He walked his bike and followed the curve and without thinking he called out to her and the figure turned, with his heart still beating into his throat. The figure moved into the porch light and it wasn’t a young girl at all but a pinched-faced old woman who smoked a cigarette in a flowered housecoat.
She looked at him and then quickly walked inside, and Billy almost turned right into the greased boy who’d worked on the car.
“You didn’t answer me,” said the skinny, pimple-faced teen. He ran his fingers under his nose and sniffed. He pushed at Billy’s shoulder.
Billy just kept walking, trying to go around, but something stopped him, and as he turned back they held the bicycle by the seat. He pulled, but then the pimple-faced boy was in front of him, twisting the bars of the bike like a steer and trying to pull him off.
“Cut it out.”
“Where you from?”
“Phenix City.”
“The shithole of this earth.”
He pushed him with one hand and Billy quit trying to push back. The other teen had yellow eyes and rotted teeth. He reached out and grabbed Billy’s shirt and ripped it from the neck.
“Do you know Lorelei?”
“Who is she? Your sister?”
And before Billy could say another word, the pimple-faced teen shot out a fist and busted Billy’s lip. Billy fought back, blind to it, because the one thing that he had heard over and over from Reuben was to never take a single ounce of shit from a living soul because, if you did, the shit would bury you. He fought with his eyes closed, windmilling, but his hands were held back, and the teen punched him hard in the eye and in the stomach, all the air rushing from him, and he was on his face, trying to catch his breath, when he heard the puttering sound of a broken muffler and looked up into the twin headlights, shining like eyes, the engine gunning, the car lurching forward.
He rolled just before it reached him.
The car bumped over his bicycle, the teens calling him a little pussy as they hit the gas around another turn, part of the bicycle caught beneath and sparking in the darkness, their laughter and yells following them down the street.
4
UNDER THE TIN ROOF of Slocumb’s Service Station, noted above with a sign reading COURTEOUS and a big red button for Coca-Cola, I watched the cars speed by Crawford Road with their big-eyed headlights glowing white in the weak gray light. It had been a sluggish, heated morning between rain and sunshine when the air almost wants to break, thunder in the distance. Fat-bodied Fords and Chevys and Hudsons and Nashes would stop in every few minutes and Arthur and I would wander out of the garage to check their oil, clean their windshields of mosquitoes and lovebugs, and fill them up with the all-new, high-test Petrox.
And soon they’d again join the snaking line up and out over the bridge and out of Alabama or deeper on to Birmingham or Montgomery. Arthur liked to talk to folks, excited to know where they were headed, maybe secretly wanting to escape Phenix, too. He’d smile and speak in that careful, deferential safe ground for negroes, but always laugh and joke with me as a friend, not a boss.
I wore an Army slicker over my green Texaco coveralls and a matching ball cap with the red star logo. In between customers, I checked the shelves for Vienna sausages and saltines and searched the cooler for Coca-Cola and Dr Pepper. There were cases filled with candy and bubble gum and cartons of cigarettes and chewing tobacco; Borden’s ice cream was hand-dipped from a freezer by the register.
It was almost lunch when a sky blue Buick coupe wheeled in.
Reuben Stokes walked into Slocumb’s, announced with the tingle of a bell over the door, and I looked up. Reuben’s hair had been freshly cut and combed tight in the back and sides with a high poof on top; he wore a royal blue leisure coat with long, vertical white stripes and pleated white pants. He smiled like a confident circus performer.
“You’re not gonna rob me, are you?”
“How much you got?” Reuben asked.
“Couple hundred.”
“Maybe I will.”
Outside, a skinny man in a pink cowboy shirt and a fat man with a head the size of a watermelon got out of the Buick, stretched, and talked with Arthur. I recognized the man in the pink shirt as Johnnie Benefield, a local clip joint operator and safecracker. He was bone thin, with big teeth and a face that resembled a skull, black eyes, and a few strands of black hair combed over his bald pate.
The fat man, whom I didn’t know, wore big overalls and a dirty white undershirt. His face was pink and jowly and looked like he hadn’t shaved for days.
“Me and Johnnie headin’ over to the Fish Camp. You want to join us?”
I smiled because it wasn’t a serious offer. Anyone in town knew an invitation to Cliff’s Fish Camp wasn’t about dinner. Sure, they served fried catfish and hush puppies with slaw. But their main attraction was a stable of whores that Cliff kept up in glorified stalls out back and you could take your pick for dessert while you waited for your meal.
“Who’s the other fella?”
“Moon? We just givin’ him a ride.”
Over Reuben’s shoulder, I watched the fat man walk to the edge of the gravel lot and begin to unhitch the straps of his overalls. He hefted himself out and then began to urinate in the weeds.
“You can tell him we have restrooms here.”
“Moon wouldn’t know how to use ’em any more than a mule.”
Reuben stuck a cigarette into the corner of his mouth, his breath smelling of sharp whiskey.
“Johnnie workin’ for you now?”
“Some. Been with a few different folks since Big Nigger got himself killed.”
For some reason people had taken to calling Johnnie’s old partner “Big Nigger” before he’d been killed in a shoot-out last year. The man had been as white as me.
“I can always use a good man who knows engines.”
“Shoot.”
“It’s gonna last. Y’all can’t even open back up.”
“You saying Phenix City’s going straight?”
“I’m just saying people around here are fed up.”
The man finished urinating, pulled back the straps on his overalls, and wiped his palms on the bib.
“You sound like this crazy man who walks up and down the streets at night. Have you seen him? He wears a blue robe and holds up a sign painted with Bible verses. He says this is all the end times and that we stand in the center of Sodom. You ain’t headed that way, are you?”
“I didn’t say it’s the end times. I just said it’s going to be different.”
“Pat wasn’t Jesus Christ.”
“Didn’t say he was.”
Outside, Arthur cleaned off Reuben’s windshield and ran a gauge on each of his fat whitewall tires. When the car was filled, he walked in and told me it had been three dollars and forty-five cents.
I made change and shoved it across the counter, closing the register with a sharp snick. Reuben crushed the bills into his wallet and left a crisp fifty on the counter. I took it and followed Reuben back out, the light growing dark.
“I’m sorry about Pat,” Reuben said, holding open the door of the Buick. “I really am.”
“You know anything about that?”
He was about to turn, but the question amused him and he smiled at me with a big cigarette clamped
