Wicked City

3

PEOPLE HAD ALWAYS CALLED Phenix City wicked. Or Sin City. For those of us who lived and worked outside the rackets, we tried our best to ignore it. But it was hard when most of the vice boasted services in neon down by the river, on the way to the only two bridges out of town. But we had schools and a hospital paid for in dirty money, and sometimes big-time poker chips would end up in the collection plates on Sunday. My son and daughter went to school and church with sons and daughters of bootleggers, pimps, and whores. Bert Fuller was a deacon, and Hoyt Shepherd, who most called the town’s kingpin, sometimes sang in the Christmas pageant and liked to play the part of the innkeeper who turned away Mary and Joseph.

It was just an engrained part of our local economy, and the vice had gone on so long, it was very much like a strand of barbed wire that cuts a tree but is later absorbed, becoming part of its growth.

Until that June, I guess I didn’t even know how deeply that wire cut. But there were things I learned, the darkest of moral depravity that went far beyond slot machines and illegal liquor that I still can’t wash from my mind.

The night after the shooting, for the first time in months, it rained. Big, thick thunderheads blew in from the west and pounded the dry Phenix City asphalt, running off the bottles and cigarette butts and trash into narrow rivulets and into the Chattahoochee. You could smell the wet asphalt and concrete, the rich red clay, and scraggly pines on the hills. The windows in my Ford station wagon fogged as Hugh Britton and I crossed the roadblock at the Lower Bridge to Columbus, the river frothing and boiling over the Rock Cut Dam to the north.

“Did you notice anything unusual about Bert Fuller this morning?” I asked.

“Something’s always unusual about Fuller.”

“You notice his rig?”

“I’ve seen it. Asshole thinks he’s Randolph Scott.”

“He wore it this morning, but those pearl-handled revolvers were gone,” I said.

Britton looked at me, the windshield wipers spastically working over the window.

“Now, have you ever known him not to wear those guns?”

“No, sir,” he said.

At a corner filling station just off Broadway, I made a phone call, and then we ate some toast and drank coffee over at Choppy’s Diner for half an hour before getting back in the station wagon and heading toward Fort Benning on Victory Drive. On Victory, there were dry cleaners and pawnshops and liquor stores and churches of redemption. Little trailer parks and workingman’s diners and drive-ins that pulled you in with neon arrows. The rain hardened and fell in long, endless sheets, and I heard little else but the drumming on the cab, until I spotted the big flashing marquee for the Victory Drive-In and another long, sweeping neon arrow that pointed past an empty box office and through an open chain-link gate. There was supposed to be a Creature Double Feature tonight and a special showing of The Robe on Sunday. But the customers had already gotten a weather refund and had pulled out of the lot.

The screen was big and concrete and seemed like an ancient monolith in the endless gravel lot pinging with rain. I slowed by the bleachers covered by a corrugated tin roof and parked close to the lighted overhang, and we made a run for it.

Soaked, Britton wiped the drops from his pressed slacks and shook his straw summer hat. “Damn it.”

Moments later, a rusted Ford pickup stopped short of us and a little man came running for the overhang, a newspaper held over his head. No one shook hands, and the little man, now out of breath, nervously wrenched off his glasses and wiped them on the front of his blue coveralls. When he sat them back on his face, he looked like a bug.

“Anyone follow?” he asked.

“No,” Britton said. “We’re fine, Quinnie.”

“You sure?” Quinnie asked.

“Sure we’re sure,” Britton said. “We did what you said. Now, what’d you know?”

Quinnie Kelley was a little man, not much more than five feet, and wore enormous Coke-bottle glasses and a short little fedora. He still had on some dirty blue coveralls from his work as the courthouse janitor. As he looked out into the rain and watched little rivulets forming and tilting toward a long, narrow ditch, he wiped the rain from his neck and put his hands on his waist.

“Heard some talk ’round the place,” Quinnie said. “Not much, but some.”

“Who?” I asked.

