by Ace Atkins
And he’d stop and look at me with that one clear eye, that cloudy one staring off dead in the distance, his ears jugged and cauliflowered, and pull me from what I was doing, on the speed bag or the heavy, and grab me by the thick of the forearm, so I could smell his coffee-tinged breath: Murphy, the gropers are those who want to learn. They are always grasping the means to find out ways of improving their lot.
When I came to the gym, I didn’t even own my own pair of gloves. I worked in the off-hours for my gear and training at the candy factory on the river and would emerge late at night smelling like burnt sugar and grease. I made my living with my fists in pickup bouts for the enjoyment of two-bit hustlers over the river in Phenix City – the same rings where they fought roosters and dogs – and soon in the legitimate ring, taking the Atlanta Golden Gloves in 1938. From there, I never thought it would end, boxing my way from New York to New Orleans and even down to Mexico City.
I bought new tailored suits and carried gobs of cash in a silver money clip, even being able to afford a nice little convertible that was a hell of a thing in the country on a spring day.
But then I met Joyce, and when we danced one night on my new nimble feet at a bandstand down on Moon Lake, the fighting didn’t seem as important. She worked as a beautician in Phenix City, was about the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. And unlike most of the girls you meet on the road who were with you until the booze and prize money ran out, she could’ve cared less about me being a fighter. In fact she hated it, and about the time the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor she asked me to please quit getting myself beat on, just like that, never acknowledging that the other fella was taking most of the beating.
Before Mr. Patterson was shot, I remember the rust-flecked mirror over the station commode becoming the boxing mirror – the place where all fighters must examine their every move and weakness – and I saw a man that had grown soft and old. At forty, I didn’t care for that feeling a bit.
I’d always been a groper.
WHEN THE PHONE RANG, I WAS HALF ASLEEP IN AN EASY chair, an empty bowl of peach ice cream in my lap, and watching television over the heads of my two children who lay on the floor, inches away from the screen. We’d just watched a show called Topper about a ghost couple and their ghost Saint Bernard who haunted an uptight banker. The kids liked it a lot anytime the ghost dog got into the banker’s booze, but now had grown a little bored and sleepy with Schlitz Playhouse of Stars, and that’s when I’d begun to doze after a long day of pumping gas and fixing engines.
Joyce walked into the room, drying her hands on a dish towel, and took a deep breath. Her face was white as she pointed me back to the kitchen.
I put down my spoon and followed. “Hugh Britton called. Mr. Patterson has been shot. They’ve taken him to the hospital.”
“My gun is in the nightstand.”
“I know where your gun is.”
“Keep it close.”
“I’ll lock the doors.”
The hospital was just up the hill from our little brick house, and I ran all the way through the fine, heated summer night. The little windows of the postwar cottages on the gentle slope glowed with soft light, and in the tiny square yards children played and grimy men drank beer and worked on cars. Women sat on stoops and smoked cigarettes in hair curlers, and I ran by them all up a curved drive, past all the cars and a few ambulances, and into the dull, attic heat of the hospital lobby.
I found John Patterson speaking to two doctors with a large gathering of newsmen and photographers. They popped off flashes from their boxed Rolleiflex cameras, John’s face sweating and dull eyes vacant in the quick strobes of light. They asked him questions about his father and the rackets and the reputed Phenix City Machine and he didn’t answer them, unblinking in the quick strobes, until I grabbed his elbow and steered him into a hallway, where he just stared down the long vacuum of tile and linoleum and nurses and doctors in antiseptic white.
John hadn’t been back from the service long, a World War II combat veteran who’d served from Africa to Austria with France in between. He’d been briefly recalled to Korea but ended up with some legal work in Germany before returning home to partner with his father. He was a stocky guy with a heavy brow, the kind of man who’d rather be in a boat fishing than be involved in anything political. But John was a loyal man, loyal to his friends and his family, and I knew he’d spent the better part of the year dropping his practice to crisscross the state to campaign for his father.
