Alive and Dead in Indiana

BIOGRAPH

Iced air. How do they do it? We could’ve gone to the Marbro, but they don’t have it there. I like the sign outside here, snow on top of all the letters. Everybody sitting outside on the street, looking over at the glowing white in the light. Light bouncing off the awnings. People dying in the heat. But you got a little money, and you are in where it’s cool. They must take the heat right out of the air. But how do they know which is the hot part? In the loft, one time, placing bets, I saw the guy who runs the machine out in the middle of the street looking at something he held in his hand. The drays and the trucks working their way around him. Only the trolleys creeping up to him, the motorman yanking on the bell. I couldn’t hear it because the windows were closed. The iced air. Everybody squinting at the man in the street holding his hand up staring at it, at something in it. Things moving slow in the heat. Boy, it’s swell. I want to stay for the whole show. Let my shirt dry out, roll my socks back up.

Everybody’s sitting in the dark. Up there in the ceiling they got the little lights that are supposed to be stars. Palm trees in pots up there on the sides of the stage. Ushers in monkey suits by the fire doors. It’s like in Mooresville at the Friends with everybody sitting and waiting for somebody to get up and talk. I could stand up here and tell them a story. Mrs. Mint is the only one who knows, and she’s worried about getting back to Romania, thanks to the house she ran in Gary.

She treats me square. No trouble when I stay with Patty. And Patty, still married to the cop, doesn’t have a clue.

Thanks me every time she smiles because I’m the one who got her teeth fixed for her.

Smiling at me in the dark.

Jimmie, she says, when you going to take off those sunglasses. You can’t see the movie. She likes a man who carries a gun, but she can’t say why.

The girls down where Patty works all tell her I look like him. I just laugh, buy her a diamond, tell her I work for the Board of Trade.

There’s a guy named Ralph Alsman’s arrested all the time because he looks like him. The story’s in the papers. How he keeps robbing banks.

There’s nothing better to do. Rob a bank, go to a movie, buy a paper. It’s all the same.

I read the paper all the time, and I start out thinking I don’t know the man. Then I think that could be me.

You have to keep your mind busy or you go nuts. Think of Homer beating it by tying string to flies he caught while he stood time on the mats in Pendleton. You go nuts without something to do. You buy a little time out of the heat.

I bet the girls wouldn’t know what to do if I was him. Wouldn’t want me to really be him. It only gives them something to talk about without no customers while Patty’s putting on her hat and I’m leaning in the doorway waiting for her to blow.

I like Patty good enough, with her smile and all. She is nice and heavy leaning on my arm when we walk on the street. My hand will be in my pocket on the gun, and I’ll tap her leg with it through the clothes. She’ll smile. Our secret. My husband, she says, only has the revolver they gave him.

I like Patty. She’ll do for now. But she’s not Terry.

Sometimes, I think I see Terry in the Loop when I’m down there with a bag of corn feeding pigeons. Out of the house pretending I’m working. I’ll be looking at the birds and her legs will walk by and I’ll follow them up and something will go wrong.

I want to ask the doll where she got those legs from, but they just clip along through the crowd of strutting pigeons.

It’s like that with a day to kill downtown. Her hand waving for a cab. And in the store windows, I see all the things I could buy that she would like. And all the other women, their hair thrown off their forehead just like hers, tilting their heads and thinking that the stuff they see will make them look like Terry. I can’t go and get her. South Bend wasn’t enough, and they’ve hidden her in some county jail. For harboring.

There has been a fire on a boat that had a party going on it. A little boy in a sailor hat is crying behind a glass window. It’s beginning to fill with smoke in there, and you can’t hear him cry. People are jumping off the ship. The railings are giving out, and people are falling into the water. There is a priest swimming with the boys. And then it is night, and the moon is shining, and the burning ship is shining on the water. Along the shore bodies are washing up, and people and police are looking through them.

So, you’re out, Pete is saying as we drive south out of Lima. They’ll go up to the farm while we’ll go down to Cincinnati.

You’re out, I say. I hadn’t seen them since I got parole. I was in Lima by the time they broke Michigan City. Dumb. I see you got my message, I say.

We’re laughing. There he was standing at the dayroom door. Too many pistols. Too many shots had been fired. Terry would be at the house.

Thanks.

Mac is reading off directions. Left here, right, right here. Something they learned from Baron Lamm’s gang. In the dark. Clark is sucking on his fingers. He shot himself. Kind of rusty, he is saying, his finger in his mouth. The sheriff didn’t look too good.

We told him, Pete said, that we were Indiana state parole officers. Mac laughs. He didn’t believe us. They laugh. Nervous.

You’re out. You’re out, I say.

You should’ve not locked up the sheriff’s wife, Mac says. Right here.

I tell you he’ll be all right, Pete says.

It’s going to be tough watching him die from across the room and behind bars, Mac says.

It’s not that bad. He’ll be okay.

He’d been square with me. The food is good.

There’s just no going back, somebody says in the dark.

The sun is just getting into people’s eyes. The light going all one color on the store windows. Mothers yanking the kids on trolleys to get them home in time to make supper. It takes longer for the men to get off and on the Toledo scales by the door. Harder to think. Almost time to go home. Not enough time to start something new. The tellers begin stacking the coins, and the hack’s in the basement looking for work.

When we were together around a kitchen table planning a job, drinking beers but no hard stuff, and it would come that time of day, why, we’d all know it. And someone goes to the window and looks out, another stretches out on the davenport, reads the morning papers again. Not working.

After getting out of the pen we’d show up at the bank, 2:45 ^{on me} dot. The bank was closed. Closed from Roosevelt’s holiday and never opened. We’d stand there, heavy in the vests and the guns. Looking through the bars and then looking real quick to see if anyone has seen us. Time thrown all off by something that happened years ago when we weren’t in the world.

I hear in Mexico they go to sleep all the afternoon.

It’s too hot for anything, even robbing the banks.

Then there are just two pair of hands. Blackie’s throwing dice, shuffling cards, and counting poker chips. Jim’s writing, turning pages in a book, and accepting a law degree. Then just Blackie’s hands, his fingers tapping on a felt-covered table, waiting for the cards to be dealt. Then Blackie spreading the cards in his hand, looking them over and getting ready to bet.

Somewhere in the Wisconsin countryside and Pete saying, That’s it. I’m feeling pretty good. We could be anywhere now. The fields all gleaned. Some shocks still standing. It’s a big Buick, and the cold wind is blowing through it since we’ve taken out the windows.

We’re going to take them to the hideout, says Mac, kidding.

Meaning the two citizens we have.

Can you cook? I am asking the lady without smiling.

She’s wearing Pete’s coat. The fellow’s got on Pete’s hat.

Pete’s not even cold.

After a fashion, says the lady.

So we go along watching the phone wires. Down to two and then one. Birds all puffed up on them. Then no wires at all, just the fields and the white sky.

Pete runs them out into a turned field. Mac changes the plates. Pete turns them away, back to the wind. The three of them out in the big field. Pete ties their hands and then he comes back half the way, stops and goes back to get his hat and coat.

After Greencastle, we could kick back. It had been Homecoming weekend at the college, and the stores were making big deposits. Pete feeling grand. I say to him, Why don’t we move in with you two and share a place? He says, Sure, without asking the girls. At the Clarendon, we carried the bags with the guns while the boy took the rest. Margaret set out right away to bake the new money. Crumbling the bills as we made fists, then smoothing them out. All the time we talked about what to do next. Not thinking about it at all. It takes time for new money to get old. But it all fell apart when Terry didn’t do her bit. She sat and made up for hours though we weren’t going anywhere. One day there was no breakfast on the table. What gives?

There’s your girl friend, says Margaret.

Terry starts right up. I can’t cook.

Well, you better start learning, I say.

Pete making a fist all the time and the green squeezing out through the fingers.

If they don’t know me, they don’t know how to say my name. The g is like in girl or gun. When they showed up from the Star and News at the farm and asked Dad what he thought about me and said the name, Dad just said, I dont know him, never heard of me. But he’s a junior, they said.

That’s not my name, Dad said. And he pronounced it for them.

That’s all changed now, they said to him.

The old man just sat there right in front of them.

That’s okay. Left all that behind. Even left that g behind.

Who told me that? Toms of the Star in Tucson while we waited for Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin to double-cross us. He came up to the bars during the sideshow, all those locals going by to look at us for a quarter. Pete steaming at Leach. Mac saying how great the weather was down there. Toms called me by my real name and told me the story. He asks me if that’s how I wanted to be known, by the other name and all. Hell, it wouldn’t do any good. It’s out of our hands, just like everything else.

The police are leaving after doing nothing. They open the door, and there is a woman standing on the other side just about to knock. Shows she’s surprised to see them, but she knows them all by name. She asks them if it is that time of month again. They nod and file out, the plainclothes first and then the uniforms. She stops one who is eating a sandwich as he goes by, takes out a hanky, and polishes his badge. AU I had was a big bolt wrapped up in a neckerchief. I kept hitting him but only knocking off his straw hat. He’d pick it up and put it on again, and I’d knock it off. He was making that godawful sound, and I could hear the Masons come running. He didn’t have no money. I didn’t know a thing then. Just a kid. Same grocer gave me a talking to when I’d swiped some jawbreakers. He knew my dad. I ran, and someone chucked a bottle after me. They found me in the barn.

It was to have been all set. But the judge didn’t care. I heard he died falling asleep across some railroad tracks, a knife in his pocket because I was coming to get him.

Since the operation, it’s been like I had on thimbles. Patty wonders what’s happened to my fingers. She’s got them spread out in front of her eyes, tired of my fortune. She says, Well, hell. How do you pick up something like a dime?

I start thinking about all the things I’ve touched. Chairs and guns and the counter I hopped over in Daleville. The glasses. The sinks. The steering wheels. The money. It’s like those things remember how I felt. But me, I forgot it as soon as I let go.

Touched Terry all over. Must have left a print on her everywhere. Some cop dusting her rear, blowing it off, saying, We got the son of a bitch. And they’re all looking at her, looking for me. All the other women too. Shaking hands with men and having them look into their palms.

You think twice about punching a light switch.

Red rushing in saying that he killed a cop at the garage. Lost the Auburn, and they got his girl. He quieted down, started in telling us all over again what had happened and that the girl could be trusted. We looked at each other’s faces, knowing that we didn’t look like anybody else no more. Mac looked like a banker. Pete like some college kid, he’s going without a hat and wearing that floppy collar. He walked into Racine and put a big Red Cross poster on the window without anybody taking a second look. And I’m looking like a sissy bookkeeper. Putting on weight.

We got the girls to dye our hair. Thought it was funny, us sitting with sheets around our necks. I said red and let my mustache grow. Terry sitting on my lap, drawing the eyebrows in. Didn’t like your face to begin with, she’s saying. Pete telling me later about the two toes he’s got grown together. And Red holding up his hand, saying, What am I going to do with these. I never thought about them before, the fingers he left on the railroad track in the Soo.

They’re going to fry you, boy.

I could hear Pete calling from the next cell. Leach was taking me back to Indiana. I fought them off awhile and they put cuffs on too hard for it. Some vacation. There was the cop from East Chicago who ran away. He tried to stop me, I tell them. Where is Wisconsin’s Lightning Justice now? I could hear Pete screaming from his cell about going to Wisconsin and staying together and Mac calling from someplace else, See you, John!

I’ll never see them again. I can’t remember their faces. They went from Tucson to Ohio when Indiana waived the bust-out from Michigan City. They’ll get it for getting me out of Lima.

The last thing is voices.

So long, John. Sioux Falls, Mason City. South Bend wasn’t enough. I met their Mouth on the fair grounds to pass them the money. The parachutes dropping from the tower. Tell them I’ll get more.

Indiana flew me to Crown Point. The pilot said that over there is Mexico.

Blackie has won the boat on a bet. They sit together on the deck with the lights of the city behind them. He asks her what she wants to name the boat. She talks about having a house and family. It’s old-fashioned, she says but that is what she wants. Then Blackie kisses her, and she stops talking about leaving the city, sailing away.

We called her Mack Truck. She made breakfast Christmas morning. The fight I had with Terry was all left over from that race driver. I told her to go back to the reservation. Take my car. She’s packing and crying.

Pete’s girl said, A girl’s got a right to choose who she wants to be with.

But it was like I didn’t know Terry no more, and she stopped being pretty.

Christmas in Florida.

Even the joint had snow.

I told her to go where it was snowing, with the race driver. And she left after Red told her how to work the spark on the Ford. I can buy another car! I shouted at her.

It was so hot. I sat around in pieces of suits, and the girls giggled about thinking the tide was a flood. They had never seen an ocean in Indiana.

It got hotter the week after Christmas. The papers said we were still raising hell in Chicago. They blame everything on us. On New Year’s Eve, people were shooting off firecrackers to see the light on the water. Pete’s girl got out a tommy gun, and it rode right up when she shot it. I took it from her and fired it out over the waves, a long rip. But it wasn’t any good firing at nothing. The tracers looked just so pitiful. Everybody else had girls and was heading for Tucson. I said I was going north and look for Terry. Red said he’d come along. We’d fence some bonds in Chicago.

If I make it to Mexico, I’ll never see any of them again. Terry lost in the jails, Pete and Mac in Ohio. We can’t pull off the magic trick again. We broke out of too many places. Even if I could walk in with this new face, there’d be no way to walk them out. The farmers they got to sit with them are taking shots at airplanes flying by. South Bend wasn’t enough.

I’ll never see Sally Rand at the Fair again. Have the woman I’m with tugging at my sleeve to get the hell out of there. But only half pulling, looking up at the stage too, at the feathers and the shiny pieces of paper. A thing like that. You can’t stop watching the fans and balloons — because they are moving and changing and her face is floating, floating above whatever it is she’s using to cover herself where she has to. The cops making such a big deal of it, standing off to the side, looking just like the rest of us looking up at the parts of her. Hiding like that. She didn’t have to hide!

The alarm is ringing on the building. Red is jumpy, getting the money when a cop walks in. He thinks it’s some kind of mistake. His blue overcoat is buttoned over his gun. Just what I was looking for, but it’s trouble. There are more outside. They’re lining up behind cars. Grab somebody and go! I yell to Red.

Someone says, Can I get my coat?

Out the door with the cop ahead of me and someone is calling the cop’s name and the cop is running off down the street. I feel the bullet hit the vest. It knocks me back. I shoot at where the smoke is, and get hit twice more. I hear glass crashing and the alarm. I shoot some more at the smoke, see Red go down to the right, grab him, grab the money. My back is to the guns.

We get away in the car.

East Chicago still has Christmas stuff up.

Red took the bullet under his arm. My chest hurts. Red says from the backseat that being shot ain’t nothing like being shot.

The ramps are crowded with people. He runs into Jim, and they shake hands, leaning forward and grabbing each other’s arms with their other hands. Jim tells Blackie that he is running for DA and that Blackie’s crowd better watch out. Blackie tells Jim that he’s all for him and that Blackie’s going straight. There is a roar from the crowd and Blackie says, Dempsey. They talk about the fight and say that they will have to get together. There is another roar, and Blackie says, Firpo.

Patty wants to hold hands in the dark. Puts my hand on her knee. She’s got no stockings on. It’s warm between her legs. We’re both looking straight ahead. Watching the movie. I’m slumped down and my hat’s on my lap. I’d say the man next to me is crowding me. His arm takes up the arm rest.

Her dress is nice. I think about what it’s made of, stitch by stitch. What if the parts fell apart? In the shop I made double task, triple sometimes — yoking sleeves, setting collars with a Tomcat. The white thread in the blue work shirts. Thinking of pulling one thread and having the whole thing fall apart. It just feels good now, the cloth and what’s underneath. She is moving.

The new DA is tired. Election night and all that. A woman breaks through the crowd and hops into the limousine after him. She says that Blackie sent her. They settle back in the seat and pull a blanket over their legs.

In Tucson, they took us one at a time, and me and Terry just getting back from looking for Indians. She stood there with her fingers crossed and her hands on top of her head. They cuffed me.

I do some shouting. Hey, I tell you, I’m Sullivan! You got the wrong man!

Some vacation, says Terry.

They had the prints on Pete and Mac by the time I made it to the station.

I don’t know them. That’s what I say. The place is lousy with reporters. The cops take me into a room where they start going through papers. They snatch my hand, turn over my wrist.

Well, what do we have here?

One bent down and undid a shoe.

The other foot, Charlie, says a guy.

They look at my heel a long time. I remember Pendleton and the foundry and pouring metal on it to get out of the heat. And then Charlie, he takes my face in his hands, and I say, Hey. He holds my head still while his thumbs feel through my mustache, pressing my lip on my teeth, my head down. This is the guy, he says.

They open the door and the reporters come in.

Guess who we got, they say.

Where’s Indiana? I ask a farmer who’s standing in his field. He points to the road crossing just ahead. Terry says, You can’t tell them apart. Illinois looks just the same. It’d be something if they were the colors on the map.

I stop to change the plates and put the chains on. The roads are thawing and it’ll just get worse as it gets warm. My dad won’t know me now with these new clothes and hat. I want him to see Terry and the car. Hubert’ll be there and the sisters. We’ll hide in the barn if anybody comes. The hay will all be gone, and we can shoot baskets in the loft.

It wasn’t warm enough for a picnic. But they filled the house with everyone bringing a covered dish and their own service.

I told them all about Crown Point. Once in the front room. Once in the kitchen. The kids on the porch. The men around back. Hubert took my picture with Terry. Then with me alone with the gun. Says he’ll not have it developed till they catch me.

The people on the floor kicked the gas candle back and forth. Homer went in to get Red out of the vault. I’d been shot already. Green bent over where the gas shell hit him. We’re all crying. I’m holding a girl when we go through the revolving door. It’s my right shoulder so it’s her I push against the glass.

She gives a little grunt.

Homer’s behind me.

We’ve got people lined up all over. It’s like a picket fence.

Red comes out and gets hit. It’s coming from up above us and behind. We all get our guns going. The people got their hands up. Lester sets them out on the Buick. Two on the fenders like deer. They’re on the back bumper, the running board, between us in the car. There must be twenty.

Slow! I yell.

Homer’s reading off the directions when someone on the running board says, Here, right here is where I live. We stop and she gets off. Cars go by honking, thinking it’s a shivaree. My arm hurts, all crowded in like that. Lester’s leaning out the back with a rifle. We stop to let some more off, and he gets out to spread some tacks. I’m thinking that he’s getting them under our car.

Some law you got! he’s yelling at the locals.

The new DA and Blackie’s girl are sitting at a table in a nightclub. A woman is on the stage, singing. After the song, everyone pounds on the tables with little wooden hammers. Then we see Blackie asleep in a room. He wakes up, and magazines fall to the floor. The phone rings, and he answers it. A woman, in bed, is on the other end of the line. She asks him to guess who she saw that night at the nightclub. Blackie hangs up and looks at the magazines.

Tellers always telling you to use the next window. Not believing you unless you have a mask. Walking in the door and wasting a whole clip above their heads. Less chance of shooting maybe, but you never know when somebody will get a wise idea, think they’re in a movie.

That boy in South Bend, looking at his hand where the bullet went through.

The sheriff in Lima saying, I’m going to have to leave you, Mother.

The bullet that killed him on the floor next to him.

Margaret so surprised when the gun went off on the beach in Florida.

All the things we didn’t do too. And did.

They’d draw my face all wrong. I don’t smoke. Finding out later, after Pete and Mac got shipped to Ohio, that Leach told the papers to give me all the play.

Didn’t matter to Pete.

Blackie closes the door, leaving the body inside. He catches up with his bodyguard, who is waiting by the elevator. It is New Year’s Eve. The bodyguard is wearing a derby.

Cops are at the door, Terry says. And I’m a Lawrence something, something Lawrence. Get dressed, I tell her, fitting in a drum.

I am always waking up to these things. I can’t remember my name. I’d been leaving every morning, heading downtown to make it look like I had a job.

Terry’s put her blouse on backwards. She’s remembering what happened at Dr. Eye’s.

Shots from the hall.

That’ll be Homer coming over for breakfast.

Hurry up, I tell her, and spray the door.

Think about the cake the neighbor lady from across the hall brought over the first day, her husband with the pipe, saying he has a crystal set.

Down the back stairs, back out the back door.

Terry dents a fender backing out the car. I’m waiting, watching the door. The birds are noisy in the vines on the side of the building.