“I don’t know who. Some peoples is sayin’ that Mr. Shepherd called in a killer from Chicago. And others say Miss Fannie Belle. I cain’t be sure. You heard the name Tommy Capps?”

“You said you saw something?” I asked. Everyone knew about Tommy Capps. He was a thug and a killer, but not dumb enough to shoot Mr. Patterson on Fifth Avenue on a Friday night.

“I don’t want this known. You hearin’ me? I got a family. I got kids. But when I was locking up last night, I heard them shots and seen this man run across Fourteenth and back behind the jail.”

“Who?”

Quinnie froze. “I didn’t say who. I don’t know nothin’ about who. I’m just sayin’ I seen a man.”

“What did he look like?” I asked.

“If you say I saw somethin’, I’ll deny it. And I didn’t see his face. He was runnin’ back in the shadows and I didn’t have on my glasses.”

Hugh Britton looked to me and then back at Quinnie.

“That’s all you got?” Britton said. “Well, good God Almighty. You call up Lamar at supper and have us driving through roadblocks and the rain for somethin’ that you ain’t even gonna admit to? And then you tell us that it may be Hoyt Shepherd or Fannie Belle who had him killed. Well, thanks, Quinnie. That’s some fine work.”

“Hold the damn phone,” Quinnie said, balancing up on his toes. “I know a man and I ain’t sayin’ his name because that sure as hell is a one-way ticket to the river. But I’ll tell what he told me. He heard someone, an officer of the court, say he wanted Mr. Patterson dead. This man said Mr. Patterson wouldn’t live if he won that election.”

We looked at him as he shifted from foot to foot.

Quinnie Kelley shook his head and looked out in the rain, the neon sign, the long sweep of the Victory Drive-In arrow. “I’d keep my eye on Mr. Arch Ferrell, if I were you. That’s the meanest son of a gun in Phenix City. But you didn’t hear a word from me. Not a dang word.”

EARLIER THAT DAY, ARCH FERRELL CHUGGED DOWN THREE glasses of bourbon and smoked eight cigarettes before hustling down the courthouse stairs to meet the outgoing attorney general, Silas Coma Garrett, on Fourteenth Street. Garrett arrived in Phenix City in a long police escort, leaning over his driver to honk the Cadillac’s horn while he waved to cops and constituents, broad smiles and thumbs up, as if the goddamn carnival had come back to town. As soon as they stopped, Garrett emerged from the passenger’s side in his white suit, tipping his matching white Stetson hat to the crowd.

Arch had to shield his eyes out in the bright light, the American flag popping crisply on the courthouse pole.

Arch straightened his tie, smoothed down his suit jacket, and popped a couple of sticks of Doublemint gum in his mouth. By the time he reached Garrett, he again showed remorse and sadness, to the click and whir of the newsmen’s film, and hung onto his mentor’s hand for a few beats longer than was customary, pulling him up onto the curb with him.

Garrett wore a concerned, if not confused, smile and clutched a leather satchel while touring the crime scene. The attorney general was well aware of the cameras, too, and would often hold an emotion or hand gesture just to make sure his visit was captured for immortality.

He was a tall, strapping man, and gave a reassuring wink to Arch as Arch continued to light one cigarette after another. Garrett slapped Arch on his back several times, and that big hand felt like that of a father letting a boy know he could relax and that he’d done good. After a while, Arch felt like he could breathe again.

Soon, the men found their way back to Arch’s office, and all the assistants and investigators waited in the hall, all except Chief Deputy Bert Fuller, who was the last inside, closing the door with a click and finding a place to sit by the radiator.

Fuller switched a toothpick to the other side of his mouth and looked down at the ground and then took to staring at each man, who talked in low, steady tones, tones of people in mourning. His eyes went from Arch to Garrett like watching a fucking tennis match.

