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 107
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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 108
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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.
It was boring. Boring at Pendleton, boring at Michigan City, I-God’s 109
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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 air-borne.
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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.
“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.