Mississippi Noir

Moonface by Andrew Paul

Thief

When I was young I didn’t know real hurt, but was still somehow capable of inflicting real hurt on those around me. It’s cruel how often that sort of thing happens, but it happens, and I was one of hurt’s propagators, a child thirteen years vicious. And I think it was this viciousness, in part, that killed Yitzhak Cohen.

It’s important to know that he wasn’t Yitzhak to us then, he was Moonface. Moonface got his name from his scars — great, circular layers of pink and violet tissue covering his entire body. Not so much a disfigurement as it was an extra layer splashed across him.

After the Six Million, some of the more unfortunate Jews gave up on their European ruins and crossed over to America, trickling down as far south as Thief, Mississippi. Some of them started businesses, worked in the First National Bank of Thief, but many simply made ends meet at the edge of town near the river, quarantined from any sense of the real world. This is where Yitzhak, where Moonface, wound up with a handful of others.

Moonface worked in the Jefferson Davis District School cafeteria, ladling out gruel to the pubescent. The first day on the job, Moonface wore a greasy T-shirt and slacks under his standard-issue apron, but we didn’t gawk at his scars. Instead, we stood on our toes over the glass buffet barrier to see the tattoo. Most of us had never even seen ink in person yet, thinking it was reserved for gangs and brawlers and other lowlife idols.

“What’re those numbers for?” my buddy John asked Moonface.

“Keep track of all women I stuck it in,” Moonface said in broken English, handing John a tray of beef stroganoff. “Now go fuck you.”

Their interchange spread through lunch before the next bell, and as we left for geometry, we saw Principal James careen out of his office toward the kitchens. Moonface wore sleeves from there on out, and kept mostly quiet, but the number was already etched into our memory as clearly as it was on his forearm.

“Nobody could fuck that many girls,” John reassured himself later that day on our walk home after school. “Their pecker would fall off.”

As the fall semester dragged on, our theories on Moonface became more and more elaborate, increasingly grisly in their details. We became obsessed with the camps and their industrial murder. I suggested that he survived the worst Nazi death internments.

“It was a secret pit that JFK still won’t even talk about because it’s so shocking. The place where only the really threatening Jews were sent. Like Asswitz times one thousand,” I whispered to John over our pizza.

“They only fed them slimy pizza once a week, but served on those crackers they like so much just to taunt them,” John added.

“Why would they serve them on something they actually liked, dipshit?” I asked.

“Psychological warfare,” he replied knowingly. “The worst of tortures.”

“Do you know why he only works up front here?” I asked, my voice dropping even softer than before.

“Why?” John said, suppressing his metallic, wiry grin.

“’Cause of the ovens. How do you think Moonface got those scars? He was too mean for gas chambers, so they decided to throw him in a furnace, but the furnace just spit him right out.”

We stopped talking, feeling we were approaching a truth we hadn’t meant to near. Behind the serving line, Moonface looked toward us from across the room. Even then I knew it was too loud in the cafeteria for him to hear anything I said, but I worried he felt us encroaching on that same truth. We were quiet the rest of lunch.

There was a girl in all this, of course. Nicole. Four years our senior, and pretty much what you’d expect. Cheerleader. Straight-A student. Gold irises, I swear. Beautiful and sad and tired of all the rest of us, and with good reason. Her suitors were a series of rotten, pawing Goliaths, the last of whom roughed her up enough to get himself sent to a cellblock for a few months. Her mother was gone. Her father, Richmond, was a leering mess of a patriarch for the remaining household. I never heard stories about beatings or late-night sessions, but I was as much out of the loop then as I am now, so who knows.

I only saw Nicole and her father interact once, and that was enough for me. Enough for a predetermined image of her in my mind, anyway. The county bus dropped us off too early for school every day, so John and I spent about half an hour each morning shooting the shit near the steps until they opened the doors for state-issued breakfast biscuits and prayer.

One particularly swamp-fogged morning, Richmond pulled up in his rattling slag-heap car with Nicole in the passenger seat. The pair shrieked at each other from inside the cab, but were drowned out by the sputtering of the exhaust, as though their volumes were turned all the way down. I nudged John, and the two of us watched their muted shouting match from the safety of the yard. After about ten minutes of this, they were both maroon from bellowing, and Richmond raised his hand to slap her. She looked at him without flinching, waiting for the blow, as he froze in place, then lowered his arm and said something quietly.

