Wicked City Read Online Free Page B

emerge late at night smelling like burnt sugar and grease. I made my living with my fists in pickup bouts for the enjoyment of two-bit hustlers over the river in Phenix City — the same rings where they fought roosters and dogs — and soon in the legitimate ring, taking the Atlanta Golden Gloves in 1938. From there, I never thought it would end, boxing my way from New York to New Orleans and even down to Mexico City.
    I bought new tailored suits and carried gobs of cash in a silver money clip, even being able to afford a nice little convertible that was a hell of a thing in the country on a spring day.
    But then I met Joyce, and when we danced one night on my new nimble feet at a bandstand down on Moon Lake, the fighting didn’t seem as important. She worked as a beautician in Phenix City, was about the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. And unlike most of the girls you meet on the road who were with you until the booze and prize money ran out, she could’ve cared less about me being a fighter. In fact she hated it, and about the time the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor she asked me to please quit getting myself beat on, just like that, never acknowledging that the other fella was taking most of the beating.
    Before Mr. Patterson was shot, I remember the rust-flecked mirror over the station commode becoming the boxing mirror — the place where all fighters must examine their every move and weakness — and I saw a man that had grown soft and old. At forty, I didn’t care for that feeling a bit.
    I’d always been a groper.
     
     
    WHEN THE PHONE RANG, I WAS HALF ASLEEP IN AN EASY chair, an empty bowl of peach ice cream in my lap, and watching television over the heads of my two children who lay on the floor, inches away from the screen. We’d just watched a show called Topper about a ghost couple and their ghost Saint Bernard who haunted an uptight banker. The kids liked it a lot anytime the ghost dog got into the banker’s booze, but now had grown a little bored and sleepy with Schlitz Playhouse of Stars , and that’s when I’d begun to doze after a long day of pumping gas and fixing engines.
    Joyce walked into the room, drying her hands on a dish towel, and took a deep breath. Her face was white as she pointed me back to the kitchen.
    I put down my spoon and followed. “Hugh Britton called. Mr. Patterson has been shot. They’ve taken him to the hospital.”
    “My gun is in the nightstand.”
    “I know where your gun is.”
    “Keep it close.”
    “I’ll lock the doors.”
    The hospital was just up the hill from our little brick house, and I ran all the way through the fine, heated summer night. The little windows of the postwar cottages on the gentle slope glowed with soft light, and in the tiny square yards children played and grimy men drank beer and worked on cars. Women sat on stoops and smoked cigarettes in hair curlers, and I ran by them all up a curved drive, past all the cars and a few ambulances, and into the dull, attic heat of the hospital lobby.
    I found John Patterson speaking to two doctors with a large gathering of newsmen and photographers. They popped off flashes from their boxed Rolleiflex cameras, John’s face sweating and dull eyes vacant in the quick strobes of light. They asked him questions about his father and the rackets and the reputed Phenix City Machine and he didn’t answer them, unblinking in the quick strobes, until I grabbed his elbow and steered him into a hallway, where he just stared down the long vacuum of tile and linoleum and nurses and doctors in antiseptic white.
    John hadn’t been back from the service long, a World War II combat veteran who’d served from Africa to Austria with France in between. He’d been briefly recalled to Korea but ended up with some legal work in Germany before returning home to partner with his father. He was a stocky guy with a heavy brow, the kind of man who’d rather be in a boat fishing than be involved in anything political. But John was a