by Ace Atkins
Synopsis:
In 1955, Look magazine called Phenix City, Alabama, “The Wickedest City in America,” but even that may have been an understatement. It was a stew of organized crime and corruption, run by a machine that dealt with complaints forcefully and with dispatch. No one dared cross them — no one even tried. And then the machine killed the wrong man.
When crime — fighting attorney Albert Patterson is gunned down in a Phenix City alley in the spring of 1954, the entire town seems to pause just for a moment — and when it starts up again, there is something different about it. A small group of men meet and decide that they have had enough, but what that means and where it will take them is something they could not have foreseen. Over the course of the next several months, lives will change, people will die, and unexpected heroes will emerge — like “a Randolph Scott western,” one of them remarks, “played out not with horses and Winchesters but with Chevys and .38s and switchblades.”
Peopled by an extraordinary cast of characters, both real and fictional, Wicked City is a novel of uncommon intensity — rich with atmosphere and filled with sensuality and surprise.
WICKED CITY
ACE ATKINS
Copyright © 2008 by Ace Atkins
For Billy
You could climb a tall tree, spit in any direction, and where the wind wafted the splutter, there you would find organized crime, corruption, sex and human depravity.
— EDWIN STRICKLAND AND GENE WORTSMAN,
Phenix City: The Wickedest City in America, 1955
Woe unto the fighter that goes into battle with the thought of keeping his features regular and his hair parted neatly in the center. He is a sucker for the rough, tough, one-track-minded youngster who carries mayhem in each foot and murder in his heart.
— Scientific Boxing by a Fistic Expert, 1936
Many of the large events in this novel are true. However, some characters have been drawn as composites to share space alongside historical figures, and in several instances time has been compressed for brevity. That said, no author could ever exaggerate the sin, sleaze, and moral decay of Phenix City, Alabama, in the fifties or the courage of the people who stood up to fight it.
WELCOME TO PHENIX CITY, Alabama, population 23,305. Located across the Chattahoochee River from Columbus, Georgia, we offer all the basic amenities of small-town Southern life. There’s Cobb’s Barber Shop, where kindly gray-headed gentlemen discuss local politics and current affairs between the buzz of the clippers and local radio ag reports. And we have the friendly Elite Café, where Mr. Ross Gibson will cook you up the best plate of eggs and grits with red-eye gravy you ever tasted. We have a small but bustling downtown filled with Seymour’s Ready-to-Wear Shop, Bentley’s Grocery, the Phenix City Pharmacy, and the wonderful Palace Theater, where on Saturdays a kid can get in for fifty cents and watch the latest B westerns or the new adventures of Francis the Talking Mule. Phenix City also boasts Idle Hour Amusement Park — you can take a miniature train from downtown into the hills and roller-skate, bowl, and swim. There is even a little zoo there with bears and lions and monkeys. All of this mixed with dozens of churches, Christian and civic clubs, and one of the best hospitals in east Alabama make Phenix City an ideal place for the family.
Not to mention the world-famous nightclubs, clip joints, and brothels. Phenix City is probably known best for its whores.
We have only the bawdiest of burlesque down on Fourteenth Street. Many of the acts come in straight from Nevada or Tijuana, showing off women who can smoke cigarettes and cigars from their privates and dish out cut-rate favors in back rooms. Perhaps that’s the reason we are the chosen nightspot for GIs in from Fort Benning and the overworked businessman visiting Atlanta or Columbus.
Folks come from all the United States for our games of chance, too. But don’t expect a winner; here in Phenix City every pair of dice is loaded and every stack of cards marked. And complaints? Yes, sir, we deal with complaints with speed in this Southern town. Usually, unfriendly words from outsiders are met with the point of a pistol or the blade of a knife slicing across your throat before being dumped through a trapdoor directly into the swirling waters of the Chattahoochee.
