Ace Atkins: Wicked City

Billy figured the crowd had to be on account of some cockamamie street brawl between a couple of GIs or some poor slob of a woman with her lip busted and some man crying and telling her he was sorry nearby. Growing up on the river, he’d seen it all before. But then he saw all the squad cars and the ambulance, and as he stepped out on the street a PC cop told him to get back on the curb just in time for the ambulance to pop into gear and slowly drive to Homer C. Cobb Memorial.

The girl watched as it passed and put her hand to her mouth.

They followed the street right into the thickest, tangled bunch of the crowd, elbowing their way through as only kids can do; the headlights and red lamps on the squad cars making old Fifth Avenue seem like Hollywood Boulevard.

A mess of Boy Scouts in their dress green outfits stood on the corner pointing at the motions of Chief Deputy Bert Fuller of the Russell County Sheriff’s Office.

Fuller squatted onto his fat haunches, his eyes following a thick mess of dried blood on the warm concrete by the windows of Seymour’s Ready-to-Wear Shop, rubbed his face, and motioned to a couple deputies.

Fuller wasn’t a tall man, but what he lacked in height he made up with girth. He walked through the town slow and deliberate in those tailored western clothes with snap buttons that some said he’d bought while stationed in Texas. Billy had never seen him without a hand-tooled gun rig – holding gold-plated pistols – and a Stetson hat.

He watched Fuller follow smaller drops that led back toward the Elite.

Fuller slipped his Stetson back on the back of his head and called out: “Would someone get me some cardboard to cover this fucking thing up?”

Many times Billy had seen Fuller at the Palace or the Strand or the Victory Drive-In, settled into his seat watching the cowboys on the big screen. He’d prop up his boots and munch on a sack of popcorn with that small, cruel mouth and peer at the screen with his beady brown eyes.

He looked straight at Billy, as if he’d been caught peeping into someone’s window. “Where’s your daddy at? Go on and pull at his pant leg about what you seen.”

Then Fuller’s gaze fell upon the girl with her pegged jeans and boy’s shirt and hair twisted into a ponytail and tied with a red bandanna. Fuller wet his lips and smiled, as if he was about to speak, his eyes wandering over her body and face as he stood there with all that activity around him, just breathing her in.

When Billy turned back, the girl – Lorelei – had disappeared.

BEFORE I MARRIED JOYCEand settled down in Phenix, I’d come to Columbus, Georgia, at the end of the Depression to make my way as a prizefighter. I was only a teenager, just old enough to leave the corn and cotton farm I’d grown up on outside Troy, Alabama, where I’d heard about Kid Weisz from boxing magazines. I knew he’d trained some of the top fellas like Corn Griffin, who was supposed to be heavyweight champ before getting upset by Jim Braddock in ’34. And I’d showed up at his sweaty hothouse brick gym with little more than a duffel bag, an old jump rope, and some dog-eared paperbacks with titles like Scientific Boxing by a Fistic Expert and The Sweet Science.

I was skinny and rangy, and my feet got tangled up about every time I sparred. But I lived in that gym every day and listened to old Weisz and his strange, loopy philosophies I still hear in my head about every morning in the shaving mirror: The world is largely made up of gropers, kid, little people who are always being pushed around by the natural bullies of society. But you got to remember that the gropers of this world are the real people. And that the bullies of the world are only the elements that make up the froth of society. They foam so freely that they necessarily come to the top more easily. But it’s the solid, substantial members of human society who remain below and grope to the top only on real, basic ability.

And he’d stop and look at me with that one clear eye, that cloudy one staring off dead in the distance, his ears jugged and cauliflowered, and pull me from what I was doing, on the speed bag or the heavy, and grab me by the thick of the forearm, so I could smell his coffee-tinged breath: Murphy, the gropers are those who want to learn. They are always grasping the means to find out ways of improving their lot.

When I came to the gym, I didn’t even own my own pair of gloves. I worked in the off-hours for my gear and training at the candy factory on the river and would emerge late at night smelling like burnt sugar and grease. I made my living with my fists in pickup bouts for the enjoyment of two-bit hustlers over the river in Phenix City – the same rings where they fought roosters and dogs – and soon in the legitimate ring, taking the Atlanta Golden Gloves in 1938. From there, I never thought it would end, boxing my way from New York to New Orleans and even down to Mexico City.

I bought new tailored suits and carried gobs of cash in a silver money clip, even being able to afford a nice little convertible that was a hell of a thing in the country on a spring day.

But then I met Joyce, and when we danced one night on my new nimble feet at a bandstand down on Moon Lake, the fighting didn’t seem as important. She worked as a beautician in Phenix City, was about the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. And unlike most of the girls you meet on the road who were with you until the booze and prize money ran out, she could’ve cared less about me being a fighter. In fact she hated it, and about the time the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor she asked me to please quit getting myself beat on, just like that, never acknowledging that the other fella was taking most of the beating.

Before Mr. Patterson was shot, I remember the rust-flecked mirror over the station commode becoming the boxing mirror – the place where all fighters must examine their every move and weakness – and I saw a man that had grown soft and old. At forty, I didn’t care for that feeling a bit.

I’d always been a groper.

WHEN THE PHONE RANG, I WAS HALF ASLEEP IN AN EASY chair, an empty bowl of peach ice cream in my lap, and watching television over the heads of my two children who lay on the floor, inches away from the screen. We’d just watched a show called Topper about a ghost couple and their ghost Saint Bernard who haunted an uptight banker. The kids liked it a lot anytime the ghost dog got into the banker’s booze, but now had grown a little bored and sleepy with Schlitz Playhouse of Stars , and that’s when I’d begun to doze after a long day of pumping gas and fixing engines.

Joyce walked into the room, drying her hands on a dish towel, and took a deep breath. Her face was white as she pointed me back to the kitchen.

I put down my spoon and followed. “Hugh Britton called. Mr. Patterson has been shot. They’ve taken him to the hospital.”

“My gun is in the nightstand.”

“I know where your gun is.”

“Keep it close.”

“I’ll lock the doors.”

The hospital was just up the hill from our little brick house, and I ran all the way through the fine, heated summer night. The little windows of the postwar cottages on the gentle slope glowed with soft light, and in the tiny square yards children played and grimy men drank beer and worked on cars. Women sat on stoops and smoked cigarettes in hair curlers, and I ran by them all up a curved drive, past all the cars and a few ambulances, and into the dull, attic heat of the hospital lobby.

I found John Patterson speaking to two doctors with a large gathering of newsmen and photographers. They popped off flashes from their boxed Rolleiflex cameras, John’s face sweating and dull eyes vacant in the quick strobes of light. They asked him questions about his father and the rackets and the reputed Phenix City Machine and he didn’t answer them, unblinking in the quick strobes, until I grabbed his elbow and steered him into a hallway, where he just stared down the long vacuum of tile and linoleum and nurses and doctors in antiseptic white.