Prison Noir

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Little girl! Poor little girl.”

  Reno was weak with shock, sickened. His heart pounded terribly—he didn’t want to die as his father had died! He would breathe deeply, calmly. He held the glass beads to the light. Amazingly the chain was intact. A thin metallic chain, tarnished. He put the little glass-bead necklace into the pocket of his khaki shorts. Hurriedly he covered the bones with dirt, debris. Pieces of the shattered urn he picked up and tossed into the cardboard box. And the barrel staves … Then he thought he should remove the bones also—he should place them in the box, beneath the debris, and take the box out to the landfill this evening. Before he did anything else. Before he washed hurriedly, grabbed a beer, and joined Marlena and the children at the lakefront. He would dispose of the child’s bones at the landfill.

  No. They will be traced here. Not a good idea.

  Frantically he covered the bones. Then more calmly, smoothing the coarse dirt over the debris. Fortunately there was a sizable hole—a gouged-out, ugly hole—that looked like a rupture in the earth. Reno would lay flagstones over the grave—he’d purchased two dozen flagstones from a garden supply store on the highway. The children could help him—it would not be difficult work once the earth was prepared. As bricks had been laid over the child’s grave years ago, Reno would lay flagstones over it now. For he could not report this terrible discovery—could he? If he called the Paraquarry police, if he reported the child skeleton to county authorities, what would be the consequences?

  His mind went blank—he could not think.

  Could not bear the consequences. Not now, in his new life.

  Numbly he was setting his work tools aside, beneath the overhang of the redwood deck. The new shovel was not so shiny now. Quickly then—shakily—climbing the steps, to wash his hands in the kitchen. A relief—he saw his family down at the shore, with the neighbors—the new wife, the children. No one would interrupt Reno washing the little glass-bead necklace in the kitchen sink, in awkward big-Daddy hands.

  Gently washing the glass beads, that were blue—beneath the grime a startling pellucid blue like slivers of sky. It was amazing, you might interpret it as a sign—the thin little chain hadn’t broken in the earth.

  Not a particle of dirt remained on the glass beads when Reno was finished washing them, drying them on a paper towel on the kitchen counter.

  * * *

  “Hey—look here! What’s this? Who’s this for?”

  Reno dangled the glass-bead necklace in front of Devra. The little girl stared, blinking. It was suppertime—Daddy had cooked hamburgers on the outdoor grill on the deck—and now he pulled a little blue glass-bead necklace out of his pocket as if he’d only just discovered it.

  Marlena laughed—she was delighted—for this was the sort of small surprise she appreciated.

  Not for herself but for the children. In this case, for Devra. It was a good moment, a warm moment—Kevin didn’t react with jealousy but seemed only curious, as Daddy said he’d found the necklace in a “secret place” and knew just who it was meant for.

  Shyly Devra took the little necklace from Daddy’s fingers.

  “What do you say, Devra?”

  “Oh Dad-dy—thank you.”

  Devra spoke so softly, Reno cupped his hand to his ear.

  “Speak up, Devra. Daddy can’t hear.” Marlena helped the little girl slip the necklace over her head.

  “Daddy, thank you!”

  The little fish-mouth pursed for a quick kiss of Daddy’s cheek.

  * * *

  Around the child’s slender neck the blue glass beads glittered, gleamed. All that summer at Paraquarry Lake, Reno would marvel he’d never seen anything more beautiful.

  End of Excerpt

  ___________________

  More about New Jersey Noir

  “Oates’s introduction to Akashic’s noir volume dedicated to the Garden State, with its evocative definition of the genre, is alone worth the price of the book . . . Poems by C.K. Williams, Paul Muldoon, and others—plus photos by Gerald Slota—enhance this distinguished entry.” —Publishers Weekly

  “It was inevitable that this fine noir series would reach New Jersey. It took longer than some readers might have wanted, but, oh boy, was it worth the wait . . . More than most of the entries in the series, this volume is about mood and atmosphere more than it is about plot and character . . . It should go without saying that regular readers of the noir series will seek this one out, but beyond that, the book also serves as a very good introduction to what is a popular but often misunderstood term and style of writing.” —Booklist (starred review)

  “A lovingly collected assortment of tales and poems that range from the disturbing to the darkly humorous.” —Shelf Awareness

  “What makes this edition such a strong example of the noir aesthetic is the vividly imagined settings and situations that it finds for all its dark doings. There isn’t a story in New Jersey Noir that doesn’t grab and hold your attention.” —Brooklyn Based

  Launched with the summer ’04 award-winning best-seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.

