The Wicked City

by Beatriz Williams

  Just a word. But what a word. Hillbillies, Miss Kelly. What do you know about hillbillies?

  “Nothing,” I lie.

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Nope.”

  “Because you sounded, just now, like a woman who knows something.”

  “I’m a working girl, Mr. Anson. A New York working girl. I get my news like everyone else. The morning paper. You can learn a lot about the world from the morning paper, but it doesn’t mean you know one single mite more than the next girl.”

  Anson shifts position, leaning back against the desk, both hands curled around the edge. It’s the kind of angle that displays the girth of his quadriceps to their absolute maximus, such that you imagine they might rip free from all that civilized wool and sock you in the stomach. Absent a coat, his shirtsleeves show up like snow in the gray, dark room. I would say there’s something colorless about him altogether, like he’s put on a mask of ice: that good, thick Adirondack ice they haul down from those lakes upstate. You could pick and pick and never draw blood. A fine pair, we are. The coffee cup sits untouched on his left side, sending up steam.

  “But every New York working girl comes from somewhere, doesn’t she, Miss Kelly?” He lifts one hand away from the desk and gestures to the window. “Nobody’s born here.”

  “That’s not true. A lot of girls are born here.”

  “Not you. You’re a country girl, aren’t you? The far end of Maryland, isn’t that right? Small town called River Junction, I believe.”

  At this point, the edges of the room go a little dark. I’d like to take a sip of coffee—poor thing’s getting cold, sitting there in my lap like that—but I’m afraid my hand will tremble. So I just clench the handle with my right thumb and forefinger, while I clench the saucer with the left. Sew my lips into a smile. Focus my vision on the tip of Anson’s oversized nose. The cleft at the tip of his damned chin, chipped from ice.

  He moves. Picks up his coffee with a steady hand. Sips, savors. Savors what, I don’t know. It’s just black coffee, nothing else. You have to be a brute to drink coffee like that, a brute as bitter as the brew you’re swallowing.

  “Tell me, Miss Kelly,” he says, setting down the cup in the saucer and resuming his pose against the desk, legs crossed at the ankles, not a care in the world, “when was the last time you saw your stepfather?”

  8

  AS IT so happens, I can name the exact hour I last saw my stepfather, though I’m not going to inform Special Agent Oliver Anson of the Bureau of Internal Revenue of that fact. I’m not going to inform Anson of anything, see, because the word informer, where I come from, carries about the same ugly weight of blasphemy as the word for a man who engages in a certain intimate act with his nearest maternal relation, from time to time. (Yes, that word.) So what I’m about to say remains right here betwixt you and me, understand? Nobody likes a rat.

  The hour was dawn. End of August, nineteen hundred and twenty. Hot as the dickens. Yours truly was up early, gathering the eggs from the miserable henhouse out back, while the sunlight crept down the mountainside and the warm mist coated the grass. In another week, I was supposed to be heading back to college, and by God I should have been counting down the seconds. Not that I especially loved college and the sneering razor-nosed girls who inhabited the joint, oh no. You see, by the time of that burning August of 1920, River Junction had taken on all the aspects of an earthly perdition for me. That’s why I woke up early—not because the eggs needed gathering, although they did, but because nobody else was up. You could stand there in the middle of the chicken coop and watch the creeping of the sun, the stir of the mist, the slow, deliberate greening of the landscape, and your only company was the hens. The birds whistling good morning from the branches of a nearby birch. The damp earth smelling of loam and chicken shit. You know the feeling. Your feet planted firm in the center of all Creation.

  Until he turned up, anyway.

  He. Him. My mother’s husband. Name of Dennis, but everybody calls him Duke. Duke Kelly. The dear soul was so kind as to bequeath me his surname when he married my mother, and I do believe he’s been aiming to collect the debt in installments ever since.

