Hot Springs (13 page)

Both youngsters nodded.

“Let’s do her good,” said Earl.

Frenchy kicked the door, which yielded quickly. They entered, walked in tandem down a long corridor. At a certain point Earl flicked on a wall switch and two targets stood before them. Frenchy, his pistol out, was fastfast-fast, putting two shots into the chest of his. A split second later Henderson’s three-shot burst tore the heart out of the target on the right.

“Good, good,” said Earl. “Now keep moving, don’t bunch up, don’t stop to admire yourself, keep your eyes moving.”

They came to a corner. Frenchy jumped across the hall, his gun locked in the triangle of his arms and supported by the triangle of his legs as he hunted for targets. Carlo came next, dropping into a good kneeling shooting position. Two targets were before them, and Earl felt the boys tense as they raised their weapons, but then relax; the targets were Xed.

“Clear,” sang Frenchy.

“Clear,” came the answer.

“Good decision,” said Earl. “Keep it up.”

They moved on to a stairwell.

“Remember the last time?” Earl asked.

That was a hint. Frenchy jumped into the stairwell, covering the back zone, while Carlo fell to the far wall, orienting his Thompson up the stairs. Both saw their targets immediately. Frenchy’s .45 rang twice as he pumped two shots into the silhouette from two feet away and Carlo fired a seven-or eight-shot burst, ripping up two silhouettes at the top of the stairs.

“Clear.”

“Clear.”

The gun smoke heaved and drifted in the smallish space. A litter of spent shells lay underfoot.

“Good work,” said Earl.

Frenchy quickly dropped his magazine, inserted another.

“Great, Short. Nobody else has reloaded and some of ‘em have run dry upstairs. Good thinking, son.”

Frenchy actually smiled.

The team crept up the stairs.

They did another explosive turn as they emerged from the stairwell to confront yet another empty hallway. Down it lurked a series of doors.

“Got to clear them rooms,” said Earl.

One by one, the team moved into the rooms. It was tense, close work: they’d kick in a door, scan the room, and find targets that could be shot or targets that couldn’t. The gunfire was rapid and accurate, and neither of them made a mistake. No innocents were shot, no bad guys survived.

Finally, there was one room left, the last one.

The two gave each other a look. Frenchy nodded, took a deep breath and kicked the door open, spilling into the room to find targets on the left. One step behind plunged Carlo, who saw three silhouettes behind a table and raised the tommy, found the front sight and pulled the—

Frenchy had a moment of confusion when he felt he should not be moving, but an immense feeling of freedom and speed hit him. It was his armored vest; the strap had popped and the vest slipped sideways, the sudden shift of its weight taking his control from him. The second strap then broke, and the vest fell in two separate pieces to the floor, but Frenchy was too far gone and felt himself sprawling forward as his feet scrabbled for leverage, but instead slipped further on empty cartridge cases.

It was all so unreal. Time almost stopped. The noise of the Thompson became huge and blocked out all other things. He smelled gun smoke, felt heat, even as he fell. He lurched toward the flash and had an instant of horror as he knew, knew absolutely that he would die, for he would in the next instant fall before the path of the bullets and Carlo would not expect him and that would be that.

Shit! he thought, as he plunged toward his death in the stream of .45s.

Yet somehow he hit the ground untouched, stars shot off in his head, and then someone heavy fell upon him and there were muffled grunts.

“Jesus Christ!” Carlo was saying.

“Y’all okay?” asked Earl.

Earl was among them in the tangle on the floor. He disengaged and got up. “Y’all okay? You fine?”

“Gosh darn it!” said Carlo.

“Short, you hit?”

“Ah, no, I—What happened?”

“I almost killed you is what happened,” said Carlo, his voice aquiver with trembling. “You fell into my line of fire, I couldn’t stop, I—”

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” said Earl. “Just get ahold of yourselves.”

“What the heck happened to you? Why were you way out there?”

“The vest broke and I fell forward and my feet slipped on some shells.”

“You are a lucky little son of a gun, Short. Mr. Earl, he grabbed the gun maybe a tenth of a second before it would have cut you up. He went through me and he grabbed the gun!”

“Jesus,” said Frenchy. A wave of fear hit him.

“Okay, you fellows all right?” said Earl.

“Jesus,” said Frenchy again, and vomited.

“Well, see, that’s what a close shave’ll do to you. Come on now, you’re both okay, let’s get up and get out of here.”

