World, Chase Me Down

by Andrew Hilleman

  On my last morning in the city, I woke up spooning a big red shoat like we were old lovers long accustomed to one another’s nighttime habits. I entered the Figaro Saloon as the sun began to boil away the morning chill. My stink followed me inside. I plopped down at the bar as if I was combed and shaved and bathed and not covered with hog filth. The place was empty. One lonely man who served as both waiter and cook was standing up on a chair filling a chandelier with lamp oil from a spigot with a long spout. His back was to me. He didn’t even bother to look at who had come inside as he said, “We don’t open for an hour.”

  I rasped my long fingernails on the counter. “I’d like use of your telephone.”

  The man swayed on the wobbly chair, keeping his balance as he turned. His face lightened. “Uncle Rags. Goll-dern. I’ve told you, you ain’t welcome in here.”

  “I have money.”

  “You stink, boy. Now go on, get out of here before I phone the sheriff.”

  I picked a dime from my pocket. “I’d be much obliged if you did. I’m turning myself in to the law.”

  The proprietor got off his chair and came behind the counter. He flung a damp towel over his shoulder and pointed to a chalkboard behind him. “See that sign?”

  I read the script in descending order: NO WOMEN, NO COLOREDS, NO INJUNS, NO CHINKS, NO CHILDREN, NO VARMINTS.

  “You’re the last one on the list.”

  “I’ll give you a dime for a beer while you phone the sheriff.”

  The barman pointed at the door. “Out or I’ll force you out.”

  “Get the sheriff over here and he’ll do it for you.”

  The barman shrugged and grabbed a candlestick telephone from under the counter and slammed it on the wood. He spun the dial, asked the operator for the sheriff, and handed the receiver to me. I flicked him my dime, and he caught it in midair. He huffed his disapproval but poured me a beer with a high foam collar. I put the telephone mouthpiece to my lips.

  “County Sheriff’s Office,” a voice answered on the other line.

  “To whom I am speaking?”

  “This is Deputy Mills.”

  “Deputy Mills, this is Pat Crowe. I want to give myself up. I’m sitting in the Figaro Saloon and will wait here for one of your men to come arrest me.”

  Laughter sounded over the wire, and the deputy rang off. I pressed the receiver lever down and asked the operator for a new connection. I waited and sipped my beer. When another connection was established, I said, “Listen to me now. My name’s Pat Crowe. I’m one of the most wanted men in the country, and if you don’t come down here to the Figaro, I will just have to come to you. I’d rather not keep harassing you like this.”

  A new voice came on the line. The speaker’s mouth was full of food. I could hear him chewing his breakfast over his words. “Stop calling here. We’ve no time for games.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “This is Marshal Goodman.”

  “Well, Marshal, you’re speaking to Pat Crowe. I want to turn myself in.”

  The marshal laughed just as the deputy had. He called out into the room. I could still hear his voice as he said, “Boys? Boys? Hey, McCrery? Go on down to the Figaro and bag that bum that’s trying to fun me to death.”

  The line went dead again, and I sat waiting for nearly half an hour before an officer showed up. He looked about the empty saloon, a sneeze of snow following him inside like trail dust flowing off a rancher’s coat. His spurs jangled as he crossed the plank floor and took up a stool two seats down from me. “Uncle Rags. I thought it might be you I’d find here. Tell you what, I ain’t going to arrest a bum.”

  “Why not?” I asked, disheartened.

  “Don’t have any cause.”

  “What about vagrancy?”

  “Vagrancy? You’re plumb mad. I don’t have time for small stuffs. Hell, last night some cowboy killed two Chinks for spitting on his boots.”

  The barman said, “I want his hide out of here. He’s driving away my business.”

  The officer looked behind him at all the empty tables. “What business?”

  “He’s a goddamn bum,” the barman said.

  The officer stood, making ready to leave. “Shoo him out yourself, then.”

