Alabama Noir

by Don Noble

  "I had no heart to tell the boy of poor Captain Dwight. Why snuff out his flame? The example of Captain Dwight served as sufficient precedent."

  My father groaned, a sound of agony and agreement. I learned much later that Captain Dwight had been the first black man to apply to join the astronaut corps, but officials had bullied him away.

  "Finally, I'd heard more than enough of the calumny, and was about to ask the white deceiver to leave my office, when he put a finger to the corner of his mouth to wipe away a luscious glob of drool that had collected there and I saw a small, broad ring on his pinkie. A woman's ring. Gold and garnet. And I made out quite clearly the H-U-E-Y of Hueytown High inscribed around the stone. I checked my anger. The poem had been written, so to speak. Now only the rhyming couplet remained unfinished.

  "And you believe them to have been lovers? I asked.

  "His face flushed, a flare of anger or embarrassment or both. No, he said. Nothing like that. She wouldn't have been caught dead . . . He composed himself. I'm only saying what I heard.

  "But why would the boy have been so severely punished, if it were not true? If there had been no true romance?

  "Romance? There ain't no romance.

  "Romeo and Juliet. O, happy dagger, / This is thy sheath. There rust, and let me die.

  "What? He rose from my chair in a near bolt, both fighting and fleeing. You need to be more respectful.

  "Indeed, I said, and as he turned I changed my tone to lure him back, back for the final conceit, Young man, one question, please.

  "He turned.

  "When is her birthday? Emma Grimes? When is her birthday?

  "January . . . He looked puzzled. January the fifteenth. Why?

  "No important reason. Just curious. Always curious, I am. I thanked him for his visit, and slowly, as if he were struck dumb by my inquisitiveness, he left the office. I sat listening to the clank of his heels on the stairs. For some long moments my mind seemed clear, not a jingle or rhyme in it. Then the image of that poor lad, lying in a ditch in the darkness with his pants soaked with blood. What horrifying thoughts must have filled his mind. Worse than the pain he must have felt, he must also have felt the fetid gloaming of his future pressing down on him. And then my anger flashed. What an insidious pogrom this petulant pareidolia wages against us! While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, / Making their mock at our accursèd lot."

  The men were silent, but all leaning in, while Dr. Blackwood finished his cigarette and crushed the stub with his foot. "The garnet," he said quietly, "is the birthstone of January."

  "You don't think he did it?" my father asked.

  "No." Dr. Blackwood shook his head. "Not the crime. But he couldn't believe that she hadn't."

  "Damn!" my father said, and suddenly stood and brought the butt of the shotgun to his shoulder. The other men stood up too, staring into the distance, over the rooftops. I stood. To the north, far down Center Street, a bright light blossomed, momentarily casting an orange bubble in the blackness. There was no sound of the blast. No whine of the speeding car. No screams of children or shouts of the men who undoubtedly rushed to the flames. No sirens. Only the imperturbable cacophony of the cicadas.

  WHAT BRINGS YOU BACK HOME

  by Michelle Richmond

  West Mobile

  What brings you back home? people want to know.

  "Work," she replies.

  The assumption is that she has returned for a certain kind of work, as innocuous as it is forgettable. She's in marketing, right? Or is it advertising? One or the other. For some big tech company in California. Married to a guy from San Francisco. She doesn't come home much, hasn't since she met the guy. That was probably fifteen, sixteen years ago. She loves it out there, despite the fires and the earthquakes.

  Only after she is gone, after the puzzle pieces have fit together, will someone say, "Who knew?"

  Well, she knew. She's not one to make it up as she goes along.

  * * *

  Driving through West Mobile on her way from the airport, she sees a subdivision where the pecan grove used to be. The subdivision isn't new, but it's new to her. It looks like it sprung up in the early aughts, one of a few dozen such subdivisions that rose from bare ground, each with a name splashed in cursive across a grand entrance. The entrances were usually made of brick, often whitewashed. For some reason, the developers in those decades gravitated toward the word plantation, as though it were aspirational rather than shameful, a word without a history. This one is called Plantation Estates. The whitewash has faded, leaving the bricks a muddy shade of gray. Someone has done a nice job with the landscaping, though, a wild tangle of hot-pink azaleas blotting out the first four letters, so that the sign reads, tation Estates.

