Alabama Noir

Laughing Boy, Crooked Girl by Brad Watson

Gulf Shores

Betty dangled the first chicken by a yellowed leg above Russell’s head and waited till she saw his prehistoric eyes shift just a fraction up to see it. She’d worked the old wig onto it, poked a bobby pin through, and fastened it to the chicken skin as best she could. She waited only a second, let go, and marveled at how the fat old alligator snatched it out of the air. The wig had been made from Aunt Sip’s own hair, cut off when it was long and young, when Aunt Sip had no need for a wig. And now that Aunt Sip was old and sick and her real hair was falling out, she never wore it, go figure, didn’t even care if she was nearly bald and ugly as a troll.

The sky was clear and so bright blue you’d never know there was a hurricane coming into the gulf, supposing to hit land smack in the mouth of Mobile Bay. The tourists had already thinned out with the coming of September and the few remaining were packing up to leave before the storm. No one was taking time to visit the souvenir shop and museum, anyway. No one much stopped in anymore at all.

Betty climbed back down the little stepladder she’d set beside the pit. There were two chickens left in the sack. She’d taken them all out to thaw the night before. The butcher at Winn-Dixie saved and sold them to her for next to nothing after their color turned, which mattered not a whit to a gator. Russell was supposed to get one a day, but she’d held off feeding him the last two days and now was going to give him three at once. She thought he might like it that way better, more like in the wild, where some days he might catch something, and some days he might not.

Into the cavity of the second chicken she had tucked the reading glasses, gold watch, and stinking dental plate with two teeth snaggling down. Into the cavity of the third chicken she stuffed a handful of snot rags, a photo of Aunt Sip on the beach in Key West with maybe the man who was later half eaten by the shark, and a thimble Aunt Sip had stuck to her finger when she fell asleep that afternoon while sewing a patch of disintegrating calico back onto an old quilt. When Betty gently pried off the thimble, Aunt Sip had only murmured something she couldn’t understand, something like Never, and Mmm-hmm, and Onions, that’s what.

She climbed back up the ladder with the second chicken and held it with both hands, so the things in the cavity wouldn’t fall out. She could see Russell’s eyes looking up at it, wearing his smug, crooked alligator smile. She dropped it and Russell had it down in a snatch as if it were no more than a little leg or a thigh.

She took up the third chicken and wrapped it in a piece of the nightgown Aunt Sip had told her to throw away on Monday because it was rotten, saying it was rotten because she, Betty, hadn’t washed it right, which wasn’t true, it was just that Aunt Sip had worn it out and Aunt Sip was so nasty it didn’t take any time to soil her clothes. It had been rose-colored but now had barely the tint of any color at all, like the color of a pan of water if you’ve cut your finger and washed it in there. She tucked the loose ends of the nightgown into the chicken’s cavity, climbed back up the ladder, and dropped it in.

She put up the ladder and washed her hands in the tub sink outside and crept back into the apartment in the rear of the museum building, down the dim narrow hallway, past Aunt Sip’s bedroom, through the living room, and had the door open to enter the museum when she heard Aunt Sip.

“Betty,” Aunt Sip said, her voice a gravelly purr followed by a phlegm-racked cough.

“Yes’m.”

“Where the hell you going?” A voice both plaintive and peeved.

“Just down to the beach awhile.”

“Did you feed Russell?”

“Yes’m.”

“Bring me some warm milk when you come back.”

“Yes’m.”

All this poised in the doorway with one foot just above the museum floor, frozen midstep and praying she wouldn’t have to go back into the room, and when Aunt Sip didn’t respond to the third “Yes’m” she quickly stepped through the door and closed it quietly, then moved past the Native American displays and basin racks of shells and starfish and seahorses, rubber toy sharks, snorkel masks, the standing racks of postcards and suntan lotions, then she was out onto the shell parking lot and across the deserted highway, through the little pass in the dunes, and down to the surf. Nobody was out just then at all. She could see the hazy shape of a shrimp boat on the horizon. The breeze flapped her lank black hair around her pale cheeks and thin, wide mouth. She was so thin and runty she looked like a little crooked, stunted sylph on longish skinny legs, her tiny torso twisted with scoliosis, a small face and large ears that stuck out through her hair like a bush baby’s, and huge eyes that almost seemed to frighten people. She would stand in the middle of her tiny pantry bedroom looking down at her crooked chest with one healthy breast blossoming like a ripe nectarine and the other nothing but a discolored little prune. The scoliosis bent her to one side and down, so it was always surprising what strength she had in her skinny shoulders and arms. She was all too aware of her appearance, not that anyone ever let her forget. She had attended the high school up in Foley until her sophomore year, and then dropped out, tired of the snickers and jeers and the boys who would imitate her crooked hobble down the halls. Of course, the principal wouldn’t let her out of gym, where the other girls barely tried to hide their horrified laughter, their oh my gods behind their palms, their cow eyes cutting over to stare. But it was the mimicking that hurt the most. Hearing laughter after she’d passed a group in the hallway and looking back to see Jimmy Teal humping along, face twisted into a grotesque freak’s, one arm hanging down nearly to the floor, twisted that way, and loping along in a hobbled gait that, altogether, looking like someone doing Frankenstein’s Igor a lot more than someone imitating Betty. It was after one of these incidents that she left school early, caught a ride to the beach in the bed of an orange grower’s pickup, and never went back.

Up the shore where the state park pier jutted into the gulf she could see a scattering of people out on the beach. She thought to walk up there and get away for a little while but knew she’d better go back and get Aunt Sip her milk.

She listened to the sand ticking against the front windowpanes, a steady, irregular ticking and spattering when the wind gusted harder. Candlelight dawn crept into the room. She heard Aunt Sip calling in her harsh, crusty voice, “Betty. Betty.”

Betty cut her eyes that way but did not move. She couldn’t move, not now. Not thinking what she was thinking now. If she moved now she might not be able to think it anymore and she wanted to. She wanted to think it until she knew she could do it.

“Coming,” she said. “In a minute.”

Je’sus stood at his post in the corner behind the glass diorama case, face and hands the color of smoked ham skin. Leathery lips sewn shut with cat gut. Arms crossed over his chest. He was said to be a Creek Indian, and she liked to imagine how it was he got the wounds in his hands that were the reason they’d named him as they did. A shop joke. Aunt Sip made her pronounce it in the Spanish way so as not to offend any Christian customers. Betty went to the library one day and looked up some traditional Creek names, and decided she would secretly call the mummy Chebona Bula: Laughing Boy. It was why they had stitched his mouth shut, to stop him from laughing, make him shut up.

Aunt Sip coughed.

“Betty.”

The cases filled with conch shells, flint arrowheads, little dried dead seahorses, augers, sand dollars, starfish, and sharks’ teeth — in such moments the small dried creatures and angular artifacts seemed still alive, trembling in a stasis barely contained within their dried skins, the polished surfaces of their shells, their coiled and chambered passages. Each glassed-in scene — of a Typical Dinner Preparation Among the Creek Indians of the East Gulf Coastal Plain, of ichthyosaurs-eating plesiosaurs, of sea crocs and prehistoric sharks, of Je’sus the Creek mummy, of Typical Wildlife of the East Gulf Coastal Plain and the Gulf Shore — watched her in reverence of the moment when she would either act or not.

