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it’s just a big dog and pony show. Just keep your head down and take your licks and it will be over. Sit down and drink with me. Don’t fight it. It won’t be long till the GIs will be so thick in here that you can’t stand.”
    Reuben nodded to Yarborough, and Yarborough uncorked the whiskey bottle again, filling three glasses, the sticky sweet alcohol spilling across the bar and shining with red light.
    He clicked glasses with the two men in front of him. “To the end of the Occupation,” Reuben said.
    Fuller snorted. Yarborough grumbled and poured the whiskey into the hole in his face.
    “So where were you last night?”
    “Where am I every Friday night?”
    “I got to ask,” Fuller said. “A lawman has to look to everybody.”
    Reuben squinted one eye at him, trying to hold him in focus, and then turned back to his drink.
    “I tell you one thing,” Bert Fuller said. “I’m not gonna lie down and let them RBA people run me down in the newspapers and corn-hole my ass. I want them to think about every fucking lie they tell about me.”
    Reuben looked down at his empty drink and then laid down some money.
    “And the worst of them all is that that goddamn bald-headed sonofabitch who runs the Texaco station. Murphy. You know that bastard, don’t you?”
    “For a long time.”
    “You his friend?”
    “We used to box together before the war.”
    “I think it’s time he just disappeared from the scene. Comprende, partner?”
    Fuller affixed his Stetson in the mirror and readjusted the rig on his fat belly and walked out as Hank sang on about a mournful wooden Indian named Kaw-liga.
     
    3
     
    PEOPLE HAD ALWAYS CALLED Phenix City wicked. Or Sin City. For those of us who lived and worked outside the rackets, we tried our best to ignore it. But it was hard when most of the vice boasted services in neon down by the river, on the way to the only two bridges out of town. But we had schools and a hospital paid for in dirty money, and sometimes big-time poker chips would end up in the collection plates on Sunday. My son and daughter went to school and church with sons and daughters of bootleggers, pimps, and whores. Bert Fuller was a deacon, and Hoyt Shepherd, who most called the town’s kingpin, sometimes sang in the Christmas pageant and liked to play the part of the innkeeper who turned away Mary and Joseph.
    It was just an engrained part of our local economy, and the vice had gone on so long, it was very much like a strand of barbed wire that cuts a tree but is later absorbed, becoming part of its growth.
    Until that June, I guess I didn’t even know how deeply that wire cut. But there were things I learned, the darkest of moral depravity that went far beyond slot machines and illegal liquor that I still can’t wash from my mind.
    The night after the shooting, for the first time in months, it rained. Big, thick thunderheads blew in from the west and pounded the dry Phenix City asphalt, running off the bottles and cigarette butts and trash into narrow rivulets and into the Chattahoochee. You could smell the wet asphalt and concrete, the rich red clay, and scraggly pines on the hills. The windows in my Ford station wagon fogged as Hugh Britton and I crossed the roadblock at the Lower Bridge to Columbus, the river frothing and boiling over the Rock Cut Dam to the north.
    “Did you notice anything unusual about Bert Fuller this morning?” I asked.
    “Something’s always unusual about Fuller.”
    “You notice his rig?”
    “I’ve seen it. Asshole thinks he’s Randolph Scott.”
    “He wore it this morning, but those pearl-handled revolvers were gone,” I said.
    Britton looked at me, the windshield wipers spastically working over the window.
    “Now, have you ever known him not to wear those guns?”
    “No, sir,” he said.
    At a corner filling station just off Broadway, I made a phone call, and then we ate some toast and drank coffee over at Choppy’s Diner for half an hour before getting back in the