Ace Atkins: Devil’s garden

“Who sent you?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

One of the boys punched him hard in the stomach. He doubled over and, as the wind came back to him, spat blood.

“Five grand. Is this a joke?”

“How ’bout I sit in for a hand?” Sam asked. “Then you can get to killing me.”

Gus looked up from the cards that he’d begun to deal. He glanced over at the boys and shrugged, one of ’em just a kid, with jet-black hair parted down hard with drugstore grease.

Gus picked the cards off the table. He shuffled. He relit the old cigar, the tip glowing red-hot.

He stomped his feet in time with the music below them.

Sam wandered to the table, took a chair, and said, “Stud?”

“I call the fucking game,” Gus said. “So, Mr. Big Shot, you got ten dollars for the pot?”

Sam reached into his coat pocket and, having left his wallet with Haultain, smiled and said, “You stake me, Gus?”

Gus cut his eyes up from the deck in hand, and then just as slow and lazy, began to deal around the table.

They played until dawn, and Sam’s stomach felt hollowed out from the cheap gin they drank from fruit jars. Someone brought in some coffee and he drank that and smoked two more Fatima cigarettes and played two more hands and was feeling pretty good with the situation and was just about to bring up the diamonds again until one of Gus’s boys thundered up the steps, threw open the door, and yelled that someone had just set fire to their cars.

Gus’s dark eyes turned right toward Sam.

LABOR DAY MORNING.

Virginia was in the hotel bathroom, naked as a jaybird, door wide-open, powdering her face and big fat boobs before checking her red lips and pulling herself into a slip. Still no panties, mind you, just the slip, as she played and combed her mousy brown hair and danced a little fox-trot before flushing the commode and adding makeup under her eyes.

Maude Delmont watched from the edge of the bed, legs crossed, dressed in a cute little black dress and smoking a thin brown cigarette. She studied herself in the mirror on back of the door. Her black hair was bobbed, as every girl who read a magazine knew to do, and she’d painted her eyes up like some kind of Oriental.

She liked it. She didn’t look half bad.

Virginia must’ve been a hell of a looker based on those photographs of Al’s. But somewhere down the line, she’d developed an ass the size of a zeppelin and looked just plain tuckered-out. She’d been sleeping pretty much since they’d gotten to San Francisco.

Virginia Rappe. She pronounced it Rap-pay, telling people she’d learned that in France. But from the boring stories Maude heard on the drive, the only thing Virginia had learned in France was how to pick pockets of rich, dumb Americans and dance in her underwear.

Al was a lousy con man.

Virginia was a lousy whore.

But Al wanted to believe she was an actress, a star of tomorrow, and had told Maude a half dozen times about how six years ago Virginia’s face appeared on the sheet music to “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” And Al would say it all serious, like a man in love, and that would make Maude laugh even more. “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” She couldn’t believe he didn’t see the humor in talking about a tired broad like Virginia as if the girl was some kind of kid virgin.

Virginia walked through the shabby little hotel room drinking some gin, still wearing a slip up top but no dress. When she turned to Maude, Maude noticed a sizable patch of fur between her white thighs, like a French poodle being strangled, and she motioned to it with the burning end of her cigarette and coughed.

“Oh, shit,” Virginia said.

“You sure you’re up for this?”

“You asked me that ten times.”

“So, how do you know ole Fatty?”

“I worked for Sennett when he was there.”

“You really in the pictures?”

“I was in a restaurant scene. Fatty was throwing pies.”

“Did you get a pie?”

“Not a crumb.”

“I always wanted to be in pictures,” Maude said and recrossed her legs. “You sure you’re okay? You look a little peaked.”

“Just nerves.”

Maude watched the girl’s hand’s shake as she combed her hair some more and tugged on her stockings and dress. Her face looked drained, and even with the makeup black circles rimmed her eyes as she turned back from the dressing table.

“After this is done, can I have dinner?” Virginia asked.

“Sure, sweetie.”

“With dessert?”

“With dessert.”

“Please excuse me.”

Virginia went back to the bathroom, where Maude heard gagging and vomiting and then the toilet flush. When she returned, Virginia asked, “Isn’t this the cutest little hat?”

It was a straw panama with a blue bow.

Maude ticked off the ash of her cigarette. “You might want to take off the price tag, honey.”

SAM FELT A LOAD of bricks against his neck and tumbled to his knees. There were fists and feet and cursing and spit, and a lot of blood after that. He heard a thud on the floor-half of an old brick had landed beside his head-and he tried to make his way on all fours as another gleaming shoe knocked him in the stomach and against the wall, and soon it felt like he was underwater trying to find the right way up, searching for air. He covered his face the way he’d seen fighters do and curled up into a ball, as there was more shouting but then less kicking, and for a few seconds he was left alone, until a final blow came to the ribs like an exclamation point to it all.

He could not breathe.

It felt like minutes passed until a sliver of air worked into his diseased lungs and he saw some light flat across the wooden floor and heard feet up and down the staircase, stumbling and bumbling like the Keystone Kops. He tried to sit but only fell flat to the ground.

Someone called his name and he opened the only eye he could.

The hands were more gentle this time but no less strong, and Sam felt himself standing through no fault of his own. His arm was draped around a man, maybe a head taller than him, and they were walking across the room in a crazy, jumbled dance, down the stairs and out to the back of the roadhouse, where the early-morning light split Sam’s skull.

He was flopped into a rumble seat and the ignition was pressed and they were off down the bumpy, curving road without a word.

“How you doin’ back there, buddy?”

Sam crossed a forearm over his eyes. “Why’d you have to go and do that?”

“What?”

“Distract ’em,” Sam said. “Don’t you know I had that son of a bitch right where I wanted him?”

“You think Gus will be more upset about his Fords or the hooch I used to start the fire?”

“Good question, Phil. Ask it to me again when we reach The City.”

ROSCOE WOKE Up Monday morning on the couch, a watery glass of Scotch in his lap, hearing the sounds of Powell Street below. He glanced over at Freddie, tall, dark, athletic Freddie, who’d snuggled up with the singer he’d met at Tait’s Café last night as Lowell walked into the bedroom shaved and showered, a fresh drink in his hand, wanting to know what everyone wanted for breakfast. His girl, a skinny redhead who wore knickers like a boy, appeared from one of the two adjoining bedrooms, trying to straighten the flower in her hat. And Roscoe said he’d love some eggs and toast and coffee. And then he told Lowell, who was on the telephone to room service, to skip that coffee and have another case of gin sent up. He was feeling like gin blossoms this morning.

“Don’t you want to go out?” Freddie asked, slipping his broad shoulders into a navy blazer. He futzed with his thick Romanian eyebrows in a window’s reflection. “See the city?”