by Ace Atkins
MOON WAS ON HIM, CRUSHING OUT ALL THE BREATH FROM Billy’s lungs, the last sound being that of a scream, and Billy felt the sick flesh against his leg and the whispering weird voice in his ear, so high-pitched and sugar sweet it sounded like that of a little girl. Moon’s breath was hot and old and smelled dead and cancerous, whispering to Billy, as he was pushed facedown, and calling him his little baby. All Billy could see was Johnnie Benefield laughing at him, sitting across from the iron bed in a chair and smoking a cigarette, coolly taking a sip of whiskey from a bottle. Billy’s face felt as if it was about to explode from blood, unable to breathe or scream but just eyeing Johnnie, wanting to kill him so badly that he ignored Moon grunting on top of him, trying to motivate his weak flesh.
Johnnie pulled the cigarette from his mouth and said, smelling a pack of hundreds, “Why does this cash smell like assholes?”
WHEN YARBOROUGH POINTED, THE TWO NEGROES TURNED and spotted us, raising their pistols and squeezing out several shots before the guardsmen opened fire, hitting one direct, the back of his head bursting in the harsh white lights before he twirled and fell from the roof, and clipping the other, who scrambled and tried to crawl back in the shadows, his feet losing the roof tile under him like the shuffling of cards.
Jack hoisted up the Thompson in his arms and walked dead center into the motor court, calling out for Clyde Yarborough to drop his gun, but Yarborough didn’t hesitate when he saw him, drawing and leveling the .44. The chatter of bullets from Jack’s Thompson raked across him and kept him up in the air, in a marionette’s dance, until Jack let go of the trigger, letting the man twirl and fall in a heap.
I kicked in the front door and found a fat bootlegger named Moon, his pants around his ankles, his tiny penis flaccid and stuck to his leg as he reached for a shotgun on the bed. As Billy crawled into a corner, he reached for the gun, too. As the fat man struggled for it, I blasted him three times with the sawed-off, splattering his grease and blood against the far wall. When Moon fell, Billy yelled, seeing Johnnie Benefield coming from behind the front door, a pistol pointed at me, smiling in the bright light as he crossed the door’s threshold and jerked Billy off the bed, my gun on him and his on me.
He held us both there.
And I didn’t breathe for half a minute, as he plucked Billy from that room, the barrel of his gun shifting from my face and onto the boy’s neck, and he walked backward, me coming into the light, the sleet stinging my face, those small, sharp needles pinging me, as I moved slow down out of the motel unit and onto the gravel. The guardsmen out now, all guns on Johnnie, who crept back with the kid and moved to Reuben’s baby blue Buick, smiling, holding the gun with one hand and saluting the guardsmen with the other.
He held Billy so tight that the boy’s face had turned a bright bloody red.
I kept my gun on him and looked over to Jack, who did the same.
BILLY FELT FOR HIS CASE FOLDING KNIFE DEEP IN HIS pocket as he was tugged along on the gravel with the gun barrel up in his face. He reached for the knife, making a fist around it, Johnnie too caught up to see him or feel his movements. And with his thumbnail, Billy pried open that old pocketknife made of bone and steel, which had rested in his grandfather’s pocket since before the turn of the century and in his father’s pocket deep in the jungles of the Philippines, and now the old bone seemed to burn in his hand like a fire poker, steady, solid, warm.
He moved the knife to the side of his leg.
And just as Johnnie pulled open the door to the Buick and tried to push him inside, Billy Stokes jabbed that four-inch blade deep into Johnnie’s cheek and the hands freed from around him and went for that sharp pain just as the blasts of shotguns and pistols and the short chatter of a machine gun rattled off like the final, deafening notes of those final sparks that light up the Fourth of July night.
I HELPED BILLY TO HIS FEET. HE WAS STILL TRYING TO breathe, and my ears rang as we moved from the car and Benefield, who was facedown in a puddle. The silence seeming electric and strange, with only the soft, subtle taps of sleet off the motel roof and the hood of the Buick.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure.”
