Wicked City (3 page)

And Patterson walked more, a struggling, dignified shuffle step and another, robotic and forced as a drunk trying to convince himself of being sober, his face blank and unseeing, with steps growing shorter and shorter, until he fell to his knees, out of juice, batteries drained, and then pitched forward on the heated concrete.

He fell to his face, shattering his glasses, a hot, wet stain spreading under him, and soon heard a boy’s question: “Who did this to you? Who shot you, Mr. Patterson?”

But instead of a helping hand, Patterson saw the branch of a pear tree and the buzzing of bees jumping from bloom to bloom. He tried to explain this to the voices he heard, but instead of words blood flowed from his mouth.

IDLE HOUR PARK WAS QUITE A PLACE IN THE SUMMERTIME
after school let out. You could take a boat ride down at Moon Lake or swim in this big pool — nicknamed the Polio Hole — and there was an arcade and a bowling alley and a roller-skating rink. Idle Hour even had a two-bit zoo, where they had a skinny, mangy lion and a half-dead bear that slept almost all day on a concrete slab unless you nailed him on the head with a pebble. They had a big iron cage full of monkeys that chattered and swung from old tires, and on the real hot days they’d jump and yell, and the males would get close to the bars and would look you in the eye while they masturbated like they were trying to pull the damn thing off.

But at fourteen, Billy had grown bored with the zoo and preferred watching girls out on the bandstand along with his buddy Mario. The boys didn’t have to say much, they’d just see a girl walk by in a nice summer dress and one of them would look to the other and raise his eyebrows. If she was really cute, Mario would pretend he’d just burned his hand on a stove. And if she beat that, Billy would act like someone had punched him in the stomach and roll to the ground.

They did this for a long time that night, until the conversation shifted pretty quickly to monsters from Mars, and Mario said there was absolutely scientific proof that other planets held horrors the government didn’t want the public to know about. Billy said that was a goddamn fool thing to say, but Mario held his ground until a cute little blonde with an upturned nose and tanned legs walked by and then it was his time to get punched in the stomach and roll to the ground.

When he returned to the bench where they sat, Billy said: “That don’t make no sense.”

“Sure it does,” Mario said. “I saw it on
Tales of Tomorrow.
We just bought us a TV. You can watch it if you like.”

“How does your mom afford all that stuff?”

“She’s a nurse. She makes a lot of money.”

And the silence just kind of hung there, because both of them knew Mario’s mother worked under the stage name Betsy Ann and that, on several occasions, Billy had lingered outside the Bama Club on Dillingham just to see a naked black-and-white photo of her, not in overalls or sloppy men’s shirts the way she looked in the apartment she shared with a redneck mill worker named George but made up like a Hollywood star in cowboy boots and a leather belt and stars pasted across her boobs.

“You wanna go back to the zoo?” Mario asked.

“I’m all right.”

“I don’t think she’s gonna show.”

“To hell with you.”

Billy still had a few dimes left, and, alone, he walked into the sweet air-conditioning of the roller rink and punched in some of his favorites on the jukebox. More Hit Parade. He tried out some Eddie Fisher and Tony Bennett, and “Come On-A My House” by Rosemary Clooney.

That’s when he heard her call his name.

Lorelei.

Billy smiled, his face turning red, and his voice shook as he said hello.

“Where you been?” she asked.

“Nowhere.”

She was cute in her boy’s western shirt, high-water blue jeans, and saddle oxford shoes. She wore her black hair up in a ponytail; her bangs had grown longer since he’d last seen her and shadowed a good bit of her blue eyes. She didn’t have makeup on or anything like that.

“I wasn’t waitin’ around or nothin’.”

“I had to go home and change,” she said. “I’d been at the pool and had to put on something dry.”

And, man, that was a hell of a thing to say to a teenage boy, because the thought of Lorelei in a wet bathing suit — something Billy could imagine a great deal and had — was perhaps just too much for him to take. Her pale skin had a red, healthy flush to it, and she smelled like sunshine.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

“Nothin’.”

“Well, your face is turning funny colors.”

“No, it’s not.”

The corny organ music came from over in the skating rink, and they heard people clapping in time with it.

“You want a shake?”

“I just had one.”

“I’ll buy,” she said.

“Sure.”

He’d met Lorelei just a few weeks before school had let out, over on the Upper Bridge from Columbus, and helped her carry a sack of groceries home. Billy figured her for the daughter of a mill worker — a Linthead, is what they called them — and they ended up talking till it grew dark out back of the Riverview Apartments, nothing but government housing, smoking cigarettes on a swing set. He’d never felt more comfortable with a girl in his entire life and finally got up enough nerve to ask her to a picture show at the Broadway.

“I went to that house where you were staying last week,” he said.

“We don’t live in the Riverview no more.”

“Where do you live?”

“My folks’ over in Bibb City,” she said. “Got some good mill jobs.”

“How ’bout you?”

“I’m over there some, too,” she said.

“You gonna go back to school?”

“Not now,” she said, rolling her eyes and pulling the straw from the shake. She sucked out the frozen bit of shake and tucked it back into the glass. “It’s summertime, dummy. It’s all as cool as a breeze. You ain’t supposed to do nothin’ now but swim and skate and not worry about a thing.”

Billy looked at her and rolled up the white T-shirt over his skinny bicep and wished he’d had a pack of cigarettes to tuck inside.

“What movie we going to see?” she asked.

“Hondo,”
he said.

“What’s it about?”

“Apaches.”

“I like Apaches,” she said.

IT WASN’T LONG UNTIL BILLY AND THE GIRL SAT IN THE
cool air-conditioning of the Palace Theater watching
Hondo,
Wayne playing a cavalry rider protecting a woman and her son from some Apaches. There was never any question if Wayne would get the woman or if he wouldn’t whip some Apache ass. They were no match for Wayne armed with a rifle he could work with one hand. It was a good picture, and Billy’s head was still kind of in it as they milled through the crowd down by the Elite, the girl at his side, watching the world through the 3-D glasses he refused to take off.

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.

2

BEFORE I MARRIED JOYCE
and 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.