Category: Fiction

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Mississippi’s Cid Sumners: from Page to Screen

In 1949, Twentieth Century-Fox released Pinky, a film that would have a lasting impact on the American film industry. The movie was based on Quality, a novel by Mississippi native Cid Ricketts Sumner.

Ricketts grew up on North State at a time when Woodrow Wilson wasn’t even a president, much less a street. She taught at both Jackson High School and her alma mater Millsaps College (where she graduated summa cum laude at the age of 16) before attending medical school at Cornell University. There she took classes under James B. Sumner, who shared the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1946. They were married in 1915 and divorced in 1930. They had four children. Sumner’s first novel was published in 1938. Her second, Quality, was published in 1946; her third, Tammy Out of Time, was published in 1948.

According to film scholar Melanie Addington, “Pinky premiered in the same year (1949) as Intruder in the Dust. Both films and novels explore legal and societal racism. Mississippi novelists at that time were helping to create some of the earliest arguments against racism and Hollywood was enamored with the idea. While Pinky may have its controversy that could limit its effectiveness, like casting a white actress (Jeanne Crain) as the lead instead of a black star like Lena Horne, the film reaches into the center of American sentiment and finds a way to move us,” Addington says.

Variety reported that Pinky was one the top-grossing films of 1949 and observed that though the story “may leave questions unanswered and in spots be naive, the mature treatment of a significant theme in a manner that promises broad public acceptance and box office success truly moves American film a notch forward in stature and importance.”

Addington says that though an aristocratic white woman helps Pinky move towards pride in being a black female, “This leads to a more interesting conclusion for the film, given the patronizing attitude that she would listen to a white woman and not her own grandmother. Ethel Barrymore’s character (Miss Em) notes, ‘Nobody deserves respect as long as she pretends to be something she isn’t,’ and the line resonates with Pinky. Hearing the truth about ourselves from strangers often helps us stop perpetuating our own myths.” When she dies, the enlightened despot Miss Em leaves her estate to Pinky, and rumors swirl that Pinky may have killed her. Accused, she stands trial. “Much like Lucas Beauchamp in Intruder in the Dust,despite her innocence, society still finds a way to shun Pinky for ‘causing trouble’,” Addington says. “This is evident in the hushed courtroom as she slowly makes her way to freedom. Pinky, in love with a white man from the North, must choose to leave but instead realizes that she must remain in the South to claim her identity.”

Pinky stays and turns the estate into a nursing school for black women. “The film falters in the final scene, which shows Pinky standing alone and misty-eyed,” Addington says. “The adaptation avoided the ending that made Quality such an interesting original story. In the book, the home is burned to the ground by the Klan, a much stronger and more dramatic ending. The studio scrapped that outcome to provide a ‘tragic heroine’ ending that left audiences feeling good about racial issues in the South. Ricketts, not Hollywood, actually got it right with a much darker truth to an ending that sadly was too real for too many.”

Pinky was the first big studio picture to troop into race issues. The movie garnered Academy Award nominations for the three female leads, Jeanne Crain, Ethel Barrymore and Ethel Waters, who played “Pinky’s Granny”. “It also led to an appeal before the United States Supreme Court in Gelling v. Texas, a victory for the local movie theater owner who screened the film over a local decree censoring it from public viewing. The June 3, 1952 edition of The New York Times reported, “The Supreme Court today struck down a motion picture censor ordinance by which the city of Marshall, Texas, disapproved the showing of the film Pinky.”

Sumner’s third novel, Tammy Out of Time (1948), an unabashedly romantic tale of a Mississippi girl, was a significant departure from the tense realism of Quality, but doubtless due to the success of Pinky, the studios took a look, and between its pages found an iconic figure for mid-century America, and its heroine. Tammy Tyree, provided a generation of young ladies with a smart, charming role model. One critic described the film adaptation, Tammy and the Bachelor (1957) as a “whimsical romance for middle America, which started Hollywood’s last series of proletarian family appeal before the family was entirely forsaken for four-letter words.”

Sumner’s three “Tammy” novels provided fodder for four films as well as a television series over a ten year period. Tammy was played by both Debbie Reynolds and Sandra Dee, and the supporting casts of the films included Leslie Nielsen, Walter Brennan, Fay Wray, Adam West, Macdonald Carey and (in his first feature role) Peter Fonda. Denver Pyle, who played Uncle Jesse in “The Dukes of Hazard”, portrayed Grandpa Tarleton in the television series (1965-66).