The wind changed direction briefly, causing the burnt-oil smoke to billow around the car instead of rising behind it. Nicole opened her door as the plume surrounded her, and I heard Richmond say, “You don’t burn quite as bright as you think.” By the time she made it out of the exhaust, Nicole composed herself anew, like nothing happened.

In my ignorance, I found it arousing how she bottled her distaste so well, how she let it twist into something which fueled her successes, and I somehow hoped it could one day propel her out of the groping pull of her life and into mine.

I thought I was made for Nicole, given these adolescent rationalizations of her pain. The one time I tried to slap her ass in the hallway she spun around, as if with some sexual harassment sixth sense, and just fried me with her eyes.

“Go ahead,” she said in front of John and me, turning back around while arching her butt toward us. “Do it.”

I had never been so terrifyingly hard in my life, and I dropped my open palm to cover my crotch.

“Yep,” she said, and walked to class.

I was late to Mississippi history for whacking off in a bathroom stall, and never spoke to her again.

Moonface talked to her, which infuriated us. Nicole talked back, which infuriated us even further. What was more, they seemed to enjoy talking to each other, like it was something they looked forward to every day. The lunch line halted whenever she caught up with Moonface.

“How goes your day?” he would ask.

“My day goes fine,” she would answer, then make some joke about the food, or try to convince him to see her cheer at the next home game. This continued for a number of weeks until I couldn’t stand the injustice any longer.

“Get ze move on, Juden,” I finally shouted one day in my best German accent. Everyone around me giggled.

“Ah, sprechen Sie Deutsch?” Moonface said to me over Nicole’s shoulder.

“What?” I said, sensing my classmates stepping aside, separating me from the pack.

“Deutsch. Sprechen Sie es?”

I backed against the wall behind me.

“You speak German like natural. Like some of men I knew back there,” Moonface explained, leaning forward while reaching up to rest his arm over the heated buffet lamp.

Part of his right sleeve caught on his forearm so that the last few digits on his tattoo showed. Since the state consistently denied budgetary increase requests, we were annually warned to take our trays from under the scalding metal, not over it. Now, Moonface rested his scars on top of the heater, not taking his eyes off me.

“I didn’t say anything German,” I muttered.

“Did you not say Juden? Jew?” he asked.

Nicole glanced back at me before walking toward the tables. Only then did Moonface momentarily break his gaze.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“You don’t think so?” Moonface said, returning to me, his eyes widening in mock surprise. “Could have fool me.”

His arm still lay across the heater, and my eyes began to water from imagining the sensation. Kids started to snicker again.

“Well. Double serving for you who fool me,” he announced, doling out with his left hand extra portions of oily spaghetti onto a tray.

“I’m not hungry,” I said.

“I’ll keep tray warm for you in case you change mind,” Moonface offered, and I heard his skin unglue sickeningly from the lamp covering as I rushed to my usual seat next to John.

“We’re getting rid of Moonface,” I declared.

My weekends were dull since I wasn’t allowed to see my father anymore. The previous summer, my mother convinced a court to keep me to herself. I only saw him a handful of times after that, and would continue to do so until he died two winters later on his own birthday. Mostly, I entertained myself from then on with solitary things — comic books and masturbation and walks near the Thief River.

On a Friday in October, after I finished both my comics and myself, I followed the riverbank south, tossing stones toward birds and water bugs, until I reached the tiny Jewish settlement outside of town, comprising mostly single-wides and leaky houseboats. It was strangely quiet to me, so I crept behind the treeline until I arrived at the lean-to homes, as if expecting some Maccabean ambush. I knew one of those places belonged to Moonface.

I stayed crouched behind a line of bushes, waiting while the sun set in pastel brushstrokes behind a small grove to my right. Even in my coat, I shivered, felt my breath leave my body with each exhale, and I sat back on my hands to keep them warm. One by one, pairs of candles began to glow through the windows of the homes, every residence except one.

I made my way to the lightless, sagging trailer and peeked through its rear window, only making out vague silhouettes of furniture through the curtains. A nine-stemmed candleholder balanced on the inside windowsill directly in front of me. I heard movement, and ducked down to peek around the corner.

There was a creak as the porch door opened, then Moonface walked outside, staring at his overly polished shoes while heading for his truck. He paused, noticing the candles glinting from his neighbors’ homes, then spat on the ground and got in his ride. I watched him turn the ignition, straighten his shirt collar in the rearview mirror, and head down the gravel road toward town.

The window above me was cracked slightly to let in the slight breeze, and I edged it further open to part the curtains and peek into the vacant room. Without thinking, I hopped one leg over the sill, slowly easing myself into the quiet house, careful not to knock over the candleholder.

One glance around Moonface’s living room was enough to take everything in — there was a fold-out sofa bed, a couple of box-crate nightstands, and a small bookshelf near me at the back window. A large radio stood by a hallway which led into both his kitchenette and bathroom, and that was it. I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I went to use the toilet.

After pissing, I turned on the light and opened the mirrored medicine cabinet, finding only a couple bottles of Darvon, a toothbrush, and some toothpaste. The kitchenette proved equally anticlimactic, revealing nothing except a few bits of clutter on the sink’s countertop near the gas stove and a TV tray littered with sealed mason jars full of clear liquid. I walked — really, only a couple steps — across the room, kneeling down eye level with the collection. A thin layer of sediment rested at the bottom of each, and I picked one up, shaking the mixture into an opaque potion while heading back toward the living room.

I kicked my feet up on the couch, and looked out the window into the bruised dusk, then worked at unscrewing the mason jar’s seal. After a brief struggle, grunting alone in the living room, I managed to open the lid, and instantly recoiled at what smelled like a combination of black licorice and turpentine and my father. The first sip nearly ruined me, and I winced to keep from retching onto Moonface’s carpet. As I cleared the water from my eyes, I noticed a small picture frame sitting on top of the radio set across the room. I set the drink on one of the crate tables, then went over to examine the photograph.

It was almost too dark to see by that point, but by angling the frame toward the remaining trace of sunlight, I realized it was a picture of a large family posing for the camera. An attractive couple stood behind their two sons and three daughters, all wearing what I assumed were their best clothes, at least what looked to be much better than the thin, itchy threads I wore for class portraits. The three daughters had the same crooked grin of their father while the sons’ eyes pinched at the corners as they smiled, like their mother. None of the children could have been older than me.

I choked down a couple more gulps, and tried to figure out which was Moonface, but nightfall soon made it impossible to examine the photo any longer. I took another swig, sputtered, then closed the jar to place it in my jacket pocket. My brain began to congeal, and I leaned back into the couch, staring out the window at the faint candlelight across the road from the other families’ homes.

The sound of tires crushing dirt and stone jolted me awake, and I saw a pair of headlights coming down the way. I jumped up and nearly fell to one side, then remembered the concoction in my pocket. I staggered toward the radio and placed the photograph back in its place as I heard Moonface’s truck creakily decelerate toward his home. When his high beams crept into the room, I fell to my hands and knees and slithered toward the back window, quickly leaping out the way I came, and eased the sill near shut like I found it.

The front door opened and slammed, and I found myself unable to leave just yet. Despite my lightweight drunkenness, I wobbled up enough to peer through the window once more. Moonface turned on the overhead light, and I saw his right eye was swollen closed. Small flecks of blood dotted his clothing. He ripped off his dress shirt while making his way to the kitchen, and I bent a little lower. I looked toward the ground and noticed the candelabra laying in the dirt — I must have knocked it out during the escape. I heard footsteps again, and knew it was too late to try to put it back.

Moonface sat on his couch with a small sandwich bag of ice held to his brow and a full mason jar in his other hand. It wasn’t long before I heard another vehicle approach from the road. It parked, and its driver hurried up the steps and threw open the front door.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Nicole said.

“I was try to help,” Moonface explained, taking a sip from his glass.

“That wasn’t help. What do you suppose is going to happen now?” she said. She wore her cheerleading outfit.

“It was good game, though. You perform well. And we won,” he said, smiling.

I staggered slightly as the drink worked its way through me, and I bumped against the wall. Moonface and Nicole looked toward the window, and I turned my back toward them, sliding down and pressing as close against the house as I could while staring into the woods ahead of me. For some reason beyond me now, I thought if I couldn’t see them, maybe they wouldn’t be able to see me. I’ve lived most the rest of my life that way.

Even so, I waited for the window to open, for Moonface to grab me by my hair and pull me into his home as it transformed into some dark, Shylockian lair lined with weights and scales and knives for pounds of flesh, but nothing happened. I turned around and peeked in once more, and saw Nicole straddling Moonface on the sofa, kissing him as he let his drink fall to the ground.

“Moonface is fucking Nicole,” I told John between heaving breaths, cold sweat dripping from my arms and neck.

He looked behind him into his house, saw that his stepfather was passed out on the couch, and closed the door as he stepped outside to meet me.

“Bullshit,” he whispered.

I tried to say, It’s true, but only got the first word out before vomiting near his front steps.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” John nearly shouted, leaping aside from my spew.

I finished as quietly as I could, then withdrew the mason jar from my inner coat pocket and wiped my hand on my sleeve. John snatched the glass from my hand, opened the lid, and winced in gleeful disgust.

“So you found some of your old man’s brew stashed away in a closet. That explains it,” he said.

I reached into my pockets once more, taking out the small menorah and handing it to John. His eyes opened wider, then he took a sip of the liquor and struggled to maintain a straight face.

“So, Moonface makes moonshine,” he rasped. “I guess we know how Nicole pays him for the stuff.”

I led John back toward the village as we passed the mason jar back and forth, drinking the bare minimum to appear like men. It was a clear night, the kind that feels like the stars are spotlights trained on you and everything you do. Now I realize it’s always like that, even when you can’t see them, but back then I thought I could lose their sights, so I made John follow me into the trees until we reached Moonface’s home.

A few minutes later John said, “I guess you didn’t hear what happened at the game tonight, now that I think about it.”

“No,” I replied too quickly, somewhat sore at my ignorance.

“Well, I tried to invite you to come, but I guess you were out on your little Peeping Tom mission already. Moonface got in a fight near the end of the match.”

“What?” I said, remembering his black eye.

“Yep. He was sitting on the front-row bleacher nearest Nicole, not being shy at all about why he was there. But she wasn’t being too shy about it neither.”

“What’s new?” I said.

“Yeah yeah. But then her dad caught on to what was happening, and he wasn’t having it.”

“Huh.”

“He must of been on something like this stuff you got here, because as soon as the time ran out on the clock and everyone stood up to cheer, he hopped down from his bench a few rows up and clocked Moonface upside the head.”

“Shit,” I said.

“It was a pretty good hit. For a sucker punch, I mean. It took everyone a minute to realize what was going on, but then everyone stepped aside and it was just Moonface and Richmond going at it in front of Nicole and the whole lot of them.”

“What happened then?” I asked, seeing the village lights through the pines.

“Well, people were trying to pull them apart, and Richmond called him a kite or something. Moonface just let go of his collar, then took off for his truck and left before anyone could stop him.”

By this point we neared the edge of the trees, and quietly made our way over to Moonface’s shack. We took spots behind the back window, and leaned in as close we comfortably could.

Oh my God, John mouthed.

Nicole stood naked by the radio holding the picture frame, illuminated only by two recently lit white candles nearby. The flickering glow washed over her so that no one part was ever fully revealed, like an apparition.

“Which one is you?” she asked Moonface, still examining the photograph. He lay on the sofa, naked as well. His scars patterned his whole body.

“Which do you think?” he answered, the edges of his eyes creasing.

She squinted and held the picture closer to her face, then half-smiled as if figuring out some small puzzle.

“You were very beautiful,” she said.

There was a squeal of tires and a roar of gears shifting too quickly. Everyone looked in the direction of the incoming din.

“You should go,” Moonface said, standing up and grabbing his clothes.

Nicole didn’t say anything, only put the photo down. Headlights raised into view.

“No,” she finally said.

“Stay inside. They will see you,” Moonface said slowly, briefly eyeing the window.

“I don’t care. That’s all they do. They just see me,” she told him offhand, walking toward the pile of her uniform.

I motioned back toward the woods to John, but he shook his head.

“Are you crazy?” he whispered, still trained on Nicole’s body.

A pair of beat-up, jangling cars rushed toward the house, their doors opening before they fully parked. Four men leaped out of the vehicles, a couple of them clutching bats. A roughed-up man near the front cocked a pistol.

“Cohen, you kike, get your ugly ass out here!” he shouted.

