Ace Atkins - Wicked City

Before he knew it, he was in Louisiana, with New Orleans seeming like a dream. In the roughneck town of Morgan City, he stopped for a piss again and found himself in a vile, filthy bathroom puking in a dirty toilet, and when he washed his face in the lavatory he had no idea why his nerves had acted up.

He bought a Coca-Cola and a piece of fried chicken to settle himself, pumping gas, and moving on over the bayou in New Iberia and Lafayette. It all was a storybook down there, with the wildness of it all and all the little waterways and clapboard shacks and sunburned people with sharp eyes who seemed to see something in the man with the Alabama plates that made them stare. Hell, he wasn’t even tired by the time he hit the Texas line and Port Arthur by Sabine Lake and hugged the lapping green waves of the Gulf, feeling stifled and hot and sweaty even though the windows were down, the Gulf and Texas bringing him nothing but humidity and hellfire gospels and twangy country music on the radio.

He knew that if he was caught, they’d revoke his bond, but he was sick of just sitting on the couch smoking cigarettes and drinking Jim Beam and watching The Lone Ranger and the Adventures of Superman on television with his daughter. And Madeline not talking to him, lying next to him at night, wide awake with worry because she just knew he’d killed Mr. Patterson even though he’d sworn he had nothing to do with it.

When he got near Galveston, he found a city park to change into a seersucker suit and black shoes. He mopped his face with a fresh handkerchief the whole ride out onto Galveston Island, listening to a sermon about the dangers of vanity and how even the slightest bit could invite the devil for dinner in your very home. The man said it as if the devil was a little red man in a red satin suit who could pass you the peas.

Arch found a circular drive winding its way to a grand old Victorian with a big wide porch where people in white spoke to each other from rocking chairs and played chess and cards. It looked like a postcard of heaven.

There was a nurse and then a doctor and then another nurse, and then finally they brought him out back to a soft little garden under two big oaks, a fine view facing the Gulf. A group of five or six people played croquet, and they laughed and cheered with each other, in their short pants and knit shirts, and, to Arch, they didn’t seem to be all that crazy.

He took off his coat and sat by the fountain under the canopy of oak arms with curtains of Spanish moss. He unbuttoned his tie and lit a cigarette, the aftereffects of the booze from a day ago floating through his head. He took a long breath as if it was his first since first starting his car early that morning.

Then he heard the squeak and turned to see Si Garrett being pushed along in a wheelchair, one arm and one leg in a cast, his neck in a high brace, looking like a curious turtle, his eyes magnified by those great circular glasses.

The nurse in the little white hat left them. Si didn’t say anything, and Arch just sat on the edge of the fountain, it trickling down in a soothing way along the rocks, mixing in a nice way with the Gulf surf.

“They don’t keep score,” Si said, finally.

Arch looked to him.

“Every one of them is crazy but doesn’t know it,” he said. Arch could tell it was hard for him to enunciate with the brace on his neck. “I told them I could keep score, you know. I can write with my left hand, and since I don’t seem to have much else to do I thought they would appreciate it.”

“When are you coming back?”

“That’s up to Dr. Edwards.”

“Who’s that?”

“My physician.”

“I didn’t figure he was your barber.”

“It’s in God’s hands now,” Garrett said. “I tried to come back. You know that. But it wasn’t meant to be.”

“You think God made you crash that car?”

“I felt the strangest sensation in my fingers before I veered off the road, as if someone had pulled my hands from the controls, to show me the way.”

“They showed you into a fucking tree.”

“Perhaps.”

“That’s funny,” Arch said, squinting into the smoke and watching the surf, feeling like Seale, Alabama, was on the other side of the earth. But he was ready to take that drive back just the same because it wasn’t a place he wanted to leave. It was a place where he wanted to make a stand. “I just kind of wanted to hear you say it.”

“Say what?”

“That you are a coward in hiding.”

“Are you angry?”

“Hell, no. I’m not angry. Why in God’s name would I be angry? My life has just been flushed down the toilet.”

“Would you push me to the ramp over there? The sunset looks so beautiful out in the ocean. The water looks like emeralds and gold.”

Arch stood behind Si Garrett and pushed his heavy mass around the garden and the croquet court and up onto a wooden landing and a small boardwalk. They were in full sun now, but every few moments the sun would dip back into a stray cloud or two.

The two men watched the surf. They watched the sun drop near the lip of the ocean. They didn’t speak for a long time.

“Just what happened in that alley, Arch? Where did all this go so very wrong?”

“Nothing went wrong,” Arch said. “Everything went according to your plan. You said what we did was for the state of Alabama and that you’d protect us all. But where did you go, Si? Are you hiding in there?”

Si just looked out at the water.

“I never hurt a soul,” Arch said. “I dare any man to say that what I did was wrong.”

A COUPLE OF GUARDSMEN FOUND HER LATER THAT NIGHT. She must’ve been there for at least a day, they said, broken and bleeding on a big gray slab of rock on the banks of the Chattahoochee. Her dress had been torn away, and the hard rains from the night before had left her shriveled and pale, her body curled and white on top of the rock dimpled with pocks of green mossy water. The men had been walking patrols and had heard her animal cries, until the swath of their flashlights found her body. She was naked and bloody and resembled something out of an old mariner’s book. Her breathing came in ragged gasps of air and muddy water.

They’d figured her ribs were broken, from the redness and black bruises. She’d lost a lot of blood.

I figured she probably had been dumped upriver, and kept alive in the current until she hit that big rock, somehow climbing to the top, finding a foothold in the night. It took the guardsmen an hour to make it out to her and pull her into the boat, covering her with a standard-issue Army blanket.

She was nearly dead by the time she got to the hospital, in shock and vomiting buckets. They gave her a shot and pumped her stomach.

The doctors told me she’d been junked full of heroin and raped. Her face had been beaten bloody by fists, not the rocks, and both arms were broken and a leg. They told me how many ribs were broken, but I don’t recall.

I didn’t even recognize her, the only identifying mark came from Billy, who had told me about the number tattooed on her bottom lip.

“Will she live?” he asked me later that night. He sat in the front seat of the black Chevy. The only illumination came from the panel’s dash and the red light on my radio.

The radio clicked on, and our dispatcher said an old woman needed help starting her car. I turned it off.

“I don’t know,” I said.

He just looked ahead through the big, broad front windshield. We didn’t talk for a long time. It was night and no light came from his house. I asked him if he needed any money.

“No, sir.”

“Would you like to come home with me? Just for a few days.”

“No, sir.”

“You can talk to your daddy, if you like.”