men I let down and who paid with it with their lives. There were legions of these beyond Bobby Lee, platoons full of them, from the 'Canal to the railyard in Hot Springs, all of whom had trusted him and there wasn't a damn thing he could do for them except watch them die.
A thought came to Earl. He could find a rope and do the same trick and that would solve a lot of problems for a lot of people, mostly himself. The faces of boys wouldn't always be there, except when he was in a gunfight, to haunt him and sour his sleep, his food, his life.
But Earl was somehow beyond that now. He had a vague memory of shooting himself in the head in a bathroom in Washington, dead drunk, and finding that he'd forgotten to load the chamber, the only time ever in his whole life when he had pulled a trigger and been surprised at what happened.
Bobby Lee hadn't been so lucky. He wanted to leave the world and no secret part of him intervened. He kicked the barrel and he left the world and went to a better world, where no drunken father would take his anger out on him, and beat him and beat him just to express his own rage at what lurked deep in his own mind. October 2, 1940. Earl had been in the Panama Canal Zone at Balboa, on jungle maneuvers, happy in his far-off mock war, his brain consumed with the tactical problems, the discomforts, the need to lead his men, his worry over a captain who seemed a little too fond of the bottle, the?
No, no. Not October 2,1940. That was something else. That was something else. Bobby Lee killed himself two days later, October 4, 1940. Why had he remembered October 2?
Oh, yes. Now he had it: Carlo Henderson had pointed out that the Alcoa payroll job had been October 2. Five men shot and killed four railway guards in the same damned railyard, and got away scot-free with $400,000 that very quickly came back to Owney Maddox, who probably was going to live off it for the rest of his life.
Something nagged at Earl.
Suddenly he wasn't in the dust-choked bam anymore, where his brother died and where the general agenda was rot and ruin, but only in his head.
Daddy must have beaten Bobby Lee really bad on October 3 or October 4. He must have gotten completely drunk and angry and forgotten himself and beat the boy so hard the boy concluded there was a better place to be and it wasn't in this world.
Why October 4?
Well, why not? If it was going to happen, it was going to happen and any one date was as good as another.
Still Earl couldn't put it quite away. It was two days after the most notorious crime of the era. His daddy would have been busy on roadblock duty all that?
Well, what about that?
Why wasn't Daddy parked out on some roadblock? A robbery that big, leaving that many men dead, the roadblocks would have stayed out for a week at least. Yet somehow in all that mess, Daddy has a chance to get liquored up and comes home and finds his second son and cannot help but release his deepest rage and beats on the boy so bad that the boy decides this life ain't worth living no more and that he will stop the hurting.
Could Charles have had something to do with the robbery?
It almost seemed possible. For with Charles's secret life in Hot Springs, he'd certainly have come to the notice of Owney and the Grumleys. His weakness made him vulnerable to blackmail, as did his gambling debts. If they needed him, he'd have been powerless to stop them. He was made to order for the taking, with his rigidity, his pride, his secret shame, his alcoholism.
And maybe it wasn't till afterward he learned that four men had died and he hadn't just helped robbers but killers as well. And he'd been so overcome with disgust and self-loathing for what he'd done, he'd laid on a big drunk. The biggest. And God help his child when he got in that way.
But then Earl had a sudden laugh. Standing there in that rotting bam, breathing the choking dust and smelling the odor of rot and shit and rust, he laughed hard.
What on earth could my daddy have known to help those birds? Charles Swagger knew nothing! What the hell value was he? He knew how to sap a drunk and get the cuffs on. He knew how to fix an uppity Negro with a stare so hard it would melt a safe. He knew how to shoot, as he'd proved in the Great War, and in the bank in Blue Eye in 1923, bur them boys didn't need shooters, that was clear; they knew how to shoot.
Earl turned, and slipped out of the barn. A cloud had come over the sun, so it was cooler now, and the freshness of the air revived him somewhat as he escaped the dense atmosphere. He allowed himself a smile. His father! A conspirator in a train robbery! That stubborn, mule-proud old bastard with his stern Baptist ways and his secret weakness and rancid hypocrisy! What could he offer such men! They'd laugh at him because they didn't fear him and without the power of fear he had no power at all.
Earl walked over to the porch and sat down. He knew he should leave soon. It was time to go. He had to make peace with his failures, to face the future, to go on and?
But: Who was my father?
Who was he? I don't know. He scared me too much to ever ask the question when the man was alive, and his memory hurt too much to ask it when he was dead. But: Who was he?
He turned and looked into the old house. If there was an answer maybe it was in the house that Charles Swagger inherited from Swaggers before and made his own little invincible kingdom.
Earl rose and went to the door. It had been nailed shut. He hesitated, then remembered that he now owned the place and the door only sealed him off from his own legacy. With a stout kick, he blasted the door open, and stepped inside.
Some houses always smell the same. He'd have recognized it anywhere, though now the furniture was gone, as were the pictures off the wall. The smell was somehow more than the accumulated odors of his mother's cooking and the generations of cooking that had come before; it was more than the grief or the melancholy that had haunted this place; it was more than the bodies that had lived here. It was unique and its totality took him backward.
He remembered himself as a boy of about twelve. The house was so big and dark, the furniture all antiques from the century before. If his father was home, the house would tell him: there'd be a tension somehow in the very structure of the universe. Daddy might not be angry that day, might merely be aloof and distant, but the danger of his explosiveness would float through these rooms and corridors like some sort of vapor, volatile and nerve- breaking, awaiting the spark that set it off.
Or maybe Daddy was drinking. He drank mostly on the weekends but sometimes, for unknown reasons, he'd drink at night and the drink loosened his tongue and let his demons spill out. Maybe he'd hit you, maybe he wouldn't, but it wasn't just the hitting; he'd be on you, like some kind of stallion or bull or bull rooster. He had to dominate you. He couldn't let you breathe.
What're you staring at, goddammit, he'd demand.
What's wrong with you, boy. You some kind of girl? You just stare. I'll knock that goddamned stare off your face.
Charles, the boy didn't mean nothing.
In my house, nobody stares at me. This is my house. Y'all live here because I let you. I set the rules. I provide the food, I pay the hands, I keep the law in this county, I set the rules.
Earl walked from room to room. Each was empty in fact but full in his own mind. He remembered everything, exactly: the placement of the sofa, the size and shape of the dining room table, the old brown pictures of Swaggers from an earlier time and place, he remembered them all.
Whoa, partner, he counseled himself. Don't let your hate just fog your mind.
He tried another approach. If you must understand your father, don't think about what made him angry, since everything made him angry. Think about what made him happy.
He tried to remember his father happy. Was his father ever happy? Had his father ever smiled?
He had no memory of such an event, but in time he realized that being occupied, his demons quelled momentarily by mental activity, was as close to happiness as Charles Swagger, sheriff of Polk County, ever got.
So Earl knew where he had to go.
Not into the kitchen or the bedroom or the cellar, and not upstairs where the boys slept, but back through the house to his father's trophy room.
That was his father's sanctum. That's where his father retreated. It was a sacred temple to… well,
