World, Chase Me Down

by Andrew Hilleman

  Outside the morning bore oily fogs and a wrinkled sky. Daylight arrived cold and pink with clouds as low as the building tops. The coffee was burnt and had the hard taste of a batch that’d been reheated three or four times and sitting in the same pot for even longer than that. I took one more sip and tossed the rest out the window.

  Hattie woke a few minutes later, blinking as slowly as an owl.

  “Don’t drink the coffee,” I said. “It’s gone bad.”

  She sat up and sniffed the air. The carpet reeked of odors trapped deep in the fibers from previous tenants: tobacco spit, toe jam, blood. I had hung a simple cross on the wall above the bed, but other than that, the walls were bare. “You really need to find a new place to live if you want me to keep coming over,” she told me.

  I pinched some tobacco from a canning jar and filled the bowl of my pipe and stared down into my empty cup. “Like what kind of place?”

  “A nice apartment. One with clean floors and its own kitchen. Or a house even. I always dreamed of living in a pink two-story house.”

  “A pink house?”

  “Mmhmm. Ever since I was a girl.”

  “I don’t have the money for that.”

  “You ever plan on getting more money?”

  “Everybody in the world has that plan,” I said and was about to say more. Instead I pressed my lips down on my pipe stem and sat blowing smoke out the window. The thousand-dollar band of money my sister had given me on loan to set myself up in the city was hidden away in my tobacco can along with my other savings. I still couldn’t believe it. A thousand dollars. I wanted to tell Hattie everything. How if things went right, I might be able to buy the exact same kind of home she dreamed of, one with vivid purple carpet and a covered porch and a pair of plum trees in the backyard. One with a new cookstove where she could bake butter cookies and a dry cellar where we could jar and store spicy pickles. But there was no use in talking about any of it before it could happen.

  I went over to my icebox and filled my cat’s dish from a quart of buttermilk. The silver coins used to keep the milk fresh rattled inside the bottle. I petted the tabby and returned to my chair by the window.

  “You’re a window watcher,” Hattie said. “Just like that cat.”

  I looked down on Cherry Street. Alleyways as wide as the avenues. A child in a black straw hat carried a large package out of a fabric shop. A group of khaki-clad Negroes were huddled around a telegraph pole, showing each other their teeth. I blotted my mouth with my handkerchief and said, “I like to see the world wake up. The streets filling with people starting out their day.”

  “You’d rather look at them than at me?”

  I turned my gaze to Hattie and then was back at the window just as soon. “The other morning I saw a hatcheck girl hurrying home after a late shift. She stopped at the corner store down there and bought a pound of cigarettes. So I went down and asked the clerk for the exact same item the woman who just left had purchased. He sold me a pound of Turkish cross cuts that came in a silk-lined box.”

  I gestured at the very box now sitting atop a pile of books in the corner. I’d opened the package but had smoked only one of the cigarettes. “I like to make up little stories in my head about all the people I see. Who they are, what they do, what their lives are like. Then I got to thinking. What if I could know one thing about that hatcheck girl? How much closer would my imagination of her be to what her reality actually was?”

  Hattie stood up, wrapping her body in the bed sheet. “Why are you telling me this? Is there something going on with you and this hatcheck girl?”

  “I only saw her the one time,” I said, putting my finger inside the curtain again to look down on the street. “I’m telling you this because you might as well be any one of those people down there right now.”

  “What’re you saying?”

  “I’m saying I don’t know anything about you.”

  Hattie sat back down on the bed. She was as stunned as a bird that’d flown into a show window. She wiped her nose and looked away. “You’re very much a serious boy.”

  “I’m not very much of any one thing in particular.”

  “You’re very content to live in a room that doesn’t even have a working sink.”

  I sighed through my nose. “Tell me something about yourself.”

  “Well, last week I was making it with the mayor and eating stuffed quail for every meal, and now I’m here with you in this god-awful little room with stained carpet, and I can’t even get a decent cup of coffee in the morning. So, that should tell you something.”