She rose from the stool behind the counter and went back to the door to the apartment. She hadn’t emptied Aunt Sip’s ashtray and maybe that was what Aunt Sip was calling about. Would say, Betty, be a dear and haul your worthless little hyena ass here to dump that goddamn ashtray. She practiced not flinching and blinking but she always did, stood there like someone had just brained her with the blunt tomahawk at Je’sus’s waist, waiting for Aunt Sip to start laughing in her raspy coughing way, falling back into the bedcovers and trying to reach for a Pall Mall, knocking everything to the floor. She was tired of smelling like Aunt Sip’s cigarettes all the time too. She could smell it on her clothes when she’d wear them over her swimsuit down to the beach, where she’d swim if there was no one around. And when she came out of the water and lay down on the sand her towel stank of it, and when she pulled her oversized shirt on over her shoulders again later, the shirt stank of it. It all stank of Aunt Sip.

Her whole life stank of Aunt Sip. The cruelest thing Aunt Sip had ever done was agree to raise her so her mother could go away to Hollywood and be a movie star, then tell her she’d never made it that far, was a prostitute in Las Vegas. She didn’t believe that for the longest time. But when you never hear otherwise, well. So maybe she would do the same. Maybe she would take some man’s money for whatever nasty he wanted to do, and then she would do the nasty all the way to Las Vegas and one night she would take a man away from some old lady who would turn out to be, once she looked hard through all the makeup, her mother, and she would laugh and maybe spit at her and say, Well all right now, how does it feel to be left behind, you old whore?

I don’t know you, she would say. I don’t care a thing about you at all. You can just shift for yourself.

She said these things, whispered them, to her image in the mirror in the bathroom, practiced the tough-looking sneer on her face when she said them.

She straightened one of the embroidered silk pillows Aunt Sip claimed she’d gotten in Shanghai. Said she’d been there buying whores, in the good old days, before the barrier island casinos in Mississippi closed down. Well, she guessed that could be something close to the truth, if you figure Aunt Sip was the head whore. The pillow’s material was smooth and almost slippery between her fingers. The pillow itself was very light, as if filled with the finest of down. She balanced it on one palm at arm’s length.

“What in the name of holy hell are you doing?”

The voice had gargled up from the covers.

“Nothing but fluffing your Chinese pillow, Aunt Sip.”

Aunt Sip’s face was a doughy gray, her eyes like old, dry, blackened wounds, punctured slits that somehow imparted derision. Hands atop the covers like large bloated frogs at the ends of her arms atop the tattered comforter.

“Well, would you kindly,” Aunt Sip started in, gathering her breath like someone trying to yank a stubborn lawnmower to life, “just light me — a cigarette — and get me a — cup of coffee? And I’m hungry, for god’s sake, don’t we even eat breakfast in this godforsaken shithole anymore? You might want to starve yourself to death, I wouldn’t blame you, but I don’t.”

Betty stood there, a bit lost in her thoughts, until Aunt Sip noticed and shouted, “DID YOU EVEN HEAR WHAT I SAID?”

Betty flinched. She couldn’t help it. But now Aunt Sip lay there purply and gasping. Betty gathered the silk pillow to her chest and walked over beside the bed. The blackened eyes followed her.

“You’re up to something.” Aunt Sip’s cracked lips worked at forming some other cruelty. Betty’s fingers tightened on the pillow’s silken fringe that brushed the backs of her hands like water.

She knew that, even with her bent-up body, and maybe because of compensating for it, she had the physical strength to do it. She tried to will it into her mind. She pictured herself pressing the silken pillow down hard on the face and holding it there, her knees on the covers on either side of Aunt Sip’s arms, pinning them. Aunt Sip like a little dog wriggling under her, playing a game. Then like her rocking horse, bucking, she could just barely remember that, from when she was about three, before her mama brought herself and Betty down here in the first place. She remembered how she loved to hold on tight to the handles beside the horse’s head and buck away, the way she wanted to hold on to the pillows and grip Aunt Sip’s big flappy ears too, and hold on.

“You always were a strange child,” Aunt Sip muttered. But there was something different in her eyes, and for the first time Betty thought there might be a little of the something there that Aunt Sip had always made her feel, in this house. She thought Aunt Sip might be just a little bit afraid.

She went into the kitchen and fried up some chopped onions until they were good and soft. She broke three eggs into a bowl and dashed in a little milk, sprinkled in some salt and pepper, and beat it all with a fork. She had a little thought that paused her, and without really carrying the thought to the front of her mind, she opened the cabinet beneath the range and peered into it. There was an old, crumbling box of rat poison back behind the pots and pans, some of it spilled out. She took the box out and sniffed at it. It didn’t smell like anything much. She sprinkled a little into the pan with the eggs and onions, stirred it in. Then shook in a good bit more. She put the box back into the cabinet, straightened up, and stirred it all together. The color was a little funny. She poured Worcestershire on them as sometimes Aunt Sip liked her eggs Western style and the sauce would stain the eggs dark brown. She cooked them harder than the way Aunt Sip liked, then took the plate in to her, saying, “Here, Aunt Sip, maybe you can eat these eggs while I try to find your dentures. I thought you might be wanting some onions in there too, so I chopped them good.”

Aunt Sip looked up at her from her silk pillow with eyes that reminded her of nothing so much as when Russell’s eyes would shift just so slightly up to her and make her blood chill in her veins. Aunt Sip took the plate, set it on her big stomach, and took a little bite, still looking at her.

“I made them Western style, how you like,” Betty said.

Aunt Sip sniffed at the plate and stared at Betty a long moment.

“Get your evil little witch’s tit out of my bedroom while I eat.”

Betty backed her way out of the room, never once taking her eyes from Aunt Sip’s, bobbing her head like a bobble toy, her mouth cocked just slightly open in the only way she could hold it to keep herself from smiling, just a little.

The sounds when they came were a little disturbing, so Betty put her hands over her ears and hummed a tuneless song to fill up her head between her blocked-off ears and let her eyes roam swiftly around the museum to distract herself from any one thought, and when that didn’t work she hurried out the front door barefoot and ran in a ragged circle around the shell parking lot above which darkening clouds scudded fast to the north, blindly following the bend of her frame, shouting out as loud as she could, “A, B, C, D, E, F, G! H, I, J, K, LMNOP! Q-R-S! T-U-V! DOUBLE-U! EX! WHY AND Z!”

Aunt Sip was heavy, but Betty had been lugging her around for a couple of years now. Lugging her to the bathroom for a bath, lugging her to the jeep to drive her to the doctor. Aunt Sip was too cheap to buy a wheelchair, and her arms had gotten weak from not using her walker, and she’d got heavier from not moving around, so Betty would lug her around with her heels dragging on the floor and through the bleached, crushed shell in the parking lot, where she would lay her down until she could get their old army jeep’s door open, hoist her again, and pull her up into the passenger seat. Aunt Sip cussing the whole time.

Now she pulled a pillowcase over Aunt Sip’s head, hiding the stricken face, and lugged her, arms hooked under her armpits, down the narrow hallway of the apartment. Out back, the property was enclosed behind a seven-foot wooden privacy fence. The museum’s visitors, when there had been any, would wander through the “garden” looking at the wildlife, which in the old days included swamp rabbits, a great blue heron, two bald eagles, an osprey, a spoonbill, six different kinds of poisonous snakes, a sting ray in a big aquarium, a mangy coyote in a chicken cage, Russell, and some parrots imported from the Virgin Islands. There weren’t any parrots native to this area, but people liked to think there were. Out of all that, the only thing left now was Russell, who’d gotten so old and fat he could hardly move except to raise his head to snatch, with surprising vigor, his two-week-old yellow pimply chickens or hunks of gray and sheeny beef.

