Wicked City

by Ace Atkins

  “When did you meet him?”

  “After the war, when I got home. He’d just been fired off WSFA and needed someone to drive him. Keep him sober for singin’ at all them roadhouses.”

  “And they hired you.”

  “His mamma did.”

  “Well, his mamma didn’t have sense at all.”

  “He could write songs from picking the words out of the air.”

  They followed a path to an old unpainted house situated next to a small, two-acre pond. Reuben turned up the liquor, damn near finishing the bottle, and watched as the moon reappeared from outside a cloud just like Hank had always said. A broken-slatted pier walked out into the water maybe six feet.

  “I want you to listen to me,” Bert Fuller said. Tonight, he’d dressed in blue jeans and his usual boots with a white snap-button shirt and matching hat. If he didn’t know better, Bert Fuller sure looked like one of the good guys. And Reuben smiled at the thought.

  “What are you laughing at?”

  A bass flopped to catch a bug in the pond. Reuben turned to look at it.

  “Listen,” Fuller said. “Cliff’s done got him this Mexican gal that you won’t believe. I know you was always sayin’ how you like those little Filipino women. The Mexes ain’t a hell of a lot different. All that talk about their pussies smellin’ like tacos is a bunch of trash. This gal has golden skin and big old brown eyes, titties the size of watermelons. Man, I just could bury my pecker between them.”

  “What’s that mean to me?”

  “It means I’ll let you have her after I fuck her. But I ain’t goin’ after you.”

  “Bert.” Reuben laid his hand on Fuller’s shoulder. It was embroidered with lassos and bucking horses. “You sure are good to me.”

  Reuben followed him inside Cliff’s Fish Camp, and in the elongated, camp-style room was a roundup of most the Machine, minus Shepherd and Matthews and a few others. Most of them were bit-part players who’d come out of the hills to run ’shine or come from Nevada or Atlantic City to deal cards or work on slots. There were the locals, too. Godwin Davis and Red Cook, the Youngblood brothers, Slim Howard, Papa Clark, Jap Sneed, and Frog Jones. And at the end of the table was the Queen herself, Fannie Belle, and she pulled Fuller in close.

  Since Shepherd and Matthews had gone into semi-retirement, Fannie had snatched up most of the PC action, including some business down in the Florida Panhandle. She’d partnered with Cliff Entrekin in the fish camp and worked the needle-and-pill racket with some buck-toothed flunkies who worked out of back alleys and barns. Some say she got a big cut of the sale of whore’s babies, too, with Dr. Floyd. But to Reuben, she’d always be that tired, big-titty, redheaded B-girl who used to work at his club, writing letters to her twenty husbands who sent her checks monthly.

  He had to admit she had a hell of a scam, getting some horny Army boy to marry her and then getting the dumb, pussy-struck sonofabitch to head overseas. Reuben used to call Fannie the Queen of Hearts.

  Fannie laughed some more with Fuller, her teeth bright and big, and Fuller probably telling some dirty joke he read in the back of a comic book. Then her face retreated into a half smile and she wrapped an arm around his fattened stomach, whispering into his ear, and Reuben wondered what the hell you had to whisper about in this world.

  Fuller stepped back from the whispering and nodded. The top of Fannie’s red hair caught in the light like a red flame. They both stood and motioned for Reuben to follow them.

  A strand of bare bulbs had been strung over the camp tables, and the men and whores talked as if this was a big, old family function with half-eaten plates of catfish and hush puppies before them. Ole Moon sat in a corner, away from the whores in their kimonos and housecoats, working on probably his fifth plate, wiping the grease from the whole bone fish across his overalls.

  Outside, Fannie walked them over to a beaten-up old Nash and popped the trunk. She reached inside for a flashlight by the wheel well and pulled back a knitted blanket. She shined a beam onto two wooden boxes.

  Fuller opened one and gave a short little laugh.

  “So easy even you two jackoffs could do it,” Fannie said.

  “Good God Almighty,” Reuben said. “What’s this shit for?”