Writer Jill Conner Browne says, “As I was writing the first book (The Sweet Potato Queens’ Book of Love), we decided that a modicum of anonymity regarding some of the tales might be in order, so we decided to select stage names for ourselves. As it turned out, since we are all Of A Certain Age and grew up watching and loving all of Tammy’s exploits (she was way better than Cinderella and seemed much more attainable to our young minds) we ALL wanted to be “Tammy.”  Believing that it was unfair for one to be allowed to use the name that ALL wanted, we simply decided that we would ALL be ‘Tammy.’”

The movie also spawned an eponymous Top 40 hit in 1957. Music historian Brian Hargett says, “The song has music by Jay Livingston and lyrics by Ray Evans. Reynolds herself described it as a ‘sweet, simple ballad.'”

The song went to #1 for three weeks beginning August 26, 1957. The #2 song that week was ‘Teddy Bear’, by a young man from Tupelo named Elvis Presley. “At the onset of the youth revolution, it was possible for a 25-year old like Reynolds to have a hit record sung rather simply without studio gimmickry,” Hargett says.

“Until the Beatles came along, record companies happily recorded talent like Debbie Reynolds. After 1964, ‘older’ acts like Reynolds were quickly dropped off record company artists rosters.”

“The studio first recorded ‘Tammy’ with just piano backing, but Henry Mancini sweetened it with strings, and Hollywood liked it enough to put it in the movie,” Hargett says. “The Ames Brothers sang it as the thematic introduction to the film, and they had a fair hit with it, too.” The song was also nominated for an Oscar.

Though the movies based on the works of Cid Ricketts Sumner are noteworthy, Sumner’s literary achievements seem more than modest by Mississippi standards; she garnered no literary laurels, and she is largely forgotten, even in her hometown. Still, she was a remarkable woman. She married a Nobel laureate, wrote 13 books, toured Europe on horseback, and when she was 64 she was the only woman in a group of eight who made a 31-day rafting trip down the Colorado River.

Sumners was bludgeoned to death at the age of 80 in her home in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Her 16-year old grandson, John R. Cutler, was charged with her murder.

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Dahomey

He was born to wealth, with a wife and children in a mansion on St. Charles, land from Natchez to Memphis, a man of taste and discretion, well-schooled in the ways of the world. She was born in poverty, with a red leather trunk containing everything she owned, a woman/child knowing nothing but footlights.

One night she plucked out his heart and held it in her hand. For an ethereal week, he kept her in an apartment on Ursuline. Then the revue—a musical comedy, ‘In Dahomey’—swept her away to Chicago, Manhattan, London, and Paris, into the arms of others. When he bought 24,000 acres in Boliver County the next year, he named the land for her face, radiant in the lime light, and her body, warm beside his in the morning sun.

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A Lambence from Olympus

Light in August is in many if not most ways Faulkner’s darkest work, dealing with madness, alienation, miscegenation, murder, and sexual mutilation.

The title has inspired a great deal of speculation. Some consider it simply a reference to the onerous sunlight of a Mississippi August; others would have us understand that the title refers to the light cast by Joanna Burden’s burning house.

Then there are careful readers who point to Reverend Hightower’s observation of “how that fading copper light would seem almost audible, like a dying yellow fall of trumpets dying into an interval of silence and waiting” while scholars with a regional bent so note that the phrase “(to be) light in August” is a Southern slang term for pregnancy, concentrating on Lena Grove.

The story that would eventually become the novel, started by Faulkner in 1931, was originally titled “Dark House” and began with Hightower sitting at a dark window in his home. But after a casual remark by his wife Estelle on the quality of the light in August, Faulkner changed the title, and later affirmed this inspiration:

“…in August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and—from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere.

It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone…the title reminded me of that time, of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization.”

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A Picture of Dorian Greene

Let’s begin with the hat.

A misty rain was falling on Bourbon Street outside the Night of Joy nightclub where Our Hero, Ignatius Reilly and his mother, Irene, had sought refuge from the police after a chaotic entanglement in front of D.H Holmes. Among the bar’s few customers was “an elegantly dressed young man who chain smoked Salems and drank frozen daiquiris in gulps”.

This fop happens to be Dorian Greene, who spills his daiquiri on his bottle-green velvet jacket. When Irene calls to the bartender for a rag, he tells her not to bother and added, with an arched eyebrow, “I think I’m in the wrong bar anyway.”

It soon becomes clear that Dorian is indeed in the wrong bar. In fact, we soon begin wondering how Dorian could have made the mistake of wandering into the Night of Joy at all.

The few other customers in the bar included a man who ran his finger along a racing form, a “depressed blonde who seemed connected with the bar in some capacity, and a snarling bartender. When Irene suggests that he should “stay and see the show” (“see some ass and tits,” the blonde prompts), he “rolls his eyes heavenward,” and in their ensuing conversation—prompted, somewhat, by her insistence on buying him a drink to replace the one he spilled—it becomes obvious that “tits and ass” are the last things Dorian Greene is interested in. Irene persists in engaging the young man.

“‘That’s sure pretty, that jacket you got.”
“Oh, this?” the young man asked, feeling the velvet on the sleeve. “I don’t mind telling you it cost a fortune. I found it in a dear little shop in the Village.”
“You don’t look like you from the country.”
“Oh, my,” the young man sighed and lit a Salem with a great click of his lighter. “I meant Greenwich Village in New York, sweetie. By the way, where did you ever get that hat? It’s truly fantastic.”
“Aw, Lord, I had this since Ignatius made his First Communion.”
“Would you consider selling it?”
“How come?”
“I’m a dealer in used clothing. I’ll give you ten dollars for it.”
“Aw, come on. For this?”
“Fifteen?”
“Really?” Mrs. Reilly removed the hat. “Sure, honey.”
The young man opened his wallet and gave Mrs. Reilly three five-dollar bills. Draining his daiquiri glass, he stood up and said, “Now I really must run.”
“So soon?” “It’s been perfectly delightful meeting you.” “Take care out in the cold and wet.”
The young man smiled, placed the hat carefully beneath his trench coat, and left the bar.

The young man is not a dealer in used clothing. When he and Ignatius meet again—much later—he reveals that the hat “was destroyed at a really wild gathering. Everybody dearly loved it.” He later reveals that he goes by Dorian Greene. “If I told you my real name, you’d never speak to me again. It’s so common I could die just thinking of it. I was born on a wheat farm in Nebraska. You can take it from there.”

When Ignatius arrives at Dorian’s address on St. Peter Street to attend the kick-off party for what appears to be global gay insurrection, he discovers a three-story yellow stucco building.

Some prosperous Frenchman had built the house in the late 1700s to house a menage of wife, children, and spinster tantes. The tantes had been stored up in the attic along with the other excess and unattractive furniture, and from the two little dormer windows in the roof they had seen what little of the world they believed existed outside of their own monde of slanderous gossip, needlework, and cyclical recitations of the rosary. But the hand of the professional decorator had exorcised whatever ghosts of the French bourgeoisie might still haunt the thick brick walls of the building. The exterior was painted a bright canary yellow; the gas jets in the reproduction brass lanterns mounted on either side of the carriageway flickered softly, their amber flames rippling in reflection on the black enamel of the gate and shutters. On the flagstone paving beneath both lanterns there were old plantation pots in which Spanish daggers grew and extended their sharply pointed stilettos.

When Ignatius asks Dorian where the money comes from “to support this decadent whimsy of yours?” Dorian replies, “From my dear family out there in the wheat. They send me large checks every month. In return I simply guarantee them that I’ll stay out of Nebraska. I left there under something of a cloud, you see. All that wheat and those endless plains. I can’t tell you how depressing it all was. Grant Wood romanticized it, if anything. went East for college and then came here. Oh, New Orleans is such freedom.”

Yes, Dorian found freedom in beautiful, decadent New Orleans, as have so many thousands of gays from the hinterlands. John Rechy, in City of Night (1963) echoes Dorian with his description of the annual gay pilgrimage to New Orleans during Carnival season:

“. . . fugitives will have felt the stirring of this call to brief Freedom. New Orleans is now the pied piper playing a multikeyed tune to varikeyed ears. In those same dark cities equally restless queens, wringing from their exiled lives, each drop of rebellion, will fell the strange excitement . . . Hips siren curved, wrists lily-delicately broken, they will stare in defiant demureness from theater screen and home screens all over the country; and those painted malefaces will challenge—and, Maybe, for an instant, be acknowledged by—the despising, arrogant, apathetic world that produced them and exiled them.”

And, so, Dorian Greene. A comic exaggeration? Yes. A gay stereotype? By any standards, most certainly. Yet Dorian, in Ignatius Reilly’s New Orleans, and, as it so happens, so many other gays in the New Orleans we all know, has found the freedom to be who he needs to be. And Toole’s acknowledgement of this freedom for gays in the city he portrays provides evidence if not of his own sexuality, then of his intimate knowledge of the city he loved.

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Down at Hippy Dick’s

“Jack,” I said, “I’ve been reading this article about honky-tonks . . . “
“You shouldn’t read things like that,” he said, turning his head from a football game to growl at me. “It always gets me in trouble.”

