“Tell the rest of it,” Schiller said harshly.
“There ain’t any more to tell. He just kept saying him and his friends in The Nations would show anybody who turned out to be a son of a bitch what a mean bunch they was. He said they was worse than the Daltons and the James boys up in Missouri years ago. He said they didn’t even bother robbing banks and trains but just went around when they felt like it, looking for pussy and livestock. You’ll pardon the expression, Mr. Pay, but that’s the way he said it.” She laughed and winked at me.
“Do you know any of his friends?”
“Not his friends in The Nations. We don’t let Indians in here and even them whites in The Nations are more Indian than the Indians. And outside The Nations, I bet he hasn’t got any friends. Not men friends. He knows how to make a woman feel good when he’s sober, but men don’t seem to take to him much.”
“You never saw him come in here with another man?”
“No, never. Most men come here in bunches and half-drunk by the time they get here, like it was to get up the nerve to do it. But my boyfriend never comes with anybody. He got drunk one night upstairs and started crying about not having any friends and no brother or anything, and I said like a joke, ‘Well, if you did, you just set ’em on fire,’ and he slapped me real hard a few times.”
“He cried?”
“Not the time I’m telling you about. That was a while ago. When he was drunk. Lots of men cry when they get drunk sometimes, don’t they?”
“What else did he say about the Winding Stair Mountains?”
“Nothing. Just what I told already. I thought about it and read those newspapers again and talked to Henryetta. She said I’d best tell the Cap’n or else he might get displeased and come troopin’ in here sometime with a whole flock of local laws and start to—”
“All right,” Schiller cut in, a dangerous edge to his voice. “He’s not interested in that part of it.”
“I was just sayin’ what happened, is all. We decided I better tell. So we sent Big Rachael over to the courthouse with a note to the cap’n here, for him to come see us when he got back from wherever he was. So that’s what happened. And here you are, Mr. Pay. Why ain’t I ever seen you in here before?”
“Let’s get to business,” Schiller said, leaning across the table toward her. “Who is this boyfriend, Lila?”
“How much?”
“Don’t step on my toes, Lila.”
“Cap’n, you know what he’d do to me if he ever found out I’d talked with you about this. He’d do something terrible.”
“I might do something terrible myself if you don’t tell us his name,” Schiller said.
“You got money for these things, haven’t you? I can’t tell his name without some money.”
Schiller looked at me. “You think we might come up with some money out of Evans’s office?”
“Not for what we’ve heard this far,” I said. “But if we get the man’s name . . .”
We both watched her closely. Now showing me her legs was forgotten. She toyed with the glass before her, frowning.
“Well,” she said. “Well, I’d want twenty dollars.”
“Five is more like it,” Schiller said.
“Five? Five? Jesus Christ, I’m takin’ my life in my hands right now, and if I tell you that—”
“I could arrest you for withholding evidence. I could get your butt on the witness stand, and if you refused, then Parker’d give you six months in the federal jail for contempt. And if you lied about it, he’d give you six years in Detroit for perjury.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Lila said. Concern was plain on her face, and the laugh was no longer there. She leaned across the table toward Schiller and laid a hand on his, and when she spoke she whined like a child about to be spanked.
“Jesus Christ, Cap’n. Don’t be mean to me now. I told you all this, and you know I could use the money. I’m just a girl trying to make a living. Jesus Christ, Cap’n.”
“Make it ten,” I said. Schiller glanced at me, pulling his hands away from Lila’s. He shrugged.
“All right,” he said. “Ten. That’s all. Ten dollars.”
“Well,” Lila said. “Can I have another drink of sloe gin?”
“Why not? Henryetta’s paying for it.”
Big Rachael brought her another full glass. This one she took in long swallows. I could hear the switch-engine bells clanging. It had grown dark, and their headlamps were turned on.
“Well?” Schiller said impatiently.
“Johnny Boins,” she blurted out, as though if she said it fast enough and had it over with, no one could be sure she’d said it.