But don’t let that worry you. Most of the joints — the Hillbilly Club, the Atomic Bomb Café, the Bamboo — are more than gambling halls. Almost all are equipped with back rooms with skinny metal beds, a pillow or two, and stained mattresses. You could take your pick from the B-girls and the whores and dancers out on Fourteenth Street and out on Opelika Road, where the motor courts and trailer parks all work on an hourly rental.
Any deviant can find the most bizarre of sexual acts to his liking.
And all whores must register with the chief deputy of Russell County — Bert Fuller — where their teeth and bodies are inspected and noted before being tattooed and sent out to please the customer.
Of course, any stories about Phenix City have the occasional negative words by newspapermen and the like. Look magazine called us “The Wickedest City in America,” and, during the war, it was noted that General George S. Patton thought the entire town should be bulldozed on account he was losing too many soldiers.
But where else would grotesque black-and-white pornographic movies be shot or babies of whores put up for sale to the highest bidder?
Phenix City may be a small town, but it’s a giant in Alabama when it comes to the state’s economics and politics.
Just ask newly elected governor Big Jim Folsom. There he is, smiling into the camera at a fund-raiser with Chief Deputy Bert Fuller and our county solicitor Arch Ferrell, a man who hasn’t prosecuted a single clip joint operator, moonshiner, or whoremaster in his tenure.
Look at the smiles on those boys’ faces. That’s the look of power.
Maybe because just a few weeks back about a dozen cars left from Phenix City, all loaded down with briefcases full of cash. They drove from Auburn to Slapout, Alabama, distributing Phenix City’s might to local officials and sheriffs, and, by God, they pulled out for ole Big Jim.
So who are They?
This is the redneck mafia, the Syndicate, the Phenix City Machine, a group of gamblers, pimps, thieves, and dope dealers big enough to fill a football stadium. There’s the old guard, the duo who built this town, Jimmie Matthews and Hoyt Shepherd. And then there’s Miss Fannie Belle, the redheaded devil who feels as comfortable calling a murder as getting a manicure and her hair done. And we could jump from Johnnie Benefield to Godwin Davis to Clyde Yarborough, a man whose face resembled fleshy pudding from dozens of skin grafts.
Sometimes it’s a chore to find out who works for who and exactly who to trust. The night Mr. Patterson was killed, the list of suspects was about as big as the city itself, because, after all, Mr. Patterson won the state attorney general run-off on a platform of a Man Against Crime.
What followed his murder was a movie, a Randolph Scott western, played out not with horses and Winchesters but with Chevys and Fords and .38s and switchblades, until the city was dismantled, stacked in vacant fields, and left to burn in smoldering trash heaps for the entire state to see.
The fires burned all that fall, filling your eyes and nose and clothes with that acrid smell.
We never rebuilt.
How could we?
I’ll always remember that bonfire smoke in ’54, when it all came tumbling down to the bugles of Guard troops. The burnings seemed to last for months, destroying the guts of the Machine, huge trailing snakes of blackness high up into the fall sky. I remember thinking to myself: This is a hell of a place to raise a family.
1
THE SPRING OF 1954 had slipped into summer with little notice. My routine hadn’t changed much; there was always the jog down Crawford Road at daybreak and then back to the li
ttle brick house I shared with my wife and two kids. As my wife, Joyce, would start coffee, I’d finish with a few rounds against the heavy bag hung on chains in an old shed and then maybe jump some rope or hook my feet under a pipe and do sit-ups until my stomach ached. That morning, a Friday, June eighteenth, my daughter, Anne, walked outside, still in her pajamas, and asked if she could work out with me, and I smiled, out of breath, my bald head slick with sweat, and reached into the shed for an apple crate. Anne, just eleven, with the same slight space in her teeth as me and the same fair skin and hair, stood on top of the shaky wood and began to work the leather of the speed bag with her tiny fists.
I stood back and smiled.
It wasn’t unusual for the neighborhood boys to ride their bikes over and watch with amazement as my little girl would work the bag with a right and left, keeping that steady, unmistakable rhythm I’d known from Kid Weisz’s gym during the Depression, when a hot cup of coffee and a donut was a feast.
Soon, Joyce called us inside and fussed at me for letting Anne run outside in her pj’s, the cuffs dusty with rich red mud, but she laughed as Anne continued mock punches, and Thomas woke up, only six, working a fist only to pull the sleep from his eyes. We sat down to a plate of ham and eggs and biscuits and grits and we said a prayer to our Lord and Savior and ate, Joyce refilling my cup when I returned to the kitchen from the bedroom, already dressed in my Texaco coveralls, ready for a day’s work at Slocumb’s — the filling station I co-owned with Joyce’s dad.
“Thomas is chewing with his mouth open,” Anne said.
Thomas smiled and chewed even wider with his eyes crossed.
“You want more coffee, Lamar?” Joyce asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I put your shoes outside, you had grease and mud all over them,” she said. “And would you mind, please, emptying out the ashtrays when you’re finished?”
“What would I do without you?”
“Nothing,” Joyce said and winked, and soon I was off, with a lunch pail rounded and red like a construction worker’s, and I followed a worn, smooth trail back behind our house and by the speed and heavy bags and through a thicket of brush, over the step of one, two, three flat stones in a little creek and then down a short stretch of smooth path and I was out behind Slocumb’s, unlocking the back door and cutting on the lights and opening up the front door for Arthur, a negro who pumped gas and cleaned windshields and had been my friend for some time.
Arthur didn’t say much, just turned over the OPEN sign as I made some coffee and loaded up the cash drawer in the register. I turned on the radio and began to hum along with some old swing stuff, music that brought back memories of being newly married at the start of the war, and Joyce and I taking everything we owned down to Eglin Airfield in Florida, where I worked as an airplane mechanic until ’46. My memories were still fresh of how the test planes could roll and crash and burn and I’d be left to pull out the bodies from the wreckage and try to make sense with what had gone wrong.
“You making the coffee?” Arthur asked. He was dressed in similar green Texaco coveralls.
“That’s what it looks like.”
“Hmm.”
“What do you mean, hmm?”
“I just wish Joyce would’ve been here is all. You ain’t one for cooking.”
“Coffee ain’t cooking.”
“And grits ain’t groceries,” Arthur said. He walked outside, ignoring the slurping pot, and stood by the big pumps waiting for their first customers to come rolling on in.
I whistled along to Harry James’s trumpet on the radio and, even as the first customer rolled under the tin overhang, kept on with the old tune “I’ve Heard That Song Before.”
The car was a two-tone tan-and-white Oldsmobile Rocket 88, and I knew the car before the engine even died and the man walked around and checked out the day just coming on from down east along the river, the morning shadows growing long and thin, almost disappearing into the harder light.
He was a tall, thin man with white hair and round spectacles. As he had stood, he used the door frame and placed the rubber tip of a wooden cane on the ground, smiling and limping his way to me with the steady clog, clog, clog of his heavy, specially fitted shoe.
“Mr. Patterson,” I said and shook his hand. “You headed somewhere?”
“Montgomery,” Patterson said, smoothing the lapels of his suit and shifting off the leg that he’d nearly lost in the First World War in the cold no-man’s-land of St. Etienne. “Promised a friend that I’d be at a hearing.”
I started to pump his gas. Usually Arthur did the pumping, unless we got really busy or there was someone special I wanted to talk to.
The light seemed to shift and grow in only seconds and covered Mr. Patterson’s soft, old features in a nice gold light. He smiled at me, as I checked the tires, and looked down Crawford Road toward the business district of Phenix City — an area where he worked but despised — and then back down the road toward the west and the capital of Montgomery, where he’d be headed next year to become the next attorney general of this state.
“I don’t know if I’ve told you this,” Patterson said, “but I sure appreciate all the support of you and all the boys. I couldn’t have done this without you.”
For the last two years, I’d been a member of an anti-vice group — the Russell County Betterment Association — that Mr. Patterson had helped found.
“I think you would have done fine.”
“I’ll need you even more in the coming months, Lamar.”
“How’s that?”
“Things will get worse before they get better.”
I smiled. “Don’t think they could get much worse,” I said and hung up the nozzle and noted the price. I asked Patterson to open his hood and I checked the oil.
“How’s this engine treatin’ you? I bet she really can open up on the highway.”
Patterson stood behind me and said in a low voice, almost a whisper: “They’re coming for me, Lamar. I think I have a one-in-ten chance of ever taking office.”
I stood, feeling ice along my neck, and wiped the dipstick on a dirty rag. The oil was clean and full, and I replaced the stick and closed the hood with a tight snap. Mr. Patterson gave a small, wan smile.
I shook my head. “Don’t talk that way. We got ’em.”
“A cheater never lets you win.”
Patterson clasped my hand and then reached into his pocket for a couple of dollars before getting back into the Rocket 88, climbing the hill, and then turning out of sight toward the west.
EARLIER THAT DAY, BILLY STOKES HEADED DOWN TO FOURTEENTH Street to turn in a sack of dimes and quarters after selling a mess of Bug tickets to some poor blacks down by the railroad. The Bug was a lottery they’d been running in town since forever, and during the summer when he was out of school he got paid five dollars by his daddy to make the Friday run. Most every house in Niggertown bought the tickets, just like some kind of religious event. Old women even bought dream books to turn what they’d seen in their heads into lucky numbers. Billy sure needed that five dollars; he’d promised to take a girl he’d just met to a picture show down at the Palace Theater.
He’d spent his last dollar on a Bug ticket himself, hoping his numbers would come out in the morning paper from numbers on the New York Stock Exchange.
Billy hadn’t seen his daddy, Reuben, since Wednesday, which wasn’t that unusual because, sometimes, he’d take off for days and return either red-eyed and sore and grumpy or dressed in a new suit with ruby cuff links and spreading out money on the table of their old house that he knew would be gone by week’s end.
He pushed his red Schwinn down the slope of Fourteenth Street, looking down to the old muddy river and between the cavern of clip joints and honky-tonks that had just started to heat up on an early Friday night. It was twilight, and the neon signs started to flicker, advertising exotic women and games of chance. THE SILVER SLIPPER. THE GOLDEN RULE. There was laughter and bawdy saxophone musi
c, and the soft green and red and blue neon seemed almost magical on that summer night as he passed GIs drinking straight from bottles of Jack Daniel’s and friendly, plump whores who would smile at him or pat him on the head as he passed by, either because they thought it was funny to see a kid down here or because they knew Billy was Reuben Stokes’s boy.
Down toward the river, Billy left his bike outside the giant, twirling yellow neon for CLUB LASSO, Reuben’s joint, and walked into the narrow café, over the beaten honeycomb-tile floors and through small little groupings of tables and chairs. On a stage toward the back by the toilets there was a girl dressed in a cowboy outfit shaking her big titties to a lone saxophone player who played the theme to Red River.
Reuben was behind the bar dressed in an ugly tropical shirt and talking on the telephone — more like calling someone a jackass on the phone — between drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette, and when he saw Billy he nodded and crooked a finger toward the bar and his son sat down and stared into the bar mirror over his dad’s shoulder. Billy saw just a skinny kid in a rangy white T-shirt and silly green military hat that once belonged to his old man during the war. He was so skinny and his teeth so big that he looked away.
Reuben reached into the cooler and pulled out a cold Coca-Cola, and Billy sat up there and drank while the saxophone music ended and the girl stepped from the soft red light by the toilets and slipped into a Chinese robe.
“Hey, I’ve been busy,” Reuben asked, “you still got food?”
“I could use five dollars.”
“What for?”
“We need some milk and cereal. I also wanted to go to a picture show.”
“You love those picture shows, don’t you? You know, you really should go see The Robe,” Reuben said. “It’s a picture about Jesus Christ.”