He shook his head. The anger came over him so bad he could hardly stand it. He wanted to fight, to smash something, to howl at the moon, to kill something, to see it bleed and twitch out. It was a killing anger, a hurting anger.
He wanted to go back to Hot Springs and start shooting. But shoot who? They were all gone. Owney was locked up and whoever it was had hit the boys in the train yard, presumably that Johnny Spanish fellow, was off in some gangster hideout.
There was no one to kill. It was the same rage he felt when he went to beat his father and his father was already dying.
Earl got out of the car.
"You didn't drink that Coke up, mister."
"No, I didn't. Feel a need for something else tonight."
"You all right?"
"I am fine, sir."
He walked past them, but this time not into the general store but into the little liquor store next to it. There, in an old frame, was the front page of the Blue Eye newspaper with its story of the death of the great Charles Swagger, sheriff of Polk County, who'd died stopping a burglary over in Montgomery County, at Turner's liquor store, this very place.
"They never caught 'em," said the liquor store clerk, who was actually the same Ike who'd just stepped through a door.
"So I heard," said Earl.
"Hard to figure, that old guy fighting to save my uncle a few dollars' worth of beer."
"He wore the badge," said Earl. "He knew what he'd signed up for. Don't waste no time worrying about him."
"So what's your poison, sir?"
"You got that Boone County bourbon? Ain't had a lick of that in a time."
"You want the pint or the fifth." Earl got out his wallet. He had seven dollars left and nothing else coming in soon. "How much the fifth?" "That'd be three dollar."
"Give me two fifths then. And keep the change, sonny."
Chapter 54
Nobody could believe how well Frenchy shot. Some of them were serious people. Some were ex-paratroopers, many ex-cops or FBI agents, some ex-Marines, all of whom who'd been in it, one way or the other. But Frenchy outshot them all, two-handed to boot.
"Son, who taught you to shoot like that?"
"An old guy, been in a lot of stuff. Worked it out, this system."
"It's not doctrine, but damn, it's so fast and accurate I don't see a point in changing it. Never would have believed it could be so fast, two hands and everything."
"You get used to it. It's rock steady."
"Wish I'd had you along on my team in Market Garden."
"Yeah, well, I was a little young for that."
"You ever in the for-real?"
"I was a cop in the South. I was in some for-real stuff. In it deep."
"Where?"
"Oh, the South."
"Oh, it's that way, is it? Sure, kid. You are a good hand."
"I was taught by the best," Frenchy said.
He was D. A.'s best pupil, really. The gun came from his holster so fast nobody could see it, was clapped by the other hand and outthrust even as his eyes clamped to the front sight and bangbang, he'd slap two holes in the kill zone, rotate to another, bangbang, and on to another, with the seventh round saved for just in case. These.45s had not been worked on like the ones D. A. had tricked up by Griffin & Howe, they were just old sloppy twenty-seventh-hand service Ithacas and Singers and IBMs, with an old Colt thrown in here and there for good measure, but they went pop every time the trigger was jacked and they felt familiar to Frenchy.
It was the shooting week of CIG training class 004, Clandestine Techniques, up on Catoctin Mountain in Maryland, where the old OSS had trained, a place called Camp Ritchie, maybe fifty miles outside of D. C. It still had a lot of World War II feeling to it, with the old LOOSE UPS SINK SHIPS and INVEST IN INVASION BUY WAR BONDS posters turning yellow and tatty, the wooden barracks thick with the odor of men having lived in close quarters, all of it nestled safely behind barbed wire and guarded by Marines.
And of course Frenchy was just as good with anything; he could shoot the Thompson, the BAR and the carbine with extraordinary skill. It just seemed to come naturally to him, and it filled him with confidence, so that when the field problems arose, he seemed always to be the one who solved them fastest, even among men who'd been in combat. Soon he was an acting team leader, and he led after Earl's techniques, giving his boys nicknames (that is, nicknaming men who were ten years older than he was, Harvard and Yale graduates, and combat veterans), teasing them, cajoling them, always putting himself out front and when it came time to work, outworking them. He had a funny tic when he explained things to them: he'd listen, then say, "See, here's the thing," then gently point out the way it should be done.
