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“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.”

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.

“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.

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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.

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The Death Of Jack Hamilton (34)

“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’sprison 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.

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The Death Of Jack Hamilton (32)

“Well, I don’t care how many of them we get, as long as that son of a bitch Melvin Purvis is one of them,” Dock says. By the time Rabbits actually got the grub on the table, it was almost the time farmers eat. We took it in shifts, two men always watching the long driveway. Buster raised the alarm once and we all rushed to our places, but it was only a milk truck on the main road. The Gees never came. You could call that bad info; I called it more of John Dillinger’s luck.

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 oozingout 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?”

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Buster Daggs or Draggs looked at them like they was crazy, but you know what? I wasn’t surprised a bit. That’s just the effect Johnnie had on people.

“I’ll stay, too,” I says. “Well, I’m getting out,” Buster says. “Fine,” Dock says. “Take Rabbits with you.” “The hell you say,” Rabbits pipes up. “I feel like cooking.” “Have you gone cuckoo?” Dock asks her. “It’s one o’clock in the morning, and you’re in blood right up to the elbows.”

“I don’t care what time it is, and blood washes off,” she says. “I’m
making you boys the biggest breakfast you ever ate—eggs, bacon,
biscuits, gravy, hash browns.”

“I love you, marry me,” Johnnie says, and we all laughed. “Oh, hell,” Buster says. “If there’s breakfast, I’ll hang around.” Which is how we all wound up staying put in that Aurora farmhouse, ready to die for a man who was already—whether Johnnie liked it or not—on his way out. We barricaded the front door with a sofa and some chairs, and the back door with the gas stove, which didn’t work anyway. Only the woodstove worked. Me and Johnnie got our tommy guns from the Ford, and Dock got some more from the attic. Also a crate of grenades, a mortar, and a crate of mortar shells. I bet the Army didn’t have as much stuff in those parts as we did. Ha-ha!

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I didn’t want to get my hands anywhere near that hole, but I wasn’t going to tell her no. I pinched it shut, and more watery pus ran out when I did. My midsection clenched up and I started making this gurk-gurk noise. I couldn’t help it.

“Come on,” she says, kind of smiling. “If you’re man enough to pull the trigger, you’re man enough to deal with a hole.” Then she sewed him up with these big, looping overhand strokes—really punching the needle in. After the first two, I couldn’t look.

“Thank you,” Johnnie told her when it was done. “I want you to know I’m going to take care of you for this.” “Don’t go getting your hopes up,” she says. “I wouldn’t give him one chance in twenty.” “He’ll pull through now,” Johnnie says.

Then Dock and Volney rushed back in. Behind them was another member of the gang—Buster Daggs or Draggs, I can’t remember which. Anyway, he’d been down to the phone they used at the Cities Service station in town, and he said the Gees had been busy back in Chicago, arresting anyone and everyone they thought might be connected to the Bremer kidnapping, which had been the Barker Gang’s last big job. One of the fellas they took was John J. (Boss) McLaughlin, a high mucky-muck in the Chicago political machine. Another was Dr. Joseph Moran, also known as the Crybaby.

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In fact, Jack wasn’t thrashing much. He was too weak. The sound of the air shrieking in and out of him kept getting thinner and thinner. It was hotter than hell with those lamps set up all around the bed, and the stink of the hot oil was almost as strong as the gangrene. I wish we’d thought to open a window before we got started, but it was too late by then.

Rabbits had a set of tongs, but she couldn’t get them in the hole. “Fuck this!” she cried, and tossed them to one side, and then stuck her fingers into the bloody hole, reached around until she found the slug that was in there, pulled it out, and threw it to the floor. Johnnie started to bend over for it and she said, “You can get your souvenir later, handsome. For now just hold him.”

She went to work packing gauze into the mess she’d made. Johnnie lifted up the dishtowel and peeked underneath it. “Not a minute too soon,” he told her with a grin. “Old Red Hamilton has turned a wee bit blue.”

Outside, a car pulled into the driveway. It could have been the cops, for all we knew, but there wasn’t nothing we could do about it then. “Pinch this shut,” she told me, and pointed at the hole with the gauze in it. “I ain’t much of a seamstress, but I guess I can put in half a dozen.”

