by Ace Atkins
“Thirteen, sir.”
“Well, you look to be sixteen from where I’m standin’,” he said. “Turn around.”
And she did, as stupid and blind as a trained dog waiting for a rancid piece of meat, and he looked at her long legs and scabby knees in that dress made out of old gingham and flour sacks. The man pulled her hair back and twisted her head from side to side.
She pulled away and looked into the corn for her father, but he was gone somewhere into the woods. Or was it town?
“You want to take a ride?”
“No, sir.”
He reached into his gray coat, and she could see he’d been sweating the way big men do, soaking their fat stomachs and under their arms, and she saw the flash of two golden pistols, as gold as pirate’s treasure, and he saw the smile, too, and handed her a card.
“Can you read?”
She shook her head.
“’Course not.”
She looked at him.
“You bring yourself to the big city,” he said. “You hear me? What’s your name, girl?”
And she told him, but she’d soon forget that name because it was so country that it made men laugh, and he laughed, too. It would be a couple years before she’d start calling herself Lorelei, after a nickname they’d given her at the Rabbit Farm.
“You come lookin’ for me,” he said. “Anybody in Phenix City will know where to find me. Bert Fuller. I’ll make sure you get some work.”
She nodded and, despite herself, felt her lips spread against that space in her buckteeth, and he kind of winced at her and said, “Don’t smile so much.”
She dropped her head.
“Come on, come on,” he said. “No need to be frownin’, with a face and legs like that. I bet them country boys chase you plenty, huh?”
“Naw.”
“Naw?” he said, laughing. “You are as country as corn bread. You in those sacks and bare feet. You ever feel what it’s like to wear a real pair of shoes? Look at that mud caked between your toes. You’re too good for this, little girl. You hitch a ride, you take a bus whenever you want, but you come see me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sir?” he said. “Honey, hush.”
She looked at him again, as if her chin had been lifted again, only feeling that he wanted to see her eyes without even the slightest touch. His face was broad and fat, pink-skinned and fleshy. His hair was buzzed above the ears, up to the cowboy hat, like men in the service. He winked at her, knocked back some more from his flask, and passed it to her.
She shook her head.
“It ain’t the demon’s blood like they tell you,” he said. “It’s just bourbon.”
And she looked down the endless red-dirt road for another car coming or her father or any sign of life by the clapboard house made from wrecked cars and trash. But there was only the wind and the unbearably hot sun, and as she took a drink the bourbon was hotter than the air and made her face turn hot and glow. But she kept drinking, not knowing it wasn’t like water, and the muddy-colored stuff ran down her chin and on her dress, and it smelled like the way her daddy smelled on Saturday nights, only without the cigarettes.
Bert Fuller took back his flask, wiped her chin with a scarred knuckle, and opened the door to the big, long Cadillac.
“See that star on the card?” he asked. “That means I’m the assistant sheriff. That means I’m real important. You understand?”
And then he pulled away, giving her a preacher’s wave before disappearing into a cloud of dust and becoming a black ink spot on the horizon that burned away into the molten sun.
Two months later, she found a ride.
She’d never been to a city before, and she’d saved pennies to buy shoes and borrowed a cotton dress from her best friend at church, May, who’d also given her a dollar she’d been saving since she was twelve. With the dollar, the new shoes, and the old dress, she hopped out from the Chevy pickup truck loaded with hay and chickens and turned and looked at all the buildings and people milling about. It was Friday afternoon, and there looked to be plenty of men from the Army around and she felt safe with that, finding one boy and showing him Deputy Bert Fuller’s card — now so crunched and wrinkled it was soft in her hand — and the Army boy just shook his head, chewing gum with a cocky smile, and winked at her.
The wink made her pull the dress tight against her chest, and she kept walking toward the lights, past bars with signs reading GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS and QUICK MONEY, and she got a few whistles and catcalls, and pretty soon she was sweating with all the noise of the music and the ringing of slot machines and the sight of things she’d never seen — like a big black-haired woman dancing on a stage with tassels on her titties, whipping them around in circles. Pretty soon, she was down by the bridge and could see the big, wide Chattahoochee, and it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, and the city beyond it, over the river, just shined with light so bright that it hurt her eyes.