  “I don’t want to fuck up a perfectly good manicure.”

  “You always were particular with your hands,” Reuben said.

  Fannie clawed at Reuben’s face, but he quickly sidestepped and told her to calm her ass down. She walked back into the night on wobbly high heels, and both the men stood there looking down at the two boxes.

  Fuller gave a low whistle and walked back into the fish camp. Reuben peeked back inside the box, looked at all those sticks of dynamite, shook his head, and closed the trunk.

  He sat down on the edge of a slatted porch and stayed there for a while and watched the loopy motion of bats gobbling up the night insects. He lit a cigarette and thought about what he’d just seen and how he always found himself taking the high dive into a tub of shit.

  When he turned, he saw a woman had joined him. She told him in a broken accent he was a handsome man.

  “Sometimes it’s just a burden, darling.”

  She smiled, a little cleft in her chin about right for his thumb, and he decided to turn and kiss her. Most people minded kissing whores, but Reuben had never had any trouble with it.

  She reached between his legs and felt for him. Reuben didn’t seem to mind or notice, still watching the loopy flights of the bats in the purple evening.

  “No?” she asked. Her eyes were brown and big as half-dollars.

  He turned to her, her black-and-red kimono half open and showing part of an ample brown breast.

  “You wouldn’t happen to be from old Mexico?”

  She nodded.

  Reuben grinned, turned, and looked through the door, not seeing Fuller but Frog Jones, with his trademark fatty throat, clog-dancing on top of a picnic table, a bottle of beer in his hand.

  “Well, come on, then,” Reuben said. “What the hell we waiting for?”

  7

  THE NEXT MORNING, Arch Ferrell woke as if he’d died. He sat up in bed, feeling his heart had just again started to beat, and tried to breathe. As he sat awake, the shadowed men stood before him, craning their necks, studying him as one would an insect, faceless, one poking a shadow rifle close to his feet. Arch pulled his toes back toward himself, only getting in some air as the men joined up together and marched into his shallow closet, single file and as one. Arch got to his feet and felt for the closed doors and opened them, running his hands over his sport coats and ties and pressed pleated trousers all arranged together in neat rows. By now, Madeline had turned on the bedside lamp and stared at him, wiggling with some difficulty in her pregnancy to sit against the headboard.

  “Arch?”

  “Did you see them?”

  “Arch?”

  He looked back at her, with labored breath, clutching his chest and still seeing the rounded shape of the Storm Trooper helmets. He pointed to his wife and opened his mouth, but nothing came out, and he walked into the bathroom and shut the door, running water so she could not hear the sound of him vomiting up a bottle of gin.

  Twenty minutes later, he’d shaved and showered, his face and scalp feeling as if they could peel from his skull, as he fought to keep his car on the road and headed out of Seale and to the courthouse before first light.

  He was the first in the Russell County Courthouse, as he’d always been in better days, and walked with dull, empty, cavernous footsteps to his office and unlocked his desk drawer, finding a revolver. He studied it for a moment in the darkness, only a thin stretch of fluorescent light from the hall, and then tucked it away.

  In the bottom drawer, he found what he wanted. A flag folded in neat corners. And he clutched that flag to his chest, walking down the steps, at once feeling almost six feet tall, winding his way to the cool, damp lawn, listening to the sounds of the crickets and early-morning birds in the dark
ness.

  He walked to the flagpole and hooked up the Stars and Stripes he’d carried with him from the depths of France to Germany and hoisted it high in the hot, windless air of the summer and stood and watched its flaccid droop, standing near the monument to the dead Confederate soldiers, some who fought the last battle of the Civil War on this very bluff, and he saluted until tears ran down his cheeks.

