Wicked City

1

THE SPRING OF 1954 had slipped into summer with little notice. My routine hadn’t changed much; there was always the jog down Crawford Road at daybreak and then back to the little brick house I shared with my wife and two kids. As my wife, Joyce, would start coffee, I’d finish with a few rounds against the heavy bag hung on chains in an old shed and then maybe jump some rope or hook my feet under a pipe and do sit-ups until my stomach ached. That morning, a Friday, June eighteenth, my daughter, Anne, walked outside, still in her pajamas, and asked if she could work out with me, and I smiled, out of breath, my bald head slick with sweat, and reached into the shed for an apple crate. Anne, just eleven, with the same slight space in her teeth as me and the same fair skin and hair, stood on top of the shaky wood and began to work the leather of the speed bag with her tiny fists.

I stood back and smiled.

It wasn’t unusual for the neighborhood boys to ride their bikes over and watch with amazement as my little girl would work the bag with a right and left, keeping that steady, unmistakable rhythm I’d known from Kid Weisz’s gym during the Depression, when a hot cup of coffee and a donut was a feast.

Soon, Joyce called us inside and fussed at me for letting Anne run outside in her pj’s, the cuffs dusty with rich red mud, but she laughed as Anne continued mock punches, and Thomas woke up, only six, working a fist only to pull the sleep from his eyes. We sat down to a plate of ham and eggs and biscuits and grits and we said a prayer to our Lord and Savior and ate, Joyce refilling my cup when I returned to the kitchen from the bedroom, already dressed in my Texaco coveralls, ready for a day’s work at Slocumb’s – the filling station I co-owned with Joyce’s dad.

“Thomas is chewing with his mouth open,” Anne said.

Thomas smiled and chewed even wider with his eyes crossed.

“You want more coffee, Lamar?” Joyce asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I put your shoes outside, you had grease and mud all over them,” she said. “And would you mind, please, emptying out the ashtrays when you’re finished?”

“What would I do without you?”

“Nothing,” Joyce said and winked, and soon I was off, with a lunch pail rounded and red like a construction worker’s, and I followed a worn, smooth trail back behind our house and by the speed and heavy bags and through a thicket of brush, over the step of one, two, three flat stones in a little creek and then down a short stretch of smooth path and I was out behind Slocumb’s, unlocking the back door and cutting on the lights and opening up the front door for Arthur, a negro who pumped gas and cleaned windshields and had been my friend for some time.

Arthur didn’t say much, just turned over the OPEN sign as I made some coffee and loaded up the cash drawer in the register. I turned on the radio and began to hum along with some old swing stuff, music that brought back memories of being newly married at the start of the war, and Joyce and I taking everything we owned down to Eglin Airfield in Florida, where I worked as an airplane mechanic until ’46. My memories were still fresh of how the test planes could roll and crash and burn and I’d be left to pull out the bodies from the wreckage and try to make sense with what had gone wrong.

“You making the coffee?” Arthur asked. He was dressed in similar green Texaco coveralls.

“That’s what it looks like.”

“Hmm.”

“What do you mean, hmm?”

“I just wish Joyce would’ve been here is all. You ain’t one for cooking.”

“Coffee ain’t cooking.”

“And grits ain’t groceries,” Arthur said. He walked outside, ignoring the slurping pot, and stood by the big pumps waiting for their first customers to come rolling on in.

I whistled along to Harry James’s trumpet on the radio and, even as the first customer rolled under the tin overhang, kept on with the old tune “I’ve Heard That Song Before.”

The car was a two-tone tan-and-white Oldsmobile Rocket 88, and I knew the car before the engine even died and the man walked around and checked out the day just coming on from down east along the river, the morning shadows growing long and thin, almost disappearing into the harder light.

He was a tall, thin man with white hair and round spectacles. As he had stood, he used the door frame and placed the rubber tip of a wooden cane on the ground, smiling and limping his way to me with the steady clog, clog, clog of his heavy, specially fitted shoe.

