“What did Helen say when she looked into a box of Cheerios? Oh, look, doughnut seeds.”
“You’re an idiot,” said Les. “Johnny, are you going to let this clown call the shots? His head is full of mothballs, and I’m afraid I’ll get the clap just looking at his broad. Hey, Mickey. Sooey!”
“Baby, he can’t talk to me that way.”
But he could. Though Les was average height, he was not weak, frightened, or unable to fight. If you messed with him—win, lose, or draw—you had an enemy for life.
“Hey, little man, you leave Mickey out of it, quack, quack. You got no cause to beat up on her.”
“The Twelfth Army’s got no cause to beat up on her. They all remember the night—”
“Okay, Les,” said Johnny, “you can lay off the girl. She ain’t a part of this.”
“Yeah, go home to your little woman, but be sure to bring a tomcat to sniff out the fishy stink,” added Homer.
The next thing he knew, hands were pulling him off Homer, whose face and eye were puffed up from Les’s blows, one hard, one glancing. Les himself had no memory of flying around the table and launching fists, then himself, at the hayseed, the two of them tumbling, chairs flying, beers spilling, the girl screaming, Charlie bitching, Jack pulling back, and somehow, some way, Johnny getting them apart.
“Save it for the Division,” Johnny said. “Goddammit, Les, calm down. He didn’t mean nothing, he just likes to tell a joke now and then.”
“Don’t you ever say nothing about my Helen again!” said Les. The screwball intensity of his expression would have melted a statue.
“Okay, okay,” said Homer, “I didn’t mean nothing by it. It was a joke, I’m funny—ha-ha—quack, quack—that’s me. Sorry for Tommy, sorry for Red, but now we need to get back to work, and I got us a good one. No need to get so steamed. Just because when you took her to the top of the Empire State Building and planes attacked, that ain’t my fault.”
“You knock it off too, Homer. Sometimes I don’t know which is worse, your dumb jokes or Les’s firecracker personality.”
But Les decided at this moment he would kill Homer. He would put a fat .45 into his gut and watch him bleed out in the gutter. He’d beg for Mama, he’d ask for a priest or a doctor, he’d tell Les he was sorry, he didn’t mean anything about Helen, but Les would just watch, studiously, as the life bubbled out of the man, forming a delta of red rivers on the pavement.
So when Johnny got them back to the table, yelled to Vince to bring more beer and a Coca-Cola for Les, and got the meeting back to a semblance of order, it wasn’t quite the victory he assumed it would be. It was because having sentenced Homer, Les felt an immediate calm come across him. Suddenly he felt all right. No fury, no seething in his gut, just the pleasing image of Homer afloat in a lake of blood on some raw and windy corner. That’s how it was with him; it blew in, it blew out.
“Okay,” said Homer, “I will do some more scouting. Maybe Les’s right, we need more dope before we jump. We’ll come back here and split the grab and go our separate ways until we need to fill our pockets again. But that’ll push it back a week, maybe two. I’m thinking June thirtieth. Meet-up here June twenty-eighth, the twenty-ninth I’ll take you through it, and on the thirtieth we go. Agreed?”
“I’d like this one to go real smooth,” said Johnny. “Those Division assholes think we’re on the run, all scattered and scared and hiding under the blankets, after Wisconsin. I’d like to pull off a nice, clean big job just to show them bastards.”
“See, I don’t want to show nobody nothing,” said Les. “I just want to kill some of the suckers, and that’s the way we teach them who we are.”
“Quack, quack,” said Homer.
—
LES DROVE TO the Happy Hoosier Tourist Camp & Cabins site seventeen miles away, pulling in to the space in front of the little log home labeled No. 14, and saw his two kids playing in the front yard. That always filled him with a kind of bliss nothing else on earth did. Kids! They were his! He had made them, he and Helen, and they were going to be something much better than their old man!
“How’re my little cowpokes? Oh, Daddy loves his cowpokes so much!”
He grabbed Darlene and flung her skyward so that her legs flew parallel to the ground as he whirled her around. The child giggled with pleasure.
“Me, Daddy, me!” shouted Ronnie, the boy. “Oh, please, Daddy!”
He set Darlene down, where, giggling and dizzy, she sat with a bump in the grass, and picked up Ronnie to do the same. The boy squealed in mock fear as he was pulled in circles, also in defiance of gravity, by his dad.
“’Round and ’round we go,” shouted Les. “Where we end up, nobody knows.”
Finally, he slowed and then stopped, freeing Ronnie to fall dizzily, giggling.
He sat on the running board of his car, a stolen Hudson with plates from another stolen car.
“Whoa!” he said. “You guys wore me out! I’m too old for this sort of thing! Pick on somebody your own size!”
“Daddy, Daddy, can we go to a zoo tomorrow?”
“Hmm,” said Les, “maybe.” He thought Indianapolis might not be too far and there’d probably be a good zoo there. “If not tomorrow, the next day. Depending on where we go.”
“I want to see the lions,” said Darlene.
“Roarrrrrrrrr!” said Ronnie, snarling up his face and turning his little hands into claws.
“Roarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!” said Les. “Yep, that’s what they do, all right. You don’t want to get too close, I’ll tell you that.”
Helen stepped out of the cabin. She was a pretty girl, in that down-home Chicago way, blue-eyed and trim, and, best of all, she was solid. She was all Les ever wanted. The other fellows with their whore girlfriends, it made Les sick. What did you get out of that except maybe a dose? With Helen, it was every time he wanted it, always good, and to have her there, to depend on, to take care of little things, to look after stuff—all that—it was so good. He never wanted anything more. Who could ask for something more, like gambling on horses—stupid—or going out to fancy places every night—stupid.
And, better yet, she was loyal. Picked up at Little Bohemia, she spent a week as a guest of the state of Wisconsin and didn’t say a thing, even if the Division boys put the pressure on her hard. She clammed up, and nothing they threatened her with got her to budge. She could be a stubborn little mule when she wanted to.
“Hi, sweetie, they run you ragged?” he asked.
“They can be a handful, but it’s not so bad I can’t handle it.”
“What’s for dinner tonight?”
“I got a nice slice of ham at the A&P and some potatoes and fresh green beans. Pineapple upside-down cake for dessert.”
Who could ask for more, especially with people starving or going on the dole all over the place.
“I can’t wait.” And it was true. He couldn’t. It sounded so good.
“How did it go?”
“Oh, you know. Johnny’s fine, he’s a good man, the others ain’t bad. That damned Homer, though, can’t abide him or his girlfriend. I don’t trust her any further than I could throw her. She’d talk her head off first chance she’d get.” In his mind, he ran a quick comparison between the slut Mickey Conforti and Helen’s decency, kindness, sweet temper, and loyalty. He’d really won that one!
“This one isn’t going to be rough, is it? You said it would be easy.”
“I said it should be easy. You can’t never predict these things. Look at how poor Tommy checked out. One minute as happy as a pig in clover, the next he’s riding the handcart to hell because of a coupla Iowa hicks. I won’t lie about that, sweetie, never have, never will. It can be a dangerous game. But nobody’s been born yet can get the drop on me. I should come out of it flush, and that’ll give us a stake for the next year, we can move somewhere nice and put
the kids in a good school.”
“Oh, Les, that would be so swell.”
“Quack, quack,” said Les, because he was so happy.
9
BLUE EYE, ARKANSAS
The present
THERE WASN’T MUCH CHARLES LEFT IN BLUE EYE. There wasn’t even much Earl left. In fact, there wasn’t much Blue Eye left in Blue Eye.
Bob ordered himself not to mark the changes out loud. It could turn the afternoon into an ordeal. Remember when Nickerson’s Five-and-Dime stood here, now it’s a Mexican laundromat. Oh, and over there, that was a Winn-Dixie, at least until Mr. Sam built out by the Interstate and closed it down. And Fred’s, where all the farmers had breakfast between 4 and 6 every morning, that’s long gone. Now there’s a Sonic. What the hell is a Sonic?
