The Death of Jack Hamilton.pdf

The Death

of Jack Hamilton

Wa nt 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 Lit-

tle 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 set-

ting 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

STEPHEN KING

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. John-

nie 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 Novem-

ber 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

EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL

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 back-

seat, 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.”

STEPHEN KING

So I slowed down to thirty-ﬁve and for a quarter of an hour every-

thing 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 win-

dow 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 John-

nie 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 win-

dow, 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.

“A re 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

EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL

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

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