We walked over to Black and stood around Clyde Yarborough, who looked more natural in death than he had in life, curled into a C shape in the gravel. Jack knelt down and drew hard on his cigar. After he got a good burn, he reached over and tapped the ash into the giant O of what had been Yarborough’s mouth.
He leaned in, whispered something in the dead man’s ear, and stood up.
I felt as if I’d intruded on something and led Billy back to my squad car. We were soon met by an excited Quinnie who wanted to know about every shot.
“Ask Billy.”
But Billy shook me off as I touched his shoulder. “Why didn’t you let me kill Benefield? You had no right. You had no damn right.”
23
WE DROVE WITH THE SUNSET behind us in that last leg from Birmingham, where we’d just watched Arch Ferrell be acquitted of murder. I can’t say it wasn’t expected. He’d already been acquitted in his vote fraud case, and, if he’d been acquitted in that, the motive fell flat. Fuller had been quickly tried before Arch and quickly convicted in the killing and sentenced to life in prison. And that spring of 1955, as we were headed home from Ferrell’s trial, me and Joyce, and Quinnie in the backseat, Si Garrett was still institutionalized, with little hope of him returning to the state of Alabama anytime soon.
“I just don’t get it,” Quinnie said, behind us.
Joyce was driving. My window was down, and I smoked a cigarette while watching the ribbon of road cut through the countryside.
“It just don’t make no sense,” Quinnie said.
A mile later, he said: “If it don’t beat all.”
When he started to speak again, just as we hit the county line, the sun dropping like a big orange ball behind us in the rearview, I held up my hand. “Quinnie, we get the point. But that man won’t ever hold office or practice law in the state of Alabama. I don’t know what will happen to him. I guess the best we can do to Arch Ferrell is ignore him.”
We rounded the corner into Phenix City, and I flicked my cigarette out the window.
“I just can’t believe it,” Quinnie said.
THAT SUMMER, I FOUND MYSELF IN PANAMA CITY BEACH, Florida, with two local deputies following up on a lead on Fannie Belle. She’d skipped town with charges against her, one of dozens who’d fled Phenix. I wore a light suit, crisp blue, with a white shirt, and I remember all the stares I got from the sunburned people as we rounded the pool with our guns and badges past the tiki bar and raft rentals and found the unit and knocked on the door.
When we didn’t get an answer, the manager knocked again.
A hot wind blew off the beach, around the cool shadows of the first floor facing the parking lot.
The manager knocked again and then tried the key.
The room was empty. A sliding door facing the Gulf was open, the curtains fluttering in the breeze. I opened the bathroom and searched inside, only to find a used razor and some wet towels. On the nightstand, I saw an empty gin bottle and a dirty ashtray. Hearing the kids outside splashing around in the pool, that hot putter of wind in the curtains, there was no mistaking she’d been there only moments ago.
You could smell her perfume just as if she stood behind you, waiting to whisper in your ear.
I knew I’d always wonder where she went and what new name she’d taken. I wondered if the new men in her life would ever know anything about her.
The Gulf stretched out green and endless across the summer horizon.
I’D ALWAYS FOUND COMFORT BEING AROUND HORSES. I even liked working with plow mares on my father’s farm, and there was a strong feeling of peace just watching them graze, standing around them and hearing their massive teeth reach into the ground and pull a clump of grass right out of the earth. The farm had been, and continued to be, for the years I remained sheriff, a sacred ground, a place where I could
retreat and work. Even when Anne grew older and went off to college and Thomas had discovered cars and girls, I’d go out there alone and feed the geldings their sweet feed and hay, clean out their water tanks and talk to them. They liked to be talked to. It soothed them. It soothed me.
I needed it sometimes. Quinnie was right. Some things you couldn’t wrap your head around.
Bert Fuller didn’t spend life in prison.
He only spent ten years for good behavior and well-placed friends.
In 1965, he’d already been out two days when I heard he planned to return to Phenix City. That was also when I learned of our star witness, Cecil Padgett, and his fate out in Texas — killed when he fell from the open door of a train, not far from the town where the newspapermen said he’d become a drunk.
