The Best American Noir of the Century

by James Ellroy

  In the hilly cemetery behind the First Lutheran Church of Ransom-ville, New York, there is a still-shiny black granite marker at the edge of rows of Nissenbaum markers, JOHN ALLARD NISSENBAUM 1872–1957. Chiseled into the stone is How long shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer you? Such angry words of Jesus Christ's! I wondered who had chosen them —not Constance or Cornelia, surely. It must have been John Nissenbaum himself.

  Already as a girl of eleven, twelve, I was pushy and curious, asking my mother about my missing grandmother. Look, Mother, for God's sake where did she go? Didn't anybody try to find her? Mother's replies were vague, evasive. As if rehearsed. That sweet-resolute stoic smile. Cheerful resignation, Christian forgiveness. For thirty-five years she taught high school English in the Rochester public schools, and especially after my father left us, and she became a single, divorced woman, the manner came easily to her of brisk classroom authority, that pretense of the skilled teacher of weighing others' opinions thoughtfully before reiterating one's own.

  My father, an education administrator, left us when I was fourteen, to remarry. I was furious, heartbroken. Dazed. Why? How could he betray us? But Mother maintained her Christian fortitude, her air of subtly wounded pride. This is what people will do, Bethany. Turn against you, turn faithless. You might as well learn, young.

  Yet I pushed. Up to the very end of her life, when Mother was so ill. You'd judge me harsh, heartless—people did. But for God's sake I wanted to know: what happened to my Grandmother Nissenbaum, why did nobody seem to care she'd gone away? Were the letters my mother and Connie swore their father received authentic, or had he been playing a trick of some kind? And if it had been a trick, what was its purpose? Just tell me the truth for once, Mother. The truth about anything.

  I'm forty-four years old, I still want to know.

  But Mother, the intrepid schoolteacher, the good Christian, was impenetrable. Inscrutable as her pappa. Capable of summing up her entire childhood back there (this was how she and Aunt Connie spoke of Ransomville, their pasts: back there) by claiming that such hurts are God's will, God's plan for each of us. A test of our faith. A test of our inner strength. I said, disgusted, what if you don't believe in God, what are you left with then?—and Mother said matter-of-factly, "You're left with yourself, of course, your inner strength. Isn't that enough?"

  That final time we spoke of this, I lost patience, I must have pushed Mother too far. In a sharp, stinging voice, a voice I'd never heard from her before, she said, "Bethany, what do you want me to tell you? About my mother? —my father? Do you imagine I ever knew them? Either of them? My mother left Connie and me when we were little girls, left us with him, wasn't that her choice? Her selfishness? Why should anyone have gone looking for her? She was trash, she was faithless. We learned to forgive, and to forget. Your aunt tells you a different story, I know, but it's a lie— I was the one who was hurt, I was the youngest. Your heart can be broken only once—you'll learn! Our lives were busy, busy like the lives of us grown women today, women who have to work, women who don't have time to moan and groan over their hurt feelings, you can't know how Connie and I worked on that farm, in that house, like grown women when we were girls. Father tried to stop both of us going to school beyond eighth grade — imagine! We had to walk two miles to get a ride with a neighbor, to get to the high school in Ransomville; there weren't school buses in those days. Everything you've had you've taken for granted and wanted more, but we weren't like that. We hadn't money for the right school clothes, all our textbooks were used, but we went to high school. I was the only 'farm girl' — that's exactly what I was known as, even by my teachers—in my class to take math, biology, physics, Latin. I was memorizing Latin declensions milking cows at five in the morning, winter mornings. I was laughed at, Nelia Nissenbaum was laughable. But I accepted it. All that mattered was that I win a scholarship to a teachers' college so I could escape the country, and I did win a scholarship and I never returned to Ransomville to live. Yes, I loved Pappa— I still love him. I loved the farm, too. You can't not love any place that's taken so much from you. But I had my own life, I had my teaching jobs, I had my faith, my belief in God, I had my destiny. I even got married— that was extra, unexpected. I've worked for everything I ever got and I never had time to look back, to feel sorry for myself. Why then should I think about her? — why do you torment me about her? A woman who abandoned me when I was five years old! In 1923! I made my peace with the past, just like Connie in her different way. We're happy women, we've been spared a lifetime of bitterness. That was God's gift to us." Mother paused, breathing quickly. There was in her face the elation of one who has said too much, that can never be retracted; I was stunned into silence. She plunged on, now contemptuously, "What are you always wanting me to admit, Bethany? That you know something I don't know? What is your generation always pushing for, from ours? Isn't it enough we gave birth to you, indulged you, must we be sacrificed to you, too? What do you want us to tell you—that life is cruel and purposeless? that there is no loving God, and never was, only accident? Is that what you want to hear, from your mother? That I married your father because he was a weak man, a man I couldn't feel much for, who wouldn't, when it came time, hurt me?"

  And then there was silence. We stared at each other, Mother in her glisten of fury, daughter Bethany so shocked she could not speak. Never again would I think of my mother in the old way.

  What Mother never knew: In April 1983, two years after her death, a creek that runs through the old Nissenbaum property flooded its banks, and several hundred feet of red clayey soil collapsed overnight into the creek bed, as in an earthquake. And in the raw, exposed earth there was discovered a human skeleton, decades old but virtually intact. It had been apparently buried, less than a mile behind the Nissenbaum farm-house.

  There had never been anything so newsworthy—so sensational—in the history of Chautauqua County.

  State forensic investigators determined that the skeleton had belonged to a woman, apparently killed by numerous blows to the head (a hammer, or the blunt edge of an ax) that shattered her skull like a melon. Dumped into the grave with her was what appeared to have been a suitcase, now rotted, its contents—clothes, shoes, underwear, gloves—scarcely recognizable from the earth surrounding it. There were a few pieces of jewelry and, still entwined around the skeleton's neck, a tarnished gold cross on a chain. Most of the woman's clothing had long ago rotted away and almost unrecognizable too was a book—a leather-bound Bible?—close beside her. About the partly detached, fragile wrist and ankle bones were loops of rusted baling wire that had fallen loose, coiled in the moist red clay like miniature sleeping snakes.

  POACHERS

  1998: Tom Franklin

  TOM (THOMAS GERALD) FRANKLIN (1962–) was born and raised in the tiny town of Dickinson, Alabama, before his family moved to Mobile. He received a BA in English from the University of South Alabama, working his way through school with jobs in a hospital morgue, a factory, and cleaning up waste at a chemical plant. He received his MFA from the University of Arkansas, where he met his future wife, the poet Beth Ann Fennelly. He taught at South Alabama and Selma University, then held the Philip Roth Residence in Creative Writing at Bucknell University, was writer in residence at Knox College, the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi, and the Tennessee Williams Fellow at the University of the South. He was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Franklin's short story "Poachers" won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1999 and was the centerpiece for his first book, Poachers: Stories (1999). His first novel, Hell at the Breech (2003), is a fictionalized version of a violent episode near the author's home in post–Civil War Alabama. When an aspiring politician is murdered, members of his constituency, mostly poor cotton farmers, form a secret society called Hell at the Breech. They wear hoods, swear an oath of loyalty, and terrorize the people they believe were responsible for the killing. When their victims retaliate, a great deal of blood is spilled. The book was
called the best novel to come out of the South since Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. Franklin's second novel, equally praised, was Smonk (2006).

  "Poachers" was originally published in the spring 1998 issue of Texas Review. It was selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 1999 and for The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century.

