Hot Springs (Earl Swagger)

by Stephen Hunter

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You tell the Grumley clan Junior Turner of Montgomery says they should go suck the devil’s own black goat’s milk. I said—”

  “You think I’m working for the Grumleys? You think I’m a Grumley?”

  “He got that Grumley look,” said one of the deputies, evidently called L.T. “Sort of narrow-eyed, towheaded with a yellow thatch all cut down. Them eyes blue, long of jaw, a rangy, stretchy boy.”

  “I think I smell a damned Grumley stink on him,” said the other deputy. “Though I ’low, Grumleys most usually travel in packs.”

  “It ain’t common to see a Grumley on his lonesome,” said Sheriff Turner.

  “I killed a Grumley,” Carlo said.

  “You what?”

  “A couple, actually. It was hard to tell. Lots of dust flying around, lots of smoke. Mary Jane’s, it was. I see they’re now calling it the greatest gunfight in Arkansas history. I fired a lot, I know I hit at least two, and they went down.”

  “You kilt a Grumley?”

  “I know you heard about that raid. That was us. That was me. That’s what this is all about. The Grumleys. Putting them out of business for good. Driving ’em back into the hills where they can have sex with their cousins and sisters and be no bother to good folk anymore.”

  “L.T., you hear that? He kilt a Grumley,” said the sheriff.

  “He must be one of them boys working for that new young Becker feller,” said the deputy.

  “I figgered he worked for Owney and Mayor O’Donovan and that Judge LeGrand and the gambling boys, like all the Grumleys these days. That ain’t so?”

  “I almost got my butt shot off fighting gamblers with machine guns,” said Carlo. “Grumleys all. A Peck and a Dodge too, I believe.”

  “Grumley cousins,” said L.T. “Just as hell-black low-down mean too. Maybe meaner.”

  “Damnation! Damnation in the high grass! Damnation in July! He’s okay! He’s goddamned okay,” said the sheriff, launching another naval shell of yellowish gunk toward the spittoon, where it banged dead bull’s-eye, a rattle that reached the rafters.

  “Sheriff’s brother was a state liquor agent,” said L.T. “That’d be my Uncle Rollo. In ’37, some ole boys set his car aflame. He was in it at the time. Burned up like a fritter that fell into the stove hole.”

  “No man should die the way my brother did,” said the sheriff. “Since then, it’s been a war ’tween the Turner and the Grumley clan. Which is why ain’t no Grumley in Montgomery County.”

  “I think he’s okay, Junior.”

  “By God, I say, he is okay. He’s more’n okay. He’s goddamned fine, is what he be. Son, what’s it you want?”

  Did Carlo want recollections? The boys provided them. The files, the photos, the physical evidence. It was his for the asking. Did he want to examine the crime scene? Off they went.

  In a few hours of cooperation, Carlo learned what was to be learned, which, as Junior said up front, wasn’t much. In the crime scene photos, Charles Swagger lay face forward in his automobile, his head cupped against the wheel, his one arm dangling, fingers languid, pointed downward. A black puddle of blood lay on the floor of the Model T, coagulated at his feet. His old six-gun, a Colt’s Army from 1904, was in the dust, one of its rounds discharged. Marks in the dust indicated no kind of scuffle. The back door to the warehouse behind Ferrell Turner’s liquor store had been pried open, though nothing taken. There really wasn’t much to go on, but the final conclusion reached by the Mount Ida detective, one James Fields, seemed to sum it up as well as anything.

  “It appears the decedent saw or heard something as he drove through town late. He pulled around back, put his spotlight on the door, and saw some movement. He got out, drew his gun, called, then started forward. He was shot, returned fire once (probably into the air or ground, as no bullet hole was found), then returned to his car as if to drive to the hospital or a doctor’s, but passed out. The recovered bullet was a .32 caliber, lodged in his heart. A manhunt and exhaustive search for clues unearthed nothing; the case remains open, though until this officer returns from wartime service it will go on the inactive list.”

  It was dated January 20, 1943, the day before Jimmy Fields went off to the war he never returned from.

  “Ferrell found him the next morning, early,” recalled L.T. “Just lying there, like in the photo.”

  “Nobody heard the shots?”

  “No sir. But that don’t mean nothing. Sound is tricky this deep in the woods. Ferrell slept about three hundred feet away in his general store but he was a drinking man. He could have slept through anything. Jimmy done a good job. He worked that case hard. If there’d a been anything to find, he’d have found it.”

  They went to the crime scene, only a couple of hundred feet from the office. There, Carlo stood in the dust behind the liquor store and saw that the warehouse was really more of a shed, secured with a single padlock, which itself could easily be pried loose.

  “What’s he keep in there?”

  “The beer, mostly. It’s cool and once a day a truck delivers the ice. It’s the only place ’round here that sells cold beer.”

  “I suppose I could talk to Ferrell.”

  “Sure, but Ferrell didn’t see nothing. But I know you want to be thorough. So, yeah, let’s go talk to Ferrell.”

  That talk was short; Ferrell did know nothing. He’d gone out back early in the morning to open up for the ice delivery and the milk truck and been surprised to find Charles Swagger’s old Ford there, old Charles Swagger dead in it. He’d heard no shots.

  Carlo asked modern, scientific questions that couldn’t be answered by any living man, about bloodstains and trails and fingerprints and footprints and whether there was dust of the kind that was from the ground here found on Charles’s boots. Ferrell had no idee; he just called the polices and the boys all come over and Jimmy Fields done took over. The only answers to those questions died with Jimmy in the hedgerow country.

  He asked as he had asked everybody: Did you all know Charles?

  Charles was a great man, they said. We seen him every damn month on his way to prayer meeting at Caddo Gap.

  As the afternoon wore on, poor Carlo began to see his time was wasted and whatever he learned really was of no importance in regard to his original mission, which had nothing whatsoever to do with Charles Swagger, his angers, his violence, his fury, his death, but with Earl Swagger, his melancholy, his courage, his baffling behavior, his possible lie about being in Hot Springs before. It almost made him dizzy. He felt he’d wandered into a madhouse and didn’t belong, was learning things best forgotten, that meant nothing except obscure pain in years back, not worth recalling.

  At nightfall, he went to say his farewells to Sheriff Junior Turner and thank him for his cooperation. After all, in the end, Junior had done all right by him, once the original misunderstanding was cleared up. But Junior had other ideas. Did he want to come up to the house and eat dinner with all the Turners? Er, no, not really, but Carlo now saw no polite way out of it, and Junior and his boys seemed really to want his company, a rare enough occurrence in his life. So in the end, he meekly said yes, and was hustled off.

  And what a dinner. Whatever the Turners did, they ate well. Squirrel stew in a black pool of bubbly gravy, like a tar pit, collard greens, turnips, scrapple, great slabs of bacon all moist with fat, taters by the long ton, in every configuration known to man, chicken-fried steak, big and gnarly and soaked in yet a different variation on the theme of gravy, corn on the cob or shelled and mushed, a mountain of grits slathered in a snowcap of butter, hot apple dumpling, more coffee, hot, black and strong, the attention of flirty little Turner girls, somebody’s female brood of cousins or nieces or something (never too clear on exactly who these girls were) and, after dark, corn likker and good storytelling.

  It was night. Mosquitoes buzzed around but the Turner boys, all loquacious, were sitting about on the porch, smoking pipes or vile cigars imported from
far-off, glamorous Saint Louie, in various postures of lassitude and inebriation. In the piney Ouachitas, crickets yammered and small furry things screeched when they died. Up above, the stars pinwheeled this way and that.

  The subject was set by the day’s events and it turned out to be the man who was both god and devil to them, who but Charles Swagger, former sheriff of Polk County, a man who walked high and mighty and treated such as them as the scum of the earth.

  “He was a proud man,” an unidentified Turner said, from the gray darkness of the porch, in a melancholy of recollection, “that you could read on him. But you know what the Book sayeth.”

  The dark chorus supported this point.

  “Yes sir.”

  “You do, you do.”

  “That’d be the truth, that would.”

  “That’s what she says. You listen, young feller. Luke’s a preacher, he know the Book.”

  “The Book sayeth, pride goeth before the fall.”

  “And you know what?” said Junior Turner. “After the fall, it hangeth around too!”

  Everybody laughed, including slightly overwhelmed and slightly overstuffed Carlo.

  “You saw him often?” he asked, amazed that Charles was so big to them, for after all, this wasn’t his county, and his office was forty miles of bad road to the west.

  “Ever damn weekend in four,” said a Turner. “He’d go on over to that Baptist prayer camp. He been a good Baptist. He been Baptist to the gills. He’d come on through in that old Model T of his, with the big star on it, and he’d stop at Ferrell’s store, and have hisself a cold Coca-Cola. You’d see him watching and keeping track.”

  “He was great at keeping track.”

  “He stand there in that black suit and he’s all glowery-like, you know. Big feller. Big hands, big face, big old arms. Strong as a goddamned blacksmith. Wore the badge of the law. Brooked no nonsense from no man. You’d as soon poke a stick at a bear as you’d rile up Charles Swagger.”

  “He must have been a worshipful man.”

  “Well sir,” said a Turner, “you could say that. He’d be headed on toward Caddo Gap. He’d be going to worship a cribful. That Baptist prayer retreat camp, that’d be at that Caddo Gap.”

  “Yes, that would, and the old man, that’s where he’d head, to do his own kind of worshipfulness.”

  And they busted out laughing.

  The Turners howled into the night! It was like the drunken deities of a fallen Olympus snarfing out a bushel basket of giggles and guffaws at the latest vanity of their pitiful progeny, that tribe of hairy-assed scufflers and hustlers known as mankind.

  “Oh, he was a prayerful man,” somebody said.

  “He worshipped all right.”

  “Pass that jug, Cleveland.”

  “She’s a coming, Baxter.”

  “I still don’t—” started Carlo.

  Junior Turner delivered the news: “He did worship. He worshipped at the altar of titty and cooze! He drank the sacred elixir of hooch. He tested God’s will and mercy by betting it all on the throw of them little old cubes with the dots! What a great man he was.”

  “That old boy, he was a inspiration to us all.”

  Carlo was suddenly confused.

  “I don’t—”

  “He didn’t go to no prayer meeting at Caddo Gap. No siree, not a goddamn bit of it. He’d come through here and make a big play of how holy he was, and tell ever damn body about the prayer retreat, then he’d roll on out of town, up Route 27 toward Caddo Gap. But goddamn, then he’d cut through the woods on some old logging road and git back on 27 out near to Hurricane Grove and head on his way to where he’s really going. Hot Springs, the Devil’s Playpen. One day a month, Charles gathered up a hundred or so dollars from the niggers and white trash he’d beat over the head, told his old wife he’s going to talk to Jesus, came through here, then cut over to Hot Springs, where he whored and drank and gambled, same as any man. So high and mighty!”

  “Jesus,” said Carlo.

  “He was a man of sin. Vast sin. He had the clap, he had ten girlfriends in ten different cribs. He never went to the quality places, where he’d might like to chance recognition. Nah, he went to low places, in the Niggertown or up Central beyond the Arlington. He’s a reg’lar, all right.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Ask Baxter. Baxter knows.”

  “I ain’t a sinner no more,” said Baxter, in the darkness. “The Lord done showed me a path. But in them earlier years, I done some helling. I knowed him ’cause I pumped gas for him so much as a youngster when he stopped for his Coca-Cola. I seen him onct, twicet and then ever damn place, ever damn time. He didn’t have no badge on then. He wore a gal on each arm, and the smile of a happy goddamned man. Sometimes the cards smiled, sometimes they didn’t, but he kept coming back. He had the best life, I reckon. He was a God-fearing man of civil authority twenty-nine days a month and on the thirtieth day he’s a goddamned hellion who got his old pecker in ever kind of hole there was to be had in Hot Springs. Great man! Great man, my black asshole!”

  “This is the truth?”

  “This is God’s honest truth,” said Junior Turner. “We all knew it. Not nobody back in his hometown did, but we sure did. So when he got hisself kilt, we figgered it was gambling debts or woman trouble. Whoever done it did a good job of covering it up. But goddamn, he paid the devil his due, that I’ll say.”

  “You didn’t investigate?”

  “Well, son, I was in combat engineer school at Fort Belvoir, in Virginia that day. My deputies was in—where was you, L.T.?”

  “Getting ready for the Aleutians.”

  “Hell, everybody was some damn place or other. Only Jimmy really was here and by God he’d tried like hell to get in, till finally the standards dropped in ’43 and they took him. Jimmy didn’t see no percentage in turning the light on Charles Swagger’s hunger for flesh and gitting himself involved in what goes on in Hot Springs. Hot Springs, that’s a evil town. If Charles went to Hot Springs for pleasure, he knew there’d be a price to pay, and by God, he ended up paying it.”

  “I see.”

  “If you want to know who killed him, I’ll tell you how to do it.”

  “Okay,” said Carlo.

  Junior leaned forward.

  “You look for a silver-plated Smith & Wesson .32 bicycle gun. Little thang, .32 rimfire, couldn’t weigh more’n ten, twelve ounces. Charles called it his Jesus gun, and he kept it secured up his left sleeve by a sleeve garter. He carried the Colt, a Winchester ’95 carbine in .30 government in the car, just like the Texas Rangers love so deeply, but that little gun was his ace in the hole. That was the gun he kilt Travis Warren’s little brother Billy with in 19 and 23, during the Blue Eye bank robbery. He shot Travis dead with the Colt, and his cousin Chandler too, but old Billy hit him with a 12-gauge from behind, and knocked him down and bloody with buck. Billy walked up, kicked the Colt across the floor and leaned over to put the shotgun under Charles’s chin for a killing shot, and Charles pulled that li’l silver thang and shot that boy slick as a whistle ’tween the eyes. Anyhows, whoever kilt that old man in 1942, he stole that gun. Everyone who knew a thing about Charles knew it was missing. The Colt was there on the ground, you seen it. But the Jesus gun was missing.”

  Carlo knew it was a bad idea, but he couldn’t help from asking.

  “Why do they call it a Jesus gun?”

  “ ’Cause when he pulls it on you, you are going to meet Jesus. Billy sure did, at the age of only sixteen.”

  “Wonder if Billy likes heaven?”

  “Bet he do. Plenty of cooze in heaven! All them angel gals in them little gowns. They don’t wear no underpants at all.”

  “Now don’t you go talking that way ’bout heaven,” warned Baxter. “It could have consequences. There are always consequences. That’s the lesson in tonight’s sermon.”

  • • •

  Eventually, most of the Turners gave up the ghost and retreated to farmhouses or cabi
ns. It suddenly occurred to Carlo that he had no place to stay, he was too drunk to drive and could see no way clear to a happy solution to his problem. But once again Junior Turner came through, and dragged him upstairs to an unused bedroom, where he was told to get his load off and stay the night, Mama Turner would have grits and bacon and hot black coffee in the kitchen beginning at 6:00 and running through 9:00.

  Carlo stripped, blew out the candle, pulled a gigantic comforter over his scrawny bones, and his head hit the pillow. He had a brief fantasy about the farmer’s daughters, since there’d been so many pretty Turner girls fluttering this way and that, but no knock came to his door, and as a graduate of a Baptist college he wouldn’t have known what to do if one did. And then the room whirled about his head one more dizzying time and he was out.

  His dreams tossed in his mind, though. Strange stuff, the product of too much white lightning and too much gravy mingled into a combustible fluid. He could make head or tails of none of it, though it disturbed him plenty and once or twice pulled him from sleep. He’d awaken, wonder where the hell he was, then remember, lie back and sail off again to a turbulent snoozeland.

  But the third time he awoke, he knew it was for good. He was sweaty and shaking. Was he sick? Was he going to get the heaves or the runs? But his body was fine; it was his heart that was rocketing along at a hundred miles per hour.

  He felt a presence in the room. Not a Turner cousin, comely and sweet, but something far worse: a haunt, a ghost, a horror. He reached out as if to touch something, but his fingers clawed at nothingness. The thing was in his head, whatever it could be. What was it rattling about in his subconscious, trying to find a way to poke a hole into his conscious, trying to get itself felt, noticed, paid attention to? Whatever, it was unsettling. He rose, went to the window, saw the Turner yard, bone-gray in the radiant gibbous moonlight, a swing hanging from a tree, a bench close by, where loving daddies could watch their baby sons play, and guard them and look after them, as his had done for him, as most had done for theirs. It was a scene of such domestic bliss and becalmed gentility it soothed him, but the luminous grayness of it suggested a photo negative, something somehow in reverse, and he saw another daddy, Charles the Tyrant, with his immense reservoir of hidden violence, his hatred, his disappointment, his vanity, his egoism, his self-doubt, and he saw him beating a boy child in that ghostly light.