Hot Springs (29 page)

Earl nodded.

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

“Yes sir. The job Fm 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.”

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 die 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 lodged 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 casde 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.”

“I need more. I need the kind of detail a clever man can provide, a shrewd man, who’s fooled by nothing in this world. That would certainly be you. A man doesn’t last in the brothel profession unless he’s a keen judge of character. So you would notice things others might not. Tell me, Memphis, about them. About him.”

“You mean they bossman?”

“Yes.”

“Suh,1 don’t mean you no disrespect, but if Grumleys all you got to go agin that boy, then, suh, you be in a peck o’ hurt. You be in a tub o’ hurt.”

“Describe him, please.”

“Uh, he mean serious bidness.” He scanned his memory for helpful images. “Nigguhs talk about Bumpy in Harlem.”

Bumpy Johnson. Owney knew Bumpy well. Bumpy used to sit with his own gunman at a back table in the Cotton Club and even the toughest white mobsters avoided him directly. Yes, he saw the comparison, for Bumpy’s every motion and dark, hooded eyes said: If you mess with me, I will kill you.

“Bumpy in Harlem. Yes, I knew him.”

“He had that. Whatever Bump had, this boy had it too. Nigguhs can pick that up. A nigguh hafta figger out right quick if a man mean what he say. And this here fella, he surely did. His own dyin’ don’t mean shit. Don’t mean shit.”

“We call him the cowboy,” said Owney.

“My galTrina? She say he worked it upstairs so no nigguh gals git shot. All them bullets flyin’, he worried about ‘hos gittin’ shot. Ain’t that nuthin’? Ain’t no white man like that down here. Hear tell they got some like that up North, but ain’t no white man like that down here.”

“What do you mean, Memphis?”

“He wouldn’t shoot no gals. He shot over they heads. So they don’t kill no nigguh gals.”

Now this was a new detail that hadn’t emerged in Owney’s investigations.

The cowboy had something for Negroes? What on earth does that mean?

“And my main gal, Marie-Claire? She say, that ol’ Grumley holdin’ a gun agin her throat, sayin’ he shoot her. Now, suh, you know any white polices in America just laugh and say, ‘Go’n and shoot that nigguh gall9 Be laughin’ all about it! But this here fella, he lif his rifle, aim careful, and hit that las’ Grumley right upside the haid. So Marie-Claire twist away, and them other fellas, they hammer that las’ Grumley. Ain’t no white cop do that, and nobody know that better than Memphis Do-good, I’m tellin’ you right, suh. I gots the scars to prove it.”

“You are probably right,” said Owney; he knew that in that situation in every city in America the policemen would have simply fired away, killing both the felon and his hostage and therefore accomplishing two objectives: saving themselves any danger, and providing a highly amusing few seconds.

The cowboy loves the Negro people for some reason.

Interesting.

“Well, you’ve been very helpful, Memphis.”

“Thank you, suh,” said Memphis Dogood.

“Unfortunately, I can’t drive you home.”

“Suh?”

“Yes. Can’t be seen with you. You know, appearances, all that. Those fellows over there, they’ll take care of you.”

“Mr. Maddox, them’s Grumley boys and—”

“Nothing to worry about, old man. You have my guarantee.”

He smiled. The door was opened, and Owney’s driver leaned in, put his large hand on Memphis’s shoulder, and directed him outward.

Some Grumley boys, young ones, watched, then began to mosey over to Memphis.

Among the many things his colleagues did not know about Walter F. (formerly “Shorty” and now “Frenchy”) Short was the following: he was wealthy.

Not rich, not a millionaire, not a playboy, a polo player or a “movie producer,” but still he had a private income that would keep him perpetually comfortable to indulge his pathologies, as derived from old family investments in Canadian timber, American pharmaceuticals and railroads and a large interest in a Philadelphia manufacturing company that made, of all things, the little brass ringlets that served as belt notches in the web gear GIs had used in defeating the Axis in the recent war.

So when Frenchy arrived in Hot Springs in overalls, a threadbare khaki shirt, a beat-up coat and a low-slung fedora, a .45 on his belt behind his right hip, his first move would have surprised everyone. It was to go to his apartment.