No, he wouldn’t be that guy. He just reacted numbly to the undeniable reality that what had once been a little town out of which a sheriff named Andy Griffith could have operated was now mostly shuttered and bleak, and all the action seemed to be in fast-food restaurants set up on the bypass. It wasn’t all that much different, he supposed, from Cascade, Idaho, a similar spot of highway blight he called home.
It wasn’t quite dead, though. Andy Vincent, Sam’s grandson, Jake’s nephew, ran the Allstate Insurance agency, and was doing well enough to afford a tribe of kids who called Swagger Mr. Bob, and still had reputation enough to open doors in the town. That’s because he was also the mayor.
For example, when they went to the Blue Eye Star-Clarion, though it was owned by an out-of-state newspaper chain, the receptionist went and got a managing editor who was most decent, and once they’d explained why they were there, had told them that the old papers—then it was just the Clarion, “Western Arkansas’s Democratic Voice for a New South”—no longer existed anywhere except on microfiche, but they could be accessed in the library, and he’d make a call over there to ensure Bob was well taken care of, not fobbed off on some seventeen-year-old intern.
“That’s very kind of you,” said Bob. “It’s much appreciated.”
“Is there a story in your returning?” the newspaperman asked. “It seems like you haven’t been around in a long time.” And, true enough, as it had been a while.
“No sir. It’s just family business, is all. My grandfather. Realized I didn’t know a thing about him and it was time to learn a little something.”
“Got it,” said the journalist. “A trip to your own past. It should be private, then, and it will be private.”
At the library, a nice young lady set Bob up on a microfiche reader, and it took him a bit of time to get used to the mirror-backwards manipulations necessary to bring the pages under the magnifier, but he got the hang of it quick enough.
“We went to this just before the whole cyberspace thing broke,” said Ms. Daniels, as plain as a pie but small-town friendly and helpful in every way, God bless her sweet soul, “and I guess we thought it would make us so modern. And we were obsolete two weeks after we got it set up.”
“Ms. Daniels, to me indoor plumbing seems like a miracle, so this is just fine by my standards. I hate the computers anyhow. I do know left from right, so I should be all right.”
Mayor Andy went to sell a policy or run a council meeting or something, leaving Bob alone in the pages of the Clarion, January through December 1934.
It was so very long ago. Everything was different, but everything was the same. The cars were beasts, but in their humps and gropes toward smooth, you could see lines that would eventually permutate into today’s Big Mac–mobiles. All were black too, or a shade of gunmetal gray, maybe navy, maybe green. Men wore coats and ties and hats in those days, everywhere, all the time, frequently with vests, always with cigarettes, pipes, or cigars. Pipes! Hadn’t seen a pipe in years. No sunglasses. Ties never loosened except at a ball game or when going bowling. The hats were fedoras mostly, and the fashion that year demanded a circular, downward slope to the brim, no snappy little uptick to the rear like a duck’s ass. Some wore theirs atilt, rakishly, but most just pulled it down to the eyebrows, to keep the sun or the snow out, and forgot all about it. No “sport clothes”; casual clothes were merely last year’s suit pants and beat-up, worn-down work shoes. The women all wore stockings, all wore girdles (he supposed) and almost always wore hats, usually little feathery constructions that curled around and were nested in their carefully tended hair. Veils were rolled about the hats, and the dresses were big-shouldered, also flowery in both material and corsage, waists trim but not cinched in to wasp dimensions. Nobody was trying to look sexy; they left that to movie stars. And they looked like they did their vacuuming in heels and pearls. Also: no feet. The foot was taboo. Toes even more so, none glimpsed in the pages of the Clarion, January 1, 1934, through December 31, same year. Farmers wore dungarees and had open shirt collars but the same fedoras. A few straw boaters revealed themselves in the newspaper pages, standing out like bright coins in the universe of gray-black dots that was printing in those days. Lots of shots of trains, the dominant mode of transportation, and many civic ceremonies seemed to take place at the station, in front of some gigantic locomotive leaking steam and grease from a dozen portals. No airplanes, except now and then a War Department–released shot of “Our New Pursuit Ship,” a biplane with a clear plastic hood over the cockpit and a long telescopic-tube gunsight along the fuselage just fore of the windscreen, where the pilot could convert to sniper and put the crosshairs on—who? Hun? Jap? Red? They had no idea of the hurricane of violence that lurked a few years ahead and would consume so many of these happy, content, tie- and girdle-wearing citizens.
