Handsome Harry

They wouldn’t have to bother if they had simply let me die. They say I took seven bullets, including one to the head and one in the spine, but I remember being hit only once. The rifles were firing and firing and I saw Fat Charley’s grin burst in blood and the next thing I knew I was lying on my face and couldn’t move. I could feel the life draining out of me, and I knew another minute would be all she wrote. But they hustled me into the hospital and the doctors outdid themselves.

So. Here I am, half-crippled and my head still feels like it’s got a rail spike in it. But they did it. They saved me for the executioner.

When I awoke from the surgery, the warden was in the room, glaring at me with a kind of furious satisfaction. He said Thought you could cheat the chair, didn’t you, Pierpont? Well, I’m here to tell
you, mister, you’re gonna burn—and keep on burning for all eternity. The warden’s a devout Christian, and he gave me a little sermon elaborating on the eternal tortures I was bound for. I have to admit he’s got a flair for description. When the warden finally left the room, the hack posted at the door brought his hands up like they were strapped to the arms of a chair and said
Zzzzzzztt
as he went big-eyed and grit his teeth and shook like he was getting the juice.

Laugh a minute, the hacks.

The warden had it right, though. I
did
figure that if the break went bad they’d shoot me dead, which would be a lot better than what they were planning for me. I mean, the things you hear. Your brain bakes and your eyes pop and your waste steams out of your mouth. Your blood turns to tar….

Oh man.

They’ve kept one nurse or another in my room around the clock and doctors check on me several times a day. I so much as clear my throat and they come running in a panic.

The nurses aren’t supposed to talk to me, but three days ago a leggy one with bold green eyes whispered Happy Birthday as she changed the sheets under me. It took me a minute to understand I was now thirty-two. She’d been reading up. I gave her a wink and she glanced toward the open door, then kissed her fingertips and touched them to my lips.

So many women have bandit hearts. This one would’ve joined us in a wink.

A few hours ago they put me on a stretcher and lugged me down here to the ready cell, next door to the death chamber. And they’ve still got a nurse watching me through the bars and a doctor on hand down the hall. It’s really funny—both ha-ha and peculiar—that they’ll go to so much trouble to keep a man alive just so they can fry him. Even if they have to carry him to the chair.

I mean to tell you, the Law’s notion of justice is more cold-blooded than any outlaw I ever knew. And I mean
outlaw
, not criminal.
Crimi
nal
doesn’t distinguish between guys like me and the guys who own the banks and insurance companies and stock markets, who own the factories and coal mines and oil fields, who own the goddamn
law
. I once said to John that being an outlaw was about the only way left for a man to hold on to his self-respect, and he said Ain’t that the sad truth. The girls laughed along with us because they knew it wasn’t a joke.

Speaking of John…I want to make something clear right off the bat. There was never any rivalry between us for leadership of the gang. There’s no question he was boss of the gang he rounded up after breaking out of Crown Point—that bunch of cowboys including Van Meter and that lunatic Nelson or Gillis or whatever the runt’s name really was—but if anybody in
our
gang could be called the leader, it was me, and even John would’ve said so. Not that any of us needed a leader. Each of us was his own man and could’ve gone his own way and done all right for himself. It just so happened the five of us made a smooth team and we could trust each other to the bone. You don’t pass up luck like that.

I’ll grant you that John was the coolest of us. He had cool in spades—except when it came to women, anyway. Russell and I had tempers like guard dogs and we had to work at keeping them on a tight leash. But not even Red and Charley, who were pretty unflappable guys themselves, could match John for coolness on a job or under fire. I’ll also grant you that Charley was the brainiest and Russell had the brute strength on us all and nobody was tougher than Red. Nevertheless, when it was time for a deciding say-so, it was always yours truly they turned to.

John got the publicity because he loved it. He played up to it. They say that in his last few weeks he wasn’t taking much pleasure in the limelight anymore and was wishing he looked like anybody but himself, but I wouldn’t know about that. What I can tell you is that while we were together he carried on like the whole thing was an adventure movie and he was Douglas Fairbanks. He wanted to be a
star.
That’s how he was.

Not me. I never even liked having my picture taken. All
I
ever wanted was to show the bastards who own the law that it didn’t mean they owned me.

