Hot Springs (14 page)

Charles didn’t drink every night, just every third night. He was a bourbon drinker, and he drank for one reason, which was to feel himself the man he knew everybody thought him to be and to banish the fears that must have cut at him. Thus, drunk, he became even mightier and more heroic and more unbending. His righteousness in all things grew to be a force of nature. His doubts vanished and his happy confidence soared. He retold the story of the day and how he had solved all the problems and what he had told the many people who had to be put in their places. But when he looked about and saw how little his family had given a man of his nobility and family lines, it troubled him deeply. He corrected his wife’s many mistakes and pointed out that her people were really nothing compared to his. He pointed out the flaws in his sons and sometimes—more often as he got older— he disciplined his eldest with a razor strop or a belt. That boy was such a disappointment. That boy was such a nothing, a nobody. You would think a great man like Charles Swagger would have a great son, but no, he only had poor Earl and his even more pathetic younger brother, Bobby Lee, who still wet the bed. He instructed his eldest in his insignificance, as if the boy were incapable of understanding it himself, though the boy understood it very well.

“He has no talent,” Charles would scream at his wife. “He has no talent. He needs to find a trade, but he’s too lazy for a trade! He’s nothing, and he’ll never be anything, and I’ll beat the fear of God into him if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

Thus, alone in his hut, that boy, grown to be a man, felt again the temptation of the bottle. Inside the bottle might be damnation and cowardice, but it was also escape from the looming of the father. It beckoned him mightily. It offered a form of salvation, a music of pleasure, the sense of being blurred and softened, where all things seemed possible. But you always woke up the next morning with the taste of an alley in your mouth and the hazy memory of having said things that shouldn’t be said or having heard things that shouldn’t be heard.

Earl opened the bottle and poured the bourbon out. He didn’t feel any better at all, but at least he had not fallen off the wagon. He went back over to the couch and lay there in the dark, listening to his wife breathe for two, and eventually he fell off to his own shallow and troubled sleep.

The next morning she was happy. He was there, it took so little to please her. He listened to her account of the doctor’s reports and she asked him to touch her stomach and feel the thing inside move.

“Doctor says he’s coming along just fine,” said Junie.

“Well, damn,” said Earl. ^That’s really great.”

“Have you picked a name yet?” Junie wanted to know.

No. He hadn’t. Hadn’t even thought of it. He realized she probably presumed he was as occupied with the baby as she was. But he wasn’t. He was pretending he cared.

The thing inside her scared him. He had no feeling for it except fear.

“I don’t know/’ he said, “maybe we should name him after your father.”

“My father was an idiot. And that’s when he was sober,” she added, and laughed.

“Well, my father was a bastard. And that’s when he was sober.” And they both laughed.

“You should name him after your brother.”

“Hmmm,” said Earl. His brother. Why’d she have to bring that up? “Well, maybe,” he said. “We have plenty of time to figure it out. Maybe we should start fresh. Pick a movie star’s name. Name him Humphrey or John or Cornell or Joseph or something.”

“Maybe it’ll be a girl,” she said. “Then we could name her after your mama.”

“Oh,” he said, “maybe we just ought to make it a new start. It ain’t got nothing to do with the past, sweetie.”

Junie was showing now. Her face was plumped up, but still the damndest thing he’d ever seen. She was packing weight on her shoulders and, of course, through the middle.

“Honey, I don’t know nothing about names. You name the baby. You’re carrying the critter, you get to name it, fair enough?”

“Well, Earl, you should take part too.”

“I just don’t know,” he said, too fiercely. Then he said, “I’m damned sorry. I didn’t mean to bark at nothing. You getting the money all right? You okay in that job? You don’t have no problems, do you, sweetie? Hell, you know what an ornery old bastard I can be.”

She forced a smile, and it seemed to be all forgotten but he knew it wouldn’t be.

That night he took her into the dining room at the Ward Hotel on Garrison Street, the nicest place to eat in all of Fort Smith.

He looked very handsome. He wore his suit so well, and he was tanned and polite and seemed happy in some odd way, in no way he had been since the war. It warmed her to see him so happy.