  ***

  AT DAWN, ON THE first day of April, the three Gates brothers banked their ten-foot aluminum boat in a narrow slough of dark water. They tied their hounds, strapped on their rifles, and stepped out, ducking black magnolia branches heavy with rain and Spanish moss. The two thin younger brothers, denim overalls tucked into their boots, lugged between them a styrofoam cooler of iced fish and coons and possums. The oldest brother—bearded, heavyset, twenty years old—carried a Sunbeam Bread sack of eels in his coat pocket. Hooked over his left shoulder was the pink body of a fawn they'd shot and skinned, and, over the right, a stray dog to which they'd done the same. With the skins and heads gone and the dog's tail chopped off, they were difficult to tell apart.

  The Gateses climbed the hill, clinging to vines and saplings, slipping in the red clay, their boots coated and enormous by the time they stepped out of the woods. For a moment they stood in the road, looking at the gray sky, the clouds piling up. The two younger ones, Scott and Wayne, set the cooler down. Kent, the oldest, removed his limp cap and squeezed the water from it. He nodded and his brothers picked up the cooler. They rounded a curve and crossed a one-lane bridge, stopping to piss over the rail into creek water high from all the rain, then went on, passing houses on either side: dark warped boards with knotholes big enough to look through and cement blocks for steps. Black men appeared in doors and windows to watch them go by—to most of these people they were something not seen often, something nocturnal and dangerous. Along this stretch of the Alabama River, everyone knew that the brothers' father, Boo Gates, had married a girl named Anna when he was thirty and she was seventeen, and that the boys had been born in quick succession, with less than a year between them.

  But few outside the family knew that a fourth child —a daughter, unnamed —had been stillborn, and that Boo had buried her in an un-marked grave in a clearing in the woods behind their house. Anna died the next day and the three boys, dirty and naked, watched their father's stoop-shouldered descent into the earth as he dug her grave. By the time he'd finished it was dark and the moon had come up out of the trees and the boys lay asleep upon each other in the dirt like wolf pups.

  The name of this community, if it could be called that, was Lower Peachtree, though as far as anybody knew there'd never been an Upper Peachtree. Scattered along the leafy banks of the river were ragged houses, leaning and drafty, many empty, caving in, so close to the water they'd been built on stilts. Each April floods came and the crumbling land along the riverbank would disappear and each May, when the floodwaters receded, a house or two would be gone.

  Upriver, near the lock and dam, stood an old store, a slanting building with a steep, rusty tin roof and a stovepipe in the back. Behind the store the mimosa trees sagged, waterlogged. In front, beside the gas pump, long green steps led up to the door, where a red sign said OPEN. Inside to the right, like a bar, a polished maple counter covered the entire wall. Behind the counter hung a rack with wire pegs for tools, hard-ware, fishing tackle. The condoms, bullets, and tobacco products, the rat poison and the Old Timer knife display were beneath the counter.

  The store owner, Old Kirxy, had bad knees, and this weather settled around his joints like rot. For most of his life he'd been married and lived in a nice house on the highway. Two-story. Fireplaces in every bedroom. A china cabinet. But when his wife died two years ago, cancer, he found it easier to avoid the house, to keep the bills paid and the grass mowed but the door locked, to spend nights in the store, to sleep in the back room on the Army cot and to warm his meals of corned beef and beef stew on a hot plate. He didn't mind that people had all but stopped coming to the store. As long as he served a few long-standing customers, he thought he'd stick around. He had his radio and one good station, WJDB of Thomasville, and money enough. He liked the area, knew his regulars weren't the kind to drive an hour to the nearest town. For those few people, Kirxy would go once a week to Grove Hill to shop for goods he'd resell, marking up the price just enough for a reasonable profit. He didn't need the money, it was just good business.

  Liquor-wise, the county was dry, but that didn't stop Kirxy from selling booze. For his regulars, he would serve plastic cups of the cheap whiskey he bought in the next county or bottles of beer he kept locked in the old refrigerator in back. For these regulars, he would break packages of cigarettes and keep them in a cigar box and sell them for a dime apiece, a nickel stale. Aspirins were seven cents each, Tylenol tablets nine. He would open boxes of shotgun shells or cartridges and sell them for amounts that varied, according to caliber, and he'd been known to find specialty items—paperback novels, explosives, and, once, a rotary telephone.