Jack is my first cousin, a really great guy and the only friend I have in the family. We’ve seen one another through thick and thin. I helped him back up on his feet out of a really bad marriage, and he rescued me from a crack house in Atlanta. We take care of each other, Jack and I do, but lately he’s been feeling like he’s doing all the work, which isn’t fair of him at all. For one thing, I’m always the designated driver, and if it weren’t for me, his jeans would look like denim accordions.

“What’s that place you always go to? ‘Hippy Dick’s’?
I could hear Jack groan all the way in the kitchen. “No!” he said.
“You said it had a juke box?”
“It doesn’t have any ABBA on it!”
“Pool tables?”
“You can’t play mahjong on a pool table!”
“Pickled eggs, pigs’ feet and jerky?”
“No! Sushi!”
“Jack,” I said, “Be fair.
I heard a long sigh. “What are you wearing?” he asked.
“I thought khakis and a button-up Oxford, hushpuppies . . .”

Jack held his hand up. “If you go in there looking like a reject from Rush Week at Ole Miss, you’re going to end up in the Yalobusha River with a trot line tied around your feet.”

So I left the house wearing jeans, flannel, a pair of Jack’s old boots and a cap that said “Embry’s Bait Shop” with a Marine insignia. At least he let me pick out which of his flannel shirts to wear.
“Lucky for you pink don’t look good on me,” he said. Jack’s got a weird sense of humor.

Hippy Dick’s was on the side of a long winding road that twisted through the backwaters of a nearby reservoir. It had big a gravel parking lot that Jack said the county kept up because Dick was the supervisor’s second cousin. It had a neon sign on top that said DICKS and a bait shop on the side.

The bar had a big mirror behind it, and two television screens; a large one near the back wall, which seemed continually tuned to ESPN, the other, smaller one, set up near one end of the bar tuned to “E!” with a bucket of iced beer on a towel in front of it. The jukebox was blaring out Faith Hill. It was crowded, about forty people. You had the sports guys crowded around a big screen television, about a dozen guys playing pool and a little more than that bellied up to the bar.

Jack ordered our drinks: a Miller Lite for him, an O’Doul’s for me. “He’s driving,” Jack explained to the bartender, a drop-dead gorgeous ginger with a gambler’s spade beard.

“Is this your date?” he asked Jack with a wink.
“Rick, this is my cousin Andy,” Jack said. Rick reached a muscular arm over the bar, smiled and shook my hand. I couldn’t help but giggle. Jack punched me in the arm and dragged me over to a table.

“You’re going to get my ass kicked if you don’t straighten up. Why don’t you sit here and not fluff your hair ?”
“Now I’m going to have to go to the men’s room to look at my hair.”
“Make sure that’s all you look at,” he said.

Having checked in the rear view mirror before I got out of the car, I knew my hair looked fine, so I wandered over to the jukebox. Sure enough, there wasn’t any ABBA, but a couple of tunes did stand out: “YMCA”, “Don’t You Want Me, Baby?” and two tunes by Madonna. I saw Jack looking at me from the corner of my eye, played it safe and picked out Reba. I was just straightening up when this woman at the bar said,  “Yeah, he gave me a little rock and a little cock!”

Naturally, I froze, but nobody else seemed to notice. I turned to look at her. She was in her mid-30s, brunette, big tits, freckled cleavage. I turned to Jack, who shrugged and took aim on the three ball for a side pocket.

“Hey, you at the jukebox!” she said. “Come here!”
Jack miscued and stood up, glaring at me. I just shrugged at him, turned to the lady at the bar, smiled and walked up to her.
“Are you Jack’s cousin?”
“Yes, I am,” I said. “His momma is my daddy’s big sister.”
“Well, y’all sure do look alike,” she said. “Just handsome as you can be!” She laid her hand on my arm. “I just want you to know that song you played is my favorite one in the whole, wide world.”
“’Little Rock’”?
“Yes, honey. And do you know why?”
“No, why?”
“Because my husband had a little cock, and he gave me a little rock.”
“That would piss anybody off,” I said.

I heard someone behind me choke on a beer, but I paid no attention, went to the other end of the bar and asked for a refill. Rick obliged with a stunning smile, but before I could thank him, a guy on a stool next to me poked me in the ribs.

I turned and found myself facing a rakish  blond wearing a Saints jersey. “I like them jeans you got on,” he said. “What size you wear?”
“Uh, on a good day, a 32,” I said.
“I used to be fat, too,” he said, and before I could protest, he said, “But I got on that Atkins diet. You know, the one that Ozzie’s wife is always doin’ ads for.”
“I’m not fat!”
“Oh, I didn’t think I was either, but you got this here,” and he patted my stomach and started rubbing on it. “Nice little beer belly …”
He let his hand linger a little too long. “Yeah, well, that’s mostly pizza,” I said, shifting away.
“Hey, I like pizza, too, but I really like them bratwursts,” he said, with what can only be interpreted as a leer.

