It was all so unreal. Time almost stopped. The noise of the Thompson became huge and blocked out all other things. He smelled gun smoke, felt heat, even as he fell. He lurched toward the flash and had an instant of horror as he knew, knew absolutely that he would die, for he would in the next instant fall before the path of the bullets and Carlo would not expect him and that would be that.
Shit! he thought, as he plunged toward his death in the stream of .45s.
Yet somehow he hit the ground untouched, stars shot off in his head, and then someone heavy fell upon him and there were muffled grunts.
“Jesus Christ!” Carlo was saying.
“Y’all okay?” asked Earl.
Earl was among them in the tangle on the floor. He disengaged and got up. “Y’all okay? You fine?”
“Gosh darn it!” said Carlo.
“Short, you hit?”
“Ah, no, I—What happened?”
“I almost killed you is what happened,” said Carlo, his voice aquiver with trembling. “You fell into my line of fire, I couldn’t stop, I—”
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” said Earl. “Just get ahold of yourselves.”
“What the heck happened to you? Why were you way out there?”
“The vest broke and I fell forward and my feet slipped on some shells.”
“You are a lucky little son of a gun, Short. Mr. Earl, he grabbed the gun maybe a tenth of a second before it would have cut you up. He went through me and he grabbed the gun!”
“Jesus,” said Frenchy. A wave of fear hit him.
“Okay, you fellows all right?” said Earl.
“Jesus,” said Frenchy again, and vomited.
“Well, see, that’s what a close shave’ll do to you. Come on now, you’re both okay, let’s get up and get out of here.”
“You saved my—”
“Yeah, yeah, and I saved myself three weeks of paperwork too. Come on, boys, let’s get our asses in gear. No need to get crazy about this. Only, Short: next time, check the straps. Do a maintenance check each time you go on a raid. Got that?”
“I never—”
“It’s the ‘never’ that gets you killed, Short.”
But then he winked, and Frenchy felt a little better.
• • •
There was no officers’ club for Earl and D.A. to go to that night, and since neither man drank anymore, it was perhaps a good thing. But D.A. invited Earl out to dinner, and so they found a bar-b-que joint in Texarkana, near the railway station, and set to have some ribs and fries, and many a cold Coke.
The food was good, the place was dark and coolish, and somebody put some Negro jump blues on the Rockola, and that thing was banging out a bebopping rhythm that took both their minds away from where they were. Afterward, the two men smoked and finished a last Coke, but Earl knew enough to know he was being prepared for something. And he had a surprise of his own he’d been planning to lay on D.A. sooner or later, and this looked to be as good a time as any.
“Well, Earl, you’ve done a fine job. I’m sure you’re the best sergeant the Marine Corps ever turned out. You got them whipped into some kind of shape right fast.”
“Well, sir,” said Earl, “the boys are coming along all right. Wish we had another two months to train ’em. But they’re solid, obedient young men, they work hard, they listen and maybe they’ll do okay.”
“Who worries you?”
“Oh, that Short kid, of course. Something in that one I just don’t trust. He wants to do so well he may make a bad judgment somewhere along the line. I will say, he learns fast and he’s a good pistol hand. But you never can tell about boys until the lead starts flying.”
“I agree with you about Short. Only Yankee in the bunch and he sounds more Southern than any man born down upon the Swanee River.”
“I noticed that too. Don’t know where it comes from. Any South in him?”
“Not a lick. He told me he had a gift for soaking up dialects. Maybe he don’t even notice that he’s doing it.”
“Maybe. I never saw nothing like it in fifteen years in the Marines.”
“Anyhow, I’m asking you because I got some news.”
“Figured you did.”
“Mr. Becker is getting very restless. He’s under a lot of pressure with anonymous phone threats and such-like and townspeople wondering when the hell he’s going to do something other than go to his office and close the door without talking to nobody. And his wife is followed by Grumley boys everywhere she goes. We got to deal with that. We got to move, and soon. Are we ready?”
“Well, you’re never ready. But we are ready on one condition.”
“I think I know what this is, Earl,” said the old man gravely.
“So did my wife. She said it was my nature.”
“She knows you, Earl. And I know you too, even though I first laid eyes on you three weeks or so ago. You’re the goddamned hero. How you made it through that war I’ll never know.”
“Anyhow, I have to go. The boys have made a connection to me, and they’ll be frightened if I ain’t there.”
“They’ll get over it.”
“Mr. Parker, I have to be there. You know it and I know it. They need a steady hand, and you’ve got too much to do setting the raids up with Becker and then dealing with the police and the press afterward.”
“Earl, if you get hit, I’d never forgive myself.”
“And if one of those kids got hit while I’se sitting somewhere sucking on a Coca-Cola, I’d never forgive myself.”
“Earl, you are a hard man to be the boss of, I will say that.”
“I know what’s right. Plus, no goddamn hillbilly with a shotgun is going to get the best of me.”
“Earl, never underestimate your enemy. You should know that from the war. Owney Maddox was called ‘Killer’ back in New York. According to the New York District Attorney’s Office, he killed over twenty men in his time. Once this shit starts happening, he’s going to bring in some mobsters who’ve pulled triggers before. Don’t kid yourself, Earl. These will be tough boys. Get ready for ’em.”