  I opened my tattered coat, full of holes and patches, and dug around one of the pockets stitched inside. Both the barkeep and the officer watched me with mild interest. My coat was not lined with blanketing or duck stuffing, but with old newspapers. I finally found a folded, yellowing sheet and put the flier on the counter, flattening it out delicately. It was a wanted poster with an artist’s rendition of my image from nineteen-aught-one.

  I said, “There’s a reward of ten grand on my head. Or used to be anyway. I’m sure Edward Cudahy of Omaha, Nebraska, would gladly pay double that. He once had a fifty-thousand-dollar bounty out for my capture. I believe it’s still in force. You are encouraged to wire him. Or Chief of Police Bill Donahue. You tell him Pat Crowe wants to surrender.”

  The officer studied the poster. “The hell you say.”

  “I do say,” I said, gripped my beer, and began to recite in soliloquy, “Stout Nebraskan once I was, to give all quizzical eye pause, the thrill of the nation they once heralded my cause. Forgotten but not unsung, many trembling snows since passed when last my tale was young, until worn became their tongues and exhaustion emptied their lungs. To make all things new is to make the old undone.”

  “You see there?” the barman said to the officer. “He’s been going around talking like that to the got-damn trees. I seen him spitting poetry to a lamppost yesterday.”

  “Some things in this town never change,” the officer replied.

  The barman continued his protest. “There are lunatics locked up in Utica Hospital that got it more together than him. Tell you what, Rags, if you ain’t out of here in under a minute, I’m just gonna smash you one over the head and be done with it.”

  The officer chuckled absently and cozied up at the counter. “Say, Bob, you got a fresh coffee?”

  “Brandy’ll warm you up faster.”

  “Coffee, Bob.”

  The barman poured him a spot into a cup. The officer sipped at it tentatively. He took another sip and spit out the sludge. “Goddamn, Bob, gimme a brandy after all.”

  “Hell of a salesman, ain’t I?” the barman said as he uncorked some purple from a bottle and lapped an inch into a dirty glass.

  The officer held up his unwashed jar to examine its spots. “Yeah, hell of a salesman. You ought to go peddle sewing notions door-to-door.”

  I stared at the bottle. “Gimme a nibble, too, would you?”

  The barman corked the brandy and shelved it.

  “Aww, let me have a little breakfast brandy,” I begged.

  “You can have mine, Rags,” the officer said and slid the glass over. “I ain’t one to drink from a soiled cup. And you deserve a swallow, you crazy bastard, asking to be arrested. Never in my life have I heard of such a thing.”

  I wolfed it down and belched. “This stuff’s been cut.”

  “It’s medicinal,” the barman said.

  “Come on, Bob. I’m going to jail for a long time in a few minutes. This stuff couldn’t float an egg. Gimme something stronger than the baby medicine you keep in your cookie jar.”

  “Do you even know how crazy you are?” the barman asked me.

  “I wouldn’t be crazy if I knew that.”

  The officer picked up the arrest notice and stood from his stool. He put his hand around my arm. “Alright, Rags, let’s go. We’ll sort this foolishness out at the jailhouse. If what you say is true, you’re the goddamn dumbest idiot I’ve ever known.”

  I drained my beer, wiped my suds mustache with my shirtsleeve, and went along without fuss. “Well now, lawman, you know what they say? It takes a brilliant man to be stupid at the ri
ght moment.”

  II

  SUNFLASH OF DAWN, red and cold, and Omaha appeared on the horizon. Our chuffing train slowing over the Tenth Street Viaduct as it pulled into the Burlington Depot. Despite the zero weather, the platform filled with triple rows of excited people awaiting my arrival.

  I peered out my window as the train jolted to a stop.

  A handprint from long ago smeared on the glass.

  Brake steam hissed. The locomotive a giant kettle on wheels.

  People everywhere in their sullen raiment: men in tattered farm coats patched with sacking, women in muted ducking and smoke-stained furs and silly hats full of feathers. Here and there a child on his father’s shoulders to get a better view. Tobacco smoke and frozen breath rolled in little clouds over the heads. Pockets of the crowd murmured in scraps of English pieced together from their quilted vocabulary: Pat Crowe is on that train!

