My Redacted Life: Chapter 26 (Cont._3)

As hard as it was to tell that woman that she was right, Brenda had me walking by noon Saturday. The more I walked, the better my ankle felt until I could get around without my arm around her shoulder. I didn’t share that with her for a spell, but she finally figured it out on her own. She spun away from me, turned, cocked her head and smiled. “Miracle cure, if you ask me,” she said.

What could I do but agree? I leaned over and kissed her. “Thanks.”

“Want to do something special? She flexed her eyebrows up and down in a disarming and devilish fashion.”

My heart fluttered. “Like what?”

“Take me to Hot Springs.”

“Hot Springs?”

“Yeah. I wanted to go before school starts in the fall. This seems like a good day for it.”

“Okay,” I said. I was stuck a couple sentences back, but it didn’t seem like terrible idea.

“Let me go change. I’ll be right back.”

I showered quickly and put on some jeans and a t-shirt, not a nautical one, just a modest blue thing that spoke, I thought, of stability and masculinity. I was hardly limping by now.

She came back just as I was finished dressing. She wore loose white slacks, a form-fitting and revealing blue pull-over and sensible walking shoes. Her long hair sparkled as it hung down her back. “I’m ready,” she said. “And quit looking at me like that.”

I came to my senses and escorted her to the car. I added a slight limp for pity’s sake. Soon we were on University Avenue headed for I-30 and adventure. She settled in an told me about some stunts that she and Vernell, who was from the Hot Springs area, had pulled while attending college. Common courtesy and a natural life-wish prevents divulging details. Let’s just say they weren’t the placid students they sometimes wished to portray.

We passed the Arkansas Highway Department “castle” just before leaving the Little Rock city limits. It towered over the landscape, an isolated and independent part of state government. Its chief function was to build highways and freeways that would induce traffic congestion. It would become very good at it over time.

We came to the small settlement of Bryant, a community that had grown up around a sawmill and boasted a bank that had been robbed four times by the same man. Next was the blue-collar union town of Benton, center of the state’s aluminum industry. Beyond that, was the Saline River, on which, farther south, Civil War armies had fought a fierce battle at a place known as Jenkin’sFerry. A Union victory had saved the remnants of a large force that left Little Rock months earlier with conquest in mind and nothing but adversity in waiting. My great-grandfather’s unit participated in the battle, on the losing side.

We didn’t care about those things. We turned off the freeway and began the lovely drive that would take us to Hot Springs.

All cities in our state are unique. There are three that are more unique than normal: Eureka Springs, Helena (as it was known at the time—any city where Robert Johnson had played guitar is unique), and the “mostest” unique city in the state, Hot Springs. It is the only city in the country built around what would become a national park. In fact, the official name of the city is “Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas.”

Oddly the spot on which the city rests has always been a place of peace, a welcome site in what can be, at times, a troubled world. Ancient Native American tribes, often at war otherwise, would meet in harmony there, in the “Valley of the Vapors” to trade, often for Novaculite Rock, also called Arkansas Stone, a hard rock useful for fashioning knives and other instruments, including arrowheads.

During the mobster era, rival gangsters would visit the city under a truce of peace to avail themselves of the baths that utilized the natural hot springs that flowed from subterranean sources. Characters as disparate as Al Capone and Babe Ruth knew the city well.

We didn’t care. I had parked the Green Angel and we were walking along Central Avenue, the main, actually the only, through street in the downtown. It was built over a creek that ran through two hillsides. That provided the only option for transportation through the pass, but it also tempted Nature, periodically, to remind puny humans of its power to flood and destroy.

As we walked along, I felt people staring at me. After much observation, I realized they weren’t staring at me. As we walked along Magnolia-lined sidewalks, I felt proud. Let them stare at that sashaying beauty holding my hand.

I didn’t care. Was I a lucky man, or what?

Our special city.