by Stephen King
“The same,” I says. “What does that leave? Chicago?”
“Yep,” he says. “Only first we have to ditch this motor. They’ll have the plates by now. Even if they didn’t, it’s bad luck. It’s a damn hoodoo.”
“What about Jack?” I says.
“Jack will be all right,” he says, and I knew to say no more on the subject.
We stopped about a mile down the road, and Johnnie shot out the front tire of the hoodoo Ford while Jack leaned against the hood, looking pale and sick.
When we needed a car, it was always my job to flag one down. “People who wouldn’t stop for any of the rest of us will stop for you,” Johnnie said once. “Why is that, I wonder?”
Harry Pierpont answered him. This was back in the days when it was still the Pierpont Gang instead of the Dillinger Gang. “Because he looks like a Homer,” he said. “Wasn’t ever anyone looked so much like a Homer as Homer Van Meter does.”
We all laughed at that, and now here I was again, and this time it was really important. You’d have to say life or death.
Three or four cars went by and I pretended to be fiddling with the tire. A farm truck was next, but it was too slow and waddly. Also, there were some fellas in the back. Driver slows down and says, “You need any help, amigo?”
“I’m fine,” I says. “Workin’ up a appetite for lunch. You go right on.”
He gives me a laugh and on he went. The fellas in the back also waved.
Next up was another Ford, all by its lonesome. I waved my arms for them to stop, standing where they couldn’t help but see that flat shoe. Also, I was giving them a grin. That big one that says I’m just a harmless Homer by the side of the road.
It worked. The Ford stopped. There was three folks inside, a man and a young woman and a fat baby. A family.
“Looks like you got a flat there, partner,” the man says. He was wearing a suit and a topcoat, both clean but not what you’d call Grade A.
“Well, I don’t know how bad it can be,” I says, “when it’s only flat on the bottom.”
We was still laughing over that just like it was new when Johnnie and Jack come out of the trees with their guns drawn.
“Just hold still, sir,” Jack says. “No one is going to get hurt.”
The man looked at Jack, looked at Johnnie, looked at Jack again. Then his eyes went back to Johnnie and his mouth dropped open. I seen it a thousand times, but it always tickled me.
“You’re Dillinger!” he gasps, and then shoots his hands up.
“Pleased to meet you, sir,” Johnnie says, and grabs one of the man’s hands out of the air. “Get those mitts down, would you?”
Just as he did, another two or three cars came along—country-goto-town types, sitting up straight as sticks in their old muddy sedans. We didn’t look like nothing but a bunch of folks at the side of the road getting ready for a tire-changing party.
Jack, meanwhile, went to the driver’s side of the new Ford, turned off the switch, and took the keys. The sky was white that day, as if with rain or snow, but Jack’s face was whiter.
“What’s your name, Ma’am?” Jack asks the woman. She was wearing a long gray coat and a cute sailor’s cap.
“Deelie Francis,” she says. Her eyes were as big and dark as plums. “That’s Roy. He’s my husband. Are you going to kill us?”
Johnnie give her a stern look and says, “We are the Dillinger Gang, Mrs. Francis, and we have never killed anyone.” Johnnie always made this point. Harry Pierpont used to laugh at him and ask him why he wasted his breath, but I think Johnnie was right to do that. It’s one of the reasons he’ll be remembered long after the straw-hat-wearing little pansy is forgot.
“That’s right,” Jack says. “We just rob banks, and not half as many as they say. And who is this fine little man?” He chucked the kiddo under the chin. He was fat, all right; looked like W. C. Fields.
“That’s Buster,” Deelie Francis says.
“Well, he’s a regular little bouncer, ain’t he?” Jack smiled. There was blood on his teeth. “How old is he? Three or so?”
“Just barely two and a half,” Mrs. Francis says proudly.
“Is that so?”
“Yes, but he’s big for his age. Mister, are you all right? You’re awful pale. And there’s blood on your—”
Johnnie speaks up then. “Jack, can you drive this one into the trees?” He pointed at the carpenter’s old Ford.
“Sure,” Jack says.
“Flat tire and all?”
“You just try me. It’s just that … I’m awful thirsty. Ma’am— Missus Francis—do you have anything to drink?”
She turned around and bent over—not easy with that horse of a baby in her arms—and got a thermos from the back.
Another couple of cars went puttering by. The folks inside waved, and we waved back. I was still grinning fit to split, trying to look just as Homer as a Homer could be. I was worried about Jack and didn’t know how he could stay on his feet, let alone tip up that thermos and swig what was inside. Iced tea, she told him, but he seemed not to hear. When he handed it back to her, there were tears rolling down his cheeks. He thanked her, and she asked him again if he was all right.
“I am now,” Jack says. He got into the hoodoo Ford and drove it into the bushes, the car jouncing up and down on the tire Johnnie had shot out.