  A man in a brimless hat exclaimed that their hero was coming home. I didn’t know what to make of that. I surely did not. The crowd hooted and hollered. Farther down, a woman with a dirty face and a jacket patched in poverty—and nearly all alone in the world because of it—prayed with a rag. Or so it appeared from my vantage. She twisted her hanky in her hands as if it were a rosary. Among the crowd were nearly forty uniformed police officers and a hive of newspaper reporters in fedoras with press cards in the hatbands, their paper tablets and short pencils at the ready. Some of the onlookers arrived still in their heavy wool sleeping clothes. Even a couple in bathrobes and slippers. Every rank of life anxious to glimpse what the morning headlines of the newspapers the country over had been declaring for the past four days: PAT CROWE CAPTURED!

  My train had been delayed nearly a full day due to blizzards in the western part of the state. Railroad lines were impassable until rotary snowplows with two locomotives coupled behind them wormed through the heaps of powder. In some parts of the track, snow drifts were cut through ten feet deep, nearly as tall as the locomotive itself.

  Finally the steam engine rolled to a stop. Newspaper cameras raised up by cogwheels and balanced upon tripods were draped with cloth over their maplewood boxes. Shutters snapped and flash pans burst magnesium powder into the air like gun smoke, hoping to capture the moment I exited the train. Under heavily armed guard, I stepped forward in a lockstep shuffle, chains connecting my manacles to my ankle bracelets.

  The crowd pushed forward to the edge of the platform and erupted in cheers as if welcoming home boys from the war.

  Hooray! they cried. Hooray for Pat Crowe!

  I did not look up to greet them.

  With my shoulders slumped and my long hair flopped over my face, I was guided through the masses by a pair of officers. Men strained to pat me on the back. Women reached out with gloved hands, hoping to get a glimpse of my face. Parting the throng was like carving a path through seawater. A pair of young boys on the platform balcony tossed a few pails of torn paper into the air and it fluttered over the masses like confetti. Some of it stuck in my hair and beard like faint snowfall.

  In the depot lobby, a new mob swelled around me as I was led outside, bulbs flashing. I never looked up once. I concentrated on my feet as I lumbered down the marble steps. A police wagon waited on the curb, double-parked against a long row of buckboards. Men and women lined the sidewalks, the traffic carnival thick. In later days, I learned more people were present at the train station to witness my arrival back home than were there to greet President Roosevelt when he visited the year before on tour for his bid of reelection.

  After I was seated in the back of the paddy, Chief of Police Bill Donahue stepped up to the van’s rear doors and climbed in after me to ensure my delivery to the federal courthouse. A giant, hammy man with twitching black mustaches and a head as big as a schoolhouse globe, his weight rocked the wagon. Two of his men slammed the doors shut.

  Donahue told the driver to get the rig moving.

  With a jolt the police van kicked backwards, reversed out of the parking lot, and began to nose its way through the crowd.

  “Well I’ll be. If it isn’t Pat Crowe in the flesh,” Donahue said with a heavy Irish brogue. His accent was so thick and ancient with the old country he might as well have been reading the ingredients to a recipe for soda bread in a Gaelic bakery. His left cheek bulged with a huge cigar nearly a foot long and as thick as a broken thumb.

  I said nothing, my head hung between my knees. My hair hid my eyes.

  “You might have heard tell of me, boy,” Donahue said.

  “Take that cigar out of your mouth when you talk to me.”

  Donahue puffed smoke. “You want one? I get ’em for a penny a grab.”

  “You’re stinking up the whole wagon,” I said.

  Donahue twisted the cigar in his lips. The wagon stopped and started as the crowd swallowed up around it on all sides. Newspaper boys hollered out questions as they pressed up against the bumpers. Camera bulbs flashed all around. The wagon rocked back and forth.

  “This is some spectacle,” Donahue said. “Half of Omaha is out there.”

  I lifted my head with great effort. “I got a lot of admirers, it seems.”

  “Most folks think you’re some kind of hero.”

  “What about you, chief? What do you think?”

  “I think that most folks are as stupid as the sky is tall and that you’re about as lousy a criminal as ever there was.”

