“I roger that,” said Earl.
The two split up, and drifted through the gathering crowd as the time of departure approached. Earl lit a cigarette, found a pillar to lean against far down the platform and commenced to smoke and watch. In time, he spotted the two gangsters talking animatedly near the station house, each smoking a gigantic cigar. The two fellows seemed to be having a good enough time. Other than that, nothing much was happening, though more and more people were boarding the train and the conductors seemed a little more frenzied. He glanced at his Hamilton, saw that it was just about 4:00 P.M. The all-aboard would come very soon. His leg hurt a little, as did his left wrist. He flexed his left hand, opening and shutting it, and shifted his weight, trying to keep his mind off of it. He wasn’t used to wearing a tie all day, either, and it was getting on his nerves, but he wasn’t about to loosen his, even in this heat, until D.A. did the same. He was thinking about a nice hot shower back in his cabin at the Best Tourist Court.
Suddenly someone stood before him, and he cursed himself for his lack of awareness. It was the woman. Her hair was red, and pinned up under a yellow beret. She stood on white, strapped heels in a yellow traveling suit cut right at the knee that showed off more leg than was healthy for anybody. She was staring at him intently, her eyes dark.
“Say, handsome,” she said, “did you use your last match to light that butt or would you have one or two others left in the box?”
Nothing shy about this one. And, she smelled great too. Her accent was sugar-dipped, like a fritter hot on a cool Southern morning, and he placed it as either from Georgia or Alabam.
“I might have another one here, ma’am,” he said. “Let me just dig through my gear and see.”
He stood, pulled the matchbox out from his inside pocket. He deftly opened it, took out a match, and struck it and cupped. He had large hands that protected the fragile flame from any gust of breeze. She came close, cupping his hands in hers, and drew his flame to her Chesterfield.
“There you go,” he said.
“Thanks, I needed that.” She stood back, inhaled deeply, then exhaled a zephyr of smoke.
“Do I know you?” he asked. “Ain’t you in the pictures?”
“Been in a couple, doll,” she replied. “But you had to look quick. It’s a crappy business unless you know big guys and I just happen to know the wrong big guys. The big guys I know scare the hell out of everybody else. You wouldn’t know any big guys, would you, handsome?”
“No ma’am,” said Earl, smiling. “I know a couple of generals, that’s all.”
“Oh, a soldier boy. I thought you might be a cop.”
“I used to be a Marine.”
“Bet you killed a tubful of Japs.”
“Well, ma’am, you just never could tell. It was so fast and smoky.”
“My chump boyfriend stayed in L.A. running a sports wire. He’s a real hero, the louse. He drags me all the way to this craphole town to meet picture people and they’re all small potatoes. It took me ten years to get out of towns like this, and here I am, back again.”
“You from Georgia, ma’am?”
“Alabama. Bessemer, the steel town. If you haven’t been there, you ain’t missed much, sugar. I—”
Earl had the peripheral impression of flailing, of something hot and wild suddenly swarming upon him, animal-like, so fast it was stunning.
“What the fuck is going on?”
It was Bugsy Siegel, his nostrils flaring, his eyes livid with rage. Two flecks of gray gunk congealed in the corners of his mouth. His body radiated pure aggression and his eyes were nasty little pinpricks.
He grabbed the woman, roughly, by the elbow and gave her a powerful yank. The strength of it snapped her neck. He squeezed her arm hard until his knuckles were white.
“What the fuck is this all about, Virginia?” he demanded.
“Christ, Ben, I just got a light from this poor guy,” she said as she pulled her arm free.
“Sir,” said Earl, “there wasn’t nothing going on here.”
“Shut up, cowboy. When I talk to you, that’s when you talk to me.” He turned back to Virginia. “You fucking slut, I ought to smack you in the face. Get to the train. Go on, get your goddamn ass out of here!” He gave her a shove toward the train, and turned after her.
But then he thought better of it, and turned back to Earl. His hot eyes looked Earl up and down.
Earl gazed back.
“What are you looking at, bumpkin?”
“I ain’t looking at nothing, sir.”
