Ace Atkins: Wicked City

It was a hot night, as most summer nights in Alabama, but it hadn’t rained in weeks, and the asphalt and concrete seemed to absorb the sun and radiate with the heat, making the wind seem like a fan off a stove. His Rocket 88 waited in a slot in the narrow alley between the Elite and the Coulter Building. Patterson rounded the corner, his right hand in his right pocket reaching for the keys, the sounds of Phenix City like a carnival midway in the distance, when he saw the shadows, the shapes of the men, heading into the alley.

Patterson opened his car door, sat down in the driver’s seat, and pulled his leg in after him. The men called out to him in the darkness and he turned.

Three shots were heard cracking in echo through the little downtown.

Moments later, Albert L. Patterson walked from the alley, staggering and shuffling without a cane for the first time in more than thirty years, with a couple teens pointing at him from across the street, snickering and saying that man was drunk as hell.

And Patterson walked more, a struggling, dignified shuffle step and another, robotic and forced as a drunk trying to convince himself of being sober, his face blank and unseeing, with steps growing shorter and shorter, until he fell to his knees, out of juice, batteries drained, and then pitched forward on the heated concrete.

He fell to his face, shattering his glasses, a hot, wet stain spreading under him, and soon heard a boy’s question: “Who did this to you? Who shot you, Mr. Patterson?”

But instead of a helping hand, Patterson saw the branch of a pear tree and the buzzing of bees jumping from bloom to bloom. He tried to explain this to the voices he heard, but instead of words blood flowed from his mouth.

IDLE HOUR PARK WAS QUITE A PLACE IN THE SUMMERTIME after school let out. You could take a boat ride down at Moon Lake or swim in this big pool – nicknamed the Polio Hole – and there was an arcade and a bowling alley and a roller-skating rink. Idle Hour even had a two-bit zoo, where they had a skinny, mangy lion and a half-dead bear that slept almost all day on a concrete slab unless you nailed him on the head with a pebble. They had a big iron cage full of monkeys that chattered and swung from old tires, and on the real hot days they’d jump and yell, and the males would get close to the bars and would look you in the eye while they masturbated like they were trying to pull the damn thing off.

But at fourteen, Billy had grown bored with the zoo and preferred watching girls out on the bandstand along with his buddy Mario. The boys didn’t have to say much, they’d just see a girl walk by in a nice summer dress and one of them would look to the other and raise his eyebrows. If she was really cute, Mario would pretend he’d just burned his hand on a stove. And if she beat that, Billy would act like someone had punched him in the stomach and roll to the ground.

They did this for a long time that night, until the conversation shifted pretty quickly to monsters from Mars, and Mario said there was absolutely scientific proof that other planets held horrors the government didn’t want the public to know about. Billy said that was a goddamn fool thing to say, but Mario held his ground until a cute little blonde with an upturned nose and tanned legs walked by and then it was his time to get punched in the stomach and roll to the ground.

When he returned to the bench where they sat, Billy said: “That don’t make no sense.”

“Sure it does,” Mario said. “I saw it on Tales of Tomorrow. We just bought us a TV. You can watch it if you like.”

“How does your mom afford all that stuff?”

“She’s a nurse. She makes a lot of money.”

And the silence just kind of hung there, because both of them knew Mario’s mother worked under the stage name Betsy Ann and that, on several occasions, Billy had lingered outside the Bama Club on Dillingham just to see a naked black-and-white photo of her, not in overalls or sloppy men’s shirts the way she looked in the apartment she shared with a redneck mill worker named George but made up like a Hollywood star in cowboy boots and a leather belt and stars pasted across her boobs.

“You wanna go back to the zoo?” Mario asked.

“I’m all right.”

“I don’t think she’s gonna show.”

“To hell with you.”

Billy still had a few dimes left, and, alone, he walked into the sweet air-conditioning of the roller rink and punched in some of his favorites on the jukebox. More Hit Parade. He tried out some Eddie Fisher and Tony Bennett, and “Come On-A My House” by Rosemary Clooney.

That’s when he heard her call his name.

Lorelei.

Billy smiled, his face turning red, and his voice shook as he said hello.

“Where you been?” she asked.

“Nowhere.”

She was cute in her boy’s western shirt, high-water blue jeans, and saddle oxford shoes. She wore her black hair up in a ponytail; her bangs had grown longer since he’d last seen her and shadowed a good bit of her blue eyes. She didn’t have makeup on or anything like that.

“I wasn’t waitin’ around or nothin’.”

“I had to go home and change,” she said. “I’d been at the pool and had to put on something dry.”

And, man, that was a hell of a thing to say to a teenage boy, because the thought of Lorelei in a wet bathing suit – something Billy could imagine a great deal and had – was perhaps just too much for him to take. Her pale skin had a red, healthy flush to it, and she smelled like sunshine.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

“Nothin’.”

“Well, your face is turning funny colors.”

“No, it’s not.”

The corny organ music came from over in the skating rink, and they heard people clapping in time with it.

“You want a shake?”

“I just had one.”

“I’ll buy,” she said.

“Sure.”

He’d met Lorelei just a few weeks before school had let out, over on the Upper Bridge from Columbus, and helped her carry a sack of groceries home. Billy figured her for the daughter of a mill worker – a Linthead, is what they called them – and they ended up talking till it grew dark out back of the Riverview Apartments, nothing but government housing, smoking cigarettes on a swing set. He’d never felt more comfortable with a girl in his entire life and finally got up enough nerve to ask her to a picture show at the Broadway.

“I went to that house where you were staying last week,” he said.

“We don’t live in the Riverview no more.”

“Where do you live?”

“My folks’ over in Bibb City,” she said. “Got some good mill jobs.”

“How ’bout you?”

“I’m over there some, too,” she said.

“You gonna go back to school?”

“Not now,” she said, rolling her eyes and pulling the straw from the shake. She sucked out the frozen bit of shake and tucked it back into the glass. “It’s summertime, dummy. It’s all as cool as a breeze. You ain’t supposed to do nothin’ now but swim and skate and not worry about a thing.”

Billy looked at her and rolled up the white T-shirt over his skinny bicep and wished he’d had a pack of cigarettes to tuck inside.

“What movie we going to see?” she asked.

“Hondo,” he said.

“What’s it about?”

“Apaches.”

“I like Apaches,” she said.

IT WASN’T LONG UNTIL BILLY AND THE GIRL SAT IN THE cool air-conditioning of the Palace Theater watching Hondo, Wayne playing a cavalry rider protecting a woman and her son from some Apaches. There was never any question if Wayne would get the woman or if he wouldn’t whip some Apache ass. They were no match for Wayne armed with a rifle he could work with one hand. It was a good picture, and Billy’s head was still kind of in it as they milled through the crowd down by the Elite, the girl at his side, watching the world through the 3-D glasses he refused to take off.