Wicked City

5

I FINISHED ADDING sweet feed for my Tennessee walkers and capped off their water tank from a nearby well pump. I liked afternoons like this most, when I could break away from the filling station and drive out a few miles into the country to my little piece of land and work with Rocky and Joe Louis. I didn’t get to ride as much as I used to, but I’d often take Anne out on the weekends. She’d taken a keen interest in brushing the horses and taking them for rides along the winding trails that had been beaten smooth by the animals’ hooves. But I was alone today and cleaned out the stalls, replaced the hay, and checked their shoes and teeth. While the horses ate, I ran some saddle soap over their tack and talked to them in a smooth calming voice, and then sang to them a bit of “My Wild Irish Rose” and even “Danny Boy.” Songs that I’d heard on the radio between the westerns and comedy shows I’d known as a child in Troy and, because I had the red hair and the Irish name, always thought they’d been important.

I’d just hung up a bridle and some rusted shoes on the nails in the barn when I heard a car approaching from the long dirt road out back. When I looked out the narrow door, I saw Hugh Britton.

I met him at the metal gate and let him inside. Britton wore a black suit in the summer heat, careful where he stepped in his dress shoes. He looked like he was headed to church and I knew that meant business. He never looked quite right when wearing a suit on his old bones.

I walked back toward the barn, where we could stand in the shade under the rusted tin roof.

“Si Garrett’s gone,” Britton said.

“What do you mean?”

“Got on a plane in Montgomery last night and headed for Texas. No one knows for sure. Some say he checked into some kinda nuthouse for his nerves.”

“Is he coming back?”

He shook his head. “Doesn’t look like it. Left the investigation in charge of a man named Sykes.”

“Does John know him?”

He shook his head again.

“At least we still have the Guard,” I said.

“Bunch of babysitters,” Britton said, running a handkerchief across his sweaty neck. “They can’t get a lick done without the damn governor allowing them to bust up a single dice game. They are worthless, and, hell, no one believes they’ll stay. And this new fella, Sykes? He’s cut from the same cloth as Si Garrett. I guarantee as much.”

“Any new word from Mr. X?”

The mysterious Mr. X had been Britton’s inside source for some time. Mr. X was constantly sending typed letters on the rackets’ latest movements and underhanded deals. Lately, he’d been sending us small black records of phone conversations with Hoyt Shepherd. Most of them had happened years ago, but they’d proved pretty useful when it came to figuring the Machine’s business.

“He just sent me a new record. He was real scared about this one. Had me go to the Columbus bus station and fetch a locker key from a phone booth. Said this one might get him killed.”

“Who was on it?”

“Our esteemed governor, talking about campaign contributions from Hoyt and Jimmie.”

“You want to go to the newspaper boys with this one?”

“I think I want to keep this one in my back pocket,” Britton said, giving a sharp smile. “But there is one thing.”

I brushed the dirt off the front of my work pants.

“A woman in my church told me about this man,” he said. “He was on Fifth Avenue when Mr. Patterson was killed.”

THE MAN LIVED LESS THAN TWO MILES AWAY FROM MY land in a little cottage on Sandfort Road. I drove, following the twisting road cutting through the red bluffs of the Chattahoochee, and finally found the address and the small gravel drive. But when we knocked on the door, we were met with the sliver of a face behind the chain asking what the hell we wanted. Britton told the man we were with the Russell County Betterment Association and said he’d like to talk to him about Mr. Patterson. He didn’t mention the name of the woman from the church.

The man stood there for a few moments.

“I don’t know why you’d want to talk to me.”

“Were you on Fifth Avenue when Mr. Patterson was shot?” I asked.

There was silence and then: “No. You are mistaken.”

“Some people saw you there,” Britton said, in his smooth country drawl. “Said you had dinner at the Elite.”

“They were mistaken.”

“You weren’t there?” Britton asked.

“I said they were mistaken. Now leave me be.”

“Sir, if you’re afraid,” Britton said, “you don’t need to be. The National Guard troops are on every street corner. We could get you help.”

Fingers reached into the crack, like small pink worms, and unlatched the chain lock. The door swung open and we walked inside. The room was empty save for two chairs and a suitcase.

“Going somewhere?” I asked.

“Far from here, if people don’t quit running their goddamn mouths.”

“We can help you, sir,” Britton said, putting his hands in his pockets and shifting back on his heels. “Unless we speak out, they’ll go free and the city will fall right back into that hellhole.”

