Read Online Wicked City by Ace Atkins - Free Book Online

who’d worked on the car.
    “You didn’t answer me,” said the skinny, pimple-faced teen. He ran his fingers under his nose and sniffed. He pushed at Billy’s shoulder.
    Billy just kept walking, trying to go around, but something stopped him, and as he turned back they held the bicycle by the seat. He pulled, but then the pimple-faced boy was in front of him, twisting the bars of the bike like a steer and trying to pull him off.
    “Cut it out.”
    “Where you from?”
    “Phenix City.”
    “The shithole of this earth.”
    He pushed him with one hand and Billy quit trying to push back. The other teen had yellow eyes and rotted teeth. He reached out and grabbed Billy’s shirt and ripped it from the neck.
    “Do you know Lorelei?”
    “Who is she? Your sister?”
    And before Billy could say another word, the pimple-faced teen shot out a fist and busted Billy’s lip. Billy fought back, blind to it, because the one thing that he had heard over and over from Reuben was to never take a single ounce of shit from a living soul because, if you did, the shit would bury you. He fought with his eyes closed, windmilling, but his hands were held back, and the teen punched him hard in the eye and in the stomach, all the air rushing from him, and he was on his face, trying to catch his breath, when he heard the puttering sound of a broken muffler and looked up into the twin headlights, shining like eyes, the engine gunning, the car lurching forward.
    He rolled just before it reached him.
    The car bumped over his bicycle, the teens calling him a little pussy as they hit the gas around another turn, part of the bicycle caught beneath and sparking in the darkness, their laughter and yells following them down the street.
     
    4
     
    UNDER THE TIN ROOF of Slocumb’s Service Station, noted above with a sign reading COURTEOUS and a big red button for Coca-Cola, I watched the cars speed by Crawford Road with their big-eyed headlights glowing white in the weak gray light. It had been a sluggish, heated morning between rain and sunshine when the air almost wants to break, thunder in the distance. Fat-bodied Fords and Chevys and Hudsons and Nashes would stop in every few minutes and Arthur and I would wander out of the garage to check their oil, clean their windshields of mosquitoes and lovebugs, and fill them up with the all-new, high-test Petrox.
    And soon they’d again join the snaking line up and out over the bridge and out of Alabama or deeper on to Birmingham or Montgomery. Arthur liked to talk to folks, excited to know where they were headed, maybe secretly wanting to escape Phenix, too. He’d smile and speak in that careful, deferential safe ground for negroes, but always laugh and joke with me as a friend, not a boss.
    I wore an Army slicker over my green Texaco coveralls and a matching ball cap with the red star logo. In between customers, I checked the shelves for Vienna sausages and saltines and searched the cooler for Coca-Cola and Dr Pepper. There were cases filled with candy and bubble gum and cartons of cigarettes and chewing tobacco; Borden’s ice cream was hand-dipped from a freezer by the register.
    It was almost lunch when a sky blue Buick coupe wheeled in.
    Reuben Stokes walked into Slocumb’s, announced with the tingle of a bell over the door, and I looked up. Reuben’s hair had been freshly cut and combed tight in the back and sides with a high poof on top; he wore a royal blue leisure coat with long, vertical white stripes and pleated white pants. He smiled like a confident circus performer.
    “You’re not gonna rob me, are you?”
    “How much you got?” Reuben asked.
    “Couple hundred.”
    “Maybe I will.”
    Outside, a skinny man in a pink cowboy shirt and a fat man with a head the size of a watermelon got out of the Buick, stretched, and talked with Arthur. I recognized the man in the pink shirt as Johnnie Benefield, a local clip joint operator and safecracker. He was bone thin, with big teeth and a face