“Johnny Boins? Do I know him?”
“He’s nice and tall, like Mr. Pay here, and with blond hair and blue eyes with them long lashes.”
“I know that name,” Schiller said as I sat there with the hair standing on the back of my neck. It was the man I’d seen with Milk Eye; I was sure of it. The man on the Frisco depot platform the night I arrived in Fort Smith. He had been on the car with me during part of that journey, and I tried to recall where he had boarded the train. But it was unclear in my mind. I had hardly noticed him until he and the small man with the puffed brown face and the white eye had passed me as I waited for my baggage.
“He ain’t from around here. But he’s been in trouble a couple times in Parker’s court for whiskey in The Nations. But he never has been convicted. He hangs out over in the Creek Nation.”
“He live there?”
“No. He lives in Eureka Springs, up in Carroll County, Arkansas. Up in that wild mountain country.”
Schiller leaned back in his chair with a sigh. He looked at me and was almost smiling.
“Give her the money, Mr. Pay,” he said. I hesitated, watching Lila.
“Miss Lila,” I said, “would you be willing to go before a grand jury and tell them what you’ve told us?”
“Jesus Christ! No, I won’t tell nobody a thing. You send me off to jail if you want to, but that’s better than gettin’ my head caved in.”
“Give her the money,” Schiller said.
Outside, the evening breeze was coming off the river and I was aware of my damp shirt. My hands were shaking with excitement.
“She’ll be on the first train to Memphis,” Schiller said. We started back along the tracks toward Garrison Avenue.
“What about Johnny Boins?”
“We’re going after him. Tonight. There’s a Frisco freight later on. We’ll take that to Seligman and change to the North Arkansas line and ride right into Eureka. Be there before noon tomorrow. Now, you get over to the commissioner’s office and have him issue a warrant for Boins’s arrest. Tell him what we’ve heard. But don’t get a murder warrant. I want a little time with this Johnny Boins before he really knows what we’ve got him for. Get a warrant for being in Indian country without a permit.”
“That’s a misdemeanor.”
“Yes, but it’ll never be tried. Once we get him here, that nigger kid can identify him and then we’ll hold him for a hearing with the commissioner and I suspect he’ll be bound over for the grand jury. We’ll just hold him until we catch those other four.”
“We could get a murder warrant now, I’d bet.”
“No. I want a little time with him. Until we’ve got an identification on him that will hold in court, we don’t even know if he’s one of our men. This may be a wild-goose chase.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said. “I’ll bet my life he’s the one I saw on the Frisco station platform with Milk Eye that night.”
I had hoped my revelation would stun him, shake him somehow. But he kept walking, the streetlights shining against his glasses, his frail body hunched forward as we walked. I might as well have commented on the weather.
“I figured that’s who it might be,” he said. “And get a search warrant, too.”
“On a misdemeanor?”
“The commissioner will do it. You tell him what we’re up to.
If this is one of our men, we’ll want a search warrant.”
“It’s our man,” I said. “I’d bet my life on it.”
“Let’s hope you don’t have to.”
SIX
Summer tourists arrived in Eureka Springs on the North Arkansas railroad, leaving the cars at the deep valley station in the north end of town where the mountains pitched up sharply on every side. The June hardwood foliage was like a jungle, and through the leaves of trees standing in thick ranks up all the slopes showed the fine Victorian houses and hotels and the peaked roofs of grottoes built around the many springs. The streets were so narrow and winding that barely two wagons could pass, and all along the sidewalks were stone benches where pedestrians making the steep ascent to hotel row could rest and admire the spectacle of houses built almost on top of one another up the shoulders of surrounding hills.
The Carroll County courthouse and jail was only a few hundred yards along the valley from the railroad station. There, Oscar Schiller and I made ourselves known to the sheriff ’s chief deputy. The sheriff, we were told, was seldom there.
