still come looking. It don't matter that Pap up and died hisself off. Flem don't have Pap's grit, but he's just as much a snake.'
'We got to find out where they're weakest and attack 'em there.'
'Give it to Owney, he knows his business. Ain't no 'weakest.''
'He is a smart bastard. He's been running things a long time. Goddamn, I hate being this goddamn close and not getting it done.'
'We'll get it done, Earl. One way, the other, sooner, later. We'll get it done. That I swear.'
They drove back, the long, grueling three-hour pull through southern Arkansas down U. S. 70, through Arkadelphia and Prescott and Hope, making Texarkana by 4:00 and the Red River Army Depot by 5:00.
The boys were sitting outside the barracks, looking disconsolate. There was an Arkansas Highway Patrol truck and three Texas Highway Patrol cars. A group of Highway Patrolmen seemed to be running some kind of operation.
Earl and D. A. walked up.
'What the hell is going on?' Earl said.
'They come to git our guns,' said Slim. 'Got a piece of paper signed by the Arkansas governor, the Texas governor and a federal judge. Becker signed off on it too.'
'Shit,' said D. A., pushing past them. 'What's all this about? Who's in charge here?'
'You'd be Parker?' said a tall Arkansas Highway Patrol officer. 'Parker, I'm Colonel Jenks, commandant of the Arkansas Highway Patrol. Sorry about this, but at ten this morning, I got a call from the governor's office. I went on over there and he'd evidently just chewed the hell out of poor Fred Becker and got him to issue an order. By eleven the governor's staff had taken it before a judge, and by noon they's on the phone, working out a deal with these here Texas boys. They want us to take charge of your heavy weapons and your vests. Y'all can still carry.45s, but?'
'Sir,' Earl said to the commandant, 'we try and do this work without a base of fire and we will end up in a pickle for sure. That's something I learned in the war, the hard way.'
'I ain't saying what you done is bad. Nobody's had the sand to go face-on with them Hot Springs Grumleys and their out-of-town mobsters till you came along. But the governor's gitting heat from all sorts of folks, and that's how governors work. We serve at his pleasure, so we do what he says. That's the way it be.'
'Earl,' one of the boys called, 'it don't seem right. How can we do this work if we don't go in well- heeled?'
'Yeah,' another said, 'if we rim into more Grumley bad boys with big ol' machine guns, what're we supposed to do?'
'You got the best pistol skills in the state,' said Earl. 'You will prevail. That I know.'
But it disturbed him nonetheless.
'Can't we make some disposition so that if we get a big raid and it looks scary we can get our firepower back?' asked D. A.
'Sir,' said Jenks, 'you'll have to work that out with the governor. I can't settle it at this level. Your Mr. Becker will be the one to make that case.'
'Only case he makes is to git his picture in the paper.'
'I have to get these guns up to Little Rock tonight, and locked in the armory at State Police headquarters. As I say, it ain't my decision. I just do what I'm ordered to do. That's the way it be.'
Now the guns came out: the Thompsons, looking oddly incomplete without magazines, three apiece under the arms of State Troopers. Then the Brownings, so heavy that a man could carry but one. Earl recognized, by a raw cut in the fore grip wood where he'd banged it against the doorjamb, the gun he'd carried as he walked down the hall, keeping up a hail of fire, Frenchy behind him, feeding him the magazines.
'Hate to lose that goddamn BAR,' said D. A. 'That's what keeps 'em honest.'
'It ain't fair,' screamed a boy, who turned out surprisingly to be Slim, the oldest and the most salty. 'They can't be asking us to continue on these raids without no fire support. That ain't right.'
'It ain't right,' said D. A. 'I'll be talking hard with Becker. We'll get this worked out.'
'But we?'
'It's not?'
'We depend on?' came a tumble of voices.
'Shut it off!' Earl bellowed, silencing his own men and shocking the Highway Patrol officers. 'Mr. D. A. said he'd work on it. Now just back off and show these boys you're trained professionals who obey your officer.' That was his command voice, perfected over hard years on parade grounds and harder years on islands, and it silenced everyone.
'Thanks, son,' said Colonel Jenks. 'Can see you're a man who knows his stuff. Bet I know which one you'd be.'
'Maybe you do, Colonel,' said Earl.
'Heard nothing but good things about the ramrod down here. They say he's a heller.'
'I do a job if it comes to that.'
'Good man,' the colonel said, as if marking him for future reference.
A sergeant came to D. A.
'Sir, you'll have to sign the manifest. And what about the carbine?'
D. A. scratched his chicken-track signature on the paper and said, 'What carbine?'
'Well sir, in the original manifest you had six Thompsons, three BARs, six Winchester pumps and six M-l carbines. But you only got five carbines.'
'Hmmm?' said D. A. He looked over at Earl. This was a mystery, as the carbines had never been deployed, they'd simply stayed locked up down here in Texas. Earl didn't like the carbine, because its cartridge was so light.
'We never used the carbine,' said Earl.
'Well sir, it says you had six, but we only rounded up five.'
'I don't have no idea. Any of you men recall losing a carbine?'
'Sir, we ain't touched the carbine since training.'
'The carbines was never up in Hot Springs.'
'Colonel Jenks, what do you want to do here, sir?' asked the sergeant.
Jenks contemplated the issue for at least a tenth of a second. Then he declared, 'Call it a combat loss, write it off, and forget all about it. We don't have to make no big case out of it. It ain't even a machine gun. Now let's get out of here and let these men git going on their training.'
Chapter 38
It took a day to set up through the auspices of a friend of his who was an FBI agent in Tulsa and knew who to call. Carlo ended up paying for it himself, because he knew there was no budget and that D. A. would never approve. But he had to know.
He had never flown before. The plane was a C-47, though now, as a civilian craft, it had reverted to its prewar identity as a DC-3. It left Tulsa's airfield at 7:30 A. M. and flew for seven hours to Pittsburgh. The seats were cramped, the windows small, the stewardess overworked. He almost threw up twice. The coffee was cold, the little sandwich stale. His knees hurt, his legs cramped. In Pittsburgh, the plane refueled, exchanged some passengers for others, and finally left an hour later. It arrived, ultimately, at National Airport just outside Washington, D. C., at around 4:00 in the afternoon.
He took a cab to the Headquarters of the United States Marine Corps, at Arlington Annex, in Arlington, Virginia. It was a set of wooden buildings, shabby for so grand an institutional identity, behind barbed wire on a hill overlooking the capital. In the distance, a white rim of buildings and monuments could be seen, grandly suggesting the greatness of the country it symbolized, but out here, across the river, the warriors of that country made do with less. The only concession to ceremony was the presence of ramrod-stiff Marines in dress blues outside, keepers of a temple, but inside, he found no temple at all. It was merely a busy workplace of men in khaki humming with
