Megan Abbott: Mississippi Noir

Welcome to Mississippi, where a recent poll shows we have the most corrupt government in the United States. Where we are first in infant mortality, childhood obesity, childhood diabetes, teenage pregnancy, adult obesity, adult diabetes. We also have the highest poverty rate in the country.

And, curiously, the highest concentration of kick-ass writers in the country too.

Okay, maybe that’s not a Gallup poll — certified statistic, but we do have more than our fair share of Pulitzers and even a Nobel. William Faulkner lived and wrote here. Richard Wright is from Mississippi. Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, Larry Brown, Ellen Douglas, Shelby Foote, Richard Ford, Ellen Gilchrist, Barry Hannah, Kiese Laymon, Willie Morris, Walker Percy, Kathryn Stockett, Donna Tartt, Jesmyn Ward, Brad Watson, Steve Yarbrough, etc. Also, the Crooked Letter boasts perhaps the heaviest-hitting trio in the crime/thriller biz: Greg Iles, Thomas Harris, and John Grisham. I could go on, and in fact I do, in this very anthology.

Faulkner said that good writing is created by “the human heart in conflict with itself.” Maybe that’s why so much art comes out of Mississippi — a state in conflict with itself in so many ways. The legacy of slavery has left wounds that are slow to scab over, not even close to healing. The South’s position of loser in the Civil War has left Southerners to “brood,” as Shelby Foote says. “The winner of a conflict goes on. But the loser...” Finish this quote. We all know it’s healthier to be the mover-oner, the winner, skipping off with a shrug. The state of brooding is a painful one, but it’s one that produces great books.

Maybe when you think of noir, you think of cities shot in grainy black-and-white; alleys and fire escapes and blinking neon signs with a letter or two gone dark. That’s part of it, sure. But noir often reveals a down-on-his/her-luck person going from bad to worse. And where can one find more wonderful “worse” than here in Mississippi? This isn’t, and hasn’t ever been, a land purely of moonlight and magnolias. Because in that moonlight, under those magnolias, terrible things happen. And in the cities, too, in the Jackson alleys and strip malls, down along the casinos on the coast, in Tupelo, home of Elvis, or the Delta, home of the blues, or along I-55, where there’s a Nissan plant almost a mile long, where trios of crosses dot the highways.

Here are sixteen stories from seasoned noir writers like Ace Atkins and Megan Abbott as well as Mississippi’s new generation of noirists, authors like William Boyle and Michael Kardos. You’ll also find unknown, first-time-published writers like Dominiqua Dickey and Jimmy Cajoleas, who won’t remain unknown for long. I’m thrilled to bring these writers to you. In Alabama, where I grew up, we had a saying: Thank God for Mississippi, otherwise we’d be at the bottom in everything.

Welcome to the bottom.

Have fun.

Tom Franklin

Oxford, Mississippi

May 2016

Paris

“I shouldn’t be doing this,” I said.

“Hell you shouldn’t,” Shelby said. “You fucking owe me.”

“Why?”

“Don’t you want to meet Lyndsay Redwine?”

“Since I saw her in a bikini at the city pool.”

“Then shut the fuck up and drive.”

Shelby was fourteen. And she talked like that.

She’d crawled into my tall Chevy Silverado without even asking. Maybe because she liked my truck, riding high on a Rough Country lift kit and new set of 295 Firestones. I gave her rides to school sometimes from the bottom ass of the county down in Paris. People tried to make something of it, which was bullshit.

I was seventeen and a senior. Shelby was a freshman, chubby, and mean as hell.

“Wasn’t your momma picking you up?” I said.

“I don’t care.”

“This comin’ down on me.”

“I ain’t goin’ home.”

“Suit yourself,” I said, waiting for the deputy directing traffic to wave me onto 334.

He stared at me through mirrored sunglasses like he knew I was trucking jailbait. But he waved me on as Shelby got some Bubblicious out of her backpack and offered me a piece. She had on faded jeans and a Walmart T-shirt that tugged at her belly, saying, Amazing Grace. How Sweet the Sound.

“Well, I’m screwed,” I said, driving south, back to Paris. I used the cut-through by the Yellow Leaf Church where my kin were buried.

“Hunter, don’t be such a pussy,” she said. “You want, just let me out. I’ll walk.”

“It’s ten miles to Paris.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “I don’t care about nothing. I’ve gone way past that road.”

She smacked her gum and started texting. I let down my window and drove on. It was late November, already deer season and cold, but it felt good to air out the truck. “That ought to do it,” she said as she finished the text.

She held out her phone, proud as hell. I glanced down as we hit the stop sign at County Road 418. I FUCKING HATE U.

“Yep,” I said. “That ought to do it. Your momma will love it.”

“She’s fucked in the head.”

“Yep.”

“She didn’t used to be that way. He’s the one who led her into all her fucked-up-ed-ness.”

“He” meaning Randy. Randy being Shelby’s stepfather. ’Course I always liked Randy. Him and my daddy had gone to Lafayette back in the day, and I’d heard that Randy got in a year at Ole Miss before tearing up his knee. He was big and potbellied, always tan and grinning with large white teeth. He built barns from wood he’d milled himself. One time he bought me a Coke at the barbershop.

“I ain’t goin’ home,” Shelby said.

“Then don’t go home.”

“Let me out up at the cemetery,” she said. “I don’t give a shit, long as it’s not home.”

I dropped her at the old Paris cemetery, crooked and rolling and alone on the hills.

As I drove away, it started to rain. I watched her in my rearview as she sat down near a headstone. She looked worn-ass out.

Where U AT? Worried. Momma.

Shelby sat on a big slab of marble and texted back. I’M NOT FUCKING COMING HOME. EAT SHIT.

She got up, walked to a cedar tree, and uncovered a rock. Under the rock, and under a couple inches of dirt, she found a half-drunk pint of Aristocrat vodka. Shelby spit out her watermelon gum and took a swig, walking back to the headstone. Probably been better if she’d known any of the dead folks around her. But her people were from Olive Branch, her daddy was buried there, and she wished to hell she could move back.

She drank.

Randy. Fucking A-1 asshole.

Their old house had been colder than shit all week and he wouldn’t get his fat ass up and fix that propane leak. Just crawled under the house and cut off the heat. Said if he hadn’t noticed that fart smell the other morning, his first cigarette could’ve killed them all. Randy said it like he was some kind of fucking hero. Her daddy had been a hero. A hero doesn’t smell farts. A hero gets blown to bits out in the desert.

The phone buzzed in her lap.

I’M CALLING THE LAW.

Shelby downed some more vodka, warming her up in the cold rain and, by God, giving her strength. The ground all bumpy and uneven with skinny old headstones and thick new ones. A few old lambs for kids and tree stumps for the loggers. Must’ve been something to be a logger back in the day. Lots of dead folks here seemed to be real proud of it.