Hot Springs (26 page)

“I’ll kill this sow!” he screamed. “Throw down your guns or by God I’ll kill this—”

But as he spoke, Earl flicked the BAR selector switch to semi-auto, brought the rifle to his shoulder like a marksman and shot him where what little of his head could be seen, just above the left ear, not a killing shot, but the rifle bullet had such velocity it spun him around to the wall. The big woman pulled away and fell to the floor and began to crawl, and before the Grumley could get his gun back into play, Slim and Carlo hammered him several times.

It was finally quiet at Mary Jane’s.

“Jesus Christ,” said Slim.

“Man,” said Carlo. “I never saw nothing like that.”

“Everybody okay?” asked Earl.

“Mr. Earl, you’re bleeding.”

“I picked up some pellet somewhere in there. It ain’t a goddamn thing. The boys all right? Frenchy, you okay?”

“Yes sir,” Frenchy said heavily.

They quickly checked to discover no casualties.

They moved back into the hallway and looked at what they had wrought. Dead Grumleys lay along the hallway, which itself was a corridor of ruin, as so many shots had torn through wood and plasterboard, and the air remained heavy with gunsmoke and floating dust and grit. Empty cartridges in the hundreds littered the floor. The blood had pooled here and there.

“There, boys,” Earl said, “y’all take a good look. That is the world you have entered. Now I want you to form a detail and pick up all the weapons. If them Hot Springs detectives get ahold of the Thompsons, they’ll just go back to the bad boys and we’ll have to take ‘em all over again. If that goddamn machine gun is too heavy to carry, Slim, you find someone who knows about such things and strip the toggle bolt. If nothing else, I want that bolt sunk deep in Lake Catherine, so we don’t have to worry about it no more. If you can’t find no one, you come to me.”

“What if the cops—”

“The cops ain’t gonna stand agin you tonight. Nobody’s going to stand agin you tonight.”

As the men spread out to retrieve the fallen guns, another raider came down the hall to Earl.

“Mr. Parker’s downstairs, Earl. He wants to see you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Earl. “I’ll get there in a moment. I don’t hear no ambulances. It’s clear now. Tell ‘em to get some ambulances in here in case any of these gals are shot up. I think we saved most of ‘em.”

They could hear a woman wailing loudly downstairs.

“Mr. Earl, you should know: there’s a problem.”

“What would that be, son?”

“Some women got shot.”

“We lost one, by my count. Them Grumley boys shot her.”

“No sir. Not here. Down the block at the Pythian Hotel. Two Negro gals sitting in the parlor. Somehow a burst came through the window and kilt ‘em both. The Negro peoples are down there all het up, and the cops may have a riot. Mr. Becker is goddamned upset and there’s all these reporters here.”

The facts were tragic. Mrs. Alva Thomas, forty-seven, of New Albany, Georgia, and Miss Lavern Sevier Carmichael, twenty-three, of New Iberia, Louisiana, had been sitting in the lobby of the Pythian Hotel and Baths when the gunfire down the street had erupted. While most sensible people got down on their stomachs at the sound, the two ladies, in deep religious concentration, declined to do so. God’s attention was elsewhere. Each was hit but once. The .30-caliber-model-of-1906 bullets had flown a long way and not lost but a mite of their power when they struck the two women fatally.

The Reverend Tyrone Blandings, of the leading Negro church in Hot Springs, requested a meeting with Mr. Becker. There he was formally apologized to, and told the county would pay for the shipping and funeral expenses of the two bodies, but that the enforcement of the law must be absolute and sometimes in these confrontations between the sinners and the sinless, unaccountable accidents happened. It was God’s will. He must have a plan.

Meanwhile, Mayor O’Donovan empaneled a group of elder Hot Springs citizens to investigate the out-of-control Jayhawkers who turned the city into a war zone. If it had been within the purview of his powers, he informed the newspapers, he would have called a grand jury and issued indictments, but unfortunately it was only the prosecuting attorney who had the legal power to convene such an assembly.

The outstanding warrants on seven of the nine Murfreesboro Grumleys were never acknowledged in the Hot Springs newspapers, though the bigger little Rock papers made certain this evidence reached the public up front.

