Memphis Noir

by Laureen Cantwell

  When he reached Fargé and turned him faceup, the man’s eyes were open. He looked at Jerry and said, “A vizion. I hev zeen a vizion.”

  “I’m seeing one too,” Jerry said. “Only it’s real. We need to get out of here.” He pulled Fargé’s arm, but the Frenchman jerked away.

  “Zair,” he said. “Ze box.” He pointed to an old metal box under the table that Jerry’s mother had been lying on only moments before. “I must have eet.” He lunged free of Jerry and grabbed it, but lost his balance and fell against the table, hitting his head and dropping again to the floor.

  Jerry grabbed him and dragged him from the room. When they were out, the Frenchman came to and shouted, “Ze box! I must have ze box!”

  “What box?” Delphi asked. “There’s a box? Is anything in it?”

  “Forget it,” Jerry said. “We need to get out of here and call the fire department.”

  Smoke poured out of the hole in the wall. An ominous crackling and popping came from the room as if it were about to explode. Jerry was dragging the Frenchman to the door when his mother rushed back through the hole. He yelled at her to stop and dropped the Frenchman, but she was already in there. He ran to the opening, and all he could see was the glow of bright orange in the smoke as fire filled the room. The heat was incredible, and he put his arm in front of his mouth so he could breathe through the sleeve of his shirt. Jerry was about to jump in, when his mother dove out, crashed into him, and sent them onto the floor. Her hair was on fire, and he ripped off his shirt and smothered the flames.

  “I have it,” she said. “I have it. I have it.” Her hair was half gone, and her face was black from the smoke. But she was holding the tin box.

  * * *

  From the front yard, Jerry watched the flames eat through the roof as he called 911 on his cell phone. Neither Fargé nor his mother seemed to care about the house. They sat cross-legged in the grass, the box between them, pulling out one thing after another. When Jerry finished the call, he went over.

  “We might be too close,” he said. “No telling what’s going to happen when the fire gets through the roof. With the gas lines and everything, the place could explode.”

  “And zees,” the Frenchman said to his mother, handing her a ribbon-tied stack of photographs and ignoring Jerry. “Vat do ju make of zees?” Between them on the grass was an old revolver, some police badges, a pair of handcuffs, and assorted papers, some of which looked like legal documents with official seals. Jerry picked one up. It was an oath of some kind, stating that one Darquemus, member of the Loyal Order of H, solemnly swore not to reveal any deeds, exploits, identities, locations, signs, or other secrets of the Order, under pain of death. At the top of the page was the name Loyal Order of H, surrounded by flames. Darquemus’s signature at the bottom was in a brown ink that reminded Jerry of dried blood. Drops of it ran across the paper, as if a wounded hand still dripping with blood had signed the document.

  Just then his mother cried out: “Pawpaw! It’s him!” She handed a photo to Fargé. “I told you, Jerry,” she said. “You’ve never seen a picture of him, but you’ll recognize the family resemblance right away.” Her soot-smeared face with its burned hair smiled up at him.

  “I’m sure I will,” he said.

  Fargé studied the picture as if carefully reading something in it, then handed it up to Jerry. “It eez ze one,” he said.

  The picture showed a man with dark hair slicked back, wearing a pinstriped suit in the broad-lapel style of the early fifties. He was heavyset and looked to Jerry more than anything like a thug. This was the beloved Pawpaw? “What do you mean, the one?” he said to Fargé.

  “Ze one who bring me to deez place.”

  “It’s all been foreseen, Jerry,” his mother said. “Mister Fargé and everything.”

  “Call me Antoine.” He lifted her hand and kissed it. Then he did not let it go but leaned over and kissed Delphi on the lips.

  Jerry didn’t know what to feel. The house was now an inferno. The sirens he’d been hearing grew louder than the fire, and two fire trucks were suddenly there at the curb. Still, this odd person did not stop kissing the scorched face of his mother. Firemen rushed past them dragging hoses.

