Handsome Harry

by James Carlos Blake

  I felt my heartbeat in my throat. It seemed a long time before the bank door opened and out they came. John was holding some citizen in front of him as a shield, and Red had the money sack in one hand and his pistol against the ribs of the cop who’d gone inside. As they started toward me, a uniformed cop stepped out from the recessed entrance of the store next door and yelled something and the citizen dropped to the sidewalk, giving the cop a clear shot at John, and bam-bam-bam-bam—he popped him four quick ones.

  John took them all in the chest, staggering back against the bank’s brick wall, then cut loose with a rattling blast of the tommy that sent the cop jolting backward like he was having a fit and dropped him to the sidewalk in a bloody heap. John scooted up beside Red and the hostage cop and I reached over the seat and pushed open the back door as the three of them hustled up to the car in a tight knot. Somebody was yelling Don’t shoot Hobie, don’t shoot Hobie but some of the cops started shooting anyway. As John dove into the car the hostage cop broke free and all the cops opened fire. Red grunted and sat down hard on the sidewalk with the sack of money tight under one arm and then the other arm jerked and his gun went skidding under the car. Bullets were cracking off the sidewalk and chipping the brick wall and punching the car. John rolled out and grabbed Red and heaved him up and into the car and tumbled in behind him, and how he didn’t get hit I’ll never know.

  I gunned the Plymouth away from the curb with the tires squealing. The open back door struck a parked car and crunched half off its hinges as we tore through a huge clatter of gunfire, bullets thunking into the car and making starbursts in the windshield. Then we were around the corner and out of sight of the cops, and John was able to wrench the broken door nearly shut and tie it closed with his belt.

  I took a lot of lefts and rights through the back streets. I don’t know if anybody tried to chase us, but if they did, we sure lost them. Then I doubled back to the main highway and mixed into the traffic heading for Shytown. Nobody around us seemed to pay any attention to the holes in our car or the mangled door. God bless the average Joe and his lack of interest in anything but himself.

  Red was slumped on the seat, swearing and groaning as John checked his wounds. The front of his pants was soaked dark red. He had two bullets high in the leg, and John said none of the blood was from an artery and the wounds were nothing to worry about.

  Fuck you, nothing to worry about, Red said. It ain’t you bleeding like a stuck hog.

  Either bullet hit any higher and it would’ve been your jewels, John said. You’re damn lucky, man.

  Oh yeah, Red said, I’m luckiern shit. Look here, Pete, how goddamn lucky I am.

  He held up his right hand for me to see in the rearview. The tip of his ring finger had been shot off.

  Looks like you’re Two-finger Jack from now on, I said. I was still riding high on the adrenaline charge.

  John said Two-Finger Jack was a hell of a lot better than No-balls Jack, and we both went into a laughing fit.

  Ha fucken ha, Red said.

  At the saloon on Byron, Billie was parked to the side of the building. She lost her big smile quick when John and I helped Red out of the Plymouth and she saw his bloody pants and the red-stained handkerchief around his hand. We eased him into the Blueberry and I sat in back with him. John got behind the wheel and told Billie it was good to see her. We left the Plymouth where it was.

  Billie was big-eyed with concern about Red, who was sweating hard despite the cold weather. Oh God, she said, how bad is it?

  I’ll be okay, Pocahontas, Red said, but there goes my Arizona vacation.

  Doc Moran’s is where we were headed. He was a good surgeon who’d taken a fall on an abortion rap. He’d managed to get his license back and still had a public practice, but prison had altered his attitude toward the law, and nowadays the biggest part of his income came from treating wounded fugitives on the QT. He received his official patients in a fancy office in a downtown hotel, but he also had a little clinic out at the edge of town where he tended to girls in trouble and guys like us.

  We parked in the alley behind the clinic and took Red in through the back door. We were in luck and Moran was there. He was a little edgy about having us in his place and kept asking if we were sure we hadn’t been followed. As always, a handful of hundred-dollar bills did wonders to settle his nerves. He examined the wounds and confirmed John’s opinion that they weren’t as bad as they looked. Red swore and said don’t try telling him they didn’t hurt as bad as they looked.

