Hot Springs

by Stephen Hunter

  Earl felt the need to drink again. This one really hurt. This one was like a raw piece of glass caught in his throat, cutting every time he breathed.

  The sun was bright, his head ached, he felt the shakiness of the hangover, the hunger from not having eaten in twenty-four hours, and the emptiness of no life ahead of him and memories of what was done stuck in his head forever.

  He wiped the sweat from his brow, and decided it was time to go on home and try and pick up the pieces. Yet something wouldn’t let him leave.

  He knew, finally: he had to see the place one more time.

  See the goddamned barn.

  He’d seen it in November when he was discharged and stopped off here before going on up to Fort Smith and getting married and joining up with the rest of America for the great postwar boom. Hadn’t felt much then. Tried to feel something but didn’t, but he knew he had to try again.

  He walked through the weeds, the wind whipping dust in his face, the sun beating down hot and ugly, a sense of desolation like a fog over the abandoned Swagger homestead, where all the Swagger men had lived and one of them had died.

  The barn door was half open. He slipped in. Dust, cobwebs, the smell of rotted hay and rotting wood. An unpainted barn will rot, Daddy had always said. Yes, and if Daddy wasn’t here to see that the barn was painted every two years, it would rot away to nothing, which is what it was doing. The stench of mildew and decomposition also filled the close dense air. The wood looked moist in places, as if you could put a foot through it and it would crumble. Odd pieces of agricultural equipment lay about rusting, like slingblades and the lawn mower that Earl had once used, and spades and hoes and forks. A tractor, dusty and rusting, stood mutely by. The stalls were empty, though of course a vague odor of animal shit also lingered in the air.

  But Earl went to where he had to go, which was to the rear of the barn, under a crossbeam. That is where Bobby Lee had hanged himself. There was no mark of the rope on the wood, and no sign of the barrel he had stood upon to work his last task, the tying of the knot, good and tight, the looping of the noose, and the final kick to liberate himself from the barrel’s support and from the earth’s woe.

  He had hung there, as the life was crushed out of his throat, believing that he was going to a better place.

  Hope you made it, Bobby Lee. I wasn’t no good to you at all. You were the first of the all-too-many young men I let down and who paid with it with their lives. There were legions of these beyond Bobby Lee, platoons full of them, from the ’Canal to the railyard in Hot Springs, all of whom had trusted him and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do for them except watch them die.

  A thought came to Earl. He could find a rope and do the same trick and that would solve a lot of problems for a lot of people, mostly himself. The faces of boys wouldn’t always be there, except when he was in a gunfight, to haunt him and sour his sleep, his food, his life.

  But Earl was somehow beyond that now. He had a vague memory of shooting himself in the head in a bathroom in Washington, dead drunk, and finding that he’d forgotten to load the chamber, the only time ever in his whole life when he had pulled a trigger and been surprised at what happened.

  Bobby Lee hadn’t been so lucky. He wanted to leave the world and no secret part of him intervened. He kicked the barrel and he left the world and went to a better world, where no drunken father would take his anger out on him, and beat him and beat him just to express his own rage at what lurked deep in his own mind. October 2, 1940. Earl had been in the Panama Canal Zone at Balboa, on jungle maneuvers, happy in his far-off mock war, his brain consumed with the tactical problems, the discomforts, the need to lead his men, his worry over a captain who seemed a little too fond of the bottle, the—

  No, no. Not October 2, 1940. That was something else. That was something else. Bobby Lee killed himself two days later, October 4, 1940. Why had he remembered October 2?

  Oh, yes. Now he had it: Carlo Henderson had pointed out that the Alcoa payroll job had been October 2. Five men shot and killed four railway guards in the same damned railyard, and got away scot-free with $400,000 that very quickly came back to Owney Maddox, who probably was going to live off it for the rest of his life.

  Something nagged at Earl.

  Suddenly he wasn’t in the dust-choked barn anymore, where his brother died and where the general agenda was rot and ruin, but only in his head.

  Daddy must have beaten Bobby Lee really bad on October 3 or October 4. He must have gotten completely drunk and angry and forgotten himself and beat the boy so hard the boy concluded there was a better place to be and it wasn’t in this world.

  Why October 4?

  Well, why not? If it was going to happen, it was going to happen and any one date was as good as another.

  Still Earl couldn’t put it quite away. It was two days after the most notorious crime of the era. His daddy would have been busy on roadblock duty all that—

  Well, what about that?

  Why wasn’t Daddy parked out on some roadblock? A robbery that big, leaving that many men dead, the roadblocks would have stayed out for a week at least. Yet somehow in all that mess, Daddy has a chance to get liquored up and comes home and finds his second son and cannot help but release his deepest rage and beats on the boy so bad that the boy decides this life ain’t worth living no more and that he will stop the hurting.

  Could Charles have had something to do with the robbery?

  It almost seemed possible. For with Charles’s secret life in Hot Springs, he’d certainly have come to the notice of Owney and the Grumleys. His weakness made him vulnerable to blackmail, as did his gambling debts. If they needed him, he’d have been powerless to stop them. He was made to order for the taking, with his rigidity, his pride, his secret shame, his alcoholism.

  And maybe it wasn’t till afterward he learned that four men had died and he hadn’t just helped robbers but killers as well. And he’d been so overcome with disgust and self-loathing for what he’d done, he’d laid on a big drunk. The biggest. And God help his child when he got in that way.

  But then Earl had a sudden laugh. Standing there in that rotting barn, breathing the choking dust and smelling the odor of rot and shit and rust, he laughed hard.

  What on earth could my daddy have known to help those birds? Charles Swagger knew nothing! What the hell value was he? He knew how to sap a drunk and get the cuffs on. He knew how to fix an uppity Negro with a stare so hard it would melt a safe. He knew how to shoot, as he’d proved in the Great War, and in the bank in Blue Eye in 1923, but them boys didn’t need shooters, that was clear; they knew how to shoot.

  Earl turned, and slipped out of the barn. A cloud had come over the sun, so it was cooler now, and the freshness of the air revived him somewhat as he escaped the dense atmosphere. He allowed himself a smile. His father! A conspirator in a train robbery! That stubborn, mule-proud old bastard with his stern Baptist ways and his secret weakness and rancid hypocrisy! What could he offer such men! They’d laugh at him because they didn’t fear him and without the power of fear he had no power at all.

  Earl walked over to the porch and sat down. He knew he should leave soon. It was time to go. He had to make peace with his failures, to face the future, to go on and—

  But: Who was my father?

  Who was he? I don’t know. He scared me too much to ever ask the question when the man was alive, and his memory hurt too much to ask it when he was dead. But: Who was he?

  He turned and looked into the old house. If there was an answer maybe it was in the house that Charles Swagger inherited from Swaggers before and made his own little invincible kingdom.

  Earl rose and went to the door. It had been nailed shut. He hesitated, then remembered that he now owned the place and the door only sealed him off from his own legacy. With a stout kick, he blasted the door open, and stepped inside.

  Some houses always smell the same. He’d have recognized it anywhere, though now the furniture was gone, as were the pi
ctures off the wall. The smell was somehow more than the accumulated odors of his mother’s cooking and the generations of cooking that had come before; it was more than the grief or the melancholy that had haunted this place; it was more than the bodies that had lived here. It was unique and its totality took him backward.

  He remembered himself as a boy of about twelve. The house was so big and dark, the furniture all antiques from the century before. If his father was home, the house would tell him: there’d be a tension somehow in the very structure of the universe. Daddy might not be angry that day, might merely be aloof and distant, but the danger of his explosiveness would float through these rooms and corridors like some sort of vapor, volatile and nerve-breaking, awaiting the spark that set it off.

  Or maybe Daddy was drinking. He drank mostly on the weekends but sometimes, for unknown reasons, he’d drink at night and the drink loosened his tongue and let his demons spill out. Maybe he’d hit you, maybe he wouldn’t, but it wasn’t just the hitting; he’d be on you, like some kind of stallion or bull or bull rooster. He had to dominate you. He couldn’t let you breathe.

  What’re you staring at, goddammit, he’d demand.

  What’s wrong with you, boy. You some kind of girl? You just stare. I’ll knock that goddamned stare off your face.

  Charles, the boy didn’t mean nothing.

  In my house, nobody stares at me. This is my house. Y’all live here because I let you. I set the rules. I provide the food, I pay the hands, I keep the law in this county, I set the rules.

  Earl walked from room to room. Each was empty in fact but full in his own mind. He remembered everything, exactly: the placement of the sofa, the size and shape of the dining room table, the old brown pictures of Swaggers from an earlier time and place, he remembered them all.

  Whoa, partner, he counseled himself. Don’t let your hate just fog your mind.

  He tried another approach. If you must understand your father, don’t think about what made him angry, since everything made him angry. Think about what made him happy.

  He tried to remember his father happy. Was his father ever happy? Had his father ever smiled?

  He had no memory of such an event, but in time he realized that being occupied, his demons quelled momentarily by mental activity, was as close to happiness as Charles Swagger, sheriff of Polk County, ever got.

  So Earl knew where he had to go.

  Not into the kitchen or the bedroom or the cellar, and not upstairs where the boys slept, but back through the house to his father’s trophy room.

  That was his father’s sanctum. That’s where his father retreated. It was a sacred temple to . . . well, whatever. Who knew? Who could say?

  Earl opened the door. The old woman had left the room pretty much intact when she left after his death. The guns were gone of course, presumably sold off, and the cabinet removed. Earl remembered standing before it as a child; in fact his one or two pleasant memories with his father seemed to revolve around the guns, which stood locked behind glass. The old man had some nice ones: Winchesters mostly, dark and oily, sheathed in gleamy soft wood, a Hi-Wall in .45-120, a whole brace of lever actions, from an 1873 he’d picked up somewhere to a ’92 to an 1895 carbine, all in calibers nobody loaded anymore, like .40-72 and .219 Zipper and a beautiful old 1886 in .40-65; Daddy also had a couple of the little self-loaders, in .401. He had three shotguns for geese in the fall, and he had one bolt gun, the ’03 Springfield, which he’d turned into a sleek and beautiful sporter. The guns were treated with respect. If Daddy approved—rare, but it happened—you were allowed to touch the guns. But they were gone. So was the desk, the volumes of works on hunting, reloading and ballistics, the liquor cabinet where the ever-filled bottle of magic amber fluid was kept. So was the map of Polk County, where he had painstakingly tracked his kills with coded color pins each year, yellow for deer, red for boar, black for bear, so that in the end, the map was a tapestry of brightly lit little dots, each signifying a good shot. A blank rectangular space stood on the wall, where the map had been taped for all those years and the paint hadn’t faded. Now it was just emptiness.

  And she had no stomach for removing the trophies themselves. It was as if Charles’s powerful medicine still inhabited them, and looking at them on another wall, he saw they were dusty and ratty, beginning to fall apart like old furniture, their ferocity largely theatrical. Earl nevertheless felt the power of his father’s presence.

  Charles was a hunter. He stalked the mountains and the meadows of Polk and other nearby counties with his Winchesters, and he shot what he saw. He was a very good shot, an excellent game shot, and he learned the habits of the creatures. He was a man who could always support himself in the woods, and he had that Swagger gift, mysterious and unsourced, for understanding the terrain and making the good read, then finishing up with a brilliant shot on the deflection.

  Earl remembered; his father took him hunting and taught him to shoot, and taught him to track, taught him patience and stoicism and a bit of crazed courage, the willingness to ignore the body and do what had to be done. And the odd thing was, they were skills that let Earl survive the dark journey that would become his fate. So he did in fact get something from his daddy, a great gift, even if he never realized it at the time.

  He looked at the heads on the wall. Bear, boar, three deer, an elk, a cougar, a bobcat, a ram, all bearing either a graceful furl of horn or a mouthful of snaggly teeth. Like any trophy hunter, his father took only the best, the oldest animals, who had long since passed their genes along to progeny. The taxidermist was a fellow in Hatfield, and he too had the gift.

