Wicked City

by Ace Atkins

  “I have six.”

  “I know.”

  “You do?”

  “You were in the papers this weekend with your kids.”

  “Guess I was,” Big Jim said. “How’d I look?”

  “Like you do now.”

  Big Jim nodded, pleased with that, and smoked, watching the speedboat zip away, yanking the girl up on skis, taking her for a quick turn in front of the dock for the governor’s appraisal, and then disappearing around a bend in the lake.

  “Pussy is gonna kill me.”

  “Sir?”

  They didn’t talk for a long while, and Sykes tried to look at his watch without the governor seeing him. He’d grown comfortable with the sunset and the gaiety of the dinner party, and that made him more nervous. When Folsom’s driver, Drinkard, came over to the Russell County Courthouse with the invitation, he should have turned it down flat.

  “I bet your wife is looking forward to living in the mansion,” Sykes said. The question came out of nowhere, just something to say. “Lot of history. That’s where Jefferson Davis lived right before the war.”

  “Let’s skip the bullshit, Bernard,” Big Jim said. Up on the hill, Sykes heard the country band finally strike up, with some women’s cackling excitement. “A man like you needs to think about his future. And I don’t take you for a stupid man. I think you’ve worked long and hard to get where you’ve gotten so fast. What are you, thirty-six? I’m sure you know you probably ain’t on any short list to be on Patterson’s team when he takes office. No matter what you do, he still is going to see you as Si Garrett’s man.”

  Sykes recognized the band’s song as “Jambalaya.” And as the music played on, you could see the people dancing on the deck overlooking Lake Martin. The sweet good-time song poured down the hill and spread out and echoed across the water and the soft coves of light and shadow.

  “How’s that investigation coming?”

  “It’s gonna take time.”

  Folsom seemed to grow impatient, standing there on the dock with the two girls in the speedboat gone. He kept on staring around the bend for their return but soon crushed his cigarette under his gleaming shoe.

  Folsom rattled the ice in his glass and looked down to Sykes: “You sure you don’t want to loosen that tie a bit, son?”

  BLACK SAW CLANTON’S HAND REACH INTO HIS OVERALLS and he coldcocked him with the butt of the shotgun without paying much attention. He reached down into the heap of old man and picked up the little rusted pistol and put it in his pant pocket. I followed along, my.45 out now, and he motioned me to head over to the left and up the ridge. He would circle in the other way. I nodded and crept along the path, feeling my hands sweat on the butt of the gun and hearing every damn sound in the woods, waiting for a crack of a limb or the crunch of boots on the molded leaves.

  I crested the hill and saw the barn in the opening. The barn was one of the biggest I’d ever seen, the kind they built before the turn of the century, not just for livestock but to run a business. I skirted the edge of the woods, the sun bright and hard on the tin roof and loading dock built out back. There was another road from the east that we’d missed because it hadn’t been on any map.

  I couldn’t see Black but headed that way anyway.

  Just as I reached the big door, Black was behind me. I pulled on the lock and chains keeping the barn shut up. The lock was old, tooled for an old-fashioned key.

  “You want me to go back?”

  He shook his head and suddenly pushed me to the ground and fired off his shotgun twice. Two more shots, pistol shots, pinged over us against the door. Black reached into his shirt pocket for some more shells.

  I fired into the tree line three times.

  The summer air fell hot and quiet for a minute or two.

  Then there were voices and the sound of feet. I started to stand, but Black pushed me back down to the landing just as a shot fired over my head. It was then we heard the pounding from the other side of the door, the sounds of screams and yells and dozens of hands slapping the old, sun-bleached wood, crying out for help.

  16

  BLACK YELLED FOR EVERYONE to step back because he was about to shoot off the lock. And when the screams and yells died down, he counted down one, two, three and hit the dead bolt and chain with the.44 from his belt and they fell to the loading dock with a clank. We didn’t move from our hands and knees, opening the big barn doors, a hot, rank smell coming from within like a rotted mouth, and crawled inside, shutting the doors closed. We felt hands on us, on our arms and chests, faces and fingers over our mouths, and I could barely make a thing out as I yelled for everyone to move back, my eyes adjusting to light coming in slats. It all was like a fun house, with partial faces of skinny girls with dark circles under their eyes and bony arms sticking through feed sacks and torn clothes. A few were naked. Others wore satin dresses covered in hay and red dirt, the women bone thin and with mouths parched, begging us for water and something to eat.