A couple lights turned on in neighboring houses. Moonface looked at Nicole one more time, his eyes crinkling again as she slipped on her skirt, and he walked outside. I tugged at John’s shoulder and dragged him into the woods, and we huddled behind a tree trunk.

“Shalom,” Moonface said, exiting his home.

“Where is she?” Richmond demanded.

“Inside,” Moonface said.

A small breeze passed through the trees, around us, through the village. Richmond swayed slightly, as if he were only a pine sapling.

“What’s she doing in there?” Richmond said.

“Celebrating our win,” Moonface said. “Go team.”

“Fuck you,” Richmond spat, advancing toward him. The group followed, and I saw John’s stepfather was among the posse. I couldn’t bring myself to look to John next to me.

I realized I still held the near-empty mason jar. Years later I am unsure of my logic, I hope that it was for the right reason, although a part of my mind croaks otherwise, but I threw the glass through the woods at the window. It crashed through the pane, knocking over the two candles nearby, and rolled out of sight. John patted me on the shoulder like I accomplished something heroic, but there was something distant in his gaze, as if he had seen into me, farther into myself than I could see on my own, and it worried him.

The men out front jumped at the noise. Nicole peered through the window into the woods, directly toward us, but we were in the forest, and the sky didn’t shine on us, so we were hidden. Moonface took the distraction to swing at Richmond, connecting with his jaw and causing him to drop his pistol while, behind them, a trace of smoke twirled out the window near the curtains. Nicole glanced to her side and withdrew from the window, and I never saw her again.

A couple of the men went at Moonface with their bats, and he was able to dodge the first few swings. The fire inside his house fanned across the room, up the drapes, accelerated by the liquor-soaked carpets. Moonface heard the roar and whipped around. John’s stepdad saw it as an opportunity to bring his bat across his back. It made a sound like striking a mattress, and Moonface groaned as he fell to one knee.

“Nicole!” her father shouted.

Moonface managed to roll over, and kicked John’s stepfather in the shins. He let out a yelp and fell backward as Moonface scrambled up toward the flames that seeped out the front door. Richmond felt around in the dirt like he’d lost a pair of glasses while the other men stepped backward slowly.

Two things happened near simultaneously; John and I still disagree on the exact order. He remembers Richmond finding his pistol and shooting Moonface in the back, causing him to spin around and tumble into the burning trailer. But I know what I saw — you don’t misremember when a moment burrows into your memory, they’re always there to recall as they were preserved:

Richmond shot and missed, the bullet hitting the doorframe. Moonface did spin around, but only to look at Richmond one final time. The sides of his eyes furrowed as in his photograph, and he leaped inside.

I heard the distant cry of sirens while the neighboring families started racing toward the giant fire, although it was clear there was nothing else to be done. Richmond steadied himself on the hood of his car, repeating his daughter’s name to no one. I remembered the remaining jars of moonshine in the kitchen, and was about to grab John when he beat me to it.

“We’ve got to get the fuck out of here,” he said.

I nodded, and we raced through the trees back toward our homes. A few seconds later, I heard a great roar from the fire and, for a moment, our path shone brightly ahead of us before darkening again to a dull glow.

The next morning, I hid the menorah under the cinder-block risers of my house and feigned ignorance of the previous night’s tragedy.

“That poor girl,” my mother said after getting off the phone with her gossiping friends. “She was so pretty. It must have been terrible trapped in there with that monster of a man.”

The story warped even more within the week, in part due to John’s near-constant retelling of his account to our classmates, and soon, Richmond was fleshed out for the story. Richmond the brave, doting father, who tried to save his rebellious daughter from the leering, deformed cafeteria worker from foreign lands. He defended her honor at the homecoming football game, and Moonface — the name caught on — then kidnapped her at gunpoint, forcing her to drive them to his lair in a final, desperate attempt to have her. The two foes grappled outside the house, Richmond wrestling the gun from Moonface’s hands and mortally wounding him before the creature fled into the house. He then torched the place from the inside. If he couldn’t have her, then no one could. We were nowhere to be found in the story.

To solidify the legend, it was rumored that the emergency crews couldn’t find any trace of bodies in the smoldering wreckage, as if Moonface and Nicole burnt away in the heat completely. Years later, when I finally could bring myself to investigate this bit of the story, I found information scarce, records lost, graves forgotten, and I couldn’t confirm or deny this addition to Moonface’s legacy.