More Army boys passed her, and one bumped into her, slapping her little rump with the flat of his hand, and she hugged herself, because the dress was thin and the wind had kicked up on the bridge.
She walked back into the city, asking a girl in a dark corner if she’d heard of Mr. Fuller, and the woman looked at her, smoking a cigarette, almost looking through her, and said: “No.”
But there was something about the no that made her keep walking, and she soon left the neon lights and bars and music and service boys and followed the train tracks. There were train tracks near her house, and she figured if she kept walking maybe she’d make it back home before morning and maybe her father would not take her to the smokehouse and beat her with the horsewhip.
The houses were rickety and old, with broken wood porches where negroes sat and drank whiskey and smoked cigarettes and called out to her or just laughed and pointed. She could only see the rocky track. Then she heard a train and wandered off the railroad and right into the path of a car that skidded to a stop and honked its horn. She’d fallen to her butt and stared into white, hot headlights and searched into them before there was the sound of a siren and red lights and the voice of a man.
“You lookin’ for me, doll?”
They kept her in jail all night. It wasn’t till the next morning that Deputy Bert Fuller watched while a guard unlocked the door of her cell and let him inside. He stood smiling at her with a steaming cup of coffee in his hand while she waited on the bunk with her nervous legs kicking back and forth. He opened the front pocket of his uniform and offered her a stick of gum. She shook her head and looked down at the dirty concrete floor and the corroded drain.
“Oh, come on, baby,” he said. “It don’t have to be like that.”
She looked up.
“You just can’t walk the streets like this is Podunk, Alabama,” he said. “This here is Phenix City. You got to have somewhere to go.”
Her eyes met his.
“You got somewhere to go?”
“I thought I did.”
“How’s that?”
She shrugged.
“You got somewhere to stay?”
“Naw.”
“Money?”
“Naw.”
“Little girl, I do believe you are in a pickle,” he said. He made a tsk-tsk sound with his tongue and slurped his hot coffee, and it must have burned his tongue because he kicked back his head and some of it stained the front of his shirt.
He came back an hour later with an old man, a much older man but just as fat and fleshy as Deputy Bert Fuller. The man wore a pin-striped suit and had thinning hair that he’d dyed red and oiled tight to his freckled skull. He smelled like burnt onions and old fish, and he walked to the girl on the bunk and held up her face and, when she turned away, plunked his fingers deep into her mouth, jabbing around for her teeth.
“Strip,” he said.
She looked at Bert Fuller, and Fuller just smiled, a tan uniform hugging his pear-shaped body, those golden six-shooters at his sides. He shrugged
.
She twisted her head from side to side. “No.”
“Strip, you country thing,” the old, smelly man said and yanked her to her feet and tore the borrowed dress from her body and with dirty fingernails clawed at her cotton underthings until it was all in a heap by the floor and she was left crawling like a pig in a trough down by the corroded drain, trying to pull the rags together and cover her embarrassingly developed breasts.
“She’ll do,” the old man said.
“Okay,” Fuller said. “Here’s the deal, girlie. You can either stay here and wait a week to see the judge about what you were doing out there, selling yourself like some kind of Jez-bel, or you can come with me, ride into Columbus, and we can get rid of those pieces of cloth you call clothes and go shopping at Kirven’s, and let me feed you a steak dinner at Black Angus. You’ll need some perfume, too.”
From the floor, she looked up at him.
“I didn’t do nothin’ wrong.”
“’Course you did,” Fuller said. “In Phenix City, whorin’ is a crime. Ain’t it, Mr. Red?”
He just smiled a rotten row of teeth.
The girl began to cry.
“Mr. Red, I do believe a decision has been made.”
The man opened up a wooden box while Fuller ran an electric cord into the hall and a little needle attached to a blue vial began to pump and buzz. “Hold ’er down, Bert. Shit, she looks to be a wildcat to me.”