  Jerry watched as the hoses came to life and the firemen doused the structure. It was clearly too late to do anything except try to stop the blaze from spreading to other houses. When he glanced back, to his horror, his mother was on top of Fargé. She’d straddled his prone body, and even though her dress covered his midsection, Jerry could tell Fargé’s pants were down.

  “For God’s sake,” he yelled, “what are you doing?”

  His mother looked up at him, and from the wild look in her eyes he knew she wasn’t really there. “It’s the dead, Jerry,” she said. “They’ve taken us over, and I can’t help myself.”

  The firemen, holding their spraying hoses against the fire, turned to watch.

  “Have you no shame?” he said. Beside his mother and Fargé was the tin box, and in it Jerry saw a gleam. A scene from his childhood came back—he and his mother leaving their house in Mexico and ’Shroom by the door, crying. He wasn’t coming with them, and Jerry didn’t understand. ’Shroom knelt and hugged him and kissed him and said, “Take care, old sport.” That was what he often called Jerry, old sport, as if he were older than ’Shroom himself. “And just remember, you can always take something good away from everything.”

  He snatched up the box and ran. He would run, back to Mexico maybe, to wherever. Away, he thought, away from this.

  When he reached his truck, which was parked a few hundred feet down the street, he flung open the door and threw the box across to the passenger’s seat. He climbed in, closed the door, and stared at the flaming pieces of the house floating out over the neighborhood. By now, people had come to watch, and he wondered if his mother and Fargé were still there getting it on, in front of the crowd. It would be just like her to go on, and then afterward to get up and start proselytizing. Yes, Accidentalism, folks, see where it will get you?

  Jerry sighed. He realized he would not run away. He was her flesh and blood. He looked over at the box on the seat beside him. He opened it. The thing he had seen shining was a dagger. Its handle was made of gold encrusted with diamonds. He held it up and turned it in the light from the fire. The red gleam in the diamonds caused a fascination to arise in him. He pointed it toward his heart and stuck its tip against his skin. He wrapped both hands around the handle. It would be so easy. Only a second. He would be free. Then he saw that in the bottom of the box was a large photo. He put the knife down and took it out.

  In the flickering light he had difficulty seeing well, but it was taken in the hidden chamber. The chimney was in the background, and six men stood around the table that led to the oven. They wore robes and masks. The masks were the faces of pigs with horns. One of the men held a dagger, the same dagger, Jerry realized. And on the table that the men surrounded? Was it human, or hog? It was impossible to know what was stretched there, ready for sacrifice.

  Nightflight

  by SHEREE RENÉE THOMAS

  Vollintine Evergreen

  Three o’clock in the morning, Old Mama Yaya walks at this hour unobserved, past tumbled-down apartment buildings, empty lots, and shuttered storefronts. She limps slowly in the streetlight, but there is another light. She looks up to her left, grimacing as if the gang graffiti has suddenly come to life, her gaze arcing toward the candle burning in the second-floor window. “Close your eyes, child,” she mutters. “At this hour, even haints sleep.” Adjusting her cart, she continues down the sidewalk, rattling as she goes.

  The child sits at her makeshift desk made of cinder blocks and her daddy’s old albums. Led Zeppelin, Muddy Waters, and Parliament Funk stare back at her. The child likes the album art, although she does not understand it. What does it mean to “get funked up”? She wants the “P-Funk” too. She loves Minnie Riperton’s Afro, so lush and wild as a black sun. These are her friends, the music and
the beautiful math behind the music. She imagines it as a kind of sacred geometry, a language that speaks to her when words are too difficult to say. It gives her the same feeling as when her daddy lifted her up into the sky by her elbows, as beautiful as seeing a moonrise over stunted willow trees. In her daddy’s hands she feels neither too fat nor too black. Skyborn, she is no ordinary, plain girl. She is a magician.

  * * *

  When the sun stopped shining in Memphis, Nelse decided that she was better suited to theory than to operations. After all, theory was not a product, and Nelse was a ponderer. Her grandmother, who raised her after her father got shot in a failed home invasion, had called her a natural-born Figurer. All math was figurin’ to her grandmother, and all math came easily to Nelse. She was inexplicably moved by it, the possibilities shifting like a multicolor Möbius strip, like the rainbow ribbons in her hair when her daddy’s arms lifted her as a child, skyrocketing her into that other space. There she could sit with the cinder blocks that now looked like two ancient columns, sit with the paper Big Mama collected from the office building’s trash cans: “Cuz most people wasteful, and the rest ain’t got no good sense.”

