Wicked City

4

UNDER THE TIN ROOF of Slocumb’s Service Station, noted above with a sign reading COURTEOUS and a big red button for Coca-Cola, I watched the cars speed by Crawford Road with their big-eyed headlights glowing white in the weak gray light. It had been a sluggish, heated morning between rain and sunshine when the air almost wants to break, thunder in the distance. Fat-bodied Fords and Chevys and Hudsons and Nashes would stop in every few minutes and Arthur and I would wander out of the garage to check their oil, clean their windshields of mosquitoes and lovebugs, and fill them up with the all-new, high-test Petrox.

And soon they’d again join the snaking line up and out over the bridge and out of Alabama or deeper on to Birmingham or Montgomery. Arthur liked to talk to folks, excited to know where they were headed, maybe secretly wanting to escape Phenix, too. He’d smile and speak in that careful, deferential safe ground for negroes, but always laugh and joke with me as a friend, not a boss.

I wore an Army slicker over my green Texaco coveralls and a matching ball cap with the red star logo. In between customers, I checked the shelves for Vienna sausages and saltines and searched the cooler for Coca-Cola and Dr Pepper. There were cases filled with candy and bubble gum and cartons of cigarettes and chewing tobacco; Borden’s ice cream was hand-dipped from a freezer by the register.

It was almost lunch when a sky blue Buick coupe wheeled in.

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 occasion.) “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.”

“What do you want us to do about it?” John said, standing.

I joined him.

“Just keep an open mind,” Hoyt said. “I hear you’re aiming for your dad’s spot.”

John nodded. “I am.”

“I understand,” he said. “I wish you luck.”

“You don’t mean that, Hoyt.”

The air smelled of chlorine and the gardenias and cow shit.

Hoyt smiled and kind of laughed, his face clouded in his exhaling breath. “Guess I don’t.”

“I haven’t been back in Phenix City long, but I know to watch where I step.”

“That’s not what this was about,” Hoyt said. “I just wanted you to know this isn’t my deal. I have no part in this. I didn’t leave my neck out for no misdemeanor vote fraud. We’re all hurting. Did you know the same night your daddy was killed, someone broke into my other house and blew a safe bigger ’an a truck? They ’bout cleaned me out.”

“What does that have to do with my father?”

“Everything,” Hoyt said. “You can’t trust a crook no more. There was a time when a man’s word meant something. This town has gone to hell.”

John simply nodded. He then looked over at Jimmie and said, “Good night.”

Jimmie gave a soft smile and both older men remained seated.

“You boys listen to me,” Hoyt said. “I will cut out my heart and place it here on the table if Bert Fuller and Johnnie Benefield didn’t have something to do with your daddy. Benefield is the most coldhearted, sadistic sonofabitch I’ve ever known.”

THEY FOLLOWED A LONG PATH INTO THE WOODS, PUSHING along a fat man in handcuffs, Fuller knocking him in the back of the head with a revolver when he’d slow down. The man wore pressed pants, no shirt, and a tie, his shirt torn away after they’d run his car off the road. Reuben walked between Fuller and Benefield, who wore a brown western suit with gold stitching.

There was a path, but it hadn’t been trod since hunting season, and Fuller swatted away branches that slapped back and hit Reuben in the face and eyes as he struggled along half drunk on Jack Daniel’s. He still carried the open bottle from Club Lasso, where he’d gotten the call, and quickly met the men in the woods.

Benefield had worked PC for years and had taken on jobs in Atlantic City and in Tampa for some Italian boys down there. He was a natural-born killer, loved the job, and had killed so many in Phenix City that Reuben had lost count. Benefield and Fuller were as thick as thieves, and, under Fuller’s protection, Benefield could do about whatever he wanted. The man’s eyes were black and soulless, and when Benefield smiled Reuben felt an icy prickle run along his back.

They wandered up a hill and through a rusted stretch of barbed wire that had been cut away by hunters. Most of the trees were young, planted on cleared land. In the glow of the fat flashlight Fuller carried, he saw a mammoth oak that seemed lost in the immature forest. The trunk as large around as an automobile, prehistoric and crooked. The men were drawn to it.

Reuben set down the bottle and stared up at the big tree and waited. Fuller pushed the fat man to the trunk of a nearby pine and lashed him to it. Benefield kicked up mounds of pine straw around the man’s legs, covering him up to his shins.

The shirtless man was breathing hard, his back and shoulders covered in acne. Fuller pulled a little notebook from the man’s back pocket and slapped him across the face with it.