And Fuller let out some air, rolled up his sleeves, and pinned the girl’s arms to the concrete floor with his fat hands until she screamed, as the old man squatted with creaking knees, opened up her bottom lip, and began to write inside her mouth.
WHEN SHE STOPPED, SHE ROLLED DOWN HER BOTTOM LIP and showed him the mark 618 tattooed in blue ink. And when she tried to tell Billy about other things, things that happened later, he’d stop her, feeling sick deep within his stomach.
“Why don’t we just leave here?” Billy said. “Run away?”
“We don’t have no money.”
“I can get money.”
She pulled away from him and rolled on her side, facing the wall.
He put his hand on her shoulder and started to talk about moving out to Hollywood, where they could work in the picture business or pick oranges or sell ice cream at the beach. He got so excited about all the plans, he could already feel the Greyhound ticket in his hand and almost didn’t notice she was crying. Billy moved his hand from her shoulder and just listened.
The calliope music was going strong up at Idle Hour, and they could hear the kids laughing and screaming and splashing up by the pool. The shades were drawn, but he could feel the heat from the window and knew the sun was shining.
“I’ll go outside,” Billy said and ran a finger along the window and looked at the black dust. “I’m really feeling better.”
“Sometimes I just wish this whole rotten town would burn to the ground.”
He rolled off the bed and found his shoes. He looked out the window up on the hill and saw a young boy about his age crawling up a tall ladder, the contraption looking loose and rickety like something fashioned from an Erector set. The boy got to the top and walked to the end of the diving board before giving the thumbs-up to his buddies below and launching into a perfect cannonball.
He let his shoes fall to the floor with a thud, lying back into the bed, back and butt finding the safe, soft curves of Lorelei. He felt the rise and fall of her chest, her raven hair on his neck and over his eyes, and, before long, Billy fell into a perfect sleep.
8
BILLY WOKE from an afternoon nap with a hot, bright light in his eyes, as if looking directly into the sun. He swatted at the light, blinked, felt a big hand grip his wrist, and stared straight up into the jowly face of Bert Fuller. Fuller yanked him out of bed and threw him to the floor and then he reached into the bed for Lorelei, who was dressed only in the boy’s white undershirt and her underwear. He wrenched her wrist, pulling her from the mattress, and twisted her arm behind her, forcing her nose to the floor, where he kicked her in the side like a dog. The flashlight fell from his hands in his fury of kicks and punches and the light went scattering in circles on the wooden floor. Billy reached for the scattering light, but, as he moved, Fuller let go of the girl and went for him, kicking the boy in the head and sending him reeling, tumbling up and then backward, knocking him against the wall.
Fuller kept a hand on the butt of his revolver and reached down with his pudgy fingers for Lorelei’s thick black hair, and he pulled her like a caveman across the cabin floor, kicking away a small card table that held their dinner from the night before and sending Coke bottles rolling in the drum of the little room.
Fuller moved his left hand from the gun and punched at the screen door, while Billy lay on his back, bleeding. Billy moved to his knees and then found his feet, wobbling, and then ran for Fuller. But Fuller paid no mind when he sent pounding fists against the back of his shaved head, knocking off the Stetson.
The white hat rolled to the floor like a half-dollar.
He turned and looked at the boy, standing there with his fists at awkward angles near the steps to the cabin, Lorelei’s head crooked into Fuller’s arm, face turning red as she tried to breathe. He smiled and laughed at Billy, a big goddamn joke, and reached down and retrieved his western hat. All around Moon Lake sat families on blankets and in boats and eating Fourth of July cold fried chicken and ice-cold watermelon from the backs of cars and trucks.
“Does Reuben know you consort with whores?”
The boy’s vision faded for a moment, and Bert Fuller appeared to him in wavy lines like an apparition but with a strong, solid voice that laughed.
“You got your dick wet. Now, go back inside before I stomp the shit out of you. Don’t make a scene.”
He took Lorelei as if leading a calf, half walking and half pulling, to where he’d parked his car along the banks of Moon Lake.