“ANDEE!” Jack’s voice thundered across the bar. “You’re UP!”
I certainly was. “Be right there!” I said over my shoulder. “I’ve got to go,” I said to the dirt road d’Artagnan.
“Maybe you can come over for a brat sometime,” he said.
“Sure!” I caught Rick smiling at me in the mirror.

Jack soon decided it was time to go. He’d lost forty bucks at pool and Lady Little Rock had her hand glued to his arm. I was ready to go myself. As we were driving off, Jack asked me if I had a good time.
“I sure did,” I said. “Rick gave me his phone number.”

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Letter from Jackson

Darling Julia,

I should soon come home to Carolina, to the house you love, to the deep old woods I love, and to loving you, forever.

When I get back, I know you’ll ask me about Jackson, what it is like, what its people are like, how it looks, how they live, what makes the city what it is. I’m going to tell you now to clear my mind of it, leave it forever. Once home I do not want to think of it.

Jackson is a fractured collection of people in a city that has lost all sense of itself, a shattered glass best melt and recast. It’s an ugly place; there are few beautiful buildings, no streets of stately homes one expects to see in an old Southern city, just blocks upon broken blocks, mile upon miserable mile of buckling asphalt and falling buildings.

The city lacks grandeur, even faded grandeur, in any degree. Its main street is blemished by vacant shops and offices with dusty, empty, shattered windows like rotten teeth. Even its recent upgrade with roundabouts and verges doesn’t disguise the squalor.

Poverty and racial tension propel Jackson, a volatile combination that pulls back more than it pushes the social, economic, physical nature of the city. The political landscape is dominated by self-serving personalities motivated solely by a desire to stay in office in order to further their own ends. Inevitably, the lion’s share of federal funding finds its way to empower political objectives.

I can see you smiling as you read this, thinking, “You fool, it’s Mississippi; what did you expect?” Well, darling, I did expect more. I told you that before I came here. I expected to find people working together, a fellowship of stewards.

Tell me that’s why you love me, because I am a dreamer, and every night here, I dreamed of you in that old house in the mountains under a million stars.

All my love, my being.

Tim

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The Red Zeppelin

It was mid-morning, late June, and Harlan’s truck was shaking, rattling, and rolling, knocking up dust on a snake-neck red gravel road two miles northwest of Big Creek, Mississippi, hauling ass over about a hundred square miles of nothing but hills and woods, heartache, hydrocodone, honky-tonks, bait shops and the occasional double-wide Baptist church perched next to a crumbling asphalt parking lot, making our way by fits and starts to the backwaters of Grenada Lake.

I was red-eyed from a blunt, grumpy and road-weary, but Harlan was ebullient behind the wheel, grinning like a Tartar, regaling me with his cynical and irreverent observations on the state of mankind and his critical assessment of my life as a microcosm thereof.

“I told you not to take up with that nigga Ricky, but did you listen? No, hell no, you had to move into that shit-hole duplex he shared with his sister.”

“People do stupid shit when they’re in love,” I said. “Case in point, what about that Miss Lauderdale County who threw the five-carat engagement ring you gave her out the window into Pontchartrain?”

He threw back his head and laughed, said she was worth every damn carat, and if he’d had any sense at all he wouldn’t had fucked her sister. Suddenly it occurred to me how little I knew him.

*****

Harlan is a tall, solidly-built man with a head full of thick, unruly greying red hair, a bright, lazy smile, and the kind of voice given to people who have little to say. He can talk his way out from between tiger’s teeth and gets his way into places most people won’t even go, like this farm in the middle of nowhere that grows the world’s most sought-after watermelon.

Harlan did a stint in the Navy, a PhD from Cornell and 32 years in USDA’s harness. Along the way he picked up enough knowledge to make him a recognized authority on watermelons, his consuming passion. He has traveled across the globe in search of rare ancestral varieties. On his farm in George County, Mississippi he grows a crop of Kalahari tsamma.

We were there because three weeks earlier, as Harlan explained it, “Some laid-back ass-lick who makes more money in a day than I see in a month working for a slick new regional called me up out of the blue and said he’d give me a dollar a word for an article about the Red Zeppelin.”

The fabled Red Zepp is a pearly green  oblong averaging some twenty-five pounds. It’s most distinctive characteristics are the pale, subtly shaded zig-zag lateral stripes that gave the melon an illusion of ribbing. The Zeppelin is also distinguished—indeed ennobled—by a dense, velvety flesh of surpassing succulence.

