Ace Atkins - Infamous

The boy reached in the overalls’ flap and pulled out a cigar. He placed it into Charlie’s hands and asked if he’d like him to light her up. Charlie said, “Sure, why not?,” and so the boy struck a couple matches and waited until the cigar got going.

Charlie stretched his legs and took in the layout of the little shack, the small hogpen and chicken coop. He saw the old well with a bucket, and in the far distance, perhaps a mile, he saw the lights of another house.

“How does she smoke, Mr. Urschel?”

“Thank you just the same,” Charlie said. “But not my brand.”

The boy remained sullen all the way back into the shack, where he told Charlie to change into a pair of pajamas. Charlie got settled back against the wall where he could get chained up for the night.

“Just how much of a cut are you gettin’, son?”

THE TELEPHONE CALL WAS PLACED FROM A SINCLAIR OIL FILLING station just across the Canadian River bridge west of the city. Jones interviewed the proprietor of the station near midnight, and the man told him right quick that it had been a couple beggars from down in Hooverville who’d made the call, even bumming the nickel from a customer. The man gave him a fair description of the two, and Jones told Berenice Urschel to wait at the station or he could call an agent to pick her up.

“I want to go with you.”

“No, you don’t.”

“You bet I do,” she said. “I can pick him out.”

Jones looked away from the gas pumps toward the oil-drum fires burning among the lean-tos and clapboard shelters. You could smell the stink and shit and cook fires even through the cut of gasoline.

“I won’t have it.”

“Then I’ll go myself.”

Berenice Urschel was already halfway across the highway following a rutted road into the camp when Jones caught up with her. He didn’t say a word as they were swallowed into the wall-to-wall dwellings, women washing laundry in galvanized tubs, nursing babies, and cooking bottom-feeding fish across small fires. A latrine had been dug along the roadway that wound its way to the river where the chamber pots and rotten food had been dumped. The smell was something to behold, and Jones covered his face several times with a handkerchief he pulled from his shirt pocket.

Standing high on the hill, you could see the tin roofs-hundreds of them-gleaming silver in the full moon. The Canadian River moved slow and sluggish in the crook of the bend.

“They live like animals,” Berenice Urschel said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Jones said. “Every city’s got one.”

“I never read of this place.”

“Ain’t a good postcard for the Chamber.”

“Where do they come from?”

“The country,” he said. “Nowhere else to go, you head to the city, looking for work.”

“But women and children,” she said. “This just isn’t decent.”

“These days, it’s what we got.”

Jones followed Mrs. Urschel, who stumbled for a moment, holding on to some rusted sheet metal and making a big, clanging racket. A tall, skeletal figure appeared from the lean-to and thrust a sharpened stick at Jones. “Who is it?”

The boy’s eyes were the color of spoiled milk. Peach fuzz covered his upper lip.

“Looking for someone.”

“Who are you?”

“Just looking,” Jones said again.

The boy reached out and touched the soft cotton of Jones’s suit jacket and moved his fingers across the side where he kept the thumb buster. He stepped back, “You the law?”

“I’m the law.”

“You gonna burn us out again?”

“Just looking for a couple hustlers that took this woman’s money.”

“Wasn’t me.”

“Didn’t say it was.”

Berenice hadn’t said a word, fascinated by the young boy with the milky eyes. Almost in a trance, she glanced down to see her hand had been cut on the sheet metal, and she stared at it with awe as the drops ran down the length of her arm and twisted back to her elbow. Jones thrust the white handkerchief into her hand and clenched her fingers inward to make a fist.

“What happened?” she asked. “Where are your eyes?”

“These is my eyes,” the boy said. “Got caught in a duster. I seen it from forever. You just noticed a line of it, just a line of ink on paper, and then it got thicker and grew till you saw it as a flood. Daylight all ’round you. Birds started to get nervous, animals turning in circles.”

“You with your people?” Jones asked.

“Daddy’s gone to find work,” he said. “Mama’s dead.”

Jones nodded. “C’mon,” he said, Berenice standing still.

“I tried to make it back,” the boy said. “I thought we was in End-Times. I covered up my mouth with a rag, but my ears were plugged, and no matter how tight I shut my eyes that dang grit worked in there. Couldn’t hear nothin’. Couldn’t feel nothin’. I thought I was dead, laying there tasting the dirt, already buried and gone, and I wondered if this wadn’t what God had planned for us, that heaven wadn’t no reward but the taste of dirt and knowing it.”

“You’re fortunate to be alive,” Berenice Urschel said. “God’s will.”

“That storm wadn’t made by no God of mine.”

Jones knew these people, how they lived and scavenged. Only most of them he’d known were down in Juarez or Nuevo Laredo, people burned off their land and out of work, fighting over a pot of beans or milk from a goat. He’d seen human beings turned to pack animals during the Revolution, and this country was being torn apart in the same way, suffering plagues he’d only heard about in a sermon, wandering in the desert and searching for something solid to believe.

Berenice staggered for a moment, re-dressing her wound. And she focused on the boy, her expression righting on her face, determined, and saying, “Well, I don’t have any money.”

“I don’t need no money,” he said. “We got everything a man could need right here. Fish and loaves to feed us all.”

She touched his face, holding it within her hands adorned with jeweled rings and shiny bracelets. The jewels winked in the firelight, and Jones thought they’d be lucky if they got out of this shithole without a fight. But they walked on, down the sliding hill and toward the banks of the Canadian River, where a group of men stood around an oil-drum fire and sang old hobo songs and buck-danced. One man played a guitar, another a harmonica, the rest singing about the “ Big Rock Candy Mountain ” and having a hell of a time.

The men in tattered clothes had fashioned a grill from an oil drum and cooked fat T-bones above the flames while passing bottles of bonded whiskey back and forth between verses about your birthday coming around once a week and it being Christmas every day. The men, six of them, were so caught up in the drunkenness that they didn’t even see the lady and old man in a cowboy hat walk close to the firelight.

Berenice Urschel just stared at one, the one tipping back the bottle and high-stepping it, and nodded in recognition.

Jones nodded back and stepped close enough to the fire to feel the warmth on his face and to hear the hissing of fat dripping from the grill. The guitar stopped on a dime and the harmonica softly petered out. The men shuffled a bit and then circled around Jones. The man with the whiskey bottle ambled up to him and gritted what few teeth he had in his rotten hole of a mouth.

“Y’all living high on the hog,” Jones said. “T-bones and bourbon. Fine ole night in the Hooverville, ain’t it?”

“Who the hell are you?” the man asked, tipping back the whiskey bottle. He was unshaven, dressed in rags, with the breath of the dead. He polished off the bourbon, Adam’s apple sweaty and stubbled, bobbing up and down as he took the last swallow.