The man’s head turned and he was slow to look back at the men before him. Reuben lit a match against a thumbnail and stared at the man.

Fuller took in an audible lungful of air and walked over to Reuben and held out his hand. Reuben handed him the bottle and Fuller took a drink. He walked back to the man and then stared up at the night sky, thinking, contemplating.

Benefield caught the edge of a cigarette from Reuben’s match.

“Why’d you put them lies in the newspaper?” Fuller asked.

“I didn’t write any lies.”

“I said admit it, goddamn you. You cain’t come to a man’s town and put them things in print. People think that garbage is the truth.”

The man looked away. Fuller reared back and struck the man in the face.

“You wrote in that rag of yours that I was-” Fuller looked to Benefield, who reached into his pocket for a piece of folded-up newsprint. Fuller took it and read: “‘The town bully. A common criminal who is a disgrace to the badge.’ Isn’t that your name at the top there?”

Fuller hit him again. Benefield took back the piece of paper, folded it dramatically, and placed it back into his pocket.

“I stand by it,” the reporter said. His mouth bled.

“Say it to my face,” Fuller said. “You goddamn Communist.”

Fuller slapped him and the blow turned the man’s head quick to the side.

“I’m not Communist.”

“What would you call it when you come to a town and piss on the head of the law?”

Johnnie Benefield kicked up some more pine needles and checked the knot binding the man to the tree. He stared up through the branches of the forest at the summer sky and took a breath. The man spit out blood from his mouth.

Reuben took a long pull of the whiskey and then poured another out on the pine needles. Fuller adjusted the rig on his fat stomach and pitched his Stetson back with his thumb.

“How ’bout it, boy?” Benefield asked. “You gonna come to Jesus?”

“Excuse me?”

“Come to Jesus,” Benefield said, answering, and plucked the cigarette from his mouth and touched it to a book of matches. He smiled to the man, looking him dead in the eyes, as the match caught to the other matches and the entire book began to burn.

The portly, shirtless man started to cry.

Almost casually, Benefield pitched the book into the dry rust-colored needles at the man’s feet. The fire kicked up instantly, the needles starting to churn smoke and then crackle with flame. The man screamed and flailed and tried to pull loose from the lasso around his waist.

The fire caught in a ring about the reporter.

“I’ll do it.”

“Do what?” Fuller asked.

“Whatever you want.”

Reuben stood next to Fuller.

“Cut him loose,” Reuben said.

“Not yet,” Fuller said. “Say what you did.”

“I wrote lies.”

“Is that an apology, Reuben?”

“Oh, hell.”

“Are you, or are you not a card-carrying member of the Communist Party?”

The man was crying, wrenching his feet from the flames and crooking them from the burning earth, curling his toes for just an inch of space from the heat. His eyes looked as if they were about to burst from the sockets as he strained against the ropes.

“I am,” the man yelled. “I am a Communist.”

Benefield doubled over from laughter, his teeth like a rotten picket fence, as he searched for some dry branches.

Reuben spit and pulled out a fat bone-handled pocketknife from his pants. With one hand, he pushed at Fuller and went for the rope, but Fuller caught his hand and easily twisted the knife from his grip.

“Do you feel what hell is like?” Benefield asked, grinning. “Get used to it, boy. Hellfire, yes, sir.”

The reporter pleaded. He cried. He said he loved Mother Russia.

Benefield just added more pine needles to the smoking, curling mass.

There was a scream, a long, howling animal scream, the smell of burning flesh, and the piercing sound made even Fuller turn his head. He nodded with strong approval and threw the knife down at Reuben like you would slop to swine.

“Get him down from there.”

When the man was free, he turned and bolted from the tree like a loose cat. Just as he was about out of sight, jumping a warped run of barbed wire on cedar posts, Benefield leveled a.44 and fired off a hard, booming shot punctuated with a rebel yell.

The shot missed, and Benefield laughed, the pine needles smoked and burned out into a perfect blackened circle. “That boy shit his drawers. Did you smell it? Did you smell it?”

THE NEXT MORNING, ARCH FERRELL AND SI GARRETT waited outside the short driveway leading to a little brick house in Cullman. Si Garrett leaned back in the driver’s seat, having given his man the morning off, and Arch slept one off in the back of the Oldsmobile, just coming awake. Garrett listened to the first morning news out of Montgomery, nothing but more and more reports about the killing of Patterson and his funeral and John’s announcement he was taking his slain father’s slot, and, as Arch sat up, he watched a man emerge from the simple white house with a mug of coffee. The man walked down the drive, careful not to spill the contents, and Garrett opened his door.

