Alabama Noir

by Don Noble

  "It's right there in black and white, son," Gary went on. "It's right there on the damn website. You know, that branch runs out to the river and the river runs to the bay and the bay—"

  "Hell, Gary, don't you think I know about geography and watersheds and currents and all? And don't call me son."

  "And the bay goes to the Gulf of Mexico and then out to the whole goddamned world. You're polluting the world with that rusted-out old septic system."

  "I told you I've fixed it. I worked on it all day yesterday, down in the bowels of it. Ha!"

  "Naw, crawling down in the empty old thing and squirting a hosepipe through it ain't fixed a damn thing about it. You've done broke so many laws I can't count 'em."

  "Why don't you google them up, then, the laws?" Yoder shot back. "Google is God now, I guess. Google is the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg looking down on the Valley of Ashes."

  "What the hell?"

  "Forget it. Why read a book when you have the Google machine to impart life's truths to your stupid ass."

  "It's the law, that's all I'm talking about. You can't let a steady stream of turds and piss-water keep rolling down that hill and into that branch. You've got to call a septic service or I'm gonna have to turn you in to the county. You're the property owner. It's your responsibility."

  Yoder, clench-fisted, tight-toothed, gritted out, "Get off my property, then. I've a good mind to evict you."

  But they both knew it was an empty threat. They had a long history of disputes, even fistfights, going back to when they were young, potent warriors of the gridiron, back when women liked their looks and a loop around the town of Foley, Alabama, from drive-in diners to picture shows in a Ford Mustang, when a make-out chick in the front seat was the pinnacle of a life promising to be all downhill from there.

  They were an odd couple, all right: Yoder, well-educated, creative, once-charming-now-cautious, carrying several DSM-referenced labels; and Gary, low of IQ, naive, spur-of-the-moment. Yoder taught art education in a community college before the mental meltdown that had him on disability by the time he was forty. Gary, no hope of a deferment, found himself, straight out of high school, chasing Charlie in the jungles of Vietnam. He spoke of it from time to time, though not with enough depth or detail to satisfy the curiosity Yoder kept in check.

  "I seen some shit there, over yonder, in itty-bitty-titty land. Nobody ought to see them things." He would fall silent for several beats, then, "I seen nothing BUT shit all my life," he would repeat, to the air, to the nights, to anybody or nobody, "and shit don't cool for folks like me."

  "You think you're the only one that had it so damn bad?" Yoder would toss out, as a challenge, their routine one-upmanship of misery, on twilit evenings when they sat on the dock, working their way through a case of Budweiser. "Hell, my stepmother was cold and wicked and hated my guts," and he would recount tales about how his real mama took the cancer when he was only six, went downhill fast, and how it was clear to everyone that his daddy had "Miss Dinah" waiting in the wings long before the cancer ever even hit.

  His memories of his real mama, Janine, were warm and conjured something like reassurance, despite the odd quirks she had, the rituals, a prominent one being the taking of the castor oil, every single Friday evening of every single week. "Folks just believed in it back then, believed it kept you regular, like it was good for you. Mama was the queen of poop."

  Yoder couldn't remember a time in his life, post–potty training, when his mother did not insist on inspecting his bowel movements, to see if his excrement was healthy or if it demanded more attention. He and Gary sometimes had a good laugh about Yoder's fecal foundation. "No sir, I wasn't allowed to flush, not until Mama checked—and she'd say things like, Oh, that one looks real good, Yodie, or, No wiggle worms to be found, or, That one's a pretty picture of health. I didn't think anything about it—that was just how our routines went along, until she got the cancer."

  When Miss Dinah took over, her two brats in tow, she showed no inclination to study Yoder's bowel movements. In fact, when, all of seven years old and eager to please his new parent, he finally offered to show her what he had landed in the toilet bowl, she scrunched up her face, shuddered, and said, "Why on God's green earth would I want to look at anybody's BM? Let alone yours." And it was the way she said it, yours, that planted her hatred of him in his mind, hardening him to her, young though he was, and by adolescence the reciprocal disdain was set in his soul.