  The doc said he’d have him patched up in an hour or two, and I gave him Patty’s number to call when the job was done. We told Red so long, we’d be back in a few weeks. He said to get him an arrowhead for a souvenir, and I said sure thing. But I’d never see him again.

  We went back to his place and broke the news to Patty. For a minute she looked like she might cry, then took it like a good soldier and said Just our luck. She had the keys to Red’s car and would collect him when Moran called.

  We dumped the money out on the table and tallied it. Sixteen thousand and some change. I gave Patty three grand to tide her and Red over and said I’d call every few days to see how he was doing. She said she didn’t really want to go to Arizona anyway. Who the hell wanted to risk a winter sunburn when you could stay nice and cool in Chicago?

  I asked John if he wanted to hold half the take till we got together in Tucson and divvied up with Russ and Charley, but he said no, Mary was the company treasurer, give her the swag for safekeeping. We had a beer for the road, then John and Billie said adios and they’d see me in Tucson, and they left for his dad’s farm in Mooresville.

  That evening I drove to Elmore Brown’s garage a few miles south of Indy and sold him the Blueberry. He paid even less than usual because he’d have to replace the blood-stained seat before he could resell the car. One of his mechanics gave me a ride back into town and dropped me off at a hotel overlooking the river park.

  As soon as I checked in, I called Margo to let her know where I was and that I was registered as Harry Roark. I told her Mary would probably arrive in town the next day unless she ran into bad weather or some other slowdown on her way from Florida. Margo had heard the news about the robbery and that one of the bandits had been shot, and she’d been worried sick. I assured her we were all fine, that Red—the only guy in the gang she’d never met—hadn’t been hit as bad as they said and was being well tended.

  I slept late and then ate a large breakfast in the hotel dining room and read the newspaper versions about the East Shy job. The cops had recognized John and Red but not me. They’d found the shot-up Plymouth and said that judging from the blood-soaked seat they were sure they had mortally wounded John Hamilton. Good. If they thought he was dead they wouldn’t be searching all over Chicago for him.

  The cop John killed was named O’Malley. The story mentioned more than once that he had a wife and kids, and it used the word tragic at least a half-dozen times. As if having a family was supposed to give a cop some kind of special protection from harm. As if we weren’t supposed to shoot back if a family man shot at us. Christ, where do people get such loony notions? If a cop doesn’t want to risk making his wife a widow or leaving his children fatherless, what’s he doing being a cop? Awfully irresponsible, if you ask me. There oughta be a law.

  In spite of the cold wind, I took a stroll through the riverside park. The trees were skeletal and the sky had no color at all. The buildings looked like huge gray tombs. People were bundled deep into their coats, their faces muffled to the eyes and their hats pulled down tight, and they walked with their heads bent to the wind. My memory of Florida seemed unreal, Miami like something I’d dreamt.

  In the afternoon I went to the movies, a double feature—Gold Diggers of 1933 and a Mae West flick with angels in the title. I’d seen the Gold Digger one before, together with the other guys, and we’d argued about which of the dancers was the best-looking. But there was no disagreement with Red’s idea that a wonderful way t
o die would be to smother under a pile of the entire long-legged, bare-assed gang of them.

  I missed Mary bad. I hadn’t spent much time alone since getting clapped into Pendleton nine years before, and the solitude felt strange in a way I can’t explain. Back at the hotel I telephoned my mother and said I wanted to pay a quick visit. She said she hadn’t spotted any cops for the past few days, but that didn’t mean they weren’t watching, so be careful.

  It was already dark outside when there came a knock at the door and a husky female voice said Telegram for Mr. Roark. I figured it was from Mary and thought maybe something had gone wrong. I was digging in my pocket for a tip as I pulled the door open—and there she stood, holding her overcoat closed around her, a small travel bag dangling from her shoulder, and smiling the greatest smile I’ve ever seen.