The dead were listed, all of them Grumleys or Grumley cousins: Nathan Grumley, forty-two; Wayne Grumley, Jr. twenty-one; Jasper “Jape” Grumley, twenty-three; Bowman Peck, twenty-seven; Alvin Grumley, twenty-eight; Jeter Dodge, thirty-two; Duane Grumley, thirty-two; Buddy “Junior” Mims, thirty-three; Dewey Grumley, thirty-seven; Felton Parr, thirty-nine; and one unidentified body, burned beyond all recognition, presumably that of R. K. Pindell, age unknown, gone missing. Of the eleven, Nathan was clearly the most violent, as he had spent twelve years in the penitentiary on a case of second-degree murder and was suspected of a variety of other crimes, including rape, child molestation and dozens of counts of armed robbery as well as being widely suspected of killing a clown. He was also a known contract killer for Jefferson Davis Grumley, known as the “Boss of Pike County,” and brother to Elmer “Pap” Grumley, once known as the “Boss of Garland County,” though now thought to be retired.

But each of the other Grumleys or Grumley cousins had at least one and some as many as five outstanding warrants lodged against their names, for crimes that went anywhere from breaking and entering to suspicion of murder. So those Murfreesboro Grumleys, most people acknowledged, were not innocents.

The next evening, Mr. Becker gave a speech before the Better Business Bureau of Hot Springs in the Banquet Room of the Arlington Hotel. Giving speeches was a gift of his, as he had that rare ability to project concern and empathy and at the same time heroic will. He bit his lip when he discussed his dilemma in sending his men in against so dangerous a foe as gamblers and wanted men armed with machine guns, but then in the end decided it was worth it, for the law had to be served no matter the cost. The law was what separates us from the apes, after all. And unlike some men, he felt the weight of the deaths of Negroes as heavily as he felt the deaths of white folks; he was sorry that such a thing had occurred, but he assured his listeners it was unavoidable, as part of his commitment to reform. The gambling and corruption that had marked Hot Springs for a century had to be stopped and he would stop it, no matter what it cost him. Most of the men in the room believed that he himself had led the raid, as he frequently referred to “his boys” and the risks they had taken for Hot Springs and for America. He knew the way ahead was tough but he knew it was the right way.

They gave him a standing ovation.

As for the raiders, early the next morning they were informed that Mr. Becker had decided the best thing for them to do would be to go on vacation for a bit. All their weapons were to be secured and they were to drive back to their training headquarters at the Red River Army Depot, and from there commence a week off.

But of course there were two private chats to be gotten out of the way. One took place between Earl and Frenchy and, surprisingly enough, was initiated by Frenchy, in the ramshackle room that served as Earl’s operations center in the pumping building.

“I wanted to apologize,” he said early. “I fucked up.”

“How’s that?” said Earl.

“With those two Negro women. I fired those shots. I was racing up the steps, I tripped on a shell, I’d just loaded the BAR. I felt it firing. I—”

“You was in a battle zone, why wouldn’t you have had your finger on the trigger? At any time a Grumley might have jumped out at you with a gun.”

“I’m still sorry. If only—”

“Don’t waste no time on ifonlys. You can run it through your head a thousand times and if this thing or that thing is different, it all turns out different. But maybe it turns out worse, not better, don’t forget that possibility.”

“Yes sir,” said Frenchy.

“Good,” said Earl.

“Thank God,” said Frenchy, “that they were only Negroes.”

Earl said nothing. But then he thought a second, as Frenchy returned to the bunk area, and said, “Just hold on.”

“Yes sir.”

“I wish you hadn’t said that.”

“Mr. Earl? I guess I meant, think of the problems we’d have if they’d have been white. That’s what I meant.”

“No, that ain’t what you meant. I know what you meant. You meant, hey, they was only niggers.”

Frenchy said nothing, but he seemed to squirm with discomfort. Then he replied, “They were only Negroes. I would never say nigger because my parents told me it was uncouth, but still, they were only Negroes. And the truth is, some of the boys are wondering why we went to so much trouble and risked so much to save some black prostitutes.”

“Okay, you listen here, Short, and you listen good. Third day on Tarawa, third day after that long walk in through the cold water, I got plugged by a Jap sniper. I like to bled out but two boys from the Ammunition Company that we used as litter bearers, they crawled out and got me. Lots of fire going on. Japs everygoddamnwhere, you hear me? They drug me in, they dumped me on their litter and they carried my bleeding ass back to the aid station. Didn’t say a word. Negro boys. I’m dead but for them two, and a few hours later one of ‘em hisself was drug in, and they laid him next to me, and he died. I watched him die. Damned if his blood weren’t the same goddamned color as mine. Bright red, when it come out, then turning sort of blackish. So don’t you tell me they’re any goddamned different.”

