Hot Springs (Earl Swagger)

by Stephen Hunter

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  “Hard earned too, by God, but I want you to have it.”

  He pressed the money on Dr. Peterson, shook his hand, dressed and slipped out the back, in the dark, as he had come.

  • • •

  “Well, ain’t we a sight?” he said with a laugh. “You’re all swoll up and I am full of holes.”

  “Earl,” she said, “that is not funny a bit.”

  “No ma’am. I don’t suppose it is.”

  Chastened, he took another sip on his Coca-Cola and then a bite of his hot dog. Under his shirt, his wounds still occasionally stung, particularly the arm, where the doc had dug so deep. They sat at a picnic table in a park in Fort Smith that overlooked the Arkansas River, a meadowy place that rolled down to the water, where the pines sprouted up. There, the black waters rushed thunderously along; there must have been a big rainstorm up north.

  But there were no storms here. It was a hot, bright Sunday in August, a year after they dropped the big ones on the Japs, and people frolicked in the shadow of an old courthouse, famous in an earlier century for its public hangings. Adults pushed their babies along the walkways in elaborate strollers; young servicemen from Camp Chaffee spooned with their townie belles. Even Negroes were welcome; it was an afternoon on the Grand Jette, Fort Smith style, complete to points of light in the bright air, and in the green of the pines, and if there weren’t monkeys on leashes there were spaniels on them. Everybody was eating Eskimo Pies or hot dogs and thinking about the future and no one looked to the southwest, for in that quadrant of the scene lay the vets’ cemetery, newly expanded, hills of rolling white markers that gleamed in the sun so freshly planted were they. One of the state’s other war heroes rested there, William O. Darby, the young Ranger major who’d fought the Germans in Italy so hard and then gotten killed by a piece of metal the size of a dime from an artillery shell late in the spring of 1945 while he stood on a hill as an observer. Earl didn’t want to go anywhere near that.

  “You were in that ruckus all the papers wrote up,” she said.

  “I was there, yes.”

  “And that’s why you have bandages all over your body.”

  “I caught some pellet, that’s all. It ain’t no big thing. Hurt myself shaving worse most mornings.”

  “Earl, they say that was the most violent gunfight in the history of the state. Fourteen people died.”

  “Eleven of ’em was bad-boy Grumleys, as low a form as has existed, whose passing is of no note whatsoever. They didn’t have to die. They could have surrendered to the law, easy as pie.”

  “It wasn’t their nature.”

  “No ma’am, guess it wasn’t.”

  He looked at her. Her face had broadened considerably, and her shoulders, legs and arms thickened up a bit. But still and all: a beautiful woman, an angel, full and fair and blond and decent, the very best of America. She licked at her Eskimo Pie, with that special grace that seemed hers alone. She was the only human being on the planet who could eat an Eskimo Pie in the full blaze of afternoon and not spill a drop of it.

  Under her breasts, the child seemed eager to come into this world, so forcefully did it thrust itself out and away from its mother. She had worn a red maternity blouse to hide it, but the subterfuge was pointless: that was a lot of baby in there.

  “I am so frightened, Earl, that you are going to die for nothing and I will be alone with this child,” she said, the last of the ice cream pie gone.

  “If it happens, you will get a nice big chunk of insurance money from the state. It’ll get the two of you a fine start in a new life. Maybe you’ll meet up with a fellow who’s around more than I am. And that money is more than my mama got when my old man got hisself bushwhacked back in ’42. She got a gold watch, a hundred dollar burial fee, and commenced to drink herself to death in a year. I know you’ll do better.”

  He took another sip on the Coca-Cola. The river wound blackly through the trees, but between here and there, boys threw a ball or sailed planes, girls cradled dolls, moms and dads held hands.

  “I am so sorry,” he finally said. “I know you didn’t sign on for this thing. But I am in it now, and I don’t know how to get out of it.”

  “You could just quit and go back to the sawmill.”

  “You know I couldn’t do that.”

  “No. You have no quit in you, that’s for sure.”