He handed Garrett the coffee.

Garrett turned down the radio.

“Mr. Folsom said to set up an appointment for later.”

“We already tried that.”

The man squatted, craned his neck toward the house, only one light on showing some movement behind a curtain. “He said he can’t miss his walk. You know how he is about that walk. And after that, he’s due in Montgomery.”

“We just need a second of his time.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Garrett,” the man said, looking into the backseat at Arch with a wry smile, the cocky sonofabitch, and turning to walk away. “Enjoy the coffee.”

Garrett cut the radio back on, watching the house with the single light on, tapping the steering wheel. More news about the killing and an interview with John Patterson coming on, piercing Arch’s head. Garrett turned it up after a commercial for Dobbs Buick in Alex City and ads for Vienna sausages and Bama jellies. The very men responsible for the condition of Phenix City are the ones running this investigation. The only true way we will see justice in this case is with the involvement of federal authorities. This whole thing is rotten all the way up to the capital.

Garrett tuned the radio to a hillbilly station playing an Ernest Tubb number called “Walkin’ the Floor Over You.”

From the backseat, Arch stared at his reflection in the rearview mirror. His hair was scattered wild, rat nose twitching and big ears pricked, as he ran a hand over an unshaven face, opened his eyes, and then closed them. He breathed in and coughed and opened the side door and vomited into a drainage ditch.

After some snorting and gagging, he sat up again and asked Garrett if he had some chewing gum. Garrett handed back some Black Jack gum, and the song changed and this time it was Alabama’s own Hank Williams – that’s the way the announcer said it – and Hank sang “Move It On Over.”

Arch started to sweat in his wrinkled dress shirt. He looked to Garrett, playing with the brim of his white Stetson that matched his suit, and then up at the simple brick house of the governor-elect, James E. Folsom, alias Big Jim.

“You ever think radio waves can get mixed up in your head?” Garrett asked him. “Sometimes I hear songs and I think they’re written just for me.”

Arch plucked a few more sticks of gum in his mouth. “I feel like death warmed over. Last thing I remember is that catfish house outside Opelika.”

“I wanted you to sleep it off. Get your mind off the worry. Worry will eat a man’s soul.”

“Think Big Jim will see us?”

Garrett didn’t answer.

“Si?”

“I’m not moving an inch till he does,” he said. “He owes us.”

Moments later, the door opened and out walked the big six-foot-eight, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound sonofabitch in khaki pants, plaid shirt, walking boots, and with a walking cane. Before Garrett could reach the door handle, Big Jim was striding down the road, reminding Arch of storybooks about Paul Bunyan, and Garrett cranked the car and followed loosely, just nosing along, and pretty soon they were beside the governor-elect.

“’Morning, Big Jim.”

Big Jim looked fresh, his hair slicked back, square jaw out, blue eyes clear and directed ahead on the narrow country road lined with oak and pecan trees. Cicadas started to click and whir high up in the trees.

“I thought Drinkard told y’all to find me later.”

“He did.”

“Well.”

“Can’t wait, Jim.”

The walking continued, Garrett moving alongside him in the Olds, Arch leaning between the front seats, feeling like a kid at a picture show. Garrett kept moving, the car idling and him smiling, trying to keep it affable and slow.

“We got real problems.”

“I’ll say.”

“They want me back in Birmingham next week,” he said. “They want me to testify on those votes before the grand jury.”

“Don’t see how that concerns me. I don’t take office till next year.”

“Just figured you could make some calls.”

Big Jim looked at Garrett and then over at Arch, who gave a self-conscious smile and a half-assed wave. The strides lengthened, but Garrett continued. Sonofabitch.

“You helped us out with Patterson,” he said. “You talked to him for us.”

“And where did that get us?” he said. “He was going to testify against you boys on Monday anyway. But I guess y’all know that already. Did you really think you could add seven hundred goddamn votes with no one noticing?”

“We’re only accused of six hundred,” Garrett said and leaned back in the driver’s seat, steering with two fingers, a boy on a country road following an insulted girl.

“Arch and the boys in Phenix City came through for you on this election,” he said. “You know that money gave you a big boost.”

“It did,” Big Jim said, eyes still staring straight ahead, not even winded, walking with the stick up in his hand like a drum major.

