bumbled toward a light ahead, and pushed through a door, and found themselves in a moist hot fog with apparitions.
'Get a doctor, get a doctor!' Earl hollered, but what he heard was screams as shapes ran by him, scattering in abject panic, which he didn't quite understand, until a naked old lady with undulating breasts ran by him.
He fell to clean tiles which he soiled with the slop on his shoes and pants as other women ran by, screaming.
And then a policeman arrived, gun drawn.
'Get this boy to a hospit?' he started, but the cop hit him, hard, in the face with the pistol barrel, filling his head with stars and pain, and he was aware that others were on him, pinning him. He heard the click as the handcuffs were locked about his pinioned wrists. Then someone hit him again.
Chapter 49
Earl lay in the city jail. No one interviewed him, no one asked him any questions, no one paid him any attention. They let him shower, and gave him a prison uniform to wear, and took his suit out for cleaning. He seemed to just brood and smoke and had trouble sleeping. Late one night, a decent bull who'd been a Marine led him from a cell into an anteroom and let him call his wife, to tell her, once again, he had survived.
'I knew,' she said. 'They didn't have your name in the papers with those other poor boys.'
'That's the one thing they got right, then.'
'All those boys, Earl,' she said.
'It was just so wrong,' he said.
'Earl, come home. That is the devil's own town. You've given it every last thing and what's it got you?'
'Nothing.'
'Earl, it's not worth it.'
'No, it's not. It never was. All them boys gone.'
'Earl, you can't think about that. It'll kill you.'
'I know. I should think of other things: how's that baby?'
'Kicking a bit. A little kicker, if you ask me.'
'I'm coming home as soon as I can, sweetheart. I will be there when it comes.'
'I know you will or die trying,' she said.
He watched it play out in the newspapers over the next few days. He thought he was beyond surprise, but even he had trouble believing what came next. The New Era had it thus:
JAYHAWKERS AMBUSH SELVES
Seven Die in Railyard Mixup
Members of the Prosecuting Attorney's special raid team evidently got in a gunfight amongst themselves in darkness last night in the Missouri and Pacific Railyard.
Seven men were killed, including D. A. Parker, a legendary FBI agent who shot it out at one time with the gangster chieftains of the '30s.
Sources indicate that Parker was the leader of the unit, known in local parlance as 'Jayhawkers,' after the Kansas brigands that bedeviled Hot Springs before the Civil War.
'I am exceedingly disappointed in Mr. Parker,' said Fred C. Becker, Garland County Prosecuting Attorney. 'He was a man of experience but evidently in his advanced age, his mind began to deteriorate and he made a number of bad judgments. Night operations are tricky, as I learned firsthand in Italy in the United States Army. I will forever hold myself responsible for my lack of foresight in not replacing him with more rational personnel. I feel the pain of this loss immensely. And I take full responsibility.'
Sources gave this account of the night's events.
Acting on a tip, Parker took his unit to the rail-yard, where he suspected a train robbery, similar to the Alcoa Payroll Job of 1942, was being engineered.
In the darkness, his men got separated. For some reason, one of them fired and all the others began to fire at indistinct targets.
When it was over, seven men, including Parker, lay dead.
The state papers in little Rock were kinder, but only a little bit. In all, that seemed the verdict: an idiotic D. A. Parker leading his little ragtag band into the railyard on a fool's errand, where out of sheer stupidity it self- combusted. The Jayhawkers had killed themselves.
Earl knotted the rag up into a ball and tossed it across the cell. He lay all day and night. It was not unlike the war. He just stared at a numb patch of ceiling, trying to work out what had happened and why. He tried not to think of the boys and the brief spurts of fire that took them down so neady, and how well planned, how ingenious the whole thing was. He tried to exile the grief he felt for the good young men and the rage he felt for Becker and Owney Maddox and this Johnny Spanish, the professional bank robber, who must have set the whole thing up.
He tried so very hard, and he tried hard not to think of the mute coffins, lined up and shipped without ceremony back to their points of origin.
On the third day, he was taken from the cell into a little room, and there discovered not Fred C. Becker but Becker's head clerk, a ferrety little man with eyeglasses named Willis O'Doyle.
'Mr. Swagger?'
'Yeah. Where's Becker?'
'Mr. Becker is working on important cases. He could not attend.'
'That bastard.'
'Mr. Swagger, attacking Mr. Becker verbally will not do you any good in this room.'
'Am I being charged with anything?'
'No. Not if you cooperate.'
'Jesus Christ, he gets seven men who fought and bled for him killed and I'm supposed to cooperate?'
'Mr. Becker is as upset as you at the outcome of the action. But he feels with more effective leadership from Mr. Parker and yourself this could have been avoided.'
O'Doyle looked at him with placid ideologue's eyes, unaware, uninterested.
'Mister, you don't know much about things, do you?'
'Be that as it may, Mr. Swagger, I am here to inform you that the governor of the state of Arkansas has today officially required that the prosecuting attorney's special raid team officially cease to exist. Mr. Becker has decided to comply with that order. A news release to that effect will be put out this afternoon.'
'He can still win, you know. He can still hit the Ohio, even with just a few state cops, close it down, and put it to Owney Maddox.'
'I don't think Mr. Becker is interested in further dangerous activities, especially in the downtown area.'
'He's given up.'
'Sir, it does you no good to assail Mr. Becker.'
'If he doesn't do something, he's a loser. He's gone. Nobody^ ever elect a quitter to anything in this state. It's the South, for God's sakes.'
'Mr. Swagger, the city attorney was going to indict you on charges of malicious mischief, discharging a firearm within city limits, leaving the scene of an accident, and breaking and entering for that little trick of crashing into the Fordyce. You're lucky he didn't include pandering and sexual deviancy for entering the women's bathing area!'
O'Doyle was a prude; his little face knitted up in distaste.
'But Mr. Becker interceded in your behalf. All charges will be dropped against you and Mr. Henderson. The condition is that you sign a statement acknowledging the events in the railyard three nights ago, and leave town immediately, and never come back. This offer is on the table for the next ten minutes. Mr. Becker wants you gone. Gone forever, so that he can begin the healing. He has many more steps to make on his journey.'
Earl just looked at him with contempt. Becker had made some kind of peace with the city, with, presumably,
