Hot Springs (Earl Swagger)

by Stephen Hunter

  “I do trust you. You are a fair and decent man. I have not a doubt about that one.”

  “But you don’t trust Becker.”

  “Not a goddamned bit.”

  “He wanted me to fire you too, Earl. I told him if you went, I went. Now you tell me if that Short goes, you go. This don’t sound like it’s working.”

  “It’s the only way I know, Mr. Parker.”

  “Call me D.A., goddammit, Earl. Okay, Short gets one more chance, you get one more chance.”

  And what he didn’t say was that he had only one more chance.

  “Now I want you to go home. The boys go home for a week, you go home for a week. And get those goddamned pellets plucked out of your hide, so you won’t be so disagreeable, do you understand? And see your wife. The poor woman is probably very upset with you.”

  25

  They got back to the Red River Army Depot, were paid in cash the money owed them, and left early the next morning for Texarkana and from there to all points for a week of pleasure. Some went home, some, whose homes were too far, headed down to the Texas beaches, but a day away by train, some headed for that lush and Frenchy town, New Orleans.

  All, that is, but two of them.

  Carlo Henderson was tapped by D.A. late that morning, as most of the others had left. He was in no hurry because he was going to catch a late bus out of Texarkana for Tulsa, where he planned to visit his widowed mother. But that was not to be.

  “Yes sir?”

  “Henderson, Mr. Earl tells me you’re doing very well. You’ve got a lot to be proud of.”

  Carlo lit up with a smile. Earl, of course, was a God to him, brave and fair but not a man given to much eloquence in his praise.

  “I am just trying to do my duty,” he allowed.

  “That’s important, isn’t it?”

  “Important?”

  “Duty, son.”

  “Yes sir,” said the boy. “Yes sir, it is.”

  “Good, I thought you’d say that,” said the old FBI agent. “Now let me ask you this: what do you think of Mr. Earl?”

  Carlo was taken aback. He felt his jaw flop open, big enough for flies to fill, and then he swallowed, gulped and blurted out, “He’s a hero.”

  “That he is,” agreed the old man. “That he is. You’ve heard these rumors that Earl won a medal, a big medal, in the Pacific? Well, they’re true. Earl was a great Marine out there. Earl killed a lot of the Yamoto race. So any young man who gits to study and learn and benefit from Earl’s bravery and leadership ability, he’s a lucky young man indeed, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes sir,” said Carlo, for he felt that way exactly.

  “But you should know something, Henderson,” D.A. continued. “Earl’s was the very toughest of wars. Five invasions. Wounds. Lots of men lost on hell’s far and barren beaches. You get my drift?”

  Carlo did not.

  “It takes something from a man, all that. You can’t go through it and come out the same. It wears a man down and exhausts him. It blunts him. Now, son,” continued the old man, “I am a mite worried about something. See if you follow me. You ever hear of this thing called combat fatigue?”

  “Yes sir,” said Carlo. “Section 8. Cuckoo. You can’t do your job no more, even though you ain’t been hit. So off you go to the nuthouse.”

  “Them jitters, they don’t always make it so you want to go to hospital. Sometimes they make it so you just want to die and git it over with. It’s part of combat fatigue. It’s called a death wish. You hear me? Death wish.”

  The concept sounded somehow familiar to Carlo, but he wasn’t sure from where. And he wondered where in hell this was going.

  “See, here’s what can happen,” D.A. explained. “A fellow can be so tired he don’t want to go on. But he’s got too much guts—they call it internal structure, the doctors do, I have looked it up—to quit. So he decides to kill himself doing his duty. He takes wild chances. He behaves with incredible bravado. But he’s really just trying to git hisself killed. Strange it is, but they say it happens.”

  “Is that what’s going on with Mr. Earl?” Carlo asked.

  “I don’t know, son. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know neither, sir. He seems all right, I guess.”

  “Yes, he does. But dammit, I have told him three times on raids to wear the damned vest and he will not do it. I have told him his job is to stay outside and coordinate, over the walkie-talkies. But again, he’s got to be right up front where the guns are. And that last stunt. Why, he walked down that hallway in plain sight, daring them boys to shoot him. What a fool thing to do. He could have laid back and with that BAR just opened fire and finished their hash off.”

  “He was afraid of hurting them colored girls.”

  “Never heard of such a thing in all my days.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Now that he thought about it, Carlo had to admit it did seem peculiar.

  “So anyway,” said D.A., “I am mighty worried about Earl. I do not want to be a party to his self-destruction. I picked him, I offered him this job in good faith and I expected him to do it in good faith, and not try and get himself killed. Do you understand?”

  “I think so, sir.”

  “Now, there’s one other thing as well.”

  The boy just stared his way.

  “You know I respect and appreciate Earl as much as any man on the team?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And you know I think he’s a true American hero, of the type there ain’t many like anymore. Mr. Purvis, he was one. Audie Murphy, now there’s another. William O. Darby, he was another. But Earl’s quite a man, that’s what I think.”

  “I do too, sir,” said the boy.

  “So I ask myself a question so hard I can hardly put it in words. Which is: Why did he lie?”

  “Sir?”

  “Why did he lie? Earl told a lie. A flat, cold, indisputable lie and it’s got me all bothered, bothered as much as his crazy need to get hisself kilt. I tried to dismiss it but I couldn’t. There seemed no point to it, none at all, not even a little one.”

  “He lied?”

  “He did.”

  “It don’t sound like him.”

  “Not a bit. But he did.”

  “On what topic?”

  “The topic was Hot Springs.”

  “Hot Springs?”

  “I asked him dead-on. Earl, have you ever been in Hot Springs? No sir, he said. ‘My Baptist daddy said Hot Springs was fire and damnation. He’d beat our hides off if ever we went to Hot Springs.’ That’s what he said.”

  “But you think he has?”

  “Shoot, son, it’s a pitcherful more than that! At least three times I have planned a certain way, based on my reconnoitering and my experience. And in each damn case, he has at the last second said, Now wait a minute, wouldn’t it be better if … And each goddamn time his way was better. Better by far.”

  “Well, I—”

  “Better because he knew the terrain or the site of the buildings. The last time was the best. He’s in the alley watching the rear-entry team, holding it all together on the radio. But suddenly he gets this feeling the team will be ambushed from behind. So he’s looking down the alley when they move a truck with gunmen in it down toward Malvern, with an enfilade on the rear to Mary Jane’s. How’s he know to look there? It’s dark as sin, but he knows where to look? How?”

  “Ah. Well, I guess—”

  “Guess nothing! I asked him straight up and he told me he was just lucky he was looking in the right direction. Bullshit! I swear to you, he goddamned knew there was just the slightest incline down that little street, called Guilford, toward Malvern. He knew a truck could roll down, no engine involved, just by releasing the emergency brake, and git into shooting position. So that’s exactly where he looked and by God when he saw them boys sliding into position he was ready. He emptied two BAR mags into that truck and up she went like the Fourth of July and three more of Pap Grumley’s
cousins went to hell. He knew.”

  The old man seemed astounded, turning this bit of information over and over in his mind. It fascinated him.

  “All right,” he said, “here’s what I want. You take this week and you turn all your detective skill loose on Earl. Earl’s background. Earl’s past. Who is Earl? Why’s he working the way he is? What’s going on in his head? What do his ex-Marine pals say? What’s his folks say? What’s his family doctor say? How was he in Hot Springs? When was he in Hot Springs? Why was he in Hot Springs? What’s going on? And you report to me. So I can decide.”

  “Decide?”

  “Decide whether or not to fire Earl. I will not be party to his suicide. It’s more than I care to carry around on my shoulders. I will not have him using me to git hisself kilt. Do you understand?”

  “I am not a psychologist, sir. I can’t make that call.”

  “Well, dammit, I can’t make it neither, not without some help. If I fire Earl, the whole goddamned shebang falls apart, that I know. And I got that bastard Becker to answer to. But if I send him ahead and he gets killed, I got my own self to answer to. Both of them are stern taskmasters.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “This is a hard job. Maybe the hardest of all. Harder than walking down that hallway in all that dust and smoke with Grumleys with tommy guns at the other end.”

