Wicked City

fighter.”

“Proud for what?” I asked.

“Being sheriff.”

“Are you kidding?”

Reuben looked at me.

“The first thing he said to me was, ‘How low can you go?’”

“What’s his problem?”

“He thinks it’s a redneck job.”

“Well.” Reuben smiled and shrugged. “You got anything more to eat?”

“Joyce dropped off some leftovers. You can have them if you want them.”

“No, that’s all right. She didn’t mean them for me.”

“I’m not all that hungry.”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“Would you please shut up, Reuben. I’ll get Quinnie to bring it in.”

“Lamar, please excuse me for being ungrateful. I mean the food is really good, please thank Joyce for that, she’s always been good to me, but I really can’t stand to be in this shithole anymore. I haven’t talked to my boy in a week. I don’t know what’s going on out at my place.”

Ten minutes later, I drove slow out into the country, turning off the paved road, the unpainted farmhouse growing in the windshield. I wheeled around and parked along a gully, and he wandered out ahead of me, dead leaves from a big shade oak twisting and scattering in the light breeze.

I watched him walk and heard the hard thwap of the screen door close. I waited there in the car and looked at the unpainted house with its rusted tin roof, the lean-to nearby that Reuben’s father used as a smokehouse. There was an outhouse, a burned-out shed, and a rotten barn. An old skinny tire, like they used to use on Model Ts, hung from a knotted rope from a pecan tree.

I didn’t see Billy and heard no sounds coming from the house.

I knew of the boy’s mother, a woman Reuben had met in California before the war, and had heard how she had left in ’48, tired of Alabama, or perhaps tired of this new man who had returned with a limp from the Philippines. A man she’d heard had been dead for two years.

But she’d left with little else but a suitcase, the boy thinking his mother would return and perhaps still believing it.

I stared at the unpainted house again and the antique tire swinging in the wind. Reuben came back with a few things wrapped up in some fresh shirts, and I started the car and drove back to Phenix City.

“How long am I gonna have to keep this up?”

“Till the trial.”

“When will that be?”

“Couple months.”

“Could they at least get me a hotel or a damn television? You ever watch the Red Buttons Show? That sonofabitch sure makes me laugh. You ever see that dumb boxer he does? Rocky Buttons? I never wanted to end up like that with half your brains left out there on the canvas. Maybe it was a good thing the war happened.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Sure I do. Listen, what about the German? What’s his name, Keeglefarven? That one makes me laugh, too. You know, on Red Buttons’s show.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“This is funny, ain’t it?” he asked. “Us ending up this way. You ever see that cartoon with the sheepdog and the wolf?”

REUBEN COULDN’T STAND THE CELL. EVEN THOUGH THAT big Jack Black kept the door unlocked and he could use the real bathroom and shower and shave in the same room as the deputies and could even get free Coca- Colas from the courthouse, the damn place made him itch. After a few weeks, just about Christmastime, Quinnie or Jack and even sometimes Lamar would let him walk downtown and have lunch at the Elite or Smitty’s and just kind of stretch his legs. He wasn’t a prisoner, and they knew it was his own decision to live at the jail. An old B-girl he used to see stopped by every day and brought him cigarettes and sometimes a jar of peanut butter and Hershey’s bars. He got letters in the mail from some of the women who’d worked for him, one card was even postmarked from Havana.

But he never could get dry, not even inside, and would drink himself to sleep every night, the deputies knowing he kept the hooch under the bunk but not really caring. It was on a cold day, sky dark as hell, that he’d just about run out and walked to the sheriff’s desk to have Lamar drive him to the liquor store. But Lamar was out.

He asked some new fat boy to call him on the radio. But the boy said Lamar was in Montgomery.

Reuben headed out the back door and walked out the chain-link gates, out and around the jail and the courthouse and up to Fourteenth to Chad’s Rose Room, a clip joint that had gone legit. Reuben sat there at the bar and drank down a couple Budweisers and ate a bowl of chili. He punched up some Ernest Tubb on the jukebox, listening to “Slippin’ Around,” “Filipino Baby,” and “Merry Texas Christmas, You All!” He liked the last one so much, he played it again.

He had another couple beers and tried to call Billy. He hadn’t seen him since he’d been in jail. There was silver tinsel all along the bar, with Christmas lights that winked.

He drank another beer and called the jail, asking for Lamar, who was still out.

He played “Merry Texas Christmas, You All!” twice more. And then the cook asked him to leave, and Reuben said that was fine ’cause he wouldn’t pay for chili that tasted like dog shit.

He walked down to the river, past all the old joints boarded up. The front door to Club Lasso boarded up with a CLOSURE notice, compliments of the Guard. He didn’t have a jacket, and his teeth chattered as he looked over the Chattahoochee churn for a while and then turned back up the hill, the street pretty much closed up and dead, making leaning shadows, trash piled up in big bunches along the road, and then wandered down Fifth Avenue, where some sonofabitch had hung candy canes from streetlamps, and the pharmacy, fake snow sprayed on the window, not fooling a soul.

His teeth chattered more as he walked by the Palace Theater, noting there was a new movie on called Atomic Man, along with White Christmas. He stepped inside to get warm and asked the usher if he’d seen a boy that looked like Billy. The teenager looked at Reuben like he was just some crazy drunk, and Reuben told the usher that he looked like a monkey in that bow tie, and that he bet White Christmas was a crock a shit, that Bing Crosby had never been no GI.

As he walked, it almost startled him that it had grown dark, seeming to close Phenix City in a little curtain. The taillights on the Hudsons, Nashes, Fords, and Chevys glowing bright red up and down Fourteenth.

He kept moving past the courthouse, not feeling like stepping back in that cell, and gave a two-finger salute to some of the Guard boys, stepping around them, down by a bus stop by the railroad tracks and Niggertown, thinking that maybe someone would have some ’shine down there.

That’s when he was greeted by something that struck him downright funny. A troop of Boy Scouts standing across from the courthouse, all duded up in their green uniforms, yellow bandannas around their necks. They marched behind a man who was dressed just like those kids, and the sight of him made Reuben really giggle. A grown man dressed up like a Boy Scout, having to march right by them Guard troops.

He stood as they passed by and he kept the salute to all of them, laughing a little bit, before turning toward the railroad tracks that cut Phenix City in half and down under a little trestle, where he found a couple of old negro men sitting on their old rotten porch eyeing him like he was about to steal one of the bald tires they had out in their yard.

“Excuse me, preacher,” Reuben said, “could I ask you a question?”

With a jelly jar full of hooch and it coming up on night, Reuben was ready to go back to the cell and maybe play a game of cards with Quinnie. How he loved playing cards with Quinnie. If the boy had any more tells on him, he’d be a damn dictionary.

The car came out of nowhere, skidding to a stop, the door popping open and a man jumping out, Reuben’s eyes having to focus and shift on the man’s face.