Hot Springs (61 page)

“Okay,” said Ben.

“He’s a former Marine first sergeant. He won the Medal of Honor on Iwo.”

Bugsy’s eyes squinted in suspicion.

“No wonder you don’t want him on your tail.”

“What else can I do? Perform some service for him and believe that it’ll protect me from his wrath? Not in this world, pal.”

“Yeah, well, this will make you real happy. I will send some guys out there. Very tough guys. They will jump this Earl Swagger with crowbars and smash him in the head. They will drag him someplace in the woods, and, on my instructions, they will break every bone in his body. Every single one. It’ll take hours. They will smash his fuckin’ teeth out, break his nose, blind him, punch out his eardrums. The last words he hears will be, ‘Compliments of Ben Siegel, who remembers you from the train station.’ Then they’ll leave him there, and either he’ll die tied to that tree or he’ll be found and he’ll spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, blind, deaf and dumb. He will remember Ben Siegel, that I guarantee.”

It was a little of Ben’s famous craziness—the Bugsy part of him—that just leaked out.

Frenchy noted it, then stood. The two men didn’t shake hands, and Ben walked him to the door.

“And if anybody ever asks you, kid,” Ben said, “you tell them about the day you learned what kind of man Ben Siegel was.”

“Yes sir,” said Frenchy.

He went to his car and drove away.

Sometime later, Ben was reading the paper on the sofa. He sat with it in his lap, waiting for Chick Hill to come downstairs with Jerri. Al Smiley, his pal, sat next to him.

“This has been a very good day,” Ben said. “A very good day. I get to scratch an itch that’s been bugging me for over a year. The Flamingo is raking in the dough. I can pay off my debt to Meyer. Virginia will be back tomorrow. Hey, Al, life is good.” “Life is good,” said Al. “I always win. Nobody outfights me!”

Outside, the shooter steadied the carbine on the trellis. He wasn’t trembling at all, but then that was his gift At moments like these, he held together. Always had. Always would. It was what he was meant to do. Front sight. That was the key.

Trigger pull. Squeeze, not yank. The carbine was light, a little beauty of a rifle, powerful as a heavy .38 or one of those Magnums.

He saw Ben Siegel’s face against the front sight. Then the face faded to blur as the sight blade became hard and perfect.

The gun recoiled; he didn’t hear the blast.

Ben had just the impression of being punched hard and also a brief awareness of glass shattering. Then he—

The gunman fired again, watched as blood flew from the neck. He wasn’t aware of the man next to Bugsy collapsing in a heap on the floor.

He shot again and again into the face, watching as the whole beautiful head quivered each time it absorbed a bullet, then settled back, more broken, bloodier, the jaw askew, the cheekbone smashed. A dog was barking.

The gunman left the trellis and walked up to the window itself, standing close to the eight bullet holes clustered in the heavy glass, each with its silvery webbing of fracture.

Ben lay with his head back on the sofa, his hands in his lap, a whole backed-up toilet’s worth of blood corrupting the beauty of his suit and the flowers of the material of the furniture. His tie was still tight and perfect.

The dog barked again.

The shooter put the little rifle to his shoulder one more time, aimed carefully and squeezed the trigger. He fired through the punctured glass, and it collapsed like a sheet of ice. He hit Benjamin Siegel in the eye, blowing it out in a puff of misted blood and bone fragments, and it spun wedy through the air and landed with a revolting sound on the tile floor.

Frenchy lowered the carbine.

“That’s for the cowboy,” he said, “you fucking yentzer.” Then he turned and coolly walked around the house, through the neighbor’s yard, dropped the carbine into the back seat of his car, and drove away to the rest of his life.

Earl sat with his son in the rocker on the porch. He held the boy close and rocked gently. The sun was bright and shone off the whiteness of the newly painted bam. He had done a lot to the old farm, including painting all the buildings that same brilliant white, mowing the high grass, planting a garden. He had a plan for plowing the field in the next spring, to put out a small crop. He wanted to buy some horses too, because he wanted his son to ride.

He checked his watch. He wasn’t due on duty for another hour and Junie was in taking her nap. The State

Police black-and-white was parked in the barnyard, next to an old oak.

A Little Rock newspaper with two items of interest lay on the floor of the porch, next to the rocker, BECKER SETS GOV BID one headline had read; and far below it, in the corner, another bit of news from the old days: WEST COAST MOBSTER SLAIN.

Neither had anything to do with him. Both seemed far away, and from another lifetime, not even his own. His life was now entirely different from that one, more settled. The rigors of duty, a necessary job; the effort it took to keep the farm running and to help Junie, who was still recovering from the strain of her labor; and the requirements of this new thing, which pleased him so much more than he could ever have believed, this business of being a father.

The infant squirmed against him, made some unidentifiable sounds, and looked him square in the eye. There was something about the boy that impressed his father. He looked at things straight on, seemed to study them. He didn’t say much. He wasn’t a crier or a bawler, he seemed never to get into accidents or do stupid things like putting his hand in a fire or grabbing the hot teakettle. He never awoke in the night, but when they went in, early, he was always awake already, and watchful.

“You are something, little partner,” he said to his son.

The boy was ten months old, but he still had the warmth of a freshly baked loaf of bread to his father’s nose.

The boy wanted to play a game. He reached out and touched his father’s nose and his father jerked his head back and made a sound like a horse, and the boy’s face knit in laughter. He loved this game. He loved his daddy holding him.

“Ain’t you a pistol! Ain’t you a little pistol, buster! You are your old daddy’s number-one boy, yes, you are.”

He had an idea for the boy. No one would ever raise a hand against him, and no one would ever tell him he was no good, he was nothing, he was second-rate. He’d already talked to Sam about it. This boy would go to college. No Marine Corps for him, no life of war, of getting shot at, scurrying through the bush. He would have a good life. He would be a lawyer or some such, and have a life he loved. He’d face none of the things his poor old dad had just survived. No sir. That wasn’t for boys. No boy should have to go through that.

“Da—” said the boy.

“There you go, little guy! That’s it! You know who I am. I am your old damned daddy, that’s me.”

The boy’s teething mouth lit up in a smile. He reached out to touch his father’s nose again, and the game recommenced.

But then Earl noticed the presence of two small boys standing just off the porch as if they’d just come sneaking out of the treeline to the left and were pleased with their stealth.

“Well, howdy,” he called.

One was a slight youth, blond and beautiful; the other was bigger and duller, with the sad, slack face of someone vacant in the mental department.

“Howdy, sir,” said the smaller, sharper boy.

“What you-all doing way out here?”

“We come out on our bikes. We’s goin’ ‘splorin!”

“You find anything?”

“We’s looking for treasure.”

“Ain’t no treasure out here.”

“We gonna find treasure someday.”

“Well, maybe so.”

“You a police?”

“Why, yes I am. I am in the State Police. I haven’t put my uniform on yet. You boys look thirsty. You want some lemonade?”

“Lemon,” said the big boy.

“Lemonade/’ corrected the smaller one. “Bub ain’t too smart.”

“Not smart,” said Bub.

“Well sir, this here’s my baby boy.”

“He’s a cute one,” said the boy.

“Whafre your names, fellas?”

“I’m Jimmy Pye. This here’s my cousin Bub.”

“Bub,” said Bub.

“Okay, you all stay there. I’m going to go in and pour you two nice glasses of lemonade, you hear?”

“Yes sir.”

Earl walked into the house and set his son into his playpen, where the boy just watched.

He opened the refrigerator and got out a pitcher of lemonade that Junie always kept and poured out two tall glasses.

But when he returned to the porch, the boys were gone, having moved on in their quest for treasure.