Hot Springs (35 page)

“He must have been a worshipful man.”

“Well sir” said a Turner, “you could say that. He’d be headed on toward Caddo Gap. He’d be going to worship a cribful. That Baptist prayer retreat camp, that’d be at that Caddo Gap.”

“Yes, that would, and the old man, that’s where he’d head, to do his own kind of worshipfulness.”

And they busted out laughing.

The Turners howled into the night! It was like the drunken deities of a fallen Olympus snarfing out a bushel basket of giggles and guffaws at the latest vanity of their pitiful progeny, that tribe of hairy-assed scufflers and hustlers known as mankind.

“Oh, he was a prayerful man,” somebody said.

“He worshipped all right.”

“Pass that jug, Cleveland.”

“She’s a coming, Baxter.”

“I still don’t—” started Carlo.

Junior Turner delivered the news: “He did worship. He worshipped at the altar of titty and cooze! He drank the sacred elixir of hooch. He tested God’s will and mercy by betting it all on the throw of them little old cubes with the dots! What a great man he was.”

“That old boy, he was a inspiration to us all.”

Carlo was suddenly confused.

“I don’t—”

“He didn’t go to no prayer meeting at Caddo Gap. No siree, not a goddamn bit of it. He’d come through here and make a big play of how holy he was, and tell ever damn body about the prayer retreat, then he’d roll on out of town, up Route 27 toward Caddo Gap. But goddamn, then he’d cut through the woods on some old logging road and git back on 27 out near to Hurricane Grove and head on his way to where he’s really going. Hot Springs, the Devil’s Playpen. One day a month, Charles gathered up a hundred or so dollars from the niggers and white trash he’d beat over the head, told his old wife he’s going to talk to Jesus, came through here, then cut over to Hot Springs, where he whored and drank and gambled, same as any man. So high and mighty!”

“Jesus,” said Carlo.

“He was a man of sin. Vast sin. He had the clap, he had ten girlfriends in ten different cribs. He never went to the quality places, where he’d might like to chance recognition. Nah, he went to low places, in the Niggertown or up Central beyond the Arlington. He’s a reg’lar, all right.”

“How do you know?”

“Ask Baxter. Baxter knows.”

“I ain’t a sinner no more,” said Baxter, in the darkness. “The Lord done showed me a path. But in them earlier years, I done some helling. I knowed him ‘cause I pumped gas for him so much as a youngster when he stopped for his Coca-Cola. I seen him onct, twicet and then ever damn place, ever damn time. He didn’t have no badge on then. He wore a gal on each arm, and the smile of a happy goddamned man. Sometimes the cards smiled, sometimes they didn’t, but he kept coming back. He had the best life, I reckon. He was a God-fearing man of civil authority twenty-nine days a month and on the thirtieth day he’s a goddamned hellion who got his old pecker in ever kind of hole there was to be had in Hot Springs. Great man! Great man, my black asshole!”

“This is the truth?”

“This is God’s honest truth,” said Junior Turner. “We all knew it. Not nobody back in his hometown did, but we sure did. So when he got hisself kilt, we figgered it was gambling debts or woman trouble. Whoever done it did a good job of covering it up. But goddamn, he paid the devil his due, that I’ll say.”

“You didn’t investigate?”

“Well, son, I was in combat engineer school at Fort Belvoir, in Virginia that day. My deputies was in—where was you, L. T.?”

“Getting ready for the Aleutians.”

“Hell, everybody was some damn place or other. Only Jimmy really was here and by God he’d tried like hell to get in, till finally the standards dropped in ‘43 and they took him. Jimmy didn’t see no percentage in turning the light on Charles Swagger’s hunger for flesh and gitting himself involved in what goes on in Hot Springs. Hot Springs, that’s a evil town. If Charles went to Hot Springs for pleasure, he knew there’d be a price to pay, and by God, he ended up paying it.”

“I see.”

“If you want to know who killed him, I’ll tell you how to do it.”

“Okay,” said Carlo.

Junior leaned forward.

“You look for a silver-plated Smith & Wesson .32 bicycle gun. Little thang, .32 rimfire, couldn’t weigh more’n ten, twelve ounces. Charles called it his Jesus gun, and he kept it secured up his left sleeve by a sleeve garter. He carried the Colt, a Winchester ‘95 carbine in .30 government in the car, just like the Texas Rangers love so deeply, but that little gun was his ace in the hole. That was the gun he kilt Travis Warren’s little brother Billy with in 19 and 23, during the Blue Eye bank robbery. He shot Travis dead with the Colt, and his cousin Chandler too, but old Billy hit him with a 12-gauge from behind, and knocked him down and bloody with buck. Billy walked up, kicked the Colt across the floor and leaned over to put the shotgun under Charles’s chin for a killing shot, and Charles pulled that li’l silver thang and shot that boy slick as a whisde ‘tween the eyes. Anyhows, whoever kilt that old man in 1942, he stole that gun. Everyone who knew a thing about Charles knew it was missing. The Colt was there on the ground, you seen it. But the Jesus gun was missing.”

Carlo knew it was a bad idea, but he couldn’t help from asking.

“Why do they call it a Jesus gun?”

” ‘Cause when he pulls it on you, you are going to meet Jesus. Billy sure did, at the age of only sixteen.”

“Wonder if Billy likes heaven?”

“Bet he do. Plenty of cooze in heaven! All them angel gals in them little gowns. They don’t wear no underpants at all.”

“Now don’t you go talking that way ‘bout heaven,” warned Baxter. “It could have consequences. There are always consequences. That’s the lesson in tonight’s sermon.”

Eventually, most of the Turners gave up the ghost and retreated to farmhouses or cabins. It suddenly occurred to Carlo that he had no place to stay, he was too drunk to drive and could see no way clear to a happy solution to his problem. But once again Junior Turner came through, and dragged him upstairs to an unused bedroom, where he was told to get his load off and stay the night, Mama Turner would have grits and bacon and hot black coffee in the kitchen beginning at 6:00 and running through 9:00.

Carlo stripped, blew out the candle, pulled a gigantic comforter over his scrawny bones, and his head hit the pillow. He had a brief fantasy about the farmer’s daughters, since there’d been so many pretty Turner girls fluttering this way and that, but no knock came to his door, and as a graduate of a Baptist college he wouldn’t have known what to do if one did. And then the room whirled about his head one more dizzying time and he was out.

His dreams tossed in his mind, though. Strange stuff, the product of too much white lightning and too much gravy mingled into a combustible fluid. He could make head or tails of none of it, though it disturbed him plenty and once or twice pulled him from sleep. He’d awaken, wonder where the hell he was, then remember, lie back and sail off again to a turbulent snoozeland.

But the third time he awoke, he knew it was for good. He was sweaty and shaking. Was he sick? Was he going to get the heaves or the runs? But his body was fine; it was his heart that was rocketing along at a hundred miles per hour.

He felt a presence in the room. Not a Turner cousin, comely and sweet, but something far worse: a haunt, a ghost, a horror. He reached out as if to touch something, but his fingers clawed at nothingness. The thing was in his head, whatever it could be. What was it rattling about in his subconscious, trying to find a way to poke a hole into his conscious, trying to get itself felt, noticed, paid attention to? Whatever, it was unsettling. He rose, went to the window, saw the Turner yard, bone-gray in the radiant gibbous moonlight, a swing hanging from a tree, a bench close by, where loving daddies could watch their baby sons play, and guard them and look after them, as his had done for him, as most had done for theirs. It was a scene of such domestic bliss and becalmed gentility it soothed him, but the luminous grayness of it suggested a photo negative, something somehow in reverse, and he saw another daddy, Charles the Tyrant, with his immense reservoir of hidden violence, his hatred, his disappointment, his vanity, his egoism, his self-doubt, and he saw him beating a boy child in that ghostly light.

“You ain’t no damned good!” he heard the old man scream. “What is wrong with you, boy! You fail at everything! You are such a goddamned disappointment!”

Whack! the strap across the legs, whack! die strap across the back, whack! the strap across the buttocks, the thumbs grinding bone bruises into the boy’s arms as the larger man pinioned him in endless, suffocating rage.

What happens to such boys? What becomes of them? They become so full of hatred themselves they lash out at the world. They become monsters hell-bent on punishing a world that did nothing to protect them. Or they become so full of pain they don’t care if they live or die and off they rush into the machine guns. Or they hang themselves at fifteen, for there is no hope on earth left.

Then at last he saw it.

He tried to push it away but it made such perfect sense now, it unified all the elements, it explained everything now.

How did Earl know so much about Hot Springs?

Because he’d been there.

Why couldn’t he tell anyone?

Because he’d been there secredy, tracking someone, setting a trap for someone.

That man was his father.

Earl couldn’t be frightened by his father, for by ‘42 he was a strong Marine sergeant with a couple of boxing tides to his name, and combat in Nicaragua and all over China, not the scrawny, frightened sixteen-year-old who’d fled home in 1930 to escape the father’s rages.

