Alabama Noir Read online

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Introduction

  PART I: COLD, COLD HEART

  Exhaustion

  Anita Miller Garner

  Florence

  Deepwater, Dark Horizons

  Suzanne Hudson

  Fish River

  Bubba and Romy’s Platonic Bender

  Kirk Curnutt

  Pike County

  Custom Meats

  Wendy Reed

  West Jefferson County

  PART II: YOUR CHEATIN’ HEART

  The Price of Indulgence

  Carolyn Haines

  Downtown Mobile

  Come Like a Thief

  Anthony Grooms

  South Titusville, Birmingham

  What Brings You Back Home

  Michelle Richmond

  West Mobile

  Murder at the Grand Hotel

  Winston Groom

  Point Clear

  Sweet Baby

  Ace Atkins

  Gu-Win

  PART III: I’M SO LONESOME I COULD CRY

  The Good Thief

  Ravi Howard

  Escambia County

  Her Job

  Tom Franklin

  Clarke County

  Xenia, Queen of the Dark

  Thom Gossom Jr.

  Avondale, Birmingham

  PART IV: THE ANGEL OF DEATH

  Laughing Boy, Crooked Girl

  Brad Watson

  Gulf Shores

  Triptych

  Daniel Wallace

  Shelby County

  The Junction Boys

  D. Winston Brown

  Ensley, Birmingham

  All the Dead in Oakwood

  Marlin Barton

  Montgomery

  About the Contributors

  Bonus Materials

  Excerpt from USA NOIR edited by Johnny Temple

  Also in Akashic Noir Series

  Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition

  About Akashic Books

  Copyrights & Credits

  To my friend Dr. David K. Jeffrey, lover of noir

  INTRODUCTION

  Troubles and Foibles

  There must be places like Hawaii where the idea of noir would be difficult to accommodate. Sunshine, drinks in a coconut, warm beaches, and leis do not generate the fear, darkness, and despair on which noir thrives.

  Alabama also has plenty of sunshine, some lovely beaches, and only a few foggy waterfronts where miscreants lurk, but it has been a famously dark place. Americans of a certain age read in their daily papers about the burning of the Freedom Riders' bus in Anniston and about the KKK beating those riders at the Birmingham and Montgomery bus stations in May 1961, with the silent cooperation of law enforcement. Americans actually watched, on the evening news, the German shepherds and fire hoses used on demonstrators in Birmingham and the violence at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

  These days, Alabama has truly turned a corner on race, but the past will not, should not, and in fact cannot be forgotten. We are aware of the past here on a daily basis.

  In Montgomery, the public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson has overseen the creation of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which features more than eight hundred hanging steel slabs, each representing an American county, with the names of lynching victims inscribed. It also features hundreds of jars of earth, taken from the sites of murders, from underneath tree limbs, and from places where shootings occurred. A walk through the memorial is sobering, chilling.

  One might expect that many of the stories in this collection would focus on racial injustice, and indeed some do. Anthony Grooms sets his story in a period of violence from an unusual African American point of view—that of a professor at the historically black school Miles College.

  The news these days is full of stories concerning the inadequacies and dangers of the Alabama prison system, where homicides and suicides abound. Ravi Howard sets his story in Holman Prison, where executions are carried out, and tells of one person's maneuver to mitigate that cruelty. Both Thom Gossom Jr. and D. Winston Brown place their stories inside black communities; racial prejudice is always present but not exactly the catalyst for action.

  It is perfectly appropriate that racial injustice permeates Alabama Noir. But of course, so do many other themes and obsessions of traditional noir, those based on the violent and dark side of human nature. Noir has been enjoying a strong resurgence in the past few years, nationwide, even worldwide, in fiction and in film, and aficionados understand that its roots are to be found in many places: Black Mask magazine stories, for example, or the novels of James M. Cain and others. But perhaps the best-known noir novel of all time is Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, and it serves amazingly well as a model or template for the form.

