Hot Springs (Earl Swagger)

by Stephen Hunter

  “What business are you in, sir?” asked the sheriff, somewhat relaxed that he’d found no gun on Owney.

  “Well, I’ve been known to wager a penny on the ponies, the fall of a card or the roll of a die.”

  “Gambler, eh? But you didn’t do too well in Hot Springs.”

  “Had a run of bad luck, yes. But I’ll be back, you can make book on it.”

  “Well, y’all be careful. Ain’t no speed limit here but you were moving mighty fast. Don’t want to scrape you off a tree.”

  “No, indeed.”

  “Say, what was the name again?”

  “Vincent Owen Maddox.”

  The sheriff’s face knitted with a little confusion, for the name sounded so familiar.

  “And you say you’re headed to Fayetteville.”

  “Headed toward Fayetteville, old fellow.”

  “Well, Mr. Maddox—”

  Then his face lit with amazement as he realized that the Owen became Owney, and his face set hard, for in an instant he knew who he was up against, and his hand flew fast and without doubt toward the big gun at his hip.

  But Owney was faster.

  In less than half a second he had a small silver revolver in his hand, as if from nowhere, as if from the very air itself, and he fired one bullet with a dry pop into the sheriff’s chest. The big man never reached his Colt and stepped back, for the bullet packed so little impact it felt only like a sting, but in the next second the blood began to gush from his punctured aorta and he sat down with an ashen look, then toppled sideways to the earth.

  “All right, you fellows,” called Owney. “Get him in his car and get it off the road, chop chop now.”

  Johnny’s gunmen got out of the Ford and dragged the dead police officer to his car. Vince started it, and began to creep along the road until he found enough of a hill to drive it over so that it would tumble off and into the underbrush.

  “Say,” said Johnny, “ain’t you a fast piece of work. Where’d you get that little ladies’ gun?”

  “When they delivered my suit to the cave, it was tucked in a pocket.”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean, where were you packing it? I didn’t realize you were heeled. You sure got it out in a flash.”

  “I am a man of some dexterity.”

  “Where was it?”

  Owney smiled, and pulled up his coat sleeve. His shirtsleeve underneath was unbuttoned and a black piece of elastic circled his wrist. Quickly he slid the gun under it, then drew the suit sleeve back down over it, where it disappeared to all but the most discerning eye. But Johnny could see it was an old nickel-plated revolver of the sort called a bicycle gun, a .32 rimfire from very early in the century, that lacked a trigger guard and had a one-inch barrel.

  “It’s a trick another sheriff once taught me,” said Owney.

  61

  My father knew the land. That’s what my father knew. But what good is that? What value is that? What does that get you?

  Earl walked out onto the porch, where he could see the sun setting to the west. But it was a quiet twilight in Polk County and no cars had headed on down the road in quite some time.

  My father knew the land.

  What does that tell me?

  But the more Earl hammered against it, the harder it became.

  He knew this land. What the hell good would that be to train robbers in Hot Springs, fifty odd miles away. He knew Polk County, an out-of-the-way spread of land, mostly mountain wilderness with a few one-horse towns far to the west, hard up against Oklahoma. What was there about Polk County that could be important to these men?

  Well, maybe they could hide out in the mountainous trees of the Ouachitas. But there were plenty of trees, mountains and wilderness in Garland County itself or in Montgomery County. What would they need to come an extra county over here for?

  He tried to recall what he knew about that robbery, what old D.A. had told him months back. Five armed men, an inside job, four guards killed, a huge payroll in cash taken, and they got away without a trace.

  He applied his tactical imagination to it. It was a military problem. You have to leave an area. You are behind enemy lines. You are being hunted in force by all police agencies. How do you do it?

  Well, obviously, you drive. But to where? Roadblocks are already out. You can’t get far by road. Do you take a train? No, don’t be ridiculous. Well, maybe you don’t leave. Maybe you go to ground for a month and wait the manhunt out. You have, after all, friends in the area who can hide you. But … the longer you stay there, the more likely that somebody will notice something, somebody will talk, somebody will see something.

