Wicked City

by Ace Atkins

  “Yeah,” Hoyt said. “That bitch wears evil like a perfume.”

  THEY CAME FOR ME THAT NIGHT. I NEVER LEARNED WHO, but around four I found Thomas pulling on my arm and telling me that Santa Claus had come early. I pushed myself up from the bed as he repeated the news, and I listened, finally hearing what he’d heard, feet shifting and moving on the roof. It was still dark, and the crickets made music with the frogs in the creek.

  Joyce switched on the bedside lamp, and I was already reaching into my closet for the Winchester I’d borrowed from my father-in-law. I cracked it open, checking the breech for shells, and snapped it back together with a sharp click.

  I tried to steady my breath, blood racing through me, and nearly jumped five feet when Anne turned the corner from her bedroom. She was half awake and almost screamed when she saw the gun in my hand.

  “It’s okay. It’s okay. There’s some kind of animal on the roof.”

  “Are you going to kill it?”

  I shook my head and steered her back to Joyce and Thomas. “I’ll be right back,” I said, forcing a smile. “It’s okay. Just a raccoon.”

  It was hard to breathe, gunstock slick in my hands, as I walked to the kitchen door in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, hearing nothing but the air-conditioning unit humming away and dripping outside on the concrete platform.

  I unlocked the door and pushed my way outside. The light a purplish black, the air conditioner even louder outside, the warm summer heat being sucked into my lungs as I walked backward in the yard and looked up to the chimney.

  I saw the inky figure of a man.

  I crept back.

  He turned and looked to me, his face nothing but a shadow.

  Without thinking, I pulled the trigger tighter and the shotgun hammered into my shoulder. I heard feet skidding and then a hard thud, and I raced around the side of the house, my face slick with sweat, blood flushing through my ears, and crossed the front of the house just in time to see the car door close to an old Pontiac with both brake lights busted. Two men in the front seats.

  The Pontiac skidded out from my house, something flying loose and free from an open window.

  I heard the laughter of the men as they turned quick down toward Crawford Road and disappeared.

  I walked toward the road and stared down at a dead black puppy with a soft white chest. Its neck had been broken, but its eyes were open and glassy, staring out with hope.

  As the sun broke over the backyard creek, I buried the animal, listening to every sound from the house, praying to God that my children wouldn’t wake up and see the dirt and blood on my hands.

  “I DON’T KNOW ANY YOUNG GIRL WHO ANSWERS TO THAT name.”

  “She lived here,” Billy said. “In the projects.”

  “Where?”

  “Never mind.”

  “What does this girl look like?”

  He stood across from the woman who hung laundry on wires stretched between two T-shaped metal posts. She’d placed a radio on the window, and it reported a storm coming in from Montgomery and then broke into some old-fashioned gospel music.

  “She’s about my height,” Billy said. “Maybe a little shorter.”

  He made a motion with the flat of his hand.

  The clothes on the line, the beaten, worn denim and gingham print and large, old-woman drawers, picked up in a bright spot of wind and began to flutter like flags. He wiped his nose. The woman kept the wooden pins in her mouth, her silver hair breaking through the black like wire.

  “Her hair’s black and her skin is real white. She cuts her hair across like this.” Billy worked his middle and index finger over his eyes like a pair of scissors.

  “She have blue eyes?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Real blue? Kinda light?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And what is she calling herself?”

  “Lorelei.”

  The woman nodded and nodded, placing more old, fat-woman drawers on the line and a coverall suit and two threadbare dresses. She looked off to the west, shielding her eyes from the momentary white-hot streaks of sunshine breaking through the gray.

  Some children played with a football in the narrow shot between the rows of cheap brick housing. They screamed and yelled. One of the boys called the other a damn cheater.

  “I know the girl.”

  His face broke into a smile. “Can you tell me where to find her?”

  “I just heard where she worked, is all.”

