The Death of Jack Hamilton (4)

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.”

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

The Death of Jack Hamilton (3)

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.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

The Death of Jack Hamilton (1)

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.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

All that you Love Will Be Carried Away (17)

Alfie drew the book back to throw it, then lowered his arm. He hated to let it go, that was the truth of it. That was the bottom line everyone was always talking about. But things were bad, now. He
raised his arm again and then lowered it again. In his distress and indecision he began to cry without being aware of it. The wind rushed
around him, on its way to wherever. He couldn’t go on living the way
he had been living, he knew that much. Not one more day. And a shot in the mouth would be easier than any living change, he knew that, too. Far easier than struggling to write a book few people (if any at all) were likely to read. He raised his arm again, cocked the hand with the notebook in it back to his ear like a pitcher preparing to throw a fastball, then stood like that. An idea had occurred to him. He would count to sixty. If the spark lights of the farmhouse reappeared at any time during that count, he would try to write the book.

To write a book like that, he thought, you’d have to begin by talking about how it was to measure distance in green mile markers, and the very width of the land, and how the wind sounded when you got out of your car at one of those rest areas in Oklahoma or North Dakota. How it sounded almost like words. You’d have to explicate the silence, and how the bathrooms always smelled of piss and the great hollow farts of departed travellers, and how in that silence the voices on the walls began to speak. The voices of those who had written and then moved on. The telling would hurt, but if the wind dropped and the spark lights of the farm came back, he’d do it anyway.

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.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

All that you Love Will Be Carried Away (15)

Alfie considered this, then nodded slowly. Not a bad idea at all. The
Spiral notebook might stay there for years. Then, someday in the distant future, it would drop out. Someone—perhaps a lodger, more
likely a maid—would pick it up, curious. Would flip through it. What
would that person’s reaction be? Shock? Amusement? Plain old head-scratching puzzlement? Alfie rather hoped for this last. Because things in the notebook were puzzling. “Elvis killed Big Pussy,” someone
in Hackberry, Texas, had written. “Serenity is being square,”
someone in Rapid City, South Dakota, had opined. And below that,
someone had written, “No, stupid, serenity=(va)2+b, if v=serenity,
a=satisfaction, and b=sexual compatibility.”

Behind the picture, then.
Alfie was halfway across the room when he remembered the pills
in his coat pocket. And there were more in the glove compartment of
the car, different kinds but for the same thing. They were prescription drugs, but not the sort the doctor gave you if you were feeling . . . well . . . sunny. So the cops would search this room thoroughly for other kinds of drugs and when they lifted the picture away from the wall the notebook would drop out onto the green rug. The things in it would look even worse, even crazier, because of the pains he had taken to hide it.

And they’d read the last thing as a suicide note, simply because it
was the last thing. No matter where he left the book, that would happen. Sure as shit sticks to the ass of America, as some East Texas turnpike poet had once written.
“If they find it,” he said, and just like that the answer came to
him.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

All that you Love Will Be Carried Away (14)

“But I’m not crazy,” he said. “That doesn’t make me crazy.” No.
Crazy might actually be better.
Alfie picked up the notebook, flipped it closed much as he had flipped the cylinder back into the .38, and sat there tapping it against his leg. This was ludicrous.

Ludicrous or not, it nagged him. The way thinking a stove burner
might still be on sometimes nagged him when he was home, nagged
until he finally got up and checked and found it cold. Only this was
worse. Because he loved the stuff in the notebook. Amassing graffiti— thinking about graffiti—had been his real work these last years, not selling price-code readers or frozen dinners that were really not much more than Swansons or Freezer Queens in fancy microwavable dishes. The daffy exuberance of “Helen Keller fucked her feller!” for instance. Yet the notebook might be a real embarrassment once he was dead. It would be like accidentally hanging yourself in the closet because you were experimenting with a new way of jacking off and got found that way with your shorts under your feet and shit on your ankles. Some of the stuff in his notebook might show up in the newspaper, along with his picture. Once upon a time he would have scoffed at the idea, but in these days, when even Bible Belt newspapers routinely speculated about a mole on the President’s penis, the notion was hard to dismiss.

Burn it, then? No, he’d set off the goddamned smoke detector.
Put it behind the picture on the wall? The picture of the little boy with the fishing pole and the straw hat?

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

All that you Love Will Be Carried Away (12)

He hung up and raised the gun again. Before he could put the barrel
in his mouth, his eye fell on the notebook. He frowned and put the gun down. The book was open to the last four entries. The first thing
anyone responding to the shot would see would be his dead body,
sprawled across the bed closest to the bathroom, his head hanging
down and bleeding on the nubbly green rug. The second thing, however, would be the Spiral notebook, open to the final written age.