  Meditation Estates, she thinks.

  Invitation.

  Rumination.

  Adaptation.

  Lamentation Estates.

  Ha! That's it. She likes the sound of it: Lamentation Estates.

  The subdivisions spread west toward the airport starting in the eighties and on through the nineties and beyond, out across the pecan groves and pastures. The subdivisions were once populated by people who liked their houses clean and new, who thought "previously owned" was a kind of a curse, people who didn't appreciate the charm of the old homes on Dauphin Street, who didn't like what was going on downtown. Now the city is booming, and people from all over move to Mobile without a history, not knowing West Mobile from Dauphin Street, picking houses online, surprised by how cheap they are, in comparison, but surprised they're not even cheaper, because, after all, it's Alabama. Not that long ago, four hundred grand would get you a mansion in Mobile. Now it just gets you a pretty nice house.

  Like the other subdivisions along this flat stretch of green, the luster has worn off of Plantation Estates. The community pool has gone mossy. The tennis courts are unkempt. The houses weren't built to last, and it shows. People love it here anyway, their own hot, humid slice of the Southern dream. Which is different from the run-of-the-mill American dream, by the way: friendlier, and with more mayonnaise. Besides, who needs a community pool when you have a better one in your backyard?

  At the ass end of the seventies, her parents bought ten acres of land where Plantation Estates now stands. Her mother's get-rich-slow scheme involved pecan trees. She and her sisters spent one sweltering summer on what her mother called the land, plucking pecans out of the dirt where they landed, collecting the hard brown shells in black garbage bags, which they transported in the family station wagon to a nut-processing facility way out I-65. It took about two hours to fill a garbage bag, and she and her sisters each earned $2.50 per bag. She doesn't know what the real profit margin was—whether her mother pocketed ten cents per bag or ten dollars. She doesn't know if her mother was subsidizing her and her sisters, or if she and her sisters were subsidizing her mother.

  She remembers it as a summer of sunburns, raw fingers, and high hopes. At some point the family abruptly stopped going to the land. She doesn't know what happened. She doesn't know if they sold it, or if they lost it—her family seemed to always be losing things in those days—or if they never really had it. Maybe they made a down payment on the land, and that was it. Maybe it was done with a wink and a handshake, and the raw deal was so embarrassing in hindsight that her parents never mentioned it. They were, by all accounts, a sweep-it-under-the-rug kind of family.

  How perfect is it that her target lives in that subdivision? Not in the biggest house, but in the second-biggest. On a quadruple lot, no neighbors on either side or behind, because he likes the privacy, and he can afford it. He bought the house when his boys were still small, when the subdivision was still going up.

  * * *

  The five-star hotel downtown is a real five stars. Everything is sparkling clean. The handsome concierge is sporting a rainbow tie, and even though he can't be a day over thirty, he speaks in the gentrified way of old Southern queens, who owned gay before it was acceptable in these parts, but
often married women anyway, for the sake of their genteel mothers. Maybe Mobile has changed, a little.

  A woman in a pastel-blue sundress presents her with a mimosa upon arrival, which is nice, then a second mimosa after she finishes the first, which is exceptional.

  She holds her breath when the porter takes her bags, but figures it would arouse suspicion if she tries to take them herself. Anyway, she doesn't want the staff to think she's not a tipper. It's always like this: she doesn't mind tipping, but she hates having someone carry her bags. It makes her feel colonial. When you come from poor, poor is always in your head, and there's a part of you that imagines your own grandfather carrying some guy's bags, calling a stranger "sir." Her grandparents were sharecroppers, traveling from farm to farm in Louisiana and Mississippi, picking whatever needed to be picked, mostly cotton, their pale Irish skin blistering until it peeled. Coming from what was once known, unsympathetically, as "poor white trash," she'll never not feel like an impostor at a five-star hotel, although she sure as hell prefers them to the Motel 6.

