“I’d rather be here with you, Bert,” I said. “You make us all feel so safe.”
“You better watch your step,” Fuller said. “I don’t care what you used to be. I’ll beat you silly.”
John stepped in front of him.
“We came by for a talk,” Fuller said.
“You can set a time with my secretary.”
Fuller snorted. He looked over to Smelley, who’d picked a file from the box and glanced through it. Smelley looked to Fuller and snorted back.
“Funny you should mention your secretary.”
John’s breathing was loud and rapid. I unconsciously staggered my feet, fingers opening and closing into a fist.
“What’s her name? Vicki?”
John breathed, temple throbbing, and Bert Fuller popped some chewing gum, waiting for a response. The short, grubby fingers of Joe Smelley flipped through Albert Love Patterson’s personal papers.
“I came up here as a favor to you, John,” Fuller said. He took a seat on Albert Patterson’s antique desk and placed his Stetson on his knee. “I know you sure would hate for the newspapermen to start poking around this thing. And your wife, Mary Jo. Good God. That would set the tongues a-waggin’. So why don’t we just sit and talk about things as men. We all know men like pussy, and it don’t mean you’re not a Christian if you set out for a little poke once in a while. Hell, I seen your secretary and I wouldn’t mind having a taste myself.”
“Shut your filthy, foul mouth and get your fat ass off my father’s desk.”
Fuller snorted again and breathed and waited a few beats. And then stood and looked back on the desk, as if mocking the idea he could have soiled the wood. He grabbed his hat and placed it back on his head, knocking it off his brow with two fingers. Resting his hands on his gun belt, he nodded and popped his gum. “Joe?”
Smelley placed the file on the desk next to the box he’d sifted through. He stood and started to pace. I lifted my back foot and shifted, watching the three men in an orchestra of heated movement. Dogs circling around each other.
“I knew your daddy real well, John. He was a fine man. I know you know he was a fine man. I don’t think there is any delicate way to say this, but it’s my job to ask these questions.”
“I have not even put my father in the ground.”
“I know,” Smelley said, holding up a hand. “I know. But, still, this is my job, and I want you to understand and respect that. Okay? Listen, there has been some talk around town that maybe your daddy was staying up late with that secretary of yours, too. We know her husband was overseas, and we know how young ladies can get real lonely looking for a daddy to cozy up to. Well, we just thought there isn’t a lot that could set daddy against son, except one thing.”
“Don’t say another goddamn word,” John said.
Fuller popped his gum again. “Hell, I’ll say it. We think you and ole Pat was hitting that same pussy and you might’ve gotten riled, is all. We got to ask these questions.”
John leapt for Fuller’s throat, but I’d seen the moment, muscles coiled, and I reached around my friend’s waist and pulled him back. Patterson jabbed his elbows back and yelled and bared his teeth, but I held on tight.
Fuller rested his hand on his gun and shook his head with feigned sadness. He shrugged, spit his gum in the wastebasket, and motioned for Smelley to come on. He shook his head for the weakness he’d seen in the office. I wanted to let Patterson go so badly, to let him unleash all that rage, but I knew Fuller wanted to shoot, had maybe come there to shoot, and there had been enough blood for the week.
We sat in the office for a long time, until it grew dark. We didn’t talk. I just wanted to hold him there until he had relaxed a bit. Later, we finished up hauling the last of the boxes, and when I walked up into the hot, dark office, just about nine, I found John Patterson sitting at his father’s desk. There was a small scrap of paper before him.
John wiped his wet face with a white handkerchief and coughed.
I started to turn around.
“It’s all right,” he said.
I nodded.
“Guess he thought this was important,” he said. “‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.’ Edmund Burke.”
He looked up at me and nodded, seeming to make a decision that had been weighing on him for a while.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I’m taking my father’s place.”
“I figured you’d stay.”
“Not here,” John said. “Not this office. I want to be attorney general. I’m adding my name in place of my father’s.”
HE’D LOST HER.
But all Sunday, Billy searched. He rode a red Schwinn Reuben had given him for Christmas from the top of Summerville Hill down to the river and through the poor little neighborhoods of Phenix City and government housing where they’d spent those first hours together. They knew the girl, although no one seemed to recall her name the way the boy did, but, on most accounts, she’d gone back to Columbus, most saying Bibb City, and by nightfall he walked his bicycle over the bridge, past the police and troops, and followed the Chattahoochee north to the mill town just outside the city limits. He rode and glided under the cooling shadows, the gold light softening over the river and on the brick mill that seemed to stretch for almost a mile, hammering and pulsing inside like a live thing. And he was given hard looks by hard people who sat on their porches in their identical white mill houses and bony women would stare at him and spit and children playing touch football on their lawns would stop in midplay because they all knew he wasn’t one of them, the way a pack of animals can sniff something in the wind. But he paid them no mind and rode past the commissary and the post office and the trading post and the mill bars that were closed down on Sunday. There was a church picnic and a preacher who waved to the boy. The man had a mouth filled with gold teeth and smiled before placing a big slice of chocolate cake in his mouth and licking his fingers.
Billy soon came upon an old woman who sat in a plastic lawn chair by a crooked oak and he coasted and stopped. She sipped from a pitcher of Kool-Aid, next to a platter of deviled eggs on a TV tray covered with buzzing bottle flies. When he spoke to her, the old woman jumped, not because she was afraid but because her eyes were clouded, filmed over in a milky blue, and she listened to the boy’s questions about a black-headed girl named Lorelei, and the woman asked about “her people” but the boy knew no names.
He pedaled more, in and out of roads and little cul-de-sacs, and soon it was dark and he was lost, all the little houses and streets all the same. Every house a perfect little white box kept up to mill standards.
He asked a group of teenage boys about her, because surely they would know her. How would boys of that age not know a girl like Lorelei? He found them with their three heads ducked under the hood of a Nash that had to have been built before the war, and they turned when he called out: “Y’all know a girl named Lorelei?”
The boy in the middle had oil-stained hands and fingers, thick-jawed with a baby-fat face. “What kind of name is that?” he asked.
“You know her?”
He looked to his buddies, with the same fifty-cent haircuts, and he shrugged. A skinny, pimple-faced boy asked him, “Where you from?”
But Billy was gone and in and out of the mill town roads, his white T-shirt soggy wet and his legs exhausted, each time stopping to ask, having to gather his breath. He slowed again on top of a hill that overlooked the brown, jagged river and the endless mill bigger than a dozen airplane hangars stacked end to end and heading halfway out into the river.
He lifted up his T-shirt and wiped his face, and he knew it would probably be coming up around ten or so. He didn’t have a watch. But when you had a father like Reuben, there never was much accounting for yourself.
In the darkness down at the gentle curve of the road stood a big magnolia tree with fat arms covering a small bare lawn with dirt so trampled it seemed to be made of talcum powder. Little fireflies clicked off and on, and Billy just caught his breath and ran his hand over his sweating face, squinting into the shadows, seeing the shadow of a girl with long black hair and long white legs and arms. Her skin the color of milk.
