“Those bums will think twice before coming in here and starting trouble.”
“So what!” Hermie said. “I’m going home. I hate this bar. It stinks in here and why do you want me to come anyway? Are you showing off? Well I don’t care. I DON’T CARE.” (She yelled this.) “You don’t impress me and I’ve got to take the baby-sitter home.”
“Baby-sitter!” John C. closed the knife and put it back in his arm holster.
“Yes, baby-sitter. It may have not occurred to you that that’s what it’s all about — baby-sitters and shopping and getting by.... And don’t wake the baby when you come in.” And she left.
John Charles watched her walk out, smiled warily at several people sitting next to him, and went back to sit with Alice Van Hooser. Alice arranged her hair around her head and smiled. “How did I look?” he asked.
“When?”
“The fight.”
“Fine,” she answered. John took a drink out of Lil’s glass and sat swirling the beer around the bottom of the glass, forcing out the few remaining bubbles.
“The wife suspects something,” he said.
“Did she say something?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“She’s getting a private investigator to follow me. Somebody around here must have been informing her.”
“John ...”
“Sure, Lil, I saw my lawyer yesterday and he said that the divorce papers will go through in a month. But until then we have to be careful” (he gestured), “because if we get caught by this detective the divorce will be thrown out of court.”
“Why?”
“Some legality.”
“But John, a separation. Anyone can get a separation. My cousin ...”
“Right. I’m getting one. As a matter of fact I’m all packed. The only thing that is left to do is decide about who takes the kid.”
“But she’s only three months old, John.”
“I know, but Hermie hates kids — always has. She wants me to take her.”
John Charles did not have to take the child. In fact he never left home at all except for a week when Alice’s mother went for a visit to her sister’s house in Illinois. John C. started a Friday-night poker table in Dirty John’s and Alice began collecting her debts; she refused to come to the tavern when she knew Mrs. Sledge would be coming; she refused to stay overnight in a motel room, but went home to her mother; she said whiskey runs were too dangerous and refused to go along. John Charles bought her a diamond ring and complained that the divorce proceedings were being slowed down by false information brought in by the private detective, whom he had had a gun-fight with in Iowa after picking up a load of whiskey — but no one was hurt because John C. knew that if he shot him there would be a lot of very ticklish questions that were better unasked because it was just the excuse the law needed to throw the book at him because they had been after him ever since he had come to St. Louis from Texas because of the reputation he had built for himself down there and that in order to keep one step ahead of the law he had to be smart — smarter than even his emotions. Alice had the ring appraised, and threw it away.
Perhaps Alice’s new attitude had penetrated into John Charles’s general understanding of the area in which he lived; or perhaps that understanding, responsive only to sharp variations, had failed to contain Hermie; or perhaps it had slowly, finally, failed to contain anything that was not already defined by it. Somehow within this labyrinth of understanding one single action became necessary. This action, by itself, is opaque and bleak, as if there had never been an infidelity charge against Hermie — never had been a desperate confusion in John C: just as though there had never been a Chief Black Hawk living on the Rock River, only someone who had built a huge monument resembling an Indian and called it that: just as though there had never been a world full of people thirty years ago. The stone remains and fantasy is the only way of memory. John Charles called Alice Van Hooser on the telephone while she sat eating dinner with her mother, August 16, 1939.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello, Lil?”
“Yes.”
“This is John.”
“Where are you?” she asked. (This must have been unexpected. John C. had used the phone before, many times, to call Alice. Unusual, I believe it was, but not important enough to be exigent.)
“I’m in the hospital. Hermie has been seriously hurt. She got out of the car to shoot at a crow with my shotgun and it exploded. She is in critical condition and they don’t know if she will live.”
“What?!” And John Charles retold the story — his wife was dying from an injury she had received when an old shotgun she was firing exploded. Alice stayed home that day with her mother and talked again to John C. that afternoon. He said that there was no change in Hermie’s condition and asked her to come to Dirty John’s that evening. She did and John C. closed the bar early in order to visit his wife before visiting hours were closed.
The following afternoon Alice Van Hooser went into downtown St. Louis after work to buy a piece of material for her mother to make draperies with. From the front window of Woolworths she saw Hermie Sledge carrying her baby and walking toward the post office. She, Alice, changed a quarter and telephoned John C. at his home. He answered and he sounded tired. “She was in the intensive care ward and they wouldn’t let me see her,” said John Charles and added that the divorce proceedings were complete and that he only had to go to his lawyer’s office and sign them. Alice was not able to find a suitable color of material and drove home. John Charles was in some way surprised by the phone call.
He bought a box of twelve-gauge shotgun shells — Nitro Long Range Express No. 4 Shot — and a stick of dynamite. He cut open one of the shells and poured the shot down the toilet in his basement. He placed the shotless shell in the firing chamber of a single-barrel gun and cut open the stick of dynamite. With a kitchen spoon he poured two and a half large spoonfuls of dynamite down the barrel of the gun and poked a piece of wadded paper after it with a cleaning rod. He carried the weapon outside and laid it on the floorboards of the back seat of his automobile.
Two days later he asked Hermie to bring the baby and come for a ride in the country. She consented and they drove out of St. Louis. After two hours of leaning over the steering wheel and looking up into the sky John Charles stopped the car and asked Hermie if she wanted to take a shot at a crow. Hermie at first couldn’t see the crow, then she didn’t want to shoot at it because the noise would frighten the child. John C. offered to take the child away, but by this time the crow was gone. They stopped at Dirty John’s on the way home and went inside for a beer, though Hermie complained. John C. then wanted her to go outside and shoot bottles in the dump behind the tavern but she didn’t want to. He asked her to come outside and throw bottles in the air for him while he shot, but she declined again and demanded to be taken home. Hugh Carson, the daytime bartender, said he’d throw some bottles up in the air for him, and John C., irritated, asked if he wouldn’t rather shoot them himself. The baby was screaming at the top of her lungs by then and John Charles and Hermie and the baby went home.
He took the shotgun out of the car and put it in the basement, where he carried it from room to room, first putting it down and going upstairs, then coming down and moving it again, not sleeping well. Three days later he was sitting on the toilet in the basement and called upstairs to his wife. She came down and he pointed to the shotgun standing against the wall, indicating that there was something wrong with the firing pin, and asked Hermie to try it out. She did and the gun worked, decapitating Hermie and splattering huge pieces of her around on the