  The boy’s face knitted in confusion, but then he saw that the old man had all but made up his mind that he would fire Earl. That is, unless he could be talked out of it, on the strength of something that he, Carl Donald Henderson, could dig out. And that was what he was good at, digging, ferreting, going through files, making calls, taking notes, comparing fingerprints, alibis, accounts and stories. So in that sense he could help Earl, he and he alone, and the heaviness of the task that had just been offered him filled him with solemnity.

  “I will look into it, sir.”

  “Good. Here’s a file on what I have. It’ll git you started. There’s people to talk to.”

  “Yes sir. Where am I going, sir?”

  “You’d start in his hometown. It’s called Blue Eye, out in Polk County.”

  • • •

  At the bus station, Carlo used up all his change calling his mother long distance and telling her he would not be coming in after all, he had another assignment.

  Then he went to the Greyhound window, and bought a ticket for Blue Eye, on the 4:30 bus that drove up Route 71 through Fort Smith to Fayetteville, and then he bought some popcorn and a root beer and sat for the longest time, watching the slow crawl of the clock hands, reading a John P. Marquand novel that he couldn’t keep track of, and trying not to think about the mysteries of Earl Swagger. The file sat unopened on his lap. He could not bring himself to look at it somehow, any more than he could bring himself to take off his Colt .45, secreted in the fast-draw holster behind his right hip. He was just too used to it.

  They called the bus at 4:15 and, ever obedient and respectful of the rules, he was one of the first to board. He sat halfway back, on the right, for it was said that the ride was smoothest there.

  And then he saw Frenchy Short.

  Yes, it was Frenchy all right, though not in his usual blue serge suit, but dressed far more casually, in denim jeans, a khaki shirt and a straw cowboy’s hat, with a carpetbag full of clothes under tow. Was it Frenchy? Yes, it was Frenchy! He almost left his seat to yell a greeting, but then he looked at Frenchy and saw that he too was in line to board a bus.

  Then his bus pulled out and Frenchy was gone.

  But later, that night, when he got to Blue Eye, he had to ask the driver, “You know that bus that was in the dock next to us at Texarkana?”

  The driver just looked at him.

  “You know that one? I didn’t get a look at it, but where was it headed?”

  “That’d be the Little Rock bus,” the driver said.

  “Oh, the Little Rock bus.”

  “Yes sir,” said the driver. “It heads straight on up 30 through Hope, on up to Little Rock.”

  “It just goes to Little Rock?” asked Carlo.

  “Yep. Well, that’s where she finishes. She stops at Hope and Malvern and all them towns. Then she veers over 270 and toward Hot Springs. That’s the Hot Springs bus. Most folks take it to Hot Springs, for the track and the gambling. Hot Springs, that’s a damned old hot town, you’d best believe it, son.”

  26

  The aspirin worked well enough on through De Queen but the throbbing began just beyond. He took some more but it didn’t seem to help. Particularly, there was a pellet lodged between the layers of muscle on the inside of his left biceps and when it rubbed a certain way it sent a jack of pain through the whole left side of his body, once so bad he had to pull off Route 71 and let it pass. It made him thirsty for a powerful drink of bourbon.

  He couldn’t stop in Blue Eye because he knew too many folks and too many folks knew him. The next towns up the road offered no promise, small, dying places like Boles and Y City, mere widenings in the road, too small to have a doctor.

  Finally, he came to Waldron, in Scott County, a town large enough to support such a thing. Waldron lay in a flatlands between the mountains, essentially a farm town, and it had grown prosperous on the rich loam of Scott. It was large enough to support a Negro district, a servant population to provide comfort to the wealthy white families in the area. Earl drove through it looking for a certain thing and at last found it: Dr. Julius James Peterson, OB-GYN, as the sign said. He parked around back and slunk up the back steps like a man on the run. It was near nine o’clock, but a light shone from within the frame house.

