The Wicked City
Nellie tilted her head in bemusement.
“That’s because you’re a dog with absolutely no morals at all,” Ella told her. “I’ll bet you’d be pregnant every twelve weeks if you weren’t fixed. You’d be letting every alpha in the Village hump you on the way to the park.”
Nellie barked and ran to the open door.
Ella followed. Moved her hand to the doorknob and let it hover there, while the longing rose in her throat until she could actually taste longing, could actually feel its bittersweetness on the back of her tongue. Nellie scrabbled her paws at the door’s corner, trying to work it open farther.
“Look, Nellie, he said to listen to your dog in matters of the heart. And you’re his dog. You work for him. How do I know I can trust you, either?”
Nellie whined and scrabbled harder, and the gap in the doorway widened. Ella put her hand on the knob and started to push it closed, and it was like someone jabbed a hot pin into the back of her hand.
“Ouch!” she hissed.
Somewhere down the stairwell, a faint thumping made her pause.
“Hector?” she called. “Are you still there?”
“What’s up?” he called back.
Ella sucked on the back of her hand. Nellie darted through the doorway and turned, looking up anxiously, expression of absolute supplication.
“It’s too soon,” Ella whispered. “It’s a leap of faith. A whole new country. What if I get lost somewhere?”
Hector’s voice. “Ella? You okay?”
Ella found herself walking out the door to the landing. Placed her left hand on the banister. Her pulse crashed so hard in her neck, she felt the skin move. She felt the blood whir in her ears. Some kind of otherworldly electricity skittering along her spinal cord, as the old Ella and the new Ella threw sparks off each other.
You belong here. Did she actually hear those words, or did they echo between her ears? The back of her hand tingled urgently.
You belong here.
Ella called down: “I’m fine. I just forgot to ask you something.”
“What?”
“Do you mind if I sleep naked in your bed?”
The air turned to glass. Not a sound came up from below; even the ordinary background clang of Manhattan seemed to disappear into another dimension. No music floating from the basement. No voices. No sirens. Just the sound of her own heart slamming against her eardrums.
And then.
Thump, thump, thump. Pause. Thump thump thump thump thump. (She walked to the end of the landing and stood thrumming at the top of the stairs.) Thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump and Hector swung around the last curve of the staircase, dark hair flying apart, and ran up the final flight and lifted her up in the air.
“This is a huge mistake,” he said.
“Huge.”
They staggered down the hall and crashed through the door.
“Also, the sexiest thing anyone’s ever said to me. Were you doing your eyebrow thing, too?”
“Probably.”
“Dream girl.” He stopped kissing her to shut the door behind them. Cupped her jaw with his hand. “I’m kissing you. We’re kissing, Ella. This is actually happening.”
“What about your meeting?”
“He’ll understand. Your dinner?”
“No contest.”
He kissed her. His hand wandered down her hand and found her fingers. “Husband?” he whispered.
“History.”
He kissed her chin, her jaw, her ear. Moved down the side of her throat. “Are you sure? Sure you want to do this?”
“No. I’m scared to death.”
“We can stop. We can wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“You tell me, Ella. You tell me what you want.”
Ella leaned into his chest and inhaled his soap, his skin, his wool, his dog, his everything, and it seemed to her she had known this scent all her life. The smell of home. Music and laughter and bourbon and honest wood shavings. All this could be hers. Just say the word, Ella.
“I don’t know,” she said. “How good are you in bed?”
“For you, dream girl? I can be off the charts. I can keep you up all night and make you breakfast in the morning.”
She lifted her head and took in another kiss. Looped her fingers around the back of his neck. The back of her hand had stopped hurting or even tingling; in fact, she was buzzing all over with the kind of dizzy well-being you ordinarily feel after a long, expensive massage in a hotel spa. She pressed her hips against his, and instead of feeling daring, she felt safe. She felt warmth. A promising firmness. Connection. Agile musician hands sliding down her back to round her bottom.
A snatch of Gershwin floated through her head. And the living is eaaaasy.
“Let’s go,” she said.