  That leaves a boat. Could you take a boat? Could you ride up the Ouachita River to—well, to where?

  That was interesting. You might go by boat, and possibly the cops wouldn’t be covering the river or the lake because they’d believe you’d be on the road. But … a boat to where? You take the Ouachita to where? It would make most sense to take it south, toward the Mississippi, and he didn’t even know if the Ouachita reached the Mississippi. And that took them into the flat part of the state, where—

  This was getting him nowhere. It was pointless speculation. Maybe they did take a boat. Where would it get them, which way would they go, who could know now, six years later? And what difference would it make?

  He heard a dry light whine from far off. It was so familiar he almost didn’t notice it. He’d heard it in the Pacific a million times. He looked into the fading light and finally caught it, a plane, a silver speck up high, where the sunlight still commanded, glowing against the darkening sky, entirely too far to be identified.

  An airplane, he thought.

  They might go someplace where they could be picked up by an airplane. This suddenly seemed reasonable. You get into an airplane and you’re free. It’s 1940, after all. There’s no radar, because it’s still a secret; and the big wartime push hasn’t begun, so the system of commercial aviation is haphazard and roundabout, planes come and go every day.

  They go to an airplane.

  What kind of airplane?

  There are four men. They all have automatic weapons and presumably some supply of ammunition. They have clothes because they’ve been living in the area prior to their raid, and they have the trophy of their efforts, the payroll. Close to half a million, in cash. In small bills, in bags or a strongbox or some such. All that cash, maybe a hundred pounds of it. He had no idea how much a half million in small bills would weigh, but it would be considerable.

  So: What kind of airplane?

  Not a Piper Cub or any other small puddle-jumper, like the observation jobs he’d seen in the war. Maybe you could land all right, but it would be too dangerous to take off again with all that weight.

  Therefore: it would have to be a multiengine plane, a substantial airplane that could carry five men, their equipment, their money. Something like … a DC-3? No, too big. But maybe some kind of Beechcraft, twin-engined, like the staff planes the brass had used in the war. You never saw them in combat zones, but behind the lines they were ubiquitous. Heavy, slow, low, but planes that were dependable and could land anywhere it was flat.

  So where would you land such a plane?

  Obviously, the airports were out, because they’d be watched by cops. You couldn’t land that big a plane in a farm meadow, or anywhere near civilization because it would clearly be spotted, and you probably couldn’t do it at night, because it would be too dangerous.

  So: you had to find a big, flat field somewhere, but somewhere far from prying eyes, somewhere in the wilderness, in the mountains, somewhere safe and secure, unlikely to be stumbled upon. That would leave out a road, a farm, a park, it would leave out just about anywhere.

  Where would you land a plane? And what on earth would his father the hunter have to do with it?

  A memory came to Earl. It was indistinct at first, a blurred image from some deep pool where experiences had been recorded. It was from his childhood. He had a vision
of a remote field, a valley, yellow and rolling. He was there with his father and a few other men. It was maybe 1927 or ’28, he was maybe twelve or fourteen years old. He heard his father’s voice, instructing.

  “Now you pay attention,” the man was saying, in that low rumble that was his voice, “because I don’t want to have to say this twice, Earl. You want to look to the treeline. The mule deer is a creature of the treeline. He likes the boundary between the open and the closed. He also likes the wind to be blowing across the open, so that he can smell anything tracking him. He won’t go into the full open, particularly during hunting season, because he knows he’s being hunted. Don’t know how, but he does. He’s smart that way. He wants the tender shoots of the margins. This is where you will find him, in the dawn or possibly at twilight. You must be alert, for his moves can sometimes seem magical, and you must be patient, for there is nothing in his mind to distract him, as there will be to distract you, so you must compel yourself to stillness. Do you understand, Earl? Are you listening, boy?”