  "Your granddaddy put himself through college washing other boys' laundry," her mother has said a thousand times. She thinks of it every time she takes her clothes to the dry cleaner, and it's her familial guilt that makes her keep her mouth shut every time a silk blouse comes back ruined or a cashmere sweater doesn't come back at all. Every time she feels like complaining to the dry cleaner, she imagines her grandfather hand-washing laundry in the middle of the night, toiling for the future of the family, and that shuts her right up, even though she never met him because he died before she was born, and anyway, her aunt has always disputed that story about the laundry. Her mother has never been the most reliable narrator of their family's history.

  In her room, after the porter leaves, she takes off her shoes and jeans and lies on the cool white bed in her T-shirt, enjoying the chemical chill of the air conditioner. After a while she gets up and showers. The bathroom smells like gardenias, and not just because of the soap. There are actual gardenias, fresh-cut, arranged in a mason jar. A nice touch—the mason jar—as if someone at the hotel has been watching Chip and Joanna on TV and wants to bring a touch of casual Southern charm to the five-star experience. She has always loved the sickly sweet scent of gardenias, though the opaque, velvet whiteness of the flowers strikes her as funereal.

  It's half past nine in the evening when she gets out of the shower. She slathers on the hotel lotion, dresses in skinny jeans, sneakers, a long, flowy silk blouse, blow-dries her hair, puts on more makeup than usual but less than the mimosa lady. Her husband always joked that "the natural look" took an hour to achieve and looked about as natural as a dog in flip-flops.

  She puts the suitcase on the bed and unzips it. She throws aside the piles of socks and T-shirts, opens the zipper compartment, retrieves the Sig Sauer that she picked up at a gun show near the airport—no ID required, no background check, just cash and a big-ass smile. The guy who sold her the gun was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a robed Jesus holding a machine gun, defending the Statue of Liberty from a burka-clad figure wielding a machete. So much for subtlety. She wonders what her mild-mannered, laundry-washing, turn-the-other-cheek-preaching grandfather would think of this passionate new marriage between guns and Our Lord and Savior.

  She slides twelve rounds into the magazine, loads the magazine into the Sig Sauer, flips the slide release, and places the weapon into the small of her back.

  Time to go to work.

  * * *

  Let's say you have made a life together. Let's say this took half a lifetime to accomplish. Let's say that, after several years of trial and error, you met the one. You quickly disentangled yourself from previous entanglements, because it was obvious: him. You forged a bond. You lived together first to test the waters, though it turned out they didn't need testing; the water was fine. It was more than fine. You got married, had a child. Let's say you were blessed with far more than you ever asked for—the good career, the nice house in a small town in California, the vacations to Canada and Oregon and Mexico and, occasionally, Europe. Let's say the child was challenging, on account of her strong will, but she was happy and healthy, and you knew that stubborn nature would do her good, in the long run. You knew she would always stand up for herself. Also, even as a toddler, she had such a strong sense of justice, a kind of explosively righteous anger when she sensed someone—anyone—was being mistreated.

  The husband was hardworking and funny and attentive, great in bed, and if you sometimes fought, you always came back together. There was no one you'd rather grow old with—really. Twenty years later, he was still the one.

  Let's say everything was going according to plan, and better. Let's say you were happy. Genuinely happy. On a razor's edge of happiness, holding your breath, thinking, How can this last?

  Let's say it didn't.

  * * *

  It's 11:01 p.m. when she pulls into Plantation Estates. She leaves the headlights off, rolls slowly through the azalea-covered entrance. She's charted it all out on Google Maps. She has photos of the house from Zillow. Not just photos but an actual walk-through, a video. How many times did she mute the Muzak and watch that walk-through in slow motion? The entryway, the living room, the open-plan kitchen, up the stairs to the master bedroom, down the stairs to the basement fitness room.

  She deactivated the Nest Cam online before she drove into the neighborhood. She did it from the parking lot of a motel on Government Street, connecting as a guest to the motel's free Wi-Fi. The motel's password was easy to figure out—Guest2018.