“Arch, we need to step back for a moment,” Garrett said, resting his shoes up on the desk and folding his big, oversized hands in his lap. “When is the last time you slept? You know I spent the morning at the country club. I swam, ate lunch, had some family time. You can’t let your job swallow you whole. I needed to be clearheaded before I drove over here. You understand that, don’t you? A mind that’s cluttered can turn to an awful case of the nerves.”

Arch’s upper lip was sweating, a cigarette bobbed and twitched in his mouth. He watched Garrett, but while he watched he poured another few fingers of bourbon into a short, stumpy glass, the kind you’d find by the sink of a roadside motel.

He drank it down.

“That’s it, boy,” Garrett said. “That’s it.”

“The governor has turned my town into a circus.”

Arch stood up and began to pace the office, fingering up the blinds to see newsmen filling up the city streets. Outside, more newsmen and photographers waited, one of them with a whirring newsreel camera perched on the stock of a shotgun, and Arch flinched at the sight.

He paced more and ran his hands through the hair at his temples. He could feel the blood rush through his ears and pound the veins in his head. “They blame me for this. They blame me for all of this. Did you hear what Governor Persons said? He said all of the debauchery and gambling has to stop and mentioned me by name, as if he didn’t know a goddamn pair of dice had ever rolled in Phenix City. Well, goddamn him to hell.”

Arch hauled off and drop-kicked his trashcan across the room and it landed with a hard clatter and a crash, and two framed diplomas fell from the wall. A black-and-white picture of Arch, a captain standing by the Rhine with his boys holding up captured Lugers and bullet-riddled helmets, loosened from a nail and hung crooked on the cracked plaster wall.

Thirty minutes later, Garrett decided to call in all the favorite newsboys into the grand jury meeting room, where he sat thoughtfully at the head of the table, the windows open, letting in hot breezes and the sounds of bullhorns and sirens. He waited for another siren to pass, face drawn and solemn, thoughtful as hell, watching his hands till he spoke. He’d left his white Stetson on the rack outside and wore a pair of large, round gold glasses that made Arch think of a cartoon owl.

Someone leaned back into their seat and the wood clicked and groaned as Garrett nodded to Bert Fuller, who closed the door to give them all some privacy. Arch wanted a drink very badly and wished he’d filled a coffee cup with bourbon.

Fuller, still in his Texas hat and western shirt, leaned against a wall, just a cowpoke against a fence. His arms were crossed.

“I want to make it plain I have complete confidence in these elected officials,” Garrett said. “Sheriff Matthews. And Mr. Ferrell. Who I believe is the best damn solicitor in the state. These men are already working on three different theories on the murder.”

One of the reporters, a worthless sonofabitch from Birmingham named Ed Strickland, didn’t miss a beat: “Does one of these theories factor in the vote fraud case concerning Mr. Patterson’s election as attorney general?”

Jesus H. Christ.

“Since I will be testifying in that particular case, I don’t think there is any reason to ask me for comment.”

“What about the accusation that you and Mr. Ferrell personally added six hundred votes in the Russell County tally to his opponent? It’s been said that Mr. Patterson knew of other cases like this across the state.”

Arch mopped his face with a handkerchief. He could excuse himself for a moment, fill the coffee mug, and step back into the meeting.

“Considering the situation, I don’t think we need to visit a mess of political slander.”

“Are you working on any leads?” asked another newspaperman.

Si Garrett nodded and nodded, his face drawn like an old hound. He brushed some dirt off his crisp white suit and stood, peeking through the slatted blinds and then back to the small group of men in the room.

Arch took a long breath. Si’s goddamn pauses working on his last nerve. If he would just be quiet, he could sneak off for that drink.

“We’ve had such little time. In fact, I only just learned that this horrendous act occurred at the exact moment Mr. Ferrell and I were on the telephone discussing the recent Brown versus Board of Education decision. I never dreamed something so horrible was happening at that very moment.”

Arch nodded along with Garrett, feeling good about him again, but as he did he noticed a few of the newspapermen looking at each other. They looked to have grown uncomfortable in their hard chairs in the closed-off room.