  In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade, private detective, exasperated, declares, "When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it." Revenge in myriad forms has always been a staple of noir fiction and this volume is no exception. In Michelle Richmond's story, a dead husband is avenged; in Carolyn Haines's, it is a father. In the story by Anthony Grooms, an assault on an innocent black man will bring retribution; in D. Winston Brown's story, it is the death of an unborn child. And less somber, perhaps, but no less fatal, Winston Groom's story tells of a man furious over unfair treatment by the state tax commissioner.

  Violence not sparked by revenge is often sparked by love and/or lust in noir, often generated by the "femme fatale." In The Maltese Falcon, that femme was Brigid O'Shaughnessy. In Alabama Noir, there are several strong and deadly females, each seeking and achieving retribution, but there is only one ferociously sexy female consciously using her wiles like the Falcon's immortal Brigid.

  When Brigid enters Spade's office she is described as "tall and pliantly slender, without angularity anywhere. Her body was erect and high-breasted, her legs long . . ." The heroine of Wendy Reed's "Custom Meats," Cassie DeBardelaiwin, drives simple Jimbo Sutt crazy from the second she enters his deer-processing room. Her eyes are the same color as her denim skirt; she smells like green apples and she "strutted right up to him until she stopped with her crotch at his face." Suzanne Hudson's Misty Smith, "with long hair streaked blond, animated green eyes, and [a] distinctive laugh," ensorcells poor Gary Wright and wrecks the fragile life he and Yoder Everett live on Fish River.

  The men in both these stories don't stand a chance. Gullible, susceptible, they utterly lack Sam Spade's sophistication and his cynicism. Neither could ever manage "We didn't exactly believe your story . . . We believed your two hundred dollars."

  Violence not generated by revenge or lust is likely to be the child of greed. Several of these stories are, like Hammett's, tales of criminal schemes gone bad. To say there is no honor among these thieves is a hopeless understatement.

  In Falcon, Spade realizes the power of this greed in a character like Kasper Gutman, and uses it against him. Of course, obsessed lowlifes will double-cross one another, feed one another to the wolves or the police. In negotiations over the missing statuette, the fat man Gutman reveals the lengths he will go to in order to obtain the bird he has been pursuing for seventeen years. He explains to his young gunman Wilmer, "I want you to know that I couldn't be any fonder of you if you were my own son; but—well by Gad!—if you lose a son, it's possible to get another—but there's only one Maltese falcon."

  In Kirk Curnutt's story, a collection of lowlifes seek their fortune in drugs and, God help us, Confederate coins. Anita Miller Garner has based her story on Chaucer's "The Pardoner's Tale," in which a simple double cross would not be enough. Trust in noir stories is in short supply.

  In both these stories and others, the action is fueled by serious drinking and
drug abuse. Alabama, despite or perhaps because of dry counties and cities, has historically been a place of alcoholism and, in keeping with the times, drug addiction—meth, OxyContin, heroin, all of it. There were and still are moonshiners and bootleggers.

  Sometimes these noir stories are not explicitly violent. They explore powerful emotions rather than actions—the emotions of extreme stress, fear, terror, and despair. Tom Franklin shows a mother, heartbroken, still cleaning up her son's mess. The heroine in Thom Gossom Jr.'s tale has her life ruined by a very modern kind of stalker.

  Sometimes the violence is offstage, or is to come immediately after the curtain falls. We don't get to watch it, but we know no power on earth can stop it. The different men in Daniel Wallace's three short-shorts are on the edge, or perhaps have gone over it. One is obsessed with coffin building—before there is a corpse. Life is fragile, as are relationships, especially marriage. The men in the woods are wifeless, becoming like feral cats, but their lifestyle is oddly compelling.

  Any discussion of the dark side of human nature will eventually deal with the debate between nature and nurture, whether a character is innately evil or has been twisted by cruel experiences. Brad Watson's little creature Betty, malformed and bitter, is capable of premeditated, cold-blooded violence, but a reader might feel justified in cheering her on in her flight to freedom. In Ace Atkins's story, which will remind readers of one of America's most famous child murder cases, one bent soul meets another; it might be difficult to figure out which of the two characters is more damaged.