  Featuring brand-new stories (and a few poems) by: Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Safran Foer, Robert Pinsky, Edmund White & Michael Carroll, Richard Burgin, Paul Muldoon, Sheila Kohler, C.K. Williams, Gerald Stern, Lou Manfredo, S.A. Solomon, Bradford Morrow, Jonathan Santlofer, Jeffrey Ford, S.J. Rozan, Barry N. Malzberg & Bill Pronzini, Hirsh Sawhney, and Robert Arellano.

  From the introduction by Joyce Carol Oates:

  “New Jersey!—’The Garden State’—our fifth smallest state, with only Hawaii, Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island below it in land mass, yet it’s the state containing the ‘most murderous’ American city (Camden) and the state generally conceded to be, square mile per square mile, the most densely politically corrupt. (Louisiana has been, by tradition, the most corrupt of all US states, but in recent years Illinois has been closing the lead.) Atlantic City, Jersey City, Hackensack, Hoboken, Secaucus, Newark, Camden (three recent Camden mayors have been jailed for corruption)—in these cities as in others corruption isn’t aberrant but rather a way of (political) life . . .

  Sitting between the great cities of New York and Philadelphia, New Jersey has been by tradition a heavily ‘organized’ Mafia state, as it was at one time a northern outpost of the Ku Klux Klan, with a concentration of members in Trenton, Camden, Monmouth County, and South Jersey . . . In such ways, the most civilized and ‘decent’ among us find that we are complicit with the most brutal murderers. We enter into literally unspeakable alliances—of which we dare not speak except through the obliquities and indirections of fiction, poetry, and visual art of the sort gathered here in New Jersey Noir.”

  New Jersey Noir is available in paperback from our website and in bookstores everywhere. The e-book edition is available wherever e-books are sold.

  INTRODUCTION

  WRITERS ON THE RUN

  From USA NOIR: Best of the Akashic Noir Series, edited by Johnny Temple

  In my early years as a book publisher, I got a call one Saturday from one of our authors asking me to drop by his place for “a smoke.” I politely declined as I had a full day planned. “But Johnny,” the author persisted, “I have some really good smoke.” My curiosity piqued, I swung by, but was a bit perplexed to be greeted with suspicion at the author’s door by an unhinged whore and her near-nude john. The author rumbled over and ushered me in, promptly sitting me down on a smelly couch and assuring the others I wasn’t a problem. Moments later, the john produced a crack pipe to resume the party I had evidently interrupted. This wasn’t quite the smoke I’d envisaged, so I gracefully excused myself after a few (sober) minutes. I scurried home pondering the author’s notion that it was somehow appropriate to invite his publisher to a crack party.

  It may not have been appropriate, b
ut it sure was noir.

  From the start, the heart and soul of Akashic Books has been dark, provocative, well-crafted tales from the disenfranchised. I learned early on that writings from outside the mainstream almost necessarily coincide with a mood and spirit of noir, and are composed by authors whose life circumstances often place them in environs vulnerable to crime.

  My own interest in noir fiction grew from my early exposure to urban crime, which I absorbed from various perspectives. I was born and raised in Washington, DC, and have lived in Brooklyn since 1990. In the 1970s and ’80s, when violent, drug-fueled crime in DC was rampant, my mother hung out with cops she’d befriended through her work as a nearly unbeatable public defender. She also grew close to some of her clients, most notably legendary DC bank robber Lester “LT” Irby (a contributor to DC Noir), who has been one of my closest friends since I was fifteen, though he was incarcerated from the early 1970s until just recently. Complicating my family’s relationship with the criminal justice system, my dad sued the police stridently in his work as legal director of DC’s American Civil Liberties Union.