A figure known as “The Sheriff” was occasionally seen, though he faded into the background of photographs and usually looked away from the camera at the moment of the snap. Who was this man? His star, always in focus; his face, never. Was he hiding something? There was something about him that seemed not to want to be pinned down, held to account.
SHERIFF ARRESTS TWO WITH ILLEGAL STILL
SHERIFF TO CLOSE DOWN ON SPEEDERS
SHERIFF SAYS NO THREAT FROM MIGRANT WORKERS
VIOLENT CRIME DROPS, SAYS SHERIFF
SHERIFF, DEPUTIES WIN STATE SHOOTING TOURNEY
SHERIFF NABS GAS STATION ROBBER
He was everywhere, even as he was nowhere, a blur, a phantom, an image of rectitude on the move. Bob tried to get a fix on him, bringing the magnification of the machine up as high as it would go, but at a certain point the image separated into dots and only the dots were visible.
Who are you, Charles Swagger? What’s your action, your ken, your mission, your passion? For a hero, you’re quite vague, scattered, separated. You never sit still long enough for anyone to pin you down. What are you hiding?
It occurred to him to mark his grandfather’s appearances in the Clarion and so he started at the beginning and began the laborious process of examining every page for every day, every month, through the entire year.
“Hard at work?” said Andy Vincent, returning in late afternoon from his obligations.
“Trying to get a fix on what he was up to in that year,” said Bob.
“Learn anything?”
“Well . . . yes. He’s in the paper, photoed either at an emergency or a crime scene or at some stupid ceremony or other, about three times a week, from January through June. That’s what you’d expect from a small-town sheriff who’s part of the administration, is elected on the party ticket, is wired into the establishment, so to speak. But then, mysteriously, he sort of disappears halfway through June. No announcement, no discussion, no reference to illness or whatever, he’s just gone. Some deputy named Cyril Judd becomes the main man for law enforcement. ‘According to Deputy Cyril Judd’—you must have seen that in the paper a hundred times. But then, in December, he’s back again, same as always. ‘Sheriff Swagger said today that the county raised over $900 in speeding fines over the fiscal year,’ et cetera
, et cetera. He just went there, he did what he did, he came back, and nobody speculated. If he was missed, it never reached the level of official scrutiny and went unnoticed in the Clarion. I’d guess Judge Tyne, who seemed to be the boss of the county in those days, had a hand in telling the paper what it could publish or not. It ain’t a cover-up so much as an agreement between consenting adults.”
“I wish I could tell them what to cover and what not to,” said Andy, with a kind of scoff in his voice.
“It sure was different in them days,” said Bob.
—
AND FINALLY, the grave.
“Did you want some privacy?” asked Andy.
A breeze rushed through the cemetery. It was for veterans, and you could work up a tear or two by looking to the long ranks of white stones rolling off toward the ridge, against the green of the grass and the here-and-there plumage of tree or bush. But Bob ordered his emotions to shut down because he was here on some sort of business that didn’t have a thing to do with young boys shot down before they even got fucked, for a cruel bitch that old and withered men had dressed up under the phony name Duty, to make them go without complaining. He’d been mourning them since he came out of his coma in the Subic Bay Naval Hospital.
“Nah,” he said. “I don’t have no feelings toward him, and won’t be feeling much. This is just an obligation of some kind.”
“Duty?” said Andy.
“Yep,” said Bob.
They walked the pathways through the garden of stone until at last they came to the site that had been registered to Charles Swagger.
“I guess as a town celeb, he got more than a stone.”
“Would that make him a success?”
“In the way they figured in those days, I suppose,” said Andy.
Still, it wasn’t much to show for a man’s life, a war hero and public servant, or so the official record insisted.