“Then you’ll let me go?”
“Shit, Earl, you have to go. That is as clear to me as the nose on my face. But I want you to go home and talk to your wife first. Hear me? You tell her like a man. So she knows. And you tell her you love her and that things will be okay. And you listen to that pup in her belly. Look, here’s twenty-five bucks, you take her out to a nice dinner at Fort Smith’s finest restaurant.”
“Ain’t no fine restaurants in Fort Smith.”
“Then hire a cook.”
“Yes sir.”
“And you meet us Tuesday in Hot Springs.”
“Tuesday?”
“Here it is, Earl. Our first warrant. We hit the Horseshoe at 10:00 P.M. Tuesday night. We’re going to start the ball rolling with a big one.”
12
He got back late Friday night; the vets village was quiet and it took him some time to find his own hut. The low, corrugated shapes had such a sameness to them that most of the women had tried to pretty them up with flower beds and bushes, maybe a trellis or something silly like that. But they were still essentially tubes half buried in the earth, passing as housing. Eventually, he got himself oriented—fellow could wander for hours in the sameness of the place, all the little streets just like all the other little streets—and found 5th Street, where he lived in No. 17. He knocked and there was no answer. She must be sleeping. He opened the door because nobody bothered to lock up.
He heard her in what passed for the bedroom; it was really just a jerry-built wall that didn’t reach the arched tin roof. She breathed steadily, deeply, as if for two. He didn’t want to startle her, so he stayed out of that room and instead remained in the large one.
He moved one small lamp so that the bulb would not shine into the bedroom, and turned it on, looking about as he undressed. It was a fairly squalid experience. The furniture was all used, the tin walls overcurving as if boring in, t
o crush the life out of all possibility here. She’d worked hard to cheer the place up inside as well as out, to disguise its essential governmentness, by painting and hanging pictures and curtains and what-not. But the effort was doomed, overwhelmed by the odor of the aluminum that encapsulated them and the feel of the give in the wooden slats that made up the floor.
The plumbing was primitive, the stove and icebox small, the place drafty. It was no place to bring up a kid.
He went to the kitchen—rather to the corner where the kitchen appliances were located—and opened the icebox, hoping to find some milk or something or maybe another Coca-Cola. But she had not known he was coming and there was nothing. But then a rogue impulse fired off and he opened a certain cabinet and there indeed, as he remembered, was a half-full bottle of Boone County bourbon.
It took a lot of Earl not to drink it. He was not in the mood to say no to bourbon, because the long pull up the western edge of Arkansas on 71 essentially took him through home ground. The road, two lanes of wandering macadam, crawled through Polk County, where his daddy had been the sheriff and a big, important man. Near midnight, the drive took Earl through Blue Eye, the county seat, nestled in the trackless Ouachitas. He hadn’t seen it in years. The main street ran west of the train tracks, lined with little buildings. He’d had no impulse to detour to see what had been his father’s office and was still the county sheriff’s office; nor had he had an impulse to detour out Arkansas 8 to Board Camp, where the farm that he had inherited as the last surviving Swagger lay fallow. He had faced it once, when he was immediately out of the Corps, and that had been enough.
Ghosts seemed to scamper through the night. Was it Halloween? No, the ghosts were memories, some happy, some sad, really just bright pictures in his mind of this day and that in his boyhood, of parades and hikes and hunting trips—his father was an ardent, excellent hunter and one wall of the house was alive with his trophies—and all the things that filled a boy’s life in the 1920s in rural America. But he always sensed his father’s giganticism, his father’s weight and bulk and gravity, the fear that other men paid in homage to Charles Swagger, sheriff of Polk County.
He tried not to think of his father, but he could no more forbid his mind from doing that than he could forbid it from ordering his lungs to breathe. A great father-heaviness came over him, and he could see a spell of brooding setting in, where his father would be the only thing in his mind and would still, all these years later, have the capacity to dominate everything.
His father was a sharp-dressed man, always in black suits and white linen shirts from the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. His black string ties were always perfect and he labored over them each morning to get them so. Daddy’s face was grave and lined and brooked no disobedience. He knew right from wrong as the Baptist Bible stated it. He carried a Colt Peacemaker on his right side, a leather truncheon in his back pocket and he rattled with keys and other important objects when he walked. He carried a Jesus gun also, a .32 rimfire Smith & Wesson stuffed up his left cuff and held there by a sleeve garter. It had saved his life in 1923 in a shoot-out with desperadoes; he’d killed all three of them and been a great hero.
Charles Swagger also had the capacity to loom. It was in part his size but more his rigidity. He stood for things, stood straight and tall for them, and represented in a certain way America. To defy him was to defy America and he was quick to deal with disobedience. People loved him or feared him, but no matter what, they acknowledged him. He was a powerful man who ruled his small kingdom efficiently. He knew all the doctors and ministers and lawyers; of course he knew the mayor and the county board, and the prominent property owners. He knew all of them and they all knew him and could trust him. He kept the peace everywhere except in his own home, and from his own aggressions.
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 g
etting 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.
Hot Springs (Earl Swagger) Page 11