The Death of Jack Hamilton (17)

“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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The Death of Jack Hamilton (14)

“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.

“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.

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The Death of Jack Hamilton (11)

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.

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The Death of Jack Hamilton (8)

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.”

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

The Death of Jack Hamilton (5)

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.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

The Death of Jack Hamilton (2)

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 señoras and señoritas 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.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

All that you Love Will Be Carried Away (16)

The snow had thickened, the wind had grown even stronger, and the
spark lights across the field were gone. Alfie stood beside his snowcovered car at the edge of the parking lot with his coat billowing out in front of him. At the farm, they’d all be watching TV by now. The whole fam’ damly. Assuming the satellite dish hadn’t blown off the barn roof, that was. Back at his place, his wife and daughter would be arriving home from Carlene’s basketball game. Maura and Carlene lived in a world that had little to do with the interstates, or fast-food boxes blowing down the breakdown lanes and the sound of semis passing you at seventy and eighty and even ninety miles an hour like a Doppler whine. He wasn’t complaining about it (or hoped he wasn’t); he was just pointing it out. “Nobody here even if there is,” someone in Chalk Level, Missouri, had written on a shithouse wall, and sometimes in those rest-area bathrooms there was blood, mostly just a little, but once he had seen a grimy basin under a scratched steel mirror half filled with it. Did anyone notice? Did anyone report such things?

In some rest areas the weather report fell constantly from overhead
speakers, and to Alfie the voice giving it sounded haunted, the voice
of a ghost running through the vocal cords of a corpse. In Candy,
Kansas, on Route 283, in Ness County, someone had written,
“Behold, I stand at the door and knock,” to which someone else had
added, “If your not from Pudlishers Cleering House go away you Bad
Boy.”

Alfie stood at the edge of the pavement, gasping a little because the
air was so cold and full of snow. In his left hand he held the Spiral notebook, bent almost double. There was no need to destroy it, after all. He would simply throw it into Farmer John’s east field, here on the west side of Lincoln. The wind would help him. The notebook might carry twenty feet on the fly, and the wind could tumble it even farther before it finally fetched up against the side of the furrow and was covered. It would lie there buried all winter, long after his body had been shipped home. In the spring, Farmer John would come out this way on his tractor, the cab filled with the music of Patty Loveless or George Jones or maybe even Clint Black, and he would plow the Spiral notebook under without seeing it and it would disappear into the scheme of things. Always supposing there was one. “Relax, it’s all just the rinse cycle,” someone had written beside a pay phone on I-35 not far from Cameron, Missouri.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

All that you Love Will Be Carried Away (13)

He considered using the john to get rid of the notebook, then shook
his head. He’d end up on his knees with his shirtsleeves rolled back,
fishing around in there, trying to get the damn thing back out.
While the fan rattled and the fluorescent buzzed. And although
immersion might blur some of the ink, it wouldn’t blur all of it. Not
enough. Besides, the notebook had been with him so long, riding in
his pocket across so many flat and empty Midwest miles. He hated the idea of just flushing it away.

The last page, then? Surely one page, balled up, would go down.
But that would leave the rest for them (there was always a them) to
discover, all that clear evidence of an unsound mind. They’d say,
“Lucky he didn’t decide to visit a schoolyard with an AK-47. Take a
bunch of little kids with him.” And it would follow Maura like a tin can tied to a dog’s tail. “Did you hear about her husband?” they’d ask each other in the supermarket. “Killed himself in a motel. Left a book
full of crazy stuff. Lucky he didn’t kill her.” Well, he could afford to be
a little hard about that. Maura was an adult, after all. Carlene, on the
other hand . . . Carlene was . . .

Alfie looked at his watch. At her j.-v. basketball game, that’s
where Carlene was right now. Her teammates would say most of the
same things the supermarket ladies would say, only within earshot and accompanied by those chilling seventh-grade giggles. Eyes full of glee and horror. Was that fair? No, of course not, but there was nothing fair about what had happened to him, either. Sometimes when you were cruising along the highway, you saw big curls of rubber that had unwound from the recap tires some of the independent truckers used. That was what he felt like now: thrown tread. The pills made it worse. They cleared your mind just enough for you to see what a colossal jam you were in.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

All that you Love Will Be Carried Away (10)

Or take this variation, which Alfie had also seen all over the country:
“Here I sit, on the pooper, giving birth to a Maine state trooper.”
It was always Maine, no matter where you were it was always Maine
State Trooper, and why? Because no other state would scan. Maine was the only one of the fifty whose name consisted of a single syllable. Yet again, it was in triplets: “Here I sit, on the pooper.”

He had thought of writing a book. Just a little one. The first title to occur to him had been “Don’t Look Up Here, You’re Pissing on Your Shoes,” but you couldn’t call a book that. Not and reasonably hope someone would put it out for sale in a store, anyway. And, besides, that was light. Frothy. He had become convinced over the years that something was going on here, and it wasn’t frothy. The title he had finally decided on was an adaptation of something he’d seen in a rest-area toilet stall outside Fort Scott, Kansas, on Highway 54. “I Killed Ted Bundy: The Secret Transit Code of America’s Highways.” By Alfred Zimmer. That sounded mysterious and ominous, almost scholarly. But he hadn’t done it. And although he had seen “If I supply the yarn, will she make me one” added to “My mother made me a whore” all over the country, he had never expounded (at least in writing) on the startling lack of sympathy, the “just deal with it” sensibility, of the response. Or what about “Mammon is the King of New Jersey”? How did one explain why New Jersey made it funny and the name of some other state probably wouldn’t? Even to try seemed almost arrogant. He was just a little man, after all, with a little man’s job. He sold things. A line of frozen dinners, currently.

And now, of course . . . now . . .
Alfie took another deep drag on his cigarette, mashed it out, and called home. He didn’t expect to get Maura and didn’t. It was his own recorded voice that answered him, ending with the number of his cellphone. A lot of good that would do; the cell-phone was in the trunk
of the Chevrolet, broken. He had never had good luck with gadgets.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

All that you Love Will Be Carried Away (7)

His pen had COTTAGER FOODS THE GOOD STUFF! written in gold
along the barrel, next to the logo, a thatched hut with smoke coming
out of the quaintly crooked chimney.

Sitting there on the bed, still in his topcoat, Alfie bent studiously over his old notebook so that his shadow fell on the page. Below “Dont chew the Trojan Gum” and “Poopie doopie you so loopy,”
Alfie added “Save Russian Jews, collect valuable prizes (WALTON NEB)” and “All that you love will be carried away (WALTON NEB).” He
hesitated. He rarely added notes, liking his finds to stand alone.
Explanation rendered the exotic mundane (or so he had come to
believe; in the early years he had annotated much more freely), but
from time to time a footnote still seemed to be more illuminating than demystifying.

He starred the second entry—“All that you love will be carried away (WALTON NEB)”—and drew a line two inches above the bottom of the page, and wrote.*

He put the pen back in his pocket, wondering why he or anyone
would continue anything this close to ending everything. He couldn’t
think of a single answer. But of course you went on breathing, too.
You couldn’t stop it without rough surgery.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual