by Stephen King
Rabbits had a set of tongs, but she couldn't get them in the hole. "Fuck this!" she cried, and tossed them to one side, and then stuck her fingers into the bloody hole, reached around until she found the slug that was in there, pulled it out, and threw it to the floor. Johnnie started to bend over for it and she said, "You can get your souvenir later, handsome. For now just hold him."
She went to work packing gauze into the mess she'd made.
Johnnie lifted up the dishtowel and peeked underneath it. "Not a minute too soon," he told her with a grin. "Old Red Hamilton has turned a wee bit blue."
Outside, a car pulled into the driveway. It could have been the cops, for all we knew, but there wasn't nothing we could do about it then.
"Pinch this shut," she told me, and pointed at the hole with the gauze in it. "I ain't much of a seamstress, but I guess I can put in half a dozen."
I didn't want to get my hands anywhere near that hole, but I wasn't going to tell her no. I pinched it shut, and more watery pus ran out when I did. My midsection clenched up and I started making this gurk-gurk noise. I couldn't help it.
"Come on," she says, kind of smiling. "If you're man enough to pull the trigger, you're man enough to deal with a hole." Then she sewed him up with these big, looping overhand strokes--really punching the needle in. After the first two, I couldn't look.
"Thank you," Johnnie told her when it was done. "I want you to know I'm going to take care of you for this."
"Don't go getting your hopes up," she says. "I wouldn't give him one chance in twenty."
"He'll pull through now," Johnnie says.
Then Dock and Volney rushed back in. Behind them was another member of the gang--Buster Daggs or Draggs, I can't remember which. Anyway, he'd been down to the phone they used at the Cities Service station in town, and he said the Gees had been busy back in Chicago, arresting anyone and everyone they thought might be connected to the Bremer kidnapping, which had been the Barker Gang's last big job. One of the fellas they took was John J. (Boss) McLaughlin, a high mucky-muck in the Chicago political machine. Another was Dr. Joseph Moran, also known as the Crybaby.
"Moran'll give this place up, just as sure as shit sticks to a blanket," Volney says.
"Maybe it's not even true," Johnnie says. Jack was unconscious now. His red hair lay on the pillow like little pieces of wire. "Maybe it's just a rumor."
"You better not believe that," Buster says. "I got it from Timmy O'Shea."
"Who's Timmy O'Shea? The Pope's butt-wiper?" Johnnie says.
"He's Moran's nephew," Dock says, and that kind of sealed the deal.
"I know what you're thinking, handsome," Rabbits says to Johnnie, "and you can stop thinking it right now. You put this fella in a car and go bumping him over those back roads between here and St. Paul, he'll be dead by morning."
"You could leave him," Volney says. "The cops show up, they'll have to take care of him."
Johnnie sat there, sweat running down his face in streams. He looked tired, but he was smiling. Johnnie was always able to find a smile. "They'd take care of him, all right," he says, "but they wouldn't take him to any hospital. Stick a pillow over his face and sit down on it, most likely." Which gave me a start, as I'm sure you'll understand.
"Well, you better decide," Buster says, "because they'll have this joint surrounded by dawn. I'm getting the hell out."
"You all go," Johnnie says. "You, too, Homer. I'll stay here with Jack."
"Well, what the hell," Dock says. "I'll stay, too."
"Why not?" Volney Davis says.
Buster Daggs or Draggs looked at them like they was crazy, but you know what? I wasn't surprised a bit. That's just the effect Johnnie had on people.
"I'll stay, too," I says.
"Well, I'm getting out," Buster says.
"Fine," Dock says. "Take Rabbits with you."
"The hell you say," Rabbits pipes up. "I feel like cooking."
"Have you gone cuckoo?" Dock asks her. "It's one o'clock in the morning, and you're in blood right up to the elbows."
"I don't care what time it is, and blood washes off," she says. "I'm making you boys the biggest breakfast you ever ate--eggs, bacon, biscuits, gravy, hash browns."
"I love you, marry me," Johnnie says, and we all laughed.
"Oh, hell," Buster says. "If there's breakfast, I'll hang around."