“Mr. Patterson,” I said and shook his hand. “You headed somewhere?”

“Montgomery,” Patterson said, smoothing the lapels of his suit and shifting off the leg that he’d nearly lost in the First World War in the cold no-man’s-land of St. Etienne. “Promised a friend that I’d be at a hearing.”

I started to pump his gas. Usually Arthur did the pumping, unless we got really busy or there was someone special I wanted to talk to.

The light seemed to shift and grow in only seconds and covered Mr. Patterson’s soft, old features in a nice gold light. He smiled at me, as I checked the tires, and looked down Crawford Road toward the business district of Phenix City – an area where he worked but despised – and then back down the road toward the west and the capital of Montgomery, where he’d be headed next year to become the next attorney general of this state.

“I don’t know if I’ve told you this,” Patterson said, “but I sure appreciate all the support of you and all the boys. I couldn’t have done this without you.”

For the last two years, I’d been a member of an anti-vice group – the Russell County Betterment Association – that Mr. Patterson had helped found.

“I think you would have done fine.”

“I’ll need you even more in the coming months, Lamar.”

“How’s that?”

“Things will get worse before they get better.”

I smiled. “Don’t think they could get much worse,” I said and hung up the nozzle and noted the price. I asked Patterson to open his hood and I checked the oil.

“How’s this engine treatin’ you? I bet she really can open up on the highway.”

Patterson stood behind me and said in a low voice, almost a whisper: “They’re coming for me, Lamar. I think I have a one-in-ten chance of ever taking office.”

I stood, feeling ice along my neck, and wiped the dipstick on a dirty rag. The oil was clean and full, and I replaced the stick and closed the hood with a tight snap. Mr. Patterson gave a small, wan smile.

I shook my head. “Don’t talk that way. We got ’em.”

“A cheater never lets you win.”

Patterson clasped my hand and then reached into his pocket for a couple of dollars before getting back into the Rocket 88, climbing the hill, and then turning out of sight toward the west.

EARLIER THAT DAY, BILLY STOKES HEADED DOWN TO FOURTEENTH Street to turn in a sack of dimes and quarters after selling a mess of Bug tickets to some poor blacks down by the railroad. The Bug was a lottery they’d been running in town since forever, and during the summer when he was out of school he got paid five dollars by his daddy to make the Friday run. Most every house in Niggertown bought the tickets, just like some kind of religious event. Old women even bought dream books to turn what they’d seen in their heads into lucky numbers. Billy sure needed that five dollars; he’d promised to take a girl he’d just met to a picture show down at the Palace Theater.

He’d spent his last dollar on a Bug ticket himself, hoping his numbers would come out in the morning paper from numbers on the New York Stock Exchange.

Billy hadn’t seen his daddy, Reuben, since Wednesday, which wasn’t that unusual because, sometimes, he’d take off for days and return either red-eyed and sore and grumpy or dressed in a new suit with ruby cuff links and spreading out money on the table of their old house that he knew would be gone by week’s end.

He pushed his red Schwinn down the slope of Fourteenth Street, looking down to the old muddy river and between the cavern of clip joints and honky-tonks that had just started to heat up on an early Friday night. It was twilight, and the neon signs started to flicker, advertising exotic women and games of chance. THE SILVER SLIPPER. THE GOLDEN RULE. There was laughter and bawdy saxophone music, and the soft green and red and blue neon seemed almost magical on that summer night as he passed GIs drinking straight from bottles of Jack Daniel’s and friendly, plump whores who would smile at him or pat him on the head as he passed by, either because they thought it was funny to see a kid down here or because they knew Billy was Reuben Stokes’s boy.

Down toward the river, Billy left his bike outside the giant, twirling yellow neon for CLUB LASSO, Reuben’s joint, and walked into the narrow café, over the beaten honeycomb-tile floors and through small little groupings of tables and chairs. On a stage toward the back by the toilets there was a girl dressed in a cowboy outfit shaking her big titties to a lone saxophone player who played the theme to Red River.

Reuben was behind the bar dressed in an ugly tropical shirt and talking on the telephone – more like calling someone a jackass on the phone – between drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette, and when he saw Billy he nodded and crooked a finger toward the bar and his son sat down and stared into the bar mirror over his dad’s shoulder. Billy saw just a skinny kid in a rangy white T-shirt and silly green military hat that once belonged to his old man during the war. He was so skinny and his teeth so big that he looked away.

Reuben reached into the cooler and pulled out a cold Coca-Cola, and Billy sat up there and drank while the saxophone music ended and the girl stepped from the soft red light by the toilets and slipped into a Chinese robe.

“Hey, I’ve been busy,” Reuben asked, “you still got food?”

“I could use five dollars.”

“What for?”

“We need some milk and cereal. I also wanted to go to a picture show.”

“You love those picture shows, don’t you? You know, you really should go see The Robe,” Reuben said. “It’s a picture about Jesus Christ.”

“I’m going to see Hondo. John Wayne’s in it.”

“That the one in 3-D?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, finish up that Coca-Cola and get gone.”

“Yes, sir.”

Some of Reuben’s negro dealers sat at empty tables waiting for folks to play blackjack and roulette and craps. And they looked funny and slick in their ill-fitted tuxedos while they shuffled cards and worked a pair of dice with fast, quick hands – with palms oddly pink to Billy – that loaded every flick and throw.

One of the men wore a pair of dark sunglasses as he fanned out a hand of cards. Reuben had once let Billy try on a similar pair, and he could see hidden red patterns on the back of each card in a red light.

The stripper sidled up next to the boy as he looked around Club Lasso. She was kind of attractive but a little soft-faced, with a round white belly under her cowhide bra. She placed a hand on his knee and asked him his name.

“His name’s Billy,” Reuben said. “And he’s too young for you, Birmingham. Get back on stage.”

The boy turned back to Reuben, who was smoking, and Reuben smiled at his son, cigarette clamped square in his teeth. But his eyes grew unfocused as he stared into an empty place on the opposite wall. He smiled again before heading back to the bathroom.

Billy sat there for a while and watched Miss Birmingham strip down to her panties and shake her fat titties while winking, and he borrowed a couple nickels from Reuben’s stickman – a teenage negro named Charley Frank Bass – and played a few slots, winning a few bucks.

But he still needed the five and walked back to the toilets and knocked. He heard water running and opened the door.

Reuben stood with one foot up on the commode, his trouser leg rolled up to his knee, showing a leather rig above his left calf. His blue knee sock had been rolled down to the ankle, and in his left hand he had a pistol cylinder open from the frame where he fed bullets with his fingers.

Billy smiled at him.

But he gave the boy such a hard look back that Billy shut the door and left Club Lasso with only his winnings.

ALBERT PATTERSON RETURNED FROM MONTGOMERY LATE that night, too late to watch his youngest boy, Jack, in the high school play, where Jack played Lord Bothwell in The Pipes of Dunbar. Jack had been pretty excited that week talking about how Lord Bothwell symbolized justice in a time of bloodshed and that the girl who played his wife Mary, Queen of Scots, was a real looker. And Patterson had asked his son which one was it, did he like the story better or the girl? And Jack said he wasn’t sure, but he knew he wasn’t excited about wearing those damn black tights they’d given him.

Patterson told his boy to forget about the tights, even Errol Flynn wore them, and that he’d try to make it back for the show. But Patterson had been sucked into attending an ethics hearing and then had to check with the secretary of state’s office on the final vote canvass. And although the press had already named him the winner, it sure felt good knowing he had the official results in hand.

