Hot Springs (30 page)

Time to get to work, he thought.

Many of his former friends and his family thought that Frenchy was lazy. Exacdy the opposite was true; he was capable of very hard work, relendess and focused. His oddity of mind, however, was that it never occurred to him to simply do what was required of him; rather he would invest three times more energy and six times more discipline in figuring out how not to do it. He was addicted to shortcuts, quick fixes, alternative routes, cutting corners, doing things his own way, no matter what, no matter how much the cost. “Does not follow directions,” his kindergarten teacher had written and no keener insight into his personality was ever revealed. It had made for quite a colorful first twenty years on the planet—his was one of those rare, bright but naturally deviated minds. He was cunning, practical, nerveless, self-promoting, rather brave and completely self-possessed at all times, or nearly all times.

So now he applied himself with a concentration that would have astonished his many detractors, who had never been allowed a glimpse of the real Frenchy and who had nicknamed him Shorty. He began at the beginning, and studiously invested close to four hours in running over the diagrams in the drawers which he correcdy assumed to be wiring diagrams.

His thinking on this problem was original and far in advance of D. A.’s or Earl’s and a prime example of how well, when focused, he could work things out. He reasoned that Owney Maddox’s empire was only secondarily an empire of force, violence, debt collection and municipal subversion; primarily, it was an empire of the telephone. Everybody knew this: die racing data had to pour in from the tracks of America, there to be distributed instantaneously to all the minor duchies of the empire, the dozens of nondescript books around town in the back of Greek coffee joints, drugstores, haberdasheries or what have you. The legendary but mysterious Central Book was therefore, as all agreed, the linchpin to the operation. They could only really bring Owney down by taking it out, drying up the info and therefore starving him out in a short while. Earl and D. A. especially knew this.

But Frenchy determined the next step, which is that the Central Book could only be accomplished with phone company collusion. Somewhere, somehow, someone in this building had made secret arrangements for wires to be laid into an otherwise bland building in Hot Springs, and those wires had to be routed somehow so they wouldn’t pass through the switchboard that unified the town. A stranger couldn’t call an operator and say, “Honey, get me Central Book!” Therefore, somewhere in this building had to be an answer.

He now industriously examined wiring diagrams. He quickly learned that a symbol, a little black diamond, indicated the presence of a phone junction, and suspected that the Central Book would have an unusual concentration of black diamonds. So his eyes searched the schematics for clusters of black diamonds. But the problem wasn’t that there weren’t any, but that there were too many. It seemed every page had a cluster and sometimes more than one, and often enough he recognized them from the addresses—one, for example, was the Army and Navy Hospital, which made sense, because wounded boys still lingering from the war’s effects would be in constant telephone contact with family and loved ones. So what he had to do was hunt for a cluster of black diamonds that had no justification.

This sounds like boring work, and for most it would be. For Frenchy it was pure bliss. It enabled him to forget who he was, what his demons commanded him to do, his paranoia, his fears, his considerable accumulation of resentments, the perpetual nervousness his bravado only partially concealed. He worked swiftiy and with great intensity and thoroughness, pausing now and then to write down the address of a diamond cluster he couldn’t identify.

On and on he worked, until it was growing light in the eastern sky. He looked at his watch. It was 6:00 A. M., and soon the day shift would come along. He still had five drawers to search, and not enough time to do so.

He determined to come back the next night, and the next too, if need be. Quickly he closed the drawer he was working on, looked to see if he’d left traces of his presence, and noted nothing and stood to rise.

But then he said: what the hell.

He plucked open one of the drawers yet unexamined, and pulled at a pile of diagrams, as if in a blur or a dream. He didn’t even look hard at them, but simply let them flutter through his peripheral vision. He saw that somebody had spilled some ink. They’d made a mistake. He passed onward.

But then he thought: there haven’t been any other mistakes.

He rifled back, found the page, and Jesus H. Christ Mother Mary of God, there was a concentration of phone lines so intense it looked like a Rorschach ink blot. In it, he saw his future.

He noted the address, and said to himself: Of course!

“No,” said Ben, “no, that one has splatters. It didn’t have splatters. No splatters.”

“What did it have, darling? You have to help me, you cute little booboo,” said the Countess.

“You two birds,” said Virginia, “you actually think this shit is fun! My feet hurt. We been walking for ten years.”