  Now, first and foremost, you have to understand that everybody in River Junction loves Duke. Loves him! He’s not the mayor, but he’s the next closest thing: the mayor’s best pal. Friendly fellow, every brick of him mortared with charm. Dresses in clean, neat clothes; brushes back his dark, curling mane with just the right dollop of peppermint hair oil. You’d like him too, if you happened to be stopping in River Junction for a cup of coffee at the depot café, and he happened to be sitting at the next table drinking his own cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette he’d rolled himself right then. He would strike up a conversation with you, ask you where you were headed, tell you that’s a right nice-looking car you got out there, or else if your car’s a jalopy, remark on your right nice-looking wife. Offer you a cigarette and a light. If you needed directions, say, he would sit down with you and your map and show you the exact best route to your destination, where to pick up a couple gallons of gas if you need them, and you would leave town thinking that River Junction was an awful nice place, nice people, that’s what’s grand about America, don’t you think, small towns like River Junction and the folks who live there. Salt of the earth. And I’m not saying you’d be wrong.

  So I was standing in the chicken coop, as I said, basket of eggs hooked over my elbow, armpits a little damp already even though the sun hadn’t yet touched us, there in the holler of two mountains that constitutes the geographic boundaries of River Junction. I heard the soft tread of footsteps on wet grass, the wiry squeak of the chicken coop door. My stomach fell.

  “Hello there, Geneva Rose,” he said. “You’s up awful early this morning.”

  “Eggs wanted gathering.”

  “That so?”

  “Every morning.”

  “You need a hand, maybe?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Lemme give you a hand.”

  “I said no thanks. I like to stand out by myself, in the morning.”

  “Well, now. That ain’t too friendly, honey.”

  I shrugged.

  “Why don’t you just turn about and look at me, Geneva Rose? Turn about and say good morning to your old daddy.”

  “You ain’t my daddy,” I said, but I turned around anyway, kind of slow, so I might fix my face in just the right expression as I went. Stiff and stony, so he couldn’t see what I was thinking. Couldn’t tell the revulsion coiling around my guts at the sight of his shining hair, his smooth, tanned skin, his blue eyes like the color of summer. His full lips stretched in a smile, just wide enough that you could see the tips of his teeth, golden with tobacco, right upper incisor chipped at the corner from a fall out the saloon door four years back. Or that was the story, anyway. I never was there when it happened.

  “You ain’t got no call to speak to me like that, Geneva Rose Kelly. When I reared you up like you was my own. Sent you off to school like your mama wanted. Never asked no questions. Never treated you no different.”

  Well, I could dissect the falsehoods in that speech one by one, the way they taught me in college: how to disassemble somebody’s argument like you might disassemble a chicken for frying. Not that any of the other girls at college had ever fried a chicken, my goodness no, let alone plucked it and pieced it and dipped it in flour. But I didn’t pick those words apart. Not out loud. Dear reader, I am no idiot.

  “And I appreciate that kindness, Duke. I really do. But I’m not your daughter, and that’s a fact. And I never was any good at pretending things that aren’t true.”

  “Just listen to you, baby girl. Sounding like some kind-a lady. Like one-a them grammar books or something. You learn to talk that way at college? You set to thinking you’re too good for your old daddy?”

  “Course not.”

  “Because that’s how it sounds to me, Geneva Rose.”

  “Well, that ain’t how
it is.”

  “Now, that’s better.” He nodded and reached for my cheek. “That’s more like my baby girl. You was but two years old when I laid eyes on you. When your mama come back home from New York City. Prettiest baby I ever seen.”

  I turned my head away. Took a step back. The smell of his hair oil stung my nostrils. The smell of his shaving soap. He wore a blue checked shirt, same color as his eyes, tucked into dungarees held high by plain black suspenders. Sweat already beading at his temples. Lips red and damp.

  “Don’t you go a-larking off, baby girl,” he crooned. “Ain’t nobody up around here excepting you and me. Your mama’s still abed.”

  “She won’t be long.”

  “Sure she will, sugar. She don’t rise herself up till noon sometimes. Just a-drinking and a-staring at the ceiling, your mama.”

  His breath smelled like cigarettes. Wee dram of brown skee, too, if I wasn’t mistaken. Liquid courage, to use another word for it, which maybe explained what he was doing there in that chicken coop, in the thick August dawn while my mother slept in her bed, one week less a day before I should have been leaving for my second year of college.

  “Baby girl,” he said. “Don’t you be shy, now. I’ll treat you right. You know I will. I treat everybody right that treats me right.”

  “I think you best be fixing to get back inside that house, Duke Kelly,” I said. Edging to the right. Clear line for the frail wire-screen door of the coop. The patch of sun on the opposite slope was falling fast now. The air turning to a foggy gold. “You best fix to get back inside before somebody sees you out here.”

  “Who’s a-going-a see us? Ain’t nobody up. Not on a hot old morning like this-un.”

  I kept on staring at his nose without looking, imagining some kind of shade between our two faces, I guess, some kind of blind, so I wouldn’t be giving myself away. Another rightward step.

  “Johnnie’s up, I reckon. Johnnie’s always up early.”

  “Johnnie don’t know from nothing. Now just you stop yourself a-moving about like that, Geneva Rose. Let me get a look at you. See how you filled out this summer. Almost a woman grown now, ain’t you? Just almost.”

  So I froze up, and you would, too, if you’d heard his voice like that, like the purr of an African cat, chilling your young bones from the inside out, worrying down your spine. Or maybe you wouldn’t. Maybe I’m the only one who hears that bass snarl of malice in Duke Kelly’s voice. Everybody else just thinks he’s a real nice fellow. Anyway, I froze up, paralysis of fear, muscles all stuck in their joints, such that I didn’t even flinch when Duke’s big hand came to rest on the collar of my dress.

  “That’s better,” he said. “That’s my good baby girl.”

  I waited and waited while that hand crawled all over my bosom, pinching and squeezing. While that voice crawled over my ears. I waited until he came in close with his mouth open, panting hot on my face, cheeks smudged red, and then I drove my fist into his stomach hard as I could, knocking his rank skee breath right from his belly, and then I ran. Ran straight through the door of that chicken coop, ripping the wire, ripping my skin, and then I did a stupid thing. See, I should have gone into the house, where Mama and the boys lay asleep, where Johnnie sat eating his porridge at the kitchen table, spoon by spoon with a drop of molasses, but I was so scared I wasn’t thinking straight. I ran for the creek instead, dumb bunny as I was back then, ran for the creek and the old fishing hole where we used to spend our summer afternoons, me and the boys, when I was home from school. Of course, the creek was screened by willows and thick with skeeters, and nobody came down there at that time of day, nobody at all, and you couldn’t hear nobody talking or screaming from down there, either, on account of the trees and the way the creek makes a holler betwixt two sloping banks, see, into which all these sounds find themselves trapped like crawdads at the bottom of a wooden barrel.

  So why did I make for the creek? God knows. Just a young, dumb bunny as I was back then. Not thinking straight.

  9

  ANYWAY. I’M nobody’s bunny any longer. What I tell that nice special revenue agent is this: “I’m afraid I don’t recollect exactly, Mr. Anson. Why do you ask?”

  “You’ve had no relations at all with your family since you left River Junction in the summer of 1920?”

  “Say. That’s a personal question.”

  He shrugs those shoulders of his. Checks his wristwatch. Sips coffee, sighs, turns his head to the window as if to make certain that Manhattan still exists out there, rattling and shouting and drinking and fornicating. A delicate glow passes across the bridge of that hefty nose. Headlights of some nocturnal automobile.

  “Have all night, do you?” I say.

  “If necessary.”

  “My goodness. Is old Duke so important as that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can’t you give me a hint?”

  He turns back to me. “Do I need to give you a hint? You seem like a clever woman, Miss Kelly. I’m sure you’ve already guessed the nature of my interest in your stepfather.”

  “I haven’t laid eyes on River Junction in nearly three and a half years, Mr. Anson. If my stepfather’s set himself up in a little business since then, taking advantage of the difference between what one half of the country wants and what the other half doesn’t want them to get, why, I don’t know a thing about it.”