Russell’s hide was so dark as to almost be black, and he was broad as a barrel. She could hardly see his clawlike feet poking out from his fat sides. He lived in a few inches of water in the bottom of his too-small pit, the walls of which were just four feet high and slippery on the inside, though Russell was far too fat to climb out now even if he’d had the opportunity or the inclination. Which he might have had during the past few days, since Betty had avoided feeding him, and the last couple of nights his call had woken her up, a loud bellow and a hissing moan. She hoped Russell would be able to handle Aunt Sip, and that she wouldn’t have to cut her up into pieces for him. She didn’t think she could do that.

She heaved Aunt Sip’s head and shoulders up onto the top of the pit’s wall and rested a moment. Russell took no notice except to cut his old slit eyes toward them and stay still. After a little rest, Betty took hold of Aunt Sip by her fleshy hips, like grabbing a giant sack of tough blubber or something, and shoved her a little more over the wall, so that now Aunt Sip’s hands touched the dry floor where the pit’s water had receded in the heat. Russell blinked. Betty rested again, then took Aunt Sip by her wrinkly, discolored knees and heaved her so that most of her went on over into the pit, then pushed at her old horny feet and fell hard onto her bony bottom from the effort. The silence just after was huge, the scuff of her nervous sneakers on the concrete as loud as the scratch of some great beast at the door. But then there was a thrashing noise from the pit and she looked up to see Aunt Sip twirl rapidly through the air, and heard another little splash, and a crackling, ripping sound, the pit walls getting knocked so hard they might crack and fall over.

Betty backed away from the pit on her bottom so as not to see inside there, until she reached the door, got up, and went inside without looking back. She walked through the apartment and into the museum. She stopped in front of the Je’sus diorama. Looked at the mummy boy standing there, holding his little spear, ever in between whatever had summoned him to stand and what would’ve come next. A hunt, maybe, or some kind of a dance. “Would you want me, Laughing Boy?” she said aloud. “Would I be a holy woman in your tribe? Or would y’all just sacrifice me to the gators?”

She went out into the shell parking lot and across the still-deserted highway, debris and sand skittering along it from the wind picking up hard from the gulf, the sky full gray and beginning to boil. She made her way to the beach. No one was out, not a soul down toward the public beach or east toward Perdido Pass. The waves white-capped and thrashing, brown, seaweedy, wind whipping her thin, limp hair. Windblown sand stinging her bare legs and face. It was a big storm coming in, maybe the worst she’d ever seen.

Triptych by Daniel Wallace

Shelby County

Building a coffin is a demanding but satisfying project for the ambitious carpenter to undertake, and entails a number of skills, including edging, corner joinery, trim, and finishing. You don’t have to be an expert carpenter, but the more experience you have the stronger the coffin will be. The last thing you want is for your coffin to fall apart. Ninety-four pounds may not seem like a lot, but if the corner joinery is weak you can bet on disaster. You can bet on catastrophe. Better safe than sorry, as my wife would say.

Choosing the wood. Hardwood veneered plywood is made of thin slices of hardwood, including oak, birch, maple, ash, or cherry, that are factory-glued to a soft, plywood substrate. You can buy this at any lumber store. Depending on the time of year it may have to be special-ordered, so it’s a good idea to start the process a week or two before you’re actually going to need it. You may find this difficult: building a coffin while its future occupant is still alive presents a number of questions, among them being, You’re not God, how do you know for sure she’s going to die? Well, just look at her. She weighs ninety-four pounds! You think she’s going to live? You hope so, sure, but hope was something you gave up last month, so the most productive thing you can do now is to build a coffin. It’s a good — and practical — distraction. Just hope she doesn’t hear you hammering.

Corner joinery. I know: I’m a broken record when it comes to corner joinery, but it’s by far the most important part of this project. You can use fluted dowels or plug-covered screws. Screws are especially attractive for three reasons: they don’t demand special equipment; they act as their own clamps by drawing the sides and ends together; and they are ideal for caskets destined to be shipped long distances, if, for instance, the future occupant insists on being buried in a plot in California, beside her mother and father, even if she moved to North Carolina years before, following her husband, who could find work nowhere else. One thing to take into consideration here is if this decision, this desire, to be buried so far, far away was made under duress, or if her mind was muddled by medication, or maybe the chemo. In those instances it should fall to the husband to decide, regardless of what other family members might think. But just in case, use the screws.

Trim and finishing. Moldings make an enormous difference to the look of any do-it-yourself casket. As a general rule, put the largest moldings along the bottom, smaller moldings around the lid. Personalizing your coffin, of course, is one big advantage of the handmade option. Create a design. Carve her initials on the side. You can add custom cushions to the interior, or maybe just wrap a favorite quilt around some bed pillows. Are you really going to keep those pillows anyway? They’re covered in hair, her hair, hair as brown as it was the day you met her. What kind of life would that be? Especially if you fulfill her last request, which is to remarry. The new wife can’t be expected to sleep with that quilt, those pillows, in that bed — not that you have plans to remarry, but who knows, things might change. Things will change. That’s the thing about things: change is all they do.

Summary. That about covers it. Following these instructions will ensure your coffin will be the best possible coffin you could build, a box you can be proud of — or a box of which you can be proud, for those of you, like her, whose goal in life it was never to end a sentence with a preposition. I don’t mean that. She had other goals, many, among them: to be kind, to love me with all her heart, to live a longer life. But what can you do? Nothing, it turns out. You can’t do anything, so you might as well build her a coffin. In a way it’s like holding her forever — like that, but not that. Nothing is like that. Nothing nothing nothing.

I remember the old man perched in his second-story window, milky behind the wavy glass, glaring at all us kids like we were the mice and he was the hungry hawk. We played in his yard sometimes. I never met him. I thought — in my nightmares — that one day he’d pitch himself through the window and grab one of us, hold us in his arms until we crumbled, sucking our life out through his withered chicken-skinned body and dragging himself back inside, appearing at the window again, waiting for another one of us to drift into his gaze, living forever. He didn’t live, though: one day he died. It happened the way it happens when you’re young: on a different plane, like clouds. I just remember wearing the coat and tie I never wore, the shoes so tight my toes bled, in a church we never went to, surrounded by the smell of the strange and old. We headed back to his house after, and I went inside for the first time. His ancient wife shivered in a big green chair on an Oriental rug, not even crying: I think she was all dried up. I ate a little sandwich, then I went outside to see if he was still there at the window — and he was. I knew he would be. He waved, all friendly now, and I waved back, I don’t know why. My throat felt strangled, my eyes so dry I thought they’d crack. Then he disappeared, fading back into the dark, and I never saw him there again. I didn’t tell anybody. How could I? I didn’t know what it meant, or could mean, because even that young I knew I didn’t believe in anything. I told my wife about it, though, twenty years later. We were in bed in the dark. Just married, our lives ahead of us — so far ahead we couldn’t even see them from where we were. I wanted to tell her everything, though, everything about me, and so I did, and part of the everything was this. It had stayed with me all these years. The story scared her, of course, but not the way it had scared me. I asked her what she thought it meant. It means you’ll be a ghost one day, she said, and so will I, and she cried as if this was the first time it had ever occurred to her, because she never wanted to think that even this — all of this, our brand-new world together, the love so big we almost couldn’t bear it — wasn’t going to last. It means I won’t be with you forever, she said, and she was right.