  The woman told him and he was off before she could ask or say more, and Billy followed Fourteenth Street up through a cavern of brick storefronts: the Riverside Café, Davis’s Pawn Shop, the Oyster Bar, Manhattan Café, Silver Dollar, Yarborough’s Café, Blue Bonnet, Boone’s, Haytag, the Coffee Pot, and the Golden Rule. The doors open and the joints empty, listless men standing outside and watching a boy running uphill from the river, weaving through the guardsmen strolling along with rifles strung across their backs.

  On a quick turn, he made his way past Central High and more service stations and motor courts and cinder-block barbecue joints, and soon onto the road to Opelika, nearly stepping in front of an Army jeep that crossed his path, but he was moving now, breathing and pumping his legs, and finally slowing into a smooth curve and down past Kemp’s Drive-In and into a pocket of more joints and motels, and finally stopping just as the first spit of rain dampened the blacktop.

  Rain dented the dust of the crushed-gravel lot of the old motel that he’d known immediately when the old woman said the place looked like the Alamo.

  Only they didn’t call the old place the Alamo, even though it had probably been there since before they invented cars. The neon sign read CASA GRANDE. Rates hourly, nightly, weekly.

  It started to rain harder, as if the whole bottom of the sky had dropped out, the sky darkening almost to night, and Billy found shelter under a crooked, long roof, leaning against the old stucco wall and catching his breath.

  The walls of the Casa Grande were stucco, and the roofs of the main building, the one that looked like the Alamo, and the little cabins behind it were made of red tile. The place seemed like some kind of half-remembered dream to Billy, and as he walked down the rows of the little cabins, getting wet but not minding it, he tried to recall what picture show that this place seemed out of. He thought maybe the Lone Ranger, one of the serials, or maybe a Lash LaRue, but none of it seemed to make a lot of sense, as he found shelter again, all the doors closed, rain pounding hard on the roof. Only dim little pockets of lights from their front porches and that buzzing glow from the Casa Grande sign broke through the storm.

  He sank to his haunches and pulled off one of his sneakers, draining the water from it. He unlaced the other shoe and then wrung out his socks. Billy sat there for a long while, scared that maybe the manager would come out and try to run him off, but when he looked into the little sign-in area there wasn’t a soul around.

  Billy sat back down and waited, and it seemed an hour before the blue Buick rolled into the motor court and killed the lights. Not on sight, just from the sound, he knew it was his daddy’s car. And Reuben wasn’t the man who would whip him for getting lost for a while. In fact, he kind of half expected his kid to find something to do besides lay around the house at night. But Billy knew Reuben had come for him, maybe because of the rain, but maybe because someone had seen him running this way and maybe Reuben had been drinking. Really, the drinking was what caused the whipping, not the sin of not coming home.

  But when the car opened, it wasn’t his father. It was Johnnie Benefield, with his thin, greasy hair and skull head and protruding teeth, wearing a loud pink cowboy shirt and carrying a bottle in a sack. He knocked on the second cabin from the road and a little light flicked on the tiny porch.

  The door opened and out walked a girl, who pressed close to skinny ole Johnnie, raising up like a child on her tiptoes and locking her hands around his neck.

  Billy’s breath caught in his throat, the rain falling
harder.

  He was soaked, walking through the rain without a thought, a car leaving the motor court sweeping its lights across his eyes, blinding him, and then readjusting as he walked to the little cabin. He wiped the light and water from his face, shoes soaking again and crunching on the gravel. The back of the Casa Grande loomed above the boy like a Hollywood set as he found the window, just one, with some dead shrubs planted underneath, stunted and brown.

  He stood just a foot away and saw nothing, the sound of rain muffling all else. He watched the thin shadow of a man, and then the pink shirt fell away and he saw a small white hand on each side of Johnnie Benefield’s lower back with painted red nails almost like bloody talons.

  And then the scene flipped, both figures framed in the window, and Billy tilted his head the way a dog does when hearing a high-pitched sound and none of what he saw seemed to register. There was a girl, with white skin, milk-colored, and that raven black hair. But it was older, all of it, the outfit, the hair. She wore it done and teased, her lips painted the same bloodred as her nails. Her eyes covered in thick, heavy eye shadow.

