Atlanta Noir

by Tayari Jones

  “Whose eyes?”

  “The man’s!” she cried in fearful delight. “We’re gonna go get that guy! We’ll be that crazy bitch’s new best friends.”

  I was drunk—that’s my excuse, to this day—but also, once provisioned with Fern’s weapons, it seemed I had signed on for her evening’s adventure. And why not? If I refused, she’d go alone, return with a story she’d be telling for years that I could have been a part of. I hardly had time to feel afraid, to wonder if there really might be a man, or what other monsters could be waiting in that house, before I was following her toward it, spike heels sinking into the lawn across the line I’d never crossed.

  “No!” came Miss Joy’s raspy voice from the end of her driveway. “Don’t go in there. He’ll kill you.”

  “Oh, Miss Joy, it’s okay,” Fern said warmly, going to her, taking her by the shoulders and scooting her toward her door. “We’re armed. We’re trained man-killers, so we’ll just go in there and get him for you.”

  “No, no, no.” Miss Joy braced back, stiff with horror—probably as much from Fern grabbing her as anything else—and refused to move. Fern went on ahead, and I after, and then Miss Joy followed us at a distance, repeating in a small, wounded voice, “Gonna kill me, gonna kill me.”

  Fern swung open the iron door, kicked something aside to step in, flicked a light switch that did nothing. But there was power: farther into the house, a shadeless lamp burned on the floor, beside what looked like a mattress. The smell was oppressive and hard to place, dank and swampy, old food and unwashed skin mixed in. Joy, huffing for breath, was pushing in behind me, making me jump inside quickly so she wouldn’t touch me.

  Piles of junk everywhere. Cockroaches. Smears of writing on the walls, what was left of the walls, in bloodred and shit brown, curving in snatches with a biblical flavor around massive holes, some patched with duct tape and tinfoil and posters of soft-eyed Jesus. The demons must live in those walls, I thought.

  “Hello,” Fern called, her pipe wrench at the ready in her fist. “Where are you, Mister Man?”

  The answering silence made the house feel empty. I relaxed just enough to follow Fern deeper in, toward the light. “Be gone, Lucifer,” she whispered to me in a witchy voice, pointing out the wall above the lamp where something like those words had been scrawled. Beneath them, a pink flowered quilt draped the mattress, a pair of dingy throw pillows embroidered with the American flag. Together we peered into the room’s junk-shop accumulation of treasures: an iron Scottie dog on a stack of molded newspaper, a rusted Weedwacker, colored glass bottles full of sticks, a small forest of alarm monitoring signs, a wooden placard that read, Home Sweet Home. Seizing me by the arm, Fern hissed, “I need a souvenir!”

  Before I could get out the word No, a crash sounded from the room ahead. She flinched to face it with her wrench hefted. “Who’s there?”

  No response. She tiptoed toward a doorway, silence a feat on three-inch heels—the kitchen, faint light shining on a faucet—and I meant to follow, should have. But fear locked me in place, while some spectral me, unaware of my immobility, went on with her to encounter the hissing thing in the kitchen: not a cat, not a snake, but—she swore—a raccoon, or a small bear, a bear-raccoon that reared up on its hindquarters big as a child.

  And just then, as I felt how far from me she’d gone, there came at my back a roar of sound. It reverberated through my body—familiar, very male, a silverback gorilla sound, the precise sound from under my window. Instantly, I understood there had always been a man over here, a murderous man who terrified Miss Joy flat out of her mind. I whirled around, hammer out, having formed no intention nor gathered the requisite power, and the flat side of it smacked into Miss Joy’s head with a meaty thunk. She gave a cry and went down. For seconds I barely noticed, still peering in terror past the heap of her for the man who wasn’t there, who had been only her.

  “Damn, girl,” Fern said, stepping up beside me. She hooked her arm through mine, breathing hard. “Well, that’s one way to get her out of here.”