  Black pushed them away, and I craned my neck up to the cathedral ceiling, streaks of light crisscrossing over the dirt floor and hay. As I moved back from the women and the wailing, I realized I was in the floor of an arena, wooden bleachers all around me. There were rooster cages filled with chicken shit at the edge of the wire arena, maybe fifty shiny new slot machines stacked in the center ring, and Black had already mounted the steps up into the loft, which squared the upstairs like the balcony in a theater.

  I looked back over toward the door and in the beams of light, I saw twenty girls. Maybe thirty. They’d sat back down on hay bales or on their backsides, and they covered their eyes with their forearms. Some cried. The nude ones were covered in sweat and dirt and moved in and out of shadow with no more shame than an animal. They were so skinny, I could see all their ribs. Many of them looked to be children.

  I walked back to the door and found a one-by-six to fit into a pair of brackets and keep anyone out. The barn was hot, a sweatbox down in the pit and even worse upstairs, where I found Black walking with hard thumps in his Army boots looking into little boxes that surrounded the arena.

  Each one had a hutch door and was enclosed in chicken wire.

  “Rabbit Farm,” he said.

  “How long they been keeping those girls here?”

  “Maybe since the Guard got here,” Black said. “I saw some tins on the floor and some empty buckets. They would be feeding them some.”

  “I saw a girl down there that couldn’t be any more than twelve.”

  Black’s face turned into shadow, not replying, as he walked from stall to stall. Each floor covered in a filthy mattress, smelling putrid and rotten, piss buckets on the floor and pie tins covered in mold.

  In one, there was a woman in a fetal position. The smell was worse here. She wore a cotton print dress, a dress that reminded me of the ones my mother had made from catalog material she’d bought at a country store. Black turned over the woman with his boot, and she was gray in the face with a purple tongue.

  We checked other stalls, and then Black bounded down the loft steps and walked into the center of the arena. He called all the girls to the center with him and they emerged into the brighter light, the crisscross patterns that made them look like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

  “I know none of you have had anything to drink or eat in some time. But you hold on, we’re getting you out of here.”

  I asked if any of them were named Sheila.

  A girl walked toward us. She was a child, but not the child I’d seen earlier. She wore a filthy man’s shirt and clogged along in a pair of men’s wingtips that were three times larger than her feet. Her hair was matted with straw and her face was devoid of any expression. She just craned her neck at me and said: “They said you were coming.”

  “Who?”

  “The Clanton boys.”

  “When did they say that?”

  “Yesterday. They said they brought you here to kill you.”

  AFTER MURPHY AND THAT GUARDSMAN WALKED I
NTO THE woods, an old woman with the face of a shriveled apple tried to use a mattock to pry Fuller loose from the D ring. The woman said her husband kept some bolt cutters and a hacksaw in his shed. And after giving up on the bolt cutters, she sawed right through the cuffs. Fuller worked circulation back into his wrists and hands and fingers, and asked the old woman for a gun. She went into the house and came back with a pistol, a six-shooter that looked like a Jesse James special, and Fuller checked the cylinder for ammo and realized he was loaded and ready.

  “Where’re your boys?” Fuller asked.

  “In the woods. They probably got them in the barn by now. Their paw-paw told ’em you wanted to be the one killed Murphy. He’s the bald fella, right?”

  Fuller nodded and stripped out of his bathrobe, but kept on the pajamas and bedroom shoes, and moved through the woods on the path. The woman called it the hog path, and before he ducked into the woods Fuller asked what happened to the swine.

  “We ate ’em.”

  “Y’all do some good barbecue.”

  “I could barbecue an ole dog and make her taste good.”

  Fuller looked down at the mangy hound trotting alongside him and its skin-and-bones coat, some mange around the face and ears.

