“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.
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“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.
“Never will,” Johnnie says, as confident as ever. “Wouldn’t spare 96
EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL
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.”
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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 98
EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL
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.