Wicked City

by Ace Atkins

  Reuben Stokes walked into Slocumb’s, announced with the tingle of a bell over the door, and I looked up. Reuben’s hair had been freshly cut and combed tight in the back and sides with a high poof on top; he wore a royal blue leisure coat with long, vertical white stripes and pleated white pants. He smiled like a confident circus performer.

  “You’re not gonna rob me, are you?”

  “How much you got?” Reuben asked.

  “Couple hundred.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  Outside, a skinny man in a pink cowboy shirt and a fat man with a head the size of a watermelon got out of the Buick, stretched, and talked with Arthur. I recognized the man in the pink shirt as Johnnie Benefield, a local clip joint operator and safecracker. He was bone thin, with big teeth and a face that resembled a skull, black eyes, and a few strands of black hair combed over his bald pate.

  The fat man, whom I didn’t know, wore big overalls and a dirty white undershirt. His face was pink and jowly and looked like he hadn’t shaved for days.

  “Me and Johnnie headin’ over to the Fish Camp. You want to join us?”

  I smiled because it wasn’t a serious offer. Anyone in town knew an invitation to Cliff’s Fish Camp wasn’t about dinner. Sure, they served fried catfish and hush puppies with slaw. But their main attraction was a stable of whores that Cliff kept up in glorified stalls out back and you could take your pick for dessert while you waited for your meal.

  “Who’s the other fella?”

  “Moon? We just givin’ him a ride.”

  Over Reuben’s shoulder, I watched the fat man walk to the edge of the gravel lot and begin to unhitch the straps of his overalls. He hefted himself out and then began to urinate in the weeds.

  “You can tell him we have restrooms here.”

  “Moon wouldn’t know how to use ’em any more than a mule.”

  Reuben stuck a cigarette into the corner of his mouth, his breath smelling of sharp whiskey.

  “Johnnie workin’ for you now?”

  “Some. Been with a few different folks since Big Nigger got himself killed.”

  For some reason people had taken to calling Johnnie’s old partner “Big Nigger” before he’d been killed in a shoot-out last year. The man had been as white as me.

  “I can always use a good man who knows engines.”

  “Shoot.”

  “It’s gonna last. Y’all can’t even open back up.”

  “You saying Phenix City’s going straight?”

  “I’m just saying people around here are fed up.”

  The man finished urinating, pulled back the straps on his overalls, and wiped his palms on the bib.

  “You sound like this crazy man who walks up and down the streets at night. Have you seen him? He wears a blue robe and holds up a sign painted with Bible verses. He says this is all the end times and that we stand in the center of Sodom. You ain’t headed that way, are you?”

  “I didn’t say it’s the end times. I just said it’s going to be different.”

  “Pat wasn’t Jesus Christ.”

  “Didn’t say he was.”

  Outside, Arthur cleaned off Reuben’s windshield and ran a gauge on each of his fat whitewall tires. When the car was filled, he walked in and told me it had been three dollars and forty-five cents.

  I made change and shoved it across the counter, closing the register with a sharp snick. Reuben crushed the bills into his wallet and left a crisp fifty on the counter. I took it and followed Reuben back out, the light growing dark.

  “I’m sorry about Pat,” Reuben said, holding open the door of the Buick. “I really am.”

  “You know anything about that?”

  He was about to turn, but the question amused him and he smiled at me with a big cigarette clamped between his teeth.

  “Do you remember our last bout, before the war?” he asked. “A five-rounder, wasn’t it? You always wondered about it.”

  “Not really.”

  “You miss that? Waking up and going over to see ole Kid Weisz at that rathole of a gym, working out till you couldn’t even stand or lift your arms? You know I felt like I was invincible, like I could bust through a brick wall.”

  “Haven’t felt like that for a while.”

  “Haven’t felt like that since the war.”

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  “Shit, I ain’t lookin’ for pity, Lamar. That wasn’t nobody’s fault. That was just the world on fire.”

  I tucked the fifty into his leisure coat’s pocket.

  He grinned at me. “Your head has always been like a rock.”

