Authors: Ace Atkins
“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 kind of winced at her and said, “Don’t smile so much.”
She dropped her head.
“Come on, come on,” he said. “No need to be frownin’, with a face and legs like that. I bet them country boys chase you plenty, huh?”
“Naw.”
“Naw?” he said, laughing. “You are as country as corn bread. You in those sacks and bare feet. You ever feel what it’s like to wear a real pair of shoes? Look at that mud caked between your toes. You’re too good for this, little girl. You hitch a ride, you take a bus whenever you want, but you come see me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sir?” he said. “Honey, hush.”
She looked at him again, as if her chin had been lifted again, only feeling that he wanted to see her eyes without even the slightest touch. His face was broad and fat, pink-skinned and fleshy. His hair was buzzed above the ears, up to the cowboy hat, like men in the service. He winked at her, knocked back some more from his flask, and passed it to her.
She shook her head.
“It ain’t the demon’s blood like they tell you,” he said. “It’s just bourbon.”
And she looked down the endless red-dirt road for another car coming or her father or any sign of life by the clapboard house made from wrecked cars and trash. But there was only the wind and the unbearably hot sun, and as she took a drink the bourbon was hotter than the air and made her face turn hot and glow. But she kept drinking, not knowing it wasn’t like water, and the muddy-colored stuff ran down her chin and on her dress, and it smelled like the way her daddy smelled on Saturday nights, only without the cigarettes.
Bert Fuller took back his flask, wiped her chin with a scarred knuckle, and opened the door to the big, long Cadillac.
“See that star on the card?” he asked. “That means I’m the assistant sheriff. That means I’m real important. You understand?”
And then he pulled away, giving her a preacher’s wave before disappearing into a cloud of dust and becoming a black ink spot on the horizon that burned away into the molten sun.
Two months later, she found a ride.
She’d never been to a city before, and she’d saved pennies to buy shoes and borrowed a cotton dress from her best friend at church, May, who’d also given her a dollar she’d been saving since she was twelve. With the dollar, the new shoes, and the old dress, she hopped out from the Chevy pickup truck loaded with hay and chickens and turned and looked at all the buildings and people milling about. It was Friday afternoon, and there looked to be plenty of men from the Army around and she felt safe with that, finding one boy and showing him Deputy Bert Fuller’s card — now so crunched and wrinkled it was soft in her hand — and the Army boy just shook his head, chewing gum with a cocky smile, and winked at her.
The wink made her pull the dress tight against her chest, and she kept walking toward the lights, past bars with signs reading
GIRLS
,
GIRLS
,
GIRLS
and
QUICK MONEY
, and she got a few whistles and catcalls, and pretty soon she was sweating with all the noise of the music and the ringing of slot machines and the sight of things she’d never seen — like a big black-haired woman dancing on a stage with tassels on her titties, whipping them around in circles. Pretty soon, she was down by the bridge and could see the big, wide Chattahoochee, and it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, and the city beyond it, over the river, just shined with light so bright that it hurt her eyes
.
More Army boys passed her, and one bumped into her, slapping her little rump with the flat of his hand, and she hugged herself, because the dress was thin and the wind had kicked up on the bridge.
She walked back into the city, asking a girl in a dark corner if she’d heard of Mr. Fuller, and the woman looked at her, smoking a cigarette, almost looking through her, and said: “No.”
But there was something about the no that made her keep walking, and she soon left the neon lights and bars and music and service boys and followed the train tracks. There were train tracks near her house, and she figured if she kept walking maybe she’d make it back home before morning and maybe her father would not take her to the smokehouse and beat her with the horsewhip.
The houses were rickety and old, with broken wood porches where negroes sat and drank whiskey and smoked cigarettes and called out to her or just laughed and pointed. She could only see the rocky track. Then she heard a train and wandered off the railroad and right into the path of a car that skidded to a stop and honked its horn. She’d fallen to her butt and stared into white, hot headlights and searched into them before there was the sound of a siren and red lights and the voice of a man.
“You lookin’ for me, doll?”
They kept her in jail all night. It wasn’t till the next morning that Deputy Bert Fuller watched while a guard unlocked the door of her cell and let him inside. He stood smiling at her with a steaming cup of coffee in his hand while she waited on the bunk with her nervous legs kicking back and forth. He opened the front pocket of his uniform and offered her a stick of gum. She shook her head and looked down at the dirty concrete floor and the corroded drain.
