by Stephen King
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?”
His eyes drifted closed. “Do the trick … with the flies,” he says, and then he was asleep again. But he’d woken up at just the right time; if he hadn’t, Johnnie would have found a dead man on that cot.
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 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.
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nbsp; 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.