  I thought on that. I sat thinking on it until my pipe bowl went cold. Hattie threw off the bedsheet and began to dress. The clothes she’d worn the night before were hanging on a nail protruding from the wall. She was right. Knowing that much was enough for now. The night I first saw her come into my sister’s place, nobody seemed to know anything about her, and even if they did, they weren’t saying. I wondered how much she even knew about herself.

  Yes, this was enough.

  She could’ve been one of many gals with the mayor. Instead she was my only gal.

  I was a packinghouse stinker with one good pair of checkered pants paid for in full and a beet red farmer’s neck. She was a hired girl at the opera club who dreamed of one day living in a pink two-story house.

  Yes, that was enough for now.

  When we lay together two days later, I booked a parlor suite at the Hotel Windsor, a palatial mammoth with turrets like a castle. A birdcage elevator was manned by a one-armed bellhop in a pillbox hat. He kept the sleeve of his missing arm folded and pinned to his shoulder. Our room on the top floor was decorated in gold leaf, had a stone bathtub filled by hand. The private balcony was garishly decorated with trellises of climbing grapevine, a baroque balustrade, and marble statues of Apollo and Daphne. The expense of one night cost me two weeks’ salary at the stockyards.

  We ate our dinner alfresco on our balcony under a cloudless autumn sky. A liveried waiter brought us a bottle of port with smoked sausage and chilled blueberry soup and a loaf of macaroni bread.

  Afterward, lying in the giant canopy bed, the posts draped with tasseled cloth, I tried as I might to equate my feelings for Hattie to something I’d experienced before. The closest thing I could conjure was when I was bit on the wrist by a copperhead as a young boy of eleven while playing in a field of tall grass next to my daddy’s farm.

  I sprinted home holding my dripping wrist. My mother dropped a plate on the kitchen floor when she saw me. She used a warm piece of chicken flesh to soak the venom out of the wound. My whole left arm was spotted, but within an hour the swelling diminished. When my wrist finally stopped bleeding, she washed the bite mark with tobacco water and covered it with a poultice of skunk root. Most of what I remembered was my lonely and delirious sprint home, my head dizzy as I contemplated my own destruction. Even the next five minutes of life seemed as distant as a glimpse of some far sky. If it was love I was feeling now, the only sensation that had ever come close to it in all my born days was a neuralgic affection.

  I went to the liquor table. The decanter of port was wrapped in a towel to keep it warm, and I poured a wisp into a snifter. I said, “I don’t think I’ll ever get a beat on you.”

  Hattie played with the ends of her hair. “I’m not so complex.”

  I stared at her curiously. I could write a lot of awful schoolhouse poetry about her if only I knew enough different words to describe her yellow hair, my drooping heart.

  “You’re giving me the goo-goo eyes again,” she said.

  “Can you blame a fella?”

  “Patrick Joseph Crowe,” she said and slapped me playfully on the wrist. “I do declare. I believe you’re in love with me.”

  “And what if I told you I wasn’t?”

  “I’d tell you that you’re a damn liar.”

 
I was in love. Or at least that’s what I figured the syndrome to be, as all its symptoms were foreign to me. It could’ve just as well been heat illness or a stomach bug, and I still would’ve misinterpreted it as love, called it by that name.

  In the morning, a doorman delivered coffee to our room. I stirred milk into my cup and sat outside on the balcony to watch the young sun skim rooftops. Down on Douglas Street, under the awning of a drugstore, a shirtless man balled up his fists and screamed at a clot of pigeons that had descended from a sagging telegraph wire.

  “Beat it, you scavengers!” the man said, rolling his fists in the air like a prizefighter circling an opponent. “Fuck outta here!”

  The birds continued to bob their heads absently, hoping to find a bit of bread. Their feathers blue in the morning light. While the man continued to threaten them, a native woman sat on the ground with three blankets wrapped around her. She bellowed, “What is you trying to prove, Harold? C’mon there, Harold. What is you trying to prove?”