“I just need you to call the dogs back.”

“It’s too late, Si.”

“It’s not too late. Goddamn Governor Persons is going to try to make this his big political send-off because he doesn’t care what bridges he burns. He’s gonna leave you a pile of flaming dog shit for you to clean up when you take office.”

“Too late,” Big Jim said. “I’m making an announcement later today that I’m supporting the Patterson boy.”

Si Garrett threw on his brakes and the big, clunky Olds skidded to a stop. He got out of the car and slammed the door behind him. Big Jim Folsom stopped and peered down at the much smaller man.

“You… you… this is going to break me. You know that? Do you understand what you are doing to my head?”

“You’re a sick man, Si. Get some help. But Phenix City is over. The sooner we all understand that, the better.”

“But throwing in with John Patterson. How could you do that? He’s not qualified or well-bred. He doesn’t have the qualifications.”

“Of someone like who? You, Si?”

Garrett stood on the side of the road, hands on his hips and shaking his head. He stayed there for several minutes, as Arch watched the sun rise high over a big, endless pasture bordered by a broken cedar fence and rusted barbed wire. Big Jim grew smaller and smaller down the long, winding road.

REUBEN AND JOHNNIE PLAYED POKER ON THE BIG PORCH of Fannie Belle’s whorehouse, a broken-down old mansion hidden way out in the county. They’d been drinking most of the morning, after shoveling down some grits and eggs a little colored girl had made for them, and now smoked cigarettes, a half bottle of Jack at their boots, as the heat broke up high through the weeds and little pine trees down the dirt road.

“Where’s Fannie?” Reuben asked.

“Asleep.”

“That woman is gonna screw you blind.”

Johnnie smiled, leaned into the table, and squinted at Reuben as if he couldn’t quite make out his face.

“Is it true she’s got sixteen husbands?”

“Oh, come on, now. It’s only a dozen or so.”

“She makes them fall in love with her and then she sends them overseas, collecting their checks like a good ole Army wife. I seen her sitting in the bar, writing all those horny letters to those boys, telling them all the illegal things they can do to her.”

Johnnie smiled. “Hell of a scam.”

“You know you’re gonna get yourself killed when one of those boys comes back to PC and sees you mounting their trophy to the wall.”

“Aw, hell.”

Reuben tossed another few chips into the pot. And behind them they heard the screen door creak open and slam closed. Fannie walked outside, naked except for a light green man’s shirt loosely buttoned. She played with her stiff red hair that Johnnie had mussed up pretty damn good and then reached for a cigarette from him. As she did, Reuben got a nice view of her right tittie.

“’Mornin’, boys.”

“Fannie,” Reuben said.

She was a green-eyed devil with fair skin and red lips, an upturned nose that some might say was pug but others might say pert. But she’d made her way with her chest, and even that early in the morning she made a big show out of taking in that first lungful of smoke, smiling in a lazy, careless way like she was still in a dream.

The door creaked again, slammed shut, leaving only her perfume and smoke on the wind.

“Be careful,” Reuben said.

“You be careful.”

“I ain’t never careful,” Reuben said.

“I’m sayin’ be careful ’cause you’re playin’ with my money.”

“The hell you say.”

“Where is it?”

Reuben fanned the cards in his hand and leaned back in the metal porch chair. He took a deep breath and shook his head. “Thought we agreed on that.”

“Things gonna die down real soon.”

“Didn’t say they wouldn’t.”

“You know every time you tell a lie, Reuben, the left corner of your mouth turns up. I heard fighters got tells like that, too. Like before they ’bout to nail you with a sucker punch, a good fighter will know it.”

“That’s true.”

“So when you gonna skip town?”

Reuben looked over the fan of cards. On the backs were photographs of naked women with big old titties. He blew out some smoke and rested the butt of the cigarette against his temple.

“A man can ask.”

“Johnnie, did your mother love you?”

“Sure,” Johnnie said. “Why wouldn’t she?”

“No reason.”

“You know, if Hoyt figures us for robbin’ him-”

“No reason, if both us keep our goddamn mouth shut,” Reuben said. “We’ll make the cut when we can. Till then, it’s tucked away.”

“Well, looky here,” Johnnie said, tossing down a pair of kings. “It’s Hoyt and Jimmie.”

Reuben laid down his cards. A full house.

“Aces and eights.”

Johnnie looked up from his cards and into Reuben’s eyes. “You know what they call that hand, don’t you?”