  Some locales seem to come with their own soundtrack. Don Ho and his tiny bubbles provide the background music for Hawaii, Edith Piaf for Paris. The reggae of Bob Marley evokes Jamaica. The soundtrack for Alabama is without question provided by our troubled troubadour Hank Williams. The 2016 biography Hank by Mark Ribowsky paints a dark picture of the musician's short, alcoholic, drug-filled life: a life of loneliness and pain. He goes so far as to call Hank's life story "noir-ish."

  Alabamians' love for and identification with Hank was expressed in the 2012 memoir of columnist Rheta Grimsley Johnson, Hank Hung the Moon . . . and Warmed Our Cold, Cold Hearts. She writes that Williams was "an Alabamian . . . whose music had a beat like that of our own hearts." He was "in our minds as a distant cousin or close friend who had died far too soon. He spoke our language and knew our secrets and made us feel better about our troubles and foibles."

  Marlin Barton's tale takes place at the Hank Williams grave in Oakwood Cemetery in Montgomery, a spot that has become "sacred" and where ceremonies and rituals of different sorts are performed by visitors, often late at night, similar to those performed at Jim Morrison's grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Barton's twisted lovers are caught in a perfectly deadly folie à deux, and with them we end the collection.

  In Alabama Noir we encounter "troubles and foibles" galore, darkness in many forms. The stories range from the deadly grim to some that are actually mildly humorous. We see desperate behavior on the banks of the Tennessee River, in the neighborhoods of Birmingham, in the affluent suburbs of Mobile, in a cemetery in Montgomery, and even on the deceptively pleasant beaches of the Gulf of Mexico.

  Fans of noir should all find something to enjoy.

  Don Noble

  Cottondale, Alabama

  January 2020

  PART I

  Cold, Cold Heart

  EXHAUSTION

  by Anita Miller Garner

  Florence

  It's late, even for young guys like me and Ray and DC. So late, it's early. The rest of the bars done closed down and we the only ones left just outside the city limits at the Hollywood where life don't start till after midnight. People been stopped playing pool and gone. Ol' Skunk—tired ol' black man, walks slow, got a big white streak in the hair on top of his head—Skunk's getting tired, shuffling back to where we're shooting nine-ball and cut-throat. White folks other than me call him Edsel. They slap him on the back, shake his hand, talk like they're black for about thirty seconds. Hey, Edsel. Man. What up? they say, think they cool. I call him Skunk just like Ray and DC do. We all call him Skunk. I can tell he's tired of asking us if we need more beers. He's too busy slow-mopping behind the bar, stacking chairs one by one on the table, making a little bit of noise so we get the message, but not so much noise that Ray gets mad. Skunk wants us to leave, but he's too scared to say nothing.

  We done hustled three drunk dudes for most they paychecks. Don't nobody look us in the eye or give us lip when we take the money. The men leave us alone and the few chicks all sit on the far side of the bar, far away from us as they can get. But they're looking, the chicks are. I catch the chicks looking at me sideways-like, acting like they're not looking. Me and Ray and DC, we're just what they want. We just what they need, baby. Hard ride. Hard six-pack ride with our big shoulders. Some nights I walk over and pick one out. Like that last white girl I had with the sweet face like she loves me. She wants me bad like I'm G-Eazy/Yelawolf. Tonight ain't that kinda night, though. Tonight's a business night. A player's gonna play when he wants to play.

  Ol' Skunk finally rattles over our way, dragging a nasty sour mop and bucket on wheels. Sun comin' up, he says. Watch out for the sheriff deputy down by the bridge, he says, like talkin' is gonna get us to leave. They catch you they put you under the jail till you cough up the big bucks. Which is bullshit. We walked here. Didn't nobody drive. Walked to the Hollywood through the woods from where Ray's girlfriend Yolanda stays. Cold weather like this, you see them green and orange outside lights of the Hollywood from Yolanda's front porch. Just walk down a steep hill and don't get caught up in no raggedy saw brier vines in the dark, cross over a footbridge, then walk back up a hill and you'll be right at the Hollywood's back door. Nobody see you coming. Nobody see you going. We way too smart for that fat cracker sheriff deputy.

  Ol' Skunk's still talking. Y'all go on over to Poochie's. He open all the time for whoever show up whenever. Poochie a good man.

  Poochie serves whoever shows up all right, but Poochie's just a bootleg man. Last time we were sitting in Poochie's front room, some man nobody ever seen before come up to DC and knocked DC out cold with a chair. Man never seen DC before.

  Ol' Skunk's getting braver now, looking us in the eye, smiling. I seen you boys back here scammin', he says, like he's up on us. Then he stands there like he's 'bout to stick his hand out like maybe he wants a piece of the action just because he thinks he knows something. That Raeburn boy you took for a hunderd, his cousin work down at the jail, Skunk says.

  I don't know where this motha thinks he's going with this line, but before he can put together his own low deal, Ray's up off his stool and got this motha choked up against the wall, Ray holding his chalky pool stick with both hands across Ol' Skunk's throat so Skunk can't breathe/talk/nothing. Ol' Skunk's right eye pretty much popping out of his head.

  Most of the time Ray's easygoing, but when the money-man comes after Ray, Ray gets nervous. I need to say something to soothe Ray down. "Hey." I start talking and think fast since I need a plan to get us out of this fast. "Hey man," I say, "we're a team. Me and you and DC makes three. Ain't that right?"

  But what I'm thinking is this: money from Skunk's cash box ain't enough to help. Ray baby needs more than the skanky jingle in Ol' Skunk's cash box. Ray's in deep to the money-man this time. Way deep. Not even Ray's fault, but that don't matter.

  Skunk is light-skinned enough that his face turns red. Other eye looks like it's about to pop too. I can tell Skunk wants to ask something, but that's hard to do with your throat mashed against a wall so hard your jaw's hanging loose.

  Ray speaks up, talking low and regular, like he's at the Dairy Queen down on Court Street, trying to decide what flavor Blizzard he wants. "I'm gonna let you down nice and easy like, and you gonna tell me what I want to know."

  And I'm thinking: What the shit? Ray's not even asked Skunk nothing I can hear, so how is Skunk gonna tell Ray what Ray wants to know? What's that shit mean
? Ray keeps Skunk held up pretty much slammed against the wall, letting him down slow, letting that chalky stick fall, bouncing off the floor. Skunk's not fighting back, either. He's just held up by Ray's big arms, blue skull and flower on top of muscle, the name of Ray's dead Texas friend in black on the other arm on Ray's light skin. Almost as light as my skin. Ink looking good on Ray.

  Ol' Skunk tries to talk. Just air comes out. Then he says, like a whisper, I got no part in that deal.

  Skunk's right hand moving and Ray is holding Skunk's collar with his right and reaching for what Skunk's reaching for with his left. Metal flashes back up on Skunk's throat.

  Ray talks easy: "You gonna tell me what I wanna know?"

  Skunk's talk is still full of air: I got no part of that deal, man.

  Ray takes the knife edge and nicks Skunk's throat like shaving. "You gonna tell me what I wanna know." But Ray is telling this time, not asking.

  DC looks at me like he's thinking: What the shit? Ol' Skunk give us Orange Crush when we kids. Skunk opened up the Hollywood during Handy Fest Week and paid that famous Muscle Shoals trumpet man to teach kids like us how to blow without spitting. DC says out loud, "Hey man, Skunk got no money. Just chump change over in the cash box."

  But Ray pays DC no mind and cuts Skunk's cheek—not deep, just enough to make it bleed.

  Skunk never pisses his pants or nothing. Looking sad, he says, Boy, what you lookin' at is being dead, ain't it?

  Ray takes the point of Skunk's own knife and makes like to stick Skunk's ribs. "You see this on my arm?" he says right in Skunk's face, breathing the man's nasty breath. "I'm already dead, man."

  The way Ray says it, Skunk's gotta know Ray means it. Ray lets him go, and me and Ray and DC leaving slow. Because we want to leave. Not because we struck out. Ray and me and DC make three, picking up our shit real slow while Skunk doubles over and rubs his face.

  We're almost out the door when Skunk gets his voice back enough to yell out at us: You wanna die, just go past that sheriff deputy and take the trail that starts at the willow!