Hot Springs (50 page)

Earl started drinking almost immediately. The bourbon lit like a flare out beyond the wire and fell down his gullet, popping sparks of illumination, floating, drifting, pulling him ever so gently toward where he hoped the numbness was. No such goddamned luck. He drank only to forget, but of course the only thing the bourbon did was make him remember more, so he drank more, which made him remember yet more again.

He wasn’t headed west on 270 toward Y City, which would take him over to 71 for the pull up toward Fort Smith and Camp Chaffee, where his wife and unborn child, his new life or whatever, awaited. He couldn’t do that, somehow. He was in no state to face them and the emotions that he had controlled so masterfully for four days now seemed dangerously near explosion. He knew he was rocky. He turned south, down 27 out of Mount Ida, to 8, and then west on 8. He knew exacdy where he was headed even if he couldn’t say it or acknowledge it.

By the time he pulled into Board Camp it was nearly midnight. Wasn’t much to be seen at all. It was never even as much as Mount Ida. He drove through the little town and there, a few miles beyond toward the county seat of Blue Eye, off on the right, he saw the old mailbox, SWAGGER it said, same as it always had.

He turned right, sank as the dirt road plunged off the highway, watched his light beams lance out in the darkness until at last they illuminated the house where he grew up, where his family lived, where his father lived, where his brother died. The light beams hit the house.

They illuminated broken windows, knocked-out boards, ragged weeds, a garden gone to ruin, peeling paint, the nothingness of abandonment. After his father died, his mother had simply given up and moved to town. He never saw her again; he was in the hospital after Tarawa when the news came that she had died.

Earl pulled into the barnyard and when his lights crossed that structure, he saw that it too had fallen into total disrepair. It needed paint and was lost in a sea of ragweed and unkempt grass. Daddy would shit if he saw it now. Daddy always kept it so nice. Or rather, Daddy directed that it be kept nice. It had to be perfect, and it was one of Earl’s chores to mow the lawn and lord help him if he forgot it, or he didn’t do it well enough. The lawn had to be perfect, the garden well cultivated, the whole thing upstanding and pretty, as befits an important man.

Earl turned off the lights. He opened the door. Crickets tweedled in the dark and the soft rush of the wind filled the Arkansas night, with maybe just a hint of fall in the air. The house was big, with four bedrooms up on the second floor. Once it had been the leading house in the eastern half of Polk County, maintained by a lot of good land, but somehow, some Swagger granddad or other back in die last century had gotten out of the farming business before really getting into it and committed to the law enforcement business, because the Swagger men were always hunters, always had a kind of natural instinct for the rifle, and a gift for reading the terrain. No one knew where it came from, but they’d been soldiers and hunters for as long as anyone could remember, just as long as they’d lived in these parts. They were never farmers.

Earl tipped the bottle up and felt the bourbon clog his throat and with a mighty gulp he took down two more harsh swallows. The illumination rounds went off in his guts, lighting the target. It made his eyes water. He stood, wobbling just a little, and faced the big house.

It scared him still. It was a house of fear. You walked sofdy in that house because you didn’t want to upset Daddy. Daddy ruled that house as he ruled so much of the known world. Daddy’s hugeness was something he could feel even now, his presence, looming and feary and cold and mad, that man who even to this day stalked the corridors of Earl’s mind, always whispering to him.

“Goddamn you, Daddy, goddamn your black soul! Come out and fight!” Earl screamed.

But Daddy didn’t.

Earl saw that he had finished the bottle. He returned to the car, now glad he’d bought a second one. He found it. He had some trouble with the cap because he was so damned drunk his fingers barely worked, but in a little bit, it came free. By now the bourbon had lost its taste. He swallowed, swallowed some more, and pitched forward. He passed out in the front yard.

Sometime later in the night, Earl awoke, still drunk but shivery in the cold. He was wet; he’d pissed his pants. No, no, it was dew, dampening him through his suit coat. He pulled himself up, shuddered mightily in the cold, seized the bottle and took another couple of pulls. But he didn’t pass out. Instead he rose, and in the blurry darkness of his vision made out the car. He wobbled back toward it, unsteadily as hell, and made it all the way, falling only once.

“Goddamn,” he cursed to no man, as around him the black world pitched and bobbed, as if he were on some merry-go-round that went up and down just as fast as it went around. He felt like he was going to puke. He flew off in all directions and all six of his hands reached for all six of the handles to the door of the vehicle, and somehow he got it open and plunged into the back seat, and collapsed with a thump as the blackness closed around him again.

He awoke again to a strange sound. His frayed mind stirred from unconsciousness. He seemed covered in grit somehow. Again the sound: loud, close, familiar. Again the grit, spraying downward on him like droplets of water, except it wasn’t water it was—

BANG!

Another bullet tore through the window, puncturing neady through, leaving a spackle of fractures, a mercury smear across the glass, erupting with a spray of grit that was pulverized glass which floated out in a cloud, then floated down upon him.

“Don’t shoot!” he screamed and in a split second realized what had happened. Somehow Owney’s Grumley boys had tracked him down. They had him nailed. They knew where he’d go and that’s where he went and they found him passed out in the car and they worried it was a trick so they laid up until the light and when he still didn’t stir after a bit they fired rounds through the windows and the windshield.

“Don’t shoot!” he screamed again, knowing he was finished. He had no gun. He was aflame with pain, head to toe, from the ravages of alcohol. His mind was all jittery with fear. Goddamn them! They had found him!

Earl hated fear and worked hard at controlling it, at testing himself against it because it scared him so much, but now he had no preparation for it, and it just came and took him and made him its toy. He began to cry. He couldn’t be brave. He couldn’t fight. He was going to end up like his daddy, shot by killers and left dying and begging for mercy.

“You show us hands!” came the cry, “or goddamn we will finish you good!”

He looked around. Nothing to fight with. Another shot rocked through the window, blowing out a puff of sheared/shredded glass.

“I’ll put one in your gut, mister, you come out or by God I will finish you.”

Earl kicked the door open and as he rose felt the shredded glass raining off his body like a collection of sand. He blinked in the sunlight, showed his hands, and edged out. There were at least four Grumleys, all with big lever-action rifles, all laid up behind cover, all zeroed on him.

One of the men emerged from cover.

“You armed?”

“No sir.”

“Don’t trust him, Luke. Them boys is tricky. I can pop him right now.”

“You hold it, Jim. Now, mister, I want you to shuck that coat and show me you got nothing or Jim will pop you like a squirrel. Don’t you do nothing tricky.”

Why didn’t they just shoot him and be done with it? Did they want to hang him, beat him, set him afire?

Slowly with one hand, then the other, he peeled off the coat, and showed by his blue shirt and suspenders that he was unarmed. He kept his hands high. Two of the men approached while two others hung back, keeping him well covered. By the way they handled their rifles, Earl could tell they had handled rifles a lot.

“Turn round and up agin that car,” commanded the leader.

Earl assumed the position. A hand fished his wallet out while another patted him down.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he was asked.

“I own this place. Been paying taxes on it for years.”

“Hell, nobody owns this place, since old lady Swagger done up ‘n’ died in town. This is Sheriff Charles Swagger’s old place, mister.”

“And I am Charles Swagger’s son, Earl.”

“Earl?”

“By God, yes,” came another voice, “according to his driver’s license, this here’s Earl Swagger hisself.”

“Jesus Christ, Earl, why’n’t you say so? Git them hands down, by God, heard what you done to them Japs in the islands. Earl, it’s Luke Petty, I’se two years behind you in high school.”

Earl turned. The men had lowered their rifles and gazed at him with reverence, their blue eyes eating him alive. Luke Petty looked slightly familiar, but maybe it was the type: the rawboned Scotch-Irish border reiver whose likeness filled the hills a hundred miles in either direction.

“Luke, I—”

“Goddamn, yes, it’s Earl, Earl Swagger, who won the Medal of Honor. Where, Earl, Saipan?”

“Iwo.”

“Iwo goddamned Jima. You made the whole damned county proud of you. Pity your daddy and mommy weren’t around to know it.”

That was another story. Earl left it alone.

“Sorry about the car, Earl. Folks is jumpy and we seen a car in an abandoned place and a man sleeping. Well, you know.”

Earl didn’t, not really, but before he could say a thing, another man said, “Earl, you look plenty wore out. You okay?”

