“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 111
STEPHEN KING
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 112
EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL
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 “Tra-ra-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 113
STEPHEN KING
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.
114
EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL
“Anyway, we’re gettin’ out of here,” he says, rubbing the sore place. “You ought to get out, too. Take your luggage. 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.”