I’m much older now, I’ve more or less kicked drinking, and I love a woman who loves me in kind, despite this story, the true one, which I have also told her. She is not as beautiful as Nicole, she quit school the same year I did, never cheered for a game in her life, but she is full of wonder, and that’s almost the same. On many days, that’s even better.

I am nothing like Moonface, but I wish I was. There is very little light from the night sky where we live now, it’s all washed away in the muddy glow of the nearby city. Sometimes, while we make love to each other in the dark, I look down at my body to find it lit in patches from streetlamps through our window blinds. I imagine these illuminations are scars from my youth, from the things I am powerless to understand. I look at the menorah resting on my bookshelf while I imagine myself Moonface, and my hurt is not hidden like those around me. I never have to explain the past to anyone ever again. Everyone will see it etched into my skin, but they won’t realize what it’s doing to them until it’s done.

God’s Gonna Trouble the Water by Dominiqua Dickey

My Dear, My One True Love by Lee Durkee

Gulfport

They have the most beautiful eyes, crazy women do, differing tints and gleams, true, but always that pinprick of wilding incandescence, the swamp gas rising. Oh, I have known crazy women with winter’s constellations in their eyes, with flying saucers, brooding lava fields, aurora borealis, and diaphanously pulsing fireflies I have chased with my kill jar across many a darkening field. To put it less romantically, I have fucked the bipolar crazy, the schizoid crazy, the posttraumatic crazy, the obsessive-compulsive crazy, the klepto crazy, the compulsive-liar crazy (especially the compulsive-lair crazy), and, on at least three separate occasions, the nymphomaniacal-multipersonality-sadistic crazy, and so on and so on (I promise); however — and this is important — it is not the madness that enchants but its symptomatic glow, that prick of purest torn-off wildly jagged piece of light I can detect now and then, never for long, usually toward dusk, like a different creature spying out from within the lover you thought you knew: this inner being furtive, crouched, wary, neither evil nor benign but uncomprehending, alien, dangerous with fear.

When a man tells you he has known crazy women he should be able to roll up his sleeves, lower his pants, and part his hairline to show you the accompanying scars. If there are no scars, or few, or faint, then he is not a true lover of crazy women. And he cannot claim to have been lucky in avoiding such fissures because crazy women invariably attack at your weakest moments, when you are vomiting into a plant or narcotized in a recliner or submerged chemically, emotionally, or otherwise into a bathtub. And the more fragile the crazy woman, the more likely she is to employ others to pummel, stab, strangle, and plunge. Crazy women can summon willing accomplices from Parchman prison, from graveyards, Ouija boards, and tarot decks. Streetlights flicker as they walk under. Oh, I have known crazy women.

We are all, of course, responsible for our own crazy lovers. Yes (as we’ve been lectured many times), it’s our own damn fault. And it is. No one to blame but that morning mirror, however blood-speckled or webbed or slashed with obscene lipstick glyphs threatening to castrate you or throat-slit some foul bitch of the imagination you’ve supposedly been fucking on the side. We stare into these mirrors while touching the white seams of scars, remembering, remembering, at times even bringing the scar tissue to our tongues so as to taste that distant pain we apparently learned nothing from. And why do we refuse to learn? Why do we succumb to that lunar lure again and again? The sex, of course. Yes, sex with crazy women is a sleek, diabolical fairground ride rumored to have decapitated two teenagers just last week in Pascagoula. C’mon, we’ve all boarded that ride, haven’t we? We’ve all knowingly taken home the insane, haven’t we? — from the floating slot machines of Biloxi, from the C-scar strip bars lining our beaches? No? Well, then uncork, I say. Unless you are a small man or sleep very deeply then I highly recommend sex with crazy women because crazy-woman sex lasts forever. They embed themselves into your mind like earwigs so that decades later you will be able to savor vivid memories of crazy-woman sex, a montage of baffling rituals, sinister accoutrements, terrifying confessions, shattered furniture, and shocking cumcalls in which hitherto confined interior personalities emerge, one by one, like bats from an attic, and always, always, the unexplainable and indiscrete wounds. Oh, I have known crazy women.

