Hot Springs (51 page)

“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 shuffiingest 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 Rem 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!”

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 swimming 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 bam.

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 bam 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 bam, 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.

He had hung there, as the life was crushed out of his throat, believing that he was going to a better place.

Hope you made it, Bobby Lee. I wasn’t no good to you at all. You were the first of the all-too-many young men I let down and who paid with it with their lives. There were legions of these beyond Bobby Lee, platoons full of them, from the ‘Canal to the railyard in Hot Springs, all of whom had trusted him and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do for them except watch them die.

A thought came to Earl. He could find a rope and do the same trick and that would solve a lot of problems for a lot of people, mostly himself. The faces of boys wouldn’t always be there, except when he was in a gunfight, to haunt him and sour his sleep, his food, his life.

But Earl was somehow beyond that now. He had a vague memory of shooting himself in the head in a bathroom in Washington, dead drunk, and finding that he’d forgotten to load the chamber, the only time ever in his whole life when he had pulled a trigger and been surprised at what happened.

Bobby Lee hadn’t been so lucky. He wanted to leave the world and no secret part of him intervened. He kicked the barrel and he left the world and went to a better world, where no drunken father would take his anger out on him, and beat him and beat him just to express his own rage at what lurked deep in his own mind. October 2, 1940. Earl had been in the Panama Canal Zone at Balboa, on jungle maneuvers, happy in his far-off mock war, his brain consumed with the tactical problems, the discomforts, the need to lead his men, his worry over a captain who seemed a little too fond of the bottle, the—

No, no. Not October 2,1940. That was something else. That was something else. Bobby Lee killed himself two days later, October 4, 1940. Why had he remembered October 2?

Oh, yes. Now he had it: Carlo Henderson had pointed out that the Alcoa payroll job had been October 2. Five men shot and killed four railway guards in the same damned railyard, and got away scot-free with $400,000 that very quickly came back to Owney Maddox, who probably was going to live off it for the rest of his life.

Something nagged at Earl.

Suddenly he wasn’t in the dust-choked bam anymore, where his brother died and where the general agenda was rot and ruin, but only in his head.

Daddy must have beaten Bobby Lee really bad on October 3 or October 4. He must have gotten completely drunk and angry and forgotten himself and beat the boy so hard the boy concluded there was a better place to be and it wasn’t in this world.

Why October 4?

Well, why not? If it was going to happen, it was going to happen and any one date was as good as another.

Still Earl couldn’t put it quite away. It was two days after the most notorious crime of the era. His daddy would have been busy on roadblock duty all that—

Well, what about that?

Why wasn’t Daddy parked out on some roadblock? A robbery that big, leaving that many men dead, the roadblocks would have stayed out for a week at least. Yet somehow in all that mess, Daddy has a chance to get liquored up and comes home and finds his second son and cannot help but release his deepest rage and beats on the boy so bad that the boy decides this life ain’t worth living no more and that he will stop the hurting.

Could Charles have had something to do with the robbery?

It almost seemed possible. For with Charles’s secret life in Hot Springs, he’d certainly have come to the notice of Owney and the Grumleys. His weakness made him vulnerable to blackmail, as did his gambling debts. If they needed him, he’d have been powerless to stop them. He was made to order for the taking, with his rigidity, his pride, his secret shame, his alcoholism.