They took him into a room in the emergency ward, never telling him a damn thing, where he found his father on a gurney, hidden under a white sheet. Sheriff Matthews was there with Chief Deputy Bert Fuller and the county solicitor, Arch Ferrell, and when John walked into the room you could only hear the click, click, click of his shoes across the floor and the stiff pop of the sheet as he pulled it away and looked down at his father.
Sheriff Matthews sucked a tooth. Bert Fuller leaned against the wall and fanned himself with his cowboy hat. And Arch Ferrell rubbed his face, his finger trembling across his jaw.
Mr. Patterson lay there dressed in a brown suit with a bloody white shirt and blue tie. His mouth was open, teeth shot away, and blood spotted upon his face, his eyes open and staring into nothing particular, glazed and empty.
“I don’t want a goddamn hand on him,” John said. “I’m sending for Dr. Rehling in Opelika. He’ll do the autopsy. No one is to touch him.”
Matthews, Fuller, and Ferrell didn’t say a word. Fuller just looked to me and then back to John, fanning his face some more and then slipping his hat back on his head. I watched as John took a breath and then reached into his father’s pockets, taking his wallet and keys, and removed a wristwatch loudly clicking off the seconds.
I followed John out into the hall. He tucked his father’s belongings into his own pockets.
“Murphy, will you stay?”
I nodded, and he walked back to the lobby.
Soon Arch Ferrell came outside and he looked at me, dressed in my Texaco coveralls: “We’ll do everything we can.”
“Who’s gonna run this?”
“Sheriff Matthews and me, of course.”
A slight sheen shone across Arch’s forehead and upper lip. His breath smelled of cheap whiskey and cigarettes. Arch was the city’s war hero – one of the first into Normandy and one of the last out of Germany – and was known to tear up at the Foreign Legion post when they played the “Star-Spangled Banner.”
Arch took a long breath. He knew me only from the service station and looked at the grease on my nails and across my uniform as he smoothed out the tie on his chest. He was shorter than me, with pointed features and large ears. The hair on the side of his head had been buzzed tight, the top curly and uncombed.
“I’ve got to get back to the scene,” he said. “The coroner will be here soon.”
“We’re waiting for the state.”
“This doesn’t involve the state. Mr. Patterson was one of our own and we will handle it here in town.”
“Nope,” I said. “No one goes in that room until the state examiner gets here.”
Arch shook his head with great disgust. “You RBA people won’t rest until you turn this whole thing into a goddamn clusterfuck.”
His right hand flexed and clinched. I didn’t say anything, just watched his face turn a bright crimson as he held his breath. “Y’all just want to be heroes,” Arch said. “But I think it’s a little too late for that.”
He turned and walked away.
I stayed there for hours, as everyone in town and every newsman in the state turned up at Homer C. Cobb Memorial. The flashbulbs were endless; twice, I had to stop newspapermen from entering the room with Mr. Patterson’s body.
Hugh Britton, who installed carpet by day but did counterintelligence for the RBA at night, stayed with me, not uttering a word, until the state medical examiner arrived. Later, we sat outside by the fountain, smoking cigarettes.
That’s when I saw John Patterson, wande
ring in and out of the cars parked along the hill. I found him, sweated through a casual yellow shirt, and he looked up to me from the hot asphalt as if seeing a man he’d never met.
“You okay?”
“I can’t find my car.”
He steadied himself against the hood of a red DeSoto Deluxe, finding purchase on the hood ornament, a likeness of DeSoto himself.
A Russell County sheriff’s car slowed, Bert Fuller leaning out the driver’s window and asking, “You need a ride?”
John nodded, stepping through Fuller’s headlights and climbing in the passenger’s seat. Fuller looked at me standing there and gave a slight grin before turning back to John and saying, “If I find the sonofabitch, I’ll bring him right to you. You got my word on that, partner.”
Fuller checked the tilt of his cowboy hat in the rearview before knocking the car in gear and moving out slow and steady down the hill.