“Oh, come on, baby,” he said. “It don’t have to be like that.”
She looked up.
“You just can’t walk the streets like this is Podunk, Alabama,” he said. “This here is Phenix City. You got to have somewhere to go.”
Her eyes met his.
“You got somewhere to go?”
“I thought I did.”
“How’s that?”
She shrugged.
“You got somewhere to stay?”
“Naw.”
“Money?”
“Naw.”
“Little girl, I do believe you are in a pickle,” he said. He made a
tsk-tsk
sound with his tongue and slurped his hot coffee, and it must have burned his tongue because he kicked back his head and some of it stained the front of his shirt.
He came back an hour later with an old man, a much older man but just as fat and fleshy as Deputy Bert Fuller. The man wore a pin-striped suit and had thinning hair that he’d dyed red and oiled tight to his freckled skull. He smelled like burnt onions and old fish, and he walked to the girl on the bunk and held up her face and, when she turned away, plunked his fingers deep into her mouth, jabbing around for her teeth.
“Strip,” he said.
She looked at Bert Fuller, and Fuller just smiled, a tan uniform hugging his pear-shaped body, those golden six-shooters at his sides. He shrugged.
She twisted her head from side to side. “No.”
“Strip, you country thing,” the old, smelly man said and yanked her to her feet and tore the borrowed dress from her body and with dirty fingernails clawed at her cotton underthings until it was all in a heap by the floor and she was left crawling like a pig in a trough down by the corroded drain, trying to pull the rags together and cover her embarrassingly developed breasts.
“She’ll do,” the old man said.
“Okay,” Fuller said. “Here’s the deal, girlie. You can either stay here and wait a week to see the judge about what you were doing out there, selling yourself like some kind of Jez-bel, or you can come with me, ride into Columbus, and we can get rid of those pieces of cloth you call clothes and go shopping at Kirven’s, and let me feed you a steak dinner at Black Angus. You’ll need some perfume, too.”
From the floor, she looked up at him.
“I didn’t do nothin’ wrong.”
“’Course you did,” Fuller said. “In Phenix City, whorin’ is a crime. Ain’t it, Mr. Red?”
He just smiled a rotten row of teeth.
The girl began to cry.
“Mr. Red, I do believe a decision has been made.”
The man opened up a wooden box while Fuller ran an electric cord into the hall and a little needle attached to a blue vial began to pump and buzz. “Hold ’er down, Bert. Shit, she looks to be a wildcat to me.”
And Fuller let out some air, rolled up his sleeves, and pinned the girl’s arms to the concrete floor with his fat hands until she screamed, as the old man squatted with creaking knees, opened up her bottom lip, and began to write inside her mouth.
WHEN SHE STOPPED, SHE ROLLED DOWN HER BOTTOM LIP
and showed him the mark 618 tattooed in blue ink. And when she tried to tell Billy about other things, things that happened later, he’d stop her, feeling sick deep within his stomach.
“Why don’t we just leave here?” Billy said. “Run away?”
“We don’t have no money.”
“I can get money.”
She pulled away from him and rolled on her side, facing the wall.
He put his hand on her shoulder and started to talk about moving out to Hollywood, where they could work in the picture business or pick oranges or sell ice cream at the beach. He got so excited about all the plans, he could already feel the Greyhound ticket in his hand and almost didn’t notice she was crying. Billy moved his hand from her shoulder and just listened.
The calliope music was going strong up at Idle Hour, and they could hear the kids laughing and screaming and splashing up by the pool. The shades were drawn, but he could feel the heat from the window and knew the sun was shining.
“I’ll go outside,” Billy said and ran a finger along the window and looked at the black dust. “I’m really feeling better.”
“Sometimes I just wish this whole rotten town would burn to the ground.”
He rolled off the bed and found his shoes. He looked out the window up on the hill and saw a young boy about his age crawling up a tall ladder, the contraption looking loose and rickety like something fashioned from an Erector set. The boy got to the top and walked to the end of the diving board before giving the thumbs-up to his buddies below and launching into a perfect cannonball.