  Theory allowed her to work mostly alone, and alone was how Nelse preferred life. There was less margin for error. When Big Mama would come home from the third shift at the factory, she would cry out in her tin-can voice, “Girl, don’t tell me you been sittin’ up figurin’ all night, wasting your eyesight.” She would gather Nelse up in her arms, stare deep into her eyes as if trying to guess her future, then she would scold her once more, saying, “If you don’t sleep more, you’ll stunt your growth and have only one titty.” Nelse would pat her flat chest and giggle at this, then finally drift off to sleep, the beautiful equations and figures filling her head.

  Big Mama was always saying funny things, but the words that meant the most to Nelse were, “Get yo’ lesson, child, if you don’t get nothin’ else.” And get is what Nelse did. Lying on her bed, the sky outside her window as dark as in the morning as it was in the night, she wiped away the final remains of the odd, recurring dream and wondered why the sky used to turn perfect red at the end of the day. She wondered why the soap bubbles in her childhood magic wand formed in nearly perfect spheres, and why the human voice filled with emotion could urge a dying plant to grow or impact the cellular life of water. She wondered why a spinning top didn’t fall over but instead slowly gyrated, its speed inversely proportional to the initial turn, why outer space goes on forever. And when the city did not burn up, when the sun went out, she wondered how life continued to go on, the way sap rose in the remaining trees, rose against gravity, the way the people rose, hoping to see that shine again, glimmering along the muddy river, hoping against probability, against fate.

  The sky now was as muddy as the river. The first day the city woke and the sun had not, people stood out on their porches, circled the pavement around their lawns, and stared, just stared at the sky, as if willing the sun back. The young folk danced down the streets with flashlights, flirting and laughing loudly as if the sun had gone out for their pleasure. The sick and shut-in sat hunched at windows, clutching curtains, shaking their heads at these end days. Then the cell phones rang out until every line was busy. The media was in an uproar, and the newly minted mayor had to be rushed to the Med after having a minor stroke. The children, those in public school and in private, were unashamedly happy. They leapt in their yards, jumped like grasshoppers until frightened mothers and fathers shooed them back into the houses. When the airwaves cleared, the mayor, mildly recovered, finally made a speech. Memphians were to get duct tape and garbage bags and seal all their windows and doors. This could be the result of a terrorist act, directed at the good citizens of Memphis. Who would do this, why, and what for were the questions that needed figuring. No one had answers.

  Not the Shelby County Center for Emergency Preparedness, nor the governor and the congressmen; even the president and the CDC could not explain why the sun had gone out only in Memphis. Some said it was because the city had given up its charter, others said it was a Chickasaw curse for building on the bluffs and bones of the city’s first inhabitants. And then there were some who blamed every crooked thing on Voodoo Village. Whole families went by car, truck, and foot across the arched bridge, zooming across I-40 like hell had opened up behind them. Barbecue pits, student loans, and thirty-year mortgages, even some marriages, Elvis, and Graceland, were left behind without a backward glance.

  No one commented on how the darkness lifted and the sunlight shone at exactly halfway across the M-shaped Hernando de Soto Bridge. If nothing else, that oddity alone was enough to prove to some that the city had been specially marked as cursed. “The Lord done spoken!” the preachers cried, and gathered their flocks with them to safety. SUVs and church buses honked and stalled on the crowded bridge, the people turning their backs on the hulking Pyramid that glowered mutely behind them. Many remained hovering in the fields, camped out in the West Memphis bottomlands in their cars and tents. They didn’t worry about waiting lists for trailers, FEMA had not bothered shipping any. Still others headed on down to the dog track and casinos, carrying their last dollars and their emergency preparedness bags with them. And those who once thought they lived in Germantown and Cordova and Collierville soon learned the true geographical reach of East Memphis. It was sunless in their neck of the woods too. Yet the good citizens in North Mississippi sat smugly in their homes, daylight shining through their curtained windows, shaking their heads at the spectacle that had finally overcome the city.