But Earl had some last business with his father. He saw how Earl’s mind would work. Earl was going to the Pacific and he would probably die. His division had orders to Guadalcanal by that time. He had no expectation of surviving the great crusade in the Pacific, for after Guadalcanal there were another hundred islands, with twisted names, letters in combinations never seen before, an archipelago of violence beckoning, promising nothing but extinction. But he had a powerful debt to pay back to the man who’d beaten him, and worse, the man who’d beaten his younger brother, without Earl there to stop it.

And Earl would know about the Jesus gun, and his father’s trick of wearing it in his sleeve, secured by a garter.

In his mind’s eye, Carlo saw what he hoped had not happened but whose logic was absolute and powerful: Earl, AWOL from the Corps, tracking his own daddy through the bawdy houses and flesh parlors of Hot Springs in January of 1942, and then at last facing him, facing the monster.

Had Earl been the man who killed his daddy?

It terrified Carlo, more than anything in his life ever had, but he knew he had to find the truth.

It was always about money with Johnny. Johnny expected to be paid very well, very well indeed, and he also insisted on charging Owney a tax for being English. He called it his Potato Famine bonus: $20,000, over and above the agreed-to sum, just because … just because all them laddies and lasses had starved in the bogs of County Mayo a hundred years ago.

“Old man,” protested Owney, “my people were selling fish and sweeping streets in the slums of the West End at the time. Doubt if they had a ha’penny between them. It was the lord highs what ruined the potato crop and set your people to dying in the river glens.”

“Ah,” said Johnny, all a-twinkle with blarney, “if you English shopkeeps had the nerve to overthrow them wig-wearing nancy boys and gone and made a proper revolution, mine’d not had to flee to the slums of New York and peck out a new life. We’d all be living in the castle now.”

We are living in the castle now, boyo, Owney thought, but didn’t express it. You couldn’t argue with Johnny, and so the deal was done and Ralph brought Johnny another mint julep. He and Owney sat on Owney’s terrace above the rumble of Central late in the afternoon. The cars churned down the broad avenue, the pigeons cooed lovingly.

“I see the mountain’s still a fair eyeful,” said Johnny, looking out beyond the Arlington to North Mountain, which rose in pine-crusted glory across the way, all twenty-one of its springs still blasting out the steamy mineral water, as they had since time immemorial.

“The town has changed in six war years, eh, Johnny?” said Owney.

“In 1940, she was still a Depression town. Now she’s modem. Now she’s a beaut. She still lights up the night sky, I’ll be betting.”

“That she does.”

“Now, tell me about these boyos who are plaguing you. They sound like the Black and Tans you Brits sent up to raid on us in the ‘20s.”

“You would know, Johnny,” said Owney.

“I would indeed. I was in County Mayo and the pubs of west Dublin running with me brothers with the Lewis guns and the Thompsons, hunting and being hunted in them alleyways. I do hate the Black and Tans. Sure but they made the people suffer. They burned, they pillaged, they tortured. Night riders, anonymous, hard to get at, highly secretive, well armed. Sounds about the same, does it not?”

ccWell, almost,” said Owney. “These boys don’t torture. They don’t bum. They sure pillage, though. They’ve cost me close to a hundred grand in lost revenues in two months.”

Actually, it was closer to three hundred grand, but Owney knew if he gave the correct number, Johnny would make a lightning calculation and up the agreed-on cost appreciably. That was Johnny; he held all the cards and he loved it.

Johnny’s raven hair was brilliantined back and his olive complexion radiated ruddy good health. He was fit, vigorous, handsome as the bloody devil himself, at forty-seven years old. He wore a double-breasted bespoke suit in gray flannel, and bespoke shoes as well. When he smiled, the sky lit up in the pure glowing radiance of it. Everybody loved Johnny. It was hard not to love Johnny. He’d fought in the Great War, the Troubles in Ireland, where he’d learned his dark skills, and since 1925 had worked his violent magic on these shores. Men wanted to drink with him, women to sleep with him. What an odd glitch it was that a man so gifted by God had this one little thing: he liked money that others had earned, in large piles, and if someone or something got in his way, he had not the slightest qualm about touching the trigger of his Thompson and eliminating them with a squirt of death. It never occurred to him to feel remorse. His mind wasn’t built that way. He had killed thirty-nine men, most of them officers of the law or bank or plant security, or German soldiers or British troopies but occasionally the bullets flew beyond targets and struck the innocent. It didn’t matter to him, not one little bit.