Ace Atkins: Wicked City

I stood back and smiled.

It wasn’t unusual for the neighborhood boys to ride their bikes over and watch with amazement as my little girl would work the bag with a right and left, keeping that steady, unmistakable rhythm I’d known from Kid Weisz’s gym during the Depression, when a hot cup of coffee and a donut was a feast.

Soon, Joyce called us inside and fussed at me for letting Anne run outside in her pj’s, the cuffs dusty with rich red mud, but she laughed as Anne continued mock punches, and Thomas woke up, only six, working a fist only to pull the sleep from his eyes. We sat down to a plate of ham and eggs and biscuits and grits and we said a prayer to our Lord and Savior and ate, Joyce refilling my cup when I returned to the kitchen from the bedroom, already dressed in my Texaco coveralls, ready for a day’s work at Slocumb’s – the filling station I co-owned with Joyce’s dad.

“Thomas is chewing with his mouth open,” Anne said.

Thomas smiled and chewed even wider with his eyes crossed.

“You want more coffee, Lamar?” Joyce asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I put your shoes outside, you had grease and mud all over them,” she said. “And would you mind, please, emptying out the ashtrays when you’re finished?”

“What would I do without you?”

“Nothing,” Joyce said and winked, and soon I was off, with a lunch pail rounded and red like a construction worker’s, and I followed a worn, smooth trail back behind our house and by the speed and heavy bags and through a thicket of brush, over the step of one, two, three flat stones in a little creek and then down a short stretch of smooth path and I was out behind Slocumb’s, unlocking the back door and cutting on the lights and opening up the front door for Arthur, a negro who pumped gas and cleaned windshields and had been my friend for some time.

Arthur didn’t say much, just turned over the OPEN sign as I made some coffee and loaded up the cash drawer in the register. I turned on the radio and began to hum along with some old swing stuff, music that brought back memories of being newly married at the start of the war, and Joyce and I taking everything we owned down to Eglin Airfield in Florida, where I worked as an airplane mechanic until ’46. My memories were still fresh of how the test planes could roll and crash and burn and I’d be left to pull out the bodies from the wreckage and try to make sense with what had gone wrong.

“You making the coffee?” Arthur asked. He was dressed in similar green Texaco coveralls.

“That’s what it looks like.”

“Hmm.”

“What do you mean, hmm?”

“I just wish Joyce would’ve been here is all. You ain’t one for cooking.”

“Coffee ain’t cooking.”

“And grits ain’t groceries,” Arthur said. He walked outside, ignoring the slurping pot, and stood by the big pumps waiting for their first customers to come rolling on in.

I whistled along to Harry James’s trumpet on the radio and, even as the first customer rolled under the tin overhang, kept on with the old tune “I’ve Heard That Song Before.”

The car was a two-tone tan-and-white Oldsmobile Rocket 88, and I knew the car before the engine even died and the man walked around and checked out the day just coming on from down east along the river, the morning shadows growing long and thin, almost disappearing into the harder light.

He was a tall, thin man with white hair and round spectacles. As he had stood, he used the door frame and placed the rubber tip of a wooden cane on the ground, smiling and limping his way to me with the steady clog, clog, clog of his heavy, specially fitted shoe.

“Mr. Patterson,” I said and shook his hand. “You headed somewhere?”

“Montgomery,” Patterson said, smoothing the lapels of his suit and shifting off the leg that he’d nearly lost in the First World War in the cold no-man’s-land of St. Etienne. “Promised a friend that I’d be at a hearing.”

I started to pump his gas. Usually Arthur did the pumping, unless we got really busy or there was someone special I wanted to talk to.

The light seemed to shift and grow in only seconds and covered Mr. Patterson’s soft, old features in a nice gold light. He smiled at me, as I checked the tires, and looked down Crawford Road toward the business district of Phenix City – an area where he worked but despised – and then back down the road toward the west and the capital of Montgomery, where he’d be headed next year to become the next attorney general of this state.

“I don’t know if I’ve told you this,” Patterson said, “but I sure appreciate all the support of you and all the boys. I couldn’t have done this without you.”

For the last two years, I’d been a member of an anti-vice group – the Russell County Betterment Association – that Mr. Patterson had helped found.

“I think you would have done fine.”

“I’ll need you even more in the coming months, Lamar.”

“How’s that?”

“Things will get worse before they get better.”

I smiled. “Don’t think they could get much worse,” I said and hung up the nozzle and noted the price. I asked Patterson to open his hood and I checked the oil.

“How’s this engine treatin’ you? I bet she really can open up on the highway.”

Patterson stood behind me and said in a low voice, almost a whisper: “They’re coming for me, Lamar. I think I have a one-in-ten chance of ever taking office.”

I stood, feeling ice along my neck, and wiped the dipstick on a dirty rag. The oil was clean and full, and I replaced the stick and closed the hood with a tight snap. Mr. Patterson gave a small, wan smile.

I shook my head. “Don’t talk that way. We got ’em.”

“A cheater never lets you win.”

Patterson clasped my hand and then reached into his pocket for a couple of dollars before getting back into the Rocket 88, climbing the hill, and then turning out of sight toward the west.

EARLIER THAT DAY, BILLY STOKES HEADED DOWN TO FOURTEENTH Street to turn in a sack of dimes and quarters after selling a mess of Bug tickets to some poor blacks down by the railroad. The Bug was a lottery they’d been running in town since forever, and during the summer when he was out of school he got paid five dollars by his daddy to make the Friday run. Most every house in Niggertown bought the tickets, just like some kind of religious event. Old women even bought dream books to turn what they’d seen in their heads into lucky numbers. Billy sure needed that five dollars; he’d promised to take a girl he’d just met to a picture show down at the Palace Theater.

He’d spent his last dollar on a Bug ticket himself, hoping his numbers would come out in the morning paper from numbers on the New York Stock Exchange.

Billy hadn’t seen his daddy, Reuben, since Wednesday, which wasn’t that unusual because, sometimes, he’d take off for days and return either red-eyed and sore and grumpy or dressed in a new suit with ruby cuff links and spreading out money on the table of their old house that he knew would be gone by week’s end.

He pushed his red Schwinn down the slope of Fourteenth Street, looking down to the old muddy river and between the cavern of clip joints and honky-tonks that had just started to heat up on an early Friday night. It was twilight, and the neon signs started to flicker, advertising exotic women and games of chance. THE SILVER SLIPPER. THE GOLDEN RULE. There was laughter and bawdy saxophone music, and the soft green and red and blue neon seemed almost magical on that summer night as he passed GIs drinking straight from bottles of Jack Daniel’s and friendly, plump whores who would smile at him or pat him on the head as he passed by, either because they thought it was funny to see a kid down here or because they knew Billy was Reuben Stokes’s boy.