I ended up going around to half a dozen scrape artists and hairline-changers. 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.
99
STEPHEN KING
“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 gray-green, 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.”
100
EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL
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 101
STEPHEN KING
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?”
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?”
102
EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL
“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 pot-hole. 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.