Anyhow, I want it understood that I never competed with John about anything, I never envied him about anything, and that’s the truth.

Or rather, it was the truth until recently. Given my present situation, I certainly envy him now.

I envy him the way he died.

I envy Fat Charley and Red for the same reason. I’m most jealous of Russell, naturally, since he’s still in one piece and can try another escape—although, sad to say, I doubt he will. But as far as dying goes, I’d trade deaths with John or Charley or Red in a Shytown minute.

Of course none of them would go for the swap. They’d laugh and tell me to go to hell. And I’d laugh along with them and say After you, gentlemen, after you.

Which is pretty much the way it’s worked out.

I doubt it will make any difference to those who think they know everything about us just because they know some of the facts, but, between you and me,
this
is how it was….

I
The Joints

It was grand.

Every single time it was grand. I loved the moment when you announce the stickup and everything suddenly goes brighter and sharper and the world seems to spin faster. You show them the gun and say hand it over and there’s no telling what’s going to happen in the next tick of the clock.

I always expected somebody to say Not on your life, Mac, and go for his piece, but it never happened—not counting the time I told the sheriff to hand over John. It never happened with money. They always handed over the money. That was the easy part. Then you had to get away. That’s when things sometimes became very intense indeed, and the notion of
present moment
took on meanings you felt in your blood.

I’ve never understood how somebody could simply hand it over and leave it at that. If somebody ever stuck a gun in
my
face and said give me the money, I’d say sure thing—and then the minute the guy took his eyes off me I’d yank out my piece and pop him. Any man who doesn’t keep a gun handy to protect himself and what’s his is a
fool. Deeds and titles and bills of sale be damned, nobody really owns anything in this world except what he can keep others from taking away, and I mean robbers, bankers, judges, or government agents.

Even if I didn’t have a gun on me and somebody tried to hold me up, as soon I saw a chance to jump him I’d do it. I’d let him have it with whatever was at hand—a chair, a bottle, a fork. I’d go at him fists, feet, and teeth.

You can’t let a guy rob you without putting up a fight. It isn’t self-respecting.

E
ven before I went to the joint for the first time I’d stolen so many cars I’d lost count. It was a snap. I swiped my first when I was sixteen—a spanking new Model T roadster, a nifty little thing. A pal named Eddie Rehnquist and I went rambling in it all over three counties before it somehow ended up in the Wildcat River. After that first one, whenever I needed a car to get somewhere, I’d pick one out and take it. If I had a date with some special girl I wanted to impress, I’d grab a Packard or a Buick or a Cadillac, something classy, even though fancy cars were easier for the cops to track down.

Like the Packard I was driving when I had my first close call with a stolen car. It was the same shade of smoky yellow as the hair on the honey snugged up beside me and saying she wished her friends could see her now. Then a cop car came up behind us and turned on its flash. I’d snatched the Packard a few hours earlier on the other side of town but had been in too much of a hurry to swap the plates. The girl took a gander at the cops and asked me if we were speeding. I said we are now—and floored the accelerator and we barreled past a stop sign, just barely avoiding a collision. We went tearing through the streets, making lefts and rights that had us leaning one way and then the other. The girl was shrieking and citizens were gawking from the sidewalks. When I didn’t see the cops in the mirror any more I slowed
down and made a nice easy turn and stayed under the speed limit for a few blocks so we wouldn’t attract further notice, then pulled into an alley and stopped. The girl was crying so hard she could hardly breathe. I gave her my handkerchief and a kiss on the ear, then got out and hopped over a fence and made myself scarce. The next day’s newspaper carried a report about the chase. The cops had found the Packard a few minutes after I amscrayed, the girl still sitting in it and bawling her eyes out. She ratted me right away, telling them I was Len Richardson, which was the name I’d given her, and that she’d known me for only an hour, which was true. The report included a photograph of her in the backseat of the police car, her face turned directly toward the camera. She didn’t seem to be wishing her friends could see her now.

Not that I ever needed a fancy car to get a girl’s attention. My looks could always do the trick. My mother said that the minute she laid eyes on my newborn self, on my fair hair and baby blues, she knew I’d never lack for female notice. She was right.

However, every jewel has its flaw, and in the interest of total honesty I have to confess that mine was in my feet. I was born with the second and third toes on each foot grown together. The toe tips were small but distinct and each one had its own nail, but there was only a bare hint of a groove where the toes should have separated from each other. Siamese toes, Red Hamilton would call them. My parents never made much of this abnormality and so neither did I, nobody did—until one summer day in Muncie when I was fifteen and a bunch of us were playing baseball in a park by the river.

I was playing barefoot like always because I could run faster without shoes. And this kid named Sorenson, whom I’d seen around but didn’t know very well, suddenly points at my feet and hollers Hey, you guys, look here! Look at the
freak!

Sorenson was at least a couple of years older than me but he wasn’t much bigger. I was always big for my age. He was still point
ing at me and saying Freak, freak, when I punched him in the face and put him on his ass. He grabbed a ball bat as he got up and the other kids all jumped back. I ducked under his first swing but he caught me on the side of the head with the next one. I staggered and saw stars but I didn’t go down. Instead of hitting me again he stood there gawking like he couldn’t believe I was still standing. That was all the chance I needed to grab the bat away from him. He tried to fend with his arm against my swing and the bone cracked like a fence picket and he let out a hell of a howl. I got him in the ribs with the next one, then gave him one to the head that laid him out. I was about to club him again when Eddie Rehnquist said Oh shit, Harry, you killed him.

Blood was running out of Sorenson’s hair. I checked closer and saw he was still breathing. Then I saw the way the other kids were looking at me and I was suddenly aware of my own blood hot around my ears and on my neck. I touched my scalp and the huge lump there and my hand came away red. I was enraged but still thinking clearly enough to know that another knock to the head would probably do him in and I’d be looking at a murder rap. Still, it didn’t feel finished. So I took out my dick and pissed on him—which really made the other guys whoop. Then I went home. An hour later the cops were at the front door and I was under arrest.

I’d been in plenty of fights but this was the closest I’d come to killing anybody, and I was lucky I didn’t get sent to the reformatory. When we went to court, several of the other kids testified that Sorenson had hit me with the bat first, and my mother wept as she told the room what a good son I was. The judge said he was troubled by some of the details of the case but decided that a clean-cut boy like me was worthy of another chance.

Mom hadn’t known all the details until they came out in the courtroom, and on our way home she said, Land’s sake, Harry, you actually…
voided
on that fellow? What will people
think?

Shortly afterward we moved away to Indianapolis. As for Soren
son, I heard that when he got out of the hospital he had a permanent walleye and walked kind of funny.

Like some kind of freak.

I
t was a fancy car that got me sent up my first time, although not for auto theft. I was nineteen years old and hadn’t worked at a legit job in almost six months, not since I’d beat the daylights out of a loudmouth foreman at the gravel pit where I was a truck loader. I got thirty days for it but it was worth every minute. Since then, I’d been making my way as a stickup man—or as Fat Charley would call it, an independent fund-raiser. I’d pulled more than a dozen robberies but nothing you could call big. Grocery stores, pharmacies, filling stations, a few greasy spoons. My biggest take was 130 bucks, and most of the others didn’t get me half that.

Anyway, what happened was, I needed a car to go see a college girl I’d met at a dance in Bloomington the week before. Annie Mac-something, a creamy brunette with wet dark eyes and a build like a modern-day calendar girl rather than most of the flat-chest flappers of the day. I could tell she was keen on me, which was no surprise, and she didn’t object to the liberties I took with her person while we were dancing cheek to cheek in a dark corner of the floor. But she was with friends and had to leave before I could get her out to the car I’d swiped in Indy and bang her in the backseat. She gave me her address and phone number and said to come see her sometime, and I said I’d be up next Saturday. I figured I’d steal a car and pull a stickup on the drive up there so I’d have enough cash to show her a really swell time and book us into the best hotel in town.

Come Saturday morning I went out looking for a car that struck my fancy and I spotted a shiny new Buick on a side street. I’ve always had a soft spot for Buicks. I was bent under the hood panel and was clipping my jumper to the coil when I heard somebody say, Hey Jack, what the
hell
you doing to my car?

Before I could run for it the guy had an arm around my neck from behind and was strangling me. He was my size and no slouch and I was sure he was going to kill me if I didn’t get free of that chokehold quick. I managed to get my hand on the .32 in my coat pocket and turn it so the muzzle was pressed against his thigh, and
bam,
I let him have it, and he hollered and fell down. I was so wound up I accidentally squeezed off another round through my coat and it glanced off the street and hit him in the same leg and really got him wailing.