  If there were windows in this room, they were pasted over in tinfoil and newspaper. The lamp lit Miss Joy only dimly, and I noted tension in her shoulders as if she were trying to rise, some movement in her mouth. I couldn’t tell if there was blood. Fern stepped up and nudged her gently with the toe of her mint-green stiletto. A moan rose from her, climbed steadily in pitch and volume to become a shriek. She rolled to her back in a shimmery flash of metal—she was wearing the gold-lamé halter. It matched my dress, I thought, just as Fern reared back and struck her with the wrench.

  I screamed, more surprised than anything, not entirely sure of what had happened, where or how the wrench had connected. Fern bent close, peered down critically, and swung again, hitting Miss Joy unmistakably in the head. “Fern! What the fuck!” Too dark to see much, brains or blood, but the woman lay silent and still. Past the simple numb shock, I felt a strange and tremendous rush of gratitude for Fern.

  “I had to do that,” she said, panting, but in a voice matter-of-fact, reasonable.

  Because I had assaulted Miss Joy. “An accident . . .” I started to say—it had been, it was true. It had been true and it no longer was. In an abstract tone that approached Fern’s calm, I said, “She attacked me. It was self-defense.”

  Fern cupped her wrench elbow in the other hand, considering, using the bottom of the tool to scratch her chin.

  “Neighbors would buy it,” I said. “Cops too.”

  Fern circled the body. “Or we were never here. It was the man. She was screaming about a man gonna kill her, and then he really did.”

  I wasn’t thinking clearly enough to find the holes in this. But a story that left us out of it, that let us go home and go to bed and be uninvolved in whatever was decided, had tremendous appeal just then. We slipped out fast, checking the neighborhood for lights or spies as we left. But we knew these houses, knew the occupants kept to themselves and would all be in bed at this hour. We crept back next door with our profusion of weapons. Washing quickly, changing clothes, we checked each other for blood and found none. Fern went out into the backyard to hide the hammer and wrench while I called 911.

  When the operator came on, I asked for the police, then repeated a version of the same call I’d made a few weeks before: my mentally ill neighbor says there’s a man. “I don’t know if y’all sent someone out last time,” I added, “because I was pretty sure she was hallucinating. She probably is again. But she seems really scared, and my roommate thought she saw a man over there earlier. I’d feel better if someone would check it out and make sure she’s okay.”

  Fern was smoking on the back porch, lit with white Christmas lights that draped the eaves. She aimed her pack toward me as I came out the door, and I took one, though I’d never smoked a cigarette in my life. “Now you can sell your house,” she said, lighting it for me as I took a seat on the flowered cushion beside her. “Though it seems a shame to. Such a sweet little neighborhood.”

  * * *

  I wanted to go to bed, to be asleep when the sirens came, but Fern said no, they’d want to talk to us. We peeked at the blue lights through the blinds, then the red, our signal to go outside. We watched from the porch for a while, keeping polite distance until a cop stepped our way. “Was there really a man?” Fern asked him, as if only confused by the ambulance.

  “We don’t know.”

  We answered his questions: What time had we seen her, and had we noticed anyone else on the property, any strange people around lately? Fern mentioned seeing a man earlier that evening, before we went out, no one she could describe, just someone taller than Miss Joy. Later she had heard arguing. “But Miss Joy argues with herself,” I explained. “She’s yelling all the time at someone in the neighborhood or someone in her head, so it’s hard to know.”

  “Yeah,” the cop said grimly, “we know. We’ve been to the house before.”

  The ambulance, pulling out of the drive, turned on its sirens. My heart had not
been racing too badly until then. “Is she hurt?”

  “Hit in the head, looks like. Hard to say how bad.”

  Which meant she wasn’t dead. I knew better than to look at Fern but couldn’t help it. She stared fixedly at the cop with her giant baby eyes. “There was really a man? Oh shit, we should have called sooner. She said he was trying to murder her. You should check with the other neighbors. Maybe she tried to get help from them before she came to us. We really thought she was just off her medication.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “Poor Miss Joy.”

