“You ain’t no damned good!” he heard the old man scream. “What is wrong with you, boy! You fail at everything! You are such a goddamned disappointment!” Whack! the strap across the legs, whack! the strap across the back, whack! the strap across the buttocks, the thumbs grinding bone bruises into the boy’s arms as the larger man pinioned him in endless, suffocating rage.
What happens to such boys? What becomes of them? They become so full of hatred themselves they lash out at the world. They become monsters hell-bent on punishing a world that did nothing to protect them. Or they become so full of pain they don’t care if they live or die and off they rush into the machine guns. Or they hang themselves at fifteen, for there is no hope on earth left.
Then at last he saw it.
He tried to push it away but it made such perfect sense now, it unified all the elements, it explained everything now.
How did Earl know so much about Hot Springs?
Because he’d been there.
Why couldn’t he tell anyone?
Because he’d been there secretly, tracking someone, setting a trap for someone.
That man was his father.
Earl couldn’t be frightened by his father, for by ’42 he was a strong Marine sergeant with a couple of boxing titles to his name, and combat in Nicaragua and all over China, not the scrawny, frightened sixteen-year-old who’d fled home in 1930 to escape the father’s rages.
But Earl had some last business with his father. He saw how Earl’s mind would work. Earl was going to the Pacific and he would probably die. His division had orders to Guadalcanal by that time. He had no expectation of surviving the great crusade in the Pacific, for after Guadalcanal there were another hundred islands, with twisted names, letters in combinations never seen before, an archipelago of violence beckoning, promising nothing but extinction. But he had a powerful debt to pay back to the man who’d beaten him, and worse, the man who’d beaten his younger brother, without Earl there to stop it.
And Earl would know about the Jesus gun, and his father’s trick of wearing it in his sleeve, secured by a garter.
In his mind’s eye, Carlo saw what he hoped had not happened but whose logic was absolute and powerful: Earl, AWOL from the Corps, tracking his own daddy through the bawdy houses and flesh parlors of Hot Springs in January of 1942, and then at last facing him, facing the monster.
Had Earl been the man who killed his daddy?
It terrified Carlo, more than anything in his life ever had, but he knew he had to find the truth.
36
It was always about money with Johnny. Johnny expected to be paid very well, very well indeed, and he also insisted on charging Owney a tax for being English. He called it his Potato Famine bonus: $20,000, over and above the agreed-to sum, just because … just because all them laddies and lasses had starved in the bogs of County Mayo a hundred years ago.
“Old man,” protested Owney, “my people were selling fish and sweeping streets in the slums of the West End at the time. Doubt if they had a ha’penny between them. It was the lord highs what ruined the potato crop and set your people to dying in the river glens.”
“Ah,” said Johnny, all a-twinkle with blarney, “if you English shopkeeps had the nerve to overthrow them wig-wearing nancy boys and gone and made a proper revolution, mine’d not had to flee to the slums of New York and peck out a new life. We’d all be living in the castle now.”
We are living in the castle now, boyo, Owney thought, but didn’t express it. You couldn’t argue with Johnny, and so the deal was done and Ralph brought Johnny another mint julep. He and Owney sat on Owney’s terrace above the rumble of Central late in the afternoon. The cars churned down the broad avenue, the pigeons cooed lovingly.
“I see the mountain’s still a fair eyeful,” said Johnny, looking out beyond the Arlington to North Mountain, which rose in pine-crusted glory across the way, all twenty-one of its springs still blasting out the steamy mineral water, as they had since time immemorial.
“The town has changed in six war years, eh, Johnny?” said Owney.
“In 1940, she was still a Depression town. Now she’s modern. Now she’s a beaut. She still lights up the night sky, I’ll be betting.”
“That she does.”
“Now, tell me about these boyos who are plaguing you. They sound like the Black and Tans you Brits sent up to raid on us in the ’20s.”
“You would know, Johnny,” said Owney.
“I would indeed. I was in County Mayo and the pubs of west Dublin running with me brothers with the Lewis guns and the Thompsons, hunting and being hunted in them alleyways. I do hate the Black and Tans. Sure but they made the people suffer. They burned, they pillaged, they tortured. Night riders, anonymous, hard to get at, highly secretive, well armed. Sounds about the same, does it not?”
“Well, almost,” said Owney. “These boys don’t torture. They don’t burn. They sure pillage, though. They’ve cost me close to a hundred grand in lost revenues in two months.”
Actually, it was closer to three hundred grand, but Owney knew if he gave the correct number, Johnny would make a lightning calculation and up the agreed-on cost appreciably. That was Johnny; he held all the cards and he loved it.
Johnny’s raven hair was brilliantined back and his olive complexion radiated ruddy good health. He was fit, vigorous, handsome as the bloody devil himself, at forty-seven years old. He wore a double-breasted bespoke suit in gray flannel, and bespoke shoes as well. When he smiled, the sky lit up in the pure glowing radiance of it. Everybody loved Johnny. It was hard not to love Johnny. He’d fought in the Great War, the Troubles in Ireland, where he’d learned his dark skills, and since 1925 had worked his violent magic on these shores. Men wanted to drink with him, women to sleep with him. What an odd glitch it was that a man so gifted by God had this one little thing: he liked money that others had earned, in large piles, and if someone or something got in his way, he had not the slightest qualm about touching the trigger of his Thompson and eliminating them with a squirt of death. It never occurred to him to feel remorse. His mind wasn’t built that way. He had killed thirty-nine men, most of them officers of the law or bank or plant security, or German soldiers or British troopies but occasionally the bullets flew beyond targets and struck the innocent. It didn’t matter to him, not one little bit.
“So tell me, Owney, tell me about these dark lads, and we’ll get to getting you your money’s worth.”
Owney explained details of the shoot-out at Mary Jane’s, confessing puzzlement at the victory of the men with the lesser guns over the men with the greater guns.
“See, your problem was your ambush site,” said Johnny. “The Maxim’s a fine gun, as all hearties found out in the Great War, but she’s got to have a wide field of fire and has to be laid just right. Shooting down some stairs don’t do a fella no good at all; it minimizes what you’ve got going for you. I can see you’ve never planned an ambush against trained men, eh, Owney? Nor had that border reiver scum from the mountains.”
“I guess not.”
“Your hero fellow kept his cool and understood that the ballistics of his weapon allowed him to shoot through wood. He waited till the belt clinked dry, then he enfiladed the stairwell. From that point you were doomed. As Herman will tell you when he gets here, properly deployed, pound for pound there’s not a better gun about than a Browning Automatic Rifle.”
“So what are we going to do? I’m running out of time. I’ve threatened to bomb Niggertown to keep them from raiding, but only the cowboy cares about the niggers. Sooner or later, that threat will lose its meaning and even he will have to go ahead. And if they get the Central Book, the money dries up fast, and I am in a world of trouble.”
“That would be the checkmate move, then?”
“Yeah, and we could do everything right and on the last day, they could hit that joint and we’d be fucked. So we have to act fast.”
Johnny’s face fell into a density of concentration. He thought
out loud.
“The chances of bumbling into them in another raid are remote. The chances of jumping them in their home ground are also remote. Plus, difficult to handle. No, we’ve got to find a prize so sweet they’ll not be able to resist. We’ve got to lay a trap so deep they won’t ever suspect. We’ve got to find something that makes them unbearably agitated.”
“And what would that be?”
Johnny said, “This Becker. You say he likes to get his picture in the paper?”
“He does.”
“Then it’s got to be something with splash. Something with style. Something that would get the New York Herald Tribune out here and Life magazine.”
“Yes.”
“So much glory that Becker will not be able to turn it down.”
Owney thought hard. He didn’t have a clue.
Johnny looked at him with impatience.
“Come on, goddammit. Use that thinker you got up there. You’re like the Brit generals during the war, you can only think about moving straight ahead.”
“I just don’t—”
But Ralph was suddenly there, hovering.
“Ralph?”
“Mr. Maddox, Vince Morella is here.”
“Christ!” said Owney. “What the hell. It can’t wait?”
“He’s very insistent.”
“Jesus Christ!” He turned to Johnny. “Wait a second. These Arkansas boys, they can’t get nothing straight.”
He rose, went into the living room where Vince Morella stood, holding hat in hand nervously.
“What the fuck, Vince. I’m inna middle of an important meeting.”
“Sorry, sorry, sorry, Mr. Maddox, but I think you’d want to hear this right away.”
“So?”
“I get to the club this morning, go into my office, and there’s a guy sitting there. He’s already in. He says he wants to meet with you.”
“Jesus Fucking Christ, I told you—”
“You don’t get it. He’s one of them.”
Owney’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.
“He’s—”
“He went on all the raids, knows who they are, where they’re quartered, how they operate, what they’ll do next, how they communicate. He’ll give it all to you!”
Owney’s eyes narrowed. Now this he finally understood.
“For money, eh. Somebody always sings for the moolah.”
“Not for money. That’s why he had to see you. For something only you can give him. He’s a college kid. His name is Frenchy Short.”
PART THREE
NIGHT HEAT
37
Both men were grouchy, dirty and cranky. Road dust clung to them in a gritty film. A shower would be so nice, a sleep. This was their third trip to Hot Springs from Texas in as many days, with the bitterness of a bad scene with Becker and the sad scene with Frenchy Short yesterday. And today was a high killer. Above, the sun beat down, a big hole in the sky, turning the sky leaden and the leaves heavy and listless. No wind puffed, no mercy, as if they’d brought some godforsaken Texas weather with them.
Dressed in farmer’s overalls with beaten-up fedoras pulled low over their eyes and .45s tucked well out of sight, they sat on the front porch of the Public Bathhouse, that is, the pauper’s bathhouse, at least in the shade. Other poor people—genuine poor people—lounged about them, too sick to look anything other than sick, come to Hot Springs for the waters of life, finding only the waters of—well, of water. The Public was the least imposing of the structures on Bathhouse Row, but it looked across the wide boulevard of Central Avenue at the Ohio Club.
It was a thin, two-story building, wedged between two others, the Plaza Building and the Thompson Building; its big feature was a kind of mock-Moorish gilded dome, completely fraudulent, which crowned the upper story, and a dormer of windows bulging out over the first-floor windows. It was in the Ohio that he and the old man had observed Mickey Rooney and his big-busted wife number two throwing away thousands of bucks in the upstairs craps game.
“That’s going to be a hard place to bust,” said D.A.
“I’d hate to do it at night when it’s all jammed up,” said Earl. “You got all the traffic and pedestrians, you got all the gamblers upstairs, you got Grumley riffraff with machine guns, you got Hot Springs coppers real close by. It could make Mary Jane’s look like just the warm-up.”
“Night’s out. I don’t think that bastard Becker would go for another night raid, especially downtown. Too many folks about.”
“I’m thinking about five, before the avenue and the joint fill up. We run some kind of cover operation. Maybe we could get our hands on a fire truck or something. Go steaming in with lights flashing and sirens wailing, be in on them before they figure it out and once we get it, we have the place nailed. Nobody dies. We close down that place, we put the word out among the Negroes to watch real careful for strange white people in their neighborhoods.”
The two men sat in silence for a while. Then the old man said, “Let’s go get us a Coca-Cola. My whistle could use a bit of wetting.”
“Mine too,” said Earl.
They walked south along Central, came finally, after oyster bars and whorehouses baking emptily in the noonday sun, the girls still snoozing off a night’s worth of mattress-backing, to a Greek place. They went in, sat at the fountain, and got two glasses of Coca-Cola filled with slivers of ice.
