by Stephen King
“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 “Trara-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 the 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.
Dock told us to take the body to a gravel pit about two miles farther down the road, just past the Aurora town line. There was a bottle of lye under the sink, and Rabbits gave it to us. “You know what to do with this, don’t you?” she asks.
“Sure,” Johnnie says. He had one of her Band-Aids stuck on his upper lip, over that place where his mustache never grew in later on. He sounded listless and he wouldn’t meet her eye.
“Make him do it, Homer,” she says, then jerked her thumb toward the bedroom, where Jack was laying wrapped up in the bloodstained sheet. “If they find that one and identify him before you get clear, it’ll make things just so much worse for you. Us, too, maybe.”
“You took us in when nobody else would,” Johnnie says, “and you won’t live to regret it.”
She gave him a smile. Women almost always fell for Johnnie. I’d thought this one was an exception because she was so businesslike, but now I seen she wasn’t. She’d just kept it all business because she knew she wasn’t much in the looks department. Also, when a bunch of men with guns are cooped up like we were, a woman in her right mind doesn’t want to make trouble among them.
“We’ll be gone when you get back,” Volney says. “Ma keeps talking about Florida, she got her eye on a place in Lake Weir—”
“Shut up, Vol,” Dock says, and gives him a hard poke in the shoulder.
“Anyway, we’re gettin’ out of here,” he says, rubbing the sore place. “You ought to get out, too. Take your lugg
age. Don’t even pull in on your way back. Things can change in a hurry.”
“Okay,” Johnnie says.
“At least he died happy,” Volney says. “Died laughin’.”
I didn’t say nothing. It was coming home to me that Red Hamilton—my old running buddy—was really dead. It made me awful sad. I turned my mind to how the bullet had just grazed Johnnie (and then gone on to kill a fly instead), thinking that would cheer me up. But it didn’t. It only made me feel worse.
Dock shook my hand, then Johnnie’s. He looked pale and glum. “I don’t know how we ended up like this, and that’s the truth,” he says. “When I was a boy, the only goddam thing I wanted was to be a railroad engineer.”
“Well, I’ll tell you something,” Johnnie says. “We don’t have to worry. God makes it all come right in the end.”
We took Jack on his last ride, wrapped up in a bloodstained sheet and pushed into the back of that stolen Ford. Johnnie drove us to the far side of the pit, all bump and jounce (when it comes to rough riding, I’ll take a Terraplane over a Ford any day). Then he killed the engine and touched the Band-Aid riding his upper lip. He says, “I used up the last of my luck today, Homer. They’ll get me now.”
“Don’t talk like that,” I says.
“Why not? It’s true.” The sky above us was white and full of rain. I reckoned we’d have a muddy splash of it between Aurora and Chicago (Johnnie had decided we should go back there because the Feds would be expecting us in St. Paul). Somewhere crows was calling. The only other sound was the ticktock of the cooling engine. I kept looking into the mirror at the wrapped-up body in the backseat. I could see the bumps of elbows and knees, the fine red spatters where he’d bent over, coughing and laughing, at the end.
“Look at this, Homer,” Johnnie says, and points to the .38, which was tucked back in his belt. Then he twiddled Mr. Francis’s key ring with the tips of his fingers, where the prints were growing back in spite of all his trouble. There were four or five keys on the ring besides the one to the Ford. And that lucky rabbit’s foot. “Butt of the gun hit this when it come down,” he says. He nodded his head. “Hit my very own lucky piece. And now my luck’s gone. Help me with him.”
We lugged Jack to the gravel slope. Then Johnnie got the bottle of lye. It had a big brown skull and crossbones on the label.
Johnnie knelt down and pulled the sheet back. “Get his rings,” he says, and I pulled them off. Johnnie put them in his pocket. We ended up getting forty-five dollars for them in Calumet City, although Johnnie swore up and down that the little one had a real diamond in it.
“Now hold out his hands.”
I did, and Johnnie poured a cap of lye over the tip of each finger. That was one set of prints wasn’t ever going to come back. Then he leaned over Jack’s face and kissed him on the forehead. “I hate to do this, Red, but I know you’d do the same to me if it’d gone the other way.”
He then poured the lye over Jack’s cheeks and mouth and brow. It hissed and bubbled and turned white. When it started to eat through his closed eyelids, I turned away. And of course none of it done no good; the body was found by a farmer after a load of gravel. A pack of dogs had knocked away most of the stones we covered him with and were eating what was left of his hands and face. As for the rest of him, there were enough scars for the cops to I.D. him as Jack Hamilton.
It was the end of Johnnie’s luck, all right. Every move he made after that—right up to the night Purvis and his badge-carrying gunsels got him at the Biograph—was a bad one. Could he have just thrown up his hands that night and surrendered? I’d have to say no. Purvis meant to have him dead one way or the other. That’s why the Gees never told the Chicago cops Johnnie was in town.
I’ll never forget the way Jack laughed when I brought them flies in on their strings. He was a good fellow. They all were, mostly—good fellows who got into the wrong line of work. And Johnnie was the best of the bunch. No man ever had a truer friend. We robbed one more bank together, the Merchants National in South Bend, Indiana. Lester Nel son joined us on that caper. Getting out of town, it seemed like every hick in Indiana was throwing lead at us, and we still got away. But for what? We’d been expecting more than a hundred grand, enough to move to Mexico and live like kings. We ended up with a lousy twenty thousand, most of it in dimes and dirty dollar bills.
God makes it all come right in the end, that’s what Johnnie told Dock Barker just before we parted company. I was raised a Christian— I admit I fell away a bit along my journey—and I believe that: we’re stuck with what we have, but that’s all right; in God’s eyes, none of us are really much more than flies on strings and all that matters is how much sunshine you can spread along the way. The last time I seen Johnnie Dillinger was in Chicago, and he was laughing at something I said. That’s good enough for me.
——
As a kid, I was fascinated by tales of the Depression-era outlaws, an interest that probably peaked with Arthur Penn’s remarkable Bonnie and Clyde. In the spring of 2000, I re-read John Toland’s history of that era, The Dillinger Days, and was particularly taken by his story about how Dillinger’s sidekick, Homer Van Meter, taught himself how to rope flies in Pendleton Reformatory. Jack “Red” Hamilton’s lingering death is a documented fact; my story of what happened in Dock Barker’s hideout is, of course, pure imagination … or myth, if you like that word better; I do.
In the Deathroom
It was a deathroom. Fletcher knew it for what it was as soon as the door opened. The floor was gray industrial tile. The walls were discolored white stone, marked here and there with darker patches that might have been blood—certainly blood had been spilled in this room. The overhead lights were cupped in wire cages. Halfway across the room stood a long wooden table with three people seated behind it. Before the table was an empty chair, waiting for Fletcher. Beside the chair stood a small wheeled trolley. The object on it had been draped with a piece of cloth, as a sculptor might cover his work-in-progress between sessions.
Fletcher was halfled, half-dragged toward the chair which had been placed for him. He reeled in the guard’s grip and let himself reel. If he looked more dazed than he really was, more shocked and unthinking, that was fine. He thought his chances of ever leaving this basement room in the Ministry of Information were perhaps one or two in thirty, and perhaps that was optimistic. Whatever they were, he had no intention of thinning them further by looking even halfway alert. His swelled eye, puffy nose, and broken lower lip might help in this regard; so might the crust of blood, like a dark red goatee, around his mouth. One thing Fletcher knew for sure: if he did leave, the others—the guard and the three sitting in tribunal behind the table—would be dead. He was a newspaper reporter and had never killed anything much larger than a hornet, but if he had to kill to escape this room, he would. He thought of his sister, on her retreat. He thought of his sister swimming in a river with a Spanish name. He thought of the light on the water at noon, moving river light too bright to look at. They reached the chair in front of the table. The guard pushed him into it so hard that Fletcher almost tipped himself over.
“Careful now, that’s not the way, no accidents,” said one of the men behind the table. It was Escobar. He spoke to the guard in Spanish. To Escobar’s left sat the other man. To Escobar’s right sat a woman of about sixty. The woman and the other man were thin. Escobar was fat and as greasy as a cheap candle. He looked like a movie Mexican. You expected him to say, “Batches? Batches? We don’t need no steenkin batches.” Yet this was the Chief Minister of Information. Sometimes he gave the English-language portion of the weather on the city television station. When he did this he invariably got fan mail. In a suit he didn’t look greasy, just roly-poly. Fletcher knew all this. He had done three or four stories on Escobar. He was colorful. He was also, according to rumor, an enthusiastic torturer. A Central American Himmler, Fletcher thought, and was amazed to discover that one’s sense of humor—rudimentary, granted—could function this far into a stat
e of terror.
“Handcuffs?” the guard asked, also in Spanish, and held up a pair of the plastic kind. Fletcher tried to keep his look of dazed incomprehension. If they cuffed him, it was over. He could forget about one chance in thirty, or one in three hundred.
Escobar turned briefly to the woman on his right. Her face was very dark, her hair black with startling white streaks. It flowed back and up from her forehead as if blown by a gale-force wind. The look of her hair reminded Fletcher of Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein. He gripped this similarity with a fierceness that was close to panic, the way he gripped the thought of bright light on the river, or his sister laughing with her friends as they walked to the water. He wanted images, not ideas. Images were luxury items now. And ideas were no good in a place like this. In a place like this all you got were the wrong ideas.
The woman gave Escobar a small nod. Fletcher had seen her around the building, always garbed in shapeless dresses like the one she wore now. She had been with Escobar often enough for Fletcher to assume she was his secretary, personal assistant, perhaps even his biographer—Christ knew that men like Escobar had egos large enough to warrant such accessories. Now Fletcher wondered if he’d had it backward all along, if she was his boss.
In any case, the nod seemed to satisfy Escobar. When he turned back to Fletcher, Escobar was smiling. And when he spoke, it was in English. “Don’t be silly, put them away. Mr. Fletcher is only here to help us in a few matters. He will soon be returning to his own country”—Escobar sighed deeply to show how deeply he regretted this. “… but in the meantime he is an honored guest.”
We don’t need no steenkin handcuffs, Fletcher thought.