he in Hot Springs? Why was he in Hot Springs? What's going on? And you report to me. So I can decide.'
'Decide?'
'Decide whether or not to fire Earl. I will not be party to his suicide. It's more than I care to carry around on my shoulders. I will not have him using me to git hisself kilt. Do you understand?'
'I am not a psychologist, sir. I can't make that call.'
'Well, dammit, I can't make it neither, not without some help. If I fire Earl, the whole goddamned shebang falls apart, that I know. And I got that bastard Becker to answer to. But if I send him ahead and he gets killed, I got my own self to answer to. Both of them are stern taskmasters.'
'Yes sir.'
'This is a hard job. Maybe the hardest of all. Harder than walking down that hallway in all that dust and smoke with Grumleys with tommy guns at the other end.'
The boy's face knitted in confusion, but then he saw that the old man had all but made up his mind that he would fire Earl. That is, unless he could be talked out of it, on the strength of something that he, Carl Donald Henderson, could dig out. And that was what he was good at, digging, ferreting, going through files, making calls, taking notes, comparing fingerprints, alibis, accounts and stories. So in that sense he could help Earl, he and he alone, and the heaviness of the task that had just been offered him filled him with solemnity.
'I will look into it, sir.'
'Good. Here's a file on what I have. It'll git you started. There's people to talk to.'
'Yes sir. Where am I going, sir?'
'You'd start in his hometown. It's called Blue Eye, out in Polk County.'
At the bus station, Carlo used up all his change calling his mother long distance and telling her he would not be coming in after all, he had another assignment.
Then he went to the Greyhound window, and bought a ticket for Blue Eye, on the 4:30 bus that drove up Route 71 through Fort Smith to Fayetteville, and then he bought some popcorn and a root beer and sat for the longest time, watching the slow crawl of the clock hands, reading a John P. Marquand novel that he couldn't keep track of, and trying not to think about the mysteries of Earl Swagger. The file sat unopened on his lap. He could not bring himself to look at it somehow, any more than he could bring himself to take off his Colt.45, secreted in the fast-draw holster behind his right hip. He was just too used to it.
They called the bus at 4:15 and, ever obedient and respectful of the rules, he was one of the first to board. He sat halfway back, on the right, for it was said that the ride was smoothest there.
And then he saw Frenchy Short.
Yes, it was Frenchy all right, though not in his usual blue serge suit, but dressed far more casually, in denim jeans, a khaki shirt and a straw cowboy's hat, with a carpetbag full of clothes under tow. Was it Frenchy? Yes, it was Frenchy! He almost left his seat to yell a greeting, but then he looked at Frenchy and saw that he too was in line to board a bus.
Then his bus pulled out and Frenchy was gone.
But later, that night, when he got to Blue Eye, he had to ask the driver, 'You know that bus that was in the dock next to us at Texarkana?'
The driver just looked at him.
'You know that one? I didn't get a look at it, but where was it headed?'
'That'd be the little Rock bus,' the driver said.
'Oh, the Little Rock bus.'
'Yes sir,' said the driver. 'It heads straight on up 30 through Hope, on up to little Rock.'
'It just goes to little Rock?' asked Carlo.
'Yep. Well, that's where she finishes. She stops at Hope and Malvern and all them towns. Then she veers over 270 and toward Hot Springs. That's the Hot Springs bus. Most folks take it to Hot Springs, for the track and the gambling. Hot Springs, that's a damned old hot town, you'd best believe it, son.'
Chapter 26
The aspirin worked well enough on through De Queen but the throbbing began just beyond. He took some more but it didn't seem to help. Particularly, there was a pellet lodged between the layers of muscle on the inside of his left biceps and when it rubbed a certain way it sent a jack of pain through the whole left side of his body, once so bad he had to pull off Route 71 and let it pass. It made him thirsty for a powerful drink of bourbon.
He couldn't stop in Blue Eye because he knew too many folks and too many folks knew him. The next towns up the road offered no promise, small, dying places like Boles and Y City, mere widenings in the road, too small to have a doctor.
Finally, he came to Waldron, in Scott County, a town large enough to support such a thing. Waldron lay in a flatlands between the mountains, essentially a farm town, and it had grown prosperous on the rich loam of Scott. It was large enough to support a Negro district, a servant population to provide comfort to the wealthy white families in the area. Earl drove through it looking for a certain thing and at last found it: Dr. Julius James Peterson, OB-GYN, as the sign said. He parked around back and slunk up the back steps like a man on the run. It was near nine o'clock, but a light shone from within the frame house.
He knocked and after a bit the door opened, though a chain kept it from flying fully wide.
'Yes?' the man said, and there was fear in his voice, as there would be in the voice of any Negro man answering a nighttime knock and finding a large white male on the other side.
'Sir, I need some medical help.'
'Fm a baby doctor. I deliver babies. I can't help you. You could go on to Camp Chaffee. There's a dispensary there that's always open if it's an emergency. They wouldn't turn you down. There's a small hospital for white folks in Peverville too, if you want to go that way. I can't let you in here.'
'I can't go to them places. I'm by myself. This ain't no raid or night rider thing. I'm a police officer.'
Earl got out his wallet and showed both the badge and the identification card, officially stamped with the seal of the great state of Arkansas.
'I can't help you, sir. You are a white person and I am a Negro. That's a chasm that can't be bridged. There are people around here who would do my family great harm if I practiced medicine on a white person. That's just the way it is.'
'I guess I ain't like them others. Doc, I need help. I got some pellet riding under my skin, hurts like hell, makes me want a drink bad, and if I start drinking again, I lose everything. I have cash money, no need to make no records. Nobody seen me. I will be quietly gone when you are done. I'm asking a mighty favor, and wouldn't if I didn't have to.'
'You say you are not an oudaw?'
'No sir, I am not.'
'Are you armed?'
'I am. I'll lock the guns in the trunk of the car.'
'Go do that. After I remove the pellet you can't stay here.'
'Don't mean to.'
'Then disarm and come in.'
Earl did as he said he would, then slipped in the door. The doctor took him to a shabbily appointed but very clean examining room. Earl took his shirt off and sat on an examination table that had stirrups of some sort at the end. He didn't like the look of them stirrups.
'I count six in all,' he said. 'The one in my arm, for some reason it hurts the most.'
The doctor, a mild-enough-looking black man of lighter, yellowish complexion and hair that was almost red, looked at the mesh of scars on his body.
'The war?'
'Yes sir. The Pacific.'
'Then you know pain and won't go into shock. This will hurt. I don't have anesthetics here.'
'Okay. It don't matter. I can get through anything if there's a promise of better on t'other side.'