  “I think I could go to Mr. Parker and see about getting a loan against the money they’ll be paying me before this thing is finished. Maybe there’s a credit union or something. Also, there’s some veterans’ rights I got coming I ain’t looked into yet. That way I could move you out of that damned Quonset hut in the village and into a nice little place much closer. Say in the towns outside of Little Rock. I’d see you much more often.”

  “Earl, it seems so ridiculous with the farm.”

  He sat a long moment, looking again down and across the meadowy grass to the river. Then he said, “I wasn’t trying to hide that place from you. It wasn’t no secret. I just never got around to telling you about it.”

  “I wasn’t prying. A letter came from the Polk County tax assessors bureau, which had been forwarded by the Marine Corps. It was stamped Open Immediately. I opened it. You owed back taxes on two hundred acres out in Polk, out Route 8. It was past due: $127.50, plus a three dollar penalty. I sent them a check. Then I got to thinking about it and so last week, before all this gun-battle business, I had Mary Blanton drive me out there. We spent the day on the farm.”

  “It’s a nice place, I recollect,” he said. “The old man had it up and running pretty tight at one point.”

  “It’s a wonderful place, Earl. The house needs work, mainly paint, but there’s a big garden. I counted four bedrooms. The kitchen hasn’t been touched in years. It could use some work too. But Earl, there’s land. There’s farmland which could be leased out, there’s a creek, there’s a stand of timber where you could hunt and raise your children. There’s meadowland and a corral and a fine barn. Earl, honey, we could be so happy out there. And we own it. We already own it. We could move in tomorrow. I don’t have to stay in a sewer pipe and take the bus to work. I could teach in Polk County. When the baby comes, he or she’d have a wonderful place to grow up.”

  “The week I left the Marine Corps,” he said, “when I was driving up to Fort Smith for you, last December? I stopped there and spent some time.”

  “You don’t want to go there, do you, Earl? I can tell from your voice.”

  “I almost burned it to the ground. That would have felt good. I’d love to see that place go up in flames. It’s …”

  He trailed off.

  “It’s what, Earl?”

  “There’s a lot of hurting in that place. It’s haunted. You see a pretty little farm and I see the place where my brother died. He hung himself in 1940. I hardly knew the boy. I sure didn’t do him no good. His big old brother didn’t do a pie’s worth of good for him. Like everybody else, I let him down. Nobody did him no good. Nobody stood up for him. In the basement of that house my old man used to beat me and so I suppose he beat Bobby Lee too.”

  “It wouldn’t have to be like that. We’d paint it white, I’d get the garden up and running, you could lease out the fields like your daddy did, it could be a good house, a happy house. It could be a house full of children.”

  Earl finished his hot dog.

  “I don’t know. I just ain’t sure I could face that place. Let me think her over.”

  “Earl, I know you have a melancholy in you over your childhood. But you have to think of your child’s childhood. Do you want him born into a Quonset hut on a military base? Or on a big, beautiful farm on the most beautiful land in the state?”

  “That is not an easy question,” he said.

  “No, it is not.”

  “I’d sell the goddamned place if I could. But land is so cheap now, and it’s so far out, I’d never find a buyer. When’s that goddamned postwar boom going to
hit Polk County? Anyhow, I’ll think some.”

  “You’ll think hard on it?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “All right, Earl. I know you’ll work it out. I know you’ll do the right thing. You always do.”

  • • •

  For the next few days, Earl was perfect. There was never a harder-working, more cheerful man, a better husband. He repainted the inside of the Quonset hut apartment a bright yellow, a day’s worth of backbreaking labor, but worth it, for the lighter color cheered the place up. He loaded the old sofa up on the roof of his government Dodge and took it to a dump, then went over to the Sears, Roebuck in Fort Smith and bought a new sofa for her, a pretty thing in green stripes. That made the rooms even brighter.

  He redug the garden, weeded it, trimmed the hedges. He took her out to dinner, twice. They went for walks. He listened to the baby move and the two of them tried to think up names for it. She wrote long lists and he laughed at Adrian and Phillip, he thought Thomas and Andrew were okay, he liked Timothy and Jeffrey. The problem was, except for Adrian, each of the names had a boy somewhere attached to it, a Marine who’d died or been maimed and was carried out by stretcher bearers screaming for his mama.