ON SUNDAY NIGHT, GARRETT DROVE ARCH OVER THE RIVER to his deluxe suite at the Ralston while troops continued hammering signs on telephone poles announcing that Fourteenth and Dillingham streets were off limits to Army personnel. Arch watched them all, slunk down in the backseat of the big black Cadillac, as Garrett talked to his driver about this wonderful place where they were all going for steaks and cocktails tonight called the CoCo Supper Club. As long as they could sneak him some liquor, all was right in the world.

“Take me home,” Arch said. “Please.”

“Nonsense,” Garrett said. “I invited half the newsmen in town to come have Sunday dinner with us. We got to get the good feelings back again. We got to let them know that you are doing everything in your power as solicitor to make sense of this horrible situation.”

“I didn’t create this place. It was here long before me.”

“Since the Civil War.”

Arch tipped a bottle of Canadian whiskey to his lips, switching from the good bourbon he’d brought from his home out in the country. “You’re goddamn right. If I tried to stop the gambling, they’d run me out of town on a greased pole.”

Garrett turned full around in the front passenger’s seat and smiled as if he’d just had a spot of great news. “Did I tell you last year I had to be institutionalized?”

“What?”

Arch just looked at him, the view of Phenix City fading from the windows around him, one of the Guard troops saluting the car. He narrowed his eyes and waited for a punch line that didn’t come.

Not long after, they were seated at the CoCo Supper Club, a hell of a little restaurant just off the runway from the Columbus Airport where you could eat fried Gulf shrimp and lobster and the best T-bone in the city while you watched planes take off and land. Garrett sat at the head of the table and ordered cocktails for everyone but himself, instead asking the waitress – a pretty little girl who called all the men doll – for an entire bottle of sparkling water with a bucket of ice and a glass. The men ate and laughed, the newsmen telling jokes and Garrett roping them back into points about the murder investigation, telling them all that they were working on those three theories and letting that bit pass just as he saw the food coming out of the kitchen and then hushing as they all settled into the shrimp and T-bones and bourbon and Gibsons with tiny onions.

Arch just looked at his food, feeling outside himself, and sometimes Garrett would ask him something and Arch would just look up expectantly, looking for another place, another situation from the one he now found himself in, and he drank. He drank at least a half dozen bourbons until he began to rattle on, mainly to himself, about Arch Ferrell – using the third person – being a good man. “Arch Ferrell never did anything illegal in his life.”

And this caused some looks from some of the newsmen and some wry smiles and poked ribs, but they all kept eating under the constant, weighted stare of Si Garrett’s owl glasses. To hell with ’em all.

Sometime during the meal, Arch looked up, sure he’d been asked a question but not sure of the question, and simply said: “Si Garrett is the best friend I got. He’s one of the greatest men in Alabama.”

And with that, Garrett motioned to the little waitress, and Arch heard him whisper into her ear: “Please bring Mr. Ferrell another. But make this one a triple.”

“Sure thing, doll.”

Later on, the steaks were polished off, just bloody bones on the plates, the fat and grease congealed into a purplish pink mixture where some of the newsmen had squashed the cigarettes they continued smoking. Arch smoked, too, but he stared beyond the newsmen and out beyond the grand dining room of the CoCo Supper Club and the empty bandstand. For a long while, he watched the planes and the flashing of red lights on the tarmac, but then he noticed the long ash on his cigarette and realized he hadn’t taken a puff.

He studied the cigarette, blinked, and then leaned in close to Garrett’s ear.

“I know all about that talk,” Arch said. “I’ve heard it since Pat was killed. I’m tough and mean, nobody knows that better than me. I’m not a religious fella, never have been, but this thing is making me wish that I were. But no matter what anybody says, I didn’t kill Patterson. I just couldn’t kill a human being.”

He nodded to the group, stubbed out his cigarette, and then took down all the bourbon in one gulp. Some of the men kept gnawing on the bones, freeing those last pieces of gristle. Arch nodded again, satisfied with an answer to a question no one asked, his eyes closing and then opening, his head bobbing down and then jerking back up awake.

And then he stood and wished everyone good-night before placing his hands on the table, taking a deep breath, and vomiting all over the white linen.

“I WAS GOING TO LEAVE THIS DIRTY, GODDAMN TOWN,” John Patterson said to me, searching through another row of files in the endless wood file cabinets in his father’s law office. After a Sunday morning service, he worked row by row, pulling out anything that could be of help, or anything too personal, and setting manila folders into cardboard boxes. He stopped, resting his arm on top of a cabinet. “I don’t want to be a vigilante or savior now. Hell, I never understood my father. His political ambitions. Why he stayed here. He could’ve made better money in about any other town in Alabama.”

I didn’t say anything. I just waited for another box of files to take down to a truck I borrowed. The window air conditioner had been cut off by mistake, and I fanned my face with a ball cap.

“The only reason I wanted to be a lawyer was to make enough money to retire early. Go fishing. Enjoy life. Not this mess.”

“Nothin’ wrong with that.”

“You are damn right,” John said. “Listen, Murphy, I want you to store this at your house, all of this. I don’t want that bastard Si Garrett going anywhere near my father’s papers.”

I reached for another loaded box on Albert Patterson’s desk.

John had rolled up his dress sleeves to his elbows and his hairy forearms glistened with sweat, not a bit of comfort coming from an old Emerson table fan.

He kept flipping through files, his fingers moving each one, another drawn and then slipped back, more yet for the growing boxes we had started to stack.

“You and Britton turn up anything?”

“A little,” I said. “Heard something about our old friend Tommy Capps.”

“Dynamite?”

“Hell of a name,” I said.

“He’d never kill my father.”

“He blew up Hugh Bentley’s house,” I said, talking about the attempted murder two years ago of our little anti-vice group’s president. His two sons and wife miraculously survived.

“You know those men from Montgomery accused Bentley of blowing up his own house to get sympathy.”

We worked for an hour in the heated second floor of the Coulter Building, the old plaster-walled law office feeling like the loft of a barn or an attic. Every few minutes, I’d take a box down to the back of the truck. Armed guards and local hick police watched the still Sunday streets, but no one asked what we were doing.

Everyone seemed to be afraid to look John Patterson in the eye.

Just before John locked up, we heard heavy footsteps on the wooden stairs and up on the landing. Deputy Sheriff Bert Fuller walked inside the office, mopping his face with a red bandanna, with Joe Smelley from the state police right behind. Fuller wore a suit, and Smelley wore wrinkled pants and a short-sleeved dress shirt soaked through the armpits.

Smelley didn’t say anything, only walked to one of the boxes and immediately helped himself, searching through the files.

John’s jaw clenched and his eyes flashed from Fuller to me.

“Well, howdy, palooka,” Fuller said to me. “Ain’t you got some gas to pump?”

“I’d rather be here with you, Bert,” I said. “You make us all feel so safe.”

“You better watch your step,” Fuller said. “I don’t care what you used to be. I’ll beat you silly.”

John stepped in front of him.

“We came by for a talk,” Fuller said.

“You can set a time with my secretary.”

Fuller snorted. He looked over to Smelley, who’d picked a file from the box and glanced through it. Smelley looked to Fuller and snorted back.

“Funny you should mention your secretary.”

John’s breathing was loud and rapid. I unconsciously staggered my feet, fingers opening and closing into a fist.

“What’s her name? Vicki?”

John breathed, temple throbbing, and Bert Fuller popped some chewing gum, waiting for a response. The short, grubby fingers of Joe Smelley flipped through Albert Love Patterson’s personal papers.