  * * *

  Every night for weeks, we waited for the cops to knock at the door. When they did, it was to arrest Fern: for threatening a client with her Heathers gun and stealing his cash. I spent the last of my money getting her bailed out, then lost my job at the Earl with all the back-and-forth to the courthouse. Armed robbery seemed a crazy charge under the circumstances but that’s what it was, bullets or no, mandatory ten years, until Fern cried a few tears and pleaded on a lesser charge, for two. The lawyer thought she could be out in one. I took over her slot at Naughty Girls: no denying it was good money, though I’d never make as much in tips as she had.

  By then, Miss Joy was home. Her shamble had become slightly lopsided, her vocalizations somewhat subdued. Her mood had shifted on its spectrum closer to fearful, so that her former territorial snarl at the UPS driver was more likely to be a shrieked, “He’s got a bomb, he’s got a bomb!” But she was unkillable, she owned her house outright, she received a monthly Social Security check that kept the lights on and food in her stolen shopping carts, five or eight of them parked in her yard until a truck arrived to load them up and return them.

  For me she reserved the core of her rage. “Murderer!” she shouted every day as I dragged home from the lunch shift. “You murdered me! You run a whorehouse! You have sex with dogs!”

  One-Eyed Woman

  by Gillian Royes

  Virginia-Highland

  She worked the iron around the faded orange flowers in the middle of the doily, trying to avoid the cheap bedspread beneath. The childhood gift from her mother was now spotted with age, but she held to the ritual of washing it before leaving one house and pressing it at the next.

  Setting the iron beside her boxes to cool, she put the doily on the bedside table with the lamp on top. There was nothing attractive about the room, shown to her earlier that evening by the old woman’s nephew, a bulky man who’d tiptoed delicately down the corridor ahead of her.

  “I’m sure you’re anxious to see it,” he’d whispered as he led her to the caregiver’s room. That’s what he’d called it, the caregiver’s room. The smallest of the three bedrooms, at the back of the house.

  A smell of mothballs had assaulted her from the doorway. The short, square woman had walked in, back erect, instantly disliking the drapes and bedspread. The room’s only window looked onto the neighbor’s wall and, as soon as the taxi driver had deposited her boxes and left, she’d pulled the curtains, creating a lavender tomb.

  Dollops of rain had hit the window a few minutes later, turning the room a deeper shade of purple. Apropos, she’d thought.

  She’d been hoping it would hold off. At least for today. Humming the birthday song that morning, she’d fried an egg in her apartment kitchen and eaten it standing at the window, looking at the looming clouds with the wisp of a hope that someone, a cousin, her brother, someone would remember her.

  “It’s my birthday,” she’d announced that afternoon to the taxi driver after he’d piled her boxes and suitcases into his SUV.

  “’Appy buthday,” he’d grunted as he wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. Then they fell into silence.

  Birthdays hadn’t always treated Veronica Williamson well. On the day she was born her face had been squeezed by the doctor’s forceps, leaving her with sunken cheeks and a boxer’s nose. A plastic surgeon hadn’t been able to help; the thoughtless nickname of Mash-face in school hadn’t either. The damage to the child’s face had changed the trajectory of her life from what it would have otherwise been, leaving her shy and solitary, her only comfort being that her light complexion and family status placed her high on the ladder of Jamaican society. She’d come to believe that class always trumped looks, the belief of a heart that had also been damaged.

  The nephew came to the door just when she started unpacking. “I took Aunt Jessie her tea, so she’s fine for the night. Can I get you some supper?”

  As soon as they sat down in the dining room, the questions started: “Where in Jamaica are you from? My wife and I went there once.”

  “Kingston,” she answered and took a silent sip of soup. She didn’t want to appear too ravenous.

  “We went to Kingston—to visit the Bob Marley Museum. We didn’t like it much.” He swept his hand over the table, frowning, suddenly irritated. “All the rich people living up in the hills and the poor crowded together in ghettoes.”

  Veronica nodded, recalling the view from her home’s veranda looking down on the harbor and the poor.

  “What did your family do there?” he asked.

