Ace Atkins - Wicked City

“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.”