If they didn't he'd throw the notebook into the field, go back into Room 190 (just hang a left at the Snax machine), and shoot himself, as planned.
Either way. Either way.
Alfie stood there counting to sixty inside his head, waiting to see if the wind would drop.
I like to drive, and I'm particularly addicted to those long interstate barrels where you see nothing but prairies to either side and a cinderblock rest area every forty miles or so. Rest-area bathrooms are always full of graffiti, some of it extremely weird. I started to collect these dispatches from nowhere, keeping them in a pocket notebook, got others off the Internet (there are two or three websites dedicated to them), and finally found the story in which they belonged. This is it. I don't know if it's good or not, but I cared very much for the lonely man at its center and really hope things turned out okay for him. In the first draft things did, but Bill Buford of The New Yorker suggested a more ambiguous ending. He was probably right, but we could all say a prayer for the Alfie Zimmers of the world.
* * *
1"To read this you must also look at the exit ramp from the Walton Rest Area back to highway, i.e. at departing transients."
The Death of Jack Hamilton
Want you to get one thing straight from the start: wasn't nobody on earth didn't like my pal Johnnie Dillinger, except Melvin Purvis of the F.B.I. Purvis was J. Edgar Hoover's right-hand man, and he hated Johnnie like poison. Everyone else--well, Johnnie had a way of making folks like him, that's all. And he had a way of making people laugh. God makes it come right in the end, that's something he used to say. And how can you not like a guy with that kind of philosophy?
But people don't want to let a man like that die. You'd be surprised how many folks still say it wasn't Johnnie the Feds knocked down in Chicago beside the Biograph Theater on July 22, 1934. After all, it was Melvin Purvis who'd been in charge of hunting Johnnie down, and, besides being mean, Purvis was a goddam fool (the sort of man who'd try to piss out a window without remembering to open it first). You won't hear no better from me, either. Little fag of a dandy, how I hated him! How we all did!
We got away from Purvis and the Gees after the shootout at Little Bohemia, Wisconsin--all of us! The biggest mystery of the year was how that goddam pansy ever kept his job. Johnnie once said, "J. Edgar probably can't get that good a blow job from a dame." How we laughed! Sure, Purvis got Johnnie in the end, but only after setting an ambush outside the Biograph and shooting him in the back while he was running down an alley. He fell down in the muck and the cat shit and said, "How's this, then?" and died.
Still folks won't believe it. Johnnie was handsome, they say, looked almost like a movie star. The fella the Gees shot outside the Biograph had a fat face, all swollen up and bloated like a cooked sausage. Johnnie was barely thirty-one, they say, and the mug the cops shot that night looked forty, easy! Also (and here they drop their voices to a whisper), everyone knows John Dillinger had a pecker the size of a Louisville Slugger. That fella Purvis ambushed outside the Biograph didn't have nothing but the standard six inches. And then there's the matter of that scar on his upper lip. You can see it clear as day in the morgue photographs (like the one where some yo-yo is holding up my old pal's head and looking all solemn, as if to tell the world once and for all that Crime Does Not Pay). The scar cuts the side of Johnnie's mustache in two. Everyone knows John Dillinger never had a scar like that, people say; just look at any of the other pictures. God knows there's enough of them.
There's even a book that says Johnnie didn't die--that he lived on long after the rest of his running buddies, and finished up in Mexico, living in a haci and pleasing any number of senoras and senoritas with his oversized tool. The book claims that my old pal died on November 20, 1963--two days before Kennedy--at the ripe old age of sixty, and it wasn't no federal bullet that took him off but a plain old heart attack, that John Dillinger died in bed.
It's a nice story, but it ain't true.
Johnnie's face looks big in those last photos because he'd really packed on the pounds. He was the type who eats when he's nervous, and after Jack Hamilton died, in Aurora, Illinois, Johnnie felt he was next. Said as much, in that gravel pit where we took poor old Jack.
As for his tool--well, I'd known Johnnie ever since we met at Pendleton Reformatory in Indiana. I saw him dressed and undressed, and Homer Van Meter is here to tell you that he had a good one, but not an especially great one. (I'll tell you who had a great one, if you want to know: Dock Barker--the mama's boy! Ha!)
Which brings me to the scar on Johnnie's upper lip, the one you can see cutting through his mustache in those pictures where he's lying on the cooling board. The reason the scar doesn't show in any of Johnnie's other pictures is that he got it near the end. It happened in Aurora, while Jack (Red) Hamilton, our old pal, was on his deathbed. That's what I want to tell you about: how Johnnie Dillinger got the scar on his upper lip.
*
Me and Johnnie and Red Hamilton got away from the Little Bohemia shootout through the kitchen windows in back, making our way down the side of the lake while Purvis and his idiots were still pouring lead into the front of the lodge. Boy, I hope the kraut who owned the place had insurance! The first car we found belonged to an elderly neighbor couple, and it wouldn't start. We had better luck with the second--a Ford coupe that belonged to a carpenter just up the road. Johnnie put him in the driver's seat, and he chauffeured us a good way back toward St. Paul. Then he was invited to step out--which he did quite willingly--and I took over.
We crossed the Mississippi about twenty miles downriver from St. Paul, and although the local cops were all on the lookout for what they called the Dillinger Gang, I think we would have been all right if Jack Hamilton hadn't lost his hat while we were making our escape. He was sweating like a pig--he always did when he was nervous--and when he found a rag on the backseat of the carpenter's car he whipped it into a kind of rope and tied it around his head, Injun style. That was what caught the eye of those cops parked on the Wisconsin side of the Spiral Bridge as we went past them, and they came after us for a closer look.
That might have been the end of us right there, but Johnnie always had the Devil's own luck--until the Biograph, anyway. He put a cattle truck right between us and them, and the cops couldn't get past.
"Step on it, Homer!" Johnnie shouts at me. He was in the backseat, and in rare good humor from the sound of him. "Make it walk!"
I did, too, and we left the cattle truck in the dust, with those cops stuck behind it. So long, Mother, I'll write when I get work. Ha!
Once it seemed we had them buried for good, Jack says, "Slow down, you damned fool--no sense getting picked up for speeding."
So I slowed down to thirty-five and for a quarter of an hour everything was fine. We were talking about Little Bohemia, and whether or not Lester (the one they were always calling Baby Face) might have gotten away, when all at once there's the crackle of rifles and pistols, and the sound of bullets whining off the pavement. It was those hick cops from the bridge. They'd caught up, creeping easy the last ninety or a hundred yards, and were close enough now to be shooting for the tires--they probably weren't entirely sure, even then, that it was Dillinger.
They weren't in doubt for long. Johnnie broke out the back window of the Ford with the butt of his pistol and started shooting back. I mashed the gas pedal again and got that Ford all the way up to fifty, which was a tearing rush in those days. There wasn't much traffic, but what there was I passed any way I could--on the left, on the right, in the ditch. Twice I felt the driver's-side wheels go up, but we never tipped. Nothing like a Ford when it came to a getaway. Once Johnnie wrote to Henry Ford himself. "When I'm in a Ford, I can make any car take my dust," he told Mr. Ford, and we surely dusted them that day.
We paid a price, though. There were these spink! spink! spink! noises, and a crack ran up the windshield and a slug--I'm pretty sure it was a .45--fell dead on the dashboard. It looked like a big black elm beetle.
Jack Hamilton was in the passenger seat. He got his tommy gun off the floor and was checking the drum, ready to lean out the window, I imagine, when there came another of those spink! noises. Jack says, "Oh! Bastard! I'm hit!" That bullet had to have come in the busted back window and how it missed Johnnie to hit Jack I don't know.
"Are you all right?" I shouted. I was hung over the wheel like a monkey and driving like one, too, very likely. I passed a Coulee Dairy truck on the right, honking all the time, yelling for that white-coat-farmer-son-of-a-bitch to get out of my road. "Jack, are you all right?"
"I'm okay, I'm fine!" he says, and shoves himself and his sub gun out the window, almost to his waist. Only, at first the milk truck was in the way. I could see the driver in the mirror, gawking at us from under his little hat. And when I looked over at Jack as he leaned out I could see a hole, just as neat and round as something you'd draw with a pencil, in the middle of his overcoat. There was no blood, just that little black hole.