“Yes, I’m fine. I now and then go on a toot, like the old man—”

“He was a drinking man, yes, I do remember. Onct boxed my ears so hard made ‘em ring for a month,” one of the other men said fondly.

“Well, I have the same curse. I’m now living up in Fort Smith and I fell off the wagon. Got so drunk I didn’t want the wife to see me. So I somehow turned up here. Sorry to rile you.”

“Hell, Earl, it ain’t nothing. You ought to move on back here. This is your home, this is where you belong.”

“Don’t know about that, but maybe. I have a child on the way and we will see.”

Then he noticed the stars. Each of these boys was a deputy, each wore a gunbelt loaded with cartridges and a powerful revolver, each had the look of a rangy manhunter to him.

“What’re you boys out huntin’? You look loaded for grizzly.”

“You ain’t heard?”

“How could I? Was drunked up like a crazy bastard last night.”

“Earl, you best watch that. Can tear a fellow down. Saw my own daddy go sour with the drink. He died too young, and he looked a hundred when he’s only forty-two.”

“I hear you on that one,” said Earl, who hoped he’d never drink again.

“Anyhow, we’re hunting gangsters.”

“Gangsters?”

“He ain’t heard!”

“Damn, he did do some drinking last night.”

“You know that Owney Maddox, the big New York gun what run Hot Springs these past twenty years? The one old Fred Becker caught?”

“Heard of him,” Earl said.

“Five bastards busted him out of Garland County jail last night late. Shot their way out. Say it was just as bad as that Alcoa train job or that big shoot-out in the train yard. Killed two men. But Owney’s fled, he’s free, the whole goddamned state’s out looking for him.”

“Earl, you okay?”

“Yeah,” said Earl.

“You look like a ghost touched you on the nose with a cold finger.”

Owney. Owney was out.

It was exacdy the kind of operation Johnny Spanish loved. It demanded his higher skills and imagination. It wasn’t merely force. On its own, force was tedious.

Labor enforcers, racketeers, small-potatoes strong-arm boys, the common soldiers of crime, they all used force and it never expressed anything except force.

Johnny always looked for something else. He loved the game aspects of it, the cleverness of the planning, the deviousness of the timing, the feint, the confusion, the misinformation, and the final, crushing, implacable boldness. It was all a part of that ineffable je ne sais quoi that made Johnny Johnny.

Thus at 10:30 P. M. at the Garland County jail in the Town Hall and Police Department out Ouachita Avenue toward the western edge of the city, the first indication of mischief was not masked men with machine guns but something entirely unexpected: tomato pies.

The tomato pie was new to the South, though it had gained some foothold in New Jersey and Philadelphia. It was a large, flat disk of unleavened dough with a certain elastic crispiness to it, coated with a heavy tomato sauce and a gruel of mozzarella cheese, all allowed to coagulate in a particularly intense oven experience. It was quite a taste sensation, both bold and chewy, both exotic and accessible, both sweet and tart, both the best of old Italy and new America at once. Four tomato pies, cut into wedges, were delivered gratis to the jail by two robust fellows from Angelino’s Italian Bakery and Deli, newly opened and yet to catch on, to the late-night jail guard shift. The boys hadn’t ordered any tomato pies—they’d never even heard of tomato pies!—but free food was one of the reasons they’d gotten into law enforcement in the first place. Even those who had no intention of eating that night found themselves powerless in the grip of obsession, when the odors of the sizzling pies began to suffuse the woeful old lockup. Who could deny the power of the tomato pie, and that devilish, all-powerful, mesmerizing smell that beckoned even the strongest of them onward.

This was the key to the plan. Like many jails built in the last century, Garland County’s was constructed on the concentric ring-of-steel design, with perimeters of security inside perimeters of security. One could not be breached until the one behind it was secure. Yet all yielded to the power of the tomato pie.

The guards—seven local deputies and warders and a lone FBI representative since the prisoner, No. 453, was on a federal warrant—clustered in the admin office, enjoying slice after slice.

“This stuff is good.”

“It’s Italian? Jed, you see anything like this in It-ly?”

“All’s I seen was bombed-out towns and starvin’ kids and dead Krautheads. Didn’t see nothing like this.”