  He soon came out of the path and into the clearing and saw the Clanton boys waiting up by a loading dock to the barn where Fuller had spent many a night watching the best roosters in Alabama tear each other a new asshole.

  Both of the boys were short and so painfully white that they seemed to glow. One chewed tobacco and offered him his pouch. The other smoked a cigarette and leaned on a rifle. The whites of their eyes were yellow and the lids almost pink.

  Fuller knew they never left the woods during the day, keeping the fire around those stills stoked and ready for the runners to move that ’shine all over the state and into Georgia.

  Fuller pushed onto the door. It held.

  He pushed again.

  And then the two boys joined him, heaving and pushing, with fat and sinew and muscle, until they heard a pop and the great doors opened, flooding the dark, hot barn with a light that almost seemed biblical to Bert.

  He pointed the gun into the arena, seeing nothing but the girls, and moved slowly under the loft rafters, where he heard a short click, almost sounding like a cricket. As he turned the corner, he felt a pop to his jaw so hard and quick he blacked out before losing his feet, his mouth bleeding, and realizing he’d just been smacked in the jaw by the stock of a gun, the big guardsman boot on his chest.

  Those hillbilly Clanton boys now opened up to shoot with rebel yells.

  I WAITED IN ONE OF THE STALLS, RIGHT BEHIND THE COOP door, and listened as two sets of feet bounded up the landing, the men speaking together in some kind of garbled countryspeak, seeming to divide and take each side, squaring the arena. The footsteps moved in closer to me on the slatted-wood floor. The sound was unmistakable, each step telegraphed before the next. Holding the gun, I found it tough to breathe but tried to keep my breath silent in the hot air.

  There was the sound of opening and closing doors. They were checking each hutch, looking for me.

  I relaxed my muscles and took in a breath. They were getting close.

  FULLER GOT TO HIS FEET AND FELT HIS MOUTH, FEELING the swelling, and tasting the blood as he spit out two teeth. He wavered on his feet and moved through a group of girls, who screamed and seemed horrified by his presence and his looks, but he had no time for them as he walked to the center of the ring, circling the mass of silver slots, and called out for Murphy. “You goddamn coward, come out. Quit hiding. You gonna sneak up on me now?”

  Behind him, the women retreated back into a dark corner, and Fuller smiled at that. He didn’t know who they were, but even in pajamas they sure as shit knew him and, for a moment, he felt good.

  He spit on the red-dirt ground, covered in chicken shit and cigarette butts, and called out for Murphy again.

  But he heard no answer from the coward.

  ANOTHER HUTCH BANGED OPEN AND THEN SLAMMED SHUT, and I waited until he came into mine, my breath slow and even and controlled. A skinny boy, just a teen with glowing skin and recessed eyes, moved into the dark coop and turned to me.

  I simply yanked the gun from his hand and knocked him on his ass with the back of my hand. The youth scrambled back onto a piss-stained mattress and screamed out, his mouth open with rotten teeth, and I grabbed the kid’s dirty white T-shirt and hauled him out of the coop, holding on to his neck.

  I pulled the boy along, the.45 loose in my hand, my finger not even on the trigger.

  As I turned the corner, there was the same boy – a mirror – this one in overalls and a slight bit older, with a rifle up to his shoulder and his eye, smiling a dirty, rotten smile, no shoes and no shirt.

  He spit and leveled the gun before half his head misted with a loud boom.

  As he slumped to the ground, Black was there behind him.

  The boy I held caterwauled and fell to his knees, crawling to his brother, the old twin, yelling, “Paw-paw. Paw-paw. He’s gone. He’s gone, Paw-paw.”

  The boy screamed and held the dead boy’s head against his chest, covering his dirt-stained shirt in fresh blood.

  Black looked down at them and shrugged, reaching down for the dead boy’s rifle and holding it just as the old man scrambled up the landing, a gun in his left hand but not raised. Caught by the sight of his two boys, he didn’t even try.

  “Drop it, old man,” Black said. “Or I’ll drop your hillbilly ass where you stand.”