He kept it in the New Waverly Hotel, and slunk through the lobby, largely unnoticed. He showered, beating off the road dust of the bumpy bus ride. Then he toweled off, and took a nap until later in the evening. Arising, he went to his closet and picked out a nice Brooks Brothers whipcord suit, light for summer, a pair of Weejun loafers, a blue shirt and a red-and-black-striped regimental tie. Under a crisp panama hat, he went out and about the town, a perfecdy dressed sporting man whom no one could possibly associate with the grim young posse of Jayhawkers who had so alarmingly shot the town up over the past several weeks.

At first he did what any young man would do in such circumstances. He gambled a little, he had a nice meal, a few drinks, and then he went to one of the finer establishments at the far end of Central, traveling past the Ohio, the Southern, the Arlington and so many other monuments to Hot Springs’ principal obsessions, and got himself laid up one side and down another.

That accomplished, he taxied back to the New Waverly and slept for two straight days.

On the third day he made a trip to a surplus store, and made a number of surprising purchases. That afternoon and night, he pleasured and partied again. He made no phone calls, because he had no friends and his family was not particularly interested in where he was or what he was doing, not after the trouble he had caused it; they just wanted him far out of Pennsylvania, for the rest of his life.

On the fourth day, he slept late again, took a light meal in the New Waverly dining room, then repaired to his room. There he opened the paper sack he’d brought from the surplus store the day before, removed his new ensemble and put it on: a new pair of black gym shoes, a black Norwegian sweater and a pair of rugged blue denim work pants. He also had a light tool kit in a brown valise. He slipped out the back of the hotel, and negotiated his way through alleys and lanes and byways, as if he had secredy studied the town’s layout on maps (he had) until at last only a fence separated him from his destination.

Someone once said, in discussing the OSS, that aristocrats make the best second-story men and Frenchy was about to prove the wisdom of this judgment. He climbed the fence and moved swiftly to the building, a four-story brick affair. A skeleton crew managed the switchboards, but that bullpen was on the first floor, just off the main entrance. The upper floors were, all dark.

Frenchy found a foothold that was a brass hose oudet, and from there made a good athletic move up to a window ledge, used the strength in his wrists and forearms to haul himself up to the roofline of the first-floor rear portico, gave a mighty oof. and pulled himself finally to the roof of the portico. He lay there, breathing heavily, imagining himself pulling such a stunt against the German embassy in Lisbon in search of codes or secret agent identities, just like his uncle had done.

But there were no SS men with machine pistols guarding the Hot Springs Bell Telephone office in late August of 1946. They had, as a species, largely vanished from the earth. The only potential opposition for Frenchy was a night watchman who never left his post on the first floor. Why should he? Who on earth would even conceive of breaking into a phone company? What would a thief be after—nickels from the pay phones?

Frenchy was fully prepared with shims and picks to crack the building; after all, at Choate he had famously liberated a biology exam for the first-formers, and made himself a legend among the populace while going blithely unpunished. At Princeton, he had tried the same trick with a physics exam, and gotten caught and expelled (the first time), but getting caught was a function of being ratted out by a bluenose prick who didn’t believe in such things.

But—hello, what’s this?—instead of having to use his treasury of deviant devices, he found the second-story man’s best friend, the unlocked window. In a trice, he was in.

He discovered himself in a darkened office and snapped on his flashlight. He learned instantly that this was the foyer of the personnel office, of no use to him whatsoever. He stepped carefully into the hallway, then taped the door lock so that it wouldn’t lock behind him, then left another tiny mark of tape high on the door so he could remember which one it was for his escape plan, and then began to patrol.

He walked down darkened corridors, checking out door titles, BOOKKEEPING, BILL PAYMENT, DIRECTORY PREPARATION. REPAIR ASSIGNMENTS. SALES. And SO On and so forth, all the little fiefdoms so necessary for the care and maintenance of a modern monopoly. At last, on the silent third floor, he discovered what he thought he needed: ENGINEERING.

He used a shim to pop the lock, slid adroidy in, and again taped the lock behind him. He sent his flashlight beam bouncing around the room. Only banality was revealed: a number of drafting boards, a number of messy desks, some cheesy, cheery Bell Telephone morale posters on the institutional green walls, the glass cubicle of a supervisor, and finally and most important a horizontal filing cabinet, that is, a wall-length chest of thin, wide drawers, each marked by geographic grid references.

Shit, he said.