Harlan’s source for these watermelons is on a sloping red sand dune with an ever weeping spring in indenture on the ridge south of the Schoona River in a remote and sparsely-populated county in north central Mississippi.

We’d been on the road a long time, and I was just flat-out tired from the long drive up from Jackson, tired of the road and impatient with Harlan, who seemed alternately fidgety and distant. I just wanted to get there, get the Zepp, and get the hell out.

*****

The sun danced on the rim of the world and shone in random rays over a country sculpted by loggers  and downpours. The road looped over hills, plunged down hollows, and turn-rowed bottom-land crops, following the design of some sweaty, half-drunk supervisor to no rational destination whatsoever.

Then suddenly there it was, a gently sloping sandy hill, glowing and imposing, on the red side of gold, a washy bronze in the pale summer sun. as lyrically striated and undulating as a vineyard and punctuated by tiny glowing ovals situated like so many open whole notes up and down a page of symphonic notation.

As we grew closer I made out upon that terraced hillside a lithe figure in loose, faded red overalls with wearing a broad red straw hat with a billowing polka-dot ribbon gently hoeing a row of bouldered vines.

“That’s Royce,” Harlan said. “Let’s go on up to the house.”

The house was a solid dogtrot overlooking the broad Loosa-Schoona bottom  with a wrap-around porch sheltering high windows that framed dangling melded Mardi Gras bead disks, swinging strings, mandalas and figurines of colored glass. Each line, angle and corner of every room of the house, glowed in turn with ruby, topaz, purple, aquamarine, and a hundred dozen colors in between, bending light into blades, spears, and arrows.

As we stood in the foyer, Royce came in. “Hey, daddy,” he said.

“Hey, sugar-booger,” Harlan said, giving him a sloppy kiss and a pat on the fanny. “Where’s Owen?

“He’s on his way back from Grenada. He’ll be here around dark. Y’all come get something from the refrigerator and we’ll sit on the porch.”

The winds were warm and shifty, the gloaming sky a bowl of scattered dirty cotton clouds. Around dusk, a light breeze sprang from the bottom. We could see the cloud pushing it sailing north up the river from the backwaters of the reservoir. A little slipper of moon dangled over the fading sun. Soon, we heard a car horn beeping in the distance.

“Here comes Owen,” Royce said, looking in the distance, and said to Harlan, “Where is she?”

Harlan exhaled, stretched, stamped his feet, and said, “In the back floorboard. I had a nice little box made, put a couple of photos in with her. One of us on our honeymoon in Daytona Beach. We both were wearing cut-offs. We were so happy. I put a picture of you in there, the one at the Sugar Bowl after the touchdown. She loved you, Royce. Don’t rob yourself of that.”

Royce smiled at him, and pointed to a faint star at mid-heaven. “There she is, Daddy. That little dot of light nobody can touch caught in the middle of the sky. Momma was a lightenin’ bug in a beer bottle, caught up in her own darkness.”

Royce leaned over and patted Harlan on the knee. “I’m settled with it, daddy. You ought to be, too. She always tried to keep herself pretty for you, even when she saw the end coming. Let’s go get her.”

Owen, dark and quiet, embraced Royce as we walked down the hill, the field around us shadowed under an open sky . We came to the east side of the hill; the crook of Leo embossed the heavens.

There in the shadows Harlan placed the glossy black box on a rough, flat red rock beside the weedy rill leading from the untidy spring. The wind rose.

“Bye, Momma,” Royce said. “Go home now. Don’t hurt anymore.”

Harlan began crying and we helped him back up to the house where we sat on the porch and drank and told stories about days we missed and days we didn’t until the noise of the night blanketed us, muffled our pain, and pushed us inside and abed.

*****

In the morning Harlan and I drove south under a blistering orange-red sun with a clutch of pearly rippled melons nestled in pine straw against the truck bed.

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Snipe Hunt

Will and Scott met in a dusty New Orleans bar on a wet November afternoon and shortly fell into a discussion of favored bridge abutments. Neither in fact were vagrants, both family men: Will an attorney, Scott a businessman, both Mississippians in NOLA for the wedding of mutual friends, Will the bride’s, Scott the groom’s. In time they found ethanol and automobiles in common too, but not hunting. Scott had never taken the field for game.

“Let me take you hunting,” Will said.

“Okay,” said Scott. “For what?”

Will looked him dead in the eye and said, “Snipe.”

“That’s not funny.”

“I’m serious,” Will said.