Finally, toward the end of the course, an instructor drew him aside.
"You've done damned well, Short. You've impressed some people."
"Thanks."
"Now many of these guys will go under embassy cover to various spots around the world where they'll run agents, or recruit locals, or make reports. Some others will stay here, this'll be their only taste of the actual, and they'll be sent to headquarters, where they'll mainly be analysts."
"Both those sound pretty boring to me."
"Yeah, I thought so. You have a cowboy look to you. Are you a cowboy, Tex?"
"No sir."
"But you have a field operator's brain, I can tell. And real good shooting skills. Real good."
"Yes sir."
"You've been mentioned for Plans."
"Plans?" said Frenchy. "That doesn't sound like much fun."
"One thing you have to learn, Short, is that in this business nothing is what it sounds like. Okay?"
"Yes sir."
"Mr. Dulles sees Plans as a kind of action unit."
"like a raid team?"
"Yeah, exactly. It'll be working in military or guerrilla-warfare situations, sometimes behind the lines, running operations. Probably high-contact work. Lots of bang-bang. Lots of sentry-knifing, dog-killing, bomb-planting, border-crossing. That sound like your cup of tea?"
"Does it ever!"
"You have a problem with Army Jump School?"
"No sir."
"You have a problem with a commando tour with the Brits? Good training."
"Sounds good."
"You have a problem with language studies?"
"Ah―I speak French and passable German."
"Think about Chinese, Short. Or Indochinese. Or Greek. Or Korean. Or Russian, if the big one ever comes."
"Yes sir," said Frenchy.
"Good man," said the instructor.
And so Frenchy's course was set. He was to become a specialist in doing the necessary, not out of sentiment but out of hard, rational thought, carefully measured risk, a burglar's guts and a killer's decisiveness. But at this point he envisioned one more moment in his career with the Garland County raid team, a kind of a last thing that he owed himself. It came some months ahead in the week after he graduated from Clandestine Techniques 004 at the head of his class and before he reported to Fort Benning for Jump School. He spent it in Washington, D. C., and for several days he roamed the city, looking for out-of-town newsstands, for copies of the Little Rock Arkansas Gazette or Democrat. He had no luck. But then he went to the Library of Congress and ordered up a batch of backdated NewYork Times and in that way, buried on a back page, learned of the fates of D. A. and the boys. EX-FBI AGENT SLAIN IN ACCIDENTAL GUNFIGHT. He did note that Earl's name was not listed among the dead, nor was Carlo Henderson's, so he assumed that somehow they had survived. It figured. You couldn't kill the cowboy. Maybe Bugsy Siegel would, as Johnny Spanish had predicted, but Owney hadn't been able to, not even with Frenchy's treacherous help.
If you saw him sitting there, in that vast, domed room on Capitol Hill behind the Congress, you would have seen a grave, calm young man, brimming with health and vitality, but already picking up a warrior's kind of melancholy aloofness from the workaday world around him. And at least at that moment―for he had not
yet entirely mastered the art of completely stifling his emotions―you might have seen some regret too. Maybe even some sorrow.
Chapter 55
Earl started drinking almost immediately. The bourbon lit like a flare out beyond the wire and fell down his gullet, popping sparks of illumination, floating, drifting, pulling him ever so gently toward where he hoped the numbness was. No such goddamned luck. He drank only to forget, but of course the only thing the bourbon did was make him remember more, so he drank more, which made him remember yet more again.
He wasn't headed west on 270 toward Y City, which would take him over to 71 for the pull up toward Fort Smith and Camp Chaffee, where his wife and unborn child, his new life or whatever, awaited. He couldn't do that, somehow. He was in no state to face them and the emotions that he had controlled so masterfully for four days now seemed dangerously near explosion. He knew he was rocky. He turned south, down 27 out of Mount Ida, to 8, and then west on 8. He knew exactly where he was headed even if he couldn't say it or acknowledge it.
