Ace Atkins - Wicked City

Black pushed them away, and I craned my neck up to the cathedral ceiling, streaks of light crisscrossing over the dirt floor and hay. As I moved back from the women and the wailing, I realized I was in the floor of an arena, wooden bleachers all around me. There were rooster cages filled with chicken shit at the edge of the wire arena, maybe fifty shiny new slot machines stacked in the center ring, and Black had already mounted the steps up into the loft, which squared the upstairs like the balcony in a theater.

I looked back over toward the door and in the beams of light, I saw twenty girls. Maybe thirty. They’d sat back down on hay bales or on their backsides, and they covered their eyes with their forearms. Some cried. The nude ones were covered in sweat and dirt and moved in and out of shadow with no more shame than an animal. They were so skinny, I could see all their ribs. Many of them looked to be children.

I walked back to the door and found a one-by-six to fit into a pair of brackets and keep anyone out. The barn was hot, a sweatbox down in the pit and even worse upstairs, where I found Black walking with hard thumps in his Army boots looking into little boxes that surrounded the arena.

Each one had a hutch door and was enclosed in chicken wire.

“Rabbit Farm,” he said.

“How long they been keeping those girls here?”

“Maybe since the Guard got here,” Black said. “I saw some tins on the floor and some empty buckets. They would be feeding them some.”

“I saw a girl down there that couldn’t be any more than twelve.”

Black’s face turned into shadow, not replying, as he walked from stall to stall. Each floor covered in a filthy mattress, smelling putrid and rotten, piss buckets on the floor and pie tins covered in mold.

In one, there was a woman in a fetal position. The smell was worse here. She wore a cotton print dress, a dress that reminded me of the ones my mother had made from catalog material she’d bought at a country store. Black turned over the woman with his boot, and she was gray in the face with a purple tongue.

We checked other stalls, and then Black bounded down the loft steps and walked into the center of the arena. He called all the girls to the center with him and they emerged into the brighter light, the crisscross patterns that made them look like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

“I know none of you have had anything to drink or eat in some time. But you hold on, we’re getting you out of here.”

I asked if any of them were named Sheila.

A girl walked toward us. She was a child, but not the child I’d seen earlier. She wore a filthy man’s shirt and clogged along in a pair of men’s wingtips that were three times larger than her feet. Her hair was matted with straw and her face was devoid of any expression. She just craned her neck at me and said: “They said you were coming.”

“Who?”

“The Clanton boys.”

“When did they say that?”

“Yesterday. They said they brought you here to kill you.”

AFTER MURPHY AND THAT GUARDSMAN WALKED INTO THE woods, an old woman with the face of a shriveled apple tried to use a mattock to pry Fuller loose from the D ring. The woman said her husband kept some bolt cutters and a hacksaw in his shed. And after giving up on the bolt cutters, she sawed right through the cuffs. Fuller worked circulation back into his wrists and hands and fingers, and asked the old woman for a gun. She went into the house and came back with a pistol, a six-shooter that looked like a Jesse James special, and Fuller checked the cylinder for ammo and realized he was loaded and ready.

“Where’re your boys?” Fuller asked.

“In the woods. They probably got them in the barn by now. Their paw-paw told ’em you wanted to be the one killed Murphy. He’s the bald fella, right?”

Fuller nodded and stripped out of his bathrobe, but kept on the pajamas and bedroom shoes, and moved through the woods on the path. The woman called it the hog path, and before he ducked into the woods Fuller asked what happened to the swine.

“We ate ’em.”

“Y’all do some good barbecue.”

“I could barbecue an ole dog and make her taste good.”

Fuller looked down at the mangy hound trotting alongside him and its skin-and-bones coat, some mange around the face and ears.

He soon came out of the path and into the clearing and saw the Clanton boys waiting up by a loading dock to the barn where Fuller had spent many a night watching the best roosters in Alabama tear each other a new asshole.

Both of the boys were short and so painfully white that they seemed to glow. One chewed tobacco and offered him his pouch. The other smoked a cigarette and leaned on a rifle. The whites of their eyes were yellow and the lids almost pink.

Fuller knew they never left the woods during the day, keeping the fire around those stills stoked and ready for the runners to move that ’shine all over the state and into Georgia.

Fuller pushed onto the door. It held.

He pushed again.

And then the two boys joined him, heaving and pushing, with fat and sinew and muscle, until they heard a pop and the great doors opened, flooding the dark, hot barn with a light that almost seemed biblical to Bert.

He pointed the gun into the arena, seeing nothing but the girls, and moved slowly under the loft rafters, where he heard a short click, almost sounding like a cricket. As he turned the corner, he felt a pop to his jaw so hard and quick he blacked out before losing his feet, his mouth bleeding, and realizing he’d just been smacked in the jaw by the stock of a gun, the big guardsman boot on his chest.

Those hillbilly Clanton boys now opened up to shoot with rebel yells.

I WAITED IN ONE OF THE STALLS, RIGHT BEHIND THE COOP door, and listened as two sets of feet bounded up the landing, the men speaking together in some kind of garbled countryspeak, seeming to divide and take each side, squaring the arena. The footsteps moved in closer to me on the slatted-wood floor. The sound was unmistakable, each step telegraphed before the next. Holding the gun, I found it tough to breathe but tried to keep my breath silent in the hot air.

There was the sound of opening and closing doors. They were checking each hutch, looking for me.

I relaxed my muscles and took in a breath. They were getting close.

FULLER GOT TO HIS FEET AND FELT HIS MOUTH, FEELING the swelling, and tasting the blood as he spit out two teeth. He wavered on his feet and moved through a group of girls, who screamed and seemed horrified by his presence and his looks, but he had no time for them as he walked to the center of the ring, circling the mass of silver slots, and called out for Murphy. “You goddamn coward, come out. Quit hiding. You gonna sneak up on me now?”

Behind him, the women retreated back into a dark corner, and Fuller smiled at that. He didn’t know who they were, but even in pajamas they sure as shit knew him and, for a moment, he felt good.

He spit on the red-dirt ground, covered in chicken shit and cigarette butts, and called out for Murphy again.

But he heard no answer from the coward.

ANOTHER HUTCH BANGED OPEN AND THEN SLAMMED SHUT, and I waited until he came into mine, my breath slow and even and controlled. A skinny boy, just a teen with glowing skin and recessed eyes, moved into the dark coop and turned to me.

I simply yanked the gun from his hand and knocked him on his ass with the back of my hand. The youth scrambled back onto a piss-stained mattress and screamed out, his mouth open with rotten teeth, and I grabbed the kid’s dirty white T-shirt and hauled him out of the coop, holding on to his neck.

I pulled the boy along, the.45 loose in my hand, my finger not even on the trigger.

As I turned the corner, there was the same boy – a mirror – this one in overalls and a slight bit older, with a rifle up to his shoulder and his eye, smiling a dirty, rotten smile, no shoes and no shirt.