Authors: Ace Atkins
“Who?”
“Say, you are new to this town. As I told John Patterson, Johnnie Benefield is only the most coldhearted, sadistic sonofabitch I’ve ever met.”
Sykes wrote down the name on a yellow legal pad and looked up.
“That’s with one
n.
”
Sykes nodded and made the correction.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Hoyt Shepherd said, plugging the cigar in his mouth.
JOHNNIE BENEFIELD AWOKE IN A DARK ROOM, THE LIGHTNING
cracking outside the window. The bed sat in a metal frame, and in another flash of light he saw there were clothes folded for him on an old ladder-back chair. His boots clean and shined sitting right under them. He leaned back against the pillow, his head feeling as if it was about to rip from his skull, a knifing, hot pain in his shoulder. Reaching over, he felt for the bandages and found crusted blood on the tape. He moaned and closed his eyes. The room smelled like dried flowers and vinegar.
He heard footsteps down a long hallway. The steps were hard and clacked as they do against wood, and when the walking stopped he saw the slice of light from under the door go black for a moment and then the squeak of hinges.
A woman’s shadow stood before him, carrying a bucket and a leather pouch.
She pulled up another chair and sat and held his cold, clammy hands.
Her face was darkened, and he only could see the outline of her hair. His eyes fluttered open and closed.
“You hurt?”
“Fannie?”
“It’s me. You been out for some time.”
“How long?”
“Two days.”
“I’m hungry.”
“Thirsty, too, I reckon.”
“Can I get some whiskey?”
“You bet.”
“I got the shakes, too.”
“I know, baby.”
Fannie opened the bag and pulled out a silver spoon and toyed with it a moment before clicking on a lighter and heating its contents. She grabbed a syringe and soon filled it and tapped the vein in his arm. She shot down the plunger, and he was filled with the most quiet, wonderful sensation, as if having sex to the point of climax and having it last and last. He closed his eyes and smiled.
“Where am I?” he asked.
“Hill Top.”
“You keeping me in a whorehouse?”
“That I am.”
“A dream come true.”
“I need you well, Johnnie.”
“You got me.”
“Everyone is gone.”
Johnnie opened his eyes and breathed through his nose. He closed his eyes again.
“The Guard. They got orders from the governor to bust up this town. I need you, Johnnie. Don’t leave.”
He reached up with his left hand and had a bit of trouble finding Fannie’s heart-shaped face. She shifted his hand over to her left breast and said everything was going to be all right. “Don’t you worry, baby.”
A flame struck again in the dark little room, and he saw Fannie Belle’s face and red lips and intent green eyes, and then it was clouded again in a puff of smoke. He heard her inhale, and then she passed the cigarette between his lips.
“I got the door locked,” she said. “I turned the lights off and closed the gate. If they even think about busting down the door, I’ll take a few of those bastards with me.”
“I love you, baby.”
“Johnnie, how ’bout you tell me more about this money you took from Hoyt. I sure like that story.”
12
THE RAIDS STARTED
that Thursday at exactly 4:30 with a proclamation from Governor Persons that Phenix City was under martial rule. That gave Hanna and the Guards the go-ahead to surround the Russell County Courthouse and relieve all law enforcement and city officials of their duties and make them surrender all weapons, squad cars, and badges. Just as General Hanna and Major Black burst into the sheriff’s office, they found Sheriff Ralph Matthews sitting behind his desk, a big wad of chaw in his cheek, playing gin rummy with four deputies and a jailer. Another jailer was within earshot of the men, sitting on the office toilet and reading a copy of
Gent
magazine. As soon as the Guard leveled their shotguns and .45s at the boys, Matthews looked from deputy to deputy and then over to the jailer on the toilet.
He shook his head and threw the remainder of his cards into the pot.
The other deputies did the same and they all slowly stood, hitching up their gun belts on their uniforms.
“What can we do you for, General?”
“Not a goddamn thing,” Hanna said, walking over to Matthews’s desk and pulling a Hav-a-Tampa from a box. “Just leave your guns and badges on the way out.”
“Sir?” Matthews laughed, the big plug in his cheek. His face turned a bright red.