“Speak out?” the man asked as he walked toward Britton and stopped. He was pudgy and wearing a dirty white T-shirt. “My wife and daughter are gone. I put them on a bus two days after the killing. It wouldn’t stop. The phone wouldn’t stop ringing. I had to take the phone off the hook and sit up for two days straight drinking coffee with a shotgun on my lap, sitting out there on that porch, my heart up my throat every time a car passed on by slow or I saw the police. Do you understand? This is none of my concern.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Things are different now.”

The man laughed, it was a harsh little laugh out his nose, like he hadn’t intended it. “Last time I checked, the same sonsabitches still hold badges.”

“What exactly did you see?” Britton asked, keeping his tone even and slow. He looked to me and then back. “Sir?”

“Please leave.”

I watched the man, saw the arms hug himself, the sweating brow, the pacing, eyes reddened and twitching. I looked to Hugh Britton and then touched the older man’s shoulder: “Come on.”

ARCH FERRELL SAT AT THE EDGE OF HIS FOREST IN A METAL lawn chair watching the sun set and drinking bourbon from the bottle. His fingers had grown yellow from the nicotine of the endless cigarettes, and he wore the same suit of clothes he’d had on for two days, his own smell sickening him. When the phone rang inside his house it was a distant thing and he paid it no mind as the sun crisply broke through the perfectly laid acres of pines that his daddy had planted before the war. Simple and straight, a lush curtain of rust-colored needles on the ground.

His wife, Madeline, seven months pregnant and waddling, came out and called to him from the ranch house they owned in Seale, ten miles from Phenix City. He heard her but didn’t, and for a while just kept concentrating on the light, the shifting of shadows pouring like ink from the trunks on the blanket of needles.

She called to him again, and he felt for the arms of the chair, pulling himself up. For a moment, he blinked, thinking he spotted a German soldier in the depths of his acreage. He saw nothing but heard the explosive thud of artillery and the snick-snick-snick of machine-gun fire. The Germans seemed to be buzzing through the trees and he squinted into the neat rows, the bottle falling and rolling at his feet, even as he turned toward Madeline’s voice and they all dissipated, the little shadowed Germans, into the full-on sunset.

The walk was endless, and he made himself count the steps, maybe a hundred feet, and she pulled the black phone out on a long cord and handed it to him by their backyard grill and he answered, hearing his voice more in his head than outside his body.

“Arch?”

“Si?”

“Listen, I want you to hear me and hear me good.”

“I’ll certainly try.”

“I’m gone.”

“What do you mean ‘gone’?”

“I just left the courthouse and I’ve fully packed. I have a car waiting on me.”

“Where?”

“Where no one on earth can find me, I assure you of that.”

“You’re not going to testify,” Arch said. The words came out slurred and long.

“I did,” Garrett said. “For ten hours straight. They have me and they have you.”

“Come again?” Arch asked, stepping backward on the patio, nearly tripping, and holding himself level only by the strength of the phone cord in his hand.

“Reid made a statement. He gave all of it. They had some kind of jew detective named Goldstein check out his stories. The grand jury knows about us at the Molton Hotel and changing those vote tallies. You hear me? Reid told it all.”

“Goddamn all to hell.”

“Don’t panic. I’ll be in touch.”

“Where? What do I do?”

“I’ll be in touch. I gave my briefcase over to my secretary and the papers on Patterson to my chief investigator. Everyone knows we were on the phone together, buddy. You can’t argue with the facts.”

“Si? You said you could handle this. You said you could stop any investigation. Si?”

The phone clicked and clicked, and an operator came on the line asking if Arch needed assistance and he told the woman yes, to please go fuck herself, and the woman gave a little yelp. Arch walked back to the chair and the bottle and the ramrod-straight rows of pines. Acres and acres.

Madeline was there, stomach about to pop, and a gentle, assuring smile on her face. He walked to her and she pulled Arch in. He smelled her neck that was all good things, flowers and biscuits, and wrapped his arms around her, crying low and hard, the night coming on, filling the trees in an endless lake of shadows.

“I need to know,” she said.

He hugged her, burying his head into her neck, just holding her. They stayed there until she nudged him; he’d drifted off and was on the chair again. She stood behind, and he could feel the weight of their unborn child pressing against his neck.

“I need to know.”

He coughed and leaned forward, finding the bottle that had rolled under the metal chair. He uncorked it and took a drink, cleansing his mouth with the taste.

“No,” he said, throat cracked and raw. “I wasn’t anywhere near Albert Patterson. I was on the phone to Si. But now Si has up and lost his mind again. A coward, a fearful coward.”

Madeline rubbed the top of Arch’s head and placed the cool back of her hand against his forehead as if checking for a fever. “I knew it,” she said. “I just knew it.”

Arch watched a wall of shadow at the edge of the forest, hoping to hear the clatter of gunshot and artillery that was always present. He wanted to walk in and join them, hoping that the two worlds and time could somehow be joined. But instead he just caught the riffle of the wind picking up and blowing through the pines, sounding to him of a gentle breeze against bulrushes.

HOYT SHEPHERD PARKED HIS BRAND-NEW LIGHT GREEN Cadillac Eldorado in a safe spot away from the others but well in sight of the massive barn out in the county where they held the fights. There was some worry that there would be any fights at all, on account of the killing and all those goddamn Guard troops. But leave it to good ole PC ingenuity to find a barn big enough for the ring and stretch the canvas tight and set up church pews for seats. Judging from the cars, it looked like at least two hundred folks had found the place and left the Guard in the dark. Shepherd waited for Jimmie to follow and he dog-cussed him as he passed for his slowness, and then wiped the solid-gold Cadillac insignia on the hood with a little white handkerchief. Matthews ignored him, and up at the barn paid the black boy at the door a ten-spot. As they passed, the boy asked Hoyt when he was coming back to the steak house.

And then Hoyt recognized him as Charley Frank Bass and clasped his hand and hugged him and told Jimmie that Charley Frank could make a mess of liver and gravy that would make you want to slap your mamma. He asked him about his brother and mamma and the black kid told him.

They strolled on in, and Hoyt shook more hands and patted some boys on the back and they wandered around the smooth dirt floor all lit up with spotlights someone had stolen out of the Baptist church along with the pews. And there were country men who sold shots of corn liquor for fifty cents and some boys from downtown selling bottles of beer in troughs filled with ice.

Hoyt bought a shot of corn liquor, and he and Jimmie found a place close to the ring. The seats were taken, but when they walked close the man organizing the whole thing – Frog Jones – kept two steps ahead and shooed out the men who had already sat down.

The fight was already on, in the second round, and two tough ole nigger boys from Columbus were getting after each other like there was fire in their britches. They were rawboned and muscular, one in blue shorts and the other wearing white. And they worked around the ring, stomping and dancing, like colored fighters will do, and then they’d tear into each other. The boy with the blue shorts had a two-mile reach and the sonofabitch landed a solid hook right before the bell that sent the other fighter reeling backward, his eye swollen to the size of an egg.

By the fifth – announced by a fat-tittied whore wearing nothing but black panties and high-heeled shoes and holding up the ring card – Hoyt had found someone who’d brought in some boiled peanuts and he’d sent Jimmie to go get him another bit of corn whiskey and Jimmie didn’t say a word about it, as silent as a fucking sphinx. After he left, the fighters turned on each other, people calling out: “Fight ’em, nigger. Fuck ’em or fight ’em.”

Hoyt stood up as the crowd yelled when the blue fighter backed the other boy into a corner and commenced to whipping the holy tar out of him. His head slapped back and forth, the fighter barely able to raise the gloves to protect his face, as the blows went from a jab to a cross to a jab to a cross, and then as an exclamation a final hook walloped the boy down to the ground and the crowd went wild.

About that time, he felt someone take a seat next to him and he figured it was Jimmie and reached out his hand for the jelly jar full of hooch. But when he looked down, it was Fannie Belle sitting in Jimmie’s chair, and Hoyt’s smile dropped.

Fannie wore a tight red dress with her freckled tits hanging out. Bright gold rings on her long white fingers and a diamond-encrusted cross on her neck. She said she was in her twenties, but Hoyt guessed she’d been on God’s green earth at least thirty-five years. She had an upturned nose, a slight pug to it, and wide, painted-on eyebrows. You wouldn’t look twice at her face, but you’d give her body a good inspection.

She crossed her muscular legs and placed a hand on Hoyt’s knee.

“Do you mind?”

“Thought I’d say hello.”

“You’re sittin’ in Jimmie’s spot.”

Hoyt watched the little black man in the ring, the referee, pull the fighter to the side and look at his face and shake his head but then change his mind, as the crowd began to throw bottles into the ring, striking him and the fighter in the head. The referee reeled back, holding his bloodied temple, and the fighter staggered to the center of the ring. His trunks were now pink from the blood, and both eyes had closed so tight that Hoyt didn’t know how he could see.

“Jesus H. Christ Almighty.” Hoyt turned his eyes away.

“How’s tricks, Big Daddy?”

Hoyt looked to her.

“I like that shirt. You get that in Cuba?”

“Talk English, Fannie. What the fuck do you want?”

Fannie Belle uncrossed her legs, straightening out the dress from her ample – but not fat – ass, and turned to Hoyt, moving close to his ear like a lover, and whispered: “This thing is only gonna end in one way. And you boys can sit around with your dicks in your hands or we can hit this mess straight ahead.”

“You plan on attacking the National Guard?” Hoyt said, and raised an eyebrow. “You know they have tanks?”

“I have a plan, Big Daddy.”

“Shit, it’s over. Quit tossin’ your pussy around. This was a beaut while it lasted, but you’re out of your goddamn mind if you think you can do a thing about it.”

“If Patterson’s boy takes over, he’s gunning straight for us.”

“Well, get ready, because unless there is an actual Republican contender in Dixie he has the job. If I were you, I’d think about changing my address.”

Hoyt watched the woman’s eyes narrow. Her face was a flawless mask of coated white makeup as she played with the rings on her fingers.

“Be a hell of a thing if a couple of them cocky newsmen got killed,” Fannie said. “Or a few prissy-ass RBA boys. Sometimes you got to cut the nuts off a dog that gets too bold.”

“It’s over.”

Fannie Belle smiled, her teeth big and white and capped, a dab of lipstick across them that Hoyt thought for a second was blood. She stared at Hoyt a good thirty seconds and Hoyt stared right back.

“I heard you were a hell of a lay back when you worked the B-girl trade.”

“I could’ve fucked you cross-eyed, Hoyt.”

Hoyt laughed and popped open the shell of a boiled peanut. He grunted and smiled.

Jimmie sat back down moments later and handed his friend the jar of moonshine. He dabbed off some of the moonshine that wet his new seersucker suit and then wrinkled up his nose and turned to Hoyt: “Does something smell like rotten eggs around here?”

“Yeah,” Hoyt said. “That bitch wears evil like a perfume.”

THEY CAME FOR ME THAT NIGHT. I NEVER LEARNED WHO, but around four I found Thomas pulling on my arm and telling me that Santa Claus had come early. I pushed myself up from the bed as he repeated the news, and I listened, finally hearing what he’d heard, feet shifting and moving on the roof. It was still dark, and the crickets made music with the frogs in the creek.

Joyce switched on the bedside lamp, and I was already reaching into my closet for the Winchester I’d borrowed from my father-in-law. I cracked it open, checking the breech for shells, and snapped it back together with a sharp click.

I tried to steady my breath, blood racing through me, and nearly jumped five feet when Anne turned the corner from her bedroom. She was half awake and almost screamed when she saw the gun in my hand.

“It’s okay. It’s okay. There’s some kind of animal on the roof.”

“Are you going to kill it?”

I shook my head and steered her back to Joyce and Thomas. “I’ll be right back,” I said, forcing a smile. “It’s okay. Just a raccoon.”

It was hard to breathe, gunstock slick in my hands, as I walked to the kitchen door in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, hearing nothing but the air-conditioning unit humming away and dripping outside on the concrete platform.

I unlocked the door and pushed my way outside. The light a purplish black, the air conditioner even louder outside, the warm summer heat being sucked into my lungs as I walked backward in the yard and looked up to the chimney.

I saw the inky figure of a man.

I crept back.

He turned and looked to me, his face nothing but a shadow.

Without thinking, I pulled the trigger tighter and the shotgun hammered into my shoulder. I heard feet skidding and then a hard thud, and I raced around the side of the house, my face slick with sweat, blood flushing through my ears, and crossed the front of the house just in time to see the car door close to an old Pontiac with both brake lights busted. Two men in the front seats.

The Pontiac skidded out from my house, something flying loose and free from an open window.

I heard the laughter of the men as they turned quick down toward Crawford Road and disappeared.

I walked toward the road and stared down at a dead black puppy with a soft white chest. Its neck had been broken, but its eyes were open and glassy, staring out with hope.

As the sun broke over the backyard creek, I buried the animal, listening to every sound from the house, praying to God that my children wouldn’t wake up and see the dirt and blood on my hands.

“I DON’T KNOW ANY YOUNG GIRL WHO ANSWERS TO THAT name.”

“She lived here,” Billy said. “In the projects.”

“Where?”

“Never mind.”

“What does this girl look like?”

He stood across from the woman who hung laundry on wires stretched between two T-shaped metal posts. She’d placed a radio on the window, and it reported a storm coming in from Montgomery and then broke into some old-fashioned gospel music.

“She’s about my height,” Billy said. “Maybe a little shorter.”

He made a motion with the flat of his hand.

The clothes on the line, the beaten, worn denim and gingham print and large, old-woman drawers, picked up in a bright spot of wind and began to flutter like flags. He wiped his nose. The woman kept the wooden pins in her mouth, her silver hair breaking through the black like wire.

“Her hair’s black and her skin is real white. She cuts her hair across like this.” Billy worked his middle and index finger over his eyes like a pair of scissors.

“She have blue eyes?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Real blue? Kinda light?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And what is she calling herself?”

“Lorelei.”

The woman nodded and nodded, placing more old, fat-woman drawers on the line and a coverall suit and two threadbare dresses. She looked off to the west, shielding her eyes from the momentary white-hot streaks of sunshine breaking through the gray.

Some children played with a football in the narrow shot between the rows of cheap brick housing. They screamed and yelled. One of the boys called the other a damn cheater.

“I know the girl.”

His face broke into a smile. “Can you tell me where to find her?”

“I just heard where she worked, is all.”

The woman told him and he was off before she could ask or say more, and Billy followed Fourteenth Street up through a cavern of brick storefronts: the Riverside Café, Davis’s Pawn Shop, the Oyster Bar, Manhattan Café, Silver Dollar, Yarborough’s Café, Blue Bonnet, Boone’s, Haytag, the Coffee Pot, and the Golden Rule. The doors open and the joints empty, listless men standing outside and watching a boy running uphill from the river, weaving through the guardsmen strolling along with rifles strung across their backs.

On a quick turn, he made his way past Central High and more service stations and motor courts and cinder-block barbecue joints, and soon onto the road to Opelika, nearly stepping in front of an Army jeep that crossed his path, but he was moving now, breathing and pumping his legs, and finally slowing into a smooth curve and down past Kemp’s Drive-In and into a pocket of more joints and motels, and finally stopping just as the first spit of rain dampened the blacktop.

Rain dented the dust of the crushed-gravel lot of the old motel that he’d known immediately when the old woman said the place looked like the Alamo.

Only they didn’t call the old place the Alamo, even though it had probably been there since before they invented cars. The neon sign read CASA GRANDE. Rates hourly, nightly, weekly.

It started to rain harder, as if the whole bottom of the sky had dropped out, the sky darkening almost to night, and Billy found shelter under a crooked, long roof, leaning against the old stucco wall and catching his breath.

The walls of the Casa Grande were stucco, and the roofs of the main building, the one that looked like the Alamo, and the little cabins behind it were made of red tile. The place seemed like some kind of half-remembered dream to Billy, and as he walked down the rows of the little cabins, getting wet but not minding it, he tried to recall what picture show that this place seemed out of. He thought maybe the Lone Ranger, one of the serials, or maybe a Lash LaRue, but none of it seemed to make a lot of sense, as he found shelter again, all the doors closed, rain pounding hard on the roof. Only dim little pockets of lights from their front porches and that buzzing glow from the Casa Grande sign broke through the storm.

He sank to his haunches and pulled off one of his sneakers, draining the water from it. He unlaced the other shoe and then wrung out his socks. Billy sat there for a long while, scared that maybe the manager would come out and try to run him off, but when he looked into the little sign-in area there wasn’t a soul around.

Billy sat back down and waited, and it seemed an hour before the blue Buick rolled into the motor court and killed the lights. Not on sight, just from the sound, he knew it was his daddy’s car. And Reuben wasn’t the man who would whip him for getting lost for a while. In fact, he kind of half expected his kid to find something to do besides lay around the house at night. But Billy knew Reuben had come for him, maybe because of the rain, but maybe because someone had seen him running this way and maybe Reuben had been drinking. Really, the drinking was what caused the whipping, not the sin of not coming home.

But when the car opened, it wasn’t his father. It was Johnnie Benefield, with his thin, greasy hair and skull head and protruding teeth, wearing a loud pink cowboy shirt and carrying a bottle in a sack. He knocked on the second cabin from the road and a little light flicked on the tiny porch.

The door opened and out walked a girl, who pressed close to skinny ole Johnnie, raising up like a child on her tiptoes and locking her hands around his neck.

Billy’s breath caught in his throat, the rain falling harder.

He was soaked, walking through the rain without a thought, a car leaving the motor court sweeping its lights across his eyes, blinding him, and then readjusting as he walked to the little cabin. He wiped the light and water from his face, shoes soaking again and crunching on the gravel. The back of the Casa Grande loomed above the boy like a Hollywood set as he found the window, just one, with some dead shrubs planted underneath, stunted and brown.

He stood just a foot away and saw nothing, the sound of rain muffling all else. He watched the thin shadow of a man, and then the pink shirt fell away and he saw a small white hand on each side of Johnnie Benefield’s lower back with painted red nails almost like bloody talons.

And then the scene flipped, both figures framed in the window, and Billy tilted his head the way a dog does when hearing a high-pitched sound and none of what he saw seemed to register. There was a girl, with white skin, milk-colored, and that raven black hair. But it was older, all of it, the outfit, the hair. She wore it done and teased, her lips painted the same bloodred as her nails. Her eyes covered in thick, heavy eye shadow.

The only thing the same was how she smoked when she broke away from Johnnie, pulling a cigarette, teasing and delicate, from his big teeth and tucking it into her lips.

She smiled and cocked a coy finger at him as she sat on the edge of the bed, him walking over, opening her knees, and her reaching roughly for his western belt and unbuckling him.

The room was dark, maybe a small glow coming from the open door of the motel bath or maybe a table lamp. But it was enough to see, with Billy there in the darkness, the dim glow coming from the boxed window like a television set, standing there, the players blind to the audience. The rain coming down even faster now, blinding him, but he didn’t even care.

Johnnie Benefield was nude, back covered in spots of black hair and pimples. His back facing Billy, the little girl was on her knees, and Johnnie worked her head against him with his bony hands, head tilted back and wide teeth grinning.

He pushed her away, and she wobbled to her feet. Johnnie moved out of frame and then reappeared with a Jack Daniel’s bottle that he turned up and placed on the nightstand. With fumbling hands, he pulled her to him, her standing on the bed on her knees, and he pulled her from a black lace top and pushed her back with the solid flat of his hand to remove her matching dress. She lay there, head turned to Billy but not seeing anything but blackness and rain, in her underthings, which were quickly pulled away without much notice, her head still turned, mouth open, and eyes dead to the black panel.

Billy walked toward the window, rain dotting and sluicing down the glass, and put his hand on the frame. He breathed through his nose, eyes filled with more water mixing with the rain, the dull sound of breath and heartbeats in his ears feeling like his head was about to break open and his chest would explode.

Billy’s loose, aimless, and useless hand hung loose at his side.

Johnnie Benefield was on top of her now, Billy’s hand upon the glass, watching Lorelei’s eyes watching nothing. Her eyes reminded him of when he’d found his grandfather dead on the outhouse stoop when he was a child and how the old man seemed to be staring but the eyes didn’t have anything in them. It made him think that something truly lived in the body and left at the time of death, just like all those stories he’d heard in church or from Reuben when he got real drunk.

His hand held a connection on the glass, mouthing nothing in the rain, idiot words, speaking in a low, busted murmur.

Johnnie’s skinny body thrusted and pumped like a piston, up and down, up and down, his skinny white ass shaking in the low light, the slab of the girl’s perfect milk flesh beneath him.

Billy wondered if it hurt badly.

But Billy tilted his head again, moving his hand away from the glass of the Casa Grande motor court, because he saw nothing in her. She was just watching nothing, the monster pumping up and down and up and down and all of it, until he stopped and shuddered. And the girl worked her way from under him and stood there completely nude in that flood of bathroom light. Her makeup and hair a mess, but her body thin and long and perfect. It was the first time Billy had seen a woman. He’d seen girls by accident or swimming, but he knew now she was a woman from the way she’d stood and cocked her hip, lighting a cigarette and pulling in a deep drag, as if wanting the smoke to cleanse her.

She tilted her head back and knotted her long black hair behind her back.

She spotted something in the glass and turned her head and walked forward as Billy walked backward, the rain slowing to a steady pattering, his feet making noisy crunches from his sneakers.

And he walked as she peered outward, and he turned and broke into a straight-out run as far as he could go. Billy had no direction in mind.