  Bert Fuller screamed nonsense from the floor of the cockfighting arena. Girls screamed and yelled from down below, the doors full open now, and the mass of them yelling for the outside and the light.

  I looked down from the loft at Bert, defenseless in his pajamas and bedroom slippers. Him calling out my manhood.

  “Bert, you are a true surprise.”

  “Come on, Murphy. Let’s go, you sonofabitch.”

  “I’m tired,” I said and threw down a pair of handcuffs I kept in my pocket. “You want me to come down there and do it myself?”

  “I do, Murphy. I got you now.”

  “Yep, Bert,” I said. “You got me right where you want me.”

  I looked over at Black. He’d cuffed the old man and the son behind their backs and tossed them into the same coop as the dead girl.

  “You really hate these guys,” I said.

  “Got a good reason.”

  “Wanna tell me about it?”

  “In time.”

  It didn’t take much to restrain Fuller, and as I pushed him through the barn door and into daylight I saw the girls all standing by a hand pump and drinking with their hands as the water overflowed from buckets.

  I asked the little girl in the man’s shirt her age and she told me she was twelve.

  “We have help coming.”

  I touched her shoulder and she jumped, running for the woods, moving so fast she lost the shoes on her bare feet.

  WHEN LORELEI FINALLY CALLED, IT DIDN’T TAKE TWO SECONDS for Billy to steal his father’s car and drive over the river to find her. She said she’d been staying with a friend, and Billy soon found the friend was a six-foot-tall she-male named Chesty LaRue. They sat in the front yard of Chesty’s little bungalow in a run-down section of old Victorians and beaten houses not far from the river in the old district and watched the children Chesty babysat on her off days. According to Chesty, the off days had been plenty. Billy would never have guessed that Chesty was a man unless Lorelei had whispered it to him, but the more Chesty talked, drinking a cup of coffee and smoking cigarettes in a Japanese robe, Billy could tell he had a mighty strong chin and a heavier brow that most ladies.

  “Did I tell you about this one fella who liked me to sit in the corner with a lampshade on my head and say goo-goo?”

  “Why he do that?” Billy asked.

  “You never really want to know,” Chesty said. “Take this one fella, he liked to be treated like a baby.
”

  “Maybe he was just feelin’ low,” Billy said. And he looked over to Lorelei and smiled.

  “You don’t get it,” Chesty said, adjusting the scarf he wore over his wigless head. “He liked to wear diapers and suck on a pacifier.”

  “Good God Almighty.”

  “I got some more stories.”

  “That’s okay, Chesty,” Lorelei said. “Thanks.”

  “You kids want some Coca-Cola?” she asked, just like any other mother on a hot summer day looking out for the neighborhood kids.

  They said no thanks. Chesty clutched her robe tight against her chest as she walked, like she had something that would pop out.

  “Do her fellas know she’s a boy?” Billy asked.

  “Some.”

  “Don’t they go crazy?”

  “Some like it.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “I think they don’t feel as bad about bein’ with a man if that man is dressed as a woman. You see what I mean?”

  “Not really. I think I’d about fall out if I was with some girl and a big old wiener hopped out of her pants.”

  Lorelei laughed and put her finger to her lips, trying to quiet him down. “Chesty has been good to me. Lets me sleep on her couch. She’s fed me and that means a lot, because I know she hasn’t worked in weeks. She’s thinking about moving to Cuba. Apparently, they like boys to be strippers down there, because they’re more reliable than women, and they do all kind of freak shows, too.”

  Billy sat back on the steps and watched the dirty children playing in the yard. One big husky boy, maybe four, led three others in some kind of military drill, and when he stopped marching they all tumbled to a stop, about running into each other, and he turned and gave a salute, pulling out a plastic gun and making bang-bang noises.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Lorelei said. “Chesty’s husband is coming back from Korea next week and that doesn’t leave me with much time. You said something about California and that’s fine by me. I think I can get enough up for gas money, and, if you already got your daddy’s car, we can hit the road. Come on, say you will. I can be packed in a New York minute.”