“You saved my—”

“Yeah, yeah, and I saved myself three weeks of paperwork too. Come on, boys, let’s get our asses in gear. No need to get crazy about this. Only, Short: next time, check the straps. Do a maintenance check each time you go on a raid. Got that?”

“I never—”

“It’s the ‘never’ that gets you killed, Short.”

But then he winked, and Frenchy felt a little better.

There was no officers’ club for Earl and D. A. to go to that night, and since neither man drank anymore, it was perhaps a good thing. But D. A. invited Earl out to dinner, and so they found a bar-b-que joint in Texarkana, near the railway station, and set to have some ribs and fries, and many a cold Coke.

The food was good, the place was dark and coolish, and somebody put some Negro jump blues on the Rockola, and that thing was banging out a bebopping rhythm that took both their minds away from where they were. Afterward, the two men smoked and finished a last Coke, but Earl knew enough to know he was being prepared for something. And he had a surprise of his own he’d been planning to lay on D. A. sooner or later, and this looked to be as good a time as any.

“Well, Earl, you’ve done a fine job. I’m sure you’re the best sergeant the Marine Corps ever turned out. You got them whipped into some kind of shape right fast.”

“Well, sir,” said Earl, “the boys are coming along all right. Wish we had another two months to train ‘em. But they’re solid, obedient young men, they work hard, they listen and maybe they’ll do okay.”

“Who worries you?”

“Oh, that Short kid, of course. Something in that one I just don’t trust. He wants to do so well he may make a bad judgment somewhere along the line. I will say, he learns fast and he’s a good pistol hand. But you never can tell about boys until the lead starts flying.”

“I agree with you about Short. Only Yankee in the bunch and he sounds more Southern than any man born down upon the Swanee River.”

“I noticed that too. Don’t know where it comes from. Any South in him?”

“Not a lick. He told me he had a gift for soaking up dialects. Maybe he don’t even notice that he’s doing it.”

“Maybe. I never saw nothing like it in fifteen years in the Marines.”

“Anyhow, I’m asking you because I got some news.”

“Figured you did.”

“Mr. Becker is getting very restless. He’s under a lot of pressure with anonymous phone threats and suchlike and townspeople wondering when the hell he’s going to do something other than go to his office and close the door without talking to nobody. And his wife is followed by Grumley boys everywhere she goes. We got to deal with that. We got to move, and soon. Are we ready?”

“Well, you’re never ready. But we are ready on one condition.”

“I think I know what this is, Earl,” said the old man gravely.

“So did my wife. She said it was my nature.”

“She knows you, Earl. And I know you too, even though I first laid eyes on you three weeks or so ago. You’re the goddamned hero. How you made it through that war I’ll never know.”

“Anyhow, I have to go. The boys have made a connection to me, and they’ll be frightened if I ain’t there.”

“They’ll get over it.”

“Mr. Parker, I have to be there. You know it and I know it. They need a steady hand, and you’ve got too much to do setting the raids up with Becker and then dealing with the police and the press afterward.”

“Earl, if you get hit, I’d never forgive myself.”

“And if one of those kids got hit while I’se sitting somewhere sucking on a Coca-Cola, I’d never forgive myself.”

“Earl, you are a hard man to be the boss of, I will say that.”

“I know what’s right. Plus, no goddamn hillbilly with a shotgun is going to get the best of me.”

“Earl, never underestimate your enemy. You should know that from the war. Owney Maddox was called ‘Killer’ back in New York. According to the New York District Attorney’s Office, he killed over twenty men in his time. Once this shit starts happening, he’s going to bring in some mobsters who’ve pulled triggers before. Don’t kid yourself, Earl. These will be tough boys. Get ready for em.

“Then you’ll let me go?”

“Shit, Earl, you have to go. That is as clear to me as the nose on my face. But I want you to go home and talk to your wife first. Hear me? You tell her like a man. So she knows. And you tell her you love her and that things will be okay. And you listen to that pup in her belly. Look, here’s twenty-five bucks, you take her out to a nice dinner at Fort Smith’s finest restaurant.”

“Ain’t no fine restaurants in Fort Smith.”

“Then hire a cook.”

“Yes sir.”

“And you meet us Tuesday in Hot Springs.”

“Tuesday?”

“Here it is, Earl. Our first warrant. We hit the Horseshoe at 10:00 P. M. Tuesday night. We’re going to start the ball rolling with a big one.”