After the trial, Cecil and I had become friends. I even recommended him for a few jobs, and, later, when John Patterson became governor, replacing Jim Folsom, Cecil became Patterson’s driver.
I didn’t see him falling. I couldn’t imagine it.
I saw Bert Fuller behind him, pushing him from an open door, destroying the man who had destroyed him, and riding the rails, the big locomotive chugging and turning on those hot steel rails, hammering like blood in those veins, all the way back to Alabama.
No one had to warn me that Fuller was coming for me.
I’d dreamed about it for ten years.
AFTER EVERY ELECTION, THE JOB BECAME EASIER. JOYCE helped me run the books and keep the prison kitchen going. Quinnie stayed with me for a short time, but Jack didn’t last a year, trading the slow pace of the new Phenix City for Atlanta, where he worked as a detective for several years. Most of my deputies worked traffic stops and stolen bicycles. We had some real excitement one time when someone was stealing tractors and hauling them away on flatbed trucks. Most of the old racketeers had left for Biloxi or southern Tennessee, where they’d become the foundation of what people later called the Dixie Mafia.
Hoyt Shepherd stayed until he died an old man.
I’d see him every so often at the barbershop.
I broke in new deputies, studied the law all I could, and tried to keep that slow-going pace.
We were in a heat wave when Fuller came back.
I stopped by a halfway house close to the railroad tracks and found him sitting on the floor of the room listening to a Gene Autry 45. He stood, embarrassed, but greeted me with a warm handshake like an old friend.
I told him I didn’t want any trouble.
And he spent the next forty minutes witnessing to me, quoting parables from the Bible, casting himself as Phenix City’s Prodigal Son. When he’d finished, I asked him again about what had happened to Mr. Patterson, telling him he didn’t have a thing to lose now that he’d served his time. I told him how much it would mean to the Pattersons to know how their father died.
But his face was filled with ignorance and questions, and in a soft child’s voice he said, “I don’t know any more ’an you what happened in that alley. I guess that’s something we’re all going to have to live with.”
“You know I’m going to keep asking?”
Fuller nodded. “Say, you know what’s showing at the Palace?”
“Bert, they tore that place down two years ago.”
He looked sad but pumped my hand again as I left, and I drove away, heading out to the farm.
Two nights later, he made his move.
RAIN HIT THE TIN ROOF OF THE BARN, AND I HAD BOTH MY horses in. Old Braddock was still hanging on, his back sloped and teeth worn, and I had a new one, a sweet filly I’d bought from a man in Auburn. The zap of the electric storm in the bright blue daylight made them skittish and they shook their heads, their eyes wide. I soothed them with talk.
I put up some rope, coiling it in my hands, and went to close a back gate after letting them in. A long row of tiny white bulbs lit the interior of the barn but flickered and sputtered out with a harsh boom, lightning hitting not a mile from where I stood.
The ground shook. The horses raised up on their hind legs.
Without their bridles, I smoothed their rumps, and they turned and turned, wide-eyed, until they slowed in the cooling darkness of the storm.
He appeared as a shadow to me at the mouth of the barn. The storm moving away now, the thunder retreating and cracking from far away. Wind rocked the flypaper that hung from the rafters of the loft, and I didn’t move, I just stood there, seeing the shadow man, and simply said, “Come on in, Bert.”
But he didn’t say anything, the dark shape shifting, studying me in the wide box of light. His hand disappeared for a moment and then reappeared with a pistol. He aimed the pistol at me without threats or words and drew a close bead down the sights.
The gun fired and fired again.
The shadow tilted and then fell back, trying to stand his ground, but losing a grip on the barn door and falling into the light, half man, half shadow.
One of my young deputies climbed down the loft ladder and walked toward Fuller, slowing as he grew close, making sure it was really him, and then he fired again. Twice more. Fuller in the mud, rain streaking across him, blood coming from his mouth. He fired twice more into the mud and blood.
I was outside with the deputy.
“I think he’s dead now, Billy,” I said.
He looked over at me, shaken awake from the dream.
“I want to be sure.”
