easy,” I said.

  She laughed.

  Things are pretty good most of the time. Fucking? Oh yeah. And she brings me food home from her job. Sometimes she gives me money for weed, but she doesn’t know it. She really needs to be more careful with her purse.

  Lately she’s been acting strange, talking about wanting me to meet her family, wondering why I spend so much time here at the overpass. It was her idea to come along. We’re way up high. I stand and look over the rail. I’m straining through the d
ark for something, anything. Glen is talking about her family again, and I can’t think.

  “When you meet Mama, you’ll understand,” she says. “I’m not saying I want you to hate her, but I don’t see how you couldn’t at first. Don’t get me wrong. I want you to like everyone if you can, but I can’t see how.”

  The wind is cold. I put my jacket around Glen’s shoulders. I’m shivering and leaning closer against the rail now. The rail is still warm from the evening sun. I grit my teeth.

  “You don’t have to meet them all at once,” she’s saying. “I know how you are about people.”

  We’re quiet for a while. I’m glad. Glen knows everything, and she’s always telling you about it.

  “I just don’t understand why you like it up here so much,” she says. “It’s so lonely.”

  “It’s peaceful,” I say. “Usually.”

  “Don’t you wish you were doing something else?”

  “Nothing else to do.”

  “You could call me,” she says.

  She calls me at all hours of the night. I hold the phone up to my ear and let her talk. She goes on for hours. “I get so lonely sometimes,” she told me once. “I feel like I don’t have nobody at all sometimes, except you. Why don’t you ever call me?”

  I never liked phones. And knowing Glen is like falling into the middle of something all the time.

  “My dad would like you, I think,” she says. “He’s got his quiet ways too. Loves to shoot. He says he’ll take you hunting when you meet him. He can’t believe you’ve never been.”

  I don’t say anything. I feel her eyes on me. I feel her hand on my shoulder. She moves closer, puts her arm around my waist. Her breath is warm against my ear.

  “I tell him you’re too gentle. Baby, I just know my family’s gonna love you,” she says.

  “Sure.” I put my arm around her. I hear nothing but her breathing, my breathing.

  Soon there are headlights cresting the hill far off, and I say, “Just a minute,” and pull away from Glen. I’m leaning over the rail again, looking out. The lights are growing, haloed. It’s a pickup truck, I think, going thirty-five, maybe forty.

  “Baby, is something wrong?” she says.

  I don’t say anything. I back off the rail. I’m stooping now, feeling around in the darkness. I hook my fingers through the holes in my cinder block, and I’m lifting it, pushing up with my legs.

  “We’re going so soon?” she says.

  “Something like that,” I say, and I wobble closer to the rail. I balance the cinder block along the edge. I’m reckoning time. The truck comes closer. I turn. “We better hurry up and get yours lifted. It won’t be much longer now.”

  Glen is just looking at me.

  “Let’s go,” I say. “You can push this one.”

  “Quit playing around,” she says.

  “Who’s playing?”

  “Have you lost your fucking mind?”

  “Something like that,” I say. I look back down the road. Glen is screaming now and reaching around me, trying to grab the cinder block. She gets a grip, but I pry her fingers loose and push the cinder block over the edge. I hear the screech of tires. I hear my cinder block crash and break against the pavement. I hear the crunch of gravel as the truck veers onto the shoulder.

  Glen is staring at me, again not saying anything. I grin, and she backs away.

  “What’s wrong, baby?” I say to her. “Don’t you understand?”

  She says nothing.

  “I bet you were right,” I say. “Your folks would love me. I’m so gentle. I’m so sweet.”

  “Stop it,” she says, her voice just above a whisper.

  “Let’s get married. Let’s have babies and drop them off this overpass.”

  She’s crying. “Please, just stop.”

  I’m laughing now. “You’ve gotta love the whole of the man,” I say. “Gotta love him all the way.”

  Then I hear footsteps crunching through the high grass leading up to the overpass. I hear two men’s voices, angry voices. One of them pumps a shotgun, and they keep coming, creeping their way up the slope. I turn and run, from what exactly I’m not sure anymore, but I’m laughing harder all the time. The soles of my tennis shoes go slapping across the pavement, then I run deep into the woods, cutting down the old dirt road toward the fish camp. Glen is right behind me all the way. Running like hell.

  OXFORD GIRL

  by Megan Abbott

  Oxford

  I fell in love with an Oxford girl

  With dark and darling eyes.