However, when I say I have known crazy women, I do not mean to say that I have always known the extent of just how crazy they were (prior to their arrests, etc.). Quite the opposite, I have a long history of underestimating the craziness of crazy women, and because of this shortcoming, let us call it, I have had, many times over, to swear them off entirely, to go cold turkey on crazy women, but it appears I command an eerie capacity for denial, and of course on some level, more mundane, I must be crazy myself. After all, no man is completely sane after his fourth crazy woman. Crazy women lay eggs into your ears, and if you’re not good at deciding whether women are crazy, or gauging how crazy they actually are, or if you’re just game about giving murkily beautiful women the benefit of the doubt, then you end up considering some strange and spooky theories on life. Creaking doors open into pink bedrooms piled high with the predatory eyes of stuffed animals. Crazy women tend to describe these haunted bedrooms to you vividly. They entice you into having sex within the confines of these supposed realities, the domed ceiling painted lasciviously with hovering goddesses and guardian angels and wild-haired prophets, and for a while the two of you live together in that space-time vacuum conceived during some childhood trauma involving an unleashed adolescent brother or a drunken stepfather or so-called uncle. Inside this hallucinatory mansion, you throw a bunch of dishes at each other or murder one of the neighborhood dogs, you explain things to cops or thank them profusely, and life goes on in this manner until someone gets led away in handcuffs or we find ourselves late at night once again shoveling away under the Mississippi stars, my dear, my one true love.

Hero by Michael Farris Smith

Magnolia

Hero and his dog Spur stare down the tracks, mimics of one another in the summer sun. Hero’s ribs can be counted from a block away and he’s clotheless except for sneakers and cutoffs. Spur’s thin face hangs on his neck and his coat is mud-colored and matted. Both underfed, both with hollow faces, four eyes staring down the tracks anxious for God knows what.

“Dumb-ass,” Wayne grumbles as the Ford clatters past Hero. “He’s got as much sense as a brick.” Wayne turns right at the first street past the tracks. At the third house on the left he pulls into the dirt driveway. I live in the house next door.

Living on the tracks in Magnolia has never been that bad. I can deal with the rumbles and whistles that seem like some strange heartbeat of small-town south Mississippi. It’s living across the tracks. Only the tax assessor’s office and the mailman acknowledge us. All the business buildings have that long-moved-out-of look, with boards nailed across busted windows and spiderwebs that look like nets swinging from the corners of abandoned entrances. The large wooden houses are grand but have paint chipping so bad that after a strong wind it looks like snow has fallen across the yards. Kids steal bikes because theirs were stolen. The neighborhood is filled with abandoned cars, teenage moms, dirt lawns, and makes people say, “I bet a long time ago this used to be such a nice neighborhood,” as they ride by with their windows up and doors locked and air conditioners blowing.

“Son of a bitch,” Wayne says as he gets out of the truck and slams the door shut. His muscles flex through the thin T-shirt he wears to work nearly every day. I get out and we stand there looking at Hero and the dog, still glaring down the railroad tracks as if the drive-in movie was on the other end. “Hero! Get the hell away from there, boy!”

“He’s all right, Wayne. Won’t be a train until later on,” I say as I walk behind the truck on my way home.

“I ain’t worried about no train. Wish one would hit his ass.”

I keep walking, too tired to listen to any more of Wayne’s rumblings. I’ve suffered ten hours of it already today. I feel heavy, drained from a day in the sun. I climb the concrete steps of my house and sit down on the porch in a recliner I picked up out of somebody’s garbage one day, and watch Hero and Spur.

Nobody remembers the last time Hero talked. He’s about eleven now, and he quit somewhere between five and six, though the date isn’t certain because Wayne and Doris either didn’t realize it or plain ignored it. There’s Wayne’s side of it, that Hero’s dumb and born that way, and Doris says little more than that except she swears one day Hero will snap out of it. And I have my own notions, listening to the crashing and tumbling that goes on in the house next to mine, the walls so thin I hear Wayne’s beer cans crush at night, and I grimace when he screams, “Goddamnit!” and Doris yells, “Wayne, stop it!” and the racket of a wrestling match follows complete with traveling furniture and flying pots.

Over my shoulder a timer clicks and a buzz begins, and in the window behind me a blue neon hand shines with red letters that read, Darna’s Psychic Readings. The light comes on at six o’clock every evening and glows until midnight, signifying the doctor is in for the curious, confused, unoccupied minds of the city blocks surrounding us. The door opens and I know Darna’s behind me.