“You heard me, you hick bastard,” Hanna said. He lit a match against his thumbnail. “Now, take off those guns nice and slow.”
Matthews shook his head again. He dramatically spit in a wastepaper basket and smiled with a lot of pity. He was a fat man with a big belly and a small mind, and he didn’t quite catch on to what was happening. His fat cheeks looked like apples.
Just then there was a creak and the men turned, seeing the jailer stand from the little box bathroom and raise a pistol, his trousers at his ankles.
Jack Black fired off a round over the man’s head. And although the shot missed him by a foot, the man ducked and landed back with a hard thud onto the commode and dropped the pistol into the water.
“Now,” Hanna said.
Matthews went first, unhitching his belt and guns, laying them atop the big wooden desk. His deputies followed, and they all stood shoulder to shoulder as five-foot-five bulldog Hanna passed by them as in an inspection line, never once saying a word but eyeing the men as if they were the sorriest bunch of bastards he’d ever seen in his life.
It was raining, and the thunder belly-grumbled outside as the water pinged against the pane glass and slid down the windows. Hanna pulled his MacArthur hat off his head and held it out to Matthews, “I said badges, too.”
“Murphy?” he called out to me. I entered the room.
Hanna handed me Ralph Matthews’s badge and pinned it over my Texaco star. “I kind of like that one better. It suits you, Sheriff.”
FOUR HOURS EARLIER, I’D SAT IN JOYCE’S BEAUTY SHOP
drinking a cup of coffee and explaining to her the job I’d just been offered by the state. She was between appointments and cleaning out a sink full of brunette hair dye. The room smelled of burnt chemicals and sweet shampoos, and as I tried to make sense of the offer she just nodded and nodded, keeping her hands busy with the washing and some sweeping and some straightening of a couple of helmet dryers by a back wall under framed pictures from
Vogue.
“Why you?”
“I have an honest face.”
She nodded. She sat down in a stylist chair and faced me. I was still dressed in my coveralls, my Texaco baseball cap in my hands, as I looked down at the floor and waited for what was about to come.
But she didn’t say a word for a long time, and when she spoke it was calm and confident. “Is this temporary?”
“It could be,” I said. “It’s just until the election.”
“If the Guard is taking over, why do they even need you?”
“It was the best we could get. Something called limited martial rule. They have to have local police. The Guard can’t make arrests on their own.”
“You don’t know a thing about being a sheriff.”
“I tried to explain that to them.”
“And what did they say?”
“They said John Patterson recommended me for the job. Jack Black, too.”
“Can’t they just find someone else?”
“Bernard Sykes already offered it to George Findletter.”
“And what did he say?”
“His wife said there was no way in hell. She’d divorce him.”
Joyce nodded. She inspected her painted nails and turned back and forth in her seat. There was a knock at the front of the little shotgun house, and she walked to the door and told a woman that she’d be right with her. She shut the door with a little click and walked back. You could only hear the air conditioner humming in a small window facing our yard.
“You already said yes, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
She nodded back. Her hair was freshly done and curled, and she wore a powder of makeup on her face. Her cotton skirt hit her at the knees, and when she walked she sometimes put her hands in the pockets.
“I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“Me, too.”
“You need this, don’t you?”
“For a long time.”
She looked at me. The woman outside walked back and forth on the little porch, impatient. I crunched the bill of my ball cap and then looked back at Joyce. She was looking right at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see our images in a bank of mirrors.
“I don’t want our kids hurt.”
“They won’t be.”
She shook her head and stood and reached down her long, lithe fingers to me. I looked up at her, confused, until I saw the way she held her hand. I took her hand and stood, and we shook on it.
AT MIDNIGHT, I WAS WITH THE GUARD DOWN ON DILLINGHAM
Street in the rain. I wore my civilian clothes under a yellow slicker but carried a standard-issue .45 Colt Jack Black had given me earlier. Black carried a pump shotgun in one hand and leaned against a jeep, while Hanna sat up in the driver’s seat smoking a cigar and talking to someone on a field telephone. The street was dead and filled with rain and quiet and dark in the absence of all the neon. You could hear the roar of the Chattahoochee, filled with storm water and rolling and breaking over the dam, but Phenix City was still, not a car heading down the road besides Guard troops. In the silence, we heard a grunt, and Hanna climbed out holding an ax.