  "She was my ruination," he would lament, blaming her for his bad luck with women. "And yeah, I had to call the bitch Miss Dinah, just like my daddy did. He was one goddamned pussy-whipped somebitch. But she sure did pretend-dote on him, waiting on him, baking seven-layer cakes and all," and Yoder would recount how the chocolate confections were locked in the china cabinet, locked away from him in particular, locked away in such a way as he would have to see the sheen of the chocolate each time he passed by, lust after it, wish for it, but he never, ever gave her the satisfaction of doing something as brazen or pathetic as, say, asking for a piece of it. Even when she brought it out as an after-school treat for her own two children, his "steps," Yoder refused to ever ask to be included.

  "Don't you want a little bit, baby?" she would singsong, if his daddy was there, and sometimes Yoder would accept a piece, sometimes not.

  The two men shared a bottle of Jim Beam down at the dock that evening, to chase behind the beer, as they typically did of a dusky sunset, having sprayed down with deet, thrown their feet up on footstools, spending hours swapping memories and disagreements, flicking cigarettes hissing into the low tide, the high tide, the ebb and the flow.

  "I'll get some prices, then," Yoder said, finally, his way of acquiescing to his foe in the great septic dispute of 2010. "But you have to kick in something. You gonna take that panhandle gig? The one that gal Sissy or Missy or somebody told you about? Because I'll be wanting you to throw in on the new septic tank. It handles your shit just as much as it handles mine."

  "It's Misty," Gary said. "Like the song. Like that Clint Eastwood movie, Play Misty for Me. And she says disaster money is almost like free money, depending."

  Depending on what? Yoder wondered, thinking Gary might need a good lookout on this Misty person.

  Gary and Misty had reconnected via the Internet, a landscape he had only begun exploring around 2007, when Yoder was threatening to put his desktop out with the trash. Yoder had bought the thing as he entered the twenty-first century in a feeble attempt at technology—an attempt that turned into his certainty and fear that the government was spying on him.

  "There's a camera on the things, you know," he said, disengaging all manner of cables. "Ever since 9/11 they've been watching us all."

  "Why don't they just watch them Islams?" Gary pushed back. "It's them Islams that's bombing themselves and all."

  "Muslims," Yoder sighed. "Islam is the religion. Muslims are the practitioners of Islam."

  "I don't understand. Baptist is Baptist, Cath'lic is Cath'lic, what the fuck?"

  "Never mind."

  "Okay. Never-minding."

  But Gary took on the surfing of the Net with uncharacteristic vigor, networking his way through Classmates.com, navigating over to the high schools of some of his old army buddies, reconnecting, flirting his way past a few former girlfriends, before finding Misty again, just after the explosion in the gulf. She talked him through the skyping process and schooled him on the larger landscape of the Internet. He boasted to her about his artist friend Yoder Everett, embellishing, "Yeah, he's a big deal around here. He gets big money for his wind chimes—well, he ought to be getting more."

  "Is there a website where I can look at them?" Misty asked.

  "Hell no—Yoder hardly never touches no computer. He thinks they're taking over the world."

  "Ridiculous," Misty said. "You have to have a website these days, to advertise, to promote, to sell—you two boys need me. I can do all of that."

  And that was the springboard for their
planned reunion. After they rendezvoused in Florida, after the work for BP played out, they would haul her trailer back to Turkey Branch, and she would barter her promotional work on Yoder's art for something like rent.

  Yoder, however, was skeptical. "Normal people don't do that, just pull up stakes, drive off to meet a stranger and start up a new life."

  "Aw, she's a good ol' gal," Gary countered, filling Yoder in on how he had dated her briefly when he returned from 'Nam, during a short, drug-fueled stay on the West Coast. "She was one of them hippie chicks—you know, titties flapping and bouncing, hairy pits, the whole deal. Which I ain't minded no hairy pits at all—all I needed was that one little particular patch of hairs, you know? I was fresh out of the army, son. Horny as hell. And she was a wild thing, always into something. Hell, man, she wants to help you sell your wind chimes."

  "What the hell? And don't call me son."

  "Yeah, she's gonna make you a website. Says nobody can't do no kind of business without no website. Says she has real experience in all kinds of business doings, advertising and whatnot."

  "Then what's she doing in a double-wide in Arkansas?"

  "She's been hiding out from an ex-boyfriend, a mean one, a stalker type. She ran off from him in Portland, changed her looks and all—you know, like that movie, like Julia Roberts in Sleeping with the Enemy."