  After a few minutes of watching the scene, I learned the man trying to fight the pigeons wasn’t named Harold. The woman was really just screaming at a leaf that had fallen at her feet.

  IX

  SEVEN MILES WEST of Omaha, along Big Papio Creek in a paddock grove on the south side of the road, Billy and I sat waiting on our haunches. From our hiding spot in the dead brush that overlooked the only passable thoroughfare to Fremont, we could see for half a mile in every direction before the sun set. I left a lantern with black and white ribbons knotted to the handle on the side of the road, waiting to ignite the wick until we saw Cudahy’s carriage.

  The hour approached nine. A thirty degree night, moonless and cloudless both.

  I continually opened and collapsed my spyglass, scanning the eastern traffic on the road of which there had been little in the last hour and none whatsoever in the past twenty minutes. Billy had his lips around a choice cigar, seated against a rock that blocked our position from any travelers below. He blew smoke rings and kept his free hand down the front of his trousers. Our white horse was hitched in a hollow on the other side of the hill for quick access.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked after I collapsed the looking glass again.

  Billy clamped his mouth shut, his speech halted by pain. He had one hell of a katzenjammer from all his whiskey the night before and probably wouldn’t be right of mind until the next day. Even at dinner earlier that evening, he hadn’t said more than a few words, commenting only on the good quality of his steak. What a fine meal it had been. Before setting out to retrieve our ransom, we dined at The Little Owl, one of the finest restaurants in the city. The inside was all silver brocade and purple velvet and Bavarian china. For our meal, an exquisite offering of smoked herring topped with banana puree, steak tartar with shirred eggs, oyster scallops, turtle soup, and asparagus soufflé.

  All total, it was a seventy-dollar supper.

  Enjoy it while we can, I had said. After this, it’s all paper towns and sleeping by creek water for us. For many months, maybe. After this, come tomorrow and every day after, we will never again be anything else but fugitives.

  We left little Eddie tied to his chair in the cottage. Leaving him alone for such a long time worried me, but we had the good sense to gag him and chain his chair to the woodstove. The kid had been a real sport about the whole thing, even when we crammed the cloth in his mouth and taped it shut. It was hard for me to wish him anything but the best after the rotten affair was over.

  I glassed the road again. Nothing.

  From my vantage, the Big Papio, frozen over since November, was a crooked strip of silver through the darkened snow. There was a small wind. The barren trees ached like settling floorboards. For the fifth or sixth time, I checked the ammunition in my short caliber rifle. My polished revolver was fully loaded. I lazily spun the cylinder like a pinwheel to pass the long minutes.

  I said to Billy, “All my life has been the wrong time in the wrong place. I doubt very seriously if that pattern will change tonight.”

  Billy had his hat tipped down past his eyebrows. His hands were folded in a steeple across his stomach, and he was practically lounging against the rock as if he were reclining on a divan without a care in the world. He spoke with the cigar in his mouth, “Relax, will you? You’re going to give me a condition, fussing around like that.”

  I looked at him sideways. “There’s not a condition in this world you don’t already have that I can give you.”

  Billy chewed his cigar stump like a teething toy.

  “How can you be so calm?”

  Billy sat up, perturbed. “Our letter said for Cudahy to depart at nine sharp. I guarantee you the man left at the exact stroke of the hour. It ain’t much past that now, and we’re seven miles out from the city. Eight and a half from his house. Even if he was saddled up on leopard back, he wouldn’t be here yet.”

  “You have no mind for extenuating circumstance,” I said. “What if he sent police out early to scout the road ahead? What if he hired detectives to currycomb from the west?”

  “You underestimate the power of fatherly love. The man will not risk the safe return of his son. He might unleash the law dogs after the kid’s home, but not before then.”

  “That’s another thing. Once this is over that’s exactly what he’ll do. He won’t stop with just the Omaha police. That won’t satisfy a man like him. He’ll put a reward out for our capture across the national wire. It won’t just be lawmen on our trail. Every set of eyes in the country will be peeled for us.”