The DA is in his office trying on an overcoat. He tugs on the lapels. He bends forward, clutching the coat together to see where it falls on his legs. He checks to see if there is a label. He turns around in it and asks his assistant for his comments. He looks over his shoulder and down the back of a sleeve. It could be yours, says the assistant. Yes, says the DA, standing there, thinking. He’s in the middle of the room, bundled up. They bring him another coat, and the DA tries it on. The DA reaches into the pocket and finds a small wooden hammer.

I heard they let her finish her drink. Then they took her out of the bar.

She’ll be out before you know it, Homer was saying.

We were on the Lincoln Highway, heading to his folks. All the little towns had banks to rob. They’re taking away parts of me, I’m saying to Homer, who’s humming. We’d been stumbling through jobs. Losing guns and money. Not even planning anything anymore. Just going in shooting. Trusting the vests.

I’m lost, I say.

Men are pushing carts of big steamer trunks through the crowd. A band is playing somewhere. There’s a ship whistle blowing. The DA looks at his watch and out over the people. Everyone is waving and shouting. There is a siren and the crowd gives way. An ambulance pulls up to the dock. Blackie gets out.

The shooting started when three guys left the bar to head home. The cops must have thought they were us. Lester opened up right away.

He sleeps with that gun.

I took off up the stairs with Homer and Red. We fired some out the windows, then covered each other to get out the back, down the bank to the lake. Walking on the far side, we could hear the shots over the water. Flashes every now and then.

They kept shooting at the house.

We tied up Red’s head and caught our breath. No-body even knew we were gone. They’d upped the reward that week.

The lake was very smooth, and we could see because of the moon and stars. They had all different sizes of guns shooting at the lodge.

The DA is running for governor. Blackie is at the racetrack. He looks through binoculars. He sees her in another part of the grandstand. He goes over and sits down. She says she’s worried about Jim’s chances to become governor. Someone is trying to ruin him, and he won’t do anything about it. Blackie tells her not to worry, that he’ll take care of it. He looks at her, tilts his head, says she mustn’t tell Jim they talked.

Crossing the Mississippi on the spiral bridge below St. Paul. Pretty tricky since we’re coming from the north. We pick up a tail. They start shooting. I knock out some glass and shoot back. Homer guns it. Red gets it. Never lucky, Red. His head already tied up from the night before at the lodge.

We shake them on a farm road and leave the car. I hold on to Red in the ditch while Homer goes to flag down a Ford. A family out for a drive, it looks like. Homer goes in the back with them. Red says he needs something to drink. The car could use gas. I stop at a place. The bottles are cold. My hands leave marks on the glass.

A lady opens the bottles for me. I go back to the car and give one to Red and try to give one to the kid in the back.

He’s had his lunch already. I don’t want him to have it, says the mother.

Down on one lip of the gravel pit, a locomotive is pushing some empty cars around. Piles of snow left over from the winter. It’s been easy to dig in the loose gravel and sand. They’re pumping water down below. Homer slides the body down through the bushes, and we put him in the hole. We’re taking off all the clothes.

You weren’t there, I say to Homer, pointing out the scar under Red’s arm.

It’s how he missed Tucson.

I tie up his clothes. Homer has the lye, but I want to do it. Feel kind of bad pouring it on his face. Turn his hands over and pour it on his fingers.

It smells real bad.

A hockey game is going on. Lots of people hollering. But there’s a man in a men’s room, two men. You can see them both in the mirrors. One of them says, You wanted to see me? The other man pulls some paper towels from the rack. He turns to answer the question. It’s Blackie. He has a gun wrapped up in the paper towels. When he shoots, you see the flashes coming from the towels.

They told me later I swallowed my tongue. Last thing I can remember is the towel on my face. Hotel Drake in gold. And the smell of the ether.

I should’ve had a local. But I couldn’t stand the thought of that, of looking at them when they did it. I wanted to wake up different.

I was always waking up the same.

The dimple was gone. But I could see where it had been. And the mole left a mark.

I was puffy and sore.

I saw a picture in a newspaper of a boy that turned out to be a picture of all the boys in a high-school class, one face on top of another. It didn’t look like anything, and it had all the parts. I remembered that picture, looking at my face. Rob another bank and I’d have to get rid of this one too.

I wonder what I looked like with my face all blue. No way to forget it. That’s me, all right.

Homer was thinking twice, cursing the tattoo. Finally went ahead and called it a goddamn mess. Lester sitting around drinking from a bottle of beer changes his mind a couple of times. Keeps what he has. Damn doctor was probably glad to let him.

Blackie sits and sketches all through his trial. The DA is examining a witness. Blackie’s lawyer starts to get up to make an objection. Blackie stops him, says, Relax, you’ve been beaten by the best, smiles at the DA, who is telling the jury that people like Blackie must be stopped.

The cops are happy to show us the guns and vests. We act dumb. What do you call this? we are saying.

Oh, that. That’s your submachine gun. They have some.45s too.

We tell them we’re from the East, doing a story on the crime wave. Sports is my regular beat, says Homer.

Yeah, well I’ve never been east, says one cop.

You should see the Fair in Chicago while you’re in this neck of the woods, says the other one.

They talk it up. We listen.

I like hearing about myself. It’s like being at your own funeral.

Being tourists got us in trouble in Tucson. Pete telling a cop he thought he was being followed, and the cop saying no. Tourists from the North. And I take pictures of cops directing traffic. You look good in a uniform, I tell them. The Sam Browne belts. The buttons picking up the light, turning white in the picture.

Pete used to say, I wish you’d stop that. It’s not smart.

I’d say, It’s my hobby.

We tell the cops in Warsaw we’ll send them the story when we get done writing it.

The governor is in his car, racing to Sing Sing so he can see Blackie before he goes to the chair at midnight. Sirens getting closer, governor’s car, motorcycles, everything speeding.

Guess who, I say to Margaret through her door. When she opens it, she knows me right away.

What happened to your face? You in an accident? I try to laugh. It’s not her fault. I go on in. She’s tough, but she misses Pete. I give her some money from Mason City and tell her about the tear gas and the bag of pennies. She says she doesn’t think it would do any good. You never know, I say.

I’ve been down seeing my folks on the farm, I say.

She says that she reads about me all the time in the papers.

You know half of it ain’t true.

It wasn’t no good with nothing to plan.

She says she was at a dance when I broke out of Crown Point. She says she made sure a cop saw her that night. Says she makes sure a cop sees her every night. She tells me she’s thinking about going into vaudeville. People had been around to ask.

I could hear her sister in the next room taking a bath.

It didn’t matter now that we had shields. They kept shooting, and the people with their hands up got hit first. The bags were too light. I was working the inside with two guys I didn’t know. They were the only ones who would work with us now. Homer was outside with a rifle and Lester by the Hudson.

We walked out and everyone started to get hit. Homer in the head from a shotgun that took the pants leg off a local. I pulled him into the car.

He said we should wear something different when we did South Bend.

New faces. Sure.

So we had on overalls over the vests. Always a clown. We wore straws too. Changed his luck. Pieces of straw mixed in with his hair in the hole in his head. Lester wanted to count the money again.

Blackie walks with the priest. The warden is there, the governor, two guards. Blackie says so long. Someone is playing a harmonica.

Mrs. Mint saying again over ice cream that Romania isn’t a country, just what was left of a place after the war. Patty holds the cherry up for me.

I don’t know anything about the world.

I’m seen everywhere.

Cops in England are searching the boats going to France. Every body that turns up is what’s left of me.

I could call the Leach home, hear him stutter while he tries to keep me on the line. But it could be anybody with a gun. I’m worth too much now that the governors got together.

I’ll check in with Henry Ford. Send a messenger to Detroit with a note. All the models I left on the edge of Chicago. Good little cars.

Mrs. Mint told me she’s already turned the bed down back at Patty’s place. But I want to stay and watch the cartoons.

The lights are going up and everybody’s squinting coming out of the dark. I can see who’s been next to me. And Patty crying. Mrs. Mint looking through her purse for a hanky for her. I can’t keep my eyes open. Pete, Mac. I’ll see their Mouth at Wrigley tomorrow, give him what I can spare from the trip.

Patty touching my hand. Then both of the women are squeezing by, heading for the aisle. The crowd is buzzing and I can smell the smoke from the lobby. It’s cold in here. Just this once I’d like to open my eyes and have it be all different.