  Actually, sir, Mary said, it’s more a special delivery than a telegram. She glanced up and down the hall, then said Ta-daaa and threw the coat open to show me how terrifically naked she was underneath it.

  I pulled her into the room and shut the door and she shrugged out of the coat and jumped on me and we tumbled to the floor, laughing and grabbing and smooching. Our first go of the evening was there on the floor with my pants around my ankles and my knees getting rug burns.

  We were at my mother’s for two days and saw no sign of police lookouts. My dad and Fred took turns going for casual walks to scout the property line. Mom told us about her and Fred’s run-in with the law in Terre Haute and their four hours as jailbirds. Her description of the dressing down she gave Matt Leach made Mary laugh, but I felt a touch of the anger that had taken me to Indy to shoot him for the bullying bastard he was. We told them about our Florida vacation, and they marveled at Mary’s descriptions of Miami and said the place sounded too good to be true. I said it did to me too, and I’d seen it with my own eyes. We caught up on our sleep and went for walks in the woods behind the property and had fun sliding around on the frozen surface of the creek. And on a Friday morning before sunrise we said goodbye and promised to visit again as soon as we got back from out West.

  It was cold but mostly sunny as we angled down through the bare cornfields of Illinois, and crossed the river into St. Louis. If you’ve never seen the Mighty Mississip, brother, you’ve got a treat in store. Then came the rugged Ozark country of south Missouri and northern Arkansas, the roads winding through dense thickets and around deep ravines. We went through the Indian Nations in Oklahoma and through oil field country where the earth was stained black for miles and miles.

  We crossed the Red River into Texas and spent a night in Dallas. While we were taking supper in a café, I saw in a newspaper a few days old that Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker had busted a partner of theirs out of an East Texas prison camp in broad daylight and killed one guard and wounded another in the process. We’d been hearing things about those two since the spring and summer before we broke out of M City. They’d been in some bad shootouts with the cops, and I recalled that Clyde’s brother had been killed in a police ambush sometime the previous summer. John thought they were nothing but triggerhappy, harebrained hillbillies, but I always admired their moxie. The only picture I’d seen of Bonnie Parker was the one almost everybody had seen, the one with a cigar in her mouth, which as much as anything else established her newspaper reputation as a rough, queer hardcase. But the farther south we went, and especially once we got into Texas, the more we heard the rural folk speak of them in the same admiring way a lot of Midwest working people spoke about us—not to mention a lot of people who were out of work. When folks see the Law siding with those who make life hard for them, they’re just naturally going to root for the outlaws.

  Anyhow, the picture of Bonnie that ran with this story was a different one. She was posing against the back of a Ford and smiling at the camera with her hip angled sexily in a clingy black dress and her blond hair showing under a sassy beret. I’d had no idea she was so pretty, or so small. It wouldn’t be till I was on death row and heard the news of her and Clyde getting ambushed by a posse—a bunch of goons so scared of a pair of kids they had to shoot them more than 150 times to be sure they were dead—that I’d find out she was exactly the same size as Mary. Four feet eleven and ninety pounds. Mary took a look at the picture and said Bonnie was wearing really nice shoes, a detail that had escaped my notice. In the interest of sticking with the whole truth, I’ll confess that after I saw that picture of Bonnie Parker I had dreams about her. I’ll even admit some of them were a little racy—like the one where we were sharing a tub filled with bubble bath in some luxury hotel and she said she never imagined anything could be so grand and Chicago was like a dream come true. She was excited about our plan to rob a bank together. She was smart and funny and had a Texas accent that knocked me out. I have no idea what she kissed like in real life, but let me tell you, the kiss she gave me in that tub was the kiss of all time. In most of the dreams, though, we had our clothes on and were either walking along the lakeshore or sitting at an outdoor café table and laughing about something. When I’d wake up I could never remember what we’d been laughing about. And I’d be holding on to Mary and feeling guilty as sin.

  We drove across dusty brown North Texas plains that stretched to the horizons, and I bought some arrowheads for Red at an Indian curio shop. We entered New Mexico and took a look at Albuquerque, then turned south along the Rio Grande. The river was the color of rum and ran past yellow hills and green pepper fields and red and blue mountain ranges under thunderheads and faraway purple rain. We stopped for the night at a motor court in Las Cruces, and we made love at sunset in an unreal ruby light flooding the cabin through an open window. Then we got dressed again and walked to a Mexican restaurant down the road and had a supper of roast kid and rice while a small brown man in a white suit sat in a corner playing a guitar and singing softly in Spanish. When we walked back to the cabin the sky was packed with stars, and a copper crescent moon was low over the mountains. I can close my eyes and still see it all as clear as a snapshot.

  Mary phoned Tweet and they chattered loud and all excited for a while in the way women friends do. Tweet gave her a telephone number for Charley and Russell and one for John. She said Russ and Charley had stayed in a hotel their first few days in town, but the night before last the place caught on fire. Lucky for them they’d rented a house the day before and it was ready to move into. They were using the names Davies and Long. As for John and Billie, they’d arrived yesterday and were staying in a tourist-camp cabin until they could find a house too. She gave Mary the name and address of the camp and said John was registered as Frank Sullivan.

  We had an early breakfast and then headed west. At daybreak the Buick’s shadow reached way out ahead of us. We passed through landscapes marked by buttes and mesas, low dark mountains and flat stretches of scrubland. We rarely saw another car. By midmorning we were in Arizona and the mountains grew higher and more jagged. We started seeing a lot of those big cactuses with their arms up like they’re being robbed. We drove through narrow red canyons and thickets of scraggly trees with bright green bark.

  All in all, I liked the desert country, but Mary wasn’t keen on it. She preferred places with tall leafy trees. As far as she was concerned, a mesquite was nothing but a big thorny weed, and the wide open spaces made her nervous. She wished we’d never left Florida, and her heart was set on Miami more than ever. I said we’d be back there soon enough—and for some reason thought of the big laugh John and I had on the drive from Daytona when we’d asked each other about our plans for settling down.

  I don’t even bother trying to imagine the life we could’ve had in Florida. It’d be like trying to imagine the life we could’ve had on the moon. Because once we got to Tucson, the life I could’ve had was all decided.

  IV

  The Falls

  It was a small, pretty town with mountains on almost every side, and I hadn’t seen so many people in cowboy hats except in movies.

  The Wild West, Mary said. Ye
eee-haw.

  I said not every town could be as sophisticated as Chicago.

  For God’s sake, Harry, she said, this burg makes Indianapolis seem sophisticated.

  We stopped for lunch at a chili parlor, then found the tourist camp and I registered us as Harry and Mary Thompson. I asked if my friend Frank Sullivan had checked in, and the clerk said he sure had, yesterday, and he kindly assigned us the cabin next door to John’s. As soon as I parked the car, John and Billie came rushing out their door to greet us and there was a lot of back-slapping and hugging and laughing and how-about-this-town and so on.

  We had a beer and told each other about the family visits and our drives west. After visiting his dad, John and Billie had gone to Kansas City for two days and had a great time in the jazz clubs, which he said could hold their own with Shytown’s. We begged off joining them for lunch and a movie since we’d already eaten and wanted to shower and rest up, but agreed to supper at seven o’clock at a steak house Russ and Charley had recommended. He wrote down the address and said he’d stop by their place later and ask them to join us.

  I joined Mary in the shower and we fooled around some and did each other’s back, then took turns drying each other off, then flopped on the bed and had a nice quickie. After napping a couple of hours, we decided to go out and have a drink somewhere before meeting the others at the steak house. It was another beautiful desert sunset as we drove out of the tourist camp and turned toward downtown.

  When I stopped for a red light at the end of the block, a cop car pulled up behind me. I checked them out as I pretended to adjust my phony specs in the rearview. There were two of them in the car, a uniform behind the wheel, a plainclothes in the shotgun seat. The driver tapped his horn lightly and the plainclothes guy stuck his head out the window and smiled and waved us over to the curb.