Ace Atkins - Wicked City

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.