Wicked City

to do. He kept thinking about Billy, wanting to walk away from this hell-soaked fire of a life after the war with something for him instead of some rotten barns and dead fruit trees.

Lamar’s heavy bag rocked back and forth on thick chains.

JOYCE AND I SWITCHED BETWEEN PABST BLUE RIBBON Bouts, watching a replay of a Pete Rademacher fight, and Down You Go, with Phil Rizzuto and Boris Karloff trying to guess a secret word or phrase some housewife had sent in to make five dollars. Of course, if you stumped the panel, you got twenty-five bucks. I was beating Joyce, recognizing damn near every one – of course it wasn’t hard to get ahead of Frankenstein himself – and repeating as she would say the wrong word, “Down you go.” I was feeling pretty good and cocky as I walked back to check on the children, the night routine going like clockwork, Thomas already in bed pretending he was asleep and Anne taking a bath.

When I knocked on the bathroom door, I heard her splash around and ask to please give her some privacy. “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

I went back to the kitchen to make another pot of coffee, looking up at the clock, knowing Jack should be over anytime. I landed back in the easy chair watching the nightly news out of Atlanta, Phenix City finally not being featured every night as a “Sin Den” and just plain “wicked.” I caught the weather, colder nights ahead, and leaned back into my chair, dozing a bit, smelling the coffee, Joyce coming in once before I fell asleep, saying “Down he goes” back to me and me hearing it and smiling with closed eyes… never hearing the back door click open.

SINCE HE’D BEEN BACK FROM PANAMA CITY, REUBEN HAD gotten to know Lamar’s routine, watching it and studying on it. Lamar hadn’t changed a damn bit, always getting to the gym at the same time, always folding his trunks the same way, and the same religious wrapping of his knuckles through the center of his hands. Reuben looked down at his watch, knowing that big gorilla deputy wouldn’t be over for another twenty minutes and that the children would be in bed. He couldn’t and wouldn’t harm a child or a woman – that was a line he would never cross – and he waited there, watching Joyce turn out the light in the bedroom and the gray-white flicker of the television box in their family room. And he took a breath and moved forward, his gait strong and controlled, moving across the backyard and by Joyce’s beauty shop, trying to think of Lamar as an opponent or the way he felt about a Jap – nothing at all – and he knew it would be over in minutes and Phenix would be gone and in his rearview.

Billy could have something. Reuben wouldn’t need forgiveness. His goddamn scorecard was already so punched full of holes that even Jesus Christ himself wouldn’t cut a loser like him a break. Lamar had taken the first shot and it had been a sucker punch, and when you sucker punched a man the comeback would be tenfold. Reuben told himself things like that, trying to think about the killing as a strategy. He lifted up the lock on the screen door with a pocketknife and turned the knob in the kitchen, smelling coffee, hearing the slurp of it perking, and as he turned he saw Lamar sprawled out and repeated the word palooka in his mind. Lamar being a big, bald, laid-out palooka, looking like he’d just hit the canvas and gone to bed.

It would be easier like this. He’d never even have to look him in the eye.

Reuben moved for him, the moonshine making his skin glow, his face sweat, smelling the way you only did when you were fearful, like a skunk. His own odor making him catch some bile in his throat. Some reason, thinking about that crazy old Kid Weisz and what he would think about this final bout between his two boys, but telling himself the Kid would understand. He’d understand what it meant to be neutered by someone, to be cheated, to be lied to. Lamar Murphy was a coward, and if it wasn’t Reuben it would be Johnnie Benefield. And Johnnie didn’t have the goddamn right.

He had the right to take the lights of the big palooka, snoring it up in the chair. So comfortable in the chair, with the knitted armrests and the little silver picture frames and the china settings hung on a wall. He moved into the family room and nearly tripped over his feet, Lamar grumbling and shuffling. The television talking about the Auburn University Tigers taking on Georgia Tech this weekend and hearing Coach Jordan’s voice sounding like that of God, saying that “the boys needed to take apart the offensive machine” and that “they’d shown some real spunk in drills and to expect a real contest in Atlanta.”

Reuben froze. He staggered again and moved backward, no longer thinking but moving backward, feeling his stomach lock up and feeling that steak and eggs and ole Moon’s formaldehyde whiskey. It was the thought of the formaldehyde and stiff dead people and blood that made him rush for the closest door and bust on in through it and stick his head right in the commode and puke his ever-living guts out.

He heard a girl scream and scream and he looked over at Anne – a girl he’d first seen at no more than knee- high when he got back from the Pacific, about a million years ago – and she screamed and kicked herself back into the corner of the tub, Reuben ignoring her until the big shadow appeared in the doorway, looking down on him – without fear or pity – but Lamar with that curious look on his face as he pointed an Army-issue.45 down at the man in the toilet.

Reuben fell back to his ass and wiped his lips with his shirt. He didn’t know if he was crying or not, just saying the first thing that came to his mind: “You think that coffee is ready yet?”

20

“SO WHAT DID YOU DO?” Hugh Britton asked, sitting across from me in a booth at Kemp’s Drive-In.

“I poured him a cup of coffee.”

“When did you know he had a gun?”

“He told me,” I said. “We sat down and didn’t talk for a long time. He left the gun in the kitchen, and we watched the Tonight Show. Steve Allen can really play the piano. He played that song before Gene Rayburn did the news, ‘This Could Be the Start of Something,’ and that kind of made Reuben loosen up.”

“The man came to your home to kill you,” Britton said.

“No, he didn’t,” I said. “He wanted an excuse. He was drunk, wasn’t thinking straight.”

“You sure are making a hell of an excuse for him.”

“Do you know what he asked me?”

Britton shook his head. It was morning, a couple days after finding Reuben in my bathroom, and the light was still gray, a cold mist outside, what the Irish call a soft day.

“He wanted to know why Joyce and I never invited him to dinner.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him that I didn’t think he’d come. I said our life was pretty boring. About the only excitement came on Wednesday night, when we have pot roast and mashed potatoes. I told him we don’t drink, just watch television, sometimes the kids get to eat off these TV trays. Funny how someone can be offended by the smallest thing.”

“I don’t think it was not having him over that ticked him off.”

I took a sip of coffee and looked out at the soft day, the brown leaves fluttering and spinning down from the trees. A couple of guardsmen laughing and coming into the diner, taking their hats off and putting them on a rack by the door.

“He stayed for breakfast,” I said. “Joyce cooked up some bacon and eggs with grits, and then he rode on with me right to the jail.”

“And he’s been there ever since.”

“He’ll stay there until he goes before the grand jury.”

“Who knows about him?”

“Only John Patterson and Sykes. We’re keeping it under wraps even from Sykes’s team right now. We don’t want any of those newspapermen to get hold of it. The only thing they’re good at is turning the world into a circus.”

“So what exactly did he see?”

I lit a cigarette, keeping it burning in one hand, and rubbed my bald head with the other, getting comfortable in the booth.