The men who live in the woods behind my house have been getting out of hand for some time. They are all in their midfifties, golfers formerly, and meat eaters — jolly men in general — but since their wives sent them away to live in the woods they have become grumpy and discontent. At night they bellow and howl. They want their televisions and ice makers and chairs beside the vents. They live like animals now in badly made straw huts and eat anything that wanders too close to their turf. We know what’s happening to our dogs and cats, but there’s nothing we can do: some of these men are very powerful; all of them belong to the country club.

Last night from a window I saw them leaving the woods and marching, single file, toward my home. They knocked at the door.

“What is it?” I said, staring at their wretchedness through the peephole. “What do you want?”

“Your telephone,” they said. “We’d like to use your telephone.”

“That’s out of the question,” I said. “You can’t come in. My wife—”

“Your wife?” one said.

“She won’t allow it.”

“His wife won’t allow it!” said a second man.

“His wife says no,” added another.

“She must be wonderful,” the first one said. “Really, I bet she is.”

“She is,” I said. “My wife is wonderful.”

“We knew your father,” one of the men said. “You’re not your father.”

Then they went away, grumbling, back into the woods.

Later in the night, in bed, I told my wife what had happened.

“They came here?” she said. I nodded. She was appalled. “I want you to go down there and tell them not to do that. Tell them never to come here again.”

“Now?” I said. “It’s like midnight.”

“Now,” she said. “For me.” She kissed me on the cheek.

I walked down the little trail which led to the woods behind our house. I saw a light, followed it. The men were cooking squirrel around a fire. They were drinking coffee from old tin cups. They bellowed and wailed. But they seemed to be having a pretty good time.

“Hey, fellas,” I said, and all the bellowing stopped, and they looked up at me and smiled. “Please don’t come around our house anymore. Okay?”

They looked at each other, then into the fire.

“Okay,” they said, shrugging their shoulders. “Fine.”

It didn’t seem to mean that much to them. All they had wanted was the phone.

When I turned to go I could see my house on the hill above me, and watched as one light after another was killed and it was all darkness. It seemed I could even hear the doors shut and lock, as my wife prepared for sleep. My house seemed to disappear into the black sky. I paused.

“Going away so soon?” one of the men said. The fire was bright, warm.

“Yeah,” said another. “And just when we were getting to know you.”

The Junction Boys by D. Winston Brown

Ensley, Birmingham

Colesbery Simon had been home three months and seven days before he decided that the way to get his life back was to deal with his ex-girlfriend’s father. Years since they’d seen each other, but her story had become his, no matter how long it had been, or how far away he was in the world. He and his ex, Chelsea Gradine, first met in a small side room of the library in their high school, a connected but isolated spot with walls of dusty books and a few shoulder-high shelves lined up in the middle, which created a space where Colesbery met Chelsea frequently in the months that followed. That first day he’d been looking for The Invisible Man, the Wells book, but Chelsea gave him the Ellison one with its near-identical title. He read the prologue that night and the next day asked her was she trying to be funny. She told him no, that her choice had nothing to do with them being different races, it was only that she had a crush on him and thought he’d like the book. She’d been like that about most things, direct, except when it came to her father. That, Colesbery learned on his own.

He didn’t make a plan. Instead, he called Lincoln Fontaine, an old friend who’d always had a knack for knowing what needed to be known. They were meeting at a pizza place on Birmingham’s Southside, a few blocks from his old high school. When Colesbery turned off University Avenue onto 20th Street and headed up the hill toward Five Points South, his mind entered a maze of memories, most of which involved Chelsea. A minute or two later he passed the new coffee shops and restaurants, the Storyteller’s fountain, the pizza place, and then turned right. The street was narrow, with cars parked on both sides and a canopy of trees that cast everything in shade until near the intersection, and when the reddish brick of the block-long high school finally came into view, Colesbery felt his breath, momentarily, snatched. He found a parking space, and stared through the windshield. The school rose up like a brick horizon, one that had not changed since he graduated five years earlier. In reality, the school both had and hadn’t changed. A few buildings had been added on either end, some cosmetic niceties done, but the main building was the same, still with the brick ramp that curved up and in front of the school and spanned much of its length, before curving down and back toward the street.

“Thinkin’ of a master plan.”

The voice was a smooth baritone and came from behind Colesbery, and he knew who it belonged to without turning around. “’Cause ain’t nothin’ but sweat inside my hands,” Colesbery replied. By the time he finished the lyric, Lincoln Fontaine was standing next to him. Even though they’d seen each other a couple of times since Colesbery came home, they grasped each other’s right hand, smiled at each other, then leaned in and embraced.

“What’s up, army man?” Lincoln said.

“Like I told you last week, and the week before that, and the week before that, just happy to be home, bro.” Somehow Lincoln had found out Colesbery was home two days after he got there. He stopped by the apartment the next day with a slab of ribs from Rib-It-Up and a prepaid cell phone for Colesbery, told him it was for when he needed something. Lincoln had kept his distance since, stopped by once or twice, mainly just called here and there to check, a minute conversation at the most.

“Thanks again for the ribs,” Colesbery said, turning back to stare at the high school.

“You don’t want to know,” Lincoln said.

“You found her?”

“I find everything.”

Lincoln was one of those people who could always make money, who could always talk to people, anywhere, and get them to talk to him. He was wearing jeans, an Ensley High School sweatshirt, and a pair of Converse, but he was equally at ease when in a pinstripe suit. He’d started his own computer consulting company out of college while he worked at Alabama Power, but he quit Alabama Power when it took off.

“Tell me,” said Colesbery.

“Tell me how you are,” said Lincoln.

“I’m good. I already told you that.” Colesbery turned toward Lincoln now. He’d heard some rumors about Chelsea having come back, and he wanted to know what Lincoln had found out. “How long since you seen her?”

“How long you gone play games?”

“Bro, relax.” Lincoln turned his head toward the high school. “You remember being there and—”

“Of course.”

“—how we use to sit in the parking lot after school listening to old-school rap. Remember when we first heard Eric B. and Rakim, drinking Thunderbird and smoking that good Bush Hills bud.”

“Of course I remember.” Colesbery knew Lincoln wasn’t stalling, but rather, trying to figure out if Colesbery really meant to do what he’d told him he was going to do. They’d been friends since they got into a fight on the playground as second graders at Holy Family Elementary. They had already known each other, but fighting made them respect each other, especially because neither of them had really won, just sort of knocked each other around and down, then wrestled to a stalemate.

“What do you think happened to her?” Lincoln asked.

“You know what happened.”

“I don’t mean the drugs,” Lincoln said. “Something was always off with that girl, always walking around with those feathers in her hair, disappearing for days.” He paused. “You dated her for two years. What was really up with her and those mood swings?”

“Just tell me what you found out.”

Lincoln turned away, started walking down the hill. “Let’s get that pizza first,” he said over his shoulder.

Colesbery watched him disappear around the corner. He turned and looked at the redbrick school once more, and began thinking about the library. He’d had girlfriends before Chelsea, but none like her. She wasn’t that glow-in-the-dark pretty, but her eyes were open whenever Colesbery asked for something in the library, like she actually heard him, like she wanted to help him. She cried right there between the shelves in that back room when Colesbery told her about how he’d walked in on his parents doing drugs so often as a child that when he walked in that last time, he just thought they were asleep. She’d taken his hand in hers, leaned her head on his chest, and cried.

By the time Colesbery entered the restaurant, Lincoln was already in a corner booth with a pizza, a pitcher of beer, and two mugs. He filled them both as Colesbery slid into the booth across from him.

“Thought you might want a beer.”

“I didn’t come here to drink beer.”

Lincoln took a sip from his mug. He bit a slice of pizza. Colesbery stared, not touching either.

“Did you call that number I texted you?”

“I don’t need to talk to anybody.”

They stared at one another. Colesbery waited, watched Lincoln’s face until it fell away, the public one full of pleasantries and vague language, and then Colesbery saw the face of Lincoln that he knew, a brown angular face with a narrowed heaviness in the eyes that only truth could render.

“He’s still here,” said Lincoln. “He moved out of the house in Ensley Highlands.” He plucked a piece of pineapple off the pizza and tossed it in his mouth. “But he still has that tire company down on Avenue F, and yes, he still walks around the block at lunchtime.”

The information at first swirled around Colesbery’s head, then he felt that twitch in his stomach that always came before a mission. The plan materialized in his brain — how he would do it, when he would do it, where he would do it. He rubbed his eyes and then stretched his fingers wide, balled them tight, stretched them again, and settled back into the moment.

“You sure about this?” Lincoln asked. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

Colesbery focused his eyes, picked up a slice of pizza but didn’t take a bite. There were too many ingredients, too much going on on the pizza. He put it on the plate. “Yes, I do,” he said. He didn’t say any more, just looked at Lincoln, his eyes steeling themselves as if seeing beyond his friend to a target.

“Well, I guess that’s that.” Lincoln refreshed his beer. “You don’t drink anymore.”

Colesbery took a gulp from his mug. The coolness felt calming on his throat, in his stomach. “How’s your business?”

“You don’t care about that, but I got a job for you when you’re ready.” Lincoln motioned for the waitress. “Remember Mrs. Gordon? She passed away last month.”

Colesbery knew Lincoln was worried, was trying to get him to back down. But it got to him anyway. Mrs. Gordon had been one of those teachers attracted to strays. And there was no more a stray than Colesbery when he entered her sophomore literature class. Dead parents, a halfway-locked-up alcoholic uncle he lived with, clothes that were ill-fitted and seldom clean — Colesbery became her cause. She lived in Bush Hills too, a few blocks away on the boulevard, and she often gave him rides to school, even invited him over for dinner sometimes. But he didn’t respond, didn’t accept her attention, until she put a book on his desk one day in class and walked away. He left it on the desk when class was dismissed, but she placed it on his desk again the next day, so he took it. At that time he was a skinny kid who only wanted to avoid attention, and confrontation. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was the first book he ever really read. He read it and reread it, especially the chapter where Douglass fights Mr. Covey.

“What happened to her?” asked Colesbery.

“Old, as far as I know. I just figured you’d want to know.” Then he asked, “What did you do with all those books she gave you?”

After he read the Douglass book, Colesbery had put it back on her desk one day before class. She’d asked if he’d read it, he’d answered yes, and that led to her bringing book after book after book. Every time he put one back on her desk, she reached into the top drawer and withdrew another one. He read them all.

“My uncle burned most of them when he set the apartment on fire.”

“She was good people.”

It was Mrs. Gordon who’d lost her copy of Invisible Man and told him to check it out of the library. He’d made the mistake in thinking she’d meant the Wells version (even though he also read it later). Mrs. Gordon had been a stout brown-skinned woman, widowed and childless, who always seemed so much taller when she stood in front of the class and peered over her glasses at each student, calling on them, cajoling them, encouraging them, correcting them, explaining things to them day after day through the semester.

“And Mr. Foster finally retired.” Lincoln drank from his glass. “Remember when he caught us with that beer behind the school?”

Colesbery was glad not to keep talking about Mrs. Gordon, but he also knew Lincoln was working him, trying to get to the real reason for his plans. Lincoln had always had a knack for getting people comfortable, getting them talking, and then getting them to reveal more than they intended.

“I need to go,” Colesbery said.

“Is it happening again?”

Lincoln had stopped by the apartment one day when things weren’t going well. There had been a smell, an odor like fried onions mixed with stale mayonnaise, which had triggered something, transported Colesbery, made him see things: jagged faces, torn limbs, trails of blood. Colesbery had heard the knock, yanked open the door to the courtyard, and tried to hit Lincoln, but Lincoln was strong enough to grab and hold Colesbery till he calmed, till he convinced Colesbery that what he thought he was seeing was not real.

“I’m good,” Colesbery said. “Thanks for the information.”

That night Colesbery couldn’t sleep. His bed always felt too big, too something, so he often couldn’t sleep there. Around midnight, after staring at the ceiling for an hour, he got up and went into the den. He watched TV for a while, tried to sleep on the couch. No luck. Again he got up, and then went out into the tiny courtyard. He didn’t have any chairs, but the courtyard made him feel more secure.

The square footprint of his apartment was evenly divided into four quadrants: the bedroom, the den, the courtyard, and the galley kitchen and bathroom split the last quadrant. Both the den and the bedroom had sliding glass doors that opened up onto the courtyard. The first week, Colesbery sat staring from the bedroom, then from the den, at the outside door in the far corner of the courtyard. He checked the lock five times a night.

Now he just leaned against the outer wall, peering into the apartment, thinking about what Lincoln had told him. He wouldn’t find Chelsea. She was strung out, probably dead, but in the wind for certain. She was a year older than him, and light-years ahead in experience. Colesbery knew about cheap wine — Mad Dog, Red Dagger, Boone’s Farm — but Chelsea drank vodka, tequila, and she knew about drugs and where to get them. White neighborhoods that Colesbery didn’t feel comfortable in sometimes. Nobody’s going to bother us, she would say as they rode past small one-story sixties and seventies houses, almost all of them with a small beat-up car and a pickup in the driveway. You think that because you white, Colesbery would say.

It was six months before she introduced him to her parents. Her father, slim and wiry with stringy black hair on its way to gray, owned a tire wholesale shop in downtown Ensley. They shook hands when Colesbery picked her up to go to Junior Achievement, but Colesbery sensed his displeasure at this black boy there to pick up his daughter. Colesbery picked her up every Tuesday for the meetings, which they did actually attend, but they also left early often, rode around and drank, and found dark, quiet, secluded spots to park. At school, Chelsea had taken to pushing Colesbery back into the side room between the shelves and giving him hand jobs. He’d stand between the two shelves, a hand on each to maintain his steadiness; she would unzip his pants and stroke Colesbery till he finished, and when he did, it was often in the pages of a book, which she would then fold closed and return to a shelf. But when they were in the car, Chelsea always pulled him hard inside of her, often grabbing his bare behind with a force that thrilled him. What always surprised him was her need to look him in the eyes when he came. Sometimes he would lower his head and she would place her hands on his cheeks and lift up his face. The first few times they used protection, but when she told him she was on the pill, that she wanted to feel him inside her, Colesbery complied. Sometimes she would cry afterward, tell Colesbery nothing was wrong, that she was just happy. And he wanted to believe her, even after he found out it wasn’t a lie, but wasn’t the truth either.