. . . . . . . . . .

They left Jackson in the darkest dawn, drove through for coffee and biscuits, then went up 49 watching the earth settle, fall away and go somewhere else.

Clambering from the truck with gear, they sank ankle-deep in muck, slugged first to one patch of mud just above the pooled water to another atoll of broken grasses, the Delta sky pushing distance to the rim of a tall lens, bringing all else into focus, amplifying sound. The rattles of the brittle grass echoed into the distance, across the river, all over the world. The mud was as old Egypt, richer than sin itself.

That close to the river, earth is a matter of water–making it, shaping it, teaching it–letting earth absorb all light, all air, all crisp, cold and fragile, brushed with a thin brittle crust on a  bitter morning.

Furrowed and churned, the field was a mummified of pale brittle stems that collapsed hither and thither, hiding muck, confusing footwork and sheltering snipe, the being itself, a will-o’-the-wisp the very color of winter—white, grey and black fading to or from indiscriminate brown, beige or buff in indifferent patterns on insignificant substance—a bird of earth without place in air where it seeks in fits to find a place and–failing, furtive–rushes back to the tussocks.

. . . . . . .  . . .

“Here we go,” Will said, stepping into the muck and pointing out into the water-mirrored field. “The birds hide up in piles of grass near water. They flush easy, so ease up before you move in.” The grass in front of them rustled and set alight two birds, translucent in the sun trailing faint alarms before they lit in another field.

“Can’t even see them mid-air,” Scott said. “They’re too light and grey.”

Will grinned. The sky was a blinding blue that dribbled down in pools and puddles. The only wind blew way above under a small cool sun, moving shadows of blades, leaves and stems. They walked, guns at their hips, talking to fill the void.

. . . . . . . . . .

“You don’t talk much about over there.”

“Not a lot to say,” Scott said. “It wouldn’t make sense to you.”

“Does it have to? Did it to you?

“Some of it did.” Beside them a clump of cattail folded brown and enclosed exploded into a busy ball of air. Scott crouched and shot, the sound bouncing across the field, the bird falling, twisting, one wing reaching for lift.

Will found the winged bird, wrung its neck, put it in the sack on his shoulder and said, “I want to know what it’s like to kill someone.”

“Why? You gonna kill somebody?”

Will grinned. “Maybe. Maybe I just want to know what it feels like to point a gun at a man and pull the trigger and watch him fall.”

“They weren’t men,” Scott said. “Not to me. They weren’t even enemies. They were just things in the distance. Dark shapes that moved. I never killed anyone. I just shot things and watched them fall.”

“But didn’t they shoot at you?”

“Yes, dammit! Sure they did. You know they did, and I got hit, too!” Scott said.

“I didn’t know that,” Will said.

“In the fucking back,” Scott said. “Shattered my shoulder blade. It’s a steel plate now. Went right through. Bled like a motherfucker.”

“Can I see the scar?”

“It’s too cold to take my shirt off, man,” Scott laughed.

“You don’t have to. Just let me feel it,” Will said.

Scott stopped walking and rubbed the tears off his face. He cradled his gun in the crook of his left arm and with his right unzipped his jacket. “It’s on the left side,” he said.

Will took the glove off his right hand, turned and moved his hand into the jacket, beneath the shirt to the skin, the hair, gently probing, pausing, feeling.

“That’s not it,” Scott said, “That’s my . . .”

“I know what it is,” Will said.

“Up,” Scott said, “There.”

“Yes. Does it still hurt?”

“No,” Scott said. “Not any more. It’s still tender, but you’re not hurting me.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Will said. “I just wanted to feel the scar.”

“You’re not hurting me, Will.”

“It’s okay, Scott. It’s okay. Why don’t we call it a day, have a couple of drinks on the way home?”

. . . . . . . . . .

They moved towards the ruts atop the dam that passed for a road, their steps less measured, more insistent, no longer stalking, but in pursuit, the sinking sun reddening, silhouetting the distance, a glittering planet punctuating the blueprint heavens.

They climbed into the truck. Will cranked it up and turned on the lights.

“We can grab a bottle and go to Smitty’s cabin on the Big Black. I’ll call Beth and tell her to call Ann,” Will said. “We’ll tell them we didn’t kill anything, be home tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Scott said, wiping tears from his face. “I’m just tired.”

“I know you are,” Will said.

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How to Make a Dagwood

Lay three slices of rye bread out on a cutting board. Smear two of them with a tablespoon each of yellow mustard. Smear the last one with mayonnaise. Top one of the mustard smeared slices of rye bread with 4 slices deli ham, 2 slices American cheese, 2 leaves of iceberg lettuce, and four slices bologna. Top the second mustard-smeared slice of rye with 4 slices salami, a half dozen pickle chips, 3 tomato slices, 4 slices turkey, 2 slices Swiss cheese, and the third slice of rye bread, mayonnaise side down. Stack this unit on top of the first mustard smeared slice. Secure the sandwich with wooden skewers with jumbo pimento-stuffed green olives.

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Hood

The heat in the room was stifling, and the smell of stale incense, feces, and decay as well as something sharp and acidic, was overpowering. If it weren’t for the open window in the back of the room, Hugh knew that a thick haze of stench would have kept them out until a fan had been brought in. As it was he felt nauseous.

“He’s over here, Hugh,” said Derek, the patrolman who found the body late that morning. He pointed to an overturned chair that once faced a computer desk. The screen glowed with the image of a rapper who was still hopping and gesturing, the music still audible in the headphones around the corpse’s neck.

Hugh stepped over and saw the body, that of a young white man, once muscular, once handsome, now swollen and blotched with purple patches. He wore a yellow t-shirt with a pattern of green palm leaves and a pair of long, loose shorts. His hands were at his chest, and his tongue protruded between white, even teeth. The desk was in a corner between two long tables, both containing two large rectangular glass tanks without covers, all except the one nearest the window, which contained a large piece of wood, a hollow rock, sawdust and a small pan of water.

“Looks like he had a lizard,” Derek said.

Hugh turned and looked at him. “A lizard?”

“Yeah, an iguana, one of those big ugly-ass lizards,” Derek said. “People keep them for pets. I wouldn’t have one of the damn things in my house, I’ll tell you that. Jesus.”

Hugh looked at the tanks. “Just one?”

“Looks like it to me. Must have been in that last tank, see? It’s the only one that has anything else in it, and there ain’t no water.”

“A dead man with an iguana,” Hugh said. “I’ve been chief of police in this town for seven years now, and this beats all I’ve ever seen. Call Moreno and get him to pick up the body so we can look at this place. And open another damned window! Bring a fan!”

…………

The body was found in a one-bedroom apartment in a small complex near the downtown business district on a street that ran parallel to the concrete-encased creek that still provided the nearby river with a venue for floodwater, but that didn’t prevent rampant development along the stream from downtown well into an old sedate residential district on higher ground upstream. The apartment complex had a variety of single and double bed apartments, and it was near a small shady park with picnic tables, a playground and two basketball courts that was always active with people, even in the hottest months in George, Mississippi.

Hugh didn’t have a forensics team in his department. Given the declining finances of the city, he considered himself lucky to have a secretary.  But he did have a county coroner, who was an exception to the general rule of limited experience when it came to coroners in the rural South. The coroner for Poindexter County was Abraham Moreno, who for one thing was a licensed physician. Moreno was also a man of parts, having served in the Peace Corps during the Sixties and traveled around the world with his late wife before settling the little city of George with his daughter. When Hugh asked him why the hell he’d come to this piece of backwoods to make a home, Moreno said, “To go fishing, of course. That’s what old men do, Chief. Well, that and grow roses, but it’s too hot here for roses.”

Hugh went back to the station and settled in for a long afternoon of complaints, most of which his secretary Kelly dealt with, but some had to be dealt with personally. One such call came from the mayor, the Honorable Claude Thompson, who by the generous rule of the town charter, had the authority to fire the chief at the drop of a hat, and was not above reminding Hugh of that.

“Hugh, I’ve been getting calls all afternoon about that body on Henry Street. What the hell is going on?”

“Claude, we’ve secured the scene and Moreno has the body,” Hugh said. “I’ll call you when I have more to tell you.”

“Jerry Wesson called me out of his mind. In case you didn’t know it, Alderman Wesson lives one street over on Olive. I also got a call from Reverend Alice Monroe, whose church happens to be on the corner, and just in case you didn’t know, the victim was her step-son.”

Claude looked at the ceiling and counted to three. “Hugh, do you want me to call them?”

“That’s the last goddamned thing I want you to do,” Claude thundered. “Just get your ass in gear. Do I need to call the coroner’s office and talk to that foreigner?”

“He’s from New Orleans, Claude.”

“I don’t give a shit. You tell him to get his ass in gear too.”

Hugh stared at the dead phone, then called Moreno. “Abe, I’m over a barrel.”

“That makes two of us, Hugh. You should come here and look at this. Do you have any men at the crime scene?”

“I’ve got a patrol car on the street, but that’s it.”

“Good. Get here as fast as you can,” Moreno said. “It wasn’t an iguana.”