Hot Springs (Earl Swagger)

by Stephen Hunter

  Across from the bar Earl saw himself in a mirror, his eyes black as the black in floodwaters as they rise and there’s no high ground left. His cheeks were drawn, and his gray lips muttered madly. He swallowed, blinked, and opened his eyes to see himself again. He saw an empty man, a man so tired and lost he hardly was worth the oxygen he consumed, or the bourbon he drank.

  He felt so unworthy.

  You ain’t no damned good, his father’s voice reached him, and he was in agreement with the old man.

  I ain’t no damned good. Any one of those men was better than me. Why in hell ain’t I with them?

  Earl took another whack on the bourbon, finished it, looked at his watch. His vision was so blurry he couldn’t read it, but given the amount of alcohol he’d drunk, he’d probably missed the train back to Fort Smith, and there’d be all kinds of hell to pay.

  He stood up uncertainly, and walked across the bar, and found the men’s room. He went in, pulled the door shut, locked the door, took a leak, took out his .45 and thumbed back the hammer.

  At no time in the war did he feel as disconsolate as he did now. It wasn’t right that he was alive and so many others were dead, and that he had a medal in his pocket that certified him as a HE-RO and they had nothing but white crosses on islands no one would ever visit and would soon forget.

  He put the pistol to his temple, felt its pressure, circular. His finger touched the trigger, then pressed it.

  The gun didn’t fire.

  It shivered as it snapped, the small vibration of a hammer falling on a firing pin that leaped forward to strike nothingness. He looked at it, then slipped the slide back a notch, saw that the chamber was empty. He removed the magazine, and found six .45 cartridges, but someone had very carefully taken out the mag and ejected the chambered shell, then replaced the mag. He knew he’d loaded it that morning.

  Did she do it? She didn’t know nothing about guns. Who did it? Maybe he forgot to chamber it? What the hell was going on?

  He reloaded, this time threw the slide to fill the chamber and cock it, ease the hammer back to its seating.

  He stuffed the gun back in his belt, drew his tunic tight, and unlocked the door.

  • • •

  The lobby of the Carlton Hotel was bright and full of swirling beauty. The light seemed to dance, as if the walls were made of glass. Maybe the VJ Day party was still going on. It was full of pretty young women and their swains, all of them so excited about television and jet planes they could hardly stand it.

  Earl slipped through the revelers; everyone was in a tuxedo or a formal gown and gay young things rushed this way and that, hungry for tomorrow to get here.

  The boys all were shaven and looked soft; he knew he shouldn’t hate them, but he did, and he let that hatred bore through his blur and he felt he needed another drink. Not a fifth of bourbon, but just something to make the pain in his head go away, like a whiskey sour or a gin and tonic or a mint julep. He glanced at his Hamilton and discovered to his relief that he hadn’t missed the train; it wasn’t yet 7:00. He had time for—

  “Sergeant Swagger?”

  He turned.

  Two men stood beside him. One was a handsome, polished charmer, with a gloss of black hair and movie star teeth, somewhere in his thirties. The other was much older, a gloomy bag of a man, with a sad leathery face and a slow way of moving. He had long arms that his suit only partially disguised and the most gigantic hands Earl had ever seen on a man. His fedora was pushed back carelessly, and his white shirt was gray and spotted. But his eyes were so wary and quick they made Earl think of Howlin’ Mad Smith’s, or some other old, combat-hard Marine. Earl saw a strap across his chest, under the tie, that indicated the presence of a shoulder holster and from the strain it showed, he knew it carried a big gun.

  “Sergeant Swagger,” said the first, in tones that Earl then related to his native state, “we’ve been waiting here for you. Your wife is upstairs packing. She said you’d be along directly.”

  “What is all this, sir?” said Earl.

  “Sergeant Swagger, we’ve come to discuss a job.”

  “A job? I got a job. I work in a goddamned sawmill.”

  “No, a job in law enforcement.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “My name is Fred C. Becker and a week ago I won a special election as prosecuting attorney for Garland County, Arkansas.”

  “Hot Springs?” said Earl. “Now what would you want with me?”