Which is how we all wound up staying put in that Aurora farmhouse, ready to die for a man who was already--whether Johnnie liked it or not--on his way out. We barricaded the front door with a sofa and some chairs, and the back door with the gas stove, which didn't work anyway. Only the woodstove worked. Me and Johnnie got our tommy guns from the Ford, and Dock got some more from the attic. Also a crate of grenades, a mortar, and a crate of mortar shells. I bet the Army didn't have as much stuff in those parts as we did. Ha-ha!
"Well, I don't care how many of them we get, as long as that son of a bitch Melvin Purvis is one of them," Dock says. By the time Rabbits actually got the grub on the table, it was almost the time farmers eat. We took it in shifts, two men always watching the long driveway. Buster raised the alarm once and we all rushed to our places, but it was only a milk truck on the main road. The Gees never came. You could call that bad info; I called it more of John Dillinger's luck.
Jack, meanwhile, was on his not-so-merry way from bad to worse. By midafternoon of the next day, even Johnnie must have seen he couldn't go on much longer, although he wouldn't come right out and say so. It was the woman I felt bad for. Rabbits seen new pus oozing out between those big black stitches of hers, and she started crying. She just cried and cried. It was like she'd known Jack Hamilton her whole life.
"Never mind," Johnnie said. "Chin up, beautiful. You did the best you could. Besides, he might still come around."
"It's cause I took the bullet out with my fingers," she says. "I never should have done that. I knew better."
"No," I says, "it wasn't that. It was the gangrene. The gangrene was already in there."
"Bullshit," Johnnie said, and looked at me hard. "An infection, maybe, but no gangrene. There isn't any gangrene now."
You could smell it in the pus. There wasn't nothing to say.
Johnnie was still looking at me. "Remember what Harry used to call you when we were in Pendleton?"
I nodded. Harry Pierpont and Johnnie were always the best of friends, but Harry never liked me. If not for Johnnie, he never would've taken me into the gang, which was the Pierpont Gang to begin with, remember. Harry thought I was a fool. That was another thing Johnnie would never admit, or even talk about. Johnnie wanted everyone to be friends.
"I want you to go out and wrangle up some big uns," Johnnie says, "just like you used to when you was on the Pendleton mat. Some big old buzzers." When he asked for that, I knew he finally understood Jack was finished.
Fly-Boy was what Harry Pierpont used to call me at Pendleton Reformatory, when we were all just kids and I used to cry myself to sleep with my head under my pillow so the screws wouldn't hear. Well, Harry went on and rode the lightning in Ohio State, so maybe I wasn't the only fool.
Rabbits was in the kitchen, cutting up vegetables for supper. Something was simmering on the stove. I asked her if she had thread, and she said I knew goddam well she did, hadn't I been right beside her when she sewed up my friend? You bet, I said, but that was black and I wanted white. Half a dozen pieces, about so long. And I held out my index fingers maybe eight inches apart. She wanted to know what I was going to do. I told her that if she was that curious she could watch right out the window over the sink.
"Ain't nothing out there but the privy," she says. "I got no interest in watching you do your personal business, Mr. Van Meter."
She had a bag hanging on the pantry door, and she rummaged through it and came out with a spool of white thread and cut me off six pieces. I thanked her kindly and then asked if she had a Band-Aid. She took some out of the drawer right beside the sink--because, she said, she was always cutting her
fingers. I took one, then went to the door.
*
I got in Pendleton for robbing wallets off the New York Central line with that same Charlie Makley--small world, ain't it? Ha! Anyhow, when it come to ways of keeping the bad boys busy, the reformatory at Pendleton, Indiana, was loaded. They had a laundry, a carpentry shop, and a clothes factory where the dubs made shirts and pants, mostly for the guards in the Indiana penal system. Some called it the shirt shop; some called it the shit shop. That's what I drew--and met both Johnnie and Harry Pierpont. Johnnie and Harry never had any problem "making the day," but I was always coming up ten shirts short, or five pairs of trousers short, and being made to stand on the mat. The screws thought it was because I was always clowning around. Harry thought the same thing. The truth was that I was slow, and clumsy--which Johnnie seemed to understand. That was why I played around.
