Handsome Harry

by James Carlos Blake

  He was right about that, I said, only they weren’t going to hang us, that was the trouble. I could face a noose, but the electric chair…oh man.

  Indeed, Charley said. It’s embarrassing.

  That threw me a little. Embarrassing wasn’t what came to mind when I thought of the chair.

  Shortly after lights out on a hot night in July, a bunch of howling, laughing hacks came barging into the row and the overhead lights blazed on and the hacks stomped up to our cells, whooping and hooting and rapping their clubs along the door bars as one of them yelled Extra, extra, read all about it! Dillinger deader than a fucking doornail!

  Everybody knows how it went. The feds ambushed him in Chicago. They lay for him outside a movie theater he’d gone into with those two double-crossing cunts. When he came out, the cops came up behind him and shot him a half-dozen times as he tried to run for it into an alley. One of the whores admitted she ratted him, and you know damn well the other one did too, no matter how much she denies it.

  They say the street turned into a circus midway. Men dipped handkerchiefs in his blood, women stained the hems of their skirts. Some woman snipped a lock of his hair and some guy was trying to pull a ring off his finger when the cops kicked his ass away. One of the cops shook John’s dead hand and said Real pleased to meet you like this, Johnny-boy. A parked car with Indiana plates was taken apart by souvenir hunters before they found out it wasn’t John’s.

  The next day the hacks brought newspaper pictures for us to see. One showed a mob standing around the blood-stained spot where he went down. Some of the people looked heartbroken and some were grinning like ghouls. Another photo showed him on a morgue slab and covered with a sheet to his neck as a line of gawkers filed by. His forearm was bent upwards under the sheet, forming a tent and giving the impression of a huge erection. Later editions retouched the shot to get rid of the tent, but the alteration only convinced everybody it had been a hard-on for sure. That’s what started all the talk about John’s big dick. I hardly recognized the close-ups of his face for the plastic surgery. He had a trim little mustache and puffy cheeks with cuts and scratches and a hole under one eye where a bullet had come out. And there was a picture of the soles of his bare feet with his name on a tag on both big toes.

  That afternoon they chained us up like King Kong and took us under armed guard into a large room two gates removed from death row, and there a bunch of reporters asked us about John. I agreed to do the interview only after the warden promised to keep cameras out of the room. Charley and I stayed cool and answered their questions, most of which were naturally pretty stupid, and we turned the tables as much as we could. When they asked if we thought it had been necessary for the feds to kill John or whether he would’ve surrendered if he’d been given the chance, I said they had to kill him so he wouldn’t tell the truth about how he’d bribed his way out of Crown Point. He’d busted out of Lima the same way, I said, only it was supposed to look like he’d been delivered, but somebody, I couldn’t say who since I wasn’t there, had panicked and shot the sheriff. They asked if it was true that John had recently sent us each ten thousand dollars to keep paying for our appeals. Charley said don’t make him laugh, he would’ve been happy if John had sent five bucks to keep him in cigarettes. One of them wanted to know what I felt like when I heard John was dead. Imagine asking such a thing. Mom was right, reporters are cannibals. I asked the guy if he had a brother and he said yeah he did. I said Well, think how you’d feel if somebody came and told you your brother had fallen into a huge meat grinder.

  Some Hoosier in the crowd wisecracked My deadbeat brother, I’d do a jig. And got a lot of laughs.

  Cannibals.

  What the warden didn’t know was that I would’ve submitted to the questioning even if he hadn’t given in on barring the cameras. It was a chance to get another look at the security set-up outside the row, which I’d seen only once, back when they first brought us into the death house. I needed that look. Because the night before, Charley and I had made a decision.

  The hacks who’d awakened us with the news had whooped it up a while in front of our cells, having a high old time, and I guess Charley did what I did, simply sat there and took it. When they finally went away and the other inmates settled back into their bunks again, I stepped up to the corner of the cell where the bars met the wall between me and Charley and checked the row with my mirror. The guards were bunched around the desk at the far end of the row, still cracking each other up with jokes about John.

  Hey, I whispered.

  Charley came up to the corner on his side and I saw his hand mirror stick out to check the guards. Sir? he said low.

  Let’s bust it.

  He chuckled and said That would be grand.

  No kidding, I said.

  I see, he said. He stuck his mirror out for another check on the guards. How?

  John’s trick, I said.

  Charley reminded me that Mr. S. said it couldn’t be bought.

  John’s trick for real, I said.

  He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then: A real fake?

  A real fake.

  He laughed low and said the word optimistic didn’t even begin to suffice for such an idea.

  I said to consider the alternative.

  He said he wanted to think about it.

  I said sure.

  He said Okay, I’m in.

  We wouldn’t have had the time to try it if we hadn’t gotten another postponement in the execution date. Jessie was straightforward about this one being it, the last shot. If we didn’t get a new trial on this motion, well….

  We told her we understood and we were grateful for everything she’d done, and I meant it. Jessie Levy is as good as they come. And I want to make it clear that she had absolutely no knowledge of what Charley and I were up to. Neither did Mary. Neither of them ever did anything more than kite letters for us. I want that understood.

  Another thing we had going for us was that they never pulled shakedowns on death row. I bet they will from now on.

  The first one took me almost two weeks to make. Charley kept a lookout for me with his mirror. I heated several bars of soap and pressed them together into a larger block and let it harden. Then I started carving with a tin spoon and a safety-razor blade. I never worked on anything as meticulously as I did in making that gun. I cut the soap into the basic shape of a bulldog revolver and then started in on the detail work. I took special care in forming the cylinder and its grooves, the chambers, the bulletheads in them, but it still took me several tries to get them right. I was careful as a surgeon in carving the ejector rod, then the trigger guard and trigger. I used a pencil to bore a sleeve into the barrel, and for an even more realistic look I fit a fountain pen cartridge into the sleeve. I used tin foil from cigarette packs to make the front and rear sights. I made the handle grips out of the cardboard cover of a jigsaw-puzzle box and even carved checkering into them. Then came the coloring. Using the ink I’d drained from the fountain pen, I did the grips in solid black, then experimented with diluting the rest of the ink until I had exactly the right shade of bluing for all the metal parts. If I say so myself, Michelangelo couldn’t have made a better-looking piece.

  I let the ink dry, and after lights out that night I passed it around the bars to Charley. A minute or so after the lights came on the next morning, he stood at the bars and said softly Most impressive, sir, most impressive.

  That was the day we got the news that Homer Van Meter had been killed by the cops in St. Paul. The way Jessie Levy told it, somebody—maybe Van Meter’s girlfriend, maybe Nelson the Runt, somebody—had ratted him out, and the cops laid a trap for him. They say he was shot so many times that when the smoke lifted he looked like bloody sticks and rags. I think I’ve made it clear I didn’t care for the guy, but he was on our side of the law and he was John’s friend. So it counted as bad news.

  I made the next one an automatic—a little thing about the size of a .25 caliber. It was much simpl
er to carve and only took half as long, and Charley was just as impressed. I suggested we make our move the next time they took me out for a shower, in two more days. He said the date caused no conflict on his social calendar.

  That afternoon Jessie Levy came to tell us what we’d known all along—there would be no new trial. The courts had rejected her last appeal. She said she was sorry, she’d done all she possibly could, she wished she could think of something more, and so on.

  I said to forget it, I had no complaints about her efforts on our behalf. I slipped her a note to give to Mary the next time she saw her. The note told her she was the love of my life all the way to the end and I hoped she’d never regret a thing.

  I didn’t.

  The shower guard was an old wiry little hack Charley and I had nicknamed Curley in honor of his total baldness. He’d been a prison guard since 1900 and had been on death row for twenty years. He’d seen it all, and he didn’t mind talking about it—except for the executions, and I knew he’d witnessed plenty of them. The first time I asked him what it was like to die in the electric chair, he said he didn’t know, he’d never died in one. Come on, I said, you know what I mean. Yeah I do, he said, but you don’t want to hear about it. And that was that. Every time I asked again, he’d only shake his head and clam up.

  He was a widower whose only three children, all sons, had been killed in the world war. His people were from Missouri, and he was proud to say both his daddy and his granddaddy had ridden with Bill Anderson’s guerrillas during the War Between the States. Charley once asked him how a man from such a notorious line of desperadoes had ended up as a prison guard. Curley said it was simple, that from the time he was a young man he’d realized he was sure to wind up in jail, one way or another, and it was better to be on his side of the bars than on ours. Just the same, I had a feeling the choice hadn’t done away with his desperado leanings.

  When he came to take me to the showers, I was holding the fake revolver under my change of underwear. The idea was that as soon as I stepped out, I’d give him no more than a glimpse of the gun as I grabbed him, then I’d hold it under his chin where he couldn’t get a better look at it.

  He put the key in the lock and said Okay, Harry, hose-off time. Then looked at me and stood there without turning the key. Maybe the old rascal saw it in my eyes, I don’t know, but I could tell that he knew what was up.

  I was standing far enough back in the cell so that the hacks by the desk couldn’t see me. I dropped the underwear and pointed the gun at his face and gestured for him to open up.

  He cut his eyes over to Charley, then glanced toward the front of the row, then looked back at me and said in a normal voice Hurry it up with those shoes, Pierpont, I ain’t got all day. Then whispered: You’d never make it, son, not even if that thing was a real McCoy. His expression was hard to read. He might’ve been sad or he might’ve been about to bust out laughing.

  Charley’s whisper—So what?—sounded like a piece of prayer.

  Curley took another look at him. And smiled. And then unlocked my door.

  I stepped out and grabbed him from behind with an arm around his neck and jammed the toy to his ear. The guy in the cell across from mine started screaming and yanking on his bars like the loony he was.

  The two guards at the desk near the door to the row were staring at us big-eyed. I shouted for them to freeze or Curley was finished.

  Where the hell, one of them said, although I barely heard him over the shrieking lunatic. I pulled Curley over to Charley’s cell and said to unlock it and he quickly did. Charley jumped out and pointed his toy with both hands at the two guards and yelled for them to come over and get into the cell.

  One of them glanced toward the door and Charley hollered Be reasonable or be dead. Judging by his face, I think he was as close as I was to laughing at the thought of them running out the door and locking us in while we yelled Bang-bang.

  They came over with their hands half raised and Charley ordered them into the cell and took the keys from Curley to lock it. I said to hold on a minute and surprised the hell out of Curley when I pushed him into the cell and pulled out a squarehead hack who thought he was tough. Oh God, the squarehead said, not me. I told him to shut up or I’d shoot him in the pussy.

  Curly wanted to argue about it too, saying Me, goddamnit, me. I gave him a little so-long salute and started for the door, pushing the squarehead hack ahead of me.

  The rest of the guys on the row were clamoring to be let out and Charley was already turning their locks as he went down the aisle. We figured that the more guys we set loose the better our own chance once we got outside the row.

  Somebody in the outer corridor shouted What the hell’s going on. A freckled face appeared at the door window for an instant before the Bug crashed into it, howling like an Indian and trying to grab the guy through the bars. In a minute there were a half-dozen guys at the door, beating at it with their fists.

  Charley had to shoulder through them to get to the door and unlock it. We let the others charge out ahead of us, and they tore after the freckled hack, who was already at the far end of the corridor and going through the gate. Another guard slammed the gate shut behind Freckles and turned the lock and they ran for the next gate, where whistles were shrilling and other guards were hollering.

  We didn’t have the keys to the second gate, but there were wooden benches along the wall and several of the cons picked one up and started ramming the gate with it. The Bug climbed halfway up the bars and was jerking and shrieking like an enraged monkey.

  Riflemen were lining up at the other gate.

  I held the squarehead hack in front of me and yelled Don’t shoot or I’ll kill this bastard!

  In those narrow corridors the sudden rifle fire was like a chain of dynamite blasts. The squarehead hollered No-no-no! as bullets sparked and rang against the gate bars and ricocheted off the walls. One of the guys battering with the bench grabbed at his belly and went down screaming. Blood flew off somebody’s head. The bench crashed to the floor and the cons went racing back to the row. High on the bars the Bug was still screaming, and then he spasmed and dropped like a sprayed roach. The hack in my arms slumped into a dead weight and he slipped out of my grasp. I felt a hard shove on my shoulder and staggered halfway around and saw Charley slumped against the wall with his hands to his bloody chest. He grinned at me and started to say something—and his mouth blew apart in a red spray.

  And then I was facedown on the floor and feeling the life draining out of me, and I knew another minute would be all she wrote.

  But, as you know, it wasn’t….

  OCTOBER 17, 1934

  So.

  It’s past midnight, and they’re a little tardy, but here they are at the door.

  The warden says something and then the guy with the Bible says something.

  I’ve been shaved above the ankle and at the top of my head. They have to help me up, they have to hold me. Two big hacks position themselves close on either side of me and support me under the arms and by the back of my belt. They’re very strong, and from even a small distance it probably looks like I’m walking mostly under my own power and they’re simply holding tight to me. In fact, I’m hardly bearing any of my weight as we go out of the ready room and into the death chamber.

  There are reporters but no cameras. All of them look like somebody just drew the curtain at the side show and they’re by God getting their two-bits’ worth.

  And there it is….

  Every picture I’d ever seen of one of them has scared me nearly witless, and for the last three weeks I’ve been as afraid as I’ve ever been.

  Now here it is for real.

  It’s smaller than I’d expected.

  And much odder than it looks in pictures. Like something some crackpot put together in his garage.

  The straps, the wires, the little metal cap….

  The thing suddenly seems, well…funny.

  Comic.

  Silly as hell.r />
  No. More than that. It strikes me as truly and hugely ridiculous.

  To think that this…this contraption…is the best they can come up with.

  This is what I was afraid of? Christ, what a waste of good fear.

  The thing isn’t frightening, it’s…embarrassing.

  Charley was dead right. It’s embarrassing to be killed this way, to be killed by people who think up shit like this. How can you think up something like this and have any self-respect?

  On the other hand…it’s pretty amusing to see how pasty-faced serious they are.

  I give a big smile to one and all as I’m strapped and buckled down. The reporters are scribbling like mad, and not a one of them smiling back.

  The metal clamp closes around my ankle.

  The metal cap clutches to my head.

  The warden asks if I have anything to say.

  I almost say Yes, would you please hold my hand?

  But it doesn’t seem worth the effort. Not for this knock-kneed, worm-dick bunch. I go on smiling and shake my head.

  They put the hood on me, and I hear them all back away a little.

  Like they do when you pull the pistol and announce the stickup.

  Jesus, it was grand.

  It was always so grand…

  Under the hood my grin grows and grows and feels like it’s going to—WOOOOOOoooooooooooooo….

  Author’s Note

  It may be of interest to the reader that all of the central characters in this book were real people and most of its major events actually took place. It should be noted, however, that much of the pertinent historical record is vague, contradictory, or in error. In any case, this book is a novel, and as such its chief allegiance is not to the fact but to the truth of its story.

  About the Author