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The Death Of Jack Hamilton (26)

I nodded as if that name meant something to me. I found out later that Volney was another member of Ma Barker’s gang. He was a pretty nice fella. So was Dock Barker. And Volney’s girlfriend, the one they called Rabbits. They called her Rabbits because she dug herself out of prison a few times. She was the best of the lot. Aces. Rabbits, at least, tried to help poor old troublesome Jack. None of the others would—not the pill-rollers, the scrapers, the face artists, and certainly not Dr. Joseph (Crybaby) Moran.

The Barkers were on the run after a botched kidnapping; Dock’s Ma had already left—gone all the way to Florida. The hideout in Aurora wasn’t much—four rooms, no electricity, a privy out back—but it was better than Murphy’s saloon. And, like I say, Volney’s girlfriend at least tried to do something. That was on our second night there.

She set up kerosene lamps all around the bed, then sterilized a paring
knife in a pot of boiling water. “If you boys feel pukey,” she said, “you just choke it back until I’m done.”

“We’ll be okay,” Johnnie said. “Won’t we, Homer?” I nodded, but I was queasy even before she got going. Jack was laying on his stomach, head turned to the side, muttering. It seemed he never stopped. Whatever room he happened to be in was filled with people only he could see.

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CHICAGO written on it in needlework. “No change?” “No change. Where are we going?”

“Aurora,” Johnnie said. “It’s a little town upstate. We’re going to move in with Volney Davis and his girlfriend.” He leaned over the cot. Jack’s red hair, thin to start with, had started falling out. It was on the pillow, and you could see the crown of his head, white as snow. “You hear that, Jack?” Johnnie shouts. “We’re hot now, but we’re going to cool off quick! You understand?”

“Walk on your hands like Johnnie Dillinger used to,” Jack said, without opening his eyes. Johnnie just kept smiling. He winked at me. “He understands,” he said. “He’s just not awake. You know?” “Sure,” I said.

On the ride up to Aurora, Jack sat against the window, his head flying
up and then thumping against the glass every time we hit a pothole.
He was holding long, muttery conversations with folks we couldn’t see. Once we were out of town, me and Johnnie had to roll down our windows. The smell was just too bad otherwise. Jack was rotting from the inside out, but he wouldn’t die. I’ve heard it said that life is fragile and fleeting, but I don’t believe it. It would be better if it was.

“That Dr. Moran was a crybaby,” Johnnie said. We were in the woods by then, the city behind us. “I decided I didn’t want no crybaby like him working on my partner. But I wasn’t going to leave without something.” Johnnie always travelled with a .38 pistol tucked into his belt. Now he pulled it out and showed it to me, the way he must have shown it to Dr. Moran. “I says, ‘If I can’t take away nothing else, Doc, I’ll just have to take your life.’ He seen I meant business, and he called someone up there. Volney Davis.”

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“I remember,” Jack said. Johnnie didn’t do no walking on his hands that night. By the time he got the glass of water to Jack’s lips, the poor bugger had gone back to sleep with his head on Johnnie’s shoulder.
“He’s gonna die,” I said. “He’s not,” Johnnie said.

The next morning, I asked Johnnie what we were going to do.
What we could do. “I got one more name out of McClure. Joe Moran. McClure says he was the go-between on the Bremer kidnapping. If he’ll fix Jack up, it’s worth a thousand to me.”

“I got six hundred,” I said. And I’d give it up, but not for Jack Hamilton. Jack had gone beyond needing a doctor; what Jack needed by then was a preacher. I did it for Johnnie Dillinger.

“Thanks, Homer,” he said. “I’ll be back in an hour. Meantime, youmind the baby.” But Johnnie looked bleak. He knew that if Moran wouldn’t help us we’d have to get out of town. It would mean taking Jack back to St. Paul and trying there. And we knew what going back in a stolen Ford would likely mean. It was the spring of 1934 and all three of us— e, Jack, and especially Johnnie—were on J. Edgar Hoover’s list of “public enemies.”

“Well, good luck,” I says. “See you in the funny pages.” He went out. I mooned around. I was mighty sick of the room bythen. It was like being back in Michigan City, only worse. Because when you were in stir they’d done the worst they could to you. Here, hiding out in the back of Murphy’s, things could always get worse.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual