Wicked City

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?”

Yarborough refilled Fuller’s glass and Fuller fired back the shot in his throat and wiped his mouth and it was all done quick and practiced as in every B western that Reuben had ever seen.

Yarborough garbled out something, and his eyes, the only part of his face that revealed something human, flashed to Reuben.

“He asked if you want another.”

“I reckon not.”

“Where you headed?”

“I don’t know,” Fuller said. “I had a half dozen whores run off on me today. I heard a bunch of them were working out at some trailer park out in Columbus.”

“You gonna drive ’em back?”

“I’m gonna least get my cut of the gash they’re dishin’ out.”

“Thatta boy.”

“You think all this is funny, don’t you?”

“Like I said, it’s just a big dog and pony show. Just keep your head down and take your licks and it will be over. Sit down and drink with me. Don’t fight it. It won’t be long till the GIs will be so thick in here that you can’t stand.”

Reuben nodded to Yarborough, and Yarborough uncorked the whiskey bottle again, filling three glasses, the sticky sweet alcohol spilling across the bar and shining with red light.

He clicked glasses with the two men in front of him. “To the end of the Occupation,” Reuben said.

Fuller snorted. Yarborough grumbled and poured the whiskey into the hole in his face.

“So where were you last night?”

“Where am I every Friday night?”

“I got to ask,” Fuller said. “A lawman has to look to everybody.”

Reuben squinted one eye at him, trying to hold him in focus, and then turned back to his drink.

“I tell you one thing,” Bert Fuller said. “I’m not gonna lie down and let them RBA people run me down in the newspapers and corn-hole my ass. I want them to think about every fucking lie they tell about me.”

Reuben looked down at his empty drink and then laid down some money.

“And the worst of them all is that that goddamn bald-headed sonofabitch who runs the Texaco station. Murphy. You know that bastard, don’t you?”

“For a long time.”

“You his friend?”

“We used to box together before the war.”

“I think it’s time he just disappeared from the scene. Comprende, partner?”

Fuller affixed his Stetson in the mirror and readjusted the rig on his fat belly and walked out as Hank sang on about a mournful wooden Indian named Kaw-liga.

3

PEOPLE HAD ALWAYS CALLED Phenix City wicked. Or Sin City. For those of us who lived and worked outside the rackets, we tried our best to ignore it. But it was hard when most of the vice boasted services in neon down by the river, on the way to the only two bridges out of town. But we had schools and a hospital paid for in dirty money, and sometimes big-time poker chips would end up in the collection plates on Sunday. My son and daughter went to school and church with sons and daughters of bootleggers, pimps, and whores. Bert Fuller was a deacon, and Hoyt Shepherd, who most called the town’s kingpin, sometimes sang in the Christmas pageant and liked to play the part of the innkeeper who turned away Mary and Joseph.

It was just an engrained part of our local economy, and the vice had gone on so long, it was very much like a strand of barbed wire that cuts a tree but is later absorbed, becoming part of its growth.

Until that June, I guess I didn’t even know how deeply that wire cut. But there were things I learned, the darkest of moral depravity that went far beyond slot machines and illegal liquor that I still can’t wash from my mind.

The night after the shooting, for the first time in months, it rained. Big, thick thunderheads blew in from the west and pounded the dry Phenix City asphalt, running off the bottles and cigarette butts and trash into narrow rivulets and into the Chattahoochee. You could smell the wet asphalt and concrete, the rich red clay, and scraggly pines on the hills. The windows in my Ford station wagon fogged as Hugh Britton and I crossed the roadblock at the Lower Bridge to Columbus, the river frothing and boiling over the Rock Cut Dam to the north.

“Did you notice anything unusual about Bert Fuller this morning?” I asked.

“Something’s always unusual about Fuller.”

“You notice his rig?”

“I’ve seen it. Asshole thinks he’s Randolph Scott.”

“He wore it this morning, but those pearl-handled revolvers were gone,” I said.

Britton looked at me, the windshield wipers spastically working over the window.

“Now, have you ever known him not to wear those guns?”

“No, sir,” he said.

At a corner filling station just off Broadway, I made a phone call, and then we ate some toast and drank coffee over at Choppy’s Diner for half an hour before getting back in the station wagon and heading toward Fort Benning on Victory Drive. On Victory, there were dry cleaners and pawnshops and liquor stores and churches of redemption. Little trailer parks and workingman’s diners and drive-ins that pulled you in with neon arrows. The rain hardened and fell in long, endless sheets, and I heard little else but the drumming on the cab, until I spotted the big flashing marquee for the Victory Drive-In and another long, sweeping neon arrow that pointed past an empty box office and through an open chain-link gate. There was supposed to be a Creature Double Feature tonight and a special showing of The Robe on Sunday. But the customers had already gotten a weather refund and had pulled out of the lot.

The screen was big and concrete and seemed like an ancient monolith in the endless gravel lot pinging with rain. I slowed by the bleachers covered by a corrugated tin roof and parked close to the lighted overhang, and we made a run for it.

Soaked, Britton wiped the drops from his pressed slacks and shook his straw summer hat. “Damn it.”

Moments later, a rusted Ford pickup stopped short of us and a little man came running for the overhang, a newspaper held over his head. No one shook hands, and the little man, now out of breath, nervously wrenched off his glasses and wiped them on the front of his blue coveralls. When he sat them back on his face, he looked like a bug.

“Anyone follow?” he asked.

“No,” Britton said. “We’re fine, Quinnie.”

“You sure?” Quinnie asked.

“Sure we’re sure,” Britton said. “We did what you said. Now, what’d you know?”

Quinnie Kelley was a little man, not much more than five feet, and wore enormous Coke-bottle glasses and a short little fedora. He still had on some dirty blue coveralls from his work as the courthouse janitor. As he looked out into the rain and watched little rivulets forming and tilting toward a long, narrow ditch, he wiped the rain from his neck and put his hands on his waist.

“Heard some talk ’round the place,” Quinnie said. “Not much, but some.”

“Who?” I asked.

“I don’t know who. Some peoples is sayin’ that Mr. Shepherd called in a killer from Chicago. And others say Miss Fannie Belle. I cain’t be sure. You heard the name Tommy Capps?”

“You said you saw something?” I asked. Everyone knew about Tommy Capps. He was a thug and a killer, but