“Well,” she said, “it does seem like we’ve come up in the world. You have a car. We get to go out at a fine place like this.”

“That’s right,” he said. “We’re on our way. You know, you could probably rent a place in town. You could get out of that vets village. They’re going to be building new housing everywhere.”

“Well, it seems so silly. Why move now, then move again when we have to go into Hot Springs? I assume I’m coming to Hot Springs sometime.”

“Well, yes, that’s the plan, I guess.”

But a vagueness came across his face. That was Earl’s horror: his distance. Sometimes he was just not there, she thought, as if something came and took his mind from him, and gave it over to memories of the war or something else. Sometimes she felt like she was in the Iliad, married to a Greek warrior, a powerful man but one who’d shed too much blood and come too close to dying too many times, a man somehow leeched by death. There was a phrase for it that she’d heard in her girlhood, and now it came back to her: “Black as the earl of death.” Hill people talked that way, and her father, a doctor, sometimes took her on his trips into the Missouri hollows and she heard the way the folks talked: black as the earl of death. That was her Earl, somehow, and somehow, she knew, she had to save him from it.

The waiter came and offered to fetch cocktails. Earl took a Coca-Cola instead, though he encouraged Junie to go ahead, and she ordered something called a mimosa, which turned out to be orange juice with champagne in it.

“Now where’d you hear about that?”

“I read about it in the Redbook magazine.”

“It seems very big-city.”

“It’s from Los Angeles-It’s very popular out there. They say California is turning into the land of opportunity now that the war is over.”

“Well, maybe we should move out there when all this is over.” But the vagueness came to his face again, as if he had some unpleasant association with California.

“I could never leave my mother,” she said hastily. “And with the baby coming—”

“I didn’t mean it, really. I wouldn’t know what to do in Los Angeles. Hell, I hardly know what to do in Hot Springs.”

“Oh, Earl.”

They ordered roast chicken and roast beef and had an extremely nice dinner. It was wonderful to see him in a civilized place, and to be in such a nice room which was filled with other well-dressed people. The waiters wore tuxedos, a man played the piano, it was all formal and pleasant.

“Now, honey,” he finally said.

A shadow crossed her face, a darkening. She knew that tone: it meant something horrible was coming.

‘“What is it, Earl? I knew there was something.”

“Well, it’s just a little something.”

“Is it about the job?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Well, so tell me.”

“Oh, it’s nothing. Mr. Parker though, he thought I should come up here and take you on a nice date and everything. He’s a fine man. I hope to introduce you to him sometime, if it works out. He’s as fine as any officer I had in the Corps, including Chesty Puller. He cares about the job, but he cares about his people too, and that’s very rare.”

“Earl? What is it?”

“Well, honey, you remember those raids I said I was never going on? Into the casinos and the book joints? Now these young men we have, they’ve worked damned hard and they’ve really become very good in the small amount of time. But two weeks. Hell, it takes two years to become a good Marine. Anyhow, these boys, they ..”

He trailed off helplessly, because he couldn’t quite find the words.

“They what?”

“Oh, they just don’t quite know enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“Enough to do it by themselves.”

“I don’t—”

“So I said to Mr. Parker, I said I should go along. At first. Just to make sure. Just to watch. That’s all. I wanted to tell you. I had told you I was just going to train them. Now I’m going with diem. That’s all. I wanted to tell you straight up.”

She looked at him.

“There’ll be guns and shooting? These raids will be violent?”

“Probably not.”

She saw this clearly. “No. That is the nature of the work. You are dealing with criminals who are armed and don’t want to accept your will. So it is the nature of the experience that there will be violence.”

“We know how to handle the violence. If there is any. That is what this training has been about. Plus, we wear heavy bulletproof vests.”

She was silent.

Then she said, “But what does that do for me and die child I carry? Suppose you die? Then—”

“I ain’t going to die. These are old men with rusty shotguns who—”

“They are gangsters with machine guns. I read the newspapers. I read The Saturday Evening Post. I know what’s going on. Suppose you get killed. I’m to raise our child alone? He’s never to know his father? And for what? To save a city that’s soaked in filth and corruption for a hundred years? Suppose you die. Suppose they win? Suppose it’s all for nothing? What am I supposed to say to this boy? Your daddy died to stop fools from throwing their money away on little white cubes? He didn’t die to save his country or his family or anything he cared about, but just to stop fools from gambling. And if you close down Hot Springs, the same fools will only go some other place. You can’t end sin, Earl. You can only protect yourself and your family from it.”