I looked down in the mud, Fuller’s head sinking into the places that my horses had made soft with their hooves.
NOT LONG AFTER, BILLY AND I RODE THE TRAILS ON MY land, hearing the sounds of the bulldozers and earthmovers cutting Phenix City in half with a highway bypass to Columbus. We found a spot at my small pond to let the horses drink, calm and sweaty from the ride, and they felt gentle and tired as they filled themselves with cool water and we made our way back up that well-worn path to the barn.
“Did I tell you my wife was pregnant?”
“Must’ve slipped your mind,” I said. “Her folks okay with y’all living here? Or they still want you in Atlanta?”
He shook his head. “They didn’t know things had changed.”
We were silent for a moment, just the sounds of hooves on earth, as we crested the hill.
“You like being a father?” Billy asked.
“Very much,” I said.
I dismounted and walked back to my patrol car, pulling out a beaten cloth book that’d I’d found deep in our evidence locker and carried the great weight of it back to the barn, chaining the gate behind me.
“What’s that?” Billy asked. He dismounted and tied the horse to a post.
I handed him the book and he flipped through all the pages, all the black-and-white photographs of all the girls and all their statistics and numbers that corresponded with the tattoos in their mouths.
He flipped through a few times and then stopped on one picture. He stared at it and then closed the book with a thump.
“Thinking about burning some of that old hay,” I said. “Want to join me?”
Billy grinned, a tall, skinny man in his deputy uniform.
He helped me toss some of the old bales into a heap and I put my Zippo to the edge of them, the dry grass quickly catching and igniting in a rush of fire. Billy picked up the book and tossed it into the dead center of the bales. We stood there for a long while and watched it catch and burn, seeing some of the faces of all those lost girls from long ago curl and smolder and turn to nothing.
As we walked back to the horses, taking off their bridles and slipping the saddles from their backs, I asked, “Did you ever hear from Lorelei after she left?”
“A few times. I got postcards from North Carolina, and even one from New York. She never left an address. After a couple years, they just stopped.”
“You ever get your daddy’s Buick back?”
He shook his head.
“Or the money you cut from the Hoyt Shepherd job?”
“Wasn’t much.”
“Eno
ugh to start over.”
“I guess.”
From the damp earth, you could smell the last bits of the fire, dying and smoldering, and leaving the smell of fall on the wind.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Background information provided by: Ed Strickland and Gene Wortsman, Phenix City: The Wickedest City in America; Margaret Anne Barnes, The Tragedy and the Triumph of Phenix City, Alabama; Alan Grady, When Good Men Do Nothing: The Assassination of Albert Patterson; the film and newsreel The Phenix City Story; the Albert Patterson murder trial transcripts; and files of the Columbus Ledger.
Nuria Chaparro, your constant friendship, support, and tireless replies to my questions were the foundation of this book. Thank you for introducing me to your father, the heroic Lamar Murphy. I’m better for knowing him.
Thanks to the entire Fussell family for the round of introductions in Phenix City and Columbus, Georgia. And to the Carson McCullers Center, for shelter while I researched this novel, and to Tim Chitwood at the Ledger, who went above and beyond to get me the Phenix City files.
For my two important friends in New York: Neil, wasn’t that easy? You’re a tough, demanding trainer. And I’m grateful for it. Esther, what can I say? You are the greatest agent of all time. I’m honored to know you.
A special thanks to two great writers: Elmore, the knock-out artist, for his continued wisdom, humbling example, and great work, and Bob Crais for a much-needed pep talk and brainstorming session.
Thanks to John Patterson, a man who lived this story, for giving me his valuable time and patient answers that meant so much. And to Joe Atkins, my great friend and brother in noir, who brought me back to Phenix City and showed me a story that lived in my family’s backyard.
For all of those who provided support or took me back to the wickedest days of Phenix City, thank you: Jim Cannon, Charley Frank Bass, Jan Shepherd, Rankin Sherling, Ray Jenkins, Billy Winn, John Lupold, Pete Hanna, Jere Hoar, and my boxing trainer, Larry Greene.