Ace Atkins: Wicked City

Britton looked to me and then back to the men. He noted the time on his wristwatch and wrote it down.

We walked back together to Fifth Avenue and toward the Coulter Building. The summer sun was full up now and painted the blacktop and sidewalks. The mannequins inside Seymour’s Ready-to-Wear Shop, now slatted in early sun rays, coyly turned and smiled, showing off their stiff summer dresses, patent leather pumps, and costume jewelry.

Hugh Britton tucked a toothpick into his mouth and set one of his hands in his trouser pockets. He took off his glasses, blew his breath on the lenses, and cleaned them with a white handkerchief. Satisfied, he slipped them back on his face.

“I don’t like this a bit.”

I nodded.

“Having Fuller in charge of this show is like making a chimp the circus ringmaster.”

“You think these state boys will be much better?”

Britton shook his head and smiled, and we both knew that only two years before a special group of investigators – fronted by a state man named Joe Smelley – had come down to investigate the illegal activities of our town. Not only did Smelley deny he saw a set of dice roll or a single whore on a street corner, he wrote a damn letter of accommodation to Governor Persons praising Bert Fuller as one of the state’s outstanding lawmen.

The state investigators stood across Fifth Avenue, almost identical in their short-sleeved dress shirts and ties, pleated trousers, and lace-up shoes. They held notebooks, pens tucked in the pockets of their shirts, and smiled and shook hands with the local boys in uniform. We watched it all from the other side of the street as hands were shook and backs were slapped. The investigator, Smelley, noticed us and leaned into Sheriff Matthews, who quickly caught Britton’s eye, whispered something to Smelley, laughed, and then spit on the sidewalk.

“The footprint,” said a voice. John Patterson stood behind us. “It’s gone. Last night they had enough to pour a mold, but when they pulled up the board someone had covered it up. I need help.”

“Anything,” I said.

“Y’all find out what you can,” John said. “I’m gonna try and get us some federal help.”

“I’ll ride with you,” Britton said. He stuck the toothpick back into his mouth and stood up on his toes like a banty rooster. He opened his mouth to speak and then closed it. He shook his head.

John rested his hand on the old man’s shoulder. His father had been one of Britton’s closest friends.

“Your father knew it,” Britton said. “He knew they were coming for him. I told him a thousand times to carry a gun. But Pat said it wouldn’t matter. Said they’d shoot him like some kind of coward and he was right.”

“If you find who did this,” John said, “I want you to bring them to me. They didn’t even give my father a chance.”

MUCH TO REUBEN’S AGGRAVATION, FOURTEENTH STREET stayed empty that Saturday night. The National Guard had been called to town by Governor Persons to keep order, and although they did little but drive the streets in jeeps and hold roadblocks it was enough for the Machine to keep their business behind closed doors while guardsmen checked driver’s licenses and IDs of everyone who drove over the river. Baby-faced, buzz-cut boys in khaki from all over Alabama walked the beat down by the two bridges with rifles slung over their backs, guns on their hips, staring up at the neon signs and advertisements for busty ladies along plateglass windows.

Still, the beer flowed from brass taps and the jukeboxes played sad and rough-and-tumble country songs. But the B-girls sat alone at the long bars and cafés and the stick men took nothing but smoke breaks out on the streets and the bartenders had nothing but time to talk to the one or two customers who would walk in the doors to discuss the latest of what they were calling an Occupation.

That first night, Reuben made a quick stop-off at the Atomic Bomb Café and asked Clyde Yarborough for Budweiser in the bottle and a pack of Camels. He felt bad about running off Billy last night. But he didn’t have time to play daddy when there was work to be done. His boy would someday understand that.

In the center of the room stood a tall bombshell that Yarborough had bought from an Army/Navy store and had someone paint a nude woman with enormous breasts on the casing. Instead of nipples, the woman wore the symbols for nuclear fallout. A fiery mushroom cloud for hair.

Yarborough pulled the beer from an old Coca-Cola cooler and shuffled off a pack from a bin by the cash register. He looked at Reuben, tilting his head like a dog, most of his face and jaw eaten away by cancer.

Most of the time he wore a bandanna over his mouth to cover the loose flesh and toothless opening of what had been a mouth. But tonight the skin grafts and holes and mush face glared back at him like a rotting jack-o’-lantern.

Reuben tapped the cigarette pack against his palm and broke out one. It remained unlit and fresh in his mouth as he leaned against the bar and shook his head. Clyde Yarborough, six foot three and still as strong as an ape, garbled something unintelligible and shuffled off.

Grime and dirt clung to the black-and-white linoleum floors and fingerprints and smudges filled the mirrors along the back of the long bar. A simple jukebox sat between the men’s and women’s bathrooms toward the back, and Reuben walked over and used a key to check the bin.

Not even enough to empty. He used a few of the coins to play some Hank Williams, his old friend who used to drink with him in this very bar before that long, last ride.

He looked down the long empty bar and toasted Yarborough, and hearing the music cutting on the jukebox, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” his rubbery face contorted into what may have very well been a smile and he snorted in what could’ve been a laugh.

Reuben smoked and drank and, when he put down the beer, tapped his fingers against the beaten bar, in all the coolness of the room and the dull, dim light of the neon beer signs.

About nine, he was piss-drunk and drinking each new beer with a side of Jack Daniel’s, thinking about arriving in Bora-Bora in that troop ship and being greeted at the landing craft by a half dozen crazed GIs who ended up ass-raping a fresh-faced boy from Iowa who’d never even fired a shot in combat.

“Did I ever tell you about those goddamn monkeys in the Philippines?”

Yarborough sliced through some lemons, a big mug of a soft gray gruel that he drank for food by his side. The big man shook his head.

“They had monkeys all over the place. That’s what this place needs. A goddamn monkey. Lose the A-bomb, I’ll take a goddamn monkey any old time.”

Yarborough’s white puckered face didn’t move, and his eyes and hands turned back to the lemons.

About that time, the front door opened and in walked Bert Fuller, dressed in his full khaki outfit and wearing his Texas gun rig and his Stetson hat. He sidled up next to Reuben and asked Clyde for a shot of anything strong and just looked at the endless lines of booze behind the bar, his face flushing the color of a beet.

“What you say, Bert?”

“What you smiling at, asshole?”

Reuben stubbed out his cigarette and stood from the chair.

“Ain’t you heard? We’ve been overrun with little green men.”

Reuben sat back down and looked at the bar. Fuller toasted himself in the mirror and sucked down the whiskey.

“Doesn’t matter,” Reuben said. “It’s all talk and posturing. They been shutting down this place since the Civil War. Phenix City will close, they’ll bust up some slots and empty out some moonshine and then two months later it’ll open back up.”

“Not this time.”

“You want to make a bet?”