“Come on, you filthy little cunt,” he said. “Back to work.”
I SAT WITH MY FAMILY NEAR THE BOATHOUSE ON A RED-and-white tablecloth Joyce had packed along with deviled eggs, fried chicken, pimento cheese, potato salad, cut tomatoes, and a gallon of sweet tea. I wore a cool short-sleeved shirt and straw hat that day and pretended I was asleep, the hat over my eyes, as I heard my children trying to wake me up. I started to snore, Thomas poking me with a piece of grass in the ear, and then Anne pulling at my foot, trying to remove my shoe, before I roused and made sounds like a bear trying to catch them. Anne ran off, and Thomas grabbed another deviled egg, licking out the inside and leaving the egg white.
Joyce poured some more sweet tea and sat down next to me, and we sat there, looking out at the boats on Moon Lake and at the little bandstand where we’d met in ’38. We’d danced there until the band stopped playing, and I kept moving with her, in my own romantic, ridiculous way, taking her for more light turns across the dance floor with my nimble boxer’s feet. I reminded her of my good feet as often as I could.
“Anne wants a dog.”
“Then let’s get a dog.”
“I don’t want a dog.”
“Then don’t get her a dog.”
“Do you always have to be so damn agreeable?”
I smiled at her and kissed her on the forehead. “No, Pieface. I’ll work on becoming a real pain in the ass.”
“Won’t take much,” she said and pinched my arm. “Pieface? I wish you’d quit calling me that.”
I kissed her again. “Okay, Pieface.”
Thomas walked up and stood before us, smiling. He handed me three empty egg halves and worked on a fourth.
“Thanks, boy. I sure do appreciate it.”
“You’re welcome,” he said, adding the last, and laughed.
On the small shore of the lake, I saw Anne talking to another young girl who was about her age. She stood tall like an adult, with hands on her hips. I knew the boys would be coming around soon and that was okay with me because I knew she’d gotten pretty damn good o
n the speed bag. And for an eleven-year-old, she had a killer jab.
“Who is that Anne’s talking to?”
Joyce squinted down to the shore, the darkness finally setting on, lights clicking on at the old bandstand. “That’s the Ferrells’ girl.”
“Are they friends?”
“I guess so. They’ve been going to school together from the start.”
“You know they officially removed Arch as county solicitor yesterday?”
“I saw that.”
I lay down on my back. “When are these damn fireworks going to start?”
Down toward the Idle Hour parking lot, I heard a woman scream and a car door slam.
BILLY FOLLOWED. HE WAS SHIRTLESS IN BLUE JEANS AND no shoes, face a bloody mess. He breathed, a hot ticking in his ears, as he watched Fuller open the back of his squad car and point inside. He saw Lorelei pull away from Fuller and shake her head, and he saw Fuller’s hand spring back and slap her across the mouth. Billy jogged toward them, yelling obscenities and picking up rocks to throw at Fuller. He ran through the crowd huddled near the shore of the lake and pushed and moved, some heads turning to Fuller, who reached for the back of Lorelei and pushed her to the car door. She clutched her hands on the door frame and pushed back, digging in her heels and refusing to get inside. Billy yelled for her and hoped others would hear and stop Fuller. But Fuller looked across at the crowd, maybe fifty people forming a circle around them, and told them all to mind their own fucking business, this was police work. Billy saw the backs turn, almost orchestrated on cue and trained, as Fuller knocked Lorelei across the ear and dumped her purse out on the sidewalk and gathered up the last two dollars in change they had.
When Fuller felt the coins in his hand, he punched her hard in the stomach and she deflated, crushed to the ground and trying to suck in air like a dying fish.
Billy pushed and ran up the slope to the parking lot, his feet cut on the stones and crushed glass but not even knowing pain, only feeling the wetness of blood between his toes. And he slowed and walked toward Fuller, his heart beating hard and steady like an Indian war drum, and he gritted his teeth and brushed the girlish tears from his eyes and yelled to Fuller that he was a fat, pig-eyed sack of shit.