THE FIRST LIGHT ON THE RIVER WASHED OVER THE CRIME scene and over the tired faces of men standing in that narrow shot of alley taking pictures and measuring Mr. Patterson’s last steps and answering newsmen’s questions and talking and talking. I hadn’t been home since the hospital, and I waited with Hugh Britton outside the ropes they’d set off to keep the gawkers back. John Patterson was there, talking to investigators who’d come down from Montgomery, and we were left with little to do in that early gray light but stand back and drink coffee and shake our heads and wait for John to tell us what to do next. Some Phenix City deputies waded through knee-deep kudzu at the far end of the alley, poking sticks into the green leaves and kicking around with their feet. Another man in a black suit finished up looking through Mr. Patterson’s car and then called out to a deputy, who opened up the rope and motioned for a wrecker to come on in and take the Olds away.
Cameras clicked and clicked, with an undeniable headline of DEATH CAR, the pocked glass on the driver’s window evident as the wrecker turned onto Fifth and into the weak light.
“Where they taking it?” Britton asked.
“Only one way to find out.”
I walked down the middle of the street – there was almost no traffic – and watched as the car turned slow down Fourteenth and then took a hard turn back behind the courthouse to the county jail.
By that time, Britton had caught up with me. He was a wiry, little gray-headed man, and he was out of breath standing by my side as I pointed behind the courthouse.
We walked around the edge of the big brick courthouse and looked down into the little cove surrounded by razor wire. There, the wrecker had stopped, and trusties in denim uniforms worked to unlatch the car as it was slowly lowered onto its fat whitewalls.
After the wrecker drove out of the gates, three of those trusties approached the Rocket 88 with big galvanized buckets and brushes. Britton pointed toward the edge of the jail, and we saw Bert Fuller pointing and yelling words to the men we couldn’t hear.
Britton pulled a little notebook from his shirt pocket and jotted down some details, no doubt to go into the endless files he’d been keeping for the RBA since we started three years ago.
Two of the trusties were black and one was fat and white. They opened the car door and crawled inside and worked their buckets and brushes all over the leather and floors. One of the men duckwalked to a nearby drain and tossed out some soapy water that was a bright pink. He repeated this a half dozen times till the interior carpet had been cleaned and he tossed the last bucket down into the drainpipe that would twist and run downhill out to the Chattahoochee.
Britton looked to me and then back to the men. He noted the time on his wristwatch and wrote it down.
We walked back together to Fifth Avenue and toward the Coulter Building. The summer sun was full up now and painted the blacktop and sidewalks. The mannequins inside Seymour’s Ready-to-Wear Shop, now slatted in early sun rays, coyly turned and smiled, showing off their stiff summer dresses, patent leather pumps, and costume jewelry.
Hugh Britton tucked a toothpick into his mouth and set one of his hands in his trouser pockets. He took off his glasses, blew his breath on the lenses, and cleaned them with a white handkerchief. Satisfied, he slipped them back on his face.
“I don’t like this a bit.”
I nodded.
“Having Fuller in charge of this show is like making a chimp the circus ringmaster.”
“You think these state boys will be much better?”
Britton shook his head and smiled, and we both knew that only two years before a special group of investigators – fronted by a state man named Joe Smelley – had come down to investigate the illegal activities of our town. Not only did Smelley deny he saw a set of dice roll or a single whore on a street corner, he wrote a damn letter of accommodation to Governor Persons praising Bert Fuller as one of the state’s outstanding lawmen.
The state investigators stood across Fifth Avenue, almost identical in their short-sleeved dress shirts and ties, pleated trousers, and lace-up shoes. They held notebooks, pens tucked in the pockets of their shirts, and smiled and shook hands with the local boys in uniform. We watched it all from the other side of the street as hands were shook and backs were slapped. The investigator, Smelley, noticed us and leaned into Sheriff Matthews, who quickly caught Britton’s eye, whispered something to Smelley, laughed, and then spit on the sidewalk.
“The footprint,” said a voice. John Patterson stood behind us. “It’s gone. Last night they had enough to pour a mold, but when they pulled up the board someone had covered it up. I need help.”
“Anything,” I said.