  I smiled. I was truly amused by the thought. The wagon jolted to a stop again and then kicked back up to speed. We hadn’t been able to manage half a block yet. I stroked my beard like a pet cat. “Maybe they think I’m somebody else. The beard throws a lot of people off the trail. I’ve heard it told that I look like Oyster Burns.”

  “Oyster Burns didn’t have a beard, Patrick.”

  “Did you know he stabbed his own teammate when he caught him sleeping in center field between games of a doubleheader? With a penknife he did that,” I said, pantomiming a blade jab to my chest. “Boy, what a world we live in.”

  “And where in the world have you been these last five years?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to be the one to know?”

  Donahue rotated his cigar with his teeth. “Oh, it doesn’t matter much now, Paddy. I told the city that you’d turn yourself in, and here you are. I know you. You’re a man inclined to companionship. You couldn’t last out there all by your lonesome. I told this city that one day you’d walk on back here.”

  I laughed. “Is that how you conduct your police work? By waiting for the criminals of the city to get so lonely they turn themselves in?”

  “It sure worked for you.”

  “You said that five years ago.”

  “I’m a patient man.”

  “A patient man,” I repeated. “Yeah, patience. Haha. Patience. My man. I’d say you got patience in spades.”

  The paddy wagon rumbled through a turn, using all of its eight-horsepower engine. It was the first time I had ridden in an automobile, and I was enjoying myself thoroughly. I stared at Donahue with a crazy smile and asked him for one of his stogies after all. The chief patted his pockets and handed over a cigar as delicately as if it were a newborn.

  “Got any tinder?”

  Donahue tossed me a matchbox and brushed ash off his waistcoat. I sparked a match between my front teeth, ignited the cigar, and drew an aromatic pull as I wet the stump, chewing it to life. Donahue noticed my long fingernails.

  “Good Lord, Pat. You need to trim them sonsuvabitches.”

  “As soon as I get hold of a pair of scissors I’ll have ’em down to the quick for you.”

  Donahue sighed. “I just don’t understand it. You were a good boy. A decent family man. Sure you had your struggles, but don’t we all?”

  “You don’t know me that well, chief.”

  “I know enough. I know your story. Hell, you were a good fella
by all accounts.”

  “You can toss the birdseed somewhere else,” I said.

  Donahue stared at me blankly.

  “You got it out for me. I made a fool of your entire department and now you’ve gone and blown a gasket.”

  “There’s nothing personal in it. I’m to do my job. I’m to enforce the law, Patrick.”

  I leaked smoke from my nose. “Well, you can’t make people good by enforcing laws or we Americans would all have been saints long years ago.”

  “Now there’s a thought. A train robber and kidnapper who talks like an anarchist.”

  “I’m no anarchist. I believe in the law if it’s upheld fairly against all.”

  The chief’s deep-set eyes shined behind his gold spectacles. His dumb Irish mug swollen red and pocked from years of abusing the bottle. He sniffed the putrid air. Wiggled his nose like a rabbit. I was still covered in stink. A month had passed since my last bath. The chief covered his nose with a handkerchief embroidered with yarn flowers, to block the lingering odor.

  He clucked his tongue in pity. “Let me tell you something, Patrick. We currently have a population of more than four hundred inmates in our Douglas County jail. That makes us the largest jail in the state. But I’m going to give you my undivided attention. After you’re so beaten and starved that you can barely lift a glass of water to take a drink, I’ll have you killed by a couple of big niggers right out in our jail yard just for giving them a steak for lunch. Now, what do you say to that?”

  “You’re the chief, and I’m your prisoner.”

  “You won’t tell me the truth, eh?”

  “The truth about what?”

  “Do you think I’m a fool?”

  “You’re an Irishman, ain’t you?”

  “Just like yourself.”

  “Just like myself.”

  Donahue nodded at my manacles. “How do you fancy your new jewelry?”

  “They’re just aces,” I said and shook my chains like bracelets.

  “I heard you were a funny man.”

  “Just another bloke trying to get by without too much trouble.”