The Wicked City - Beatriz Williams

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think you best be fixing to get back inside that house, Duke Kelly,” I said. Edging to the right. Clear line for the frail wire-screen door of the coop. The patch of sun on the opposite slope was falling fast now. The air turning to a foggy gold. “You best fix to get back inside before somebody sees you out here.”

      “Who’s a-going-a see us? Ain’t nobody up. Not on a hot old morning like this-un.”

      I kept on staring at his nose without looking, imagining some kind of shade between our two faces, I guess, some kind of blind, so I wouldn’t be giving myself away. Another rightward step.

      “Johnnie’s up, I reckon. Johnnie’s always up early.”

      “Johnnie don’t know from nothing. Now just you stop yourself a-moving about like that, Geneva Rose. Let me get a look at you. See how you filled out this summer. Almost a woman grown now, ain’t you? Just almost.”

      So I froze up, and you would, too, if you’d heard his voice like that, like the purr of an African cat, chilling your young bones from the inside out, worrying down your spine. Or maybe you wouldn’t. Maybe I’m the only one who hears that bass snarl of malice in Duke Kelly’s voice. Everybody else just thinks he’s a real nice fellow. Anyway, I froze up, paralysis of fear, muscles all stuck in their joints, such that I didn’t even flinch when Duke’s big hand came to rest on the collar of my dress.

      “That’s better,” he said. “That’s my good baby girl.”

      I waited and waited while that hand crawled all over my bosom, pinching and squeezing. While that voice crawled over my ears. I waited until he came in close with his mouth open, panting hot on my face, cheeks smudged red, and then I drove my fist into his stomach hard as I could, knocking his rank skee breath right from his belly, and then I ran. Ran straight through the door of that chicken coop, ripping the wire, ripping my skin, and then I did a stupid thing. See, I should have gone into the house, where Mama and the boys lay asleep, where Johnnie sat eating his porridge at the kitchen table, spoon by spoon with a drop of molasses, but I was so scared I wasn’t thinking straight. I ran for the creek instead, dumb bunny as I was back then, ran for the creek and the old fishing hole where we used to spend our summer afternoons, me and the boys, when I was home from school. Of course, the creek was screened by willows and thick with skeeters, and nobody came down there at that time of day, nobody at all, and you couldn’t hear nobody talking or screaming from down there, either, on account of the trees and the way the creek makes a holler betwixt two sloping banks, see, into which all these sounds find themselves trapped like crawdads at the bottom of a wooden barrel.

      So why did I make for the creek? God knows. Just a young, dumb bunny as I was back then. Not thinking straight.

       9

      ANYWAY. I’M nobody’s bunny any longer. What I tell that nice special revenue agent is this: “I’m afraid I don’t recollect exactly, Mr. Anson. Why do you ask?”

      “You’ve had no relations at all with your family since you left River Junction in the summer of 1920?”

      “Say. That’s a personal question.”

      He shrugs those shoulders of his. Checks his wristwatch. Sips coffee, sighs, turns his head to the window as if to make certain that Manhattan still exists out there, rattling and shouting and drinking and fornicating. A delicate glow passes across the bridge of that hefty nose. Headlights of some nocturnal automobile.

      “Have all night, do you?” I say.

      “If necessary.”

      “My goodness. Is old Duke so important as that?”

      “Yes.”

      “Can’t you give me a hint?”

      He turns back to me. “Do I need to give you a hint? You seem like a clever woman, Miss Kelly. I’m sure you’ve already guessed the nature of my interest in your stepfather.”

      “I haven’t laid eyes on River Junction in nearly three and a half years, Mr. Anson. If my stepfather’s set himself up in a little business since then, taking advantage of the difference between what one half of the country wants and what the other half doesn’t want them to get, why, I don’t know a thing about it.”

      Anson places his cup and saucer back on the desk and walks across the few yards of thready Oriental carpet to where I sit in my chair, all folded shut like a clam at low tide. The silk lining over my shoulders responds with an electric ripple. Or maybe that’s the nerves underneath. Each button of Anson’s plain waistcoat is done right up, not a stitch loose, not a single flaw in the weave of fine gray wool, and the reason I can report these details is because he’s come to rest about a foot away, not even that. I do expect I can tell you the brand of starch stiffening the cuffs of his sleeves. From this angle, his head looks like a prehistoric skull, all bone.

      He sinks to one knee, right there next to my chair, and lays his right forearm over his thigh. His eyes are larger than I thought, more charcoal than blue, the color of winter.

      “Not a little business, Miss Kelly. Your stepfather has built a network of distilleries across Allegany County and beyond, and nobody will say a word against him. I don’t know if they love the man or if they’re plain scared, or if they’re on the take.”

      “All three, I do expect.”

      “In two years, the Bureau hasn’t been able to make a dent in his business, not a single arrest. A few months ago, two of our best men disappeared out there.”

      “My condolences. What’s the world coming to, when a Prohi can’t just take a little lettuce in his back pocket and keep his blood on the inside?”

      “My agents don’t accept bribes, Miss Kelly.”

      “You don’t say? Because a little birdie tells me they’d be the first.”

      “They’re good men with families. Wives and children.”

      “Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Do you have a wife and children, Mr. Anson?”

      A slow blink, like a reptile. “That’s a personal question, Miss Kelly.”

      “Oh, I see! I’m the one who’s supposed to spill all the beans in this room, isn’t that right, while you get to keep your beans to yourself. Seems you’ve got a nice little racket of your own, Anson. A nice little racket.”

      He breathes in slow, regular drafts from a pair of gargantuan lungs. Fresh coffee on his breath and nothing else, not tobacco nor liquor nor money, just good clean virtue.

      “You see? It’s all a matter of perspective, isn’t it? There was this painter I used to sleep with, when I first came to New York. A real wisenheimer. He taught me about a lot of things. He taught me all about perspective. How you can change the essence of an object, the soul of it, you can change this thing entirely just by looking on it some different way. But you know what? I’ll bet you already knew that. Something tells me you know a lot about art, don’t you, Mr. Anson? Expensive art, the kind they hang in museums and fancy Fifth Avenue apartments. You know from perspective, I’ll bet.”

      “I understand the concept.”

      “You think you’re the good guy, don’t you, Mr. Anson? You think you’re some kind of honest-to-goodness knight, riding into River Junction on your fine white charger to do away with that dastardly villain with the twirling mustache. Cover yourself with medals. Laurels on your head, damsels on your arm. I wonder what you’d say if you knew how it looks from where I’m sitting.”

      “So tell me.”

      I turn a little on my hip on that chair, so we’re face-to-face, terribly intimate, the way you turn to your lover in bed. Prop my elbow on the back of the chair. Drape one leg over the other. His knee’s no more than an inch from my own.

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