“You fucking dog, I ought to beat the shit out of you right here. I ought to smash you into the pavement, you little nobody. You nothing. You piece of fucking crap.” His anger fueled the color of his language.
“Ben, leave the poor guy alone, I started talking to—”
“Shut up, bitch. Get her to the train, goddammit,” he barked at two of Owney’s Grumleys who’d shown up in support. Earl saw Owney himself with two others back a few steps and around them a cone of onlookers had formed. It was dead quiet.
“Do you know who I am?” Ben said.
“Ben, get ahold of yourself,” said Owney.
“He’s just a guy on a platform,” the woman yelled, pulling away from the two goons.
But now the focus of Ben’s rage was entirely upon Earl, who just stood there with a passive look on his face.
“Do you know who I am?” Siegel screamed again.
“No sir,” said Earl.
“Well, if you did, you fucking putz, you would be shitting bricks in your pants. You would be stinking up this joint. You do not want to fuck with me. You don’t even want to be in the same state as me, do you understand that, you country fuckhead?”
“Yes sir,” said Earl. “I only lit the lady’s cigarette.”
“Well, you thank your fucking lucky stars I didn’t decide to wipe your ass on the railway tracks, you got that, Tex? Do you get that?”
“Yes sir,” said Earl.
Bugsy leaned close. “I killed seventeen men,” he said. “How many you killed, you pitiful farmer?”
“Ah, I’d say somewhere between 300 and 350,” said Earl.
Bugsy looked at him.
“And see,” Earl explained further, “here’s the funny thing, the boys I killed, they was trying to kill me. They had machine guns and tanks and rifles. The boys you killed was sitting in the park or in the back seat of a car, thinking about the ball game.” Then he smiled a little.
At first Bugsy was stunned. No one had ever talked to him this way, particularly not in the face of one of his rampages. And then it struck him that this hick wasn’t scared a lick. The guy smiled at Bugsy and—fuck him, fuck him, FUCK HIM!—actually winked.
Bugsy threw his punch with his right. It wasn’t a roundhouse, for he was a skilled fighter and knew that roundhouses were easily blocked. It was an upward jab, with the full force of his body behind it, and his reflexes were fast, his strength considerable and his coordination brilliant, all driven by his mottled fury. He meant to punch the cowboy right below the eye and cave in the left side of his face.
He threw the punch and for quite a while—say somewhere between .005 and .006 second—felt the soaring pleasure that triumph in battle always unleashed in him, the imposition of his will on an unruly world, his ego, his beauty, his cunning, all in full expression. He knew important people! He hung out with movie stars! He fucked a countess, he fucked Wendy Barrie, he fucked hundreds of the world’s most beautiful starlets! He was Bugsy, the Bugman, Bughouse, friend of Meyer and Lucky, he counted in this world.
Then it all vanished. With a speed that he could never have imagined, the cowboy got a very strong hand inside his wrist to turn the blow, not so much block it, and with his other hand himself strike.
Bugsy was not a coward. He had been in many street fights, and he’d won most of them. He was indefatigable in battle when he had a stake in the outcome, and his rage usually sealed him off from the sensation of pain until
hours later. He had been hit many times. But the blow he absorbed took all that away from him. It was a short right-hand punch that traveled perhaps ten inches but it had a considerable education in mayhem behind it, and it struck him squarely below the heart, actually cracking three ribs. It was a hammer, a piston, a jet plane’s thrust, an atom bomb. It sucked the spirit from him. The shock was red, then black, and his legs went, and he slipped to the platform, making death-rattle sounds, feeling bile or blood pour from his nostrils to destroy his bow tie. He urped and his lunch came up. He convulsed, drew his legs up to his chest to make the hurt go away, sucked desperately for oxygen and felt something he had not felt in years, if ever: fear.
His antagonist was kneeling.
“You know what?” he said. “I only hit you half as hard as I know how. If I see you in this town again, I’ll hit you so hard it’ll knock your guts out of your skin. Now you get on this train and you go far, far away. Don’t come back, no more, no how, not ever.”