ENCORE
We Make Like a Banana
(and split)
DIXIE HIGHWAY
March 1924
WE DRIVE almost until nightfall, stopping only for gas and food and hot coffee, for a set of dry, warm clothes for each of us. Roll of new gauze for Anson’s chest, which I wind carefully upon his bare skin, while he does close his eyes against my touch. Then I curl up on the seat and sleep, while Patsy, so fully alive as only a five-year-old child can be, sits on Anson’s lap and asks him a thousand questions. He answers each one with grave patience—at least those I’m conscious to hear. At six o’clock Anson pulls over at a motor inn and pays for a room. I don’t bother asking where he got the money. Sewn inside his trousers, probably. Or else given him by Luella, right before she drove out of River Junction in that two-seater Franklin, bearing Billy to help. Against her own wishes, probably. Anson forcing her to the same sacrifice I asked of him.
I can’t stop shivering, no matter how much coffee I drink, no matter how many clothes Anson piles upon me. When at last Patsy falls asleep in her cot, I crawl into my narrow bed and draw the covers around me and curl into so small a ball as I can, and still my teeth set to chattering in my head. Maybe they will chatter forever. Maybe cold is my permanent condition, in consequence of my sins.
Anson speaks softly from the other bed. “Still chilled?”
“Thought I told you to get some sleep.”
Soft creak of bedsprings.
“You can’t sleep here,” I say. “Bed’s too narrow.”
He just lifts the covers and slides in, resting his weight on his good side. I turn my face to his chest and suck his warmth into my skin. Breathe in the store-bought smell of his wool sweater. Man’s like a blast furnace, burning high-grade Pennsylvania anthracite to a pure, noble hotness. I think of my mama and her last fever, and the difference between that sickly heat and this one. I ask him where we’re going.
“Away,” he tells me.
“New York?”
“No. Farther. They’re going to be looking for you in New York. We’re going to Florida. Fellow down in Cocoa Beach owes me a favor.”
I nod. The wool of his sweater scratches my nose. My hurt arm slows to a dull, stiff ache at my side. He asks me if I’m still cold, and I say not anymore.
We are quiet. Not touching, except for my nose and his chest. Clothes on. The sheets are thin and cheap; the bed smells of must. I want to sleep; my head aches, my stomach roils, the way you feel after a night of gin and beefsteak and dancing, all clangy and drained, your bones stiff. But there is no more sleep in me. If I shut my eyes, I see blood and splintered bone, I see sloshing water and rain and the certain knowledge of annihilation. I see Anson’s bruised face. I hear his rough, beat-up voice. So I open my eyes and stare at the blur of dark knitting before me, only just visible because there’s a light on somewhere outside our window, and the glow streaks through the shabby curtains.
“Billy be all right?” I whisper.
“I guess so. Going to take some healing.”
“His poor face,” I say, “his lovely face.”
Anson puts one arm around me. Doesn’t tell me not to cry or anything
stupid like that. Just allows me to sob, muffling the sound with his own body, so Patsy doesn’t hear and wake herself. I put my hand on the back of his soft neck and my sobs turn into hiccups.
“All right?” he whispers.
“Sure I’m all right. Never better. You?”
“Just fine.”
And my hiccups turn to giggles, and his chest shakes a little too, though it must hurt like the devil. “Lord Almighty,” I say, between spasms, “I am going to hell. What’s wrong with us?”
“Just shock, that’s all. The grief comes later.”
“It’s just too much. It’s too much.”
“It’s over now. He’s gone.”
“Duke’s gone.”
“He is. He’s dead, Gin. Saw his body myself, floating downstream. No life in him at all.”
I think about that spot on the wall of the springhouse, the sound of bones snapping. Brief and violent. Look of amazement on Duke’s face as he prepared to meet his Maker. My heart sets to thumping. I tilt my face to the ridge of Anson’s chin. Can’t see the bruises in this dark, but I know they’re there. I know that jaw is swollen and purple. I touch it with my finger and he flinches.
“Sorry,” I say.
He takes the finger and holds it there against his skin. “Try to sleep. We’ll be driving all day tomorrow.”
“Can’t sleep. Head won’t stop thinking.”
“Thinking about what?”
“Everything. Pair of fugitives, aren’t we? No past remaining to us. Everything left behind. Just what lies ahead.”
“Regrets?”
“Maybe,” I say, and then, “No. Everything I hold dear is right in this room. Except maybe those things my mama left me, I guess, the buttons and the letters, but that doesn’t matter like it did.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“No. What difference does it make, who my daddy was? You can’t yearn for what was never yours to begin with. I would a million times ruther have Johnnie back than some old buttons. Million times ruther have Billy untouched. So I am grateful for what’s left. My mama’s in my heart. My baby sister’s sleeping safe nearby. And you. Alive. Lying here against me. Everything plain between us.”