As he came back to Phenix City, he parked in that familiar narrow alley across from the Elite Café. Using his cane, he slowly made his way to the post office to check his box, feeling every damn step the six bullets that remained in his leg from a machine gunner in that no-man’s-land outside St. Etienne. And he thought back on that time during the First World War, learning to walk again and living in that hospital in Atlanta in a narrow bed and having little else to do but watch a pear tree bear fruit outside his window for two seasons.

It was hot and dark at the top of the staircase of the Coulter Building when he pushed open the frosted-glass door of the office of Patterson & Patterson, a partnership with his oldest boy, John.

He set down his keys and grabbed some thank-you letters that his personal secretary, Lucille, had left with him. He flicked on the old banker’s light on his desk, staying there for God knows how long signing his name and then rummaging through the bills that had left him eleven thousand in debt since entering the race.

His office walls were bare except for two framed diplomas and several short wooden bookshelves holding volumes of law. But the plaster still bore black scorch marks where the Machine had tried to burn him out two years ago.

Soon he heard a short rap on the door, and his old buddy, Leland Jones, walked in and asked him if he’d like to join him and his wife for supper. Patterson said he sure appreciated that, but he’d had a milkshake with an egg and a hamburger at a drive-in before he left Montgomery.

“Why’d you put an egg in it?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Why’d you put an egg in it?”

“What?”

“Pat, you ain’t paying a damn bit of attention to me.”

Patterson crumpled up another envelope and tossed it over his shoulder, his eyes slowly meeting Jones’s. “’Course I have.”

“The hell you say.”

“What is it?”

“You got to eat.”

“I’m fine,” Patterson said. His eyes returned to the desk, that narrow space of white light on the letters.

“Something eating you, Pat?”

Patterson shook his head.

“What do you think about the hearings?”

“I’ll let you know Monday.”

“What’s Monday?”

“When I testify against those bastards.”

“So you’re going to do it.”

Patterson nodded.

“You found something on them, didn’t you?”

Patterson nodded again.

Jones asked Patterson to dinner one more time, saying his wife was waiting in the car, and Patterson told him no again, saying he had more paperwork to do. But it wasn’t but ten minutes later that he signed the last signature of thanks, fixed the last stamp on the last bill, grabbed his hat and cane, and cut off his lamp.

A ceiling fan rocked and squeaked above him. The air conditioner hummed and dripped. He locked up and used the handrail to clog his way down the narrow staircase with that specially fitted shoe bumping all the way down to Fifth Avenue.

On the street, the nearby honky-tonks and cathouses were in full swing early on a Friday night, and you could hear the saxophone music and the yells and loud talk of the GIs from Fort Benning and smell the cigarettes and vomit and urine. On Fourteenth Street, the neon cast a pinkish hue down the road and almost up on the steps of the Russell County Courthouse.

It was a hot night, as most summer nights in Alabama, but it hadn’t rained in weeks, and the asphalt and concrete seemed to absorb the sun and radiate with the heat, making the wind seem like a fan off a stove. His Rocket 88 waited in a slot in the narrow alley between the Elite and the Coulter Building. Patterson rounded the corner, his right hand in his right pocket reaching for the keys, the sounds of Phenix City like a carnival midway in the distance, when he saw the shadows, the shapes of the men, heading into the alley.

Patterson opened his car door, sat down in the driver’s seat, and pulled his leg in after him. The men called out to him in the darkness and he turned.

Three shots were heard cracking in echo through the little downtown.

Moments later, Albert L. Patterson walked from the alley, staggering and shuffling without a cane for the first time in more than thirty years, with a couple teens pointing at him from across the street, snickering and saying that man was drunk as hell.

And Patterson walked more, a struggling, dignified shuffle step and another, robotic and forced as a drunk trying to convince himself of being sober, his face blank and unseeing, with steps growing shorter and shorter, until he fell to his knees, out of juice, batteries drained, and then pitched forward on the heated concrete.

He fell to his face, shattering his glasses, a hot, wet stain spreading under him, and soon heard a boy’s question: “Who did this to you? Who shot you, Mr. Patterson?”