He stood and looked Owney square in the eye.
“You or any of your boys want to try me, Mr. Maddox, you go right ahead.”
Owney and his crew of Grumleys took a step back.
“I didn’t think so,” said Earl, smiled, winked at the pretty lady and slipped away.
8
After he regained his voice and his legs, but not his color, Bugsy turned his rage on Owney, demanding to know who the vanished cowboy was. Owney admitted he didn’t know at all. As the crew of Owney’s Grumley boys led him to the Pullman car and as he nursed the wretched pain in his side, Bugsy passed out what could only be an edict, with the full power of his associates back east behind it: You find out who that guy is. You find out where he lives, who he hangs with, what he does. You mark him well. But do not touch him. I will touch him. Touching him, that’s for me, do you understand?
Owney nodded.
Virginia said, “Sugar, you’re going to touch him with what now, a howitzer? An atom bomb? A jet?” She threw back her hair, flushed and victorious, and laughed powerfully, a laugh that emerged from a diaphragm as if coated in boiled Alabama sap and grits. “Honey,” she said, “you ain’t got the guts to face that kind of how-de-do again, let me tell you. Ha! He got you so good! You should have seen the look on your face when he poked you! You poor ol’ thing, you done got the white beat off you!”
“Virginia, shut up,” said Bugsy. “You were the cause of all this.”
“So how was I supposed to know he was Jack Dempsey? Anyhow, you were the idiot that swung on him. Couldn’t you see he was a tough guy? He looked tough. He stood tough. He talked tough. And, honey, he sure as hell hit tough!”
“Do you want a doctor, old man?” Owney asked. “We could delay the train.”
“And let these hicks laugh at me some more? Let some hick sawbones pick at me? No thank you. Owney, you said you ran a smooth town. You said we’d all be safe here, you owned things, things ran great in Owney’s town. And this happens. Some ringer. He had to be a pro boxer. I never saw no guy’s hands move that fast, and I never got hit so fucking hard in my life. So maybe this ain’t such a safe town and maybe you ain’t doing such a good job.”
With that he limped bravely up the steps of the Missouri-Pacific and was taken to his Pullman stateroom by a covey of Negro porters.
Virginia followed, but she turned for a last whisper to the befuddled Owney.
“You tell that cowboy to watch out. The goddamn Bugman holds grudges. And tell that sugar boy if he ever comes to L.A. to look me up!”
Shortly, the train pulled out of the station, and Owney hoped that he was forever finished with Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, who had come for a “vacation and a bath” at the urging of Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello, who were big in New York.
“All right,” he said when the train pulled out, addressing Grumleys present and elsewhere, “now you know what’s going on. Find out who that guy is and find out fast. But don’t touch him! Something’s going on and I have to know what the fuck it is.”
He was troubled: change was coming, he knew, and to ride it out he had to keep things running smoothly down here. Hot Springs had to be a smooth little empire, where nothing went wrong, where boys from all the mobs could come and have their fun, and mix and get together, without problems from the law. That’s what he was selling. That was his product. Everything he had was tied up in that. If he lost that, it meant he lost everything.
“Mr. Maddox, he’s long gone,” said Flem Grumley, one of Pap Grumley’s sons and the eldest of these Grumleys. “He just melted so fast into the crowd, we didn’t get a fix on him. Who’d have thought a guy would have the balls to paste Bugsy Siegel in the ribs?”
“Find him” was all Owney could think to say.
• • •
They drove away from the station in silence. Earl stared glumly into the far distance. His hand hurt a bit. He figured it would be bruised up some in the morning.
“Tell you what,” said D.A. finally, “I never saw one man hit another so hard. You must have boxed.”
“Some” was all Earl said.
“Pro?”
“No sir.”
“Earl, you’re not helping me here. Where? When? How?”
“ ’Thirty-six, ’37 and ’38. I was the Pacific Fleet Champ, middleweight. Fought a tough Polak for that third championship on a deck of the old battlewagon Arizona in Manila Bay.”
“You are so fast, Earl. You have the fastest hands I ever saw, faster even than the Baby Face’s. You must have worked that speed bag hard over the years.”