“Why couldn’t you have shot out a back one, you goddam fool?” Jack sounded angry and out of breath. Then he wrestled the car into the trees and out of sight, and came back, walking slow and looking at his feet, like an old man on ice.
“All right,” Johnnie says. He’d discovered a rabbit’s foot on Mr. Francis’s key ring, and was working it in a way that made me know that Mr. Francis wasn’t ever going to see that Ford again. “Now, we’re all friends here, and we’re going to take a little ride.”
Johnnie drove. Jack sat in the passenger seat. I squeezed in back with the Francises and tried to get the piglet to shoot me a grin.
“When we get to the next little town,” Johnnie says to the Francis family in the backseat, “we’re going to drop you off with enough for bus fare to get you where you were going. We’ll take the car. We won’t hurt it a bit, and if no one shoots any bullet holes in it you’ll get it back good as new. One of us’ll phone you where it is.”
“We haven’t got a phone yet,” Deelie says. It was really a whine. She sounded like the kind of woman who needs a smack every second week or so to keep her tits up. “We’re on the list, but those telephone people are slower than cold molasses.”
“Well, then,” Johnnie says, good-humored and not at all perplexed, “we’ll give the cops a call, and they’ll get in touch. But if you squawk, you won’t ever get it back in running shape.”
Mr. Francis nodded as if he believed every word. Probably he did. This was the Dillinger Gang, after all.
Johnnie pulled in at a Texaco, gassed up, and bought soda pops all around. Jack drank a bottle of grape like a man dying of thirst in the desert, but the woman wouldn’t let Master Piglet have his. Not so much as a swallow. The kid was holding his hands out for it and bawling.
“He can’t have pop before his lunch,” she says to Johnnie, “what’s wrong with you?”
Jack was leaning his head against the glass of the passenger window with his eyes shut. I thought he’d passed out again, but he says, “Shut that brat up, missus, or I will.”
“I think you’ve forgotten whose car you’re in,” she says, all haughty.
“Give him his pop, you bitch,” Johnnie says. He was still smiling, but now it was his other smile. She looked at him and the color in her cheeks disappeared. And that’s how Master Piglet got his Nehi, lunch or no lunch. Twenty miles farther on, we dropped them off in some little town and went on our way toward Chicago.
“A man who marries a woman like that deserves all he gets,” Johnnie remarked, “and he’ll get plenty.”
“She’ll call the law,” Jack says, still without opening his eyes.
&nbs
p; “Never will,” Johnnie says, as confident as ever. “Wouldn’t spare the nickel.” And he was right. We saw only two blue beetles before we got into Chi, both going the other way, and neither one of them so much as slowed down to look at us. It was Johnnie’s luck. As for Jack, you had only to look at him to know that his supply of luck was running out fast. By the time we got to the Loop, he was delirious and talking to his mother.
“Homer!” Johnnie says, in that wide-eyed way that always used to tickle me. Like a girl doing a flirt.
“What!” I says, giving him the glad eye right back.
“We got no place to go. This is worse than St. Paul.”
“Go to Murphy’s,” Jack says without opening his eyes. “I want a cold beer. I’m thirsty.”
“Murphy’s,” Johnnie says. “You know, that’s not a bad idea.”
Murphy’s was an Irish saloon on the South Side. Sawdust, a steam table, two bartenders, three bouncers, friendly girls at the bar, and a room upstairs where you could take them. More rooms in the back, where people sometimes met, or cooled off for a day or two. We knew four places like it in St. Paul, but only a couple in Chi. I parked the Francises’ Ford up in the alley. Johnnie was in the backseat with our delirious friend—we weren’t yet ready to call him our dying friend— and he was holding Jack’s head against the shoulder of his coat.
“Go in and get Brian Mooney off the bar,” Johnnie says.
“What if he isn’t there?”
“Then I don’t know,” Johnnie says.
“Harry!” Jack shouts, presumably calling for Harry Pierpont. “That whore you set me up with has given me the goddam clap!”
“Go on,” Johnnie says to me, soothing his hand through Jack’s hair just like a mother.
Well, Brian Mooney was there—Johnnie’s luck again—and we got a room for the night, although it cost two hundred dollars, which was pretty dear, considering the view was an alley and the toilet was at the far end of the hall.
“You boys are hotter than hell,” Brian says. “Mickey McClure would have sent you right back into the street. There’s nothing in the papers and on the radio but Little Bohemia.”
Jack sat down on a cot in the corner, and got himself a cigarette and a cold draft beer. The beer brought him back wonderful; he was almost himself again. “Did Lester get away?” he asked Mooney. I looked over at him when he spoke up and saw a terrible thing. When he took a drag off his Lucky and inhaled, a little puff come out of the hole in the back of his overcoat like a smoke signal.
“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.