  “Hot Springs is the wildest town in America. We have gamblers, we have gunmen, we have whores, we have more crooks than you can shake a stick at and many of them are wearing uniforms and carrying guns. All run by New York mobsters. Well, sir, I’m going to clean up Sodom and Gomorrah and I’m looking for a good man. Everyone I talk to says you’re the best.”

  3

  The city’s tallest skyscraper was a spire of art deco, byzantine, glamorous, bespeaking the decadent pleasures of an empire. And from the apartment on the top floor, the empire was ruled.

  “It’s very New York, eh? I mean, really, one must agree. It’s very New York,” our proud host said to his number-one guest.

  “You can say that again,” said the guest.

  They were quite a pair. One, with the English accent, was in his mid-fifties, five foot ten, solid beef, with a handsome swarthy face. That was our host. He wore an elegantly fitted white dinner jacket, with a rose cummerbund. It fit him like a coating of thick cream poured by a delighted milkmaid. A carnation sparkled in his lapel. His hair was slicked back, and he smoked a cigarette in a holder. He wore a dapper little mustache, just a smudge of one, to suggest not merely masculinity but a certain savoir faire in affairs of business and, as well, the heart. In his other hand, he held a thin-stemmed martini glass. Onyx cuff links gleamed from his cuffs.

  “Me,” said the other, “now I’m not saying nothing against this, you understand. It’s beautiful. It’s very beautiful. But I’m a homier guy. I got a place that’s what they call Tudor. It looks like a king from your country could have lived there.”

  “Yes, old man. I know the style. Quite appropriate, I would say. It’s actually named for a king’s family.”

  “Yeah,” said the guest, “that’s me all the way. A real fucking king.” He smiled, showing a blast of white teeth.

  He was ruddier. He glowed with animal vitality. He wore expertly fitted clothes too, but of a sportier nature, a creamy linen sport coat over a crisp blue oxford shirt, open at the collar. He wore mohair slacks and dazzlingly white bucks. An ascot, a little burst of burgundy silk, completed the ensemble, and in his strong fingers, he clutched a fine Cubano.

  “But this is okay,” he said again. “It’s real swank.” He was shorter, more muscular, tanner, more athletic. He had big hands, wide shoulders, a linebacker’s pug body. His eyes were especially vivid, as he gobbled the room up. He was not stupid, but he was not really smart either.

  “Do you know who did it?” asked his host.

  “Did it?”

  “The decor. You hire a decorator. You just don’t do it yourself. One could never come close.”

  “Oh,” said the sport. “Yeah, a decorator.”

  “Donald Deskey. The same fellow who did the interiors at Radio City Music Hall. Hence, the wood, the high gloss, the art moderne, the streamline. Why, Cole Porter would be comfortable here.”

  He gestured with his cigarette holder, and his apartment gleamed before him, cherrywood walls dusky in the glow of muted golden lighting from torchères and sconces, black-lacquered furniture supported by struts of gleaming metal that could have been pried off the 20th Century Limited. Silk-brocaded drapes billowed in the breeze from the terrace door, and outside the lights of the city sparkled, infinitely tempting.

  In the corner of the cherrywood cathedral, a small band played, and a Negro singer with marcelled hair crooned into a microphone. It was up-tempo, smooth as silk, very seductive, about the glories of Route 66 that you’d encounter on the way to
Californi-ay. Next to them, another Negro served drinks, martinis mostly, but the odd bourbon or Scotch, to a fast, glamorous crowd. The movie star Dick Powell was there, a craggily handsome head mounted upon a spindly body, a man who beamed beauty and good feeling, and his truly beautiful wife, a woman so unusually comely that in any normal room she would stop traffic. But not this room. Powell’s screen girlfriend June Allyson stood off to a side, a small woman, almost perfectly configured but seeming more like a Kewpie doll, with her fetching freckles and her spray of blond hair and her crinkly blue eyes.

  The other specimens were not so perfect. One was the writer John P. Marquand, surrounded by some admiring fans, all of them exquisitely turned out. Another was the football star Bob Waterford, a gigantically muscular man with a thick mane of hair. He was so big he looked as though he could play without pads. Walter Winchell was expected later. Mickey Rooney was also rumored to be planning an appearance, although with the Mick, one could never be too sure. The Mick burned legendarily hard at both ends of the candle, and he kept to his own schedule. That was the Mick. Then there were the usual assorted politicos, gambling figures and their well-turned-out, even high-bred women.

  But the center of attention was another beautiful woman. Her shoulders, pale in the golden light, yielded to the hint of breasts so soft and pillowy that an army could find comfort there, and were cupped as if for display by the precision of her gown, just at the crucial point, where there was but a gossamer of material between her nipples and the rest of the world. She had almost no waist at all, a tiny, insect’s thing. Her ample hips were rounded and her buttocks especially firm. The red taffeta evening gown she wore showed all this off, but it was cut to reveal a hint of her shapely legs, made muscular and taut by the extreme rake of her high heels. Her face, however, was the main attraction: it was smart, but not intellectual, say rather cunning. Her features were delicate, except for that vulgar, big, luscious mouth. Her eyes were blue, her skin so pale and creamy it made everyone ache and her hair genuine auburn, like fire from a forbidden dream, a rapture of hair.

  “Hi, babe,” called the Sporty Guest from across the room, for she was with him.

  She ignored him and continued to jiggle ever so seductively to the music, as if in a dreamworld of rhythm. Her dance partner smiled nervously at the boyfriend and Our Host. He was a small, pale boy, weirdly beautiful, not really a good dancer and not really dancing with the woman at all, but merely validating her performance by removing it from the arena of sheer vanity. He had thin blond hair; his name was Alan Ladd, and he was in pictures too.

  “I better watch her,” said the sport to our host, “she may end up shtupping that pretty boy. You never know with her.”

  “Don’t worry about Alan,” said Our Host, who knew such things. “It’s not, as one would say, on Alan’s dance card, eh, old man? No, worry instead about the blackies. They are highly sexualized. Believe me, I know. I once owned a club in Harlem. They like to give the white women some juju-weed, and when they’re all dazed, give them the African man-root, all twelve inches of it. Once the white ones taste that pleasure, they’re ruined for white men. I’ve seen it happen.”

  “Nah,” said the sport. “Virginia’s a bitch but she knows if she fucks a schvartzer I’ll kick her ass all the way back to Alabama.”

  Our Host aspired to British sophistication in all things, and made a slight face at this vulgarity. But, unfazed and in his own mind rather heroic, he kept on.

  “Ben,” he said. “Ben, I must show you something.”

  He took his younger compere through the party, nodding politically at this one and that one, touching a hand, giving a kiss, pausing for an introduction, well aware of the mysterious glamour he possessed, and led his guest to an alcove.

  “Uh, I don’t get it,” said Ben.

  “It’s a painting.”

  “I understand that it’s a painting. Why is it all square and brown? It looks like Newark with a tree.”

  “I assure you, Ben, that our friend Monsieur Braque has never seen Newark.”

  “You couldn’t tell that from the painting. Looks like he was born there.”

  “Ben, try to feel it. He’s saying something. Use your imagination. As I say, one must feel it.”

  Ben’s handsome face knitted up as if in concentration, but he appeared to feel nothing. The painting, entitled Houses at L’Estaque, depicted a cityscape in muted brown, the dwellings twisted askew to the right, a crude tree stuck in the left foreground but the laws of perspective broken savagely. When Our Host looked at it, he did feel something: the money he’d spent to obtain it.

  “It’s the finest work of early Cubism in this hemisphere,” he said. “Painted in 1908. Note the geometric severity, the lack of a central vanishing point. It predates Picasso, whom it influenced. It cost me $75,000.”

  “Wow,” said Ben. “You must be doing okay.”

  “I’m telling you, Ben, this is the business to be in. You cannot lose. It’s all here and the rule of numbers says over the long haul each day is a profitable day, each year a profitable year. It just goes on and on and on, and nobody has to get killed or blown up and sent for a swim with the fishies of the East River.”

  “Maybe so,” said Ben.

  “Come, come, look out from the terrace. At night, it is so impressive.”

  “Sure,” said Ben.

  Our host snapped his fingers and instantly black men appeared, one with a new martini and the other with a long, thick Cuban cigar, already trimmed, and a gold lighter.