  "That's even worse," Yoder said. "All we need is some stalker nutcase to come around here. Hell, somebody's likely to get killed."

  "Naw, man, you got it all wrong. Her guy can't leave Portland, his job—and last Misty heard, he's done took up with a whole 'nother woman. It's cool."

  "I don't know."

  "Shit, man, think of her like the business manager you never had. Remember you always said the business side of art makes you want to puke? Well, Misty's a pro, knows computers, says she's a real, for sure, people person. Which you ain't, right?"

  "Right."

  "So let her manage the crap you hate—the crap you suck at—and see if your income gets better. Come on, man."

  "Can't argue with that," Yoder mumbled, seeing a few dollar signs gathering in his future. He did, indeed, hate hauling the chimes around to all the fru-fru and chi-chi and cutesy-cute little galleries and shops in the Foley–Gulf Shores–Orange Beach area, making fake-nice with all the managers and artsy-arts folks. Even though his pieces were popular, unique, and sold quite well, he thought some of those "fancy ladies and gay boys," as he called them, the ones running the shops, might be overpricing and skimming their own special kind of slick off the top of his profits.

  It was his mind-set, to be wary. The older he got, the less he trusted folks, even old friends. He had just about stripped away anyone who ever mattered to him, stripped away with suspicion, always, of ulterior motives. His two children were long estranged, radio silent for over a decade, and the ex-wives did not even bother to try anymore. Gary was all he had. And Gary, like him, had alienated his own set of friends and family, not with paranoia but with his scattershot approach to living, his sheer and utter unreliability.

  Gary and Misty had skyped throughout May, June, and into July's haze, becoming more and more familiar, gestating the plans that would culminate in their reunion, in mere weeks, the revival of a long-ago hot second of a romance—all while the Deepwater Horizon vomited its ominous cloud of crude into the cesspit of the Gulf of Mexico, in ever-mounting numbers of gallons per day. It seemed like CNN had a picture of it on TV 24-7, the live, real-time movie of the slow murder of the gulf. And the numbers, the volume of the disaster, forever ticked upward.

  "It's an awful thing," Gary told Misty's image on the computer screen, "a terrible thing—not just the folks killed but no telling what all else is gonna die. They say it'll kill the coral, even. Hell, I didn't know coral was alive to begin with."

  "Well, that's what a lot of the free money is for, to help with that, so I'm going to get there as quick as I can—no later than July's end. Can't wait to see you in the real flesh, sweetie," she cooed.

  Gary allowed that she had held up pretty well. She laid claim to the age of fifty-four but looked light of it, with long hair streaked blond, animated green eyes, and the distinctive laugh he remembered from all those years ago, "kind of a hoarse, horsey laugh," he always called it. And the once–braless teenybopper showed him her relatively new fake boobs. "I was dating a plastic surgeon in San Francisco for a while," she said, spreading her top open, unhooking her bra from the front, spilling them on out, right in his face, giving him the kinds of sexual itches he had not scratched in years. "The doc gave me these, plus an eye job, and a slight nose job—just got rid of that little bump. You remember that little bump on my nose?"

  He did not. He was preoccupied with the not-little boobs.

  "What do you think, daddy? Nice, huh? It's a D-cup size."

  Gary was done for.

  They spent more and more hours skyping, which soon became elaborate cyber-sexcapades full of dirty talk and all manner of autoeroticism the likes of which Gary had never imagined himself doing. "She sure does know about some variety," he confided to Yoder one humid evening. "But hell," and he took a long pull from the bottle, "why jerk off to a nudie mag when you can see everything right there, just a-writhin' along with you?"

  "Can't argue with that," Yoder exhaled his cheap cigarette. "Just seems kind of weird to me, having romantic doings like that."

  "You're being old-fashioned, man. This is how it's done these days—everything's on the Internet line."

  "Can't argue," Yoder said again.

  * * *

  Elite Septic Systems sent a "technician" to Turkey Branch the day after Gary headed out for Blountstown, to his new, big-boobed love, and the cleanup job, armed with booze and Viagra.

