over but he hadn’t been drinking. Rather it was the caffeine he’d had in the Diet Coke at Bob Lee Swagger’s that had kept him awake, full of ideas and theories and arguments that he hadn’t made, until well after four. Finally, he had been permitted to sleep. He checked his watch. It was close to eleven.
Nothing to do. He tried to figure out his next move but there was no next move. He thought he’d go back to his apartment in Oklahoma City and maybe work something out. But that idea filled him with boredom. His big book was going the way of all flesh: that is, toward lassitude and indolence and ultimately nothingness.
Russ showered, dressed, checked his wallet. He had less than fifty dollars left. It was about a ten-hour drive back to Oklahoma City, through New Mexico and across Texas and half of Oklahoma. It filled him with despair and self-loathing.
He threw his dirty clothes in the suitcase and went out to dump it in his car. Then he settled up with the motel—his credit card didn’t bounce, not quite yet—and gassed up. Driving through Ajo, he pulled into the little cantina where he’d had so many lunches.
He went in, took his familiar seat at the bar, and without even having to order it, the usual plate of excellent barbecue was served, with a draft beer. Russ ate, enjoying it. That woman sure could cook.
“Well,” he said to the bartender, “I didn’t quite spend a thousand on the barbecue, but it’s pretty damn close.”
“You did okay, son,” the bartender said. “Now I take it you’re moving on.”
“Yep. Gave it my best shot. Got to the man, put it before him and maybe for just a second I saw something in his eyes. But no. He said no.”
“You worked as hard as any of ’em. But he’s a tough nut to crack, that one.”
“That he is. Well, anyway, I really enjoyed your barbecue. No kidding, it was the best. I’ll miss it. I—”
But then he noticed how quiet it had become in the bar and that the barkeep was standing almost gape- mouthed and goofy. He looked left and right and there was only silence and men staring quietly. Then he looked in the mirror across the bar and at last saw the man standing behind him, tall and sunburned, with a shock of tawny hair and gray, narrowed eyes.
Swagger sat down next to him.
“Howdy,” he said.
“Er, howdy,” said Russ.
“Barbecue’s pretty good here, so they say.”
“It’s great,” said Russ.
“Well, one of these days I’ll have to get some. You still interested in writing that book?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Nothing in it about Vietnam? Nothing about 1992? That still the deal?”
“Yes sir.”
“You all packed?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Well, then,” Bob said, “you and me’re going to Arkansas.”
10
The offices, which occupy the top two floors of the Superior Bank Building right across from Central Mall, are everything one might imagine of dominant prosperous regional corporations, complete to potted palms, soothing wall-to-wall carpeting, leather furniture and exposed brick in the public and presentation areas, all of it designed and coordinated by one of the finest (and most expensive) corporate interior design firms in Little Rock, no Fort Smith firm quite being up to the owner’s tastes. In these offices, lawyers and secretaries and engineers labor intensively on Bama Construction’s far-reaching plans, such as the Van Buren Mall or the Planters Road residential development; meanwhile trucking executives supervise the hundreds of routes and accounts that Redline controls, as Fort Smith is ideally located for east-west commerce, given its central location on the huge U.S. 40 route between Little Rock and Tulsa. It all hums along perfectly. The only oddity is the huge corner office, jammed with antiques, with two vivid picture windows that yield powerful views of the city. From here, one can see the old downtown, the bridge over the mighty Arkansas River and even a little of Oklahoma.
It’s a beautiful office, some say the most beautiful in Fort Smith. It displays on one wall civic awards and family mementos, pictures of visiting dignitaries and political figures, examples of philanthropy and civic involvement, all signifying a solid career and a solider place in the community. Yet the office is almost always empty.
Rather, Randall T. “Red” Bama prefers to spend his time in the back room of Nancy’s Flamingo Lounge, on Midland Boulevard in north Fort Smith, on an uneasy tribal border where the black district spills into a poor white one, where the city’s surprisingly large Thai population has begun to contest its more lengthily settled Vietnamese one, where a workingman can get an honest but tough game of pool and a shot and a beer, all for under five dollars, and a stranger can get a steely look that tells him to get lost fast. Perhaps such quarters are an unnecessary indulgence. To keep his empire running—or at least that part of the empire which the newspapers so regularly chronicle—Red must make dozens of calls a day to his middle managers, for of course he makes all decisions himself. It helps that he has a supremely organized mind and a special gift for numbers. It’s said he can add as many as eight three-digit numbers accurately in less than ten seconds, which qualifies him not quite as a prodigy but certainly as a man with a flair for integers.
Red arrives at ten, parking his gray Mercedes S-600 on the street where it will not be molested, stolen, ticketed or even touched. He always drives himself, enjoying the time alone on his spin down from his family’s complex on Cliff Drive above Fort Smith, clearing his mind for the day’s tasks. But he’s preceded by two extremely professional men in a black Chevy Caprice who are authorized by the state of Arkansas to carry the SIG-Sauer P229 .40-caliber semiautomatics they wear in shoulder holsters under their jackets. They are tough, calm and decisive, excellent shots. Each wears Kevlar Second Chance body armor, capable of defeating all handgun and most shotgun ammunition. They are never far from Red.
Red doesn’t say hello to Nancy because there is no Nancy and nobody can remember or cares much if there ever was. He makes his way to the back room, where he hangs up his expensive suit coat, sits at a navy-surplus desk and begins to drink black coffee out of Styrofoam cups from the bar while a continual stream of supplicants, acolytes, gofers, errand boys, emissaries and the summoned go before him for judgment or assignment. It is here that he receives reports on his nineteen pawnshops, his seven porno stores in the greater Fort Smith area, on his heroin dealerships and his crack franchises, mostly located in the black section of town, his six brothels and his seven rural gambling cribs, located across the river in Oklahoma, and the jewel of his night empire, the Choctaw Gentleman’s Club, in Holden, Oklahoma, five miles west on Route 64, where rubes pay five dollars admission and sit there drinking overpriced beer and slipping one-dollar bills between the plastic-engorged breasts of the strippers, who must give forty-five cents on the dollar to the boss man.
His enforcers and district captains report in, with good news or bad, usually good. Occasionally, Red must order severe consequences for an infraction, not a pleasant task but a necessary one and one from which he has never and will never shrink. It is here that he conducts meetings when necessary with Armand Gilenti, the crime boss of Little Rock and Hot Springs, or with Jack Deegan, who runs Kansas City these days, and sometimes with Carmen St. Angelo, of the New Orleans organization and sometimes Tex Westwood, of Dallas.
It is said that Red sticks to the old room in the back of the old bar and billiard parlor because that is where his father, Ray Bama, did his business and built, on a smaller scale, the brilliant organization which Red inherited upon his father’s death (car bomb, culprit uncaught, 1975) and so vigorously expanded upon.
Perhaps, perhaps not. Red in other ways does not seem a man given to sentiment, being noted far and wide for shrewdness, sagacity, persistence and toughness, though he indulges his three children from his first marriage