When Junior Achievement ended, Colesbery started working at Rally’s, and when he got off at night, he would sometimes bring Chelsea a burger and some fries and a strawberry soda. He always parked on the street at the end of the block and walked up the alley. From there he could slip in through the fence and make his way to her window. It was dark, shaded by trees and a fence, and her parents were usually in the den on the opposite end of the house. But one night they were on the porch when Colesbery got there. The grass was thick and usually soundless, but there were still a good number of leaves on the ground, so he had to be careful, move slower than usual. As he neared Chelsea’s window, he heard her parents talking. Before he tapped on the window, her father said his name. Colesbery froze, but no one was coming at him around the front corner of the house. They were discussing him. Her mother, a woman with long and frizzy auburn hair and a penchant for cookbooks, was saying she didn’t like it much better than her husband, but she thought it was a phase, that it would pass. Mr. Gradine then said that he just didn’t want that nigger coming around his house into the next year, and his friends were starting to talk, saying that she was tainted now. He’d heard the word before, but hadn’t expected it here, not after so many months of her parents being civil to him. He wanted to confront them, but just stood frozen, looking into the window of her bedroom. She was on the bed reading, but he couldn’t knock, not then.

He’d left, run back to his car, but only drove around. Fuck that, he kept telling himself. He was going to have to say something. An hour later, near midnight, he was back. Chelsea’s light was still on. When he got to her window, what he saw nearly made him throw up. Chelsea’s nightgown was puffed up near her neck and just over the tops of her breasts, but she was naked from the waist down, her face turned toward the window where he stood. He thought she saw him, but her eyes were blank, absent. Her father was on top of her, then pushed himself up till he could turn and sit at the foot of the bed. He reached down and pulled up first his boxers and then a pair of dingy work pants. Colesbery looked from him to her and back to him. Mr. Gradine rose and left. Colesbery didn’t knock, his anger from earlier now transformed into something that he didn’t know how to handle.

Standing now in his small courtyard, Colesbery replayed those moments in his mind. He could have done something, should have done something. But he just turned and ran, from Chelsea, from everything. Didn’t tell her what he saw either. When he did see her again, there was distance between them, which became less the sporadic interruption and more the norm. They argued more and more. He began not showing up when he said he would. Once, when he was high and stopped by, her father was on the porch smoking a cigarette. She ain’t here, he’d said, but kept talking. Colesbery noticed the empty beer cans, the cigarette butts. That night Mr. Gradine had been the first to suggest Colesbery go to the service, and for once something made sense to him. He could remember it now just as clearly as when it happened. He’d wanted to tell the man to fuck himself, that he should leave, but getting away sounded like the best option. Getting as far away as possible from Birmingham, from his drunk uncle, from school, from Chelsea.

The next morning, after putting cereal into a Styrofoam bowl, Colesbery took several minutes to pour enough milk to nudge the cereal, the white just visible here and there, peeking out. Still, he couldn’t look at the milk, kept seeing faces, boys halfway around the world, dead. He wasn’t surprised, the milk thing had been happening since he got home. He left the milk sitting there, got dressed, and left.

His uncle lived in the same run-down apartment. Colesbery knocked, then walked through the unlocked door.

“What the hell you doing back? You must’ve come back to see ’bout that little white girl who was having your baby when you left.” His uncle was sitting in a goldish-brown chair from another era. His hair was nearly gone now on the top, and his arthritis had turned his fingers into twisted roots and knots. “Go to the kitchen and get me a beer.”

“Just came to see how you doing, Uncle.” Colesbery went to the kitchen and grabbed a can from the refrigerator. “Got to go to the bathroom,” he said as he handed it over. He bypassed the kitchen and went to his uncle’s bedroom. In the same drawer, in the same box. Colesbery exhaled, surprised his uncle hadn’t sold the.38 by now, and relieved at knowing he wouldn’t have to find another one. He checked it over, then tucked it into the back of his pants.

“You coming back?” his uncle asked when Colesbery returned to the den and told him he had somewhere to be.

“I’ll bring you a twelve-pack, Uncle,” he said, and left.

Downtown Ensley hadn’t changed. Shortly before noon, Colesbery parked his pickup in a lot near Carter’s Barbershop and walked back the two blocks, past Hawkins Park. When he was in high school, he and his friends would sometimes gather there, call themselves the Junction Boys ’cause they had been a couple of times to the Function in the Junction, an annual festival that took place in that park and celebrated the musical history of Ensley. But they didn’t know about the history then, just liked to call themselves the Junction Boys because it sounded like it carried weight, like there was something there to be respected. Didn’t know it then, but now it seemed to Colesbery that everything in the world came down to respect. It was his uncle who had told him about how Erskine Hawkins had written and recorded that song as a B side, and about how a white dude recorded it later and had made a boatload of money, none of which went to Hawkins. “It’s always respect,” Colesbery said aloud.

He walked almost to the corner, near where they placed the historical marker on the Belcher-Nixon Building, and waited. He wondered what it was like back when the streetcars used to come through and all the black folks would unload. The housing projects were gone, replaced by some new Hope VI housing. It was clean and newish and modern. Maybe they got some hope now, he thought. Yet nothing felt much different, even though he’d driven by the sign of some smiling city councilman touting the changes that were happening.

When Mr. Gradine rounded the corner like he had at lunchtime for as many years as Colesbery could remember, he came face-to-face with Colesbery, almost walked into him, and stopped. He was shorter than Colesbery remembered, and his face was lined with age and his eyes looked tired.

“You remember me?” asked Colesbery.

“I don’t know where she is.”

“I don’t care about her.” He had the pistol now in the waistband in the front of his pants, and raised his shirt, then placed his hand on the handle. “I’m here for you.”

Mr. Gradine looked around, over Colesbery’s shoulder, then to the right toward the KFC. “What does that mean?” he asked.

“Need you to know when you made her get that abortion, the child you—”

“What are you talking—”

“—killed was mine.”

Chelsea had tracked Colesbery down and told him. When he told her about what he saw that night outside her bedroom, she said that was the first time her daddy had done that in close to eight months, that she knew she was pregnant before that.

“I didn’t kill any child.” Mr. Gradine’s face scowled into indignation. “Back then I thought you were just a ni—”

The shot was not loud. Mr. Gradine seemed more startled than injured. He put his hands on his chest, then wavered left till the bricks caught him, held him up for a moment. The stain spread down his white shirt from beneath his hands. He slid down the wall, the whole time staring with disbelief at Colesbery.

Colesbery stepped closer, and as he was looking down into Mr. Gradine’s eyes, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a playing card. When he first thought of this moment, he envisioned leaving behind his dog tag, a spent cartridge from Afghanistan, and his Airborne shoulder patch, but he’d changed his mind; he would not end his life here. He’d decided this moment, if he got away, would be his beginning. The playing card was white, and it said JOKER in black in opposite corners. In the middle of the card hovered a jet-black figure, a dancing joker.

Colesbury pinched the card between his index and middle fingers, then flicked it. The spinning card flew in an arc and landed on Mr. Gradine’s chest, just above the growing bloodstain.

“What’s that for?” asked Mr. Gradine through the blood and spittle gurgling out of the corner of his mouth.

“I’m playing my race card.”

Colesbery waited till death claimed the eyes, then turned and walked away. He heard no sirens, no screams, nothing. Things would be different now, he told himself.

All the Dead in Oakwood by Marlin Barton

Montgomery

His name was Hiram. The moment she met him at the songwriters group she knew who he was named after. He’d right away told her no, he did not go by Hank as the man himself had done. If he looked his age, she put him at twenty-nine. When she asked, he nodded. She knew people thought of thirty-three, her age, as their Jesus year. “So is this your Hank year?” she asked. He only stared at her, and when he did, he looked way past twenty-nine, and she wondered, fleetingly, if that look was the only way he’d ever reach past the age Hank had lived, then dismissed this thought as the kind of dark notion she was prone to, dismissed it until later when she learned he’d done time for assault, twice, and after he told her the stories, she suspected the second time he’d meant to kill the man.

“Polly,” she told him when he asked. It was a name she’d hated as a girl, thought too plain, simple, old-fashioned. But at eighteen, after she’d learned to play guitar so well that her parents bought her a Martin D-28, she first heard the song “Pretty Polly,” and the beauty and tragedy of the hundreds-year-old murder ballad, its very intensity, made her hear her name in a new way that weighed heavy on her in a way she liked, felt connected to.

That first meeting had been eight months ago, though it seemed much longer. Now she was in the cab of his truck, their guitars stowed in hardshell cases in the bed, where they’d put them after playing at the bar on Fairview, and she wondered, not for the first time, if names could be destiny. Another dark thought. She knew their source, but that never made them go away.

They were headed again to the place they’d ended up that first night, Oakwood Cemetery, at the top of the hill where Hank was buried next to French pilots killed in training at Maxwell airbase during World War II. She remembered now, because she couldn’t not, the feel of the cold marble slab against her ass as they fucked over Hank at four in the morning. Even as she heard the slap of his body against hers she realized he knew what a younger man didn’t, that every stroke of his dick was a stroke against death, a futile one. Afterward, when they pulled their jeans back on, she told him about the French pilots, and that the French word for orgasm meant little death. “So did you die?” he asked. “Many times over,” she answered. What she didn’t say was that she’d been dying, many times over, for years.

When the light changed, he pulled off Fairview and onto Perry Street. He’d once joked about their moving into one of the big houses there, maybe next to the governor’s mansion, when he sold a song that ended up a hit. She noticed he’d talked about his success, not hers. So far, none of their group had sold anything to a Nashville publisher, which is why he’d said they should call themselves Songwriters Anonymous.

He reached toward the dash and turned off the Steve Young song, “Montgomery in the Rain,” that had been playing. Hi, as she often called himbecause she didn’t want to disparage Hank’s true namehad claimed Young was Hank’s heir. After the silence between them had replaced the music, he said, “You don’t have to do this.”

Her first thought wasn’t about his pleading tone, nor about the sound of too much whiskey mixed in his syllables, but rather how horribly predictable and unoriginal he sounded. He’d never allow such a line into one of his songs. That he thought he knew what she wanted did not surprise her. She’d counted on it. She had her ways of handling him, not the least of which, this night, was singing her harmonies off-key on every song, and that was a hard thing for her to do, took great effort, and he knew that too.

“I don’t understand why you did it. On ‘Seven Bridges Road’ you sounded like you’d never sung it before, never even heard it, when you know it backward and forward. Hell, you even know the road it’s about, know it like absolutely nobody else does, I’d say.”

“Fuck you for that last remark. Just fuck you.” They were passing the governor’s mansion now, heading up the hill to the bridges over I-85, which came to its end a mile farther down. “And I keep telling you, the song’s about a mythical road. That’s the only reason I can sing it at all.”

“How many bridges does Woodley Road have south of town?” he said.

“Seven.”

“And where was Steve Young living when he wrote the song?”

“Here.”

“You even knew the man whose backseat Young was riding in when he started writing the song.” He stopped talking, appeared to swallow against a dry throat, then opened and drank from the flask between his legs. “Let me tell you something else.” His voice began to shake now, not out of anger, she knew, but fear, afraid like a child, because that’s what he was, had always been, no matter how many men he’d beaten. She’d need to hear enough of both fear and anger in his voice before the night was over.

He took another drink. “You say you can only sing that song because it’s mythical. That’s bullshit. You live on that road, the real one, the one you can’t leave. Instead of you trying to break up with me at Hank’s gravebecause that’s what you want, that’s what you were telling me with all your shit harmonies, that’s what I been feeling from youwhy don’t we just go to your dead husband’s grave, the one you killed, and you can try breaking up with me there? How ’bout that?”

“Fuck you, Hi. Just take me to where we’re going, and then you can do whatever else you want.”

“Take you where you died up under me?”

“That’s right. Where I died over and over.”

“How often do you die? Every time you think of him?”

“Yes, and every time I think about how he died.”

They were headed downhill now, still on Perry, about to cross Dexter where parades and protesters marched their way to the capitol on Goat Hill, where politicians had once sent boys off to slaughter for reasons they little understood and where the politicians were still no better than the rutting animals that once grazed on its slopes.

“You say how he died. You mean how you killed him, don’t you? Just how drunk were you that night?”

“Not as drunk as you now.”

“Drunk enough, then.”

She had been drunk, enough so that she could not deny it or let go of the fact, but angry too, more angry than drunk. She’d been playing a dive way down Woodley Road, past its miles of Spanish moss and seven bridges. Her husband knew how rough the place was, so he’d gone with her. He sometimes turned jealous, ended the night by accusing her of playing up to the men, wanting more ones and fives thrown into her open guitar case, implying a woman with a guitar in a place like that was no better than a stripper, and some strippers, he told her, would take it outside, burn their knees on the carpet inside a truck. Was jealousy a sin punishable by death? She didn’t think so, but she had punished him, had killed him. A circle of red as bright as her anger hanging over them, her hands raised above ten and two, the impact slamming him against the door, and her husband’s body twisted into an impossible shape, dead on arrival, and the child she hadn’t known about would never arrive. All lost, lost as she was on Woodley Road and on Hank’s lost highway, but she knew the destination she sought, a place a man named Hiram might take her.

They were on Upper Wetumpka Road now, passing the backside of the police station and city court, and just on the other side of the station stood the main entrance to Oakwood, where the bodies of Confederate dead and Union prisoners lay.

After he’d told her about his time in prison, first as a juvenile and later as an adult, he’d finally unburdened himself. A man inside Kilby would not leave him alone. Out in the yard others had crowded around the predator, knew what was coming. Hi joined the gathering, entered it with talk and laughter, and a sharpened piece of plastic, his first shiv, broke it off deep in the man’s stomach, and edged away with the crowd, the body left lying on the ground in their wake. The story had not frightened her, had only drawn her closer to him.

Just past the main entrance lay the graves of lost children, and beyond them the site where Hank’s body had first lain before he’d been moved to another hilltop and French pilots dug up to make room, punished in death for one man’s tortured fame and immortality.

“Say my name,” she said now into the silent cab, needing the reminder of who she was, her identity something older than her age. “Please, say it.”

“Why? You already know your name.”

“Don’t be smart. Just say it.”

“Polly.”

“No. Say it. Say what I want to hear.” He turned onto the narrow asphalt drive that led up to the dead. Then she said, more quietly, “Sing it.” He would have to understand now, at least what she wanted to hear if not yet what she really wanted from him, what she knew he was capable of delivering.

“Polly, pretty Polly,” he sang and then began to hum the harrowed tune. “You want to end things with me the way the man ends things with Polly in the ballad? You want to kill me? That what you do to men? Because your breaking off with me will be my death. And why? Why do it? Aren’t we good together, or have been? Can’t we be again?”

The pleading was back in his voice, which meant the kind of fear a child feels was showing itself again. She half expected him to whimper, and realized if she did hear it, that’s when he would be at his most dangerous. He’d need to whimper.

He stopped the truck at the end of the French graves, where the final pilot had not had to give up his rest in peace, like the others, to the teeth of a backhoe. Hiram lowered his window and cut the engine. The hum of nighttime air filled the now-dark cab, a timeless song of crickets, a soft wind, distant frogs from the bank of the Alabama River, unseen but not far from them, down the far side of this hill they sat atop.

“You’re a child,” she said. “And it’s way too late for you to be a child at your age. Don’t you know that much?”

He surprised her by simply opening his door and stepping out of the truck. Then she heard him pulling his guitar case from the bed and dragging it over the side, as if something heavier than a guitar lay within.

She opened her door, closed it behind her, then walked around and closed his, watched the light inside the truck again dim and disappear. A three-quarter moon lit the white marble of the first of the two large, towering headstones, the grave on the left belonging to the first wife, who’d been determined to join her husband in death if she couldn’t lie beside his wrecked body while it still had lifeand that’s why his grave had been moved, easier to dig up Frenchmen than the dignified locals from wealthy families in order to make room for a headstrong ex-wife. Hank’s stone and marble slab lay to the right, and a low, white marble border wall surrounded the plot’s artificial turf, put down to prevent seekers from digging up pieces of hallowed ground. Beneath the moon the turf was subdued to a more natural, darker color. Hiram walked over to the marble bench, a dark figure but more than a shadow. He carried his guitar case, and then sat down, facing the stones. She slowly walked toward him, said his name, Hiram, quietly to herself, unsure why she now had that name on her tongue, felt as if maybe she were trying to conjure the spirit of something she couldn’t truly give name to. She sat down beside him, close enough so that in the warm night she felt the heat from his body.

He bent over, opened the case before him, and pulled out his guitar, a prewar Martin that had first been played before those pilots, with shouts or with silence, had met their deaths, most probably country or Appalachian songs echoing out of the guitar’s sound hole in some 1930s honky-tonk, or maybe more than one murder ballad. There were so many to choose from, such an ancient and timeless form. He began to play a quiet melody out of single notes, his fingers moving across the fretboard, his palm hard against the neck. He played so slowly it took time before she recognized the bare melody of “Cold, Cold Heart.” He always knew overplaying was senseless, could kill a song’s beauty.

“Why leave me now, why tonight?” he said as the melody disappeared into the dark reaches of two a.m.

“It’s the right time for me,” she said, and didn’t want to answer further, though she could have. But his knowing tonight was the ten-year mark of her husband’s death wouldn’t have been an explanation that made any sense to him as a cause for their end. Better to not offer him any explanation, leave him all the more frustrated.

“Have I not treated you good?” he said quietly over the sound of a diminished D chord.

“You have,” she said, “mostly.”

“Maybe that’s your problem with me. You’re a woman who wants awful treatment. Be careful what you wish for. I can give it to you. But you know that, don’t you?”

At first she remained quiet, gave herself time to think, to judge the moment. “Yes,” she said finally. “I do.”

“We didn’t have to come here tonight. You wanted this, whatever this is. Like in that song you love, when the man takes Polly riding into the night, toward her death, she knows where he’s taking her. He even tells her that her guess is about right, but it wasn’t a guess. It’s what she wanted.”

“That’s one version,” she said.

“It’s your version. Child that I am, as you say, I know you better than you think.”

“I don’t think you do,” she said, ready to push him now, goad him, play on his anger for the moment, later on his fears. She knew them, including one he’d never given voice to but was there, waiting for her to use.

“I’ve seen pictures of you as a teenager,” he said, “the ones you showed me where you’re wearing all that black, the crazy hair, the black makeup and fingernails. You were all Goth. Death as pretend. Little death. You’ve been drawn to it all your life, like some drug you want. Killing your husband and baby was the closest you’ve come. It wasn’t enough, was it? Just made you crave it more, thought it gave you all the more reason for wanting it. Fucking over a grave was foreplay for you.”

She waited to speak, bided her time, wanted to steel herself for all that would come. Then he began to play simple notes again, and she recognized the song she needed to hear but didn’t realize it until she heard the title line in the melody as he played “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive.” She could not look at him now, but she began, hesitantly. “That man in prison,” she said, “the one who wouldn’t leave you alone.”

He stopped playing. “What about him? Why bring him up now?” He looked toward the two headstones, appeared to read the engraved words, but she knew it was too dark for him to read them. He then began to sound two notes on the fretboard, the second note flat, the D string out of tune. He turned the tuning peg, tightening the string, hit the two notes again, waiting on her, she knew, looking for comfort inside the sound of the instrument.

“It wasn’t the way you told me, was it?” she said, ready now to push him beyond an irrevocable point. “He didn’t force you. You wanted it, and kept wanting it.”

He tightened the string again, hit the note that now grew sharper, and sharper again with another turn of the peg, and he kept striking the note, the sound climbing.

“You liked it. But you couldn’t live with wanting a dick. That’s why you killed him. So nobody would know.”

He twisted the peg hard, the sound beyond sharp, and she heard the sudden, awful snap of the metal, bronze-wound string. It sprang from the neck, and he caught a broken end, pulled its other end from out of the body of the guitar and held the two ends of the heavy-gauge string in his closed, tightened hands. She knew what he now wielded, and her blood surged and then seemed to thin, and she felt as if she were being lifted higher, climbing her way toward something without effort. All she had to do was let him bear her, not fight.

He raised his hands, the string taut between them, and in one motion threw it past her and toward Hank’s grave where it landed on his engraved marble slab, rolled toward the far edge.

She didn’t speak at first, waited only to see if his anger would show itself, but he neither moved nor spoke.

“You broke it on purpose,” she said. “For no reason? Just to throw it away?”

He took a slow breath, as if to mark the end of contemplation. “You know it wasn’t like that. The man did me harm, like you can’t imagine, unless you’ve suffered that and haven’t told me. Have you suffered it?”

“No,” she said, “not that.”

“Then why claim what you just claimed to know about me?” He lowered his guitar into the case, sat upright again, his back rigid, as if he were bracing or preparing himself for something he expected from her. “You had a reason. I want to hear you say it.”

Now she felt afraid, not of what he might do, but afraid to articulate the lie she’d told herself, afraid to reveal some empty, unfillable place within her for him to judge.

“You can’t answer. It’s all right.” He placed his right arm over her shoulder, gently. “I know the reason, and I know where you want to go.” He drew his arm higher, closer, pulled her toward him, intoning her name, and began to squeeze, his forearm now tight against the side of her neck, his bent elbow the spring-loaded hinge in a closing wedge. “I’m going to take you past where you want to go. Do you hear me? Are you prepared?” She felt his left hand upon her bare throat, felt his fingers tighten. She could not move her head, did not try. “Past it, and you’ll awake with breath. Are you ready?”

She could not answer with words, could only feel his hand closing, cutting off any form of utterance he might understand. All she could do was whimper.