  I stood in the doorway and watched him leave. More thunder grumbled in the distance, but it didn’t feel like serious thunder and I paid it little mind.

  The fat man, Moon, and Johnnie Benefield waited in the car. Johnnie hunched into the center of the car, turning the radio’s dial. The fat man stared straight ahead, immobile in the backseat, a simple, solid smile on his face.

  Reuben walked back, leaving the car door halfway open. “There’s no need to be a hero right now,” he said.

  I smoked down the cigarette and flicked a tip of ash into the gravel.

  “Just go home, Lamar. Watch your family.”

  “A threat’s not really your style.”

  “It’s not a threat,” he said. “You understand?”

  I nodded at the words and watched as the car drove off, my stomach feeling weak and cold.

  WE BURIED ALBERT PATTERSON OUTSIDE A SMALL CHAPEL in Tallapoosa County on a hot, airless June day after an endless stream of handshakes and condolences and sermons and prayers. After, a train of cars followed the long highway back east where the women of Phenix City filled the Patterson home with fried chicken and deviled eggs and macaroni and cheese and cool Jell-O molds and chilled lemon and chocolate pies. Most of the men still wore their black suits, the doors opening and shutting and battling the summer heat, while people mourned by exchanging loose talk about the killing, giving hugs, or exchanging funny stories about how stubborn ole Pat could be or how rotten this town had grown.

  I grabbed a plate of cold fried chicken and some baked beans and found a little chair out on the small front porch with my wife and kids.

  I still wore a black armband as one of the pallbearers.

  “You doing okay?” Joyce asked.

  “Fine and dandy.”

  She had a soft summer glow on her face and a light dusting of freckles across her nose. A hot wind brushed the brown hair, which she’d recently cut short to match the new Parisian styles, over her dark eyes.

  I smiled at her. She winked at me.

  “Reuben came by the filling station the other day.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He tried to warn me off. Tried to give me fifty dollars.”

  “Fifty dollars? You should’ve taken it.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “Sure I do.”

  “He’s connected to this thing. They all are, whether their hands are dirty or not.”

  “Did you ask him about it?”

  I nodded.

  “You two were such good friends. When I married you, I thought Reuben was part of the deal.”

  “You never liked him.”

  “The thing you hate about Reuben is that you have to smile when you see him. He has that way about him that just makes you laugh.”

  “I don’t think it’s intentional.”

  “I think it is.”

  “You know, when we used to spar, he’d play and josh around for the first couple rounds. Always smiling and laughing, tapping out the jabs, while the Kid would yell at us for half-assing it. And then he’d come on, drop that head and lay into you with a cross that would leave you with stars. That’s Reuben, all laughs till he decides to knock your lights out. He’s been up to something, I know it.”

  “When is Reuben not up to something?”

  “Did I tell you he was with Johnnie Benefield?”

  She
shook her head and looked away. “He never learns.”

  We stayed till late and helped the Pattersons clean up, the night growing cool and dark, Anne and Thomas joining a cluster of kids in the backyard, running and chasing lightning bugs in little shadowed pools under oaks and magnolias. The kids held fat pickle jars with holes poked in the lid with forks so the bugs could breathe.

  Joyce stayed in the kitchen with some other women cleaning dishes, while I helped Hugh Britton stack some folding chairs they’d borrowed from the Methodist church back into his station wagon.

  I’d barely seen John Patterson all night, but when I came back into the house to grab Joyce and the kids John called me into a back room. He’d dropped his jacket somewhere and loosened his black tie. He looked out in the hall and then quietly shut the door.

  An old mantle clock whirred away in his parents’ bedroom by a loose grouping of sepia photos in silver frames. The room smelled soft and ancient, like an old woman’s powder box. Albert Patterson’s cane hung on the back of the door.

  “Hoyt Shepherd called.”

  “Now, that’s class.”

  “He wants to see me.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “Tonight? You got to be pulling my leg.”

  “Would you ride with me?”

  “Sure. You want me to get Hugh?”

  “Maybe you can get him to take your wife and kids home,” John said. “You mind driving? Not really feeling up to it.”