“Virginia, I told you not to wear them really high heels.”

“But she looks gorgeous, darling,” said the Countess. “She’s more edible than any of these paintings, and I love the shade of her pretty pink toenails.”

“Dorothy, you’re the one they should call Bugsy. You’re as screwy as they come.”

The threesome stood in the modern wing of the Los Angeles County Museum before a bewildering display of the very latest in decadent art. The painting immediately before them looked like Hiroshima in a paint factory, an explosion of pigment flung demonically across a canvas until every square inch of it absorbed some of the fury of the blast.

“That guy has problems,” observed Bugsy.

“He’s a bastard. A Spanish prick who collaborated with the Nazis and beats all his women. But he’s the most famous artist in the world. He gets a lot of pussy.”

Ben leaned forward to read the name.

“Never heard of him,” he said. “He ought to take drawing lessons “

“You never heard of him! You never heard of nothing didn’t have a dame or a ten-spot attached,” said Virginia, bored. Dammit! The spaghetti strap of her right shoe kept slipping off her foot and coming to nesde in the groove of her little toe. There, it rubbed that poor painted soldier raw. She kept having to bend over to readjust it. She did so one more time, and heard boyfriend Ben say to his best friend Dorothy the Countess from directly behind her, “Now that’s art!”

“You dirty-minded Jew-boy,” she said. “Ben, you are so low. You come to look at pictures and you end up doing close-ups on my ass!”

“He’s just a boy,” said the Countess. “Virginia, what can you expect? That’s why we love him so.”

“Yeah, Dorothy, but you don’t have to uck-fay him no more. I still do.”

The Countess laughed. Her raffish friends filled her with glee. They were certainly more amusing than the dullards she’d grown up with in Dutchess County.

“Anyhow, dear: no splatters?”

“None. Not a one. I’m telling you, it looked like Newark with a tree.”

“Newark?”

“I been to that town,” said Virginia. “It’s New York without Broadway. It’s just the Bronx forever. Wops and guns. I wouldn’t go back on a bet.”

“Newark meaning? What was its quality of Newarkness?”

“Square, dark, dirty, crowded, brown. I don’t know why I thought of Newark.”

“Oh, it’s so obvious. In that little rat brain of yours, darling, New York is still glamorous and adventurous. But if you subtract the neon and the glamour, you’re left with nothing but masses of grimy buildings. Voila: Newark.”

“I wish I could remember the fucking name. He told me the name. It just went right out of my head. Virginia, you remember the name? Oh, no, that’s right, you were rubbing your tits against Alan Ladd.”

“I don’t think he noticed. He’d never get me a part in a picture. His wifey wouldn’t let him.”

“Our attentions are wandering again, are they not?” said Dorothy. “Let us recommit them to the object at hand.”

“It may not matter, anyhow,” said Bugsy. “He’s smack in the middle of a fucking war down there. Eleven of his boys got blown out of their boots in some nigger cathouse thing. Everybody’s talking he’s going down.”

“That cowboy may get him,” said Virginia. “Dorothy, did our hero ever tell you how he straightened this cowboy out at the train station in Hot Springs? Guy lights my cigarette, so Benny pulls his tough-guy act on him. But the cowboy ain’t buying it. So Ben gives him a poke. Only it don’t land, and the cowboy hits Ben so hard it almost makes him bald. Ben cry-babied for a month and a half and I notice he ain’t been back to Hot Springs. He ain’t going back until somebody takes care of the cowboy.”

“Virginia, he hits me harder every time you tell that story/’ said Ben. “It’s her favorite story. She’s been telling it all over town. I got New York guys calling me and asking me if I settled up with the cowboy, for Christ’s sakes.”

“But you haven’t. See, Dorothy, he really does fear the cowboy.”

“He knew how to throw a punch, I’ll tell you that,” said Bugsy, remembering the hammerblow to his midsection. “But I’ll tell you what else. When I finally get a line on his ass, he will be—hey, hey! There it is! It was like that,” he said excitedly. “Virginia, wasn’t that it?”

He pointed to a dense, enigmatic work, darkish and lacquered.

Dorothy didn’t have to examine the label. She knew a Braque anywhere.

Earl’s daddy? they said. Earl’s daddy was a great man.

It wasn’t like it was now, they said. Back then the law meant something and the law meant Earl’s daddy, Charles.

