Ace Atkins - Wicked City

“Yes, sir.” Billy had seen the rotting, hard piece of leather hanging from a rusted nail in the smokehouse. He’d never understood why his father kept it there like some kind of trophy.

“I think the sonofabitch enjoyed it. Use to take me and my brother to the shed out yonder.”

“What’d you get at the store?”

“Be careful with those whores,” he said, ignoring the question and getting to his feet, dusting the dirt off his legs. “You know when I was your age, I was so horny I would’ve screwed a snake.”

Billy didn’t say anything.

“Pussy is good, son,” Reuben said. “But it can just about eat a man alive.”

His father reached into his pocket and pulled out a thick Case folding knife and handed it to him. “This was your granddaddy’s. Stick that in your cigar box.”

Billy opened the blade, the unoiled metal hard to pry with a thumbnail but finally coming loose and gleaming back the reflection of his eyes.

Reuben stayed there in the field for a while, and Billy walked back past the empty laundry line and dead peach trees and a rusting, tireless car. And he checked in the grocery bag, placing the bacon and eggs in the icebox and turning on their radio to listen to the late-night radio show out of Birmingham that played “Louisiana Hayride,” featuring Hank Snow and some kid from Memphis named Elvis.

Before he went to bed, the boy looked back out the kitchen window for Reuben but instead saw a massive, crackling fire from one of the old sheds. It was his grandfather’s smokehouse, and the fire inside had grown so hot the red paint crackled and flaked like a snake’s scales. He sprinted down and found Reuben, who didn’t seem fazed at all. He just stood there drinking, two-tone shirt open, with his face and chest shiny from the summertime fire.

He stepped back and wiped his face, black smudges crossed under his eyes and his chin. He laughed at himself.

Billy’s hands and voice shook as he screamed at him, telling him it was gonna burn down if they didn’t get some water. But he was invisible to his father.

“I always hated that fucking place,” Reuben said and threw his beer bottle at the building.

And he tripped and wandered back to the house, grabbed the keys to his baby blue Buick, and sped off into the Alabama night.

THAT SAME NIGHT, JOHN PATTERSON AND I CLOSED DOWN the Elite Café. We drank coffee down to the dregs and ate lemon icebox pie, having met right after dinner with our families. We smoked cigarettes and talked little except when joined by the cook, Ross Gibson, who’d just scraped off the grill and shut down. Gibson was an old, wiry man with gray hair in his ears and a grease-splattered apron and white T-shirt. He smoked a lot, tired after a long day’s work, and took a cup of coffee while I asked him about the night Albert Patterson had been shot in the alley beside the kitchen.

“I saw just one man,” Gibson said. “I went outside to get some air and I seen that one fella in the tan suit at the back of the alley.”

“And you didn’t recognize him?”

“No, sir.”

“You never saw him before?” I asked.

“No, sir.”

“What kind of tan suit? A uniform?”

“Naw, just a suit. You know. A Sunday suit.”

“How long until you heard the shots?”

“Couple minutes.”

“Would you recognize the man’s picture?”

“No, sir.”

“How come?”

“I didn’t get a good look at his face.”

“Was he a white man?”

“I couldn’t say.”

Gibson excused himself, and John Patterson pulled a notebook from his suit jacket and made a notation. He started to take another bite of pie but instead mashed the crust with his fork and pushed away the plate with a grunt. He just stared into space for a while and breathed.

“You know your mother gave Anne a kitten,” I said, just reaching for something in the silence. He leaned into the table and watched his hands. “Would you tell her thank you for us?”

Patterson nodded. “That old cat is always having kittens.”

“How’s your mother?”

Patterson shrugged and blew out a long breath. Ross Gibson walked to the front of the Elite and clicked off the neon OPEN sign.

“You know, there was a long black car parked just across the street,” Gibson said. “Now, that fella sittin’ at the wheel had to have seen somethin’.”

“You know the make?” I asked.

“It was dark.”

I laid down a couple dollars under the smoldering ashtray, and we left through the front door, passing by the long, vacuous stretch of alley in between the Elite and the Coulter Building.

The alley was quiet and warm, almost absorbing the sounds from the passing cars and our dress shoes. I stopped as Patterson walked into the alley. I didn’t feel it was my place, and knew there was little for John to do but to play back the killing of his father over and over like a broken projector.

A long mural advertising Coca-Cola had been painted on the side of the café. The sky above was broad and open and black, a ceiling lightly shining from a soft moon.

I stayed on the sidewalk and watched as Patterson found the spot where his father was shot and kneeled. He touched the warm asphalt and stood, turning his head slowly in each direction.

A patrol car roamed slow on Fifth and shone a spotlight down into the alley – we were frozen in its swath. The black-and-white looked as if it hadn’t been washed in ages, and craggy faces peered out from where windshield wipers had cleared away red dust.

Patterson looked into the light, blinded. I waved the men on. But the car stayed, the two cops conversed, and then it finally moved on down Fifth.

“Did you know about that car Gibson mentioned?” he asked.

“Lots of folks saw it. I think it was one of those long cars they made before the war. No one seems to know the make. Britton and I’ve been checking around, but we’re not getting too far.”

John and I walked together in the stretch of alley behind the Coulter Building – a long embankment filled with mulberry trees and scrub oak and long, twisted stretches of kudzu. We moved up and around the post office, just across the street from the county courthouse, and Patterson took off his jacket and held it in the crook of his arm.

He placed his right hand in his pocket. Even at night, the summer heat was tremendous.

“I make bad decisions when I’m mad.”

“Don’t doubt yourself.”

“Attorney general? I don’t have any business holding office.”

“And Si Garrett does?”

At Fourteenth Street, Patterson looked past the Confederate monument and up to the second floor; all the lights were dimmed. He then twisted his head back to the alley and bit into his cheek.

He nodded to himself.

“You’re sure, aren’t you?” I asked.

“I don’t have a doubt in my mind that Arch Ferrell is shielding the man who killed my father. He helped plan it and probably stood at that window in the courthouse, watching this very alley, probably took a drink after he knew it was done, and then rang off a long-distance connection with the attorney general for this state.”

I nodded. I opened and closed the fingers of my swelling hand.

“But knowing doesn’t give us much,” John said. “Fuller must’ve been invisible on a Friday night in Phenix City. Didn’t anyone see that sonofabitch run from that alley and back to his sheriff’s office or into a getaway car? He has this entire town scared shitless. They saw him. That cook saw him. I know there are others, but we can’t do a thing but sit and wait. I just hope the pressure works on that man’s rotten soul.”

ARCH FERRELL TOOK A SEAT AT BERT FULLER’S BEDSIDE AND waited for a chunky woman with blond hair to leave the room. The woman kept baby talking to Fuller as she finished shaving the left side of his face with a straight razor. She cooed and rubbed the fresh red skin – half his face still covered in lather – while he stared at the ceiling and spoke to Arch.