  I asked her if she’d marry me,

  And me she nothing denied.1

  Two a.m., you slid one of your Kappa Sig T-shirts over my head, fluorescent green XXL with a bleach stain on the right shoulder blade, soft and smelling like old sheets.

  I feigned sleep, your big brother Keith snoring lustily across the room, and you, arms clutched about me until the sun started to squeak behind the Rebels pennant across the window. Watching the hump of your Adam’s apple, I tried to will you to wake up.

  But I couldn’t wait forever, due for first shift at the Inn. Who else would stir those big tanks of grits for the game-weekend early arrivals, parents and grandparents, all manner of snowy-haired alumni in searing red swarming into the café for their continental-plus, six thirty sharp?

  So I left you, your head sunk deep in your pillow, and ducked out still wearing your shirt. Wore it hustling across the Grove, my legs bare and goosy in last night’s party skirt, the zipper stuck.

  I wore your shirt, frat boy, because it was stiff and warm and smelled like you, your bed, you.

  I wore it all day Friday, to my midterm and to gen chem lab and to Walgreens and Holli’s Sweet Tooth to pick up the cookies for tomorrow’s tailgate.

  That evening, head in my calc text, I fell asleep at my desk still wearing it, page crease on my cheek.

  So of course I was still wearing it when you woke me up, coming on eleven o’clock, you drunk and heated up on something, everything.

  You had a funny look in your eye I’d not seen before and I thought, Does he know? But you couldn’t have.

  I’d only learned myself a few hours before, the Walgreens bag hidden in my trash.

  The baby inside me was far smaller than a pinhead, the Internet told me.

  Did you feel it, though, somehow—can boys?—when you hoisted me on the sinktop in the Kappa Sig bathroom the night before, your hands on my belly? Your fingers were five thumbs like hot dogs but you were strong, strong as my dad swinging a bat in our backyard in Batesville, saying, My girl, my girl, she’s going to the U, all. That’s my pride and joy. She aims proud and true.

  Someone as strong as you couldn’t feel something as small as a pinhead, could you?

  But is that why you did me, because of the baby you put inside me?

  It wasn’t even a baby yet, except maybe to God.

  Didn’t you know I would fix it. I had dreams too.

  Bigger dreams than you, frat.

  §

  The first time I saw you was at church, and it was fate because I hadn’t been since Easter. Your face stuck out among all the others. It was like I knew you, girl.

  It wasn’t until later I figured out where I’d seen you before: in the painting hanging on the wall of my grandmother’s house. A smudgy rendering of a petticoated country girl feeding a baby calf with a bottle. It was on her wall my whole life, right above the table with the phone you had to dial, and the girl was so beautiful, with light on her face.

  You had that light on your face.

  The next day, I saw you again. You were gliding up the library steps at seven a.m., just as I was slouching home. One of those mornings I’d been sneaking fast through some girl’s pink-foiled door—the entire door covered in wrapping paper, that’s a thing some girls do, the door also dripping with things, Mardi Gras beads, a message board with a frilly pen hanging from it. So many things, so that when you snuck out just as the sky was shaking n
ight off you couldn’t help but wake that girl, the cinnamon blast of last night’s fireball from her open sleep-mouth.

  Even after I escaped the sweet cream whip of a bed, wriggling free by sliding out from her arm hooked around my neck, wrist pinned to my thigh, that booby-trapped door still told on me. The clatter-click shimmy-slap of that gimcrack door, waking all the girls on the hall, their topknots sliding from sleeping heads.

  These girls, they were all like candy, sweet ’n’ sour.

  My mouth, my gut, coated with it. With them.

  But you were different. I could tell.

  Your heart, pure as a girl in a dream—that’s what I knew, just from looking at you. You in the faded pasteled picture in my grandma’s house, that baby calf near purring with delight, head nestled on your soft bosoms.

  Your heart pure and your body barely touched, never said a curse and bet you ironed your bedsheets just like my grandma too. She told me that boys were meant to misbehave and it was for a good girl to save us boys, each and every one.

  You were that girl.

  §

  “Don’t drink anything served out of a trash can.”

  That’s what my big sisters told me before the party.

  “Which will be a change from Batesville,” one of them added, winking mean at me.

  I was the only Batesville Chi O. Mom had the plan long ago, all those weekends I spent babysitting for her boss at South Panola Veterinary, Dr. JoAnn Kitts, who also happened to be president of the local Chi O alum chapter.