  But Earl tried not to let any of that show on his face. He tried so hard to be the kind of man he thought she deserved, the kind of man he thought he wasn’t. He never told her about the way his father would sneak up on him and whisper something fierce and hurtful in his ear, then steal away, to leave nothing but sunlight and trees blowing in the breeze.

  Finally, he drove her to the doctor’s office and sat out front during the exam and then the doctor brought him in and spoke to him while she dressed. Earl had seen lots of docs, and this one was no different from any in an aid station, a field hospital or a hospital ship: a grave official type man, with a blur of mustache and eyes that were somehow lightless.

  “Mr. Swagger, first of all, the baby and your wife are both doing fine. The health of both seems well within the parameters of what we’d qualify as a normal, healthy term. The baby should be right on time. I’d say first week in October.”

  “Yes sir, great. That’s great news.”

  “Now I did want to say something to you. There’s no cause to be alarmed just yet, but I have noted that the baby is situated a certain way in your wife’s uterus. Not abnormal by any means, but at the same time not exactly where we’d expect it to be.”

  “Yes sir,” said Earl gravely. “Does Junie know this?”

  “No, she doesn’t. I’d prefer her not to know. It would cause anxiety, quite possibly undue. It may not be anything to get alarmed at.”

  “But it means something. What does it mean, sir?”

  “There can be complications. Usually of no consequence. But what happens sometimes in this case is that the child arrives in the wrong presentation. That is, instead of breeching face up, it breeches face down. Then it gets tricky. I want you prepared.”

  Earl nodded.

  “It says in the paperwork you’re a state employee. An engineer, a crew foreman?”

  “No sir. I work as an investigator for a prosecuting attorney in another county.”

  “I see. Law enforcement. Is it demanding?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “You were in the war, weren’t you?”

  “Yes sir. The Pacific.”

  “Well, then, you’ve seen some emergency medical situations I’d guess.”

  “A few, yes sir. I was wounded a few times.”

  “Good. Then you know what can happen.”

  “Are you telling me there’s a chance my wife could die?”

  “A very small one.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “For a damned baby.”

  “The baby is very important to her, as it would be to any woman. That’s part of being a woman, and that’s part of what’s so wonderful about women. And that’s part of the reason I’d prefer her not to know. Sometimes we men have to make the serious decisions.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “So what I am saying is that if the complications are grave, I may have to make a choice. I may only be able to save one, the child or the mother. I am assuming the mother would be your choice.”

  “Ain’t no two ways about it. We didn’t plan this kid, I ain’t settled in this job yet, the timing was all off. And I don’t feel much for it. Don’t know why, I just don’t.”

  “Many men who came back from a hard war feel the same way. I’ve heard those words a hundred times. I think it’ll change when you hold your child, but to many men who’ve been in combat, the idea of bringing a new child into a somewhat profane world seems pointless.”

  Earl thought: You just said a mouthful, Doc.

  “Anyhow, here’s what’s most important. You must be around when the child is born. I don’t know what sort of arrangement you and your wife have, with your work so far away, but you absolutely have to be here in case a decision is needed. Do you understand?”

  “Sir, I’ve made my decision.”

  “Yes, but if the baby comes late at night or when I’m not on call, I might not be here. Any of a dozen things could happen. It’s quite common for the delivery to be assisted by the staff resident. That would be a younger doctor, possibly not willing to make the decision that you just made. He might not have the sand to intervene and you could lose them both. So you need to be here. You may have to fight for your wife’s life. You may even have to fight your wife for it.”

  Earl nodded.

  “But I can see something on your face,” the doctor said.

  “Yes sir. The job I’m in, sometimes it gets very complicated and I can’t get back. I just don’t want to let nobody down.”

  “Well, Mr. Swagger, you’ll just have to decide what’s more important to you. You don’t want someone else making that decision, do you? No, Mr. Swagger, please, please, try and be here.”

  “Yes sir,” said Earl, feebly, knowing it might not happen that way. “I’ll do my best.”

  27

  Pap Grumley danced a dance of grief and shame. It was a strange mountain dance that somehow connected with people who worshipped the Lord with poisonous snakes or through the speaking of tongues, practices which were part of Grumley life in one way or other.

  He was dressed for mourning, all in black, black frock coat, black pants, his black boots, a black hat that could hold twenty gallons, pulled low over his eyes. Eleven coffins filled with Grumleys had been lowered into the ground and words were said over them. All the Grumleys and assorted clans were there, including Pecks, Dodges, Grundys and Pindells. The women and the men were grim in their mourning clothes, their taut mountain faces bleak and severe, their blue eyes gray with pain, their demeanor dignified and stoic, yet hurting massively.

  A Grumley preacher said the Lord’s words, about how He must have wanted Grumleys in heaven for a peculiar hard job, so He sent for a whole lot of them, to stand by His right hand and help Him spread the Word. But the words he said were not nearly as eloquent as the dance Pap danced.

  The spirit moved in him. He tramped in the dust, back and forth, he shivered, he shook, he stamped. The music was unheard by men’s ears but came from a part of all the Grumley soul, old mountain music, the whining of a fiddle played by a drunk who’d watched his children die one by one of the pox, and had felt the cold creeping in late at night when blankets were thin and a fiftieth or a sixtieth day of feeding on taters and nothing but had just been finished, with a fifty-first or a sixty-first in view for tomorrow. It was a dance of ancient Scotch-Irish pain and within it lay a racial memory of life on a bleak border and the piping of grief and the wailing of banshees late in the cold night, where a man had to survive on his own for the government belonged to one king or another; it was reiver’s music, or plunderer’s music, the scream of rural grief, of a way of thinking no city person who didn’t fear the harsh Presbyterian God but who had not also run ’shine against the mandates of the Devil City in far-off eastern America, the demon city lodge
d between Maryland and Virginia, where godless men passed laws meant to take the people’s and the Grumleys’ freedom and convert it to secret wealth for the castle people, could but feel.

  “That man bound to ’splode, look to me,” said Memphis Dogood. “He is a hurting old boy.”

  “He may indeed, old fellow. These Grumley chaps take things like this quite seriously,” said Owney.

  Owney and Memphis sat in the back of Owney’s bulletproof Cadillac, which had wound down the miles between the Medical Arts Building and this far Grumley compound in a trackless forest just north of Mountain Pine.

  Had the Grumleys known a Negro man was one witness to the privacy of their ceremony it is altogether possible they would have hanged him or tarred him, for the Book is explicit in its denunciation of the sons of Ham, and they took the Book at its literal truth. That was what was so Grumley about them. But Owney wanted Memphis to behold the festival of grief that attended the burial of the eleven Grumley dead on the theory that it might get Memphis more talkative than he had heretofore been.

  So the two of them watched from leather seats in the back of the V-16—Memphis had never seen such a fine car—as the Grumleys, en masse, and Pap, in particular, mourned.

  Pap stamped and the dust rose. Pap twitched and the dust rose. Pap did three this way then three that and the dust rose. He danced amid a fog of dust, the dust coating his boots and trousers into a dusky gray. His face too was gray, set hard, his eyes blank or distant. He folded his arms and gripped his elbows and danced and danced the afternoon away. His back was straight, his neck was stiff, his hips never moved. God commanded his legs alone, and had no use for the rest of him, and so deadened what was left until it reached a form of statuary.

  “That boy could dance all night,” said Memphis.

  “And into the morrow,” said Owney. “Now Memphis, you are possibly wondering why I brought you out here.”

  “Am I in trouble, Mr. Maddox? Weren’t nothin’ I could do, ’splained it to the bossman. Didn’t say nothin’ to nobody. Them revenooer boys, they knowed you had yo’ Grumleys spread all over my place. And they was loaded up for bear. Next thing old Memphis know, the Big War done broke out. Ripped up my place right good.”