Ace Atkins - Wicked City

More Army boys passed her, and one bumped into her, slapping her little rump with the flat of his hand, and she hugged herself, because the dress was thin and the wind had kicked up on the bridge.

She walked back into the city, asking a girl in a dark corner if she’d heard of Mr. Fuller, and the woman looked at her, smoking a cigarette, almost looking through her, and said: “No.”

But there was something about the no that made her keep walking, and she soon left the neon lights and bars and music and service boys and followed the train tracks. There were train tracks near her house, and she figured if she kept walking maybe she’d make it back home before morning and maybe her father would not take her to the smokehouse and beat her with the horsewhip.

The houses were rickety and old, with broken wood porches where negroes sat and drank whiskey and smoked cigarettes and called out to her or just laughed and pointed. She could only see the rocky track. Then she heard a train and wandered off the railroad and right into the path of a car that skidded to a stop and honked its horn. She’d fallen to her butt and stared into white, hot headlights and searched into them before there was the sound of a siren and red lights and the voice of a man.

“You lookin’ for me, doll?”

They kept her in jail all night. It wasn’t till the next morning that Deputy Bert Fuller watched while a guard unlocked the door of her cell and let him inside. He stood smiling at her with a steaming cup of coffee in his hand while she waited on the bunk with her nervous legs kicking back and forth. He opened the front pocket of his uniform and offered her a stick of gum. She shook her head and looked down at the dirty concrete floor and the corroded drain.

“Oh, come on, baby,” he said. “It don’t have to be like that.”

She looked up.

“You just can’t walk the streets like this is Podunk, Alabama,” he said. “This here is Phenix City. You got to have somewhere to go.”

Her eyes met his.

“You got somewhere to go?”

“I thought I did.”

“How’s that?”

She shrugged.

“You got somewhere to stay?”

“Naw.”

“Money?”

“Naw.”

“Little girl, I do believe you are in a pickle,” he said. He made a tsk-tsk sound with his tongue and slurped his hot coffee, and it must have burned his tongue because he kicked back his head and some of it stained the front of his shirt.

He came back an hour later with an old man, a much older man but just as fat and fleshy as Deputy Bert Fuller. The man wore a pin-striped suit and had thinning hair that he’d dyed red and oiled tight to his freckled skull. He smelled like burnt onions and old fish, and he walked to the girl on the bunk and held up her face and, when she turned away, plunked his fingers deep into her mouth, jabbing around for her teeth.

“Strip,” he said.

She looked at Bert Fuller, and Fuller just smiled, a tan uniform hugging his pear-shaped body, those golden six-shooters at his sides. He shrugged.

She twisted her head from side to side. “No.”

“Strip, you country thing,” the old, smelly man said and yanked her to her feet and tore the borrowed dress from her body and with dirty fingernails clawed at her cotton underthings until it was all in a heap by the floor and she was left crawling like a pig in a trough down by the corroded drain, trying to pull the rags together and cover her embarrassingly developed breasts.

“She’ll do,” the old man said.

“Okay,” Fuller said. “Here’s the deal, girlie. You can either stay here and wait a week to see the judge about what you were doing out there, selling yourself like some kind of Jez-bel, or you can come with me, ride into Columbus, and we can get rid of those pieces of cloth you call clothes and go shopping at Kirven’s, and let me feed you a steak dinner at Black Angus. You’ll need some perfume, too.”

From the floor, she looked up at him.

“I didn’t do nothin’ wrong.”

“’Course you did,” Fuller said. “In Phenix City, whorin’ is a crime. Ain’t it, Mr. Red?”

He just smiled a rotten row of teeth.

The girl began to cry.

“Mr. Red, I do believe a decision has been made.”

The man opened up a wooden box while Fuller ran an electric cord into the hall and a little needle attached to a blue vial began to pump and buzz. “Hold ’er down, Bert. Shit, she looks to be a wildcat to me.”

And Fuller let out some air, rolled up his sleeves, and pinned the girl’s arms to the concrete floor with his fat hands until she screamed, as the old man squatted with creaking knees, opened up her bottom lip, and began to write inside her mouth.

WHEN SHE STOPPED, SHE ROLLED DOWN HER BOTTOM LIP and showed him the mark 618 tattooed in blue ink. And when she tried to tell Billy about other things, things that happened later, he’d stop her, feeling sick deep within his stomach.

“Why don’t we just leave here?” Billy said. “Run away?”

“We don’t have no money.”

“I can get money.”

She pulled away from him and rolled on her side, facing the wall.

He put his hand on her shoulder and started to talk about moving out to Hollywood, where they could work in the picture business or pick oranges or sell ice cream at the beach. He got so excited about all the plans, he could already feel the Greyhound ticket in his hand and almost didn’t notice she was crying. Billy moved his hand from her shoulder and just listened.

The calliope music was going strong up at Idle Hour, and they could hear the kids laughing and screaming and splashing up by the pool. The shades were drawn, but he could feel the heat from the window and knew the sun was shining.

“I’ll go outside,” Billy said and ran a finger along the window and looked at the black dust. “I’m really feeling better.”

“Sometimes I just wish this whole rotten town would burn to the ground.”

He rolled off the bed and found his shoes. He looked out the window up on the hill and saw a young boy about his age crawling up a tall ladder, the contraption looking loose and rickety like something fashioned from an Erector set. The boy got to the top and walked to the end of the diving board before giving the thumbs-up to his buddies below and launching into a perfect cannonball.

He let his shoes fall to the floor with a thud, lying back into the bed, back and butt finding the safe, soft curves of Lorelei. He felt the rise and fall of her chest, her raven hair on his neck and over his eyes, and, before long, Billy fell into a perfect sleep.

BILLY WOKEfrom an afternoon nap with a hot, bright light in his eyes, as if looking directly into the sun. He swatted at the light, blinked, felt a big hand grip his wrist, and stared straight up into the jowly face of Bert Fuller. Fuller yanked him out of bed and threw him to the floor and then he reached into the bed for Lorelei, who was dressed only in the boy’s white undershirt and her underwear. He wrenched her wrist, pulling her from the mattress, and twisted her arm behind her, forcing her nose to the floor, where he kicked her in the side like a dog. The flashlight fell from his hands in his fury of kicks and punches and the light went scattering in circles on the wooden floor. Billy reached for the scattering light, but, as he moved, Fuller let go of the girl and went for him, kicking the boy in the head and sending him reeling, tumbling up and then backward, knocking him against the wall.