  Anson places his cup and saucer back on the desk and walks across the few yards of thready Oriental carpet to where I sit in my chair, all folded shut like a clam at low tide. The silk lining over my shoulders responds with an electric ripple. Or maybe that’s the nerves underneath. Each button of Anson’s plain waistcoat is done right up, not a stitch loose, not a single flaw in the weave of fine gray wool, and the reason I can report these details is because he’s come to rest about a foot away, not even that. I do expect I can tell you the brand of starch stiffening the cuffs of his sleeves. From this angle, his head looks like a prehistoric skull, all bone.

  He sinks to one knee, right there next to my chair, and lays his right forearm over his thigh. His eyes are larger than I thought, more charcoal than blue, the color of winter.

  “Not a little business, Miss Kelly. Your stepfather has built a network of distilleries across Allegany County and beyond, and nobody will say a word against him. I don’t know if they love the man or if they’re plain scared, or if they’re on the take.”

  “All three, I do expect.”

  “In two years, the Bureau hasn’t been able to make a dent in his business, not a single arrest. A few months ago, two of our best men disappeared out there.”

  “My condolences. What’s the world coming to, when a Prohi can’t just take a little lettuce in his back pocket and keep his blood on the inside?”

  “My agents don’t accept bribes, Miss Kelly.”

  “You don’t say? Because a little birdie tells me they’d be the first.”

  “They’re good men with families. Wives and children.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Do you have a wife and children, Mr. Anson?”

  A slow blink, like a reptile. “That’s a personal question, Miss Kelly.”

  “Oh, I see! I’m the one who’s supposed to spill all the beans in this room, isn’t that right, while you get to keep your beans to yourself. Seems you’ve got a nice little racket of your own, Anson. A nice little racket.”

  He breathes in slow, regular drafts from a pair of gargantuan lungs. Fresh coffee on his breath and nothing else, not tobacco nor liquor nor money, just good clean virtue.

  “You see? It’s all a matter of perspective, isn’t it? There was this painter I used to sleep with, when I first came to New York. A real wisenheimer. He taught me about a lot of things. He taught me all about perspective. How you can change the essence of an object, the soul of it, you can change this thing entirely just by looking on it some different way. But you know what? I’ll bet you already knew that. Something tells me you know a lot about art, don’t you, Mr. A
nson? Expensive art, the kind they hang in museums and fancy Fifth Avenue apartments. You know from perspective, I’ll bet.”

  “I understand the concept.”

  “You think you’re the good guy, don’t you, Mr. Anson? You think you’re some kind of honest-to-goodness knight, riding into River Junction on your fine white charger to do away with that dastardly villain with the twirling mustache. Cover yourself with medals. Laurels on your head, damsels on your arm. I wonder what you’d say if you knew how it looks from where I’m sitting.”

  “So tell me.”

  I turn a little on my hip on that chair, so we’re face-to-face, terribly intimate, the way you turn to your lover in bed. Prop my elbow on the back of the chair. Drape one leg over the other. His knee’s no more than an inch from my own.

  “Why, you look exactly the same, you and my stepfather. You take me by surprise. Haul me to your lair. Corner me where I can’t strike back. Hold someone dear over my head, just to make sure I play along. You and Duke, you just want to get a little something out of me, whether I like it or not, and you don’t ever mean to pay me back for my trouble.”

  Well, if I was hoping to get a little flicker out of him, some sign of impact, forget it. You might as well chip emotion from a glacier. Just those wintry eyes, staring at me. Those fingers hanging downward from his thigh, thick and knobbled. Scar on his chin. On his forehead. Lashes black and plentiful. The room throbs around us, the city throbs around the room. A block or two away, the boats skate silently across the Hudson River, hauling in booze, hauling in contraband everything in an unstoppable swarm, like the skeeters back home, too small and quick and clever for you to swat.

  Without warning, the fingers flex. A few quick strikes, like the twitches of a dying man.

  “I have neither wife nor children, Miss Kelly,” he says. “Your turn.”

  “All right. Here’s my turn: Duke Kelly’s a cold-blooded bastard, and I’ll turn myself in at the nearest precinct before I trundle back to River Junction like some poor sucker and help you catch him.”