Ace Atkins - Wicked City

“Arch?”

“Did you see them?”

“Arch?”

He looked back at her, with labored breath, clutching his chest and still seeing the rounded shape of the Storm Trooper helmets. He pointed to his wife and opened his mouth, but nothing came out, and he walked into the bathroom and shut the door, running water so she could not hear the sound of him vomiting up a bottle of gin.

Twenty minutes later, he’d shaved and showered, his face and scalp feeling as if they could peel from his skull, as he fought to keep his car on the road and headed out of Seale and to the courthouse before first light.

He was the first in the Russell County Courthouse, as he’d always been in better days, and walked with dull, empty, cavernous footsteps to his office and unlocked his desk drawer, finding a revolver. He studied it for a moment in the darkness, only a thin stretch of fluorescent light from the hall, and then tucked it away.

In the bottom drawer, he found what he wanted. A flag folded in neat corners. And he clutched that flag to his chest, walking down the steps, at once feeling almost six feet tall, winding his way to the cool, damp lawn, listening to the sounds of the crickets and early-morning birds in the darkness.

He walked to the flagpole and hooked up the Stars and Stripes he’d carried with him from the depths of France to Germany and hoisted it high in the hot, windless air of the summer and stood and watched its flaccid droop, standing near the monument to the dead Confederate soldiers, some who fought the last battle of the Civil War on this very bluff, and he saluted until tears ran down his cheeks.

A little later, he grabbed coffee at the Elite and took it with him out the door, feeling the furtive stares of the truckers and contractors following him. He soon found refuge behind the pebbled glass of A. FERRELL COUNTY SOLICITOR and drank coffee and tried again to reach Si Garrett’s family. He spoke to a Democratic chairman named Frank Long for at least two minutes, but Frank had to go, and Arch tried some other important people he knew who were either not in or already in conference. So he lit a cigarette, no secretary in the anteroom, and no morning briefings with his staff. He just smoked in silence without the lights, staring up at the cracked ceiling and trying, just for a moment, to piece together his mind.

But there was a knock at the door, and he stood and quashed out the cigarette and found two guardsmen dressed in khakis with.45s clipped to their canvas belts asking if he was Archer Ferrell.

“Can’t you read the fucking door, you goddamn morons?”

They said they had orders for him to come to the city jail, where a warrant was issued.

“For what?”

“Sir, I hate to inform you that you’ve been indicted for vote fraud by the grand jury in Birmingham.”

“Well, if that doesn’t fuck all. One minute.”

“Sir?”

“I said, one goddamn minute.”

He slammed the pebbled-glass door in their faces and returned to the black phone on his desk, calling up the operator and calling direct for James E. Folsom, Big Jim. But Big Jim wasn’t in, according to that liar of a wife. And so he tried again for Si Garrett and only got the secretary again, who didn’t answer his question, only asked him if he’d read the papers.

He slammed down the phone so hard that it cracked.

He stood and paced. He lit a cigarette and looked back at the desk. He reached in the desk for a bottle of Jack Daniel’s that always waited in his bottom left drawer and as the guards began to grow furious and call out to him with pussy-sounding “sir” s he drained nearly three-quarters of the bottle and called out to them, “One fucking minute.”

He called Madeline. He was firm. He was angry.

He was sorry.

He cried.

And then the door opened and the guardsmen appeared with several of their friends and they didn’t say a word, only came at him from both sides of the big mahogany desk that had been in his family for nearly a century, and each one grabbed a forearm, yanking him to his feet.

Arch Ferrell reached out with a desperate hand for the black phone and grabbed the receiver and clocked the one with the bad teeth right in the ear, and then he hopped over his desk and ran, scooting down the hallway, his heart pounding in his ears, seeing shadows with helmets behind all the pebbled-glass doors of every office he passed. He finally turned, not remembering how to find the stairs, and ran right into the men, who braced him and grabbed him by the arms.

They marched Arch right out of the courthouse, and in a sloppy, half-lidded, lazy way he tried to remain high with dignity. His tie hung loose off his neck, his dress shirt pulled from his pants, trouser knees skidded and black.

And then as they approached the flag, he dug his heels in the ground, stopping the men, pulling a hand free and saluting to the “Communist States of America,” and then yelled, “Three cheers for Bert Fuller.”

Then he burst out laughing, half forgetting the punch line, before they loaded him into the back of the jeep and bolted him to the floor.

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY,” SHE SAID.

Billy sat up from the bunk’s mattress, yawned, and reached out for the covered plate Lorelei handed him.

“I couldn’t find any candles. You want me to light a match to stick in the frosting?”

“Where’d you get this?”

“The Elite.”

“You know it ain’t my birthday.”

“Says who? Birthdays always make you feel better.”

The boy smiled and shook his head.

“Do you feel older?”

“On account it’s not my birthday?”

“Yes.”

She sat at his feet while he peeled off the tinfoil and began to eat the chocolate cake with his fingers. They’d been together two days straight, never leaving Moon Lake, breaking into the little clapboard cabin on the opposite shore when it started to rain the other night.

She’d gone into town when they got hungry and brought back fried chicken and hamburgers from the park and small green bottles of Coca-Cola. Yesterday, she brought back a sack of comic books and magazines from the Phenix City Pharmacy, and Billy had spent the day on the bunk reading Superman and True Crime and Front Page Detective.

“Don’t you want to go outside?”

“Not really,” Billy said.

“You still feeling sick?”

“No.”

“We can’t stay here forever. Someone’s gonna kick us out.”

He shrugged and left half the cake for her. She refused, and then took it and ate the last bite, before resting her head on his lap.

The cabin was just a big bare room with two cots with rolled-up mattresses and a little kitchen with a skinny stove and sink. If you wanted to use the bathroom, you had to go to the community showers down near the boats.

Billy leaned back into the mattress, the springs squeaking as Lorelei joined him and lay on her back. She lit a cigarette, and they both stared at the ceiling, and he could feel the blood rushing into his chest and into his pecker when she moved against him. Her raven hair smelled like the roses on his granddaddy’s casket that had stunk up the front parlor of their house even after the old man was put in the ground.

“People are probably looking for me,” she said.

“What people?”

“Who do you think?”

Last night was the first time they’d kissed. When everyone had left the park and the lights had clicked off at the dock and along the shore, the moon slipping behind the clouds, they both undressed and swam quietly out into the lake. They swam away from each other, not leaving from the safety of the bank, and floated on their backs, him seeing her chest and other parts, and when he’d swim close she’d drift away with a laugh. The water was as warm as a bath, the light silvery on the pine needles, and when they finally found their stiff clothes and dressed, Billy turning away as she darted from the water to the shore, they kissed.