By the time he pulled into Board Camp it was nearly midnight. Wasn't much to be seen at all. It was never even as much as Mount Ida. He drove through the little town and there, a few miles beyond toward the county seat of Blue Eye, off on the right, he saw the old mailbox, SWAGGER it said, same as it always had.
He turned right, sank as the dirt road plunged off the highway, watched his light beams lance out in the darkness until at last they illuminated the house where he grew up, where his family lived, where his father lived, where his brother died. The light beams hit the house.
They illuminated broken windows, knocked-out boards, ragged weeds, a garden gone to ruin, peeling paint, the nothingness of abandonment. After his father died, his mother had simply given up and moved to town. He never saw her again; he was in the hospital after Tarawa when the news came that she had died.
Earl pulled into the barnyard and when his lights crossed that structure, he saw that it too had fallen into total disrepair. It needed paint and was lost in a sea of ragweed and unkempt grass. Daddy would shit if he saw it now. Daddy always kept it so nice. Or rather, Daddy directed that it be kept nice. It had to be perfect, and it was one of Earl's chores to mow the lawn and lord help him if he forgot it, or he didn't do it well enough. The lawn had to be perfect, the garden well cultivated, the whole thing upstanding and pretty, as befits an important man.
Earl turned off the lights. He opened the door. Crickets tweedled in the dark and the soft rush of the wind filled the Arkansas night, with maybe just a hint of fall in the air. The house was big, with four bedrooms up on the second floor. Once it had been the leading house in the eastern half of Polk County, maintained by a lot of good land, but somehow, some Swagger granddad or other back in die last century had gotten out of the farming business before really getting into it and committed to the law enforcement business, because the Swagger men were always hunters, always had a kind of natural instinct for the rifle, and a gift for reading the terrain. No one knew where it came from, but they'd been soldiers and hunters for as long as anyone could remember, just as long as they'd lived in these parts. They were never farmers.
Earl tipped the bottle up and felt the bourbon clog his throat and with a mighty gulp he took down two more harsh swallows. The illumination rounds went off in his guts, lighting the target. It made his eyes water. He stood, wobbling just a little, and faced the big house.
It scared him still. It was a house of fear. You walked sofdy in that house because you didn't want to upset Daddy. Daddy ruled that house as he ruled so much of the known world. Daddy's hugeness was something he could feel even now, his presence, looming and feary and cold and mad, that man who even to this day stalked the corridors of Earl's mind, always whispering to him.
"Goddamn you, Daddy, goddamn your black soul! Come out and fight!" Earl screamed.
But Daddy didn't.
Earl saw that he had finished the bottle. He returned to the car, now glad he'd bought a second one. He found it. He had some trouble with the cap because he was so damned drunk his fingers barely worked, but in a little bit, it came free. By now the bourbon had lost its taste. He swallowed, swallowed some more, and pitched forward. He passed out in the front yard.
Sometime later in the night, Earl awoke, still drunk but shivery in the cold. He was wet; he'd pissed his pants. No, no, it was dew, dampening him through his suit coat. He pulled himself up, shuddered mightily in the cold, seized the bottle and took another couple of pulls. But he didn't pass out. Instead he rose, and in the blurry darkness of his vision made out the car. He wobbled back toward it, unsteadily as hell, and made it all the way, falling only once.
"Goddamn," he cursed to no man, as around him the black world pitched and bobbed, as if he were on some merry-go-round that went up and down just as fast as it went around. He felt like he was going to puke. He flew off in all directions and all six of his hands reached for all six of the handles to the door of the vehicle, and somehow he got it open and plunged into the back seat, and collapsed with a thump as the blackness closed around him again.
He awoke again to a strange sound. His frayed mind stirred from unconsciousness. He seemed covered in grit somehow. Again the sound: loud, close, familiar. Again the grit, spraying downward on him like droplets of water, except it wasn't water it was―
BANG!
Another bullet tore through the window, puncturing neady through, leaving a spackle of fractures, a mercury smear across the glass, erupting with a spray of grit that was pulverized glass which floated out in a cloud, then floated down upon him.
"Don't shoot!" he screamed and in a split second realized what had happened. Somehow Owney's Grumley boys had tracked him down. They had him nailed. They knew where he'd go and that's where he went and they found him passed out in the car and they worried it was a trick so they laid up until the light and when he still didn't stir after a bit they fired rounds through the windows and the windshield.
"Don't shoot!" he screamed again, knowing he was finished. He had no gun. He was aflame with pain, head to toe, from the ravages of alcohol. His mind was all jittery with fear. Goddamn them! They had found him!
Earl hated fear and worked hard at controlling it, at testing himself against it because it scared him so much, but now he had no preparation for it, and it just came and took him and made him its toy. He began to cry. He couldn't be brave. He couldn't fight. He was going to end up like his daddy, shot by killers and left dying and begging for mercy.
"You show us hands!" came the cry, "or goddamn we will finish you good!"
He looked around. Nothing to fight with. Another shot rocked through the window, blowing out a puff of sheared/shredded glass.
"I'll put one in your gut, mister, you come out or by God I will finish you."
Earl kicked the door open and as he rose felt the shredded glass raining off his body like a collection of sand. He blinked in the sunlight, showed his hands, and edged out. There were at least four Grumleys, all with big lever-action rifles, all laid up behind cover, all zeroed on him.
One of the men emerged from cover.
"You armed?"
"No sir."
"Don't trust him, Luke. Them boys is tricky. I can pop him right now."
"You hold it, Jim. Now, mister, I want you to shuck that coat and show me you got nothing or Jim will pop you like a squirrel. Don't you do nothing tricky."
Why didn't they just shoot him and be done with it? Did they want to hang him, beat him, set him afire?
Slowly with one hand, then the other, he peeled off the coat, and showed by his blue shirt and suspenders that he was unarmed. He kept his hands high. Two of the men approached while two others hung back, keeping him well covered. By the way they handled their rifles, Earl could tell they had handled rifles a lot.
"Turn round and up agin that car," commanded the leader.
Earl assumed the position. A hand fished his wallet out while another patted him down.
"Wh
at the hell are you doing here?" he was asked.
"I own this place. Been paying taxes on it for years."
"Hell, nobody owns this place, since old lady Swagger done up 'n' died in town. This is Sheriff Charles Swagger's old place, mister."
"And I am Charles Swagger's son, Earl."
"Earl?"
"By God, yes," came another voice, "according to his driver's license, this here's Earl Swagger hisself."
"Jesus Christ, Earl, why'n't you say so? Git them hands down, by God, heard what you done to them Japs in the islands. Earl, it's Luke Petty, I'se two years behind you in high school."
Earl turned. The men had lowered their rifles and gazed at him with reverence, their blue eyes eating him alive. Luke Petty looked slightly familiar, but maybe it was the type: the rawboned Scotch-Irish border reiver whose likeness filled the hills a hundred miles in either direction.
"Luke, I―"
"Goddamn, yes, it's Earl, Earl Swagger, who won the Medal of Honor. Where, Earl, Saipan?"
"Iwo."
"Iwo goddamned Jima. You made the whole damned county proud of you. Pity your daddy and mommy weren't around to know it."
That was another story. Earl left it alone.
"Sorry about the car, Earl. Folks is jumpy and we seen a car in an abandoned place and a man sleeping. Well, you know."
Earl didn't, not really, but before he could say a thing, another man said, "Earl, you look plenty wore out. You okay?"
"Yes, I'm fine. I now and then go on a toot, like the old man―"
"He was a drinking man, yes, I do remember. Onct boxed my ears so hard made 'em ring for a month," one of the other men said fondly.
"Well, I have the same curse. I'm now living up in Fort Smith and I fell off the wagon. Got so drunk I didn't want the wife to see me. So I somehow turned up here. Sorry to rile you."
"Hell, Earl, it ain't nothing. You ought to move on back here. This is your home, this is where you belong."
"Don't know about that, but maybe. I have a child on the way and we will see."
Hot Springs es-1 Page 39