  The only thing the same was how she smoked when she broke away from Johnnie, pulling a cigarette, teasing and delicate, from his big teeth and tucking it into her lips.

  She smiled and cocked a coy finger at him as she sat on the edge of the bed, him walking over, opening her knees, and her reaching roughly for his western belt and unbuckling him.

  The room was dark, maybe a small glow coming from the open door of the motel bath or maybe a table lamp. But it was enough to see, with Billy there in the darkness, the dim glow coming from the boxed window like a television set, standing there, the players blind to the audience. The rain coming down even faster now, blinding him, but he didn’t even care.

  Johnnie Benefield was nude, back covered in spots of black hair and pimples. His back facing Billy, the little girl was on her knees, and Johnnie worked her head against him with his bony hands, head tilted back and wide teeth grinning.

  He pushed her away, and she wobbled to her feet. Johnnie moved out of frame and then reappeared with a Jack Daniel’s bottle that he turned up and placed on the nightstand. With fumbling hands, he pulled her to him, her standing on the bed on her knees, and he pulled her from a black lace top and pushed her back with the solid flat of his hand to remove her matching dress. She lay there, head turned to Billy but not seeing anything but blackness and rain, in her underthings, which were quickly pulled away without much notice, her head still turned, mouth open, and eyes dead to the black panel.

  Billy walked toward the window, rain dotting and sluicing down the glass, and put his hand on the frame. He breathed through his nose, eyes filled with more water mixing with the rain, the dull sound of breath and heartbeats in his ears feeling like his head was about to break open and his chest would explode.

  Billy’s loose, aimless, and useless hand hung loose at his side.

  Johnnie Benefield was on top of her now, Billy’s hand upon the glass, watching Lorelei’s eyes watching nothing. Her eyes reminded him of when he’d found his grandfather dead on the outhouse stoop when he was a child and how the old man seemed to be staring but the eyes didn’t have anything in them. It made him think that something truly lived in the body and left at the time of death, just like all those stories he’d heard in church or from Reuben when he got real drunk.

  His hand held a connection on the glass, mouthing nothing in the rain, idiot words, speaking in a low, busted murmur.

  Johnnie’s skinny body thrusted and pumped like a piston, up and down, up and down, his skinny white ass shaking in the low light, the slab of the girl’s perfect milk flesh beneath him.

  Billy wondered if it hurt badly.

  But Billy tilted his head again, moving his hand away from the glass of the Casa Grande motor court, because he saw nothing in her. She was just watching nothing, the monster pumping up and down and up and down and all of it, until he stopped and shuddered. And the girl worked her way from under him and stood there completely nude in that flood of bathroom light. Her makeup and hair a mess, but her body thin and long and perfect. It was the first time Billy had seen a woman. He’d seen girls by accident or swimming, but he knew now she was a woman from the way she’d stood and cocked her hip, lighting a cigarette and pulling in a deep drag, as if wanting the smoke to cleanse her.

  She tilted her head back and knotted her long black hair behind her back.

  She spotted something in the glass and turned her head and walked forward as Billy walked backward, the rain slowing to a steady pattering, his feet making noisy crunches from his sneakers.

  And he walked as she peered outward, and he turned and broke into a straight-out run as far as he could go. Billy had no direction in mind.

  6

  BILLY DIDN’T GO HOME. Idle Hour Park never closed that summer, and on Friday night, four nights after he’d seen Lorelei at the Casa Grande, the kids from Phenix City and Columbus had the grounds all to themselves, free of the GIs that picked up prostitutes and disappeared for five minutes at a time or bought little bottles of booze from toothless hicks in from the country. Billy was the Pinball Kid, winning four dollars that night from two juniors at Central High, and then trying to take on his pal Mario but deciding instead to take the winnings and buy them both a Coca-Cola and hot dog, dinner for the night. They found a bench to sit and eat, two old men at fourteen, and watched some buzz-cut football players, maybe from Auburn, tossing peanut shells to some mangy monkeys. One of the boys spit on one of the monkeys when it got close to the bars and laughed like hell, and the monkey wiped away the insult with its tiny little hands, smoothing the spittle down into what was left of its fur.

