Wicked City (12 page)

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.

I was studying a
Ledger
cartoon, with three Phenix City officials as the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil monkeys perched atop a box marked
VICE, PROSTITUTION, MURDER
, when I heard a knock at the door. Anne ran ahead of me and I yelled for her to step back, and she looked at me, hurt from the harsh sound of my voice.

“I got it,” I said. “It’s okay.”

Two men stood at the door. One huge man wore a khaki Guard uniform and the other a navy suit and hand-painted tie. The man in the suit asked if I was Lamar Murphy and I nodded.

“Bernard Sykes,” said the man in the crisp navy suit. He introduced the guardsman as Major Black.

I shook both their hands and invited them inside. Sykes walked in, but Black said he’d prefer to wait by the jeep.

We sat down at our dinette, and I offered him some coffee.

“I’m fine. Thank you.”

Bernard Sykes was a little younger than me, a little taller, with a ski-slope nose and neatly combed brown hair. His suit was linen, recently pressed, and he wore a gold watch, cuff links, and some kind of class ring. The gem was red, so I figured he went to the University of Alabama.

He started out talking about the heat, how it was going to get up into the nineties, and then I responded with something about hoping for more rain. As we talked like farmers, Sykes opened up a plastic briefcase and pulled out a yellow legal pad and began to twirl a pen.

I excused myself and poured more coffee.

“I guess you know why I’m here.”

“To talk about the weather?”

“John Patterson is in Washington.”

“Flew up yesterday,” I said. “It was in the papers.”

Sykes looked down at the blank sheet of paper and then back at me across the dinette. My wife had hung some skillets on the wall, and we had one of those small cuckoo clocks that sounded eight just as he was about to speak.

I smiled and shrugged.

“Mr. Patterson has made statements publicly about us being babysitters.”

“John’s frustrated.”

Sykes looked up. “When no one in town even admits they’ve heard the name Albert Patterson, there are bound to be problems.”

“You might want to start disarming the town first.”

He looked at me.

“Until you strip those gangsters of their pieces, no one in their right mind is going to talk to you.”

Sykes nodded. “We’d have to place the entire city under martial law, and I don’t believe that’s been done since Reconstruction. Governor Persons wants alternatives.”

I nodded and shrugged. I lit a cigarette and sipped a bit of my coffee. From the kitchen window, I saw two elderly women walking through our backyard with shower caps on their head. Joyce helped them up onto the steps of her little white-clapboard beauty shop and greeted them with a smile.

“Did you know old women like their hair to be blue?”

“You men are going to have to trust somebody,” Sykes said.

“That would be nice.”

Sykes put down his pen. He took a deep breath and picked it up again, drumming the point on the blank paper. “Just pass this on. I do not work for Silas Garrett. He’s not a part of this.”

“And what about Arch Ferrell and Sheriff Matthews?”

I watched him. Sykes drew something on the blank pad.

“You don’t need to concern yourself with Mr. Ferrell,” Sykes said.

“You want to tell me a little more, doc?”

“Let’s just say that the attorney general’s office is in complete control of this investigation.”

“What about the town? Are you going to just leave it the way you found it?”

“No, sir.”

“When are you going to really shut it down?”

“We haven’t found anything yet,” he said. “That’s the problem.”

I took another sip of black coffee, emptying the rest, and then washed out the cup, leaving it to dry on a wooden rack. Out in my little shaded backyard, my children played cowboys and Indians in the dirt. Tommy had a pair of those silver six-shooters with caps and blasted and blasted from behind a tree.

“Is it that hard?” I asked.

“What’s that?”

“Finding what you’re looking for,” I said, grabbing my Texaco ball cap from the counter. “Let’s go. I’ll show you the way.”

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, MAJOR BLACK BOUNDED THE
jeep along a backcountry road, not too far from Seale, and pulled over where I pointed. The road was dirt and endless and covered in a canopy of oak and pecan branches. And soon they were behind me, me leading the way down a little fire road maybe a half mile into the woods, where we came across another dirt road and followed it for a while until I held up a hand and pointed into a clearing. Sykes followed along, swatting branches away from his face, his suit jacket in the car, his suit pants rolled to above his ankles, wingtips covered in red dust. He’d sweated clean through his dress shirt, but Black didn’t show an ounce of perspiration as he squatted down behind a long row of privet bush and waited.