  "This one's a doozey, one of the worst I ever seen. Gonna need new field lines too," Ronny, the self-proclaimed turd wrestler, insisted. "This thing is a dinosaur, that's all there is to it. We got to put in all new. Run you a few thousand dollars."

  "Nothing here to work with at all?" Yoder responded.

  "Zero. Zip. You're lucky you ain't had the EPA and the Corps of Engineers and any government regulator you can think of out here. The money you'll save in fines could install a boatload of septic systems."

  Yoder seethed and silently vowed to garnish Gary's British Petroleum wages or government money or whatever. And he didn't have to wait long. After only three weeks on the job, sans Turkey Branch commute, not a trailer but a pop-up camper on the back of a Toyota pickup following Gary's own truck came rolling up to his property, which one Misty Smith hit with the force of Hurricane Katrina.

  "I'm moving in with Gary," she squealed. "My man. My destiny."

  Gary blushed. "If it's no never mind to you, that is," nodding at Yoder.

  "Of course he doesn't mind!" Misty was possessed of grand movements, physically—large swoops of arms, long strides of legs, and she had a booming voice to match, a voice she exercised with the looseness of one who was possessed of few boundaries. "The only way I can get the work done is to set up office space. Not going to happen in a camper, that's for sure. And Yoder, I promise, I guarantee you, that I'll get you noticed, get the bucks rolling in. As your agent, I'll negotiate for higher prices, and as your advertiser and website administrator I'll handle it all. My sweetie here explained your dilemma in detail. And it's so typical of artist types. You just need to be left alone to do the art. You deserve to be known, and I'm making your fame my mission in life, along with loving up this guy," nudging Gary, who blushed again, with her elbow. "Oh! Where's my camera? Look on the front passenger seat, honey, and grab it for me." But she strode her long legs past Gary, arms flailing a pricey digital camera out of her vehicle and commenced striding, bounding all over the property snapping pictures of individual wind chimes, studying them, making a show of her professional eye. It wore Yoder out already, her energy, but, he told himself, she obviously was a worker bee, and it was, after all, for him.

  "What happened to the
cleanup job?"

  "Aw, man, it was bullshit—walking up and down the beach scooping up tar balls, wearing these dinky, cheap-ass rubber gloves and neon vests. All Misty had to do was hand out water all the livelong day; said she was definitely overqualified for that."

  "Can't disagree."

  "But after I got hit with that fog a few times, I was thinking I had enough."

  "Fog?"

  "Yeah, man, that shit they been spraying all out over the water from planes. To bust up the oil."

  "Dispersant? I saw something about that on the news, I think. Breaks up the oil and sinks it to the bottom of the gulf." Yoder tapped out a cigarette and lit it. "You say you got hit with it?"

  "Lots of folks got hit with it—anybody on the beach—'cause the damn planes would be maybe a hundred, two hundred yards out, and that gulf wind blowed it all up on the beach, in the air, smelling like a bitch, burning our eyes and all. Nasty stuff. It ate clean through them cheap-ass gloves they gave us. And them stupid lawn-mowin' masks ain't no kinda protection."

  "Damn, Gary, that can't be good. It's bound to have had some kinds of physical effects on you. Did you get nauseous or light-headed?"

  "Not really. It was just a nasty stink, mostly—my eyes got okay. It's just those damn ate-up gloves, man. That's some toxic shit. Poison."

  Gary's utter lack of concern beyond the stupid gloves frustrated Yoder to no end. Gary had taken the same blasé attitude when Yoder had questioned him about Agent Orange, years earlier. It wasn't no big deal, Gary had said, they used it all the time.

  "It was a big deal," Yoder said now, under his breath.

  That afternoon, while Misty flitted about the place clicking chime images and Gary lazed on the hanging bed in one of the screened-in porches on the outbuilding, Yoder drove into Foley, to the public library, and began sifting through the reference section.

  * * *

  The septic system was to be installed on October 1, but the existing tank and lines had to be yanked before that. Due to scheduling there would be lag time, so they would have to make do with a porta-potty in between. Ironically, the Elite Septic System folks scheduled the euthanasia of the tank for September 19, the very same date that the Deepwater Horizon well was declared "effectively dead" by the national incident commander, some admiral or other. And it was on that exact date that Yoder began to move from suspicion to decision about one Misty Smith.