  So was the senator's. He's a well-known Bama fan, and he graduated in 1988. Bama88.

  It doesn't matter how much you tell people about the fragility of their "smart homes," they will continue to choose dumb passwords, passwords they can remember.

  His wife isn't home tonight. His two mostly grown sons are away. It's so easy to map a person's home these days, to map a person's life. So many details are public. The wife is the CEO of a telecommunications firm, and she spends a lot of time giving speeches. This week she's in Iowa. It's good for his brand—such a visible, attractive, articulate wife. Well-spoken but soft-spoken, powerful without committing the cardinal sin of losing her feminine charm. A powerhouse in her own right. Why isn't she the senator, instead of him? At press events and rallies and town halls, someone invariably asks, "When's your wife gonna run?" and he invariably smiles and says, "The day she runs is the day I hang up my hat. One politician in the family is enough."

  She checked the sons' Instagram and Facebook profiles before she left the hotel, just to be 100 percent certain. The youngest son just posted drunk pictures from a frat party at Vanderbilt, and the eldest is leading an all-night coding session at his start-up in Greensboro, North Carolina. By noon tomorrow, she knows, the wife and sons will be heading home, converging in a cloud of shock and grief, a thousand unanswered questions. She feels bad for the sons, not necessarily for the wife. The wife helped him get where he is. Half a million dollars and counting from the NRA, the organization that would most keenly approve of her back-channel, unlicensed, untraceable purchase of the Sig Sauer.

  She knows from interviews that he exercises in his home gym, at night between ten thirty and eleven thirty, while watching TV. He is regimented in his exercise schedule. He claims to only need six hours of sleep per night, and he says doing the elliptical before bed helps him sleep like a baby. He's not shy about his state-of-the-art sound system, or his affection for eighties TV. In an interview for a regional magazine last year, the wife said she had the whole thing soundproofed to save their marriage.

  The sliding glass door on the back of the house is easy enough to open. He has never given up his pride at being a regular guy, living in a regular neighborhood, foregoing the security detail.

  She finds him in the basement. It looks just like it did in the Zillow walk-through, only without the wallpaper. He is on the elliptical, facing a large wall-mounted television, his gray sweatshirt and
blue running shorts streaked with sweat. The TV surround-sound is turned up loud, Hawaii Five-O—the original series.

  If he were to turn around, he would see a woman who looks like a Girl Scout mom or mabe a new neighbor. She is not a scary person. She waits a moment. Perhaps he will turn around. She wants to tell him why she is doing this. She wants to tell him he is only the first one.

  She wants to tell him she is starting at home. She wants to say, This is the only way to make you people listen.

  Standing four feet behind him, she is not certain she would find the words. She is not certain she would be so articulate, or that she could even go through with it.

  He doesn't turn around.

  * * *

  Is it even worth going into the details? The phone call from her sister, saying, "I just saw the news and wanted to make sure you're okay."

  She was in the middle of trying to find colored ink cartridges for the printer, because she needed to print some photos for her daughter. She was sitting on the floor of the hallway, going through the cabinets where she thought the extra ink cartridges would be, if they had any.

  "What news?" she had asked, holding her breath, but of course she already knew what kind of news it would be, because it was always that kind of news, once every couple of weeks or so. You just hoped it didn't happen in your town. You never thought it couldn't—that kind of arrogant assurance, "it doesn't happen here," ended at an elementary school in Connecticut—but you hoped it wouldn't. You hoped your town would be spared.

  "Are Brian and Dottie at home?" her sister had asked carefully.

  She could hardly get out the word "no"—wasn't sure if she said it, or if she just thought it so loudly that her sister heard.

  "Where?" she asked.

  One beat, two, an eternity. "Burlingame Avenue," her sister said.

  "I have to go."

  She called her husband, but there was no answer. She got in the car, hands shaking. They had gone out to Walgreens. Dottie had a poster due the next day. She was Star of the Week in her fourth grade class. They needed poster board, foam letters, and photographs, which was why she was searching for ink cartridges.