The deputy was also jailkeeper. He was a genial man of such mild disposition and unimposing manner that he left little impression on us. Within five minutes of having met him, neither Oscar Schiller nor I could recall his name. He was willing to take us as guests of the county under the facade of a vagrancy charge so that we might sleep in his cells and eat at no expense to ourselves. At the same time, this gave him the opportunity to skim off the few pennies’ profit a jailer of those times could make on the allowance paid for feeding overnight prisoners.
Johnny Boins was a well-known figure in the town. He had been variously involved with misdemeanors since old enough to walk. Once, his parents had sent him to a private school in Missouri where be vandalized the headmaster’s library and assaulted another student twice his size and age with a paring knife from the academy kitchen. Lila’s story of the playmate doused with kerosene and set fire was confirmed. The deputy said we might see that victim at any time on the streets of Eureka Springs, a twenty-year-old man now but still with the burn scars across his face. Johnny Boins, the deputy said, had always been a high-spirited boy. A genuine hell-raiser. During his tenure as town terror, he had knocked out the plate-glass windows in most of the stores along Main and Spring streets at different times. As he grew older, his tastes changed. He had been threatened a number of times with shotguns by irate fathers whose daughters he had dishonored and one he had allegedly impregnated.
“I don’t reckon Johnny ever felt the sting of a willow switch,” the deputy said. “He was the Boinses only child, and they never could bring theirselves to whup him. He’d get in trouble and they’d pay his way out of it or, later, get theirselves a good lawyer.”
It was an exceptional situation in this deep mountain country, where the young were expected generally to toe the line or suffer the physically painful consequences. But because the Boinses were held in high regard in the community, and because they had the money to spend on him, Johnny was never in serious trouble with the law.
“His punishments run to strawberry shortcake and cream in his mother’s kitchen,” the deputy said. “Far as I know, he ain’t ever been whupped or convicted of a crime.”
We were closemouthed about the real reason for wanting Johnny Boins. The deputy was cooperative and promised to keep our presence in town to himself. It would be an easy matter to lose ourselves amongst all the flood of tourists when we needed to get out on the streets.
Our first day was given over to an examination of the town so a decision could be made on where Johnny Boins might be arrested. The deputy told us that in winter, when the tourists were not there, Johnny was usually away. But in summer he always returned. He worked part-time in his father’s hardware store. Mornings he spent along hotel row, playing croquet with the girls who were in the Ozarks with their parents to enjoy the scenery and take the waters. In the evenings, he played poker with some of the young men tourists and sometimes caroused along the streets with them singing songs unfit for decent ears. And each day, too, after a morning session on the croquet courts and before taking his place among the nails and screwdrivers, he had a bath at the Olympia Bath House, located up the mountainside between the courthouse and hotel row.
Oscar Schiller gave no hint of what he was thinking as we strolled along the streets, but I knew he was figuring where best to arrest Johnny Boins. Too many of his colleagues had been shot to death trying to take a fugitive without planning ahead.
Moving along the steep sidewalks, we paused frequently at one of the benches and sat watching the people pass. The Boinses’ hardware store was not difficult to find and we stationed ourselves across from it at about the time the deputy said Johnny Boins would come in to work. I had no way of knowing whether I would recognize him, having seen him only that one time. For some time, I had been trying to recall the features of both men, but as so often happens, the more I tried to picture them in my mind, the muddier became my memory of their faces.
It was half past one when Oscar Schiller and I began our vigil across the street from the Boinses’ store. We waited almost an hour. When Johnny Boins finally walked around the corner of the winding street and along the sidewalk toward his father’s store, I recognized him at once. He was dressed in a tailored vested suit and wore a small straw hat fashionable among the tourists and much unlike the one I had seen him wearing before. He had a smile on his face, showing fine white teeth, and he tipped his hat to all the passing ladies. Even from across the street, I could hear the metal taps on the heels of his patent leather pumps.
“There he is,” I said.
Schiller fixed his stare on the tall figure across the street. I found it somehow disappointing that he showed none of the excitement that made my own chest pound. He said nothing until after Johnny Boins had disappeared into the hardware store.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. It’s him.”
“He’s some dandy, ain’t he?”
“He’s the one I saw with Milk Eye on the station platform.”
Abruptly, Schiller rose. “All right. Let’s see about that bathhouse.”
The Olympia Bath House looked like a Moorish mosque. Like so many of the buildings here, it was constructed of native limestone. There were columns in front along the sidewalk, and a huge dome above, plated with brass, turned green now and aswarm with pigeons and sparrows. Inside was a lavish waiting room or lobby with a desk at the rear beside a wide door that led back into the baths. The clerk explained that there were immersion baths with cold, warm, and hot water, a Turkish section, a massage parlor, and a sundeck in back for lounging. Immediately behind the reception desk was a long room, lockers built along either wall and padded dressing benches down the center aisle. The fee was fifty cents including a towel, each additional one costing a dime. Oscar Schiller allowed me to pay for both of us, explaining that I could submit a voucher to Evans for reimbursement.
In the locker room, we undressed, wrapping ourselves in the towels. In the instant I saw Schiller’s body the impression of a frail, bony child came to mind. His ribs showed and the joints of his spine pressed against his pale skin like the knobby stalks of the hollyhocks we had seen in the Thrashers’ backyard. Along his right side was an ugly scar, and I remembered Evans’s story of his Civil War exploits. He kept his back to me as he pulled the towel around his hips, as though ashamed to be seen naked.
We did not bathe, but passed through all the rooms with their white enamel tubs, brass fittings, massage tables like long chopping blocks. There were at least two dozen men there, relaxing in the steamy rooms, taking the sun in wicker chairs where it streamed through high cathedral windows. Oscar Schiller looked at everything, mentally marking each door and window and alcove. By the time we had returned to the locker room, damp from the steam, I knew he had everything stenciled in his mind, like the blueprint of a floor plan.
“Everything comes back through this room,” h
e said while we dressed. “And it’s least crowded, too. I don’t want a lot of other people around in case there’s shooting. Killing innocent bystanders can be embarrassing. We’ll take him here, when he comes out, naked. A man caught without his clothes isn’t in any frame of mind to resist.”
It rained during the night and by morning the streets were clean and fresh-smelling. The honey locust was blooming up the hillside above the courthouse, the blossoms like popcorn balls, delicate and sending their sweet smell through the town. By midmorning, I was out of the courthouse and wandering the streets. I bought a china dog for Jennie, white with the words Eureka Springs, Arkansas. 1890 printed along one flank. In a small bookstore I bought a copy of Blackmore’s Lorna Doone although I had a copy in my room at the hotel in Fort Smith. Well before noon, I was at the spring across the street from the Olympia Bath House. Within a few moments after I took a seat and began to pretend reading, Oscar Schiller showed himself at the corner of the bank building, as we had planned.
I could imagine Johnny Boins, on hotel row, playing his morning game of croquet with the young ladies all dressed in bright cotton frocks and undoubtedly wearing bonnets to avoid freckling in the warm spring sun. People passed along the street, many of them walking and some stopping at my spring to drink the water from one of the many public cups sitting in neat rows along the ledges of the bluff where the water came out. I waited, the sweat beginning to run down through the hair on the back of my neck. The sun rose higher, warming as it did. At exactly noon, I heard the click of Johnny Boins’s heels along the sidewalk from up the ridge.
He was smiling as he came into view. For an instant, his eyes fixed on me and my throat closed. But he gave no sign that he had ever seen me. I sat with my head lowered, my wide hat brim shading my eyes. I could hear his heels tapping toward me, then crossing the street toward the bathhouse. I looked again and he was going into the Olympia, his head up, his back straight like a drum major passing in review. I allowed a few moments before I rose, my knees wobbly. Oscar Schiller was watching me from the corner of the bank. Even at that distance, I could feel his eyes on me. I walked across the street and into the lobby of the bathhouse.
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