  Of course he was listening. Who could not listen to Daddy? Daddy demanded respect, and Daddy got it. Earl sat with his rifle as his father explained to him, as he was introduced into the rituals of the hunt.

  But now he remembered and he saw: a wide field, so remote that to see it was to feel oneself the first white man in the territory in the year 1650-something, and to marvel at it, its length, its yellowness, the low hills that encased it to make it a valley and the far, blue peaks of higher mountains.

  A name came out of his memory.

  Hard Bargain Valley, a splash of flat yellow in the mountains, called such because some westward pilgrims had thought to winter there and by spring all that remained was food for the crows. Earl remembered the crows wheeling overhead, back and forth, like bad omens. God had made a hard bargain with the pilgrims indeed.

  Could you land a plane on Hard Bargain Valley?

  Yes, he knew in a second. You could. Easily. A bigger plane too, not a Cub but a substantial twin-engined craft.

  Now it came together in a moment, as if all the parts of the puzzle had been sunk in his brain all these years and at some darker deeper level he’d been working on them. Now they fit. They announced themselves with a thunderclap, a vision of purity so intense it almost knocked him back.

  Five men, heavily armed, fleeing Hot Springs. They have to get to a remote spot where a plane can pick them up.

  There’s only one such place within a night’s travel. But how will they find it? There’re no paved roads in, only a hopeless mesh of old logging trails, some drivable, some not. Who would help them?

  It would have to be a man who knew the territory better than anyone. Sheriff Charles Swagger, the great lawman and hunter.

  And they’d know about Swagger. He had a secret life in Hot Springs. Once a month, he’d show up for gambling and whoring and sporting with the special, secret vice he loved the best. Owney Maddox, that champion of human weakness, would know this. He’d have the leverage on old Charles and there would be the man, a paragon of public morality for so long, suddenly caught in the grip and crushed into obedience by a gangster.

  So Charles would draw up a route. He would then engineer the roadblocks so that the fleeing men could get through them when they reached Polk County. Then he would meet them deep in the forest, and take them the last few miles to Hard Bargain Valley, and it would be a good bargain for them, for the plane would come at dawn and pluck them away and they’d have disappeared forever. The $400,000 would be quickly enough laundered and it would return in a few weeks to Hot Springs, as working capital for Owney Maddox, who would use it to build the Southern, the most elegant and successful casino in America.

  Earl could see the last melancholy act too. Charles hadn’t known men had been killed in the robbery. He’d gotten in because it was just robbers stealing money from Big Business like Alcoa and the money would go to gamblers, it was just the way the world worked, victimless, corrupt, ancient. But four men had died and suddenly his father is an accessory to murder. It sickens him, and that’s why he returns home drunk and bent with anger at himself, and who does he run into but his young son, Bobby Lee, and the boy becomes the focus of his fury, his deep disappointment in himself, all his failures. He beats the boy and beats him and beats him, then passes out. Maybe he beats him to death and strings up the body to hide the crime. Maybe the boy hangs himself. But that is how it had to be. The evil father, the helpless son, the one man who had a chance to stop it fled to another family called the United States Marine Corps.

  It was at that point Earl realized that they would do tonight exactly what they did in 1940. Of course. It was the same problem, except the treasure wasn’t a payroll, it was Owney Maddox himself. It had worked before. The same route, the same arrangements with a plane, the same destination. Only this time they didn’t need a Charles Swagger because they were smart, one of them had paid attention and he could find Hard Bargain Valley on his own.

  Earl looked at his watch. It was near 8:00 and the sun was almost gone.

  They were going to get away with it, because nobody else knew where Hard Bargain Valley was or could get there in time.

  He himself had no idea where it was. It was somewhere in the mountain vastness that even now was fading into darkness and that no one could find who hadn’t been there before and didn’t know the way and he didn’t know the way and there was no map, the map was gone.

  Then Earl remembered his daddy’s room. The map was gone, yes, but its outline still was described by that bright patch of unfaded paint.