  A little later, he grabbed coffee at the Elite and took it with him out the door, feeling the furtive stares of the truckers and contractors following him. He soon found refuge behind the pebbled glass of A. FERRELL COUNTY SOLICITOR and drank coffee and tried again to reach Si Garrett’s family. He spoke to a Democratic chairman named Frank Long for at least two minutes, but Frank had to go, and Arch tried some other important people he knew who were either not in or already in conference. So he lit a cigarette, no secretary in the anteroom, and no morning briefings with his staff. He just smoked in silence without the lights, staring up at the cracked ceiling and trying, just for a moment, to piece together his mind.

  But there was a knock at the door, and he stood and quashed out the cigarette and found two guardsmen dressed in khakis with.45s clipped to their canvas belts asking if he was Archer Ferrell.

  “Can’t you read the fucking door, you goddamn morons?”

  They said they had orders for him to come to the city jail, where a warrant was issued.

  “For what?”

  “Sir, I hate to inform you that you’ve been indicted for vote fraud by the grand jury in Birmingham.”

  “Well, if that doesn’t fuck all. One minute.”

  “Sir?”

  “I said, one goddamn minute.”

  He slammed the pebbled-glass door in their faces and returned to the black phone on his desk, calling up the operator and calling direct for James E. Folsom, Big Jim. But Big Jim wasn’t in, according to that liar of a wife. And so he tried again for Si Garrett and only got the secretary again, who didn’t answer his question, only asked him if he’d read the papers.

  He slammed down the phone so hard that it cracked.

  He stood and paced. He lit a cigarette and looked back at the desk. He reached in the desk for a bottle of Jack Daniel’s that always waited in his bottom left drawer and as the guards began to grow furious and call out to him with pussy-sounding “sir” s he drained nearly three-quarters of the bottle and called out to them, “One fucking minute.”

  He called Madeline. He was firm. He was angry.

  He was sorry.

  He cried.

  And then the door opened and the guardsmen appeared with several of their friends and they didn’t say a word, only came at him from both sides of the big mahogany desk that had been in his family for nearly a century, and each one grabbed a forearm, yanking him to his feet.

  Arch Ferrell reached out with a desperate hand for the black phone and grabbed the receiver and clocked the one with the bad teeth right in the ear, and then he hopped over his desk and ran, scooting down the hallway, his heart pounding in his ears, seeing shadows with helmets behind all the pebbled-glass doors of every office he passed. He finally turned, not remembering how to find the stairs, and ran right into the men, who braced him and grabbed him by the arms.

  They marched Arch right out of the courthouse, and in a sloppy, half-lidded, lazy way he tried to remain high with dignity. His tie hung loose off his neck, his dress shirt pulled from his pants, trouser knees skidded and black.

  And then as they approached the flag, he dug his heels in the ground, stopping the men, pulling a hand free and saluting to the “Communist States of America,” and then yelled, “Three cheers for Bert Fuller.”

  Then he burst out laughing, half forgetting the punch line, before they loaded him into the back of the jeep and bolted him to the floor.

  “HAPPY BIRTHDAY,” SHE SAID.

  Billy sat up from the bunk’s mattress, yawned, and reached out for the covered plate Lorelei handed him.

  “I couldn’t find any candles. You want me to light a match to stick in the frosting?”

  “Where’d you get this?”

  “The Elite.”

  “You know it ain’t my birthday.”

  “Says who? Birthdays always make you feel better.”

  The boy smiled and shook his head.

  “Do you feel older?”

  “On account it’s not my birthday?”

  “Yes.”

  She sat at his feet while he peeled off the tinfoil and began to eat the chocolate cake with his fingers. They’d been together two days straight, never leaving Moon Lake, breaking into the little clapboard cabin on the opposite shore when it started to rain the other night.

  She’d gone into town when they got hungry and brought back fried chicken and hamburgers from the park and small green bottles of Coca-Cola. Yesterday, she brought back a sack of comic books and magazines from the Phenix City Pharmacy, and Billy had spent the day on the bunk reading Superman and True Crime and Front Page Detective.

  “Don’t you want to go outside?”

  “Not really,” Billy said.

  “You still feeling sick?”

  “No.”

  “We can’t stay here forever. Someone’s gonna kick us out.”

