Hot Springs (Earl Swagger)

by Stephen Hunter

  “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.

  30

  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 everydamnbody.”

  “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, chortling.

  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 pointless 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 t! 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?”

  “Well, sir—”

  “No, no, I insist. I yelled, you got upset, you got to take a nice afternoon off.”

  There was some shuffling, but in a second a woman came out, her hat on, her eyes reddened and swollen, and a formidably large, sheltering bear of a man led her out as if he were taking his infirm mother to see the doctor.

  The couple walked by Carlo without noticing, and as they went, Carlo finally saw the name on the door of the now-empty office: SAMUEL C. VINCENT, ASSISTANT PROSECUTING ATTORNEY.

  He walked in and waited in the outer office and waiting room.

  In a minute or so, the large man returned, his eyes black with intensity. His hair was a thatch that had never seen a comb and grew in every direction and he wore frameless specs that blew his dark eyes up like camera lenses. He was fleshy, not soft but large and strong. His suit fit like it’d been bought off the rack by someone who knew nothing about suits and it was covered with flecks of burnt ash.

  “Who the hell are you, sonny?” he demanded, fixing the young man with a glare.

  “Sir, my name is C. D. Henderson. I’m an investigator with the Garland County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office,” he said. He got out his badge and offered it to the man, whose eyes flashed that way, then back to his face, where they lit square and angrily.

  “What the hell problems they got in Garland County bring ’em over here to Polk? Your Fred Becker has enough fun gittin’ his picture in the paper all the damn time, what’s he need over here? He going to start raiding in Polk now? B’lieve the colored folk run some illegal bingo in their church on Saturday night. That’d be a good raid. Hell, he’d get lots of ink out of that one!”

  Carlo let the squall blow past, tried to look as bland as possible.

  “Sir,” he said, “this isn’t anything about that. Mr. Becker don’t even know I’m here. I’m here at the request of my supervisor, Mr. D. A. Parker.”

  “Parker! The old gunfighter! Yeah, he’s the kind of boy you’d want if you’d be going to bang down doors and shoot places up! You don’t look like no gunfighter to me, son. Do you shave yet?”

  “Onct a week, sir.”

  “You was probably in the war, though. You was probably a general in the war?”

  “No sir. Spent two months in Florida in the Air Corps, till they realized I didn’t see colors too well. That’s why I’m a policeman.”

  “Well, come on in, but let me warn you, I hope you ain’t no fool, because I am not the sort who can stay civil in the presence of fools. Y
ou’re not a fool, are you?”

  “Hope not, sir.”

  “Good.”

  The assistant prosecuting attorney led him into the office, which was not merely a mess but already half afog with pipe smoke. A deer head hung off the wall, but possibly it had died of asphyxiation, not a rifle bullet. In one corner well-thumbed legal volumes lay behind a glass case. The rest was documents, case folders, police reports, everywhere. Literally: everywhere.

  “Let me tell you it ain’t easy running a county when your prosecutor is a political hack like ours,” said Mr. Vincent. “May have to run for the goddamn job myself one of these damned days. Now, sit down, tell me what you’re investigating and why you came all the way out to the West.” He began to fiddle with a pipe, clearly feeling the room wasn’t smoky enough.

  “Well, sir, I’m looking into the background of a man born and raised here in Polk County. You may know him.”

  “Earl. You’d be the johnny asking about Earl. Thought so.” He got the pipe fired up, and belched a smokestack’s worth of gassy unpleasantness into the air, which hung and seethed. The young man’s eyes immediately began to water.

  “Let me tell you something, sonny. If Earl’s involved in that ruckus over in Hot Springs, it’d be a damned shame. Not after what Earl gone through. I’d hate to see Earl die to make Fred C. Becker the youngest governor in the nation. That would be as pure a crime as any Owney Maddox ever perpetrated. Is he on that raid team?”

  “Sir, that is confidential information. No one knows who is on that raid team.”

  The older man fulminated a little. “No finer man was ever born in these here parts than Earl. He went off to war and won the Medal of Honor. Did you know that?”

  “I knew he won a big medal.”

  “He did. He fought all over the Pacific. He’s as foursquare as they come. If you’re investigating him, you’d better have a goddamned good reason, or I’ll throw you out of my office on your bony young ass myself.”

  “Sir, he ain’t be investigated for no crime. No sir.”

  “What, then?”

  “Well sir, as Mr. Parker explained it to me there’s something called a ‘death wish.’ ”

  “A what?”

  “A death wish. Some men for some reason, they want to die.”

  “Craziest goddamn thing I ever heard of.”

  Carlo nodded. Then he said, “But I see from them diplomas you went to Princeton University, out east. Hear that’s a pretty good school. Did me some reading on what Dr. Freud said about death wishes. I’d bet you’d have run across it too, in your time educating.”

  Sam Vincent stared hard at the young man.

  “Say, I’ll bet you think you don’t miss a trick, do you?”

  “Miss ’em all the time, sir. But I’d bet a dollar against a cup of coffee that someone who went to Princeton and Yale Law School and wants to be elected a prosecuting attorney himself real soon-like, I’d bet he knows more about a death wish than most.”

  “Well, all right then. I have heard of such a thing. I will say Earl has a melancholy streak to him. Would that be a death wish? Don’t know. I do know his daddy encouraged discipline and obedience with both his boys, and wouldn’t brook no messy feelings or nothing. They were raised to do the job and see it through, and Earl certainly proved out. But they were both boys for holding things in and maybe that’s what D. A. Parker sees as sadness unto death in Earl.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Do you know Earl?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “What do you think of Earl?”

  “I—I think he’s the bravest man ever lived,” said Carlo. “I seen him do some things no man should have the grit to pull.” He thought of Earl advancing through the dust with the BAR, daring the Grumleys to come out and shoot at him, letting his people get behind cover in the doorways. He thought of Earl taking that shot on a Grumley to save the Negro gal’s life.

  “Nobody wants nothing bad to happen to Earl,” said Sam.

  “Yes sir.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Well. One of the things Mr. Parker wanted me to look into is this: Was Earl ever in Hot Springs? It seems he knows it damned well.”

  “Never. Never, never, never. Old Baptist Charles thought Hot Springs was hell and blasphemy. He’d have beat the hide off his boy if he’d have caught him in that sewer.”

  “I see.”

  “Earl has a gift for terrain. All the Swaggers do. They have natural feelings for land, they’re fine hunters and trackers and they have an uncommon gift for shooting. They are born men of the gun. Charles Swagger was a wonderful hunter, got a buck every damned year. Tracked the county up and down, and always came home with game. A wonderful shot. The finest natural shot I ever saw, and I’ve hunted with some fine shots. Don’t know where it comes from, but all them boys could shoot. Earl’s daddy was a hero in a war too, and he shot it out with three desperadoes in a Main Street bank in the ’20s, and sent them to hell in pine boxes. So if Earl seems to know things, it’s just his gift, that’s all.”

  “I see. Let me ask about one last thing. Earl’s brother. He had a brother, named Bobby Lee. He hung himself, I believe, back in 1940. You probably hadn’t gone off to fight in 1940. Maybe you were here for that.”

  Sam Vincent’s eyes scrunched up and even behind the glasses, Carlo could make out something there.

  “What you want to dig all that up for? Poor Bobby Lee. It ain’t got nothing to do with anything. That’s long over and done.”

  “I see.”

  “Hell, Earl was somewhere in the Marines then. It don’t mean much.”

  “You knew Earl?”

  “I knowed ’em both. Earl was two years ahead of me at high school and Bobby Lee was ten younger. I was the prosecutor that handled Bobby Lee’s death. I was there when they cut him down. I wrote the report. You want to see it?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Betty!” Sam called.

  “Her name is Ruth and you gave her the day off.”

  “Goddamn her. Don’t think she’ll work out neither. You wait here.”

  The older man left and Carl sat there, suffocating, as the fog in the air wore him down. He felt a headache beginning and he heard Sam banging drawers and cursing mightily.

  Finally, Sam came back.

  “There, there it is.”

  He handed over the file, and Carlo read what was inside. It turned out to be straightforward enough: on October 4, 1940, the fire department was called by Mrs. Swagger and a truck got out to the place fast. The firemen found her crying in the barn at the feet of her son, who had hanged himself with a rope from a crossbeam. Sam arrived and directed that the body be taken down. The sheriff was located and he arrived from a far patrol and took over. Sam made the necessary interviews as brief as possible and supervised as the boy’s body was taken to the morgue. The boy was buried without ceremony a day later and the sheriff never talked about it again. The county judge ruled death by suicide.

  “No autopsy?” Carlo asked.

  “What?” said Sam.

  “Didn’t y’all do an autopsy?”

  “Son, it was open and shut.”

  “Well sir, I learned my policing in Tulsa under a chief detective inspector named O’Neill and if I’d have closed on a suicide without an autopsy, he’d have—”

  “Henderson, you’re like all the kids today. You think every damn thing is a crime. It’s my job to represent the state in these tragic instances and believe me there wasn’t nothing in that circumstance worth an autopsy. I wasn’t no greenhorn neither. I’d been assistant prosecuting attorney since 1935. I’d seen a lifetime’s worth of squalor and misery and pain and lost life. So I made a judgment.”

  “But it was irregular?”

  “You are a persistent son of a bitch, ain’t you?”

  “I take great pride in my investigative work, sir. I believe I have a calling at it.”

  “Okay. You believe in law and order?”

 
“Of course I do. More than anything.”

  “Now you listen to me. Law and order. Law and order, you understand? That’s a easy one. But let me ask you. Do you believe in law or order? That one ain’t so easy.”

  Carlo drew a blank. He wished he were smarter and could play ball with this sly dog.

  “Seems to me they are the same,” he finally allowed.

  “Maybe mostly. But maybe not. And if you’ve got to choose, what do you choose?”

  “I don’t see how there can be one ’thout the other.”

  “Sometimes you got to give up on law to save order. Sometimes order is more important than law. By that I mean, sometimes you learn something that might hurt order. It might hurt the way people think on things. They have to trust the man with the badge. He’s got to be a paragon, a moral certainty to them. If he has weaknesses, and those weaknesses become public knowledge, well, my God, who knows where it might lead. To doubt, then chaos, then anarchy. The edifice is only as strong as its weakest buttress. So sometimes you make a call: you don’t deal with something. You let it pass, you shave a corner, you do this, you do that. Because the idea of the lawman as a man of honor and virtue and courage and decency is much more important than that lawman himself. You understand?”

  Carlo did, of course. He now knew what the old bastard was getting at. He himself knew cops who were drunks or cheats or liars or cowards. But if you made a moral cause of it, and by that cause held the larger issue of the police up to ridicule, you only weakened the structure that supported the community or, even larger, the nation. So a police officer or a prosecutor had to use a certain discretion: there was a time to act, and a time to look away, and that was the heart of it.

  “You’ve been a great help, Mr. Vincent,” Carlo said, rising. “I can see the people in this county are well represented.”

  “Don’t be in no hurry, Henderson. You ain’t done learning for today. You and me, we got a place to go. You want to learn a thing or two? Then by God so you will. Get your hat and let’s go.”