Wicked City

The boy smiled and shook his head.

“Do you feel older?”

“On account it’s not my birthday?”

“Yes.”

She sat at his feet while he peeled off the tinfoil and began to eat the chocolate cake with his fingers. They’d been together two days straight, never leaving Moon Lake, breaking into the little clapboard cabin on the opposite shore when it started to rain the other night.

She’d gone into town when they got hungry and brought back fried chicken and hamburgers from the park and small green bottles of Coca-Cola. Yesterday, she brought back a sack of comic books and magazines from the Phenix City Pharmacy, and Billy had spent the day on the bunk reading Superman and True Crime and Front Page Detective.

“Don’t you want to go outside?”

“Not really,” Billy said.

“You still feeling sick?”

“No.”

“We can’t stay here forever. Someone’s gonna kick us out.”

He shrugged and left half the cake for her. She refused, and then took it and ate the last bite, before resting her head on his lap.

The cabin was just a big bare room with two cots with rolled-up mattresses and a little kitchen with a skinny stove and sink. If you wanted to use the bathroom, you had to go to the community showers down near the boats.

Billy leaned back into the mattress, the springs squeaking as Lorelei joined him and lay on her back. She lit a cigarette, and they both stared at the ceiling, and he could feel the blood rushing into his chest and into his pecker when she moved against him. Her raven hair smelled like the roses on his granddaddy’s casket that had stunk up the front parlor of their house even after the old man was put in the ground.

“People are probably looking for me,” she said.

“What people?”

“Who do you think?”

Last night was the first time they’d kissed. When everyone had left the park and the lights had clicked off at the dock and along the shore, the moon slipping behind the clouds, they both undressed and swam quietly out into the lake. They swam away from each other, not leaving from the safety of the bank, and floated on their backs, him seeing her chest and other parts, and when he’d swim close she’d drift away with a laugh. The water was as warm as a bath, the light silvery on the pine needles, and when they finally found their stiff clothes and dressed, Billy turning away as she darted from the water to the shore, they kissed.

“Will your dad be worried for you?” she asked.

“Naw,” he said. “When my daddy gets drunk, he says he won me in a poker game and that the only reason my bitch of a mother left without me was on account I didn’t belong to her or nobody.”

“Is that true?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Reuben once told me he’d known a mule in the Army who could talk and sing.”

“Who’s your dad?”

“Reuben Stokes.”

He looked over at Lorelei for recognition, but she was still looking at the ceiling, and when she felt the focus upon her she crooked her arms around his neck and kissed him again.

“Reuben was in the Philippines during the war and got captured,” Billy said. “They were taking him and everyone on the island on a long march, and Reuben waited till the guards looked the other way and rolled into a ditch full of piss and shit. When the damn Japs passed him, they figured he was dead. He said he even left his eyes open and stuck out his tongue all funny. He hightailed it after they left, and fought up in the mountains till the troops came back.”

“My daddy was too old for the war.”

“Is he still alive?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about your mamma?”

She didn’t say anything and he kissed her some more, and his small chest felt like it would just explode. And then she told him everything.

SHE WAS ONLY THIRTEEN WHEN THE LONG BLACK CADILLAC pulled off to the side of the highway and she saw the fat man taking a leak into the mosquito ditch. She was long-legged and scabby-kneed, with black hair that grew down past her rump, hair that women in church whispered was pure vanity. As the man finished, she kept picking corn to fill a wire basket, and then ran a red bandanna over her neck and across her face before tying back her hair. He looked to be rich, not only with the car but by the way he stood and looked down off the road at all those poor people having to work on a hot summer day. He shook his head and knocked back a little from a silver flask that reflected hard in her eyes. It must’ve been about a minute later that he whistled for her in the way that a man whistles for a beaten dog.

She came.

And she hated herself for that, and would hate herself all the way from the summer of ’50 onward, but she was a country girl with not a thought in her head. The only world that she knew was a clapboard shack fashioned from scavenged wood and twisted metal from wrecked automobiles and the half acre that her daddy rented out from their neighbor. A rotten-toothed, soulless man who cheated and lied more than the pharaohs of Egypt.

She walked to the rich man, her head down, and he took a step toward her, pulling her from the red dirt road and onto the shoulder where he stood. He wore a checked gray suit with a red tie and a straw cowboy hat. He smiled at her, looking down at her face, as he brought it up with a light finger and smiled for a long time.

She didn’t smile back on account of the big space between her teeth.

“How old you, girl?”

“Thirteen, sir.”

“Well, you look to be sixteen from where I’m standin’,” he said. “Turn around.”

And she did, as stupid and blind as a trained dog waiting for a rancid piece of meat, and he looked at her long legs and scabby knees in that dress made out of old gingham and flour sacks. The man pulled her hair back and twisted her head from side to side.

She pulled away and looked into the corn for her father, but he was gone somewhere into the woods. Or was it town?

“You want to take a ride?”

“No, sir.”

He reached into his gray coat, and she could see he’d been sweating the way big men do, soaking their fat stomachs and under their arms, and she saw the flash of two golden pistols, as gold as pirate’s treasure, and he saw the smile, too, and handed her a card.

“Can you read?”

She shook her head.

“’Course not.”

She looked at him.

“You bring yourself to the big city,” he said. “You hear me? What’s your name, girl?”

And she told him, but she’d soon forget that name because it was so country that it made men laugh, and he laughed, too. It would be a couple years before she’d start calling herself Lorelei, after a nickname they’d given her at the Rabbit Farm.

“You come lookin’ for me,” he said. “Anybody in Phenix City will know where to find me. Bert Fuller. I’ll make sure you get some work.”

She nodded and, despite herself, felt her lips spread against that space in her buckteeth, and he