whatever. Who knew? Who could say?
Earl opened the door. The old woman had left the room pretty much intact when she left after his death. The guns were gone of course, presumably sold off, and the cabinet removed. Earl remembered standing before it as a child; in fact his one or two pleasant memories with his father seemed to revolve around the guns, which stood locked behind glass. The old man had some nice ones: Winchesters mostly, dark and oily, sheathed in gleamy soft wood, a Hi-Wall in.45-120, a whole brace of lever actions, from an 1873 he'd picked up somewhere to a '92 to an 1895 carbine, all in calibers nobody loaded anymore, like.40–72 and.219 Zipper and a beautiful old 1886 in.40–65; Daddy also had a couple of the little self-loaders, in.401. He had three shotguns for geese in the fall, and he had one bolt gun, the '03 Springfield, which he'd turned into a sleek and beautiful sporter. The guns were treated with respect. If Daddy approved?rare, but it happened?you were allowed to touch the guns. But they were gone. So was the desk, the volumes of works on hunting, reloading and ballistics, the liquor cabinet where the ever-filled bottle of magic amber fluid was kept. So was the map of Polk County, where he had painstakingly tracked his kills with coded color pins each year, yellow for deer, red for boar, black for bear, so that in the end, the map was a tapestry of brightly lit little dots, each signifying a good shot. A blank rectangular space stood on the wall, where the map had been taped for all those years and the paint hadn't faded. Now it was just emptiness.
And she had no stomach for removing the trophies themselves. It was as if Charles's powerful medicine still inhabited them, and looking at them on another wall, he saw they were dusty and ratty, beginning to fall apart like old furniture, their ferocity largely theatrical. Earl nevertheless felt the power of his father's presence.
Charles was a hunter. He stalked the mountains and the meadows of Polk and other nearby counties with his Winchesters, and he shot what he saw. He was a very good shot, an excellent game shot, and he learned the habits of the creatures. He was a man who could always support himself in the woods, and he had that Swagger gift, mysterious and unsourced, for understanding the terrain and making the good read, then finishing up with a brilliant shot on the deflection.
Earl remembered; his father took him hunting and taught him to shoot, and taught him to track, taught him patience and stoicism and a bit of crazed courage, the willingness to ignore the body and do what had to be done. And the odd thing was, they were skills that let Earl survive the dark journey that would become his fate. So he did in fact get something from his daddy, a great gift, even if he never realized it at the time.
He looked at the heads on the wall. Bear, boar, three deer, an elk, a cougar, a bobcat, a ram, all bearing either a graceful furl of horn or a mouthful of snaggly teeth. like any trophy hunter, his father took only the best, the oldest animals, who had long since passed their genes along to progeny. The taxidermist was a fellow in Hatfield, and he too had the gift.
The animals seemed to live on that wall. They were frozen in expressions of anger or assault, their lips curled back, their fangs bared, the full animal majesty of their power exploding off their faces. It was all make- believe, of course; Earl had been to the shop and the taxidermist was a bald, fat little cracker who smelled of chemicals and had a shop full of marble eyes sent from 34th Street in New York, intricate replicas of the real thing that gleamed and seemed to stare, but were merely glass.
What does this room tell me?
Who was my father?
Who was this man?
He stared at the trophy animals on the wall, and they stared back at him, relendess, if locked in place, still spoiling for a great fight.
What did my father know?
On the evidence of this room, only the pleasures of the hunt. And the pleasures of the land the hunt was conducted upon.
That's what a hunter knows. A hunter knows the land. A hunter roams the land, and even if he's not hunting that particular day, he's paying attention, storing up information, recording details that someday may come in handy.
That's what my father would know: the Arkansas mountain wilderness, as well as any man before or since.
That was the only place he was ever really happy.
Chapter 58
Owney was nervous. Across the way, there seemed a lot of activity. Searchlights and the pulsing flash of red gumballs cut the night as the cops stopped cars, threw up roadblocks, sent out search teams and dogs on the hunt for him. But the lake was serenely calm. It lay in the dark like a sheet of glass, glinting with illumination from the various points of light on the shore.
'Don't worry,' said Johnny. 'It'll be like the last time. It'll go without a hitch.'
'I ain't worried about the lake' said Owney. 'I'm worried about the forest. How can you remember? It was so complicated. It was at night.'
'I have a photographic memory,' said Johnny. 'Certain things I don't forget and you can take that to the bank.' He smiled, radiating charm. He held all the cards, and he knew it.
'And then we talk money.'
'There's plenty, believe me,' Owney assured him.
'That's the problem. I don't believe you. No matter what I ask for you'll cry-baby and try to jew me down. But I know you've got millions.'
'I don't have millions,' said Owney. 'That's a fuckin' myth.'
'Oh, I've done some checking,' said Johnny. 'I have a figure in mind. A very nice figure. After all, we are saving your life. It seems like I should take you for everything, because I'm saving everything.'
'Is this a getaway or a kidnapping?'
'Well, actually, it's a wee bit of both,' said Johnny. 'We won't leave you with nothing.'
'No, you wouldn't want to do that,' said Owney. 'You want me to be your friend after all this is over. I'll get back, somehow, you know I will. I'm Owney Maddox. I ran the Cotton Club. I ran Hot Springs. This is just a little setback. I ain't going into no retirement. I'll be big in the rackets again, you'll fuckin' see.'
'Yeah, sure,' said Johnny.
'I think I'll move out to California. The opportunities are golden and I got a feeling there's about to be a change in management real soon. A certain party's luck just ran out.'
It was almost time.
Johnny checked his watch and went to the mouth of the cave and looked across the lake. Owney followed and sure enough, out of the darkness they saw the white flashing sails of a large craft. That was the core of Johnny's plan. He knew that the law enforcement imagination was somehow drawn to the drama of the high-speed getaway. Thus cops thought of roads mainly, and of airplanes and railways. Crime was modem, fast-paced, built on speed. Who would ever suspect?a sailboat?
It was a beauty, owned by Judge LeGrand, a fifty-footer under two masts and a complexity of sails that pulled it gracefully and silently across the water. The judge entertained on it many times, taking visiting congressmen and dtans of industry out for elegant sails across the diamond-blue water, under the diamond-blue sky, swaddled in the green rolling pine hills of the Ouachitas, where they sipped champagne and ate oysters and laughed the evening away like the important men they were, so that when they lost their hundreds of thousands at Owney's gaming tables, they still went home with wondrous tales of Southern hospitality and sleek nights under starry skies.
The boat drew four feet; she was a trim craft, pure teak and brass, with a crew of four to run her and an auxiliary engine?nobody knew about this, it was her secret?that could propel her through the water in the absence of wind and had the special gift of taking her along narrow passages under mechanical power if necessary, and it would be very necessary.
The boat was too cumbersome to dock, so it simply put up at anchor seventy-five feet out and a dinghy, propelled by two oarsmen, slid toward them.
'All right, you boys, let's get aboard,' Johnny commanded as the small craft nudged ashore.