  After eating, the boys roller-skated for almost an hour, until their heads swam with the endless laps and they turned in their skates and Mario left. Billy stayed, having not been home for nearly four days, sleeping at friends’ houses and out in an abandoned cabin not far from the park. Pocket money kept him fed with full, hot days at the park and cool nights down on Moon Lake. He often thought Reuben would come get him, but he never did, and he’d grown fine with that, he thought, smoking and looking out on Moon Lake as most of the kids had trickled away from the park. The calliope music piped in on the loudspeakers now silent, with only negroes picking up the wrappers and bottles the kids left. It was then that he felt her, before seeing her, and turned around.

  Billy just stood and flicked the cigarette into the weeds, already reaching for the pack rolled up tough in his T-shirt sleeve, waiting for something. He heard the sound of a motor gunning and frogs chirping along the muddy banks.

  “You had no business coming there.”

  He waited.

  “I saw you. You watched me, standing there in the rain. Why did you do that? You had no right.”

  Billy turned from her and followed the curve of Moon Lake, the chirping frogs almost deafening, rounding the corner past the rental boats and floats and down by a loose grouping of clapboard cottages. He felt a rock whiz by his ear and turned and saw Lorelei on her knees, crying and reaching for more stones. He didn’t move, and she stopped a cupped hand of pebbles and her arm in midthrow.

  The stones missed him and fell with a dull thud into the lake, and she dropped her arm and walked near. Behind her, the lights strung over the pool and bandstand cut off, and they were left in complete shadow. He could hear her breathing, she once again a child in T-shirt and jeans and a ponytail, and there was a cracking feeling in his stomach as he watched the disappointment in her face, holding steady but angry and crying.

  “That’s not me. Don’t you understand that? Don’t you believe me? Why won’t you say nothing? Why don’t you hit me? Hit me, or are you just going to run? That’s right, run away and hide, you coward. Can’t you see me anymore? That’s not me. That’s an act, a kid playing around. Dress-up. I don’t have no choice in that. It was a path made for me and I have to travel on it. But it won’t last. It’s a trial. It’s a trial. Don
’t you see?”

  She came to him, and he listened to her breathing and he breathed, his skin sticky in the summer air, and he looked into her face and hated himself for wanting to touch her face and cheekbones and pull her close. But he watched her and shook his head and felt uneasy, as if he would vomit, and he put his fingers to his lips thinking that he might, but he caught himself and rocked back, uneasy on his feet and on the banks of the lake.

  “You are a stupid boy. I never asked you to be my savior or my friend. You followed me.” She reached for his hand, and he left it there dead to her fingers, and she held on to him so hard his knuckles popped. “Do you want to understand it? Or do you want to stand there and blame me and call me a whore a thousand times in your mind, not knowing a damn thing but how to be a child and blame people for things you see? You don’t see anything. You are blind, Billy Stokes. I see myself. I know what I am. Do you want to understand it? Do you want to understand how I am that awful, disgusting girl and am also me?” She pounded her chest with her fist. “Do you want to? Or do you want to just know always that you are in love with a filthy whore?”

  Billy slipped his fingers from her hand and continued along the banks of Moon Lake. The surface was flat and black and endless.

  IN THOSE FIRST FEW WEEKS, I DIDN’T SLEEP MUCH. I drank a lot of black coffee and sat up most nights on a hard metal porch chair, a Winchester 12-gauge at my feet. Joyce usually woke me with sounds coming from the kitchen, the rattle of pans and such, and with more black coffee and bacon and eggs. And when she left for work at the little beauty shop we’d built behind our house, serving up the best in permanents and dyes for the ladies, she was unaware that Hugh Britton was parked right down the road reading the funny papers and keeping an eye out for most of the morning. Sometimes he’d be there when I’d walk home, sweated down to his old bones, and I’d check the mail in front of the little brick house and he’d wave from his open window and drive away.