by Stephen King
"You mean Baby Face?" Mooney asked.
"You don't want to call him that where he can hear you," Johnnie said, grinning. He was happier now that Jack had come back around, but he hadn't seen that puff of smoke coming out of his back. I wished I hadn't, either.
"He shot a bunch of Gees and got away," Mooney said. "At least one of the Gees is dead, maybe two. Anyway, it just makes it that much worse. You can stay here tonight, but you have to be gone by tomorrow afternoon."
He went out. Johnnie waited a few seconds, then stuck his tongue out at the door like a little kid. I got laughing—Johnnie could always make me laugh. Jack tried to laugh, too, but quit. It hurt him too much.
"Time to get you out of that coat and see how bad it is, partner," Johnnie said.
It took us five minutes. By the time he was down to his undershirt, all three of us were soaked with sweat. Four or five times I had to put my hands over Jack's mouth to muffle him. I got blood all over my cuffs.
There was no more than a rose on the lining of his overcoat, but his white shirt had gone half red and his undershirt was soaked right through. Sticking up on the left side, just below his shoulder blade, was a lump with a hole in the middle of it, like a little volcano.
"No more," Jack says, crying. "Please, no more."
"That's all right," Johnnie says, running the palm of his hand through Jack's hair again. "We're all done. You can lie down now. Go to sleep. You need your rest."
"I can't," he says. "It hurts too much. Oh, God, if you only knew how it hurts! And I want another beer. I'm thirsty. Only don't put so much salt in it this time. Where's Harry, where's Charlie?"
Harry Pierpont and Charlie Makley, I guessed—Charlie was the Fagin who'd turned Harry and Jack out when they weren't no more than snotnoses.
"There he goes again," Johnnie says. "He needs a doc, Homer, and you're the boy who has to find one."
"Jesus, Johnnie, this ain't my town!"
"Doesn't matter," Johnnie says. "If I go out, you know what's going to happen. I'll write down some names and addresses."
It ended up being just one name and one address, and when I got there it was all for nothing. The doc (a pill-roller whose mission was giving abortions and acid melts to erase fingerprints) had happied himself to death on his own laudanum two months before.
We stayed in that cheesy room behind Murphy's for five days. Mickey McClure showed up and tried to turn us out, but Johnnie talked to him in the way that Johnnie had—when he turned on the charm, it was almost impossible to tell Johnnie no. And, besides, we paid. By the fifth night, the rent was four hundred, and we were forbidden to so much as show our faces in the taproom for fear someone would see us. No one did, and as far as I know the cops never found out where we were during those five days in late April. I wonder how much Mickey McClure made on the deal—it was more than a grand. We pulled bank jobs where we took less.
I ended up going around to half a dozen scrape artists and hairlinechangers. There wasn't one of them who would come and look at Jack. Too hot, they said. It was the worst time of all, and even now I hate to think about it. Let's just say that me and Johnnie found out what Jesus felt like when Peter Pilot denied Him three times in the Garden of Gethsemane.
For a while, Jack was in and out of delirium, and then he was mostly in. He talked about his mother, and Harry Pierpont, and then about Boobie Clark, a famous fag from Michigan City we'd all known.
"Boobie tried to kiss me," Jack said one night, over and over, until I thought I'd go nuts. Johnnie never minded, though. He just sat there beside Jack on the cot, stroking his hair. He'd cut out a square of cloth in Jack's undershirt around the bullet hole, and kept painting it with Mercurochrome, but the skin had already turned graygreen, and a smell was coming out of the hole. Just a whiff of it was enough to make your eyes water.
"That's gangrene," Mickey McClure said on a trip to pick up the rent. "He's a goner."
"He's no goner," Johnnie said.
Mickey leaned forward with his fat hands on his fat knees. He smelled Jack's breath like a cop with a drunk, then pulled back. "You better find a doc fast. Smell it in a wound, that's bad. Smell it on a man's breath . . ." Mickey shook his head and walked out.
"Fuck him," Johnnie said to Jack, still stroking his hair. "What does he know?"
Only, Jack didn't say nothing. He was asleep. A few hours later, after Johnnie and I had gone to sleep ourselves, Jack was on the edge of the bunk, raving about Henry Claudy, the warden at Michigan City. I-God Claudy, we used to call him, because it was always I-God I'll do this and I-God you'll do that. Jack was screaming that he'd kill Claudy if he didn't let us out. That got someone pounding on the wall and yelling for us to shut that man up.
Johnnie sat next to Jack and talked to him and got him soothed down again.
"Homer?" Jack says after a while.
"Yes, Jack," I says.
"Won't you do the trick with the flies?" he asks.
I was surprised he remembered it. "Well," I says, "I'd be happy to, but there ain't no flies in here. Around these parts, flies ain't in season just yet."
In a low, hoarse voice, Jack sang, "There may be flies on some of you guys but there ain't no flies on me. Right, Chummah?"
I had no idea who Chummah was, but I nodded and patted his shoulder. It was hot and sticky. "That's right, Jack."
There were big purple circles under his eyes and dried spit on his lips. He was already losing weight. I could smell him, too. The smell of piss, which wasn't so bad, and the smell of gangrene, which was. Johnnie, though, never gave no sign that he smelled anything bad at all.
"Walk on your hands for me, John," Jack said. "Like you used to."
"In a minute," Johnnie said. He poured Jack a glass of water. "Drink this first. Wet your whistle. Then I'll see if I can still get across the room upside down. Remember when I used to run on my hands in the shirt factory? After I ran all the way to the gate, they stuck me in the hole."
"I remember," Jack said.
Johnnie didn't do no walking on his hands that night. By the time he got the glass of water to Jack's lips, the poor bugger had gone back to sleep with his head on Johnnie's shoulder.
"He's gonna die," I said.
"He's not," Johnnie said.
The next morning, I asked Johnnie what we were going to do. What we could do.
"I got one more name out of McClure. Joe Moran. McClure says he was the go-between on the Bremer kidnapping. If he'll fix Jack up, it's worth a thousand to me."
"I got six hundred," I said. And I'd give it up, but not for Jack Hamilton. Jack had gone beyond needing a doctor; what Jack needed by then was a preacher. I did it for Johnnie Dillinger.
"Thanks, Homer," he said. "I'll be back in an hour. Meantime, you mind the baby." But Johnnie looked bleak. He knew that if Moran wouldn't help us we'd have to get out of town. It would mean taking Jack back to St. Paul and trying there. And we knew what going back in a stolen Ford would likely mean. It was the spring of 1934 and all three of us—me, Jack, and especially Johnnie—were on J. Edgar Hoover's list of "public enemies."
"Well, good luck," I says. "See you in the funny pages."
He went out. I mooned around. I was mighty sick of the room by
then. It was like being back in Michigan City, only worse. Because when you were in stir they'd done the worst they could to you. Here, hiding out in the back of Murphy's, things could always get worse.
Jack muttered, then he dropped off again.
There was a chair at the foot of the cot, with a cushion. I took the cushion and sat down beside Jack. It wouldn't take long, I didn't think. And when Johnnie came back I'd only have to say that poor old Jack took one final breath and just copped out. The cushion would be back on the chair. Really, it would be doing Johnnie a favor. Jack, too.
"I see you, Chummah," Jack says suddenly. I tell you, it scared the living hell out of me.
"Jack!" I says, putting my elbows on that cushion. "How you doing?"
When Johnnie finally did come back, he practically busted down the door. I had my gun out. He saw it and laughed. "Put away the bean shooter, pal, and pack up your troubles in your old kit bag!"
"What's up?"
"We're getting out of here, that's what." He looked five years younger. "High time, wouldn't you say?"
"Yeah."
"He been all right while I was gone?"
"Yeah," I said. The cushion lying on the chair had SEE YOU IN CHICAGO written on it in needlework.
"No change?"
"No change. Where are we going?"
"Aurora," Johnnie said. "It's a little town upstate. We're going to move in with Volney Davis and his girlfriend." He leaned over the cot. Jack's red hair, thin to start with, had started falling out. It was on the pillow, and you could see the crown of his head, white as snow. "You hear that, Jack?" Johnnie shouts. "We're hot now, but we're going to cool off quick! You understand?"
