by Ace Atkins
Arch just looked at him, the view of Phenix City fading from the windows around him, one of the Guard troops saluting the car. He narrowed his eyes and waited for a punch line that didn’t come.
Not long after, they were seated at the CoCo Supper Club, a hell of a little restaurant just off the runway from the Columbus Airport where you could eat fried Gulf shrimp and lobster and the best T-bone in the city while you watched planes take off and land. Garrett sat at the head of the table and ordered cocktails for everyone but himself, instead asking the waitress — a pretty little girl who called all the men doll — for an entire bottle of sparkling water with a bucket of ice and a glass. The men ate and laughed, the newsmen telling jokes and Garrett roping them back into points about the murder investigation, telling them all that they were working on those three theories and letting that bit pass just as he saw the food coming out of the kitchen and then hushing as they all settled into the shrimp and T-bones and bourbon and Gibsons with tiny onions.
Arch just looked at his food, feeling outside himself, and sometimes Garrett would ask him something and Arch would just look up expectantly, looking for another place, another situation from the one he now found himself in, and he drank. He drank at least a half dozen bourbons until he began to rattle on, mainly to himself, about Arch Ferrell — using the third person — being a good man. “Arch Ferrell never did anything illegal in his life.”
And this caused some looks from some of the newsmen and some wry smiles and poked ribs, but they all kept eating under the constant, weighted stare of Si Garrett’s owl glasses. To hell with ’em all.
Sometime during the meal, Arch looked up, sure he’d been asked a question but not sure of the question, and simply said: “Si Garrett is the best friend I got. He’s one of the greatest men in Alabama.”
And with that, Garrett motioned to the little waitress, and Arch heard him whisper into her ear: “Please bring Mr. Ferrell another. But make this one a triple.”
“Sure thing, doll.”
Later on, the steaks were polished off, just bloody bones on the plates, the fat and grease congealed into a purplish pink mixture where some of the newsmen had squashed the cigarettes they continued smoking. Arch smoked, too, but he stared beyond the newsmen and out beyond the grand dining room of the CoCo Supper Club and the empty bandstand. For a long while, he watched the planes and the flashing of red lights on the tarmac, but then he noticed the long ash on his cigarette and realized he hadn’t taken a puff.
He studied the cigarette, blinked, and then leaned in close to Garrett’s ear.
“I know all about that talk,” Arch said. “I’ve heard it since Pat was killed. I’m tough and mean, nobody knows that better than me. I’m not a religious fella, never have been, but this thing is making me wish that I were. But no matter what anybody says, I didn’t kill Patterson. I just couldn’t kill a human being.”
He nodded to the group, stubbed out his cigarette, and then took down all the bourbon in one gulp. Some of the men kept gnawing on the bones, freeing those last pieces of gristle. Arch nodded again, satisfied with an answer to a question no one asked, his eyes closing and then opening, his head bobbing down and then jerking back up awake.
And then he stood and wished everyone good-night before placing his hands on the table, taking a deep breath, and vomiting all over the white linen.
“I WAS GOING TO LEAVE THIS DIRTY, GODDAMN TOWN,” John Patterson said to me, searching through another row of files in the endless wood file cabinets in his father’s law office. After a Sunday morning service, he worked row by row, pulling out anything that could be of help, or anything too personal, and setting manila folders into cardboard boxes. He stopped, resting his arm on top of a cabinet. “I don’t want to be a vigilante or savior now. Hell, I never understood my father. His political ambitions. Why he stayed here. He could’ve made better money in about any other town in Alabama.”
I didn’t say anything. I just waited for another box of files to take down to a truck I borrowed. The window air conditioner had been cut off by mistake, and I fanned my face with a ball cap.
“The only reason I wanted to be a lawyer was to make enough money to retire early. Go fishing. Enjoy life. Not this mess.”
“Nothin’ wrong with that.”
“You are damn right,” John said. “Listen, Murphy, I want you to store this at your house, all of this. I don’t want that bastard Si Garrett going anywhere near my father’s papers.”
I reached for another loaded box on Albert Patterson’s desk.
John had rolled up his dress sleeves to his elbows and his hairy forearms glistened with sweat, not a bit of comfort coming from an old Emerson table fan.
He kept flipping through files, his fingers moving each one, another drawn and then slipped back, more yet for the growing boxes we had started to stack.
“You and Britton turn up anything?”
“A little,” I said. “Heard something about our old friend Tommy Capps.”
“Dynamite?”
“Hell of a name,” I said.
“He’d never kill my father.”
“He blew up Hugh Bentley’s house,” I said, talking about the attempted murder two years ago of our little anti-vice group’s president. His two sons and wife miraculously survived.
“You know those men from Montgomery accused Bentley of blowing up his own house to get sympathy.”
We worked for an hour in the heated second floor of the Coulter Building, the old plaster-walled law office feeling like the loft of a barn or an attic. Every few minutes, I’d take a box down to the back of the truck. Armed guards and local hick police watched the still Sunday streets, but no one asked what we were doing.
Everyone seemed to be afraid to look John Patterson in the eye.
Just before John locked up, we heard heavy footsteps on the wooden stairs and up on the landing. Deputy Sheriff Bert Fuller walked inside the office, mopping his face with a red bandanna, with Joe Smelley from the state police right behind. Fuller wore a suit, and Smelley wore wrinkled pants and a short-sleeved dress shirt soaked through the armpits.
Smelley didn’t say anything, only walked to one of the boxes and immediately helped himself, searching through the files.
John’s jaw clenched and his eyes flashed from Fuller to me.
“Well, howdy, palooka,” Fuller said to me. “Ain’t you got some gas to pump?”
“I’d rather be here with you, Bert,” I said. “You make us all feel so safe.”
“You better watch your step,” Fuller said. “I don’t care what you used to be. I’ll beat you silly.”
John stepped in front of him.
“We came by for a talk,” Fuller said.
“You can set a time with my secretary.”
Fuller snorted. He looked over to Smelley, who’d picked a file from the box and glanced through it. Smelley looked to Fuller and snorted back.
“Funny you should mention your secretary.”
John’s breathing was loud and rapid. I unconsciously staggered my feet, fingers opening and closing into a fist.
“What’s her name? Vicki?”
John breathed, temple throbbing, and Bert Fuller popped some chewing gum, waiting for a response. The short, grubby fingers of Joe Smelley flipped through Albert Love Patterson’s personal papers.
“I came up here as a favor to you, John,” Fuller said. He took a seat on Albert Patterson’s antique desk and placed his Stetson on his knee. “I know you sure would hate for the newspapermen to start poking around this thing. And your wife, Mary Jo. Good God. That would set the tongues a-waggin’. So why don’t we just sit and talk about things as men. We all know men like pussy, and it don’t mean you’re not a Christian if you set out for a little poke once in a while. Hell, I seen your secretary and I wouldn’t mind having a taste myself.”
“Shut your filthy, foul mouth and get your fat ass off my father’s desk.”
Fuller snorted again and breathed and waited
a few beats. And then stood and looked back on the desk, as if mocking the idea he could have soiled the wood. He grabbed his hat and placed it back on his head, knocking it off his brow with two fingers. Resting his hands on his gun belt, he nodded and popped his gum. “Joe?”
Smelley placed the file on the desk next to the box he’d sifted through. He stood and started to pace. I lifted my back foot and shifted, watching the three men in an orchestra of heated movement. Dogs circling around each other.
“I knew your daddy real well, John. He was a fine man. I know you know he was a fine man. I don’t think there is any delicate way to say this, but it’s my job to ask these questions.”
“I have not even put my father in the ground.”
“I know,” Smelley said, holding up a hand. “I know. But, still, this is my job, and I want you to understand and respect that. Okay? Listen, there has been some talk around town that maybe your daddy was staying up late with that secretary of yours, too. We know her husband was overseas, and we know how young ladies can get real lonely looking for a daddy to cozy up to. Well, we just thought there isn’t a lot that could set daddy against son, except one thing.”
“Don’t say another goddamn word,” John said.
Fuller popped his gum again. “Hell, I’ll say it. We think you and ole Pat was hitting that same pussy and you might’ve gotten riled, is all. We got to ask these questions.”
John leapt for Fuller’s throat, but I’d seen the moment, muscles coiled, and I reached around my friend’s waist and pulled him back. Patterson jabbed his elbows back and yelled and bared his teeth, but I held on tight.
Fuller rested his hand on his gun and shook his head with feigned sadness. He shrugged, spit his gum in the wastebasket, and motioned for Smelley to come on. He shook his head for the weakness he’d seen in the office. I wanted to let Patterson go so badly, to let him unleash all that rage, but I knew Fuller wanted to shoot, had maybe come there to shoot, and there had been enough blood for the week.
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, bl
ind 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.