Wicked City (35 page)

But he never could get dry, not even inside, and would drink himself to sleep every night, the deputies knowing he kept the hooch under the bunk but not really caring. It was on a cold day, sky dark as hell, that he’d just about run out and walked to the sheriff’s desk to have Lamar drive him to the liquor store. But Lamar was out.

He asked some new fat boy to call him on the radio. But the boy said Lamar was in Montgomery.

Reuben headed out the back door and walked out the chain-link gates, out and around the jail and the courthouse and up to Fourteenth to Chad’s Rose Room, a clip joint that had gone legit. Reuben sat there at the bar and drank down a couple Budweisers and ate a bowl of chili. He punched up some Ernest Tubb on the jukebox, listening to “Slippin’ Around,” “Filipino Baby,” and “Merry Texas Christmas, You All!” He liked the last one so much, he played it again.

He had another couple beers and tried to call Billy. He hadn’t seen him since he’d been in jail. There was silver tinsel all along the bar, with Christmas lights that winked.

He drank another beer and called the jail, asking for Lamar, who was still out.

He played “Merry Texas Christmas, You All!” twice more. And then the cook asked him to leave, and Reuben said that was fine ’cause he wouldn’t pay for chili that tasted like dog shit.

He walked down to the river, past all the old joints boarded up. The front door to Club Lasso boarded up with a
CLOSURE
notice, compliments of the Guard. He didn’t have a jacket, and his teeth chattered as he looked over the Chattahoochee churn for a while and then turned back up the hill, the street pretty much closed up and dead, making leaning shadows, trash piled up in big bunches along the road, and then wandered down Fifth Avenue, where some sonofabitch had hung candy canes from streetlamps, and the pharmacy, fake snow sprayed on the window, not fooling a soul.

His teeth chattered more as he walked by the Palace Theater, noting there was a new movie on called
Atomic Man,
along with
White Christmas.
He stepped inside to get warm and asked the usher if he’d seen a boy that looked like Billy. The teenager looked at Reuben like he was just some crazy drunk, and Reuben told the usher that he looked like a monkey in that bow tie, and that he bet
White Christmas
was a crock a shit, that Bing Crosby had never been no GI.

As he walked, it almost startled him that it had grown dark, seeming to close Phenix City in a little curtain. The taillights on the Hudsons, Nashes, Fords, and Chevys glowing bright red up and down Fourteenth.

He kept moving past the courthouse, not feeling like stepping back in that cell, and gave a two-finger salute to some of the Guard boys, stepping around them, down by a bus stop by the railroad tracks and Niggertown, thinking that maybe someone would have some ’shine down there.

That’s when he was greeted by something that struck him downright funny. A troop of Boy Scouts standing across from the courthouse, all duded up in their green uniforms, yellow bandannas around their necks. They marched behind a man who was dressed just like those kids, and the sight of him made Reuben really giggle. A grown man dressed up like a Boy Scout, having to march right by them Guard troops.

He stood as they passed by and he kept the salute to all of them, laughing a little bit, before turning toward the railroad tracks that cut Phenix City in half and down under a little trestle, where he found a couple of old negro men sitting on their old rotten porch eyeing him like he was about to steal one of the bald tires they had out in their yard.

“Excuse me, preacher,” Reuben said, “could I ask you a question?”

With a jelly jar full of hooch and it coming up on night, Reuben was ready to go back to the cell and maybe play a game of cards with Quinnie. How he loved playing cards with Quinnie. If the boy had any more tells on him, he’d be a damn dictionary.

The car came out of nowhere, skidding to a stop, the door popping open and a man jumping out, Reuben’s eyes having to focus and shift on the man’s face.

He saw those big choppers first as the man smiled. “Howdy.”

Reuben searched for something to say, but that was right when Johnnie reached into his coat pocket, popped open the switchblade, and gouged it into his throat.