“’Bout time. Where y’all been?” a slow, angry voice asks.

“Workin’, Darna. Where else?” I say without turning around.

“Where else my ass. You and Wayne ain’t been workin’ all this time. I’m open now so don’t sit on this porch long. I don’t want you running off business.” When she finishes she goes inside.

“Guess you heard that,” a softer voice says.

I turn around and there’s Haley. Her aqua tank top fits loose, race-car-red lipstick her only makeup. “Oh, hey. I didn’t know you were there.”

“I was trying to be quiet. Darna scares me too.”

“She doesn’t scare me. I just get tired of hearing it, that’s all. I swear to God. One day I’m outta here.”

“Yeah, right,” Haley says. She’s Darna’s younger sister, but as different from Darna as a kitten from a bull. Her legs and arms show off a July brown and she’s skinny like me.

“I am,” I say again. “One day.”

“And go where and do what? Maybe you can join the circus.” She laughs and juggles imaginary bowling pins.

“Go ahead and make fun, Haley. Just like Darna does. Never takes me serious.”

“Stop it. You know I’m not like Darna. Just relax. You want a beer?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You’ve got until I get back to quit pouting.” Haley goes inside and returns with Budweiser cans for each of us.

“C’mon. Sit down,” I say, and get up to let her have the recliner. I unfold an aluminum chair that’s leaning against the wall. “You want in on the checker match?”

“I might. Bet Hero puts it to you tonight.”

“He’s not bad. I used to let him win but I think it’s the other way around now. What’ve y’all been doing all day?” I ask her as she leans back in the recliner.

“Nothin’ hardly. Darna carried me over to Hudson’s and I got some nail polish. Only ten cents a bottle. I got every color in the rainbow. See?” She holds her hands out and every fingernail is a different shade. “Wish I worked there instead of Rose’s. Bet they get better discounts.”

I look up and Hero and Spur are making their way toward the porch. Two squirrels scamper down the oak tree by the road and like wayward lightning bolts run quick circles around Hero’s feet. Spur leaps back, but doesn’t bark. Hero bends down and puts out his hand and one of the squirrels runs up his arm and sits on his shoulder. The other plays between the two of them.

“That is so weird,” Haley whispers.

“A little Tarzan,” I answer. The first squirrel jumps off Hero and they scurry off. Hero and Spur resume their walk toward us. “C’mon, Hero. Haley doesn’t think I’m your checker equal.”

Hero climbs the stairs and I grab a milk crate from the edge of the porch and place it between us. Under the crate is a box holding checkers and a board, more pink and gray than red and black. Hero folds his lanky legs Indian-style on one side of the crate and I sit in my aluminum chair on the other. Spur nestles next to Haley and she scratches the back of his neck.

We play into the twilight. Hero smiles shyly when he wins and I see words forming in him so clearly that I feel I could reach down his throat and pull them out. Haley cheers for Hero, poking fun at my bad moves and slapping Hero on the back whenever I’m forced to crown him. It’s warm with Haley here — she laughs and flirts and I imagine this as our house, our porch.

“I told you he was good,” she says whenever he gets me in a pinch. I laugh and tell Hero he’s just lucky.

“Hero! Get your ass over here! Your momma’s got supper ready,” Wayne yells from next door. It’s nearly dark now. Hero scampers to his feet and he and Spur rush home, kicking up dust along the way. Haley is the next to go.

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

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

“When will you be back?” I ask.

“When do you want me back?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You wanna work or not?”

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

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

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

“I guess. I don’t know. What for?”

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

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

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

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

“Ain’t nothing free.”

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

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

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

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

“In there,” I direct Wayne.

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

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

“So?” I say.

“So what?” she answers.

“What’d he want?”

“You know I can’t tell that.”

“C’mon, Darna. It’s just Wayne.”

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

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

“Same for everybody,” she says.

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

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

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

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

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

“Jesus Christ! What am I doing?”

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

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

I stare at him.

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

I fold the checkerboard and slide it under the recliner.

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

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

“Not since last night,” I answer.

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

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

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

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

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

“Two nights now,” I say.

“I know it. Sad, ain’t it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not now,” I answer.

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

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

“Like what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Christ, settle down.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Get your ass up and get in.”

“Wayne, I swear—”

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

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