  * * *

  Nelse lies in her bed in what would have been late afternoon, twilight, just before the old evening, when the first lightning bugs would come out. Her head aches, migraines, vestiges of the crazy dream. The same she’d had since she was a little girl. Had someone already figured out why a focusing mirror must be parabolic in shape? Why a flat or spherical mirror won’t work? There was a logical reason, a kind of quiet grace, she knew, but none for why the sky in Memphis remained forever dark, nor why she stayed when so many others had fled, praying and crossing themselves, never looking back.

  Closing her eyes, she imagines various shapes; her mind traces the trajectory of light rays, ancient messengers of stars long dead before the journey. Silvered glass curving, nothing like the shadowy glass in her grandmother’s chifforobe.

  Big Mama, are you with the stars, up in the heavens shaking your head, trying to help me figure this out? Yellow and gold light rays careened at angles to the perpendiculars, reflected at equal angles, slow-danced like she used to by herself with her father’s quiet-storm albums, her mind heading back into space. Polished glass flexed and curled, like the dark lashes of her closed eyes. She wiped a tear away, imagining glass gently sweeping through space as helicopters droned above. Glass holds memory, mirrors distort reality. There had been no mirrors in her grandmother’s house.

  * * *

  The world buckled to its knees when the sun stopped shining in Memphis. Just as it had when Nelse took her first algebra class. The lesson began with word problems, and while the teacher went on and on about state tests, Nelse had felt herself warming inside, like when she’d lean her head against the window and let the sun warm her skin. At first they thought it was a power outage, a fluke by Memphis Light, Gas & Water, but when the signals uncrossed, MLG&W had promptly released a statement that basically translated as, We ain’t got nothing to do with the sun! Nelse remembered when a straight-line wind had come flying off the Mississippi River, cutting down hundreds of the city’s oldest oak, pecan, and poplar trees, all the way from the banks to the city’s limits at Stateline, how they lay piled up across the city like corpses. But this was nothing like that. The only trauma was that which was building inside of people. They spent the first day trying to figure out if they’d finally lost their natural minds, but NPR and the National Guard soon told them they had not gone stone-cold crazy. Memphians were fine. The sky was not.

  “How the hell
can particles in the air do this?” Marva, Nelse’s next-door neighbor, wanted to know. Nelse usually only saw her when Marva darted across her yard in the mornings to steal her water (“My dahlias take better to the sweet water in yo’ pump”).

  Truth was, Marva didn’t want her own water bill to be sky high. Today she didn’t even try to hide her hustle. Marva had stood in the middle of the devil’s strip, clutching the flowers to her chest. “What’s gon’ happen to my garden?”

  That first night-day, Nelse opened her bedroom window, and the wind fluttered the lace curtains as if a handkerchief waved by invisible hands. It had to be a mistake, a grave error, as if someone had taken a great cosmic clock and sprung much too far ahead into the future. It had to be a power outage in the night or the work of Nelse’s diabolical pills—which dulled the migraines, felled her nightly like an ax to a tree, and turned her into a sleepwalking clock-changer—or a dark cloud sent by terrorists, terrorists who hated the South and its barbecued pulled pork. Perhaps they really had lost their minds.

  “What is the mayor going to do about this?” Marva wanted to know. She sat now on Nelse’s lumpy sofa, too frightened to look outside again. Every light in the house was on, a parody of morning, as if it were the eve of a new year. All they needed was some black-eyed peas.

  Nelse sat bravely by the window. “They say it happened after Tanzania, all those years ago,” she said. “The ash was so thick that for three whole days it was utter darkness.”

  “But nothing’s happened. We aren’t in a war. Well,” Marva said, giving Nelse an exaggerated side eye, “those foreign ones don’t count if nothing’s happened here.”

  “The weatherman said it isn’t dangerous. The sun just isn’t out.”

  “Are you going to the lab?”