Wicked City (7 page)

We sat in the office for a long time, until it grew dark. We didn’t talk. I just wanted to hold him there until he had relaxed a bit. Later, we finished up hauling the last of the boxes, and when I walked up into the hot, dark office, just about nine, I found John Patterson sitting at his father’s desk. There was a small scrap of paper before him.

John wiped his wet face with a white handkerchief and coughed.

I started to turn around.

“It’s all right,” he said.

I nodded.

“Guess he thought this was important,” he said. “‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.’ Edmund Burke.”

He looked up at me and nodded, seeming to make a decision that had been weighing on him for a while.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I’m taking my father’s place.”

“I figured you’d stay.”

“Not here,” John said. “Not this office. I want to be attorney general. I’m adding my name in place of my father’s.”

HE’D LOST HER.

But all Sunday, Billy searched. He rode a red Schwinn Reuben had given him for Christmas from the top of Summerville Hill down to the river and through the poor little neighborhoods of Phenix City and government housing where they’d spent those first hours together. They knew the girl, although no one seemed to recall her name the way the boy did, but, on most accounts, she’d gone back to Columbus, most saying Bibb City, and by nightfall he walked his bicycle over the bridge, past the police and troops, and followed the Chattahoochee north to the mill town just outside the city limits. He rode and glided under the cooling shadows, the gold light softening over the river and on the brick mill that seemed to stretch for almost a mile, hammering and pulsing inside like a live thing. And he was given hard looks by hard people who sat on their porches in their identical white mill houses and bony women would stare at him and spit and children playing touch football on their lawns would stop in midplay because they all knew he wasn’t one of them, the way a pack of animals can sniff something in the wind. But he paid them no mind and rode past the commissary and the post office and the trading post and the mill bars that were closed down on Sunday. There was a church picnic and a preacher who waved to the boy. The man had a mouth filled with gold teeth and smiled before placing a big slice of chocolate cake in his mouth and licking his fingers.

Billy soon came upon an old woman who sat in a plastic lawn chair by a crooked oak and he coasted and stopped. She sipped from a pitcher of Kool-Aid, next to a platter of deviled eggs on a TV tray covered with buzzing bottle flies. When he spoke to her, the old woman jumped, not because she was afraid but because her eyes were clouded, filmed over in a milky blue, and she listened to the boy’s questions about a black-headed girl named Lorelei, and the woman asked about “her people” but the boy knew no names.

He pedaled more, in and out of roads and little cul-de-sacs, and soon it was dark and he was lost, all the little houses and streets all the same. Every house a perfect little white box kept up to mill standards.

He asked a group of teenage boys about her, because surely they would know her. How would boys of that age not know a girl like Lorelei? He found them with their three heads ducked under the hood of a Nash that had to have been built before the war, and they turned when he called out: “Y’all know a girl named Lorelei?”

The boy in the middle had oil-stained hands and fingers, thick-jawed with a baby-fat face. “What kind of name is that?” he asked.

“You know her?”

He looked to his buddies, with the same fifty-cent haircuts, and he shrugged. A skinny, pimple-faced boy asked him, “Where you from?”

But Billy was gone and in and out of the mill town roads, his white T-shirt soggy wet and his legs exhausted, each time stopping to ask, having to gather his breath. He slowed again on top of a hill that overlooked the brown, jagged river and the endless mill bigger than a dozen airplane hangars stacked end to end and heading halfway out into the river.

He lifted up his T-shirt and wiped his face, and he knew it would probably be coming up around ten or so. He didn’t have a watch. But when you had a father like Reuben, there never was much accounting for yourself.

In the darkness down at the gentle curve of the road stood a big magnolia tree with fat arms covering a small bare lawn with dirt so trampled it seemed to be made of talcum powder. Little fireflies clicked off and on, and Billy just caught his breath and ran his hand over his sweating face, squinting into the shadows, seeing the shadow of a girl with long black hair and long white legs and arms. Her skin the color of milk.

He walked his bike and followed the curve and without thinking he called out to her and the figure turned, with his heart still beating into his throat. The figure moved into the porch light and it wasn’t a young girl at all but a pinched-faced old woman who smoked a cigarette in a flowered housecoat.

She looked at him and then quickly walked inside, and Billy almost turned right into the greased boy who’d worked on the car.

“You didn’t answer me,” said the skinny, pimple-faced teen. He ran his fingers under his nose and sniffed. He pushed at Billy’s shoulder.

Billy just kept walking, trying to go around, but something stopped him, and as he turned back they held the bicycle by the seat. He pulled, but then the pimple-faced boy was in front of him, twisting the bars of the bike like a steer and trying to pull him off.

“Cut it out.”

“Where you from?”

“Phenix City.”

“The shithole of this earth.”

He pushed him with one hand and Billy quit trying to push back. The other teen had yellow eyes and rotted teeth. He reached out and grabbed Billy’s shirt and ripped it from the neck.

“Do you know Lorelei?”

“Who is she? Your sister?”

And before Billy could say another word, the pimple-faced teen shot out a fist and busted Billy’s lip. Billy fought back, blind to it, because the one thing that he had heard over and over from Reuben was to never take a single ounce of shit from a living soul because, if you did, the shit would bury you. He fought with his eyes closed, windmilling, but his hands were held back, and the teen punched him hard in the eye and in the stomach, all the air rushing from him, and he was on his face, trying to catch his breath, when he heard the puttering sound of a broken muffler and looked up into the twin headlights, shining like eyes, the engine gunning, the car lurching forward.

He rolled just before it reached him.

The car bumped over his bicycle, the teens calling him a little pussy as they hit the gas around another turn, part of the bicycle caught beneath and sparking in the darkness, their laughter and yells following them down the street.

4

UNDER THE TIN ROOF
of Slocumb’s Service Station, noted above with a sign reading
COURTEOUS
and a big red button for Coca-Cola, I watched the cars speed by Crawford Road with their big-eyed headlights glowing white in the weak gray light. It had been a sluggish, heated morning between rain and sunshine when the air almost wants to break, thunder in the distance. Fat-bodied Fords and Chevys and Hudsons and Nashes would stop in every few minutes and Arthur and I would wander out of the garage to check their oil, clean their windshields of mosquitoes and lovebugs, and fill them up with the all-new, high-test Petrox.

And soon they’d again join the snaking line up and out over the bridge and out of Alabama or deeper on to Birmingham or Montgomery. Arthur liked to talk to folks, excited to know where they were headed, maybe secretly wanting to escape Phenix, too. He’d smile and speak in that careful, deferential safe ground for negroes, but always laugh and joke with me as a friend, not a boss.

I wore an Army slicker over my green Texaco coveralls and a matching ball cap with the red star logo. In between customers, I checked the shelves for Vienna sausages and saltines and searched the cooler for Coca-Cola and Dr Pepper. There were cases filled with candy and bubble gum and cartons of cigarettes and chewing tobacco; Borden’s ice cream was hand-dipped from a freezer by the register.

It was almost lunch when a sky blue Buick coupe wheeled in.

Reuben Stokes walked into Slocumb’s, announced with the tingle of a bell over the door, and I looked up. Reuben’s hair had been freshly cut and combed tight in the back and sides with a high poof on top; he wore a royal blue leisure coat with long, vertical white stripes and pleated white pants. He smiled like a confident circus performer.

“You’re not gonna rob me, are you?”

“How much you got?” Reuben asked.

“Couple hundred.”

“Maybe I will.”

Outside, a skinny man in a pink cowboy shirt and a fat man with a head the size of a watermelon got out of the Buick, stretched, and talked with Arthur. I recognized the man in the pink shirt as Johnnie Benefield, a local clip joint operator and safecracker. He was bone thin, with big teeth and a face that resembled a skull, black eyes, and a few strands of black hair combed over his bald pate.

The fat man, whom I didn’t know, wore big overalls and a dirty white undershirt. His face was pink and jowly and looked like he hadn’t shaved for days.

“Me and Johnnie headin’ over to the Fish Camp. You want to join us?”

I smiled because it wasn’t a serious offer. Anyone in town knew an invitation to Cliff’s Fish Camp wasn’t about dinner. Sure, they served fried catfish and hush puppies with slaw. But their main attraction was a stable of whores that Cliff kept up in glorified stalls out back and you could take your pick for dessert while you waited for your meal.

“Who’s the other fella?”

“Moon? We just givin’ him a ride.”

Over Reuben’s shoulder, I watched the fat man walk to the edge of the gravel lot and begin to unhitch the straps of his overalls. He hefted himself out and then began to urinate in the weeds.

“You can tell him we have restrooms here.”

“Moon wouldn’t know how to use ’em any more than a mule.”

Reuben stuck a cigarette into the corner of his mouth, his breath smelling of sharp whiskey.

“Johnnie workin’ for you now?”

“Some. Been with a few different folks since Big Nigger got himself killed.”

For some reason people had taken to calling Johnnie’s old partner “Big Nigger” before he’d been killed in a shoot-out last year. The man had been as white as me.

“I can always use a good man who knows engines.”

“Shoot.”

“It’s gonna last. Y’all can’t even open back up.”

“You saying Phenix City’s going straight?”

“I’m just saying people around here are fed up.”

The man finished urinating, pulled back the straps on his overalls, and wiped his palms on the bib.

“You sound like this crazy man who walks up and down the streets at night. Have you seen him? He wears a blue robe and holds up a sign painted with Bible verses. He says this is all the end times and that we stand in the center of Sodom. You ain’t headed that way, are you?”

“I didn’t say it’s the end times. I just said it’s going to be different.”

“Pat wasn’t Jesus Christ.”

“Didn’t say he was.”

Outside, Arthur cleaned off Reuben’s windshield and ran a gauge on each of his fat whitewall tires. When the car was filled, he walked in and told me it had been three dollars and forty-five cents.

I made change and shoved it across the counter, closing the register with a sharp snick. Reuben crushed the bills into his wallet and left a crisp fifty on the counter. I took it and followed Reuben back out, the light growing dark.

“I’m sorry about Pat,” Reuben said, holding open the door of the Buick. “I really am.”

“You know anything about that?”

He was about to turn, but the question amused him and he smiled at me with a big cigarette clamped between his teeth.

“Do you remember our last bout, before the war?” he asked. “A five-rounder, wasn’t it? You always wondered about it.”

“Not really.”

“You miss that? Waking up and going over to see ole Kid Weisz at that rathole of a gym, working out till you couldn’t even stand or lift your arms? You know I felt like I was invincible, like I could bust through a brick wall.”

“Haven’t felt like that for a while.”

“Haven’t felt like that since the war.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Shit, I ain’t lookin’ for pity, Lamar. That wasn’t nobody’s fault. That was just the world on fire.”

I tucked the fifty into his leisure coat’s pocket.

He grinned at me. “Your head has always been like a rock.”

I stood in the doorway and watched him leave. More thunder grumbled in the distance, but it didn’t feel like serious thunder and I paid it little mind.

The fat man, Moon, and Johnnie Benefield waited in the car. Johnnie hunched into the center of the car, turning the radio’s dial. The fat man stared straight ahead, immobile in the backseat, a simple, solid smile on his face.

Reuben walked back, leaving the car door halfway open. “There’s no need to be a hero right now,” he said.

I smoked down the cigarette and flicked a tip of ash into the gravel.

“Just go home, Lamar. Watch your family.”

“A threat’s not really your style.”

“It’s not a threat,” he said. “You understand?”

I nodded at the words and watched as the car drove off, my stomach feeling weak and cold.

WE BURIED ALBERT PATTERSON OUTSIDE A SMALL CHAPEL
in Tallapoosa County on a hot, airless June day after an endless stream of handshakes and condolences and sermons and prayers. After, a train of cars followed the long highway back east where the women of Phenix City filled the Patterson home with fried chicken and deviled eggs and macaroni and cheese and cool Jell-O molds and chilled lemon and chocolate pies. Most of the men still wore their black suits, the doors opening and shutting and battling the summer heat, while people mourned by exchanging loose talk about the killing, giving hugs, or exchanging funny stories about how stubborn ole Pat could be or how rotten this town had grown.