“Burned a few speed bags out, yes sir, I surely did.”
“Earl, you are a piece of work.”
“I’m all right,” he said. “But I made a mistake, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did, Earl.”
“I should have let him hit me?”
“Yes, you should have.”
“I think I know that,” said Earl, aware somehow that he had failed. He turned it over in his mind to see what the old man was getting at.
“Do you see why, Earl?”
“Yes sir, I do,” said Earl. “I let my pride get in the way. I let that little nothing in a railroad station get too big in my head.”
“Yes, you did, Earl.”
“I see now what I should have done. I should have let him hit me. I should have let him smack me to the ground and feel like a big shot. I should have begged him not to hit me no more. Then he’d think I’se scared of him. Then he’d think he owned me. And if it was ever important, and he came at me again, he’d sail in king of the world, and I’d have nailed him to the barn door so bad he wouldn’t never git down.”
“That is right, Earl. You are learning. But there’s one other thing, Earl. You threw caution to the wind. That was an armed, highly unstable professional criminal, surrounded by his pals, all of them armed. You are unarmed. If you’d have hit him again, you’d probably be a dead man and no jury in Garland County would have convicted your killers, not with Owney’s influence on Bugsy’s side. So it was a chance not worth taking.”
“I’m not too worried about myself,” Earl said.
“No true hero really is. But the heroics are over, Earl. It’s time for teamwork, operating from strength, careful, professional intelligence, preparation, discipline. Discipline, Earl. You can teach these young policemen we have coming in discipline, I know. But you have to also show it, Earl, embody it. Do you understand?”
“Yes sir.”
“It’s not a pretty nor a right thing for me to address a hero of the nation in such a way, but I have to tell you the truth.”
“You go ahead and tell me the truth, sir.”
“That’s good, Earl. That’s a very good start.”
They drove on in silence for a bit.
“Now they know there’s a new fellow or two in town,” Earl finally said.
“Yes, Earl, they do.”
“And that would be why we are not heading back to the cabins?”
“That is it, exactly.”
They were driving out Malvern through the Negro section, and now and then the old man eyed the rearview mirror. On the streets, the Negro whorehouses and beer joints were beginning to heat up for a long night’s wailing. Mammas hung from the window, smoking, yelling things; on the streets, pimps tried to induce those of either race or any race to come in for a beer or some other kind of action. Now and then a Negro casino, usually smaller and more pitifully turned out than the ones for the white people, could be glimpsed, but mostly it was just black folks, sitting, watching, wondering.
“Tell me, Earl, what was in your room?”
“Some underclothes for a change, some underclothes drying in the tub. Some socks. Two new shirts. A razor, Burma-Shave. A toothbrush, and Colgate’s. A pack of cigarettes or two.”
“Any books, documents, anything like that? Anything to identify yourself?”
“No sir.”
“That’s good. Can you live with the loss of that stuff?”
“Yes, I can.”
“That’s good, because if I don’t miss my guess, starting now them boys are going to turn that town upside down looking for the Joe Louis that poleaxed their special visitor. I paid for the cabins through next Monday; if we check out today or make a big folderol about packing and leaving in a hurry, that’s a dead giveaway as to who we are. It’s best now just to fade quietly. They’ll check everywhere for boys who’ve left suddenly, left in a lurch, left without paying up. So if we don’t do anything to draw attention to ourselves, we’ll keep them in the dark a little longer.”
“Yes sir,” said Earl. “I guess I’m a little sorry.”
“Earl, in this work, sorry don’t matter. Sure is better than sorry. Remember: the mind is the weapon. Think with the mind, not the fast hands.”
• • •
Owney’s Grumleys turned the town pretty much upside down. He had a gang of former bootleg security boys and did all the heavy hitting he found necessary. There were a bunch of Grumleys, all related, including several Lutes, more than a few Bills, and not less than three and possibly as many as seven Slidells, as well as a Vern and a Steve. The Slidell Grumleys were by repute the worst and they had to be kept apart, for they would turn on each other murderously, given half a chance.