21

REUBEN LAY THERE
on that street corner, holding his throat, his face turning pale as a bleached sheet, as the Boy Scouts ran to him, circling him, the troop master pressing his bandanna to Reuben’s bloodied neck. Some of the boys ran for the courthouse, yelling, and Reuben lay there looking up at the sky, not moving his eyes or blinking and twice trying to talk but his voice unable to work right. He finally gathered it in a sputtering, bloody gag, and he asked for the sheriff. He asked for me twice more, before a woman walking down the road, a stripper who had worked for him at Club Lasso, spotted his cowboy boots hanging off the curb. And she ran to him, wobbling on the big red high heels that matched her tight red dress, and she dropped to her knees, taking Reuben’s head in her lap and calling out for help, and being told the boys were finding it.

And she cried and held him there on the street corner, more people gathering around, circling Reuben, the curious sight of him and the buxom woman holding him in her lap and crying. His face grown whiter now, still calling out for me, and another boy running off when they knew he’d meant Sheriff Murphy. A short man in a suit said the man on the ground had just testified in the Patterson murder, and the crowd all started talking and whispering while Reuben spit up more blood, hearing a siren in the distance.

Reuben’s eyes shifted for a moment, his body shook, and he smiled up at the girl, recognizing her face, and croaked, “Howdy, Birmingham.”

She smoothed back the hair from his forehead and cried, screaming for everyone to clear away, and then a path opened, Jack Black pushing his way through and kneeling down to see Reuben and yelling for more room so they could all breathe.

Reuben waited, his arms splayed out open, Texas show boots crossed at the ankle and a smile on his bloody lips. “I bet I sure look like shit.”

The stripper held the Boy Scout bandanna, not gold now but soaked in blood, and men rushed from an ambulance and spoke to Jack Black and then hoisted Reuben onto a gurney, taking him to Homer C. Cobb.

I didn’t learn what had happened until I drove back into Phenix City and was met at my house by Quinnie Kelley, who drove me to the hospital. Reuben had already had a blood transfusion by that time, and I sent Quinnie out to look for Billy, but, by midnight, Quinnie had returned alone.

It was about that time a nurse told me that Reuben had called for me, and I left the waiting room where I was staying with Joyce and walked back to his room. Reuben was there, his neck bandaged, two nurses working on him, and I half expected him to sit up and make a joke about ladies in white. But he just lay there, eyes closed, shirt off, but still wearing blue jeans and muddy boots.

He opened his eyes, asking for Billy, and I had to kneel down and tell him that he was on his way. And Reuben nodded and closed his eyes and jerked a bit like you do nodding off while trying to stay awake. The nurse pushed me out of the room and wheeled him fast around the corner.

I followed, a door with a circular window slamming in my face.

Not five minutes later, the door swung back open, and a doctor gripped my upper arm, a man I knew from church, and he told me he wanted me in surgery.

“I’m fine right here.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “I know who this man is and what he did today. If something happens, I want you to watch as a witness.”

I was hustled into a bleached smock and told to stand back from the operating table, up on a wooden apple crate. I watched them fill Reuben’s pale chest and throat with tubes, opening up the gash below his chin, more fresh blood being pumped into his body.

He lay there, out cold, with his slicked hair and closed, droopy eyes and what looked like a smile. An honest-to-God smile. I watched his face, trying to figure out the smile, the last joke on all of this, just as the sound of cracking startled me, the doctor sawing into Reuben’s chest. My head jerked back, as if hearing the report of a rifle, and I watched as the doctor held Reuben’s heart in his simple human hands and tried to massage him back to life, only to give up minutes later and check the watch on his wrist.

“HOW MANY MORE OF US HAVE TO GET KILLED BEFORE
someone will make a damn decision?”

John Patterson was outside by the hospital fountain, yelling at Bernard Sykes, who just stood there taking it but shaking his head in disagreement. I joined them, listening, John telling Sykes to present the grand jury with everything, don’t hold a piece back on Fuller or Ferrell or they’d never indict. But Sykes shook his head, saying they’d have to wait for the grand jury.

“It’s a slow process,” Sykes said. “We have to build the case.”

“This case is going to be taken away from you. Don’t you know that?”

“They’re going to indict.”

“Not a word of his testimony can be used in court,” Patterson said. “The defense can’t cross-examine a dead man.”

Patterson rubbed his neck, exhausted, and looked at Sykes and then back at me. He shook his head in defeat, before walking back out into the shadows.

IT WAS TWO A.M. WHEN BILLY ARRIVED AT THE HOSPITAL,
walked in by Jack Black and Quinnie. He moved slow through the lobby, the older people there watching him, seeing if he knew, how he would react, would he fall or keep upright.

I put my arm around him, not saying a word.

He’d been told.

In a back hospital room, Reuben lay on the gurney, covered up to the chin by a white sheet, the stripper sitting near him, as if guarding his body. In a chair, she shined his boots with a cloth and mug of soapy water.

“Who are you?” Billy asked.

“Just a friend,” she said.

She stopped while wiping down the cactus on the shaft, smoothing her black hair over the soft leather and crying, and watched as Billy moved to the body, standing there and looking down at his father.

“This is yours,” the woman said, handing the boy an envelope with his name scrawled on it in Reuben’s hand.

He just wavered there for a few moments, and, without a word, turned and ran out the door, leaving the room and leaving the hospital.

BILLY WOULD HIT THE ALABAMA-MISSISSIPPI LINE EARLY
the next morning at seventy miles per hour, feeling the air rush from his lungs as he left the state. He felt for the first time that he could catch his breath, even though he couldn’t tell a damn bit of difference from one state to another. The moon shone on the same clapboard houses, the same tired laundry lines with flags of dresses and overalls blowing in the cold wind, and the same winding, muddy roads leading off that main highway for hardscrabble folks to follow. He lit a cigarette early that morning and turned the dial on that old blue Buick’s radio, searching for a station in range. He’d gotten only a few miles into Mississippi when he got a solid signal out of Memphis and leaned back into his seat, cracked the window, and felt the cool air slice across his face.

He could breathe better, without a doubt.

And, in the rearview mirror, he peered at the two faces, the tired boy and the girl who slept on his shoulder. Her face still scarred, nose broken, but no less beautiful to him. He could feel a warmth spread in his chest as she shifted herself toward him, making him feel that solid, firm weight anchoring them together.

The envelope lay unopened on the dash, fluttering in the wind.

A WEEK LATER, WORD SPREAD THAT THE GRAND JURY HAD
made a decision. Outside the courtroom doors, the Russell County Courthouse became choked with reporters and attorneys and normal folks off the street who waited to hear the news. I saw Arch Ferrell in the middle of it all, dressed in a gray suit and shaking hands, smiling, knowing he was going to beat it all. He stayed for a while, but by three p.m. he drove off in his Pontiac. Not two minutes later, the courthouse doors opened, newspapermen running out to their typewriters and telephones, saying Ferrell and Fuller had been indicted for the murder of Albert L. Patterson.

There were gasps and yells. A few people clapped.

John was there, and we shook hands and hugged. Soon, Sykes moved out of the courtroom, trailed by dozens of newspapermen, and he led them all out to the courthouse steps where he confidently answered their questions. Afterward, he followed me back to my office, reached into his briefcase, and handed me three neatly typed and folded arrest warrants.

Si Garrett had been indicted as an accessory, and, under Alabama law, Sykes explained to me, that was the same as pulling the trigger.

We wasted no time. Jack Black drove, I sat in the passenger’s seat, and Quinnie in the rear, as we made our way to Bert Fuller’s garage apartment. His lawyer had finally finagled him a house arrest for the vote fraud because of an injured back from a “fall from a horse.” And he’d been there for weeks, with boys from the Guard taking turns watching him lie in bed in his pajamas, reading the Bible and watching television, only leaving the bed to relieve himself.

A shapely blonde met us at the door, chewing gum, hands on hips. And I reached into my pocket for the warrant, but she just let the door swing open and waved us in with the flat of her hand, saying, “We’ve been expecting you.”

Bert Fuller woke, as if being gently woken from a dream. He smiled up at me and Jack Black and said, “Blessings.”

“Get your fat ass up, Fuller,” Black said. “You’re hereby under arrest for the murder of Albert Patterson.”

He tilted his head, still not moving it from a pillow. “Boys, I am not fit to move from this bed. I’m under bed-rest orders from an Atlanta physician, and any move from my bed could paralyze me.”

Black nodded and looked to me.

“Quite a place you got here,” Black said. “I like those lassos and hats on the wall. Just how many pairs of boots do you have?”