  At Euphrates Morrisette's place, the Gates brothers pounded on the back door. In his yard a cord of wood was stacked between two fence-posts and covered by a green tarp, brick halves holding the tarp down. A tire swing, turning slowly and full of rainwater, hung from a white oak. When Morrisette appeared —he was a large, bald black man—Kent held out the fawn and dog. Morrisette put on glasses and squinted at both. "Hang back," he said, and closed the door. Kent sat on the porch edge and his brothers on the steps.

  The door opened and Morrisette came out with three pint jars of home-made whiskey. Each brother took a jar and unscrewed its lid, sniffed the clear liquid. Morrisette set his steaming coffee cup on the windowsill. He fastened his suspenders, looking at the carcasses hanging over the rail. The brothers were already drinking.

  "Where's that girl?" Kent asked, his face twisted from the sour whiskey.

  "My stepdaughter, you mean?" Morrisette's Adam's apple pumped in his throat. "She inside." Far away a rooster crowed.

  "Get her out here," Kent said. He drank again, shuddered.

  "She ain't but fifteen."

  Kent scratched his beard. "Just gonna look at her."

  When they left, the stepdaughter was standing on the porch in her white nightgown, barefoot, afraid, and rubbing the sleep from her eyes. The brothers backed away clanking with hardware and grinning at her, Morrisette's jaw clenched.

  Sipping from their jars, they took the bag of eels down the road to the half-blind conjure woman who waited on her porch. Her house, with its dark drapes and empty parrot cages dangling from the eaves, seemed to be slipping off into the gully. She snatched the eels from Kent, squinting into the bag with her good eye. Grunting, she paid them from a dusty cloth sack on her apron and muttered to herself as they went up the dirt road. Wayne, the youngest, looked back, worried that she'd put a hex on them.

  They peddled the rest of the things from their cooler, then left through the dump, stumbling down the ravine in the rain, following the water's edge to their boat. In the back, Kent wedged his jar between his thighs and ran the silent trolling motor with his foot. His brothers leaned against the walls of the boat, facing opposite banks, no sound but rain and the low hum of the motor. They drank silently, holding the burning whiskey in their mouths before gathering the will to swallow. Along the banks, fallen trees held thick strands of cottonmouth, black sparkling creatures dazed and slow from winter, barely able to move. If not for all the rain, they might still be hibernating, comatose in the banks of the river or beneath the soft yellow underbellies of rotten logs.

  Rounding a bend, the brothers saw a small boat downriver, its engine clear, loud, and unfamiliar. Heading this way. The man in the boat lifted a hand in greeting. He wore a green poncho and a dark hat covered with plastic. Kent shifted his foot, turning the trolling motor, and steered them toward the bank, giving the stranger a wide berth. He felt for their outboard's crank rope while Scott and Wayne faced forward and sat on the boat seats. The man drawing closer didn't look much older than Kent
. He cut his engine and coasted up beside them, smiling.

  "Morning, fellows," he said, showing a badge. "New district game warden."

  The brothers looked straight ahead, as if he wasn't there. The warden's engine was steaming, a flock of geese passed overhead. Wayne slipped his hands inside the soft leather collars of two dogs, who'd begun to growl.

  "You fellows oughta know," the warden said, pointing his long chin to the rifle in Scott's hands, "that it's illegal to have those guns loaded on the river. I'm gonna have to check 'em. I'll need to see some licenses, too."

  When he stood, the dogs jumped forward, toenails scraping aluminum. Wayne pulled them back, glancing at his brothers.

  Kent spat into the brown water. He met the warden's eyes, and in an instant knew the man had seen the telephone in the floor of their boat.

  "Pull to the bank!" the warden yelled, drawing a pistol. "Y'all are under arrest for poaching!"