"Never mind Jack, just run the son of a bitch!" Johnnie shouted at me.
I ran it. We gained maybe half a mile on the milk truck, and the cops stuck behind it the whole while because there was a guardrail on one side and a line of slowpoke traffic coming the other way. We turned hard, around a sharp curve, and for a moment both the milk truck and the police car were out of sight. Suddenly, on the right, there was a gravel road all grown in with weeds.
"In there!" Jack gasps, falling back into the passenger seat, but I was already turning in.
It was an old driveway. I drove about seventy yards, over a little rise and down the other side, ending at a farmhouse that looked long empty. I killed the engine, and we all got out and stood behind the car.
"If they come, we'll give em a show," Jack says. "I ain't going to no electric chair like Harry Pierpont."
But no one came, and after ten minutes or so we got back in the car and drove out to the main road, all slow and careful. And that's when I saw something I didn't like much. "Jack," I says, "you're bleeding out your mouth. Look out or it'll be on your shirt."
Jack wiped his mouth with the big finger of his right hand, looked at the blood on it, and then gave me a smile that I still see in my dreams: big and broad and scared to death. "I just bit the inside of my cheek," says he. "I'm all right."
"You sure?" Johnnie asks. "You sound kind of funny."
"I can't catch all my breath just yet," Jack says. He wiped his big finger across his mouth again and there was less blood, and that seemed to satisfy him. "Let's get the fuck out of here."
"Turn back toward the Spiral Bridge, Homer," Johnnie says, and I did like he told me. Not all the stories about Johnnie Dillinger are true, but he could always find his way home, even after he didn't have no home no more, and I always trusted him.
We were once again doing a perfectly legal parson-go-to-meeting thirty miles per, when Johnnie saw a Texaco station and told me to turn off to the right. We were soon on country gravel roads, Johnnie calling lefts and rights, even though all the roads looked the same to me: just wheel ruts running between clapped-out cornfields. The roads were muddy, and there were still scraps of snow in some of the fields. Every now and then there'd be some hick kid watching us go by. Jack was getting quieter and quieter. I asked him how he was doing and he said, "I'm all right."
"Yes, well, we ought to get you looked at when we cool off a little," Johnnie said. "And we have to get your coat mended, too. With that hole in it, it looks like somebody shot you!" He laughed, and so did I. Even Jack laughed. Johnnie could always cheer you up.
"I don't think it went deep," Jack said, just as we came out on Route 43. "I'm not bleeding out of my mouth anymore--look." He turned to show Johnnie his finger, which now just had a maroon smear on it. But when he twisted back into his seat blood poured out of his mouth and nose.
"I think it went deep enough," Johnnie said. "We'll take care of you--if you can still talk, you're likely fine."
"Sure," Jack said. "I'm fine." His voice was smaller than ever.
"Fine as a fiddler's fuck," I said.
"Aw, shut up, you dummocks," he said, and we all had a laugh. They laughed at me a lot. It was all in fun.
About five minutes after we got back on the main road, Jack passed out. He slumped against the window, and a thread of blood trickled from one corner of his mouth and smeared on the glass. It reminded me of swatting a mosquito that's had its dinner--the claret everywhere. Jack still had the rag on his head, but it had gone crooked. Johnny took it off and cleaned the blood from Jack's face with it. Jack muttered and raised his hands as if to push Johnnie away, but they dropped back into his lap.
"Those cops will have radioed ahead," Johnnie says. "If we go to St. Paul, we're finished. That's what I think. How about you, Homer?"
"The same," I says. "What does that leave? Chicago?"
"Yep," he says. "Only first we have to ditch this motor. They'll have the plates by now. Even if they didn't, it's bad luck. It's a damn hoodoo."
"What about Jack?" I says.
"Jack will be all right," he says, and I knew to say no more on the subject.
We stopped about a mile down the road, and Johnnie shot out the front tire of the hoodoo Ford while Jack leaned against the hood, looking pale and sick.