  I nodded and then watched as he opened the top drawer of his father’s bureau and pulled out an Army-issue.45 he’d probably carried in North Africa and Sicily. He checked the magazine. “Let’s go.”

  HOYT SHEPHERD CAME TO PHENIX CITY DURING THE DEPRESSION to make it in the mills built alongside the Chattahoochee. But instead he found out his talent lay elsewhere and joined up with a British-born hustler and cardsharp named Jimmie Matthews. Soon, the two learned they could make more money playing poker with soldiers at Fort Benning than they ever could working looms or in the hellfire heat of the foundries or delivering laundry, like Matthews had done. Hoyt Shepherd never even graduated high school, but he’d always had a peculiar – some said genius – way with numbers and figures and was the man to ask when playing the odds. He and Jimmie soon took over the Bug racket – the town’s numbers game – and by the time the big war was in full swing, they were knee-deep in whores and cash and hoped to hell the good times would never end.

  But it had been a decade since D-day, and the rackets game couldn’t be played as wide open as the old days. Once again playing out the odds, he and Jimmie had sold off their interests on Fourteenth and Dillingham a few years back and parlayed their twenty-year hustle into some good real estate and a factory that made marked cards and loaded dice for saloons and casinos from Atlantic City to Havana.

  John and I drove out on Opelika Highway, heading toward the Lee County line, where I turned onto a backcountry road that dipped up over a hill and followed a loose downward curve into a little private valley. The narrow road softly turned again, causing the car to glide and flow on its own, and we could see the massive brick ranch house set among long, wide wooden fences corralling Black Angus and a few quarter horses that pricked their ears as the car neared.

  At the iron gate, I slowed, and a man carrying a hunting rifle tapped on the driver’s-side glass. I rolled down the window and told him who we were, and the man looked into the front seat and checked the back. He asked us to step out of the car and we did.

  He patted both of us down, taking the.45 off John and checking the trunk.

  Finally, he unlatched the gates and swung them wide to a long gravel road.

  The house glowed bright, as perfect as a doll’s house, and we weren’t halfway up the concrete walk, landscaped neatly with a row of crepe myrtles and sweet-smelling gardenias, when Hoyt Shepherd shuffled outside.

  He was shoeless in black trousers and a big Cuban-style shirt and he smiled and waved and walked toward John, offering him a big, meaty hand, a soft smile on his lips.

  John looked to me and then back to Hoyt. Not knowing what else to do, he just shook his hand. But I could see it pained him, and he tore away as soon as making contact and Hoyt invited us inside.

  Hoyt didn’t shake my hand. Only looked to me and grunted.

  He asked us if we wanted a cocktail and we both declined, and he walked us through the house, past a big old stone fireplace with a big deer head over it holding an antique rifle and through all the modern, boxy furniture and out back to a kidney-shaped pool. A little record player on a drink cart played a rhumba.

  Jimmie Matthews sat at a table under an umbrella, only a soft blue glow coming from the pool, and the light made Matthews’s face look strange and pale as he nodded to us and also offered his hand to both of us.

  We sat in a loose grouping of lounge chairs, and Hoyt relit a dying cigar while I pulled a pack of cigarettes from my shirt pocket. Ripples of light from the water scattered across them.

  “Ain’t you the fella from the fillin’ station?” Hoyt asked.

  “That’s me.”

  “I know your wife’s daddy. He sure is a pistol.”

  Matthews was dressed in a blue pin-striped suit, white shirt, and no tie. He waited, his legs crossed and posture erect.

  Hoyt got the stogie going and pulled an ashtray close. He smiled and grunted. That man really liked to grunt.

  “Now, John,” Hoyt said. “I want you to know right off that I didn’t have a thing to do with what happened. I didn’t want another day to pass ’fore I said that to you.”

  John nodded. The filter of the pool made whirring sounds in the silence. Matthews just looked into the face of John Patterson, meeting his eyes, and nodded along with Hoyt’s words.