  Both of my parents worked overtime. By the time my sister Kathy was nine and I was seven, we were latchkey kids prone to roam, explore, and occasionally break laws. Though an arrest for shoplifting helped curb my delinquent tendencies, the interest in crime remained. After college I worked with adolescents and completed a master’s degree in social work; my focus was on teen delinquency.

  Throughout the 1990s, my relationship with the urban underbelly expanded as I spent a great deal of time in dank nightclubs populated by degenerates and outcasts. I played bass guitar in Girls Against Boys, a rock and roll group that toured extensively in the US and Europe. The long hours on the road not spent on stage gave way to book publishing, which began as a hobby in 1996 with my friends Bobby and Mark Sullivan.

  The first book we published was The Fuck-Up, by Arthur Nersesian—a dark, provocative, well-crafted tale from the disenfranchised. A few years later Heart of the Old Country by Tim McLoughlin became one of our early commercial successes. The book was widely praised both for its classic noir voice and its homage to the people of South Brooklyn. While Brooklyn is chock-full of published authors these days, Tim is one of the few who was actually born and bred here. In his five decades, Tim has never left the borough for more than five weeks at a stretch and he knows the place, through and through, better than anyone I’ve met.

  In 2003, inspired by Brooklyn’s unique and glorious mix of cultures, Tim and I set out to explore New York City’s largest borough in book form, in a way that would ring true to local residents. Tim loves his home borough despite its flagrant flaws, and was easily seduced by the concept of working with Akashic to try and portray its full human breadth.

  He first proposed a series of books, each one set in a different neighborhood, whether it be Bay Ridge, Williamsburg, Park Slope, Fort Greene, Bed-Stuy, or Canarsie. It was an exciting idea, but it’s hard enough to publish a single book, let alone commit to a full series. After we considered various other possibilities, Tim came upon the idea of a fiction anthology organized by neighborhood, each one represented by a different author. We were looking for stylistic diversity, so we focused on “noir,” and defined it in the broadest sense: we wanted stories of tragic, soulful struggle against all odds, characters slipping, no redemption in sight.

  Conventional wisdom dictates that literary anthologies don’t sell well, but this idea was too good to resist—it seemed the perfect form for exploring the whole borough, and we got to work soliciting stories. We batted around book titles, including Under the Hood, before settling on Brooklyn Noir. The volume came together beautifully and was a surprise hit for Akashic, quickly selling through multiple printings and winning awards. (See pages 548–550 for a full list of prizes garnered by stories originally published in the Noir Series.)

  Having seen nearly every American city, large and small, through the windows of a van or tour bus, I have developed a deep fondness for their idiosyncrasies. So for me it was easy logic to take the model of Brooklyn Noir—sketching out dark urban corners through neighborhood-based short fiction—and extend it to other cities. Soon came Chicago Noir, San Francisco Noir, and London Noir (our first of many overseas locations). Selecting the right editor to curate each book has been the most important decision we make before assembling it. It’s a welcome challenge because writers are often enamored of their hometowns, and many are seduced by the urban landscape’s rough edges. The generous support of literary superheroes like George Pelecanos, Laura Lippman, Dennis Lehane, and Joyce Carol Oates, all of whom have edited series volumes, has been critical.

  There are now fifty-nine books in the Noir Series. Forty of them are from American locales. As of this writing, a total of 787 authors have contributed 917 stories to the series and helped Akashic to stay afloat during perilous economic times. By publishing six to eight new volumes in the Noir Series every year, we have provided a steady venue for short stories, which have in recent times struggled with diminishing popularity. Akashic’s commitment to the short story has been rewarded by the many authors—of both great stature and great obscurity—who have allowed us to publish their work in the series for a nominal fee.

  I am particularly indebted to all sixty-seven editors who have cumulatively upheld a high editorial standard across the series. The series would never have gotten this far without rigorous quality control. There also couldn’t be a Noir Series without my devoted and tireless (if occasionally irreverent) staff led by Johanna Ingalls, Ibrahim Ahmad, and Aaron Petrovich.

  * * *

  This volume serves up a top-shelf selection of stories from the series set in the United States. USA Noir only scratches the surface, however, and every single volume has more gems on offer.