  Billy singed out his cigar and tossed it into the snow. “Did you honestly think it would ever go any other way than that?”

  “I keep lying to myself about it if you want the truth.”

  “Honesty is the best policy.”

  “And the best people can have all of it. They want it. They even wanted the little bit I thought I wanted. They’re welcome to it. I’ll never play the honest game again. The cards are all marked, and the dice are all loaded.”

  “Yeah,” Billy said too loudly for my liking. “Now that you finally got that figured, you’ll see it ain’t such a tough old world after all.”

  “Hush up,” I said and elongated the spyglass again. The road was still empty. I wiped dust and snow off my coat sleeves. The countryside all over my clothing. I’d convinced myself the entire forty-mile stretch of road between Omaha and Fremont was teeming with scouts covering every rod.

  I said, “He’ll hire Pinkertons for certain.”

  Billy waved off the idea. “So what? Let that bastard waste more of his money. Those Pinkerton thugs give up easy.”

  “They do like hell. I heard it once that Frank Geyer tracked down H. H. Holmes for five months over three states. They hanged him fast after he was caught. Son of a bitch strangled for twenty minutes after the trap dropped because his neck didn’t snap.”

  “Yeah, in Philly that happened. My sister tell you about that, too?”

  I stared through the spyglass again. “Gruesome thing to die from lack of wind. Rather I’d be chopped up by an axe.”

  “I’m hoping for a quick heart attack in a whore’s bed at the age of ninety.”

  “Quiet,” I said, aiming the glass. “I see something.”

  Billy turned onto his stomach and peered over the rock. “Where?”

  “Yonder.” I pointed. “Yonder.”

  In the distance, half a mile off, a faint red glow appeared between the trees. There was just enough gray in the sky to make out the distinctive shapes between the actual roadway and the hills that surrounded its sunken course like the bottom of a valley. The only real light was trapped inside the silver creek, the ice cutting through the black ground. I stared at the red blip through my scope. It grew in size, slowly, until I could see it flicker.

  “Hot goddamn,” I said to Billy. “That’s Cudahy’s lantern.”
/>   “How do you know?”

  “It’s on the dashboard of his buggy.”

  “I mean, how do you know it’s his buggy and not the chief of police?”

  I collapsed the spyglass and covered the looking window with the eye piece and shoved it into an umbrella bag tied off to one of my belt loops. I stood and wiped off my trouser legs, making sure I had the matches in my pocket.

  “We won’t know unless I light our beacon,” I replied and scrambled down the hillside to fetch the lantern I’d left on the shoulder of the road.

  I opened the glass door and sparked the wick just as the approaching buggy rattled over the plank bridge a quarter mile away. I watched it near. If two vehicles crossed the bridge instead of one, I would’ve doused the glim and let them drive past. But there was no second carriage. Cudahy’s buggy was quite alone. Maybe Billy was right. Maybe Cudahy hadn’t involved the police yet. If he had contacted the authorities, they were not within a mile in either direction. I set the lantern in the middle of the road with a heavy clank and sprinted back up the hill where there was hardly any snow left on the ground so as not to make tracks. The law might’ve been able to snuff us out at a designated spot, but not every tract in a forty-mile stretch could be scoped no matter how many men Cudahy hired. Every foreseeable circumstance had been covered. Our plan was without flaw.

  X

  A LOW BANK of snow clouds spread out over the city as I entered The Sallie Purple a month after Hattie and I started going steady. The first flurries of the season. Winter drizzle fell and sang in the gutters. The sky was as dark as dusk despite being the height of the day. In the distance, a church bell marked the midday hour. A group of children rode trash can lids like sleds down the enamel of a frozen hillside. Netted bundles of winter radishes and cabbages hung from yokes outside the greengrocer next door, its store windows sweating like the glass of a hothouse. Mr. Bram, owner of the greengrocer, was salting the walk in front of his shop.