As luck would have it, a squad car had come around the corner while we were at it and the two cops inside saw the whole thing. The car screeched up and they jumped out with their guns pointed at me, yelling drop it or else.

So I dropped it—and the gun hit the sidewalk just so and went off again,
bam,
and we all flinched as the bullet glanced off the building and smacked the side of the Buick. It’s Christ’s own wonder those jumpy cops didn’t shoot me then and there.

The guy I shot bled pretty impressively but he wasn’t in any real danger of dying, and an ambulance took him away. I was booked on attempted murder, but my mother hired a good lawyer who got the charge reduced to felonious assault.

The lawyer did the best he could to persuade the judge that I was a high-spirited youth who meant no real harm and deserved nothing worse than a period of probation. I was wearing a new suit and was freshly barbered and looked every inch the college boy headed for a career in accounting. My bearing was attentive and respectful, my manner amiable and confident in the wisdom of the court. But the prosecutor had to go and bring up the business about Sorenson and the baseball bat back in Muncie. He insisted I was a violent personality in need of a severe rehabilitation of attitude.

The judge agreed. He gave me two to five in the state reformatory at Jeffersonville.

T
here isn’t much to tell about J-Ville, as we called it. According to the rules-and-regulations booklet every inmate received on his arrival, the reformatory’s purpose was to help young offenders become useful citizens through vocational training and character guidance. In truth, the inmates were little more than slave labor for the private companies that contracted with the state to provide work inside the walls. J-ville had a small factory for making shoes, plus a carpentry shop and a garage for teaching auto mechanics. I’d heard plenty about the reformatory from guys who’d been there, so I had some idea of what to expect. Still, it took some getting used to, the constant whine of machinery and electrical saws and steam whistles, the smells of sawdust and exhaust smoke and disinfectants.

I’d only been there about two weeks when I got jumped. One minute the shower room was full of naked guys and the next there was nobody there but me and the three hardcases who came at me. Their intention, as one of them so explicitly put it, was to break the cherry in this pretty boy’s ass. They must’ve fixed it with the guards, because the fight lasted a while and we weren’t quiet about it, but not a hack showed his face until I got a grip on one guy’s balls and twisted as hard as I could and he screamed like he was on fire. That’s when the hacks came running and found him folded up on the floor and bawling like a baby. One of his pals was down too—I’d rammed his head against the wall and he was out cold. The third guy took off before the hacks showed up.

I had a broken nose and what felt like cracked ribs and a shiner that almost closed my eye, but I’d retained my rectal virtue. None of us finked and the superintendent gave us each three days in solitary confinement, although the other two couldn’t serve their punishment till they got out of the infirmary.

The solitary cells were in the guardhouse basement under the mat room. The mat room was large and windowless but brightly lit and didn’t have any furnishings except for a few chairs for the guards and
a dozen straw mats arranged in a wide circle in the center of the room, each mat two feet square. Commit a minor infraction and you were brought in here and made to stand on a mat for six hours in your underwear and with your hands cuffed behind you. Step off the mat without permission and you got a beating and a stretch in solitary. But the two fastest ways into the hole were by fighting or trying to escape.

The hole cells were along the rear wall of the basement, which was always chilly and smelled of piss and shit. Of the guys I’d known who’d been in J-ville, only one had done time in solitary, and he said it was no big deal. He was right. They made you strip naked but they gave you a small blanket, and the cell was big enough to stretch out in. The door had a small window that admitted some of the hallway’s light, and there was a big can of drinking water, and at noon you got a plate of beans. That was a reformatory’s idea of harsh punishment—making you sleep on the floor and piss in a can, eat beans and be alone. It was nothing like the holes I’d heard about from guys who’d been in real joints like Joliet or Michigan City. I could’ve done a month in J-ville’s hole standing on my head.

When I was let back into general population I had a lot of new friends. The three guys who’d ganged on me had been regarded as the toughest mugs in the place and they’d been lording it over most of the other inmates, who were glad to hear I’d settled their hash. Guys came around to introduce themselves and ask if I needed anything.

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