  The animals seemed to live on that wall. They were frozen in expressions of anger or assault, their lips curled back, their fangs bared, the full animal majesty of their power exploding off their faces. It was all make-believe, of course; Earl had been to the shop and the taxidermist was a bald, fat little cracker who smelled of chemicals and had a shop full of marble eyes sent from 34th Street in New York, intricate replicas of the real thing that gleamed and seemed to stare, but were merely glass.

  What does this room tell me?

  Who was my father?

  Who was this man?

  He stared at the trophy animals on the wall, and they stared back at him, relentless, if locked in place, still spoiling for a great fight.

  What did my father know?

  On the evidence of this room, only the pleasures of the hunt. And the pleasures of the land the hunt was conducted upon.

  That’s what a hunter knows. A hunter knows the land. A hunter roams the land, and even if he’s not hunting that particular day, he’s paying attention, storing up information, recording details that someday may come in handy.

  That’s what my father would know: the Arkansas mountain wilderness, as well as any man before or since.

  That was the only place he was ever really happy.

  58

  Owney was nervous. Across the way, there seemed a lot of activity. Searchlights and the pulsing flash of red gumballs cut the night as the cops stopped cars, threw up roadblocks, sent out search teams and dogs on the hunt for him. But the lake was serenely calm. It lay in the dark like a sheet of glass, glinting with illumination from the various points of light on the shore.

  “Don’t worry,” said Johnny. “It’ll be like the last time. It’ll go without a hitch.”

  “I ain’t worried about the lake,” said Owney. “I’m worried about the forest. How can you remember? It was so complicated. It was at night.”

  “I have a photographic memory,” said Johnny. “Certain things I don’t forget and you can take that to the bank.” He smiled, radiating charm. He held all the cards, and he knew it.

  “And then we talk money.”

  “There’s plenty, believe me,” Owney assured him.

  “That’s the problem. I don’t believe you. No matter what I ask for you’ll cry-baby and try to jew me down. But I know you’ve got millions.”

  “I don’t have milli
ons,” said Owney. “That’s a fuckin’ myth.”

  “Oh, I’ve done some checking,” said Johnny. “I have a figure in mind. A very nice figure. After all, we are saving your life. It seems like I should take you for everything, because I’m saving everything.”

  “Is this a getaway or a kidnapping?”

  “Well, actually, it’s a wee bit of both,” said Johnny. “We won’t leave you with nothing.”

  “No, you wouldn’t want to do that,” said Owney. “You want me to be your friend after all this is over. I’ll get back, somehow, you know I will. I’m Owney Maddox. I ran the Cotton Club. I ran Hot Springs. This is just a little setback. I ain’t going into no retirement. I’ll be big in the rackets again, you’ll fuckin’ see.”

  “Yeah, sure,” said Johnny.

  “I think I’ll move out to California. The opportunities are golden and I got a feeling there’s about to be a change in management real soon. A certain party’s luck just ran out.”

  It was almost time.

  Johnny checked his watch and went to the mouth of the cave and looked across the lake. Owney followed and sure enough, out of the darkness they saw the white flashing sails of a large craft. That was the core of Johnny’s plan. He knew that the law enforcement imagination was somehow drawn to the drama of the high-speed getaway. Thus cops thought of roads mainly, and of airplanes and railways. Crime was modern, fast-paced, built on speed. Who would ever suspect—a sailboat?

  It was a beauty, owned by Judge LeGrand, a fifty-footer under two masts and a complexity of sails that pulled it gracefully and silently across the water. The judge entertained on it many times, taking visiting congressmen and titans of industry out for elegant sails across the diamond-blue water, under the diamond-blue sky, swaddled in the green rolling pine hills of the Ouachitas, where they sipped champagne and ate oysters and laughed the evening away like the important men they were, so that when they lost their hundreds of thousands at Owney’s gaming tables, they still went home with wondrous tales of Southern hospitality and sleek nights under starry skies.