He doesn’t speak. I wonder whether he is recollecting those things Duke said in the springhouse, considering the possibility of something else lying between us. The state of his body, I perceive, is so tense as a coiled spring. So taut as his legs curled up beneath him in that springhouse, ready to strike. The gentle touch of his hand against my back belies something else, something akin to the craving I keep inside my own skin, like you crave water to drink and air to breathe. Garments to clothe your nakedness. Balm to heal your wounds.
I slide up a few inches, so we are face-to-face. Lips touching but not kissing.
“Are we sinners, Anson? You and me.”
His thumb, which had been circling some knob of my spine, slows to a stop. We sink into contemplation of each other, and I recollect how we first lay together, blind as moles.
“Yes,” he says. “God forgive us.”
“What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know, Ginger. Find a way, somehow. Wake up in the morning and find a way home.”
As I told you before, a narrow bed does foster intimacy. Nowhere to spread your limbs, nowhere to hide. You lie conjoined as babes in the womb. Life in flood between you. Cells multiplying and dividing.
Thus you fall asleep, and your flesh rests content against him.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Driving through rural Maryland to a bookstore a few years ago, I passed by a town that startled me. Instead of the modest farmhouses of other villages, several imposing homes lined the main street, made of brick and stone and clearly dating from the earlier part of the twentieth century. I asked the bookstore manager what industry had driven this apparent boom in wealth. She told me it was bootlegging money, and The Wicked City started to take shape in my head, right there. From the beginning, however, I saw Ginger belonging more to the mountain culture of the Appalachians than the hills outside of Washington, so I moved her hometown to the northwest corner of the state, where Maryland drags a hand into West Virginia.
The Appalachian dialect is a complicated, variegated work of human language, and while I spent a considerable amount of time researching its unique syntax, pronunciation, and vocabulary, I make no pretense to reproducing it here. For one thing, there are so many arcane phrases and word usages that would either misdirect readers or pull them out of the story altogether; for another thing, the dialect has evolved since the 1920s, leaving very few surviving examples of its earlier forms, which makes historical accuracy virtually impossible. For example, most (though not all) current maps tend to place the northwest counties of Maryland in the Midland dialect group, but sound files of older residents intriguingly suggest the more Southern speech patterns indicative of classic Appalachian usage; I suspect that mobility and industrialization have had their way during the past century. Meanwhile, Ginger herself is a chameleon who has journeyed through a variety of different environments, all of which have influenced her speech to varying degrees. Taking all these factors into account, I gave the residents of my fictional, isolated town of River Junction a proud mountain twang, and in doing so have tried to remain faithful to the sense of Appalachian English—its extraordinary poetry and rhythm, its almost Shakespearean rendering of sentences—without losing either myself or my readers in its specifics. I hope linguists and native speakers will forgive me for any errors and inconsistencies, intended or otherwise.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My name may be the one on the cover, but The Wicked City was really brought to you by a number of unsung heroes whose passion it is to turn manuscripts into books. Thanks are forever due to my dear and fabulous agent, Alexandra Machinist of ICM; to her assistant, Hillary Jacobson, who sadly has no clone; and to my badass editor, Rachel Kahan, and all her fellow miracle workers at William Morrow whose support has meant so much to me, both professionally and personally.
I owe so much to the booksellers and librarians who have loved and championed my novels, and to the readers who have then taken these books to their hearts. Your enthusiastic words feed me daily, and most especially on those days when both words and enthusiasm come hard.
Last and always, I’m grateful for my family—husband and children, parents and sister, in-laws and outlaws—and my beloved friends with whom I share coffee and champagne, as needed.
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About the Author
A graduate of Stanford University with an MBA from Columbia, Beatriz Williams spent several years in New York and London hiding her early attempts at fiction, first on company laptops as a communications strategy consultant, and then as an at-home producer of small persons, before her career as a writer took off. She lives with her husband and four children near the Connecticut shore.
Visit her online at
www.beatrizwilliams.com
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Also by Beatriz Williams
A Hundred Summers
Tiny Little Thing
Along The Infinite Sea