“I came up here as a favor to you, John,” Fuller said. He took a seat on Albert Patterson’s antique desk and placed his Stetson on his knee. “I know you sure would hate for the newspapermen to start poking around this thing. And your wife, Mary Jo. Good God. That would set the tongues a-waggin’. So why don’t we just sit and talk about things as men. We all know men like pussy, and it don’t mean you’re not a Christian if you set out for a little poke once in a while. Hell, I seen your secretary and I wouldn’t mind having a taste myself.”

“Shut your filthy, foul mouth and get your fat ass off my father’s desk.”

Fuller snorted again and breathed and waited a few beats. And then stood and looked back on the desk, as if mocking the idea he could have soiled the wood. He grabbed his hat and placed it back on his head, knocking it off his brow with two fingers. Resting his hands on his gun belt, he nodded and popped his gum. “Joe?”

Smelley placed the file on the desk next to the box he’d sifted through. He stood and started to pace. I lifted my back foot and shifted, watching the three men in an orchestra of heated movement. Dogs circling around each other.

“I knew your daddy real well, John. He was a fine man. I know you know he was a fine man. I don’t think there is any delicate way to say this, but it’s my job to ask these questions.”

“I have not even put my father in the ground.”

“I know,” Smelley said, holding up a hand. “I know. But, still, this is my job, and I want you to understand and respect that. Okay? Listen, there has been some talk around town that maybe your daddy was staying up late with that secretary of yours, too. We know her husband was overseas, and we know how young ladies can get real lonely looking for a daddy to cozy up to. Well, we just thought there isn’t a lot that could set daddy against son, except one thing.”

“Don’t say another goddamn word,” John said.

Fuller popped his gum again. “Hell, I’ll say it. We think you and ole Pat was hitting that same pussy and you might’ve gotten riled, is all. We got to ask these questions.”

John leapt for Fuller’s throat, but I’d seen the moment, muscles coiled, and I reached around my friend’s waist and pulled him back. Patterson jabbed his elbows back and yelled and bared his teeth, but I held on tight.

Fuller rested his hand on his gun and shook his head with feigned sadness. He shrugged, spit his gum in the wastebasket, and motioned for Smelley to come on. He shook his head for the weakness he’d seen in the office. I wanted to let Patterson go so badly, to let him unleash all that rage, but I knew Fuller wanted to shoot, had maybe come there to shoot, and there had been enough blood for the week.

We sat in the office for a long time, until it grew dark. We didn’t talk. I just wanted to hold him there until he had relaxed a bit. Later, we finished up hauling the last of the boxes, and when I walked up into the hot, dark office, just about nine, I found John Patterson sitting at his father’s desk. There was a small scrap of paper before him.

John wiped his wet face with a white handkerchief and coughed.

I started to turn around.

“It’s all right,” he said.

I nodded.

“Guess he thought this was important,” he said. “‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.’ Edmund Burke.”

He looked up at me and nodded, seeming to make a decision that had been weighing on him for a while.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I’m taking my father’s place.”

“I figured you’d stay.”

“Not here,” John said. “Not this office. I want to be attorney general. I’m adding my name in place of my father’s.”

HE’D LOST HER.

But all Sunday, Billy searched. He rode a red Schwinn Reuben had given him for Christmas from the top of Summerville Hill down to the river and through the poor little neighborhoods of Phenix City and government housing where they’d spent those first hours together. They knew the girl, although no one seemed to recall her name the way the boy did, but, on most accounts, she’d gone back to Columbus, most saying Bibb City, and by nightfall he walked his bicycle over the bridge, past the police and troops, and followed the Chattahoochee north to the mill town just outside the city limits. He rode and glided under the cooling shadows, the gold light softening over the river and on the brick mill that seemed to stretch for almost a mile, hammering and pulsing inside like a live thing. And he was given hard looks by hard people who sat on their porches in their identical white mill houses and bony women would stare at him and spit and children playing touch football on their lawns would stop in midplay because they all knew he wasn’t one of them, the way a pack of animals can sniff something in the wind. But he paid them no mind and rode past the commissary and the post office and the trading post and the mill bars that were closed down on Sunday. There was a church picnic and a preacher who waved to the boy. The man had a mouth filled with gold teeth and smiled before placing a big slice of chocolate cake in his mouth and licking his fingers.