“It ain’t the how of the raid,” said D.A. “It’s figuring out the why of it. We have to justify it. Short was right on that one.”
“Maybe we lay up outside, pick up a runner, and sweat him. When we break him, we hit the place.”
“But we got it all set up first? Don’t like that. Also, Owney’d track down the runner and kill him and maybe his family as a lesson. I don’t like that.”
“No, I don’t neither. Maybe we find someone who works in the joint who’d testify.”
“Who’d that be? He’d become the number-one bull’s-eye in the town. Sooner or later, we move along. Sooner or later, he’d get it. Some Grumley’d clip him for old timey sake.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Maybe a Grumley. Find a Grumley to talk. Turn on his kin for a new start.”
“But we ain’t got no budget to finance a new start. We can’t protect ’em. There’s nothing we can offer that’ll make a Grumley turn. Finally, them Grumleys hate us. We put eleven of ’em in the ground, remember? They might still come looking. It don’t matter that Pap up and died hisself off. Flem don’t have Pap’s grit, but he’s just as much a snake.”
“We got to find out where they’re weakest and attack ’em there.”
“Give it to Owney, he knows his business. Ain’t no ‘weakest.’ ”
“He is a smart bastard. He’s been running things a long time. Goddamn, I hate being this goddamn close and not getting it done.”
“We’ll get it done, Earl. One way, the other, sooner, later. We’ll get it done. That I swear.”
• • •
They drove back, the long, grueling three-hour pull through southern Arkansas down U.S. 70, through Arkadelphia and Prescott and Hope, making Texarkana by 4:00 and the Red River Army Depot by 5:00.
The boys were sitting outside the barracks, looking disconsolate. There was an Arkansas Highway Patrol truck and three Texas Highway Patrol cars. A group of Highway Patrolmen seemed to be running some kind of operation.
Earl and D.A. walked up.
“What the hell is going on?” Earl said.
“They come to git our guns,” said Slim. “Got a piece of paper signed by the Arkansas governor, the Texas governor and a federal judge. Becker signed off on it too.”
“Shit,” said D.A., pushing past them. “What’s all this about? Who’s in charge here?”
“You’d be Parker?” said a tall Arkansas Highway Patrol officer. “Parker, I’m Colonel Jenks, commandant of the Arkansas Highway Patrol. Sorry about this, but at ten this morning, I got a call from the governor’s office. I went on over there and he’d
evidently just chewed the hell out of poor Fred Becker and got him to issue an order. By eleven the governor’s staff had taken it before a judge, and by noon they’s on the phone, working out a deal with these here Texas boys. They want us to take charge of your heavy weapons and your vests. Y’all can still carry .45s, but—”
“Sir,” Earl said to the commandant, “we try and do this work without a base of fire and we will end up in a pickle for sure. That’s something I learned in the war, the hard way.”
“I ain’t saying what you done is bad. Nobody’s had the sand to go face-on with them Hot Springs Grumleys and their out-of-town mobsters till you came along. But the governor’s gitting heat from all sorts of folks, and that’s how governors work. We serve at his pleasure, so we do what he says. That’s the way it be.”
“Earl,” one of the boys called, “it don’t seem right. How can we do this work if we don’t go in well-heeled?”
“Yeah,” another said, “if we run into more Grumley bad boys with big ol’ machine guns, what’re we supposed to do?”
“You got the best pistol skills in the state,” said Earl. “You will prevail. That I know.”
But it disturbed him nonetheless.
“Can’t we make some disposition so that if we get a big raid and it looks scary we can get our firepower back?” asked D.A.
“Sir,” said Jenks, “you’ll have to work that out with the governor. I can’t settle it at this level. Your Mr. Becker will be the one to make that case.”
“Only case he makes is to git his picture in the paper.”
“I have to get these guns up to Little Rock tonight, and locked in the armory at State Police headquarters. As I say, it ain’t my decision. I just do what I’m ordered to do. That’s the way it be.”
Hot Springs (Earl Swagger) Page 29