Bobby Byrd: Lone Star Noir

Texas, in all its many places, bleeds noir fiction.

In putting together the collection, we had to decide how to group the stories. Texas is not easily divided. It’s not a pie chart. But like most things literary, the stories themselves told us how to do the job. People think of Texas, they think cowboys and dirt farming. They think “Back Roads Texas.” But Texas has changed. Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby made sure we got that message. “Big City Texas”-Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso-is now the face of the state. But we also had these strange and dark stories from the Gulf Coast, so different than tales from the cities and back roads. Those stories made a place for themselves. And luckily for us, the only two carpetbaggers in the collection-Luis Alberto Urrea and David Corbett-collaborated on a road journey across Texas. That story’s heart is in the Cajun world of the Gulf Coast, but it wanders upstream on Interstate 10 through San Antonio and careens toward El Paso, finally to disappear in the darkness that is now Juárez, 2010. It reminds us that all these stories are tied together by the Texas that is right now.

Speaking of luck, nothing could have been better karma than having an unpublished story from James Crumley (1939-2008). Jim’s widow Martha Elizabeth in Missoula, a wonderful lady and a true keeper of Jim’s flame, was delighted to work with us and she found nestled in one of his files the story “Luck.” Now being hailed as “the patron saint of the post-Vietnam private eye novel,” Jim was born in Three Rivers and raised in South Texas. He was one of those writers who could hate Texas and love Texas in the same sentence. He understood Texas, his own piece of Texas-its language, its machismo, its fears and loves-even if he fled the place. His busted-up heroes Milo Milodragovitch and C.W. Sughrue don’t exist without Texas.

Many people have aided and abetted this anthology, and Johnny Byrd and I thank them, especially David Thompson of Murder by the Book in Houston, Clay Smith of the Texas Book Festival, Susan Post of BookWoman in Austin, Milton T. Burton, and Bill Cunningham. Props go out to publisher Johnny Temple (a.k.a. Johnny Akashic)-friend and colleague. The guy has patience, the guy has smarts. Thanks and kudos especially to the writers, all of whom came up with such excellent stories, some like Joe R. Lansdale and Jessica Powers at very short notice.

And finally, on a very personal note, I want to say that it’s been an honor to work with my coeditor and son Johnny Byrd. He brings a wise and steady hand to the sometimes erratic whims of his old man.

It’s been such a pleasure.

And now it’s done. I hope there will be more. One Lone Star Noir won’t do the job.

Bobby Byrd

El Paso, TX

August 2010

Beaumont

Five past eight. Phelan sat tipped back in his desk chair, appreciating the power of the Beaumont Enterprise . They’d centered the ad announcing his new business, boxed it in black, and spelled his name right. The other ad in the classifieds had brought in two girls yesterday. He figured to choose the brunette with the coral nails and the middle-C voice. But just then he got a call from his old high school bud Joe Ford, now a parole officer, and Joe was hard-selling.

“Typing, dictation, whatcha need? She learned it in the big house. Paid her debt to society. What say you talk to her?”

“Find some other sucker. Since when are you Acme Employment?”

“Since when are you a private eye?”

“Since workers’ comp paid me enough bread to swing a lease.”

“For a measly finger? Thought you liked the rigs.”

“Still got nine fingers left. Aim to keep ’em.”

“Just see this girl, Tommy. She knows her stuff.”

“Why you pushing her?”

“Hell, phones don’t answer themselves, do they?”

“Didn’t they invent a machine that-”

Joe blew scorn through the phone. “Communist rumor. Lemme send her over. She can get down there in two shakes.”

“No.”

“I’m gonna say this one time. Who had your back the night you stepped outside with Narlan Pugh and all his cousins stepped outside behind him?”

“One time, shit. I heard it three. Time you realized gratitude comes to a natural end, same as a sack of donuts.”

Joe bided.

Phelan stewed.

“Goddamnit, no promises.”

“Naw! Course not. Make it or break it on her own. Thanks for the chance, it’ll buck her up.”

Phelan asked about the girl’s rap sheet but the dial tone was noncommittal.

Drumming his fingers, he glanced out his window toward the Mobil refinery’s methane flare, Beaumont’s own Star of Bethlehem. Far below ran a pewter channel of the Neches, sunlight coating the dimples of the water. Black-hulled tankers were anchored in the port, white topsides, striped flags riffling against the drift of spring clouds.

Or that’s the view he’d have once his business took off-San Jacinto Building, seventh floor. Mahogany paneling, brasstrimmed elevator. Now he looked out on the New Rosemont, $1 and Up , where a ceiling fan once fell on the proprietress. The secretary’s office had a window too, where sunlight and humidity pried off the paint on the Rosemont’s fire escape.

8:32. Footsteps were sounding on the stairs to his second-story walk-up.

Wasn’t skipping up here, was she? Measured tread. The knock on the door lately lettered Thomas Phelan, Investigations wasn’t fast, wasn’t slow. Not loud, not soft.

Phelan opened up. Well. Not a girl. Couple crows had stepped lightly at the corners of her eyes; a faint crease of bitter slanted from the left side of her barely tinted lips. Ash-brown hair, jaw-length, roomy white blouse, navy skirt. Jailhouse tan. Eyes gray-blue, a little clouded, distant, like a storm rolling in from out in the gulf. This one wouldn’t sit behind the desk blowing on her polish. The hand he was shaking had naked nails cut to the quick.

“Tom Phelan.”

“Delpha Wade.” Her voice was low and dry.

DelphaWade. His brain ratcheted a picture toward him but not far enough, like when a Mars bar gets hung up partway out the vending machine.

They sat down in his office, him in a gimpy swivel behind a large metal desk, both included in the rent. Her in one of the proud new clients’ chairs, padded leather with regally tall backs.

“Gotta be honest with you, Miss Wade. Think I already found a secretary.”

No disappointment in those blue eyes, no hope either. She just passed a certificate with a gold seal across the desk. The paper said she typed seventy words a minute, spoke shorthand, could do double entry. The brunette with the coral nails claimed all that too, but she’d backed it up with a giggle, not a diploma from Gatesville.

“Your first choice of a job a P.I.’s office?”

“My first choice is a job.”

Touché. “What number interview would this be for you?”

“Number one.”

“I’m flattered. Get off the bus, you come here.”

The blue eyes let in a smidgen of light. “Course that doesn’t count the dozen applications I wrote out ’fore they showed me the door.”

No wonder Joe was pushing her. “Had your druthers… where’d you work, Miss Wade?”

“Library. I like libraries. It’s what I did there .”

There being Gatesville. Now that she’d brought it up.