“Come on,” he said. We headed over to the Bridge Grocery, and Hanna began to pound on the front door, about twenty uniformed men behind him. He banged some more, until I heard fat little Godwin Davis call out from behind the door that ain’t nobody shown him a goddamn warrant.
“I got a warrant,” Hanna said. He stood back and began to tear into the door with the ax, and when the splintering set in good he nodded to Black, who just stepped up to the door and kicked it in. I followed and walked into the dimly lit space, the lights with red bulbs looking onto a dirty concrete floor filled with one-armed bandits and horse-racing machines. Davis was shirtless, a portly little man with white chest hair, a fat, distended stomach, and breasts like a woman. He strutted around the room calling the troops names with a cigar between his teeth.
A tabletop projector showed a black-and-white stag film against the cracked plaster wall. A woman was having sex with a mule. Black shut off the projector and the reel stopped with a
click, click, click.
When I got close to Davis, I could smell his peculiar barnyard odor and winced. He looked me over and saw the badge pinned to my slicker and shook his head, saying, “Well, I’ll fuck a monkey.”
“I bet,” I said.
He grunted and turned away, wiping under his underarms with a rag and sitting down on a vinyl diner’s chair and watching the troops carrying out the machines and tagging the equipment for evidence. Black nodded to me and handed me a piece of paper running down Davis’s rights.
I read it to him. And he laughed the whole time and then spit right in my face.
I wiped it away while Jack spun him around and clamped cuffs on his wrists.
THREE HOURS LATER, WE STOOD NEAR THE UPPER BRIDGE,
and for the first time in ten years I walked into one of the clip joints, a place called the Atomic Bomb Café. It took four men there to restrain old Clyde Yarborough, his jawless face worked into a howl, his long ape arms tearing and pounding against the soldiers’ backs until they restrained him.
I turned on the house lights, and we walked behind the bar, finding three sawed-off shotguns, two .38s, and a .44 Magnum.
I pointed to the .38s and asked for a couple of the guardsmen to bag them as evidence.
“Not bad, chief,” Black said.
“I watch
Dragnet
on occasion.”
The guardsmen pushed Yarborough past me, and his misshapen flesh flexed like the skin on heated milk. His black eyes watched me, and then he grunted deep in his destroyed, toothless mouth with a bellowing laugh.
Black reached out and patted the man’s ruined face. And while the guardsmen held him there, Black bent down and whispered something into the old man’s ear. His black eyes grew wide, before he was pushed out the door.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Just saying hi.”
“You know him.”
Black shrugged.
“Clyde Yarborough. He’s been here since the twenties. Taught Shepherd and Matthews everything they know.”
“He looks like something out of
Dick Tracy.
”
“But he’s beautiful on the inside,” I said.
“I bet,” Black said.
We had to use a crowbar on a back storage room and then run flashlights over the endless rows of slots and card tables, roulette wheels, and soiled rollaway beds. There was a door off to the right of the room and a long row of blinds that a soldier opened to reveal a row of stalls. Soldiers appeared on the other side and tapped against the glass.
“Two-way mirror,” Black said.
In each room, there were tools of the trade, boxes of jimmies and lubricant, some whips and handcuffs, long plastic devices shaped like a man’s peter, and bottles of Lysol spray.
“God, it’s awful in there,” a soldier said. “It smells like rotten tuna.”
A couple of the guardsmen showed off a long, socketlike device that could plug into a wall and they burst into laughter, holding it away from them with a handkerchief.
“What the hell is that?” Black asked.
“Do you really want to know?”
“Not really.”
Boxes were brought in to gather the devices and the slots, and soldiers cataloged every single item, which were soon loaded onto trucks by hordes of other soldiers and driven back to the armory outside town. Several of the men explored the back rooms of the club, and one of them called over to Black about a door he found leading to a staircase. I followed and hit the beam of my flashlight, the steps running right into a tunnel of rock and dirt, a long, dirty hole that pinged in silence with the dripping of water.