  She sat up and ran a hand over her neat, gray hair. “My father was a solicitor, with one of the largest practices in Kingston. My mother didn’t work.”

  He picked up his toast. “You said you went to college there.”

  “Yes, the University of the West Indies, MA in history.”

  “Great.” His eyes flickered around, unsure of what to light on next.

  She could tell by the lowering of the eyebrows, the narrowing of the eyes, that he was puzzled about her descent from graduate school to caregiver, but he knew not to ask. She’d liked him from their first meeting at the Starbucks in Little Five Points and spotted the wedding ring when he put out his hand. There was something genteel about him—an architect, he’d said he was, a man with breeding. He’d tried not to stare at her nose.

  “When did you come to the States?” he asked while he washed up the dishes, his back to her.

  “Thirteen years ago.”

  He’d asked fewer questions during the brief interview, waving a cup of chai tea while he talked about his aunt, an invalid who was childless and widowed. Her last live-in had just returned to Guatemala and he’d had no luck finding a substitute.

  The ad in the Journal-Constitution had been equally brief: Virginia-Highlands. Live-in companion needed for elderly woman. Room and board and stipend.

  “A hospice nurse comes in three days a week to bathe Auntie, and we have a lady who cooks and cleans every day except weekends,” he’d told her in the coffee shop. “We just need a responsible person there—in case of anything.”

  “I have lots of experience,” she’d assured him. “I took care of my mother before she died. I had to be up with her at night and go to work the next day.” They’d chuckled as if it were a joke, and he’d seemed relieved when she accepted the position. Later she’d thought him a very nice man—but too trusting. He should have asked for references. Anyone could put a pillow over an invalid’s face or disappear with the valuables.

  He was more measured this evening, taking his time washing up. “Are you a . . . a citizen?”

  The corners of her lips twitched. Ah, there it was. He’d forgotten to ask if she was legal during the interview and his wife had reminded him after.

  “I’m a permanent resident,” she answered. “I have a green card.” His big shoulders relaxed. She wouldn’t mention her birthday; he’d try to find out how old she was.

  Before he left, he handed her a sheet with instructions for his aunt’s care from morning to night, starting with, Change diaper. Below that every meal, every medication, every bath was listed. There was nothing about talking or reading, nothing about being a companion.

  “Should I supervise the woman who comes in the day?” she inquired.

  “Yes, please, and pitch in when necessary, if you don’t mind. You can call us in an emergency.”

  As he escaped through the front door,
the new caregiver wondered if pitching in meant changing diapers. Shuddering, she returned to her room, tiptoeing past the ninety-seven-year-old.

  “I know you’ll both become friends,” he’d commented at the end of the interview, and she’d smiled and said nothing.

  There was little chance of becoming friends with his aunt. It would have been out of character for Veronica, who’d never trusted women and only occasionally men. It wasn’t that she was mean-spirited. Just the opposite. She’d worked for thirty-five years with a Jamaican nonprofit that housed and fed the poor. But when it came to intimate relationships, she was most comfortable in the well of her own thoughts, preferring a safe distance between herself and others.

  Returning to her unpacking, Veronica placed her cosmetics bag on the dresser. She couldn’t leave it in the bathroom since there was only one. The house was smaller than she’d been expecting, but it didn’t matter, because she’d just escaped eviction from her former apartment, the best birthday gift she could have given herself. Even better, she’d escaped to live in the city, and not just any part of the city, but in Virginia-Highlands. Trendy, gentrified, quietly classy, the neighborhood had enthralled her from the first day she’d seen it a few years earlier. The boutiques and restaurants at the intersection of Virginia and Highland, the tall old trees, the updated bungalows with their compact gardens had made her hanker to live there, to live among people who didn’t spit and throw litter out the car window, who didn’t shout curses in the middle of the night, who knew how to behave.

  She slid the closet door back and hung up the black Alfani, pausing for a second to straighten its plastic bag. Her mother would have loved this suit. She’d always loved beautiful clothes. There’d been that day—she’d been around thirteen—when her mother had tried on a black cocktail dress.