"Walk on your hands like Johnnie Dillinger used to," Jack said, without opening his eyes.
Johnnie just kept smiling. He winked at me. "He understands," he said. "He's just not awake. You know?"
"Sure," I said.
On the ride up to Aurora, Jack sat against the window, his head flying up and then thumping against the glass every time we hit a pothole. He was holding long, muttery conversations with folks we couldn't see. Once we were out of town, me and Johnnie had to roll down our windows. The smell was just too bad otherwise. Jack was rotting from the inside out, but he wouldn't die. I've heard it said that life is fragile and fleeting, but I don't believe it. It would be better if it was.
"That Dr. Moran was a crybaby," Johnnie said. We were in the woods by then, the city behind us. "I decided I didn't want no crybaby like him working on my partner. But I wasn't going to leave without something." Johnnie always travelled with a .38 pistol tucked into his belt. Now he pulled it out and showed it to me, the way he must have shown it to Dr. Moran. "I says, 'If I can't take away nothing else, Doc, I'll just have to take your life.' He seen I meant business, and he called someone up there. Volney Davis."
I nodded as if that name meant something to me. I found out later that Volney was another member of Ma Barker's gang. He was a pretty nice fella. So was Dock Barker. And Volney's girlfriend, the one they called Rabbits. They called her Rabbits because she dug herself out of prison a few times. She was the best of the lot. Aces. Rabbits, at least, tried to help poor old troublesome Jack. None of the others would—not the pill-rollers, the scrapers, the face artists, and certainly not Dr. Joseph (Crybaby) Moran.
The Barkers were on the run after a botched kidnapping; Dock's Ma had already left—gone all the way to Florida. The hideout in Aurora wasn't much—four rooms, no electricity, a privy out back—but it was better than Murphy's saloon. And, like I say, Volney's girlfriend at least tried to do something. That was on our second night there.
She set up kerosene lamps all around the bed, then sterilized a paring knife in a pot of boiling water. "If you boys feel pukey," she said, "you just choke it back until I'm done."
"We'll be okay," Johnnie said. "Won't we, Homer?"
I nodded, but I was queasy even before she got going. Jack was laying on his stomach, head turned to the side, muttering. It seemed he never stopped. Whatever room he happened to be in was filled with people only he could see.
"I hope so," she says, "because once I start in, there's no going back." She looked up and seen Dock standing in the doorway. Volney Davis, too. "Go on, baldy," she says to Dock, "and take-um heap big chief with you." Volney Davis was no more a Indian than I was, but they used to rib him because he was born in the Cherokee Nation. Some judge had given him three years for stealing a pair of shoes, which was how he got into a life of crime.
Volney and Dock went out. When they were gone, Rabbits turned Jack over and then cut him open in a X, bearing down in a way I could barely stand to look at. I held Jack's feet. Johnnie sat beside his head, trying to soothe him, but it didn't do no good. When Jack started to scream, Johnnie put a dishtowel over his head and nodded for Rabbits to go on, all the time stroking Jack's head and telling him not to worry, everything would be just fine.
That Rabbits. They call them frails, but there was nothing frail about her. Her hands never even shook. Blood, some of it black and clotted, come pouring out of the sunken place when she cut it. She cut deeper and then out came the pus. Some was white, but there was big green chunks which looked like boogers. That was bad. But when she got to the lung the smell was a thousand times worse. It couldn't have been worse in France during the gas attacks.
Jack was gasping in these big whistling breaths. You could hear it in his throat, and from the hole in his back, too.
"You better hurry up," Johnnie says. "He's sprung a leak in his air hose."
"You're telling me," she says. "The bullet's in his lung. You just hold him down, handsome."
In fact, Jack wasn't thrashing much. He was too weak. The sound of the air shrieking in and out of him kept getting thinner and thinner. It was hotter than hell with those lamps set up all around the bed, and the stink of the hot oil was almost as strong as the gangrene. I wish we'd thought to open a window before we got started, but it was too late by then.
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 Mor
an'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.