The Invaders

It wasn't anything new for Curtis to smack Linda June around, especially when he'd been drinking. This seemed like too much, Eric thought, even for them. Eric came up behind Curtis as he stood over Linda June all balled up on the couch. When Curtis cocked his hand back, Eric grabbed it. Curtis spun around and landed a haymaker on Eric's temple that sent him flying into the kitchen table. The sounds of Linda June's screaming prompted the neighbors in the trailer park to call the police. They wouldn't get there soon enough to stop what would happen next.

"I'm going back to that bedroom to get my pistol." Eric picked himself up off the floor. "When I come back you better not be here."

"If you bring that pistol in here, by God, you damn well better use it." Curtis didn't have to say "or else." Everybody in the room knew what he meant. And they knew that he meant it.

Eric staggered back to the bedroom. When he came back through the hall with his pearl-handled .38 revolver, he hoped Curtis would be gone. He wasn't surprised when he saw Curtis standing in front of the couch with his hands balled up at his sides, his nostrils flaring. "Get out of here, Curtis." Eric had the gun pointed right at Curtis's chest. Curtis didn't say a word. He lunged for the gun.

When the police finally arrived at the trailer on Vineyard Street, Eric was sitting peacefully at his kitchen table. In one hand he held the telephone to his ear. With his other thick, red hand he gripped a nearly empty glass. On the table next to the pearl-handled pistol was a bottle of Wild Turkey.

"The police are here. I need to go," Eric said into the receiver.

"What do I do, Eric?" my father asked on the other end of the line. Not much had changed since Eric and my grandmother had split up. He still looked after her with whatever little money he had. He still bought my sister and I birthday and Christmas gifts. And he still called my dad first whenever he got in a pinch.

"Just call Don," Eric replied. "Tell him to give you a horse. He'll understand."

Eric hung up the phone, knocked back what was left in the glass, then stepped over Curtis's body as he made his way to open the door for the police. The year was 1983. Eric Boatright was 59 years old. He was about to be arrested on a charge of murder in the first degree.

I visited my hometown of Hot Springs, Arkansas, for the Grade III $250,000 Southwest Stakes at Oaklawn Park. The Southwest is an important prep race for April's Grade I $1 million Arkansas Derby, which itself is an important prep for the Kentucky Derby.

Hot Springs, a town Garrison Keillor called the "loose buckle on the Bible Belt," has a colorful history. On the Friday before the race, I took in some of that history at the Gangster Museum of America on Central Avenue. The folks who work there wear fedoras and pinstripes but have accents like Cooter from The Dukes of Hazzard. It was jarring at first, but once I finished the tour it was easy to imagine all of Bathhouse Row in downtown Hot Springs bustling with redneck wise guys — the way it was from Al Capone's first trip there in 1920 until 1967, when the Arkansas State Police shut the doors on the last of the town's illegal casinos.

The first thing they tell you on the Gangster Museum of America tour is that Hot Springs has always been neutral territory. The Native Americans originally used the "valley of the vapors" as a place where warring tribes could fish, trade, and bathe in the hot waters without conflict. Gangsters, too, used Hot Springs as a refuge from violence. A popular vacation spot for hoods from New York to New Orleans, the unwritten rule was that when mobsters visited Hot Springs, everyone left their beefs behind. Rival gangsters could fish, bathe, and shoot dice side-by-side without fear of catching a bullet in the head.

For nearly a century, Hot Springs, Arkansas, was what they called a "wide-open town." There had been out-in-the-open illegal gambling in Hot Springs in one form or another for nearly a hundred years. Free-flowing booze and a half dozen major casinos made Hot Springs a larger gambling destination than Las Vegas, and a popular spot for mobsters to lam it. When the FBI finally caught Charles "Lucky" Luciano in 1936, after a nationwide manhunt, they found him taking a stroll down Bathhouse Row with the chief detective of the Hot Springs Police Department.