“Yes ma’am. But now I have given my word, and I have boys depending on me. And, the truth is, I am happy. For the first time since the war, I am a happy man. I am doing some good. It ain’t much, but it’s what I got. I can help them boys.”

“Earl, you are such a fool. You are a brave, handsome, noble man, but you are a fool. Thank you, though, for telling me.”

“Would you like some dessert?”

“No. I want you to go home and hold me and make love to me, so that if you die I can have a memory of it and when I tell our son about it, I will have a smile on my face.”

“Yes ma’am,” he said. It was as if he’d just heard the best order he’d ever gotten in his life.

Hard-boiled eggs (two), dry toast, fresh orange juice. Then he went over accounts for three hours and made a number of phone calls. For lunch he went to Coy’s and had a fillet. On a whim, he stopped at Larry’s Oyster Bar on Central and had a dozen fresh plump ones from Louisiana, with a couple of cold Jaxes. He went back and took a nice nap. At 3:00 a girl from Maxine’s came over and he had his usual good time. At 4:00 he met Judge LeGrand at the club and they got in a quick nine holes. He shot a 52, best of the week. He was catching on to this damned game. At 6:00 he went to the Fordyce and took a bath, a steam session and a rubdown. At 7:00 he had dinner at the Roman Table restaurant with Dr. James, the head of surgery at the hospital, and Mr. Clinton, who owned the Buick agency; both were on the board of the country club, the hospital, and Kiwanis and the Good Fellows. At 9:00 he went to the Southern, caught some of Xavier Cugat’s act, which he had seen a dozen times before, checked with his floor managers, his pit bosses and his talent manager to make certain that Mr. Cugat and his boys were being well taken care of. At 11:00 he walked back to the Medical Arts Building, took the elevator up, got into a dressing gown, and had a martini on the patio, while reading that morning’s New York Mirror, just delivered from little Rock. That Winchell! What a bastard he could be.

Owney took a moment before bed and stood at the balcony. He had come a long way. He was unusual in his profession in that he had just a sliver of an inner life. He wasn’t pure appetite. He knew he existed; he knew he thought.

Today had been such a good day, such a perfect day, yet such a typical day that he took a little pleasure in it all: how hard he had fought, how tough it had been, and how beautifully it had worked out. So many of them died, like the Dutchman, spouting gibberish as the life ebbed out of him, or Mad Dog, splattered with tommy gun fire in a phone booth, or Kid Twist, who went for a swim in midair after volunteering to rat the boys out; or went crazy, like Capone, down there in his mansion in Florida, a complete lunatic by reports, so hopelessly insane on the corrosiveness of his dose that nobody would even bother to visit him. He remembered Capone, the plump sensualist with a Roman emperor’s stubby fingers and a phalanx of legionnaires to guard him everywhere, taking the Apollo Suite at the Arlington because it had two entrances, or, as Alphonse would think of it, two exits. A tommy gun legendarily leaned in a corner, in case A1 or a lieutenant had a sudden problem that only a hundred .45s could solve.

“Al, it’s safe here. That’s the point: it’s smooth, it’s safe, you can come down here by train and enjoy yourself. A man in your position, Al, he should relax a little.”

A1 just regarded him suspiciously, the paranoia beginning to rot his mind, turning his eyes into dark little peepholes. He didn’t say much, but he got laid at least three times a day. Al was reputed to have an organ bigger than Dillinger’s. Pussy was the only thing he really cared about and pussy, in the end, had destroyed him. He was afraid of the needles so he came to Hot Springs, under the belief the waters could cure him. They couldn’t, of course. They could only stay the course of the disease a bit. All his soaking in 141 degrees had earned Scarface but a few extra hours of sanity in the end.

Owney finished his martini, turned to check that his pigeons had been fed, saw that they had, and started in, when he was surprised by Ralph, his Negro manservant.