  Hoyt had grown fatter since I’d seen him last, and his nose had started to swell in that big Irish way. He lifted up a Scotch filled with melting ice and took a sip and alternated it with the cigar. He’d always reminded me of W. C. Fields with a Southern accent.

  “Can’t I please get y’all somethin’? I know it’s been a heck of a day. But I’ve heard what all the newsmen have been saying about me and all those stories about me and Jimmie and the Bug and the nightclubs and all that ancient history. I never suspected you’d pay attention to it.”

  John looked up at him, his jaw tight. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Well,” Hoyt said, and grinned and then closed his mouth. His face flushed red. “Well, I mean, you know how things were between me and your daddy.” Hoyt turned to me. “Hey, you. You mind goin’ somewhere else while we talk?”

  “I do,” I said.

  “He stays,” John said.

  Hoyt just nodded. He pulled a wet napkin from under his drink and ran it over his face and fattened neck.

  “I know you did everything in your power to make sure that my father lost the election and the runoff,” John said. “I know you bought off every vote you could in Russell County and sent your men all across Alabama to do the same. How many tens of thousands of dirty money did you put out there?”

  “And we both know that Monday he was set to tell the grand jury in Birmingham about every dirty penny,” I said. “He had folks who could prove it.”

  “Boy, why don’t you go and scrape the grease from your fingernails?”

  I smiled at Hoyt. “And to think I got all dressed up to impress you.”

  Hoyt grunted. He smiled at me. It was like watching a bulldog pant.

  The back of the ranch house was mostly windows, and, inside, Hoyt’s wife, Josephine, glided through the family room in a pink satin robe with feathered ruffles. She was blond and built like a brick house, a damn-near twin for Betty Grable, and when she appeared outside and came toward us it was brisk and upright on three-inch high heels that I soon noticed were made from a cheetah print.

  A little dog yapped after her, a poodle trimmed in the traditional way and dyed a bright pink. (I knew she also liked to dye the dog blue on occasio
n.) “Can I offer you men a cocktail? We have some fresh cocktail shrimp.”

  John didn’t even acknowledge her, still studying his eyes on Hoyt Shepherd and Matthews, and they exchanged glances.

  “I don’t think these boys are stayin’, Josie.”

  I thanked Hoyt’s wife and she smiled and winked politely and moved away, her shapely backside switching and swaying like a pendulum.

  “You believe that woman married me for my looks?” Hoyt asked, watching her walk, and laughed till he coughed. He swigged down some more Scotch.

  “Are we finished?” John asked.

  “Just listen,” Hoyt said and reached out and touched John’s hand. “I may be a real sonofabitch and sometimes what many people may call a fool. And maybe I didn’t want your daddy becoming attorney general. I mean, can you blame me?”

  “Yes,” John said.

  I remained quiet and finished out a cigarette and crushed it under the heel of my shoe. I leaned forward, listening, watching the pool, watching Hoyt and silent Jimmie.

  Jimmie looked to me and nodded with recognition.

  “I’m not a stupid man,” Hoyt Shepherd said. “I know that the killing of your father wouldn’t do a thing but topple down my world. The man who did this just stopped business in Phenix City cold. What do we have now? No GIs in bars. Girls off the streets. National Guardsmen on every corner. That’s not something I ever wanted to see in my town.”

  John watched him. Hoyt offered his hand, again.

  Not caught off guard, he just looked at it. Out in the valley, the cattle grew nervous and groaned and called out, sounding almost like screams, and I could hear their heavy feet shuffling and brushing against each other, frustrated under the moon.

  I started a new cigarette.

  “Last night, that nutcase Si Garrett and his trained monkey, Arch Ferrell, hauled me into the courthouse at three o’clock in the morning,” Hoyt said. “Ferrell was as drunk as a skunk, and Garrett talked so fast I couldn’t even understand most of what he said. But most of what he said, Jimmie, correct me if I’m wrong on this-”

  Jimmie nodded.

  “They like both of us for this,” he said. “Garrett called us the crime lords of the den of iniquity. And I’ll be goddamned if I didn’t have to look up what that meant in the dictionary when I got home. And, men, it wasn’t good.”