If you didn't make your day, you had to spend the next day in the guardhouse, where there was a rush mat, about two feet square. You had to take off everything but your socks and then stand there all day. If you stepped off the mat once, you got your ass paddled. If you stepped off twice, a screw held you while another worked you over. Step off a third time and it was a week in solitary. You were allowed all the water you wanted to drink, but that was a trick, because you were allowed only one toilet break in the course of the day. If you were caught standing there with piss running down your leg, you got a beating and a trip to the hole.
It was boring. Boring at Pendleton, boring at Michigan City, I-God's prison for big boys. Some fellows told themselves stories. Some fellows sang. Some made lists of all the women they were going to screw when they got out.
Me, I taught myself to rope flies.
A privy's a damned fine place for fly-roping. I took up my station outside the door, then proceeded to make loops in the pieces of thread Rabbits had given me. After that, there was nothing to it except not moving much. Those were the skills I'd learned on the mat. You don't forget them.
It didn't take long. Flies are out in early May, but they're slow flies. And anyone who thinks it's impossible to lasso a horsefly . . . well, all I can say is, if you want a challenge, try mosquitoes.
I took three casts and got my first one. That was nothing; there were times on the mat when I'd spend half the morning before I got my first. Right after I snagged him, Rabbits cried out, "What in God's name are you doing? Is it magic?"
From a distance, it did look like magic. You have to imagine how it appeared to her, twenty yards away: man standing by a privy throws out a little piece of thread--at nothing, so far as you can see--but, instead of drifting to the ground, the thread hangs in midair! It was attached to a good-sized horsefly. Johnnie would have seen it, but Rabbits didn't have Johnnie's eyes.
I got the end of the thread and taped it to the handle of the privy door with the Band-Aid. Then I went after the next one. And the next. Rabbits came out to get a closer look, and I told her that she could stay if she was quiet, and she tried, but she wasn't good at being quiet and finally I had to tell her she was scaring off the game and send her back inside.
I worked the privy for an hour and a half--long enough that I couldn't smell it anymore. Then it started getting cold, and my flies were sluggish. I'd got five. By Pendleton standards, that was quite a herd, although not that many for a man standing next to a shithouse. Anyway, I had to get inside before it got too cold for them to stay airborne.
When I came walking slowly through the kitchen, Dock, Volney, and Rabbits were all laughing and clapping. Jack's bedroom was on the other side of the house, and it was shadowy and dim. That was why I'd asked for white thread instead of black. I looked like a man with a handful of strings leading up to invisible balloons. Except that you could hear the flies buzzing--all mad and bewildered, like anything else that's been caught it don't know how.
"I be dog," Dock Barker says. "I mean it, Homer. Double dog. Where'd you learn to do that?"
"Pendleton Reformatory," I says.
"Who showed you?"
"Nobody," I said. "I just did it one day."
"Why don't they tangle the strings?" Volney asked. His eyes were as big as grapes. It tickled me, I tell you that.
"Dunno," I says. "They always fly in their own space and don't hardly ever cross. It's a mystery."
"Homer!" Johnnie yells from the other room. "If you got em, this'd be a good time to get in here with em!"
I started across the kitchen, tugging the flies along by their halters like a good fly cowboy, and Rabbits touched my arm. "Be careful," she says. "Your pal is going, and it's made your other pal crazy. He'll be better--after--but right now he's not safe."
I knew it better than she did. When Johnnie set his heart on a thing, he almost always got it. Not this time, though.
Jack was propped up on the pillows with his head in the corner, and although his face was white as paper, he was in his right mind again. He'd come around at the end, like folks sometimes do.
"Homer!" he says, just as bright as you could want. Then he sees the strings and laughs. It was a shrill, whistley laughter, not a bit right, and immediately he starts to cough. Coughing and laughing, all mixed together. Blood comes out of his mouth--some splattered on my strings. "Just like Michigan City!" he says, and pounds his leg. More blood now, running down his chin and dripping onto his undershirt. "Just like old times!" He coughed again.
Johnnie's face looked terrible. I could see he wanted me to get out of the bedroom before Jack tore himself apart; at the same time, he knew it didn't matter a fiddler's fuck, and if this was a way Jack could die happy, looking at a handful of roped shithouse flies, then so be it.
"Jack," I says, "you got to be quiet."
"Naw, I'm all right now," he says, grinning and wheezing. "Bring em over here! Bring em over where I can see!" But before he could say any more he was coughing again, all bent over with his knees up, and the sheet, spattered with a spray of blood, like a trough between them.
I looked at Johnnie and he nodded. He'd passed beyond something in his mind. He beckoned me over. I went slowly, the strings in my hand, floating up, just white lines in the gloom. And Jack too tickled to know he was coughing his last.
"Let em go," he says, in a wet and husky voice I could hardly understand. "I remember . . ."
And so I did. I let the strings go. For a second or two, they stayed clumped together at the bottom--stuck together on the sweat from my palm--and then they drifted apart, hanging straight and upright in the air. I suddenly thought of Jack standing in the street after the Mason City bank job. He was firing his tommy gun and was covering me and Johnnie and Lester as we herded the hostages to the getaway car. Bullets flew all around him, and although he took a flesh wound, he looked like he'd live forever. Now he lay with his knees sticking up in a sheet filled with blood.
"Golly, look at em," he says as the white strings rose up, all on their own.
"That ain't all, either," Johnnie says. "Watch this." He then walked one step to the kitchen door, turned, and took a bow. He was grinning, but it was the saddest grin I ever saw in my life. All we did was the best we could; we couldn't very well give him a last meal, could we? "Remember how I used to walk on my hands in the shirt shop?"
"Yeah! Don't forget the spiel!" Jack says.
"Ladies and gentlemen!" Johnnie says. "Now in the center ring for your delight and amazement, John Herbert Dillinger!" He said the "G" hard, the way his old man said it, the way he had said it himself before he got so famous. Then he clapped once and dived forward onto his hands. Buster Crabbe couldn't have done it better. His pants slid up to his knees, showing the tops of his stockings and his shins. His change come out of his pockets and rattled away across the boards. He started walking across the floor that way, limber as ever, singing "Tra-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!" at the top of his voice. The keys from the stolen Ford fell out of his pocket, too. Jack was laughing in these big hoarse gusts--like he had the flu--and Dock Barker and Rabbits and Volney, all crowded in th
e doorway, were also laughing. Fit to split. Rabbits clapped her hands and called "Bravo! Encore!" Above my head the white threads were still floating on, only drifting apart a little at a time. I was laughing along with the rest, and then I saw what was going to happen and I stopped.
"Johnnie!" I shouted. "Johnnie, look out for your gun! Look out for your gun!"
It was that goddam .38 he kept tucked into the top of his pants. It was working free of his belt.
"Huh?" he said, and then it dropped onto the floor on top of the keys and went off. A .38 isn't the world's loudest gun, but it was loud enough in that back bedroom. And the flash was plenty bright. Dock yelled and Rabbits screamed. Johnnie didn't say nothing, just did a complete somersault and fell flat on his face. His feet came down with a crash, almost hitting the foot of the bed Jack Hamilton was dying in. Then he just lay there. I ran to him, brushing the white threads aside.
At first I thought he was dead, because when I turned him over there was blood all over his mouth and his cheek. Then he sat up. He wiped his face, looked at the blood, then looked at me.
"Holy shit, Homer, did I just shoot myself?" Johnnie says.
"I think you did," I says.
"How bad is it?"
Before I could tell him I didn't know, Rabbits pushed me to the side and wiped away the blood with her apron. She looked at him hard for a second or two, and then she says, "You're all right. It's just a scrape." Only we seen later, when she dabbled him up with the iodine, that it was actually two scrapes. The bullet cut through the skin over his lip on the right side, flew through maybe two inches of air, then it cut him again on the cheekbone, right beside his eye. After that it went into the ceiling, but before it did it plugged one of my flies. I know that's hard to believe, but it's true, I swear. The fly lay there on the floor in a little heap of white thread, nothing left of it but a couple of legs.
"Johnnie?" Dock says. "I think I got some bad news for you, partner." He didn't have to tell us what it was. Jack was still sitting up, but now his head was bowed over so far that his hair was touching the sheet between his knees. While we were checking to see how bad Johnnie was hurt, Jack had died.