Ace Atkins - Wicked City

“But she met up with some fella and she fell in love, but it turned out he wasn’t doing nothin’ but tryin’ to turn her out. I heard he worked her out of some motels over on Crawford Road, and when he’d gotten what he wanted he cut her loose, sold her off to this Rabbit Farm, and then left town.”

I put up a hand.

“What do you mean ‘sold’?”

Lorelei didn’t change expression, just looked at me level with her clear blue eyes and said, “Sold. Just like I said.”

“Who was the man?”

“That fella who was in the papers. The one who got killed, Ernest Youngblood.”

I looked over to Jack Black and he adjusted the blinds, letting in a sliver of light and causing Lorelei to put a hand up over her eyes with the flat of her hand.

“Deputy Fuller knowed the place,” she said. “Sheila should be sixteen now.”

Black was smoking, and his exhaling breath and the light behind him obscured his face.

JACK BLACK DROVE AND FULLER SAT IN BACK, TALKING about what he’d learned in his years of police work and how it all had brought him to God. He said he’d been offered five hundred dollars to tell his story to the Saturday Evening Post, but when he turned in his handwritten notes they never called him back. He said they only wanted sensational details about sex in a modern-day Sodom and nothing about his conversion.

“I told them I seen a blue light that day in church. You were there, Lamar. You know it.”

“You mind turning up the radio?” I asked Jack.

Black turned on a Montgomery station and I hung my arm out the window. We drove a brand-new Chevy, flat black, with no official markings. That’s the way I wanted it, and figured on keeping it that way for some time.

Still not out on bond – we heard Papa Clark and Godwin Davis were out collecting signatures and cash – Fuller was dressed in pajamas and a bathrobe. He smoked cigarettes and talked a little about his aching back and shifted in his seat, looking to find some comfort. He said he had broken two vertebrae.

I pointed out a country crossroads store and Jack slowed down and stopped while I asked a man about a place called the Rabbit Farm. He looked at us and then Fuller in the backseat. The man took a breath, nervous, and shook his head.

“Who would know?” I asked.

He shrugged, from where he sat atop of an old bucket. He scratched his neck and spit.

I got out and showed him my badge. It was the first time I’d done it.

Black drove the car out of earshot, and I spoke to the man a little about the weather and the heat and how we expected a bad cotton harvest. I then looked over at the car and back at the man and told him that Fuller didn’t work for me and didn’t have a clue what we were talking about.

The man muttered the name Clanton and wandered off. I got back in the car and told Black to keep driving.

Jack rolled on, the countryside dry, yellow, and harsh. It hadn’t rained in weeks, not since the night the Guard took over. As we drove, the radio station broadcasted the latest news: The president of Brazil commits suicide. The Lone Ranger broadcasts final radio episode after twenty-one years.

“Gosh dang,” Fuller said. “I love the Lone Ranger. They ain’t a thing on radio no more. No heroes.”

We bought a Coca-Cola at another filling station down the road, and the woman who worked there knew me and she told me that she knew Clanton. She said he had a farm five miles down the road we just crossed. I thanked her, and brought Coca-Colas out to Jack and Fuller, and Jack doubled back.

“Your memory coming back to you, Bert?”

“No, sir.”

But as I pointed out the turn and Black hit a straightaway bordered by a long barbed-wire fence on cedar posts, Fuller looked as if he’d swallowed his tongue. We passed loose groups of cows lying in shallow, drying mud pits and under large, lone pecan and oak trees, swatting flies with their tails and trying to escape the heat.

Down the road, a little single-story white frame house came into view, and Black turned in to the dirt drive. He had to slow down at the mailbox, on account of a group of guineas that wouldn’t move out of the road, and a skinny hound bayed and wailed as we circled to the front porch and killed the engine.

I knocked on the screen door, the door open into a shallow little hall. Junk spilled from the front door out onto the porch and into the front yard and driveway. Old washboards and bed frames, engine parts, rocking chairs, and piles of garbage.

I heard the chugging of a tractor nearby but didn’t see one. Black walked around the building and came back to the front porch, a man appearing from the far side of the property in overalls, no shirt, and work boots. He had dark circles under his eyes and didn’t look like he’d bathed in some time.

Black leaned against the spotless black Chevy and smoked. He nodded to me and I walked over to the man, not offering my hand but slow and confident.

“Mr. Clanton?”

He nodded. He was a hard country man, with brown parched skin and gold teeth. He wore an oversized straw hat and black-framed glasses. One of his eyes seemed a little crossed, or it could have been because of the light magnifying in the lens. Either way, it was damn hard to figure out which one to look at while you spoke.

I introduced myself, deciding to go with the left, and Black asked him what he did out here.

“Farm.”

“You do any other business, doc?”

“No, sir.”

“You ever rent your place out?”

He tilted his head at me, his stubble beard a stark white, and made a face like something stank. Then he looked to the backseat at Bert Fuller and his face changed, and he smiled and said, “Hey, Bert. I ain’t seen you in a coon’s age.”

Fuller didn’t say a word, just turned to look across the road at the fields and pretended not to hear.

CLANTON STAYED ON THE ROTTED JUNK PORCH AND SPOKE to Fuller, who we kept chained to a D ring in the backseat. The window was down, and after Clanton talked to him about what the drought did to his watermelons he asked Fuller to join him on the porch but Fuller said he was doing A-OK in the car. There was a chattering up in a chinaberry tree, and a small monkey skittered out from the branches, scratching himself and twirling a rock in his hands before dropping it hard.

“That little sonofabitch is Wilbur,” Clanton said. “Bought him off an Army sergeant who got him overseas.”

Clanton moved over to the tree, and, despite the chain, the monkey jumped up onto his back and took a spot on the old man’s shoulder. As Clanton spoke to the monkey, the monkey seemed to take on the exact same facial expressions as the old man.

I traded looks with Black, and the monkey noticed and stuck out his tongue.

“I think he wants you to give him a penny,” Clanton said.

“I don’t have any change,” I said.

The monkey ran off Clanton’s back and toward me, and Clanton yanked him back to the ground. “You got to be careful – you don’t give him a penny, and he’ll piss on your head.”

Clanton let the monkey go and went back to his failing front porch, sitting down on the steps and rolling a forearm across his brow. As we walked around the house, I heard Bert Fuller start a conversation with the old man.

“Mr. Clanton, may I ask you a personal question?”

“Sure, Bert.”

“How is your relationship with Jesus Christ?”

Almost out of earshot and around the bend, we heard Clanton respond, “I don’t know, Bert. ’Spec same as yours.”

We found a small shed out back where Clanton kept his tractor and feed, some spare parts, and a couple of discs that looked like they’d last been pulled by mules. He had some tanks of gasoline and little drums of oil. There was a workbench and a vise, and some files laid out from where he’d been sharpening a scythe.