But instead of a helping hand, Patterson saw the branch of a pear tree and the buzzing of bees jumping from bloom to bloom. He tried to explain this to the voices he heard, but instead of words blood flowed from his mouth.

IDLE HOUR PARK WAS QUITE A PLACE IN THE SUMMERTIME after school let out. You could take a boat ride down at Moon Lake or swim in this big pool – nicknamed the Polio Hole – and there was an arcade and a bowling alley and a roller-skating rink. Idle Hour even had a two-bit zoo, where they had a skinny, mangy lion and a half-dead bear that slept almost all day on a concrete slab unless you nailed him on the head with a pebble. They had a big iron cage full of monkeys that chattered and swung from old tires, and on the real hot days they’d jump and yell, and the males would get close to the bars and would look you in the eye while they masturbated like they were trying to pull the damn thing off.

But at fourteen, Billy had grown bored with the zoo and preferred watching girls out on the bandstand along with his buddy Mario. The boys didn’t have to say much, they’d just see a girl walk by in a nice summer dress and one of them would look to the other and raise his eyebrows. If she was really cute, Mario would pretend he’d just burned his hand on a stove. And if she beat that, Billy would act like someone had punched him in the stomach and roll to the ground.

They did this for a long time that night, until the conversation shifted pretty quickly to monsters from Mars, and Mario said there was absolutely scientific proof that other planets held horrors the government didn’t want the public to know about. Billy said that was a goddamn fool thing to say, but Mario held his ground until a cute little blonde with an upturned nose and tanned legs walked by and then it was his time to get punched in the stomach and roll to the ground.

When he returned to the bench where they sat, Billy said: “That don’t make no sense.”

“Sure it does,” Mario said. “I saw it on Tales of Tomorrow. We just bought us a TV. You can watch it if you like.”

“How does your mom afford all that stuff?”

“She’s a nurse. She makes a lot of money.”

And the silence just kind of hung there, because both of them knew Mario’s mother worked under the stage name Betsy Ann and that, on several occasions, Billy had lingered outside the Bama Club on Dillingham just to see a naked black-and-white photo of her, not in overalls or sloppy men’s shirts the way she looked in the apartment she shared with a redneck mill worker named George but made up like a Hollywood star in cowboy boots and a leather belt and stars pasted across her boobs.

“You wanna go back to the zoo?” Mario asked.

“I’m all right.”

“I don’t think she’s gonna show.”

“To hell with you.”

Billy still had a few dimes left, and, alone, he walked into the sweet air-conditioning of the roller rink and punched in some of his favorites on the jukebox. More Hit Parade. He tried out some Eddie Fisher and Tony Bennett, and “Come On-A My House” by Rosemary Clooney.

That’s when he heard her call his name.

Lorelei.

Billy smiled, his face turning red, and his voice shook as he said hello.

“Where you been?” she asked.

“Nowhere.”

She was cute in her boy’s western shirt, high-water blue jeans, and saddle oxford shoes. She wore her black hair up in a ponytail; her bangs had grown longer since he’d last seen her and shadowed a good bit of her blue eyes. She didn’t have makeup on or anything like that.

“I wasn’t waitin’ around or nothin’.”

“I had to go home and change,” she said. “I’d been at the pool and had to put on something dry.”

And, man, that was a hell of a thing to say to a teenage boy, because the thought of Lorelei in a wet bathing suit – something Billy could imagine a great deal and had – was perhaps just too much for him to take. Her pale skin had a red, healthy flush to it, and she smelled like sunshine.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

“Nothin’.”

“Well, your face is turning funny colors.”

“No, it’s not.”

The corny organ music came from over in the skating rink, and they heard people clapping in time with it.

“You want a shake?”

“I just had one.”

“I’ll buy,” she said.

“Sure.”