  When I set out to compile USA Noir, I was delighted by the immediate positive responses from nearly every author I contacted. The only author on my initial invitation list who isn’t included here is one I couldn’t track down: the publisher explained to me that the writer was “literally on the run.” While I’m disappointed that we can’t include the story, the circumstance is true to the Noir Series spirit.

  And part of me—the noir part—is expecting a phone call from the writer, inviting me over for a smoke.

  Johnny Temple

  Brooklyn, NY

  July 2013

  ___________________

  More about USA Noir

  The best USA-based stories in the Akashic Noir Series, compiled into one volume and edited by Johnny Temple!

  “All the heavy hitters . . . came out for USA Noir . . . an important anthology of stories shrewdly culled by Johnny Temple.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice

  “Readers will be hard put to find a better collection of short stories in any genre.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “A must read for mystery fans, not just devotees of Akashic’s ‘Noir’ series, this anthology serves as both an introduction for newcomers and a greatest-hits package for regular readers of the series . . . There isn’t a weak story in the collection . . . Strongly recommended for readers who enjoy mysteries published by Hard Case Crime, as well as for fans of police procedurals.” —Library Journal (starred review)

  “The 37 stories in this collection represent the best of the U.S.-based anthologies, and the list of contributors include virtually anyone who’s made the best-seller list with a work of crime fiction in the last decade . . . a must-have anthology.” —Booklist (starred review)

  “It’s hard to imagine how the present anthology could be topped for sheer marquee appeal . . . Perhaps the single most impressive feature of the collection is its range of voices, from Joyce Carol Oates’ faux innocent young family to Megan Abbott’s impressionable high school kids to the chorus of peremptory voices S.J. Rozan plants in a haunted thief’s head. Eat your heart out, Walt Whitman: These are the folks who hear America singing, and moaning and screaming.” —Kirkus Reviews


  “A less enlightened Temple cover collection of crime and mystery stories could easily reduce itself to stereotypical cartoons about white detectives with a whiskey bottle and a gun in the drawer but Akashic’s series takes itself very seriously in its mission to represent all aspects of a city’s dark side.” —Kirkus Reviews, Feature Story/Interview with Johnny Temple

  “For those who prefer their crime closer to home, there is USA Noir, a veritable greatest hits of Akashic’s long-running, acclaimed noir anthology series, rounding up solid gold blackness of the bleakest and darkest kind . . . Like Chuck Berry sang, ‘Anything you want, we got right here in the USA.’” —Mystery Scene Magazine

  Launched with the summer ’04 award-winning best seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books has published over sixty volumes in its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.

  Featuring Noir Series stories from: Dennis Lehane, Don Winslow, Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Susan Straight, Jonathan Safran Foer, Laura Lippman, Pete Hamill, Joyce Carol Oates, Lee Child, T. Jefferson Parker, Lawrence Block, Terrance Hayes, Jerome Charyn, Jeffery Deaver, Maggie Estep, Bayo Ojikutu, Tim McLoughlin, Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, Reed Farrel Coleman, Megan Abbott, Elyssa East, James W. Hall, J. Malcolm Garcia, Julie Smith, Joseph Bruchac, Pir Rothenberg, Luis Alberto Urrea, Domenic Stansberry, John O’Brien, S.J. Rozan, Asali Solomon, William Kent Krueger, Tim Broderick, Bharti Kirchner, Karen Karbo, and Lisa Sandlin.

  JOHNNY TEMPLE is the publisher and editor in chief of Akashic Books, an award-winning Brooklyn-based independent company dedicated to publishing urban literary fiction and political nonfiction. Temple won the 2013 Ellery Queen Award; the American Association of Publishers’ 2005 Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing; and the 2010 Jay and Deen Kogan Award for Excellence in Noir Literature. Temple plays bass guitar in the band Girls Against Boys, which has toured extensively across the globe and released numerous albums on independent and major record companies. He has contributed articles and political essays to various publications, including the Nation, Publishers Weekly, AlterNet, Poets & Writers, and BookForum. He is also the chair of the Brooklyn Literary Council, which works with Brooklyn’s borough president to plan the annual Brooklyn Book Festival in September.