“Y’all find out what you can,” John said. “I’m gonna try and get us some federal help.”
“I’ll ride with you,” Britton said. He stuck the toothpick back into his mouth and stood up on his toes like a banty rooster. He opened his mouth to speak and then closed it. He shook his head.
John rested his hand on the old man’s shoulder. His father had been one of Britton’s closest friends.
“Your father knew it,” Britton said. “He knew they were coming for him. I told him a thousand times to carry a gun. But Pat said it wouldn’t matter. Said they’d shoot him like some kind of coward and he was right.”
“If you find who did this,” John said, “I want you to bring them to me. They didn’t even give my father a chance.”
MUCH TO REUBEN’S AGGRAVATION, FOURTEENTH STREET stayed empty that Saturday night. The National Guard had been called to town by Governor Persons to keep order, and although they did little but drive the streets in jeeps and hold roadblocks it was enough for the Machine to keep their business behind closed doors while guardsmen checked driver’s licenses and IDs of everyone who drove over the river. Baby-faced, buzz-cut boys in khaki from all over Alabama walked the beat down by the two bridges with rifles slung over their backs, guns on their hips, staring up at the neon signs and advertisements for busty ladies along plateglass windows.
Still, the beer flowed from brass taps and the jukeboxes played sad and rough-and-tumble country songs. But the B-girls sat alone at the long bars and cafés and the stick men took nothing but smoke breaks out on the streets and the bartenders had nothing but time to talk to the one or two customers who would walk in the doors to discuss the latest of what they were calling an Occupation.
That first night, Reuben made a quick stop-off at the Atomic Bomb Café and asked Clyde Yarborough for Budweiser in the bottle and a pack of Camels. He felt bad about running off Billy last night. But he didn’t have time to play daddy when there was work to be done. His boy would someday understand that.
In the center of the room stood a tall bombshell that Yarborough had bought from an Army/Navy store and had someone paint a nude woman with enormous breasts on the casing. Instead of nipples, the woman wore the symbols for nuclear fallout. A fiery mushroom cloud for hair.
Yarborough pulled the beer from an old Coca-Cola cooler and shuffled off a pack from a bin by the cash register. He looked at Reuben, tilting his head like a dog,
most of his face and jaw eaten away by cancer.
Most of the time he wore a bandanna over his mouth to cover the loose flesh and toothless opening of what had been a mouth. But tonight the skin grafts and holes and mush face glared back at him like a rotting jack-o’-lantern.
Reuben tapped the cigarette pack against his palm and broke out one. It remained unlit and fresh in his mouth as he leaned against the bar and shook his head. Clyde Yarborough, six foot three and still as strong as an ape, garbled something unintelligible and shuffled off.
Grime and dirt clung to the black-and-white linoleum floors and fingerprints and smudges filled the mirrors along the back of the long bar. A simple jukebox sat between the men’s and women’s bathrooms toward the back, and Reuben walked over and used a key to check the bin.
Not even enough to empty. He used a few of the coins to play some Hank Williams, his old friend who used to drink with him in this very bar before that long, last ride.
He looked down the long empty bar and toasted Yarborough, and hearing the music cutting on the jukebox, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” his rubbery face contorted into what may have very well been a smile and he snorted in what could’ve been a laugh.
Reuben smoked and drank and, when he put down the beer, tapped his fingers against the beaten bar, in all the coolness of the room and the dull, dim light of the neon beer signs.
About nine, he was piss-drunk and drinking each new beer with a side of Jack Daniel’s, thinking about arriving in Bora-Bora in that troop ship and being greeted at the landing craft by a half dozen crazed GIs who ended up ass-raping a fresh-faced boy from Iowa who’d never even fired a shot in combat.
“Did I ever tell you about those goddamn monkeys in the Philippines?”
Yarborough sliced through some lemons, a big mug of a soft gray gruel that he drank for food by his side. The big man shook his head.
“They had monkeys all over the place. That’s what this place needs. A goddamn monkey. Lose the A-bomb, I’ll take a goddamn monkey any old time.”