  He turned swiftly, walked back through the house and entered the room.

  He faced the emptiness.

  Nothing. What had he expected? It was just a square of lighter paint, even now losing its distinction as the light failed.

  He tried to remember what it showed. It showed Polk, one of Arkansas’ most westerly, most poverty-stricken, most mountainous, most remote counties. He tried to think: What is the essential quality of Polk County? He tried to remember as he stared at the square: What did I see here? Remember what you saw. Remember what was here.

  He remembered. A big map, with few roads and many creeks, and many blank areas marked UNMAPPED. The swirl of color depicting different elevations as the larger forms of the mountains were at least suggested. But what was the pure quality of Polk County by shape?

  He remembered: it was very regular. It was, like the sheet of paper that documented it, almost perfectly rectangular, with only a flare to the northwesterly corner and the southwesterly quarter to render the shape irregular. But otherwise it was drawn as if with a ruler, by men who laid out counties from far away without any knowledge of what the land was and therefore in defiance of the land. The borders didn’t follow mountain crests or rivers or natural forms in the land; they defied them, they bisected them, they conquered them.

  So the rectangle on the wall, it almost represented the pure shape of the county, with those deviations in the corner that were largely irrelevant because neither of them contained unmapped areas.

  Earl tried to remember. What else was there? What else marked the county? He couldn’t remember anything, any roads, any mountains, any creeks or rivers. It was over sixteen years since he’d really been here. How could he be expected to—

  Pins. Pins. The map was festooned with pins where Charles Swagger had taken game and over the years he’d taken a lot of game, and he loved mule deer most of all, mulies they were called, magical creatures of muddy earth color who exploded from stillness to grace to invisibility in the blinking of an eye, and if you even saw one, much less managed to kill one, you felt that nature had been benevolent.

  Earl looked away, then looked back again, seeing nothing. Then he edged sideways so that he saw the blank space on the wall at an angle, and could read the texture of it and that’s when he saw them.

  Of course. The map was gone. The pins were gone. The Swaggers were gone, all of them, dead or cursed, especially t
his last one, but what remained after it all were the pinholes.

  Scanning the empty space from an angle, Earl quickly began to pick them up, here, there, one at a time, little pricks in the plaster, perhaps visible only in this light, with its play of shadows to bring out the irregularities. A prick here, a prick there, two pricks close together and—

  That would be it. That had to be it.

  A large concentration of pricks lay in the northwest corner of the lightened space, maybe thirty-five or forty. Not in a cluster, but in two parallel lines, suggesting the margins of the treeline defining the valley itself. That’s where Hard Bargain Valley would be. That’s where Charles Swagger went every year and every year he tagged his mulie buck, in the margins, just off the flat, remote high field of yellow grass, over which crows heeled and cruised, like omens of ill chance.

  Earl knew: it’s in the northwest corner of the county.

  He knew if he could get close enough by car, he could hump it in if he worked like the devil. He’d need a county map—there was an Arkansas state map in large scale in his car, and with it he could get close enough. It was maybe two hours’ driving, maybe four hours of hard hike and climbing. He glanced at his watch. He could make it by dawn with an hour to spare.

  He only needed one more thing.

  • • •

  He went into the third dusty stall and bent to the boards against the wall. He remembered hiding here in the long ago, from his father’s rages. Earl! the old man would cry, Earl, you get your ass in here, goddammit! But Daddy never found him though it only forestalled the beatings a few minutes. No one else ever found him there either. He bet Bobby Lee had a secret place too, but this was Earl’s.

  With a few swift tugs he removed the boards from the wall. He leaned in—as he had when he stopped at the farm months ago, though then to emplace, not remove. He leaned in and dragged it out, a green wooden box wrapped in a tarpaulin, which bore the stamp SWAGGER USMC atop it, denoting that it was a sea chest that had followed its owner from ship to ship and battle to battle. He dragged the case into the barn, flicked on the bare-bulb light and pried it open.