  “Light it, sir?”

  “No, Ralph, I have told you that you don’t hold the lighter right. I have to light it myself if I want it done correctly.”

  The Negroes disappeared silently, and the two men slipped between the curtains and out into the sultry night.

  Pigeons cooed.

  “The birds. Still with the birds, eh, Owney?” said Ben.

  “I got to like them during Prohibition. A pigeon will never rat you out, let me tell you, old man.”

  The pigeons, immaculately kept in a rack of cages against one wall, cooed and shifted in the dark.

  Owney downed his martini with a single gulp, set the glass on a table, and went over to the cages. He opened one, reached in and took out one bird, which he held close to his face, as he stroked its sleek head with his chin.

  “Such a darling,” he said. “Such a baby girl. So sweet. Yes, such a baby girl.”

  Then he put the pigeon back in the cage, plucked the cigar out of his pocket, and expertly lit it, scorching the shaft first, then rolling the end through the flame, then finally drawing the smoke through the thing fully, letting it bloom and swell, sensing each nuance of taste, finally expelling a blast of heavy gray smoke, which the breeze took and distributed over midtown.

  “Now come, look,” he said, escorting the younger man to the edge of the terrace.

  The two stood. Behind came the tinkle of the jazz, the sounds of laughter, the clink of glasses and ice.

  Before them curved a great white way.

  Lights beamed upward, filling the sky with illumination. Along the broad way, crowds hustled and milled, too far to be made out from this altitude, but in their masses recognizable, a great, slithering sea of humanity. The traffic had slowed to a stop, and cops worked desperately to unsnarl it. Beeps and honks rose with the exhaust and the occasional squeal of tires. Along the great street, it seemed the whole world had come to gawk at the drama of the place, and the crowd seemed an organism its own self, rushing for one or another of the available pleasures.

  “Really, it’s a good place,” Owney said. “It works, it hums, everybody’s happy. It’s a machine.”

  “Owney,” said Ben, “you’ve done a great job here. Everybody says so. Owney Maddox, he runs a great town. No other town runs like Owney’s town. Everybody’s happy in Owney’s town, there’s plenty of dough in Owney’s town. Owney, he’s the goddamn king.”

  “I’m very proud of what I’ve built,” said
Owney Maddox, of his town, which was Hot Springs, Arkansas, and of the grand boulevard of casinos, nightclubs, whorehouses and bathhouses that lined it, Central Avenue, which curved beneath his penthouse on the sixteenth and highest floor of the Medical Arts Building.

  “Yeah, a fellow could learn a goddamn thing or two,” said his guest, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, of Los Angeles, California, and the organized crime confederation that had yet to be named by its investigators but was known by its members, in the year 1946, simply as Our Thing—to those of them that were Sicilian, “Cosa Nostra.”

  4

  The bar of the Carlton was one of those rooms that made Earl immediately uneasy. It was full of shapes that had no place in nature, mainly circular ones—round, inscribed mirrors, a round cocktail bar, round little tables, rounded chairs with bold striping. It was the kind of a bar you’d expect on a rocket ship to the moon or Mars.

  It mi-IGHT as we-ELL be spaRING

  some pretty boy sang over the radio, getting a strange upward twist into words where no such thing could logically be expected. Everyone was young, exuberant, excited, full of life. Atop the prow that lay behind the bar, stocked with enough bottles to besot a division, a young goddess and her pet fawn pranced. She was sculpturally frozen in Bakelite, the struts of her ribs showing, the struts of the fawn’s ribs, all of it gleamy, steamy and wet, from the spray of water, somehow rigged to float across her tiny, perky breasts.

  “Hey, look at that,” said the older man. “Don’t that beat a World’s Fair in St. Louie?”

  Earl hardly glanced at the thing. It seemed wrong. The sculpture was naked. He was drunk. The world was young. He was old.

  The three scooted to the last table in a line, nestled into the corner, under a mirror clouded with inscribed images of grapes, dogs and women. It was very strange. Nothing like this on Iwo.

  A girl came; Becker took a martini, the old man a soda water and Earl his regular poison, the Jim Beam he’d grown so fond of.