Things are wild now, but they wasn’t when Earl’s daddy was around. Earl’s daddy kept the law. Nobody done busted the law when Earl’s daddy was around.

Earl’s daddy was a great man.

Even if Earl won a big medal killing Japs, he wasn’t the man his daddy was. Now that man was a great man.

I don’t know nobody who’d stand against Earl’s daddy.

You know. Earl’s daddy was a big hero in the Great War. He killed a mess of Germans.

It was nearly unanimous. In Blue Eye, Arkansas, the one-horse town that was the seat of Polk County, the station stop for western Arkansas on the Kansas City, Texas & Gulf run to New Orleans, and a place where the weary traveler could get a cold Coca-Cola off of Route 71, Earl’s daddy still cast a big and a bold shadow. You could ask about Earl in a grocery store and in a barbershop or at the police station and what you heard about wasn’t Earl at all, but Earl’s daddy. He was such a great man, it was said, that his own sons were overwhelmed by him. One ran away and t’other kilt hisself at fifteen. That was a sad, sad day, but Earl’s daddy kept going, because he was a man who did his duty and knowed what his duty was. Hell, in the ‘20s, he killed three bank robbers. And many’s the big-city boy or the uppity nigger who thought he could put one over on Earl’s daddy and ended up with a knot on his head the size of a pie plate, for Earl’s daddy brooked no nonsense, had fast hands, the lawman’s will and a leather birdshot sap that seemed never far from his right hand.

Carlo went to the cemetery. There was the big monument that read CHARLES F. SWAGGER, CAPT. AEF 1918 SHERIFF 1920, 1891-1942 and “Duty Above All” in marble bas relief on a pedestal atop which stood the sculpture of a patriotic American eagle, its wings unfurled to the sky, its talons taut and gripping. The wife was nowhere to be found, nor was the younger son.

“Now that one,” said a Negro caretaker who noticed the young man, “that one, he was a stern fellow. He didn’t take no guff, no sir. He put the fear of God in everydamn-body.”

“He was a great man, I hear,” said Carlo.

The old man laughed, showing few teeth and pink gums. “Oh, he surely was,” he said, “a very damn great man!” He toddled off, chording.

Carl went to the newspaper office, and looked up in the bound volumes the story of the tragic day of Charles’s death. Wasn’t much. Evidently old Charles had been coming back from his monthly Baptist prayer weekend at Caddo Gap, driving through Mount Ida late, and he saw the door open behind Ferrell Turner’s liquors. He parked his car and got out his flashlight and went to investigate, even if he was in Montgomery County and not Polk. He was close to Polk, just a few miles, he saw what could have been a crime and he went to investigate.

One shot was fired by a burglar and down the old hero went. Probably some damned kids with a stolen gun and some hooch, looking for more hooch before they went off to war. Simple, stupid, tragic; they found him the next day and buried him two days later. It was a shame Earl’s daddy had to die so pitifully. Both his boys was gone then, his wife was a drunkard and nobody from the family showed up when that great man was put to rest, but most of the rest of the county was there, great men and small, rich men and poor, man, woman and child, for in some way Earl’s daddy had affected them all.

Carlo spoke to the new sheriff, a veteran named Beaumont Piney who’d been training for North Africa when Earl’s daddy had gotten killed, and to the mayor and to other politicians, deputies and municipal employees and never got much beyond the recognition of Charles’s greatness. But finally, on the third day, and a poindess interview with the county attorney, he heard a voice on his way out coming from down the hall.

“Goddammit, Betty, right here, I said ‘Fifteenth,’ but you just typed 15-h without no damn r/You have to type the goddamn thing over. Can’t you be more careful, goddammit!”

The woman sniveled and wept and then the screamer stopped screaming and Carlo heard, “I’m sorry, it ain’t nothing, I got to watch my damn temper, please, Betty, I didn’t mean nothing, it don’t matter.”

And the secretary said, “But Mr. Vincent, my name is Ruth, not Betty. And I’ve worked here three whole weeks.”

“Oh,” said the man. “My last secretary was named Betty.”

“No sir,” Ruth said, “she was named Phyllis. Don’t make a difference, though. Both Betty and Phyllis quit.”

“Now don’t you quit, Ruth. I don’t mean no harm. I just yell too damn much. Here, now, I have an idea. Why don’t you take this afternoon off?”