He didn’t realize by the end he was screaming, but as Frenchy shrank back further and further it became clearer and clearer and he looked up to see everybody else around him staring, all the guys.

“So any other bird got a complaint?”

There was silence.

“You are good, brave boys. You are as good as any Marines. But underneath, your blood is the same color as any Negro’s, so when a Negro dies it’s a real hard death. Anybody have any goddamned problem with that?”

“No sir,” came a comment.

“Then get your asses back to packing up. We have to move back to Texas before we can take some time off.”

If Earl seemed to have a particularly brutal edge to his voice, they were all unaware of a reason. But perhaps it had to do with a previous discussion Earl had just concluded with D. A., which developed along different lines.

“Earl,” D. A. said, “this smells of so many kinds of bad I don’t know where to start.”

“Start at the top, finish at the bottom,” said Earl.

“The kid who killed them two gals? Becker wants him dumped. He wants his ass gone. He says it’s the smart move. It’ll quieten the Negroes, it’ll show we’re responsive to community pressures and that we’ve got hearts and consciences.”

“If that boy goes, I go,” said Earl intractably.

“Earl, I—”

“If that boy goes, I go. No other way.”

“Earl, Becker and some of his people are beginning to think we are out of control.”

“I can’t fight no other way, Mr. Parker. Fighting’s too goddamned tough as it is to do it while being second-guessed by folks who’ve never done a lick of it and don’t have no stomach for it nohow.”

“Earl, in truth, you made some faulty decisions.”

“I know I did. But it ain’t on the boys, it’s on me. If mistakes were made, I made ‘em. You’d best fire me, Mr. Parker, and leave them boys alone.”

The old man just shook his head.

“Damn,” he said, “you are a stubborn man. You don’t have some kind of craziness in your head that makes you want to die, to be with your pals in the Pacific? They say that’s common. Is that what’s going on with you? Is that why you didn’t wear the vest?”

“I didn’t wear the vest because I had to move fast. The vests ain’t no good when you move fast. They’re heavy, they’re cumbersome, they eat up your energy real fast, and they only stop shotgun and pistol. They wouldn’t have stopped that big German machine gun a lick.”

“But you keep jumping into the guns.”

“It’s the only way I know.”

“You are a hard piece of work, Earl. But I keep having to say the same goddamned things. You have to wear the damned vest. That’s how I want it done. You were to command from outside, not inside. This isn’t the Marine Corps. You are a law officer, sworn true, and your job is to follow the instructions of your superior, which is me. Earl, I will not steer you wrong. Don’t you trust me?”

“I do trust you. You are a fair and decent man. I have not a doubt about that one.”

“But you don’t trust Becker.”

“Not a goddamned bit.”

“He wanted me to fire you too, Earl. I told him if you went, I went. Now you tell me if that Short goes, you go. This don’t sound like it’s working.”

“It’s the only way I know, Mr. Parker.”

“Call me D. A., goddammit, Earl. Okay, Short gets one more chance, you get one more chance.”

And what he didn’t say was that he had only one more chance.

“Now I want you to go home. The boys go home for a week, you go home for a week. And get those goddamned pellets plucked out of your hide, so you won’t be so disagreeable, do you understand? And see your wife. The poor woman is probably very upset with you.”

They got back to the Red River Army Depot, were paid in cash the money owed them, and left early the next morning for Texarkana and from there to all points for a week of pleasure. Some went home, some, whose homes were too far, headed down to the Texas beaches, but a day away by train, some headed for that lush and Frenchy town, New Orleans.

All, that is, but two of them.

Carlo Henderson was tapped by D. A. late that morning, as most of the others had left. He was in no hurry because he was going to catch a late bus out of Texarkana for Tulsa, where he planned to visit his widowed mother. But that was not to be.

“Yes sir?”

“Henderson, Mr. Earl tells me you’re doing very well. You’ve got a lot to be proud of.”

Carlo lit up with a smile. Earl, of course, was a God to him, brave and fair but not a man given to much eloquence in his praise.