He’d met Lorelei just a few weeks before school had let out, over on the Upper Bridge from Columbus, and helped her carry a sack of groceries home. Billy figured her for the daughter of a mill worker – a Linthead, is what they called them – and they ended up talking till it grew dark out back of the Riverview Apartments, nothing but government housing, smoking cigarettes on a swing set. He’d never felt more comfortable with a girl in his entire life and finally got up enough nerve to ask her to a picture show at the Broadway.

“I went to that house where you were staying last week,” he said.

“We don’t live in the Riverview no more.”

“Where do you live?”

“My folks’ over in Bibb City,” she said. “Got some good mill jobs.”

“How ’bout you?”

“I’m over there some, too,” she said.

“You gonna go back to school?”

“Not now,” she said, rolling her eyes and pulling the straw from the shake. She sucked out the frozen bit of shake and tucked it back into the glass. “It’s summertime, dummy. It’s all as cool as a breeze. You ain’t supposed to do nothin’ now but swim and skate and not worry about a thing.”

Billy looked at her and rolled up the white T-shirt over his skinny bicep and wished he’d had a pack of cigarettes to tuck inside.

“What movie we going to see?” she asked.

“Hondo,” he said.

“What’s it about?”

“Apaches.”

“I like Apaches,” she said.

IT WASN’T LONG UNTIL BILLY AND THE GIRL SAT IN THE cool air-conditioning of the Palace Theater watching Hondo, Wayne playing a cavalry rider protecting a woman and her son from some Apaches. There was never any question if Wayne would get the woman or if he wouldn’t whip some Apache ass. They were no match for Wayne armed with a rifle he could work with one hand. It was a good picture, and Billy’s head was still kind of in it as they milled through the crowd down by the Elite, the girl at his side, watching the world through the 3-D glasses he refused to take off.

Billy figured the crowd had to be on account of some cockamamie street brawl between a couple of GIs or some poor slob of a woman with her lip busted and some man crying and telling her he was sorry nearby. Growing up on the river, he’d seen it all before. But then he saw all the squad cars and the ambulance, and as he stepped out on the street a PC cop told him to get back on the curb just in time for the ambulance to pop into gear and slowly drive to Homer C. Cobb Memorial.

The girl watched as it passed and put her hand to her mouth.

They followed the street right into the thickest, tangled bunch of the crowd, elbowing their way through as only kids can do; the headlights and red lamps on the squad cars making old Fifth Avenue seem like Hollywood Boulevard.

A mess of Boy Scouts in their dress green outfits stood on the corner pointing at the motions of Chief Deputy Bert Fuller of the Russell County Sheriff’s Office.

Fuller squatted onto his fat haunches, his eyes following a thick mess of dried blood on the warm concrete by the windows of Seymour’s Ready-to-Wear Shop, rubbed his face, and motioned to a couple deputies.

Fuller wasn’t a tall man, but what he lacked in height he made up with girth. He walked through the town slow and deliberate in those tailored western clothes with snap buttons that some said he’d bought while stationed in Texas. Billy had never seen him without a hand-tooled gun rig – holding gold-plated pistols – and a Stetson hat.

He watched Fuller follow smaller drops that led back toward the Elite.

Fuller slipped his Stetson back on the back of his head and called out: “Would someone get me some cardboard to cover this fucking thing up?”

Many times Billy had seen Fuller at the Palace or the Strand or the Victory Drive-In, settled into his seat watching the cowboys on the big screen. He’d prop up his boots and munch on a sack of popcorn with that small, cruel mouth and peer at the screen with his beady brown eyes.

He looked straight at Billy, as if he’d been caught peeping into someone’s window. “Where’s your daddy at? Go on and pull at his pant leg about what you seen.”

Then Fuller’s gaze fell upon the girl with her pegged jeans and boy’s shirt and hair twisted into a ponytail and tied with a red bandanna. Fuller wet his lips and smiled, as if he was about to speak, his eyes wandering over her body and face as he stood there with all that activity around him, just breathing her in.

When Billy turned back, the girl – Lorelei – had disappeared.