He got back late Friday night; the vets village was quiet and it took him some time to find his own hut. The low, corrugated shapes had such a sameness to them that most of the women had tried to pretty them up with flower beds and bushes, maybe a trellis or something silly like that. But they were still essentially tubes half buried in the earth, passing as housing. Eventually, he got himself oriented—fellow could wander for hours in the sameness of the place, all the little streets just like all the other little streets—and found 5th Street, where he lived in No. 17. He knocked and there was no answer. She must be sleeping. He opened the door because nobody bothered to lock up.

He heard her in what passed for the bedroom; it was really just a jerry-built wall that didn’t reach the arched tin roof. She breathed steadily, deeply, as if for two. He didn’t want to startle her, so he stayed out of that room and instead remained in the large one.

He moved one small lamp so that the bulb would not shine into the bedroom, and turned it on, looking about as he undressed. It was a fairly squalid experience. The furniture was all used, the tin walls overcurving as if boring in, to crush the life out of all possibility here. She’d worked hard to cheer the place up inside as well as out, to disguise its essential governmentness, by painting and hanging pictures and curtains and what-not. But the effort was doomed, overwhelmed by the odor of the aluminum that encapsulated them and the feel of the give in the wooden slats that made up the floor.

The plumbing was primitive, the stove and icebox small, the place drafty. It was no place to bring up a kid.

He went to the kitchen—rather to the corner where the kitchen appliances were located—and opened the icebox, hoping to find some milk or something or maybe another Coca-Cola. But she had not known he was coming and there was nothing. But then a rogue impulse fired off and he opened a certain cabinet and there indeed, as he remembered, was a half-full bottle of Boone County bourbon.

It took a lot of Earl not to drink it. He was not in the mood to say no to bourbon, because the long pull up the western edge of Arkansas on 71 essentially took him through home ground. The road, two lanes of wandering macadam, crawled through Polk County, where his daddy had been the sheriff and a big, important man. Near midnight, the drive took Earl through Blue Eye, the county seat, nestled in the trackless Ouachitas. He hadn’t seen it in years. The main street ran west of the train tracks, lined with little buildings. He’d had no impulse to detour to see what had been his father’s office and was still the county sheriff’s office; nor had he had an impulse to detour out Arkansas 8 to Board Camp, where the farm that he had inherited as the last surviving Swagger lay fallow. He had faced it once, when he was immediately out of the Corps, and that had been enough.

Ghosts seemed to scamper through the night. Was it Halloween? No, the ghosts were memories, some happy, some sad, really just bright pictures in his mind of this day and that in his boyhood, of parades and hikes and hunting trips—his father was an ardent, excellent hunter and one wall of the house was alive with his trophies—and all the things that filled a boy’s life in the 1920s in rural America. But he always sensed his father’s giganticism, his father’s weight and bulk and gravity, the fear that other men paid in homage to Charles Swagger, sheriff of Polk County.

He tried not to think of his father, but he could no more forbid his mind from doing that than he could forbid it from ordering his lungs to breathe. A great father-heaviness came over him, and he could see a spell of brooding setting in, where his father would be the only thing in his mind and would still, all these years later, have the capacity to dominate everything.

His father was a sharp-dressed man, always in black suits and white linen shirts from the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. His black string ties were always perfect and he labored over them each morning to get them so. Daddy’s face was grave and lined and brooked no disobedience. He knew right from wrong as the Baptist Bible stated it. He carried a Colt Peacemaker on his right side, a leather truncheon in his back pocket and he rattled with keys and other important objects when he walked. He carried a Jesus gun also, a .32 rimfire Smith & Wesson stuffed up his left cuff and held there by a sleeve garter. It had saved his life in 1923 in a shoot-out with desperadoes; he’d killed all three of them and been a great hero.

Charles Swagger also had the capacity to loom. It was in part his size but more his rigidity. He stood for things, stood straight and tall for them, and represented in a certain way America. To defy him was to defy America and he was quick to deal with disobedience. People loved him or feared him, but no matter what, they acknowledged him. He was a powerful man who ruled his small kingdom efficiently. He knew all the doctors and ministers and lawyers; of course he knew the mayor and the county board, and the prominent property owners. He knew all of them and they all knew him and could trust him. He kept the peace everywhere except in his own home, and from his own aggressions.