  He shrugged and left half the cake for her. She refused, and then took it and ate the last bite, before resting her head on his lap.

  The cabin was just a big bare room with two cots with rolled-up mattresses and a little kitchen with a skinny stove and sink. If you wanted to use the bathroom, you had to go to the community showers down near the boats.

  Billy leaned back into the mattress, the springs squeaking as Lorelei joined him and lay on her back. She lit a cigarette, and they both stared at the ceiling, and he could feel the blood rushing into his chest and into his pecker when she moved against him. Her raven hair smelled like the roses on his granddaddy’s casket that had stunk up the front parlor of their house even after the old man was put in the ground.

  “People are probably looking for me,” she said.

  “What people?”

  “Who do you think?”

  Last night was the first time they’d kissed. When everyone had left the park and the lights had clicked off at the dock and along the shore, the moon slipping behind the clouds, they both undressed and swam quietly out into the lake. They swam away from each other, not leaving from the safety of the bank, and floated on their backs, him seeing her chest and other parts, and when he’d swim close she’d drift away with a laugh. The water was as warm as a bath, the light silvery on the pine needles, and when they finally found their stiff clothes and dressed, Billy turning away as she darted from the water to the shore, they kissed.

  “Will your dad be worried for you?” she asked.

  “Naw,” he said. “When my daddy gets drunk, he says he won me in a poker game and that the only reason my bitch of a mother left without me was on account I didn’t belong to her or nobody.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Reuben once told me he’d known a mule in the Army who could talk and sing.”

  “Who’s your dad?”

  “Reuben Stokes.”

  He looked over at Lorelei for recognition, but she was still looking at the ceiling, and when she felt the focus upon her she crooked her arms around his neck and kissed him again.

  “Reuben was in the Philippines during the war and got captured,” Billy said. “They were taking him and everyone on the island on a long march, and Reuben waited till the guards looked the other way and rolled into a ditch full of piss and shit. When the damn Japs passed him, they figured he was dead. He said he even left his eyes open and stuck out his tongue all funny. He hightailed it after they left, and fought up in the mountains till the troops came back.”

  “My daddy was too old for the war.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What about your mamma?”

  She didn’t say anyth
ing and he kissed her some more, and his small chest felt like it would just explode. And then she told him everything.

  SHE WAS ONLY THIRTEEN WHEN THE LONG BLACK CADILLAC pulled off to the side of the highway and she saw the fat man taking a leak into the mosquito ditch. She was long-legged and scabby-kneed, with black hair that grew down past her rump, hair that women in church whispered was pure vanity. As the man finished, she kept picking corn to fill a wire basket, and then ran a red bandanna over her neck and across her face before tying back her hair. He looked to be rich, not only with the car but by the way he stood and looked down off the road at all those poor people having to work on a hot summer day. He shook his head and knocked back a little from a silver flask that reflected hard in her eyes. It must’ve been about a minute later that he whistled for her in the way that a man whistles for a beaten dog.

  She came.

  And she hated herself for that, and would hate herself all the way from the summer of ’50 onward, but she was a country girl with not a thought in her head. The only world that she knew was a clapboard shack fashioned from scavenged wood and twisted metal from wrecked automobiles and the half acre that her daddy rented out from their neighbor. A rotten-toothed, soulless man who cheated and lied more than the pharaohs of Egypt.

  She walked to the rich man, her head down, and he took a step toward her, pulling her from the red dirt road and onto the shoulder where he stood. He wore a checked gray suit with a red tie and a straw cowboy hat. He smiled at her, looking down at her face, as he brought it up with a light finger and smiled for a long time.

  She didn’t smile back on account of the big space between her teeth.

  “How old you, girl?”

  “Thirteen, sir.”

  “Well, you look to be sixteen from where I’m standin’,” he said. “Turn around.”

  And she did, as stupid and blind as a trained dog waiting for a rancid piece of meat, and he looked at her long legs and scabby knees in that dress made out of old gingham and flour sacks. The man pulled her hair back and twisted her head from side to side.