Billy soon came upon an old woman who sat in a plastic lawn chair by a crooked oak and he coasted and stopped. She sipped from a pitcher of Kool-Aid, next to a platter of deviled eggs on a TV tray covered with buzzing bottle flies. When he spoke to her, the old woman jumped, not because she was afraid but because her eyes were clouded, filmed over in a milky blue, and she listened to the boy’s questions about a black-headed girl named Lorelei, and the woman asked about “her people” but the boy knew no names.

He pedaled more, in and out of roads and little cul-de-sacs, and soon it was dark and he was lost, all the little houses and streets all the same. Every house a perfect little white box kept up to mill standards.

He asked a group of teenage boys about her, because surely they would know her. How would boys of that age not know a girl like Lorelei? He found them with their three heads ducked under the hood of a Nash that had to have been built before the war, and they turned when he called out: “Y’all know a girl named Lorelei?”

The boy in the middle had oil-stained hands and fingers, thick-jawed with a baby-fat face. “What kind of name is that?” he asked.

“You know her?”

He looked to his buddies, with the same fifty-cent haircuts, and he shrugged. A skinny, pimple-faced boy asked him, “Where you from?”

But Billy was gone and in and out of the mill town roads, his white T-shirt soggy wet and his legs exhausted, each time stopping to ask, having to gather his breath. He slowed again on top of a hill that overlooked the brown, jagged river and the endless mill bigger than a dozen airplane hangars stacked end to end and heading halfway out into the river.

He lifted up his T-shirt and wiped his face, and he knew it would probably be coming up around ten or so. He didn’t have a watch. But when you had a father like Reuben, there never was much accounting for yourself.

In the darkness down at the gentle curve of the road stood a big magnolia tree with fat arms covering a small bare lawn with dirt so trampled it seemed to be made of talcum powder. Little fireflies clicked off and on, and Billy just caught his breath and ran his hand over his sweating face, squinting into the shadows, seeing the shadow of a girl with long black hair and long white legs and arms. Her skin the color of milk.

He walked his bike and followed the curve and without thinking he called out to her and the figure turned, with his heart still beating into his throat. The figure moved into the porch light and it wasn’t a young girl at all but a pinched-faced old woman who smoked a cigarette in a flowered housecoat.

She looked at him and then quickly walked inside, and Billy almost turned right into the greased boy who’d worked on the car.

“You didn’t answer me,” said the skinny, pimple-faced teen. He ran his fingers under his nose and sniffed. He pushed at Billy’s shoulder.

Billy just kept walking, trying to go around, but something stopped him, and as he turned back they held the bicycle by the seat. He pulled, but then the pimple-faced boy was in front of him, twisting the bars of the bike like a steer and trying to pull him off.

“Cut it out.”

“Where you from?”

“Phenix City.”

“The shithole of this earth.”

He pushed him with one hand and Billy quit trying to push back. The other teen had yellow eyes and rotted teeth. He reached out and grabbed Billy’s shirt and ripped it from the neck.

“Do you know Lorelei?”

“Who is she? Your sister?”

And before Billy could say another word, the pimple-faced teen shot out a fist and busted Billy’s lip. Billy fought back, blind to it, because the one thing that he had heard over and over from Reuben was to never take a single ounce of shit from a living soul because, if you did, the shit would bury you. He fought with his eyes closed, windmilling, but his hands were held back, and the teen punched him hard in the eye and in the stomach, all the air rushing from him, and he was on his face, trying to catch his breath, when he heard the puttering sound of a broken muffler and looked up into the twin headlights, shining like eyes, the engine gunning, the car lurching forward.

He rolled just before it reached him.

The car bumped over his bicycle, the teens calling him a little pussy as they hit the gas around another turn, part of the bicycle caught beneath and sparking in the darkness, their laughter and yells following them down the street.