When we needed a car, it was always my job to flag one down. "People who wouldn't stop for any of the rest of us will stop for you," Johnnie said once. "Why is that, I wonder?"
Harry Pierpont answered him. This was back in the days when it was still the Pierpont Gang instead of the Dillinger Gang. "Because he looks like a Homer," he said. "Wasn't ever anyone looked so much like a Homer as Homer Van Meter does."
We all laughed at that, and now here I was again, and this time it was really important. You'd have to say life or death.
Three or four cars went by and I pretended to be fiddling with the tire. A farm truck was next, but it was too slow and waddly. Also, there were some fellas in the back. Driver slows down and says, "You need any help, amigo?"
"I'm fine," I says. "Workin' up a appetite for lunch. You go right on."
He gives me a laugh and on he went. The fellas in the back also waved.
Next up was another Ford, all by its lonesome. I waved my arms for them to stop, standing where they couldn't help but see that flat shoe. Also, I was giving them a grin. That big one that says I'm just a harmless Homer by the side of the road.
It worked. The Ford stopped. There was three folks inside, a man and a young woman and a fat baby. A family.
"Looks like you got a flat there, partner," the man says. He was wearing a suit and a topcoat, both clean but not what you'd call Grade A.
"Well, I don't know how bad it can be," I says, "when it's only flat on the bottom."
We was still laughing over that just like it was new when Johnnie and Jack come out of the trees with their guns drawn.
"Just hold still, sir," Jack says. "No one is going to get hurt."
The man looked at Jack, looked at Johnnie, looked at Jack again. Then his eyes went back to Johnnie and his mouth dropped open. I seen it a thousand times, but it always tickled me.
"You're Dillinger!" he gasps, and then shoots his hands up.
"Pleased to meet you, sir," Johnnie says, and grabs one of the man's hands out of the air. "Get those mitts down, would you?"
Just as he did, another two or three cars came along--country-go-to-town types, sitting up straight as sticks in their old muddy sedans. We didn't look like nothing but a bunch of folks at the side of the road getting ready for a tire-changing party.
Jack, meanwhile, went to the driver's side of the new Ford, turned off the switch, and took the keys. The sky was white that day, as if with rain or snow, but Jack's face was whiter.
"What's your name, Ma'am?" Jack asks the woman. She was wearing a long gray coat and a cute sailor's cap.
"Deelie Francis," she says. Her eyes were as big and dark as plums. "That's Roy. He's my husband. Are you going to
kill us?"
Johnnie give her a stern look and says, "We are the Dillinger Gang, Mrs. Francis, and we have never killed anyone." Johnnie always made this point. Harry Pierpont used to laugh at him and ask him why he wasted his breath, but I think Johnnie was right to do that. It's one of the reasons he'll be remembered long after the straw-hat-wearing little pansy is forgot.
"That's right," Jack says. "We just rob banks, and not half as many as they say. And who is this fine little man?" He chucked the kiddo under the chin. He was fat, all right; looked like W. C. Fields.
"That's Buster," Deelie Francis says.
"Well, he's a regular little bouncer, ain't he?" Jack smiled. There was blood on his teeth. "How old is he? Three or so?"
"Just barely two and a half," Mrs. Francis says proudly.
"Is that so?"
"Yes, but he's big for his age. Mister, are you all right? You're awful pale. And there's blood on your--"
Johnnie speaks up then. "Jack, can you drive this one into the trees?" He pointed at the carpenter's old Ford.
"Sure," Jack says.
"Flat tire and all?"
"You just try me. It's just that . . . I'm awful thirsty. Ma'am--Missus Francis--do you have anything to drink?"
She turned around and bent over--not easy with that horse of a baby in her arms--and got a thermos from the back.
Another couple of cars went puttering by. The folks inside waved, and we waved back. I was still grinning fit to split, trying to look just as Homer as a Homer could be. I was worried about Jack and didn't know how he could stay on his feet, let alone tip up that thermos and swig what was inside. Iced tea, she told him, but he seemed not to hear. When he handed it back to her, there were tears rolling down his cheeks. He thanked her, and she asked him again if he was all right.
"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.