Alfie imagined some cop, some Nebraska state trooper who would
never be written about on any bathroom wall due to the disciplines
of scansion, reading those final entries, perhaps turning the battered
old notebook toward him with the tip of his own pen. He would read the first three entries—“Trojan Gum,” “Poopie doopie,” “Save Russian Jews”—and dismiss them as insanity. He would read the last line, “All that you love will be carried away,” and decide that the dead guy had regained a little rationality at the end, just enough to write a halfway sensible suicide note.

Alfie didn’t like the idea of people thinking he was crazy (further
examination of the book, which contained such information as
“Medger Evers is alive and well in Disneyland,” would only confirm
that impression). He was not crazy, and the things he had written here over the years weren’t crazy, either. He was convinced of it. And if he was wrong, if these were the rantings of lunatics, they needed to be examined even more closely. That thing about don’t look up here, you’re pissing on your shoes, for instance, was that humor? Or a growl of rage?

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

All that you Love Will Be Carried Away (11)

After the beep he said, “Hi, it’s me. I’m in Lincoln. It’s snowing.
Remember the casserole you were going to take over to my mother.
She’ll be expecting it. And she asked for the Red Ball coupons. I know
you think she’s crazy on that subject, but humor her, okay? She’s old. Tell Carlene Daddy says hi.” He paused, then for the first time in
about five years added, “I love you.”

He hung up, thought about another cigarette—no worries about lung cancer, not now—and decided against it. He put the notebook, open to the last page, beside the telephone. He picked up the gun and rolled out the cylinder. Fully loaded. He snapped the cylinder back in
with a flick of his wrist, then slipped the short barrel into his mouth.
It tasted of oil and metal. He thought, Here I SIT, about to COOL it, my plan to EAT a fuckin’ BOOL-it. He grinned around the barrel. That was terrible. He never would have written that down in his book.

Then another thought occurred to him and he put the gun back in
its trench on the pillow, drew the phone to him again, and once more
dialled home. He waited for his voice to recite the useless cell-phone
number, then said, “Me again. Don’t forget Rambo’s appointment at
the vet day after tomorrow, okay? Also the sea-jerky strips at night.
They really do help his hips. Bye.”

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

All that you Love Will Be Carried Away (9)

He had started collecting when he was selling the UPCs, noting
various bits of graffiti in the Spiral notebook without at first knowing
why he was doing it. They were just amusing, or disconcerting, or
both at the same time. Yet little by little he had become fascinated
with these messages from the interstate, where the only other communications seemed to be dipped headlights when you passed in the rain, or maybe somebody in a bad mood flipping you the bird when you went by in the passing lane pulling a rooster-tail of snow behind you. He came gradually to see—or perhaps only to hope—that something was going on here. The e. e. cummings lilt of “Poopie doopie you so loopy,” for instance, or the inarticulate rage of “1380 West Avenue kill my mother TAKE HER JEWELS.”

Or take this oldie: “Here I sit, cheeks a-flexin’, giving birth to
another Texan.” The meter, when you considered it, was odd. Not
iambs but some odd triplet formula with the stress on the third: “Here
I sit, cheeks a-flexin’, giving birth to another Texan.” Okay, it broke
down a little at the end, but that somehow added to its memorability,
gave it that final mnemonic twist of the tail. He had thought on many occasions that he could go back to school, take some courses,
get all that feet-and-meter stuff down pat. Know what he was talking about instead of running on a tightrope of intuition. All he
really remembered clearly from school was iambic pentameter: “To be
or not to be, that is the question.” He had seen that in a men’s room
on I-70, actually, to which someone had added, “The real question is
who your father was, dipstick.”

These triplets, now. What were they called? Was that trochaic?
He didn’t know. The fact that he could find out no longer seemed
important, but he could find out, yes. It was something people
taught; it was no big secret.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

All that you Love Will Be Carried Away (8)

The wind gusted outside. Alfie looked briefly toward the window, where the curtain (also green, but a different shade from the rug)
had been drawn. If he pulled it back, he would be able to see chains
of light on Interstate 80, each bright bead marking sentient beings
running on the rod of the highway. Then he looked back down at his
book. He meant to do it, all right. This was just . . . well . . .

“Breathing,” he said, and smiled. He picked his cigarette out of the
ashtray, smoked, returned it to the groove, and thumbed back
through the book again. The entries recalled thousands of truck
stops and roadside chicken shacks and highway rest areas the way certain songs on the radio can bring back specific memories of a place, a time, the person you were with, what you were drinking, what you were thinking.

“Here I sit, brokenhearted, tried to shit but only farted.” Everyone
knew that one, but here was an interesting variation from Double D
Steaks in Hooker, Oklahoma: “Here I sit, I’m at a loss, trying to shit
out taco sauce. I know I’m going to drop a load, only hope I don’t
explode.” And from Casey, Iowa, where SR 25 crossed I-80: “My
mother made me a whore.” To which someone had added in very different penmanship: “If I supply the yarn will she make me one?”

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual