Hot Springs (Earl Swagger)

by Stephen Hunter

  “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.

  “What 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.”

  Then he noticed the stars. Each of these boys was a deputy, each wore a gunbelt loaded with cartridges and a powerful revolver, each had the look of a rangy manhunter to him.

  “What’re you boys out huntin’? You look loaded for grizzly.”

  “You ain’t heard?”

  “How could I? Was drunked up like a crazy bastard last night.”

  “Earl, you best watch that. Can tear a fellow down. Saw my own daddy go sour with the drink. He died too young, and he looked a hundred when he’s only forty-two.”

  “I hear you on that one,” said Earl, who hoped he’d never drink again.

  “Anyhow, we’re hunting gangsters.”

  “Gangsters?”

  “He ain’t heard!”

  “Damn, he did do some drinking last night.”

  “You know that Owney Maddox, the big New York gun what run Hot Springs these past twenty years? The one old Fred Becker caught?”

  “Heard of him,” Earl said.

  “Five bastards busted him out of Garland County jail last night late. Shot their way out. Say it was just as bad as that Alcoa train job or that big shoot-out in the train yard. Killed two men. But Owney’s fled, he’s free, the whole goddamned state’s out looking for him.”

  “Earl, you okay?”

  “Yeah,” said Earl.

  “You look like a ghost touched you on the nose with a cold finger.”

  Owney. Owney was out.

  56

  It was exactly the kind of operation Johnny Spanish loved. It demanded his higher skills and imagination. It wasn’t merely force. On its own, force was tedious. Labor enforcers, racketeers, small-potatoes strong-arm boys, the common soldiers of crime, they all used force and it never expressed anything except force.

  Johnny always looked for something else. He loved the game aspects of it, the cleverness of the planning, the deviousness of the timing, the feint, the confusion, the misinformation, and the final, crushing, implacable boldness. It was all a part of that ineffable je ne sais quoi that made Johnny Johnny.

  Thus at 10:30 P.M. at the Garland County jail in the Town Hall and Police Department out Ouachita Avenue toward the western edge of the city, the first indication of mischief was not masked men with machine guns but something entirely unexpected: tomato pies.

  The tomato pie was new to the South, though it had gained some foothold in New Jersey and Philadelphia. It was a large, flat disk of unleavened dough with a certain elastic crispiness to it, coated with a heavy tomato sauce and a gruel of mozzarella cheese, all allowed to coagulate in a particularly intense oven experience. It was quite a taste sensation, both bold and chewy, both exotic and accessible, both sweet and tart, both the best of old Italy and new America at once. Four tomato pies, cut into wedges, were delivered gratis to the jail by two robust fellows from Angelino’s Italian Bakery and Deli, newly opened and yet to catch on, to the late-night jail guard shift. The boys hadn’t ordered any tomato pies—they’d never even heard of tomato pies!—but free food was one of the reasons they’d gotten into law enforcement in the first place. Even those who had no intention of eating that night found themselves powerless in the grip of obsession, when the odors of the sizzling pies began to suffuse the woeful old lockup. Who could deny the power of the tomato pie, and that devilish, all-powerful, mesmerizing smell that beckoned even the strongest of them onward.

  This was the key to the plan. Like many jails built in the last century, Garland County’s was constructed on the concentric ring-of-steel design, with perimeters of security inside perimeters of security. One could not be breached until the one behind it was secure. Yet all yielded to the power of the tomato pie.

  The guards—seven local deputies and warders and a lone FBI representative since the prisoner, No. 453, was on a federal warrant—clustered in the admin office, enjoying slice after slice.

  “This stuff is good.”

  “It’s Italian? Jed, you see anything like this in It-ly?”

  “All’s I seen was bombed-out towns and starvin’ kids and dead Krautheads. Didn’t see nothing like this.”

  “Man, this stuff is good.”

  “Best thing is, they deliver to your doorway and it’s piping hot.”

  “It’s ‘Mambo Italiano’ in cheese and tomato. I love the toastiness. That’s
what’s so good. I like that a lot.”

  At that point, two more men from Angelino’s showed up, with four more pies.

  “You guys-a, you love-a this-a one, it’s got the pepperoni sausage, very spicy.”

  “Sausage?” said the guard sergeant.

  “Spicy,” said the deliveryman, who opened the flat cardboard box, removed a 1911 Colt automatic with a Maxim silencer, and shot the man once. The silencer wasn’t all that silent, and everyone in the room knew immediately that a gun had been fired, but it reduced the sound of the percussion enough to dampen it from alerting others in the building. More guns came out, and a large fellow appeared in the doorway with a BAR.

  “Get against the wall, morons,” screamed the commander of the commandos—that is, Johnny Spanish at his best.

  “Jesus, you shot—”

  Johnny knew the tricky moment was in the early going where you asserted control or you lost it and it turned to nightmare and massacre. Therefore, according to his lights, he was doing the humane thing when he shot that man too, knocking him down. If he’d been closer he would have clubbed the man with the long cylindrical heft of the silencer, but that was the way the breaks went, and they didn’t go well for that particular guard that particular day.

  Herman grabbed the biggest of the men and said simply and forcefully, “Keys,” and was obediently led to the steel cabinet on the wall, it was opened, and the keys were displayed for his satisfaction.

  “Which one, asshole?” he demanded.

  The man’s trembly fingers flew to a single key, which Herman seized. With Ding-Dong as his escort, he headed into the interior of the jail.

  Iron-barred doors flew open quickly enough and, deep in the warren, they came to the cage that contained Owney Maddox. That door too was sprung, and Owney was plucked from ignominy. He threw on his coat and rushed out, passing the parade as Johnny and his boys led the surrendered guards back into the jail to lock them up away from telephones so that he didn’t have to shoot the lot of them.

  “Good work,” Owney cried. And it was. For his legal situation had collapsed and it appeared a murder indictment for the four guards slain in 1940 was in the offing. A gun had been found in his warehouse that had been used in that crime and the FBI test results had just come in. Meanwhile, all his well-placed friends had deserted him, and even lawyer F. Garry Hurst wasn’t sanguine about his chances of survival. A life on the lam, even well financed as his would be, would be no picnic but it was infinitely preferable to life in the gray-bar hotel.

  Johnny’s team quickly completed the herding operation, locking the bulls back with the cons. Then they methodically ripped out all phone lines. Owney was bundled into the back of an actual Hot Springs police car, driven by Vince the Hat de Palmo in an actual Hot Springs police uniform and he disappeared into the night.

  Johnny and his boys left in the next several seconds, but not, of course, before they’d finished the pizza.

  • • •

  Vince drove Owney through the night and at a certain point on the outskirts of town, they pulled into a garage. There, the stolen police car was abandoned, and Owney got into the hollowed-out core of a pile of hay bales already loaded on the back of a hay truck, which was to be driven by two trustworthy Negroes in the Grumley employ. The hay pressed in close around him, like a coffin, and the truck backed out and began an unsteady progress through town. It would only be a matter of minutes before sirens announced the discovery of the breakout, but the plan was to get Owney out of the immediate downtown area before roadblocks were set up. They almost made it.

  The sirens began to howl just a few minutes into the trip. Yet nobody panicked. The old truck rumbled along and twice was overtaken by roaring police cars. Once it was stopped, cursorily examined, its hay bales probed and pulled slightly apart. Owney lay still and heard the Negro driver answering in his shufflingest voice to the police officers. But the cops hurried onward when they grew impatient with the molasses-slow drift of the driver’s words as he explained to them that the hay was for Mr. Randy in Pine Mountain, from the farm of Mr. Davidson in Arkadelphia, and so they passed on.

  They drove through the night, though at about thirty-five miles an hour. Owney knew the city would be in an uproar. A certain code had been broken when the two police officers had been shot, which meant that now the cops would pursue him with all serious purpose, earlier arrangements having been shattered. But it could be no other way. Very shortly he’d be transferred to a sounder federal incarceration and there’d be no escape from that. Whatever, he understood, his Hot Springs days were over; his fortune had already been transferred, and the ownership of his various enterprises passed on, through the good offices of F. Garry Hurst, to other men, though the benefits to him would accrue steadily over the years.

  But he did not believe that retirement was at hand. He would leave the country, live somewhere quietly in wealth and health over the next few years, and things would be worked out. He had too much on too many people for it to be elsewise. Somehow, he knew he wasn’t done; possibilities still existed. It would be explained that he was abducted, not escaped; the deaths of the policemen would have nothing to do with him; a deal would be worked out somehow, a year or two in a soft prison, then he’d be back in some fashion or other.

  He had to survive. He had but one ambition now, and that was to arrange for the elimination of Ben Siegel, who clearly was the agent of his downfall. It couldn’t be done quickly, though, or harshly. Ben had friends on the commission and was said to be doing important work for them in the West. He was, for the time being, protected. But that wouldn’t last. Owney knew Ben’s impetuousness would make him somehow overreach, his greed would cloud his judgment, his hurry would offend, his hunger would irritate. There would be a time now, very shortly, when Ben was vulnerable, and he would be the one to take advantage of it.

  In what seemed long hours later, the quality of the ride changed. It signified the change from macadam to dirt road, and the speed grew even slower. The vehicle bumped and swayed through the night and there was no sound of other traffic as it wound its way deeper and deeper toward its destination.

  Finally, they arrived.

  The hay bales were pulled aside, and Owney rose and stretched.

  “Good work, fellows,” he said, blinking and stretching, to discover himself on a dirt road in a dense forest, almost silent except for the heavy breathing of the drivers.

  “Yas suh,” said one of the drivers.

  “You take good care of these boys,” he said, addressing Flem Grumley, who stood there with a flashlight in a party of several of his boys, all heavily armed.

  “I will, Mr. Maddox,” promised Flem.

  “The others arrive yet?”

  “Johnny and Herman. The other two haven’t made it in yet. But they will.”

  “Yes,” agreed Owney.

  The two drivers restored the hay and left with the truck. Meanwhile, Flem led Owney and Vince through the trees and down a little incline. A body of water lay ahead, glinting in the moonlight and from the lights of buildings across the way. It was Lake Catherine.

  They stepped through rushes, and eased their way down a rocky incline toward the water, under the illumination of the flashlights guided by the Grumleys.

  In time, they came to a cave into which the water ran and slid into it.

  “Hallo, Owney lad,” sang Johnny, rising to greet the man whose life he had just saved. “It’s just like the last time, except we didn’t steal any payroll, we stole you!”

  57

  The deputies had gone, leaving Earl alone with his headache, his shot-out car windows and his bad news.

  He shook his head.

  Owney makes it out; he’ll get away, he’s got some smart boys in town with him, he’ll get his millions of dollars out, and he’ll go live in luxury somewhere. He won’t pay. The dead boys of the Garland County raid team and their old leader pass into history as fools and the man they died to stop ends up living with a swim
ming pool in France or Mexico somewhere.

  Earl felt the need to drink again. This one really hurt. This one was like a raw piece of glass caught in his throat, cutting every time he breathed.

  The sun was bright, his head ached, he felt the shakiness of the hangover, the hunger from not having eaten in twenty-four hours, and the emptiness of no life ahead of him and memories of what was done stuck in his head forever.

  He wiped the sweat from his brow, and decided it was time to go on home and try and pick up the pieces. Yet something wouldn’t let him leave.

  He knew, finally: he had to see the place one more time.

  See the goddamned barn.

  He’d seen it in November when he was discharged and stopped off here before going on up to Fort Smith and getting married and joining up with the rest of America for the great postwar boom. Hadn’t felt much then. Tried to feel something but didn’t, but he knew he had to try again.

  He walked through the weeds, the wind whipping dust in his face, the sun beating down hot and ugly, a sense of desolation like a fog over the abandoned Swagger homestead, where all the Swagger men had lived and one of them had died.

  The barn door was half open. He slipped in. Dust, cobwebs, the smell of rotted hay and rotting wood. An unpainted barn will rot, Daddy had always said. Yes, and if Daddy wasn’t here to see that the barn was painted every two years, it would rot away to nothing, which is what it was doing. The stench of mildew and decomposition also filled the close dense air. The wood looked moist in places, as if you could put a foot through it and it would crumble. Odd pieces of agricultural equipment lay about rusting, like slingblades and the lawn mower that Earl had once used, and spades and hoes and forks. A tractor, dusty and rusting, stood mutely by. The stalls were empty, though of course a vague odor of animal shit also lingered in the air.

  But Earl went to where he had to go, which was to the rear of the barn, under a crossbeam. That is where Bobby Lee had hanged himself. There was no mark of the rope on the wood, and no sign of the barrel he had stood upon to work his last task, the tying of the knot, good and tight, the looping of the noose, and the final kick to liberate himself from the barrel’s support and from the earth’s woe.