  He knocked and after a bit the door opened, though a chain kept it from flying fully wide.

  “Yes?” the man said, and there was fear in his voice, as there would be in the voice of any Negro man answering a nighttime knock and finding a large white male on the other side.

  “Sir, I need some medical help.”

  “I’m a baby doctor. I deliver babies. I can’t help you. You could go on to Camp Chaffee. There’s a dispensary there that’s always open if it’s an emergency. They wouldn’t turn you down. There’s a small hospital for white folks in Peverville too, if you want to go that way. I can’t let you in here.”

  “I can’t go to them places. I’m by myself. This ain’t no raid or night rider thing. I’m a police officer.”

  Earl got out his wallet and showed both the badge and the identification card, officially stamped with the seal of the great state of Arkansas.

  “I can’t help you, sir. You are a white person and I am a Negro. That’s a chasm that can’t be bridged. There are people around here who would do my family great harm if I practiced medicine on a white person. That’s just the way it is.”

  “I guess I ain’t like them others. Doc, I need help. I got some pellet riding under my skin, hurts like hell, makes me want a drink bad, and if I start drinking again, I lose everything. I have cash money, no need to make no records. Nobody seen me. I will be quietly gone when you are done. I’m asking a mighty favor, and wouldn’t if I didn’t have to.”

  “You say you are not an outlaw?”

  “No sir, I am not.”

  “Are you armed?”

  “I am. I’ll lock the guns in the trunk of the car.”

  “Go do that. After I remove the pellet you can’t stay here.”

  “Don’t mean to.”

  “Then disarm and come in.”

  Earl did as he said he would, then slipped in the door. The doctor took him to a shabbily appointed but very clean examining room. Earl took his shirt off and sat on an examination table that had stirrups of some sort at the end. He didn’t like the look of them stirrups.

  “I count six in all,” he said. “The one in my arm, for some reason it hurts the most.”

  The doctor, a mild-enough-looking black man of lighter, yellowish complexion and hair that was almost red, looked at the mesh of scars on his body.

  “The war?”

>   “Yes sir. The Pacific.”

  “Then you know pain and won’t go into shock. This will hurt. I don’t have anesthetics here.”

  “Okay. It don’t matter. I can get through anything if there’s a promise of better on t’other side.”

  The doctor washed, sterilized a long, sharply pointed probe and began to dig. The first three pellets came out easily enough, though not without pain. The doctor disinfected each wound with alcohol, a flaming sensation if ever there was one, then bandaged each with a gauze patch and a strip of adhesive. The fourth and fifth were deeper and even more painful. But the last one, in the arm, was a bastard. It wouldn’t come and it seemed the more the man dug, the further into the muscle it slipped. But Earl didn’t move or scream; he closed his eyes, tried to disassociate himself from his hurting, and thought of other places, better times, and his teeth ground together as if they meant to crush each other to dental powder, and then he heard a clink as the last pellet was deposited in a dish.

  “You’re not from around here?” said the doctor. “No white man would let a black one inflict so much pain on him without the word ‘nigger’ being spoken at least ten times.”

  “Funny, never crossed my mind. I grew up in Polk County.”

  “No, I’d say you grew up in the South Pacific and became more than a man, you became a human being.”

  “Don’t know about that, sir.”

  “I won’t ask you how you got these wounds. I doubt it was a hunting accident. It’s not bird season. And I heard tell of a great battle in Hot Springs, but I know you not to be a Grumley sort. So if you carry the badge of the law, I assume you’re a good man. I know you’re a lucky one: No. 7 birdshot doesn’t play so gentle in most cases.”

  “Been lucky my whole life. What do I owe you?”

  “Nothing. It’s not a problem. You continue with the aspirin, have another doctor look at it the day after tomorrow. Possibly, he will prescribe penicillin, to fight an infection. But you must go now.”

  “Sir, I have a hundred dollars. I’m guessing you don’t charge poor women who come to you much if anything at all. You ain’t no rich doctor, I can tell. So you take this hundred, and it’s for them.”