private and exactly what Earl had in mind, and so a check changed hands and in two days, when the check cleared, Earl took over the lease for the next six months.
'Hope you and your daddy are happy out here, Mr. Bogash,' said the agent.
'This place'll make Daddy right happy, I guarantee it,' Earl said.
That done, he spent the next few days setting up. This involved, of course, notifying the phone company to get the phone hooked up, but once that was done, it was mainly rounding up supplies, but never overbuying in a single store. Though if you looked, you might have been surprised to find that in each of ten gun stores in northwest Florida, and in Alabama, in towns such as Brewton and Bluff Spring and Atmore, then all the way over to Crestview and Milton, then as far west as the larger city of Mobile, which had three gun stores and pawnshops, and as far up as Greenville, five boxes of.38–44 high velocity police cartridges had been sold. The fellows would bring their own rifle ammo, but Earl had to provide for himself, so in each of the stores he picked up something for the long gun he'd determined to carry, which was a.348 Winchester Model 71 that would punch through nearly anything solid. It was the biggest of the American big game cartridges, and the strongest lever action ever made, and the bruise it left in his shoulder was nothing to the hole it left in what he'd be shooting at.
In each of the same number of grocery stores, he purchased like-size amounts of Coca-Cola, coffee beans, hamburger meat, cans of green beans, mustard, ketchup, buns, steaks, roasts and chucks, plus plenty of bread and milk were taken up, to say nothing of detergent, soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes, and of course toilet paper. Elsewhere, in department stores: sheets, blankets, pillows. You'd have had to travel a wide circle to catch on to the fact that somebody was caching up for the arrival of a group. Then he made his most astonishing purchase: at a war surplus store in Pensacola, he bought two cases of canteens. Not American, however; rather, these were Italian, from World War I, and they resembled wine bottles. Each had been well maintained, and each had a canvas cover with a strap.
He worked for a couple of days laying in these supplies and setting up the place for the few days in a week or so when it would be occupied.
He had other tasks: he called Los Angeles and arranged for shipment of his cowboy pictures. He also studied maps of the state, the next state, and of course the next state after that, which was Mississippi.
He tried to think of everything. Was he missing something? Had he forgotten a detail? He had good men, a plan, and had kept a careful running account of all this for Mr. Trugood, whose advance he hoarded shrewdly and paid out of with a great deal of misery. He couldn't think of a thing, but he had a nagging suspicion there was a hole in his thinking. What the hell was it?
But it never came to him, and finally, he had but two last jobs to do.
The first was easy: it was sending a cash payment and a letter to the classified ad section of the Pensacola Journal Times, specifying that a certain ad should be run on a certain day. That was the ad that would He wrote a letter, addressed to a fellow in government service in Pensacola. He waited. There was nothing to do but wait by the phone for it to ring, and he thought it would, for the man he'd written to was extremely dutiful about obligations. It could have taken a week; it took a day. Earl answered. They had a brief chat, and agreed to meet the day following in a bar in downtown Pensacola.
Instead of his slacks and a sports shirt, Earl put on his suit, Brylcremed his hair, Kiwied his shoes, tied his tie tight, and tried to look as prosperous and solid as possible.
He then drove by back roads to Pensacola proper, and there he located the naval station. A uniformed shore patrolman stood sentry outside the gate that Earl had figured on, and Earl of course had his usual irritated reaction to such a fellow. They'd been the bane of his i young life, but this one simply sat in his little house in his dress whites, saluting and letting folks in and out.
Then Earl saw the man he'd written to and who had called him. He was in civilian clothes and drove a '50 Dodge convertible, jet black, but even so dressed everything about him looked military: the closeness of his haircut, the stern set of his mouth, and the precision of his head to his body, and the squareness of his shoulders and the erect ness of his posture.
Earl followed him from five car-lengths back in his own car, the point being just security. He wanted to make certain nobody was following him.
And nobody was.
The officer pulled up to the bar he had chosen at exactly the moment he had said he would, and he walked inside.
Earl lingered outside and made sure the meeting was unobserved, and then he headed in as well.
He entered, blinked in the darkness' and saw the man. He didn't know him well, and the man, when he recognized Earl, didn't smile. He put down his glass, stood, and briefly assumed a position of ramrod posture, a military gesture in an old run-down honky-tonk on the bad side of town.
The last time Earl had seen him was October of 1942. On that day, he was bleeding from two bullet wounds in the cockpit of a Grumman Wildcat that the Japs had just shot down. The plane was on fire and the Japs were still shooting at it. Earl shot at the Japs, driving them back, and raced under a screen of covering fire to the plane, which incidentally was about to blow up, said to him, when he got there, exactly what he now said in the bar, nine years later: 'Sonny, this ain't no way to meet new friends.'
'Howdy, Gunny Swagger,' said the officer. 'Jesus Christ, nice to see you. I know you got out a first sarge, but you'll always be ' to me.'
'Well, sir,' said Earl, taking the firm grip and paying it back with one just as firm, 'it don't matter, ' now it's just plain old Earl. And you may not be so happy when you hear what I got cooked up.'
'Knowing you, gunny, I'll bet it's a wowzer.'
Earl smiled.
'It is, Admiral. It is.' jam came home ragged and spent. He was not in the best of moods. He gathered up his mail, poured himself a bourbon, and retired alone to his dark study. Throughout the house, he could hear the echo of kids, which had once filled him with joy. Tonight, it just made his headache greater and his depression heavier.
He'd spent hours on the phone, tracking fellows from the Harvard Medical School class of '28, and all that he could find were well established now, deep in prosperous practices or inhabiting prestigious professorships, which meant of course that they were too busy or too important to come to the phone, and when they did, they were usually so pompous and self-adoring that it took a great deal of nudging and apple-polishing to get anywhere with them. And when he finally got someplace, it was no place.
Some, but by no means all, remembered David Stone, and an even smaller subset of that group were willing to share any insight into him, and even those who did, it quickly turned out, knew only the David Stone that Sam began with: brilliant researcher, selfless humanitarian, hard worker, charmer. Married a beautiful woman. Came from a great family.
Never had kids, no, but he was too busy on the frontiers of medicine, doing good in the world. Did something important for the Army during the war. A real tragedy, his loss. There seemed to be something of a physicians' benevolent protective society in play by in formal fiat, by which one doctor agreed never to say anything negative about another doctor.
The David Stone that Sam had uncovered?a man with secrets, a man obsessed with cleansing the world, a man who in his most intimate letters to his wife was strangely inauthentic, a man with a nervous disposition that might be regarded as clinical madness?only existed in Sam's knowledge, but there was no other public acknowledgment of such a personality.
So Sam had the hideous weight on his shoulders that he was simply wasting his time and the money that Davis Trugood would have to pony up for the phone bills of so many long-distance calls. And Sam had to charge him, for he was very low on funds, and no other even small cases were coming to him, as if the men from HUAC, though vanquished and driven off, had still besmirched him in the county imagination.
So Sam also kept busy living up to his civic responsibilities during this period, to keep himself before the public eye, though his heart was no longer in it. He attended town council meetings and Democratic party meetings (essentially the same, and Sam always wondered why the hell they just didn't combine them) and continued as a deacon of the church and as recording secretary of the P. T. A. and made the rounds on the Negro churches because he didn't want to lose that vote, and encouraged the newspaper to continue its chronicles of the various malfeasances of the hapless Feebus Bookins, his scandalous replacement.
And of course he worried.
