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World, Chase Me Down
“Part poetry, part penny dreadful, World, Chase Me Down grips you with an originality that will keep you rooted to your chair.”
—Craig Johnson, New York Times bestselling author of the Walt Longmire mysteries
“The kidnapping that was called ‘the crime of the century’ in the early 1900s later became just a footnote in Omaha history, but Andrew Hilleman has again given it fascination and life.”
—Ron Hansen, bestselling author of The Kid and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
“Andrew Hilleman is a fine stylist with a great sense of fun and an impressive grasp of popular culture in the early twentieth century.”
—Mary Doria Russell, bestselling author of Doc and Epitaph
“A brilliant mix of pulp and balladry, narrated by an adventurous, philosophical, lovelorn outlaw, World, Chase Me Down reminds me of my favorite portraits of criminal lives—Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me and Ron Hansen’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford—and proves Andrew Hilleman to be as good a writer as any there is.”
—Timothy Schaffert, author of The Swan Gondola
“A first-class page-turner, layered with ambition, greed, promises made and broken, and the powerful bond of friendship. The writing is pitch-perfect, the dialogue pops, the flashes of humor are just right, and the courtroom scenes are not to be missed. Best of all is the sophisticated portrait of the kidnapper, a complicated and unforgettable character. Bravo.”
—Ann Weisgarber, author of The Personal History of Rachel DuPree and The Promise
“Supremely compelling. Gleaming with dark beauty in every line and gritty truth in its portraits of both haves and have-nots, World, Chase Me Down is that rare thing: a novel paced like a blazing page-turner and crafted like a finely woven tapestry. Brilliant on all counts.”
—Elizabeth Rosner, author of Electric City, Blue Nude, and The Speed of Light
“A thunderous debut: a raucous gallivant through the wild heartland of our American myth, an indictment of big beef money, and a portrait of the twentieth century’s first great outlaw. This book will raise laughs from your belly and stab the wild meat of your heart. It sounds the barbaric yawp of a great new voice in American fiction.”
—Taylor Brown, author of Fallen Land
“A riveting read that brings a turn-of-the-century crime into shivering reality. Pat Crowe, butcher turned kidnapper, is a fascinating combination of high hopes and dark desires.”
—Jonis Agee, author of The Bones of Paradise and The River Wife
“The crime at the heart of this novel reverberates from dirty back streets to the halls of power. Once World, Chase Me Down grabs you, it won’t let go.”
—Brent Spencer, author of Rattlesnake Daddy
“Unforgettable: a raucous and engaging story told by a voice so convincing you’ll think the author must be channeling his turn-of-the-twentieth-century antihero, with all his imagination, boldness, wry humor, and natural eloquence. Rich historical details bring the sights, sounds, and smells of rough-and-tumble meat-packing Omaha to life in this suspenseful and surprising novel.”
—Mary Helen Stefaniak, author of The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia and The Turk and My Mother
PENGUIN BOOKS
WORLD, CHASE ME DOWN
ANDREW HILLEMAN was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1982. He earned his BA and MA in English at Creighton University, in Omaha, and his MFA in fiction from Northern Michigan University. He has been published by The Fiddlehead and was a finalist for Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award. He lives in Omaha with his wife and their daughter.
PENGUIN BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
penguin.com
Copyright © 2017 by Andrew Hilleman
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Ebook ISBN 9781101992784
This is a work of fiction based on actual events.
Cover design: Ervin Serrano
Cover images: (man) Stephen Mulcahey/Arcangel
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CONTENTS
Praise for WORLD, CHASE ME DOWN
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
All Things Long Past
BOOK ONE
THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Knowledge of All Dark Things
BOOK TWO
THE THRILL OF THE NATION
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
All Things Made New
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For April
Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
Michel de Montaigne
The righteous shall rejoice when he sees the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.
Psalm 58:10
All Things Long Past
IN THE HISTORY of all things, good stories one day become old stories and then cease to be told at all, and I suppose mine is no different. For the past twenty years I’ve been puzzling my way back to humanity, but all I’ll be remembered for, if I’m remembered in the first place, is perhaps the foulest of all crimes: the kidnapping of a child. The apogee of a life nourished by lawlessness. When I was furthest from the aubade.
Oh, there’s a litany of other transgressions.
For a short while, I was the most wanted man in America. This was around the turn of the century. Thirty years past and more now. After my final arrest, I drew a bigger crowd at a Nebraska train station than President Roosevelt when he made a campaign stop in the same town during his bid for reelection. A few scattered folks still talk about me like legend. I relished it all. Even the fake stories the newspapers trumped up about my escapades.
When I was young I believed that my tale would be threaded on parchment that never frayed and etched in tablets that would never
erode and inked upon the presses from the wharves of New York to the goldfields of California. My role in it all would be auditioned for on stages the world over. I could hear the thunderclap of ovation like a madman certain of his own future and creation’s reaction to it. I could see it all floating like glow bugs in a fortune-teller’s globe. But, let me say this: the world is not a skirt to be lifted. There’s no redemption for the devil. I have returned to the teaching of my childhood. I have suffered, have been hungry and homeless and cold and for want of anyone to share with me a kind word since those days now long since passed. It’s been mighty rough trotting, but I will not repine.
I’ve robbed banks and stolen diamonds, nearly killed three police officers in a Cicero gunfight, escaped a burning building and a prairie fire, and even looted the entire town of Shinbone, New Mexico, after me and my old pal Billy Cavanaugh locked up the village marshal in his own jail.
Poor goddamn Billy. Had I never stepped in to break up that fight in the stockyards all those years ago, the stupid kid, fortuned by his own stupidity, probably would’ve made a life out of things much longer and brighter than what he came to finally afford.
I laugh at that memory still.
How gorgeous it is to be sad.
Yet he is here still, even if he is only here to me. Love and money and happiness—they are dead sea fruits. All have had their own short running meters in my life. But the idea of friendship operating on that same arrhythmia is too depressing a thought to contain. Let me say this: I have found no happiness in evil. I will not paint roses on the life of an outlaw. Here there is only truth without imagination.
What is over for me now was over long ago. It’s the second-to-last day of October, nineteen and thirty-nine. Either my sixty-eighth birthday or my seventieth. I’m not certain which. My hair’s gone white with the snow of age, my livery hands are spotted like trout skin, my clothes stink worse than old breechclout. Ragged light of new day. The world turns like she always has. A tonnage of stars around a half moon yet to vanish, and steam rising from sewer grates all along the flagstone of Farnam Street.
I lurch out of my squalid flophouse into the awful darkness of morning. My staggering walk is like that of a clubfoot gimp for I’m near ruin and emptied of all heart and I expect no pity for these things. It’s a mammoth struggle to button my shirtfront. Lamplights flicker yet in the early gloss. The street is empty, sunken between lopsided buildings like the floor of a canyon. I tamp my pipe. Only a few leavings in my tobacco pouch. A loud noise startles me like gunshot. In an alley across the street a young boy chucks crab apples against a brick wall. Thud, thud, thud. Like a pitcher warming his arm in a bull pen. I curse the tramp child and struggle against my cane. A spume of low cloud like mist in evenfall. My big spurs jangle as loudly as if I were wearing chain mail. Silly to wear spurs at my age.
Silly to be anything now.
It’s my morning ritual: a short walk to the lagoon at Hanscom Park to feed the pigeons as the sky fills with color. I scatter seed and candy. Twenty birds gather at my feet. Spearhead cloud cover. Acorns fallen from their cups. Dogwoods limp in cracking sun. Cattails long in the orange mud. An omen of first snow in the dawn.
I halloo the pigeons. Give them hallowed names.
“Hullo there, Billy,” I say to one.
“Hullo there, Hattie,” I say to another.
“Hullo there, Matilda,” I say to the smallest of the roost.
The birds give no response. They bob their heads and peck the seeds and take counsel with one another in their own cooing language around my worn boots. I speak to them like they are people. I mumble to myself. Lose spittle down my last clean shirtfront.
They’re speechless to reply.
I can see them all yet.
There is Billy in our very own little butcher shop. Both of us not much past thirty. CROWE AND CAVANAUGH, BUTCHERS, the storefront sign read in cursive script. Our long end of a dream. Days spent skinning carcasses and rolling sausages out of a grinder. How often I find myself lost inside those memories. Even the banal acts of scrubbing tile walls and mopping up wastewater are a fantastic caprice when remembered from a great distance.
There, too, is Hattie. Her startling yellow hair piled up in waves under a leghorn hat. Her lipstick as messy as if applied in a fun house mirror after a long night of necking. She bore a rare beauty often seen in women painted on cigar boxes but hardly in everyday life. Her china blue eyes as big as hailstones. Break your heart quicker than a plate dropped on the floor, those eyes could. Her throaty laugh that shook the china in your hutch. The nightgowns she wore as thin as mist to bed every night. A complexion the color of moonstone.
I will never be shed of that woman.
There she is under a cluster of noisy apple trees, leaves rustling as loudly as wrapping paper, blotches of sunlight turning her yellow hair pink. A thunderbolt flash and she appears naked in our bedroom during an electrical storm. A skunk stripe of moonlight on her back as she turns and beckons me to bed while rain slashes the window.
How she still affects me now from such a great distance is a special kind of madness I cannot parcel. The moon is not tanned by the sun, after all. Still, there she is, a spectral visitor, clear in my mind but forever gone. Nothing left here but the empty.
It occurs to me now that I have created legendary days of her in my own memory. I’ve never seen her under any goddamn apple trees or made love to her during a thunderstorm with moonlight on her skin or any of the other cruel and haunting images conjured up in retrospect. My remembrance of her is invented out of the same cotton as perfectly shaped clouds in a child’s artwork. Such things never existed nor ever will. The contemplation of her love for me and raising our daughter Matilda together in a pink house with a quiet but substantial life was as grossly paradisal as the notion of Eden.
It had been that way all along. All things of any beauty are lost before they are gained, and they stay lost forever after, and the gaining of them in the first place is just a temporary figment, and that’s just the natural way of the world, and not a damn fool ignorant to all around him or a genius aware of too much for his own good can remedy their way out of that.
Here I am now. Here I sit among the birds. An old man galled of crotch from poor bathing and thin as fish line from poor diet who quivers yet against the capsizing of the world. My right leg jerks in spasm and the pigeons scatter in fright.
“No,” I call to them. “Don’t go. Come back, friends. Come on back now.”
“It’s just my leg quaking,” I say.
Just my heart, going.
I am still here. There is a twinkle left yet.
I wipe my mouth with a cloth and stuff the cloth back in my pocket and scatter more seed for the birds. Most of them do not return. You’ve never known me, never had the capacity to know me, and I don’t know any of you except by your markings, but I very much love you still, and my love is an obsession despite all that has made it absent. I cackle and spit again. My paper sack empty of feed. I sit on the bench by the park lagoon for a few more minutes and accidentally fall asleep. A policeman comes by and pokes me with the end of his baton.
“Hey there, old timer, no sleeping in the park.”
I snap awake, dazed.
“Best get now,” the officer adds.
“I’m Pat Crowe,” I say.
“You’re loitering is what you are,” the officer tells me and continues his beat.
The day browns in color and falls in temperature. Sun streaked and freezing both. Autumn given way to new winter in two hours. Wind empties trees. Shadows lasso, and hearthstones glow in the growing dark like the eyes of rodents. Ten more degrees plummet, then twenty. Flurries settle on stoop pumpkins. Day passes into evening.
I stagger home. What I now call home.
I totter about my flophouse room. A miasma of dust and velvet. The curtains dark as liver and mossy
with age. A bloodstain from a previous tenant the size of a throw rug on the wood floor, scrubbed to a faint pink square. I reheat leftover coffee and fry wholemeal with fatback in a spider pan. A medicine show crackles on my tube radio. I peel away my socks. What effort it takes. The cotton crunchy with ice. My toes nearly black from frost and neglect and poor circulation. I fill a deep pot with water boiled on the cookstove for my feet. My toes come alive again in the boiling pan.
Outside my window, the world.
Omaha, Nebraska.
A glittering sedan sputters in the season’s first snow. A Chevy Master with four doors that hiccups and stalls and sputters like an invention still in the throes of imagination. I peer out into the slanted snow. An elderly Negro woman is shitting into an old tin can between a narrow crevasse of clapboards.
I laugh and say aloud to myself, “Good for you, old girl.”
It’s high time for a gill of brandy. My hands quake on the glass like it was a heirloom long lost and now returned. I stoke the pitiful fire in my cookstove with the few chips left in the scuttle and watch the snow accumulate on my window. Rising from my cane rocker is a considerable effort and I plod about the room as if I were shuffling my feet over ice.
A whole day come and gone. Nothing more I can manage than to survive it. My pocket watch clicks against a glass of water on the nightstand. I hang my mothy suit on a wickerwork chair and swallow two barbiturates the size of small toes as per my doctor’s orders following my stroke this past Christmas. The pills are strong enough to put a dog to sleep and I must cut them into thirds. They have a pleasant effect in small doses. My hands shake as I climb into bed. In old age, it’s harder and harder to fall asleep in a timely fashion. I often sit up for hours before I’m relaxed enough to close my eyes.
I don’t want this world to vanish. There’s nothing left for me in it, and still I cling. As I listen to the ticking of my windup alarm clock, my mind wanders from one thought to the next. On some occasions, I can still see that Cudahy boy squirming in his chair, bound by horse hobbles and his face covered in an old baby shirt, smoking cigarette after cigarette under his makeshift blindfold. Young Edward Junior. He was an alright skate if there ever was an alright skate on this grim planet. A truly brave soul. And yet he whimpered and cried at night, begged us to return him to his mother and father. I can hear those pleas still. Let me say this right off the bat: I am a guilty man. Make no mistake. I kidnapped that young man and held him for ransom and got away with it scot-free for five long years before my spirit completely broke and I returned to Omaha for my just desserts.
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