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.
Chapter 36
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.
'So tell me, Owney, tell me about these dark lads, and we'll get to getting you your money's worth.'
Owney explained details of the shoot-out at Mary Jane's, confessing puzzlement at the victory of the men with the lesser guns over the men with the greater guns.
'See, your problem was your ambush site,' said Johnny. 'The Maxim's a fine gun, as all hearties found out in the Great War, but she's got to have a wide field of fire and has to be laid just right. Shooting down some stairs don't do a fella no good at all; it minimizes what you've got going for you. I can see you've never planned an ambush against trained men, eh, Owney? Nor had that border reiver scum from the mountains.'
'I guess not.'
'Your hero fellow kept his cool and understood that the ballistics of his weapon allowed him to shoot through wood. He waited till the belt clinked dry, then he enfiladed the stairwell. From that point you were doomed. As Herman will tell you when he gets here, properly deployed, pound for pound there's not a better gun about than a Browning Automatic Rifle.'
'So what are we going to do? I'm running out of time. I've threatened to bomb Niggertown to keep them from raiding, but only the cowboy cares about the niggers. Sooner or later, that threat will lose its meaning and
