Whiskey River (7 page)

The oldest, a tall bareheaded bald man in his late forties named Hannion, was different. He had come to Detroit at the invitation of relatives after his release from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary at McAlester, where he had served nineteen years for the robbery of the Kansas, Texas, and Missouri Railroad in 1905. He had a road-gang complexion, sun-cracked and windburned, and a short cigarette smoldering in a groove in his lip that didn’t move when he spoke, a characteristic of men accustomed to conversing in an environment where silence is enforced.

“You were a desperado?” I had grown up on a steady diet of Tom Mix and William S. Hart.

“Not as desperate as the ones that spent so much time chasing me.” His rigid lips flattened his Southwestern drawl further. “There was quiet times.”

“Quiet as this?”

He accepted a crate and passed it on. “Work like this here’s the reason I went on the scout in the first place.”

“So why are you doing it?”

“Trains run too fast these days.”

Austin Camarillo—Lon to his fellow bootleggers—proved a disappointing interview. Stationed at the end of the line, the skull-faced former aviator socked crates into the back of a battered black Lincoln hard enough to rattle the bottles inside, wouldn’t discuss his experiences in the war, and responded to questions about his current activities with monosyllabic snarls. So much for what Winchell wrote about the easy sociability of hired killers. I got a rise out of him just once, when I asked him how he came to know Joey Machine.

There was a lull while another stack was being carried from the depths of the warehouse. Camarillo fished papers and makings out of his shirt pocket and rolled a cigarette with a careless ease I would sooner have associated with Hannion, the Oklahoma bandit. He speared it between his meatless lips, struck a match on the seat of his pants, and paused with the flame shimmying an inch from the end of the cigarette.

“Influenza,” he said, and lit the tobacco.

“Sorry?”

He blew smoke through his nostrils and shook out the match. “I came down with the influenza November ninth, nineteen-eighteen. We were short on planes, so somebody else flew my bus. Coming back from patrol the squadron ran into heavy Archie. Archie, that’s anti-aircraft fire. A piece hit the fuel tank and my plane went up like a Catherine wheel with somebody else inside. Two days later I was strong enough to fly, but in the meantime the Kaiser signed the Armistice and I shipped home.”

“So?”

“So if it wasn’t for the influenza I wouldn’t have come to know Joey.”

The line started moving again and he went back to work. I thanked him and walked away.

Bass Springfield had been spelled early on the loading dock by Andy Kramm, who although he was half the colored man’s size had two functional hands and worked just as fast. Springfield rested his bulk on an upended barrel with his mangled fingers spread on his knees. I wandered over there and leaned my elbows on the dock.

“Miss baseball a lot?”

“What you think?” He was watching the operation.

“Is this the only work you could get?”

He nodded. “I ain’t any too good at it neither.”

I asked him, after having asked Kramm, Hannion, and Camarillo, what I had come to think of as The Question.

“I don’t know Mr. Machine nohow,” he said. “I was hired by Mr. Jack.”

“Where’d you meet him?”

“You should’ve seen it.” Jack Dance came over to the edge of the dock, brushing sawdust off the front of his coat. “I was meeting a train at the station on Brush when I hear this banging coming from a freight on the siding, a real racket. The train’s late, so I stroll over there and take a peek inside this boxcar where the noise is coming from. I see this big nigger walloping a white man’s head against the side of the car. This other white man’s laying on his face on the floor and you just got to figure he had the same.

“Well, it wasn’t none of my business, except I’m a white man too, so I show the nigger the piece. He lets go and the guy just kind of slides into a pile on the floor. It was like his bones turned to piss.”

“They was Pinkertons,” contributed Springfield. “Come to put me off the train. They tried to grab my hands.”

“I can see right off here’s a nigger I can use if I don’t have to shoot him, so I had him come down out of the car. I got him to tell me his name, which I don’t know from Lenin’s, not being a fan of colored ball like Andy there, and I asked him if he wanted a job. He didn’t say no. Joey’s train’s coming in now, all the way from Atlantic City; I ain’t worked for him so long I figure I can trot Bass up to the platform and ask can I keep him. I gave him a hundred to get cleaned up and buy some duds without nothing living in them but him and told him to come see me at the Book-Cadillac. I figure I bought him for the C-note if he don’t show up, but he does, all decked out in yellow from hat to heels.” He shook his head. “You should’ve seen it.”

You should’ve seen it.
I would come to recognize that as Jack’s favorite phrase, a recurring declaration of his faith in the wonder of the world. I visited his grave recently in Hebrew Memorial Park and was disappointed to learn that no one had thought to inscribe it on his stone.

“What happened to the Pinkertons?” I asked.

Jack moved a shoulder. “I didn’t read about them in the paper so I guess they must’ve come around finally. Either that or some hoboes stripped their carcasses and dumped them off along the rails somewhere between here and wherever that freight was headed.” He raised his voice. “That’s the load. Let’s leave some room for passengers.”

The lines broke up. Jack retired into the warehouse with the hard fat man, but not before I saw a thick packet of stiff new bills change hands.

Moments later, Springfield, Andy Kramm, and I were back inside the Hudson, Kramm resting his arm on a crate with a red maple leaf stenciled on it on the seat between us. Jack climbed under the wheel, uncorked his thermos, and helped himself to a swig of chicken broth. This time he didn’t offer it to anyone else. He rammed the cork back in and reached inside his coat.

“Here, Connie.” He stuck a Luger over the back of the seat with his hand wrapped around the barrel.

I stared at the brown checked grip. The sharp oil smell nipped my nostrils. “What’s that for?”

“You flip back the little dingus on the side and pull the trigger. It goes bam. Take it. I got another.”

“Thanks. I’m just an observer.”

Springfield, staring out the window, muttered something about pulling weight. Jack told him to shut up. He took the Luger in both hands and studied it. His face in the light from the loading dock was childlike. “I filed down the trigger sear and converted it to full auto,” he said. “You can empty a clip in two seconds.”

“What’s the good of that?” I asked.

“You don’t always get time to aim. The other one’s regular semi-auto for when you do. I only offered you this one because I don’t know what kind of a shot you are. Hell, suit yourself.” He put the pistol away and stamped the engine into life.

I heard a clank and watched Andy Kramm remove a disassembled Thompson submachine gun, glistening black with walnut handgrips, from the toolbox where he’d rested his feet on the way over. He rattled the buttstock into place, wound tight the lever on the pie-tin clip, and clamped it to the action. Finally he drew back the breech and slammed a cartridge into the chamber.

This was becoming real. I asked Jack if he thought guns would be necessary.

“Only for shooting.” He let out the clutch. “Bon voyage, gents. We’re in the wrong country.”

We followed a confusion of side streets to an imperfectly paved road that paralleled railroad tracks for six blocks and then degenerated into gravel as we left the city limits. After a hundred yards of that we swung down an antique logging trail leading toward the lake, that blank expanse with the lights on the American side looking tiny and far away. The lamps of the other cars followed us and slowed when we slowed. We were barely moving as we crunched through spears of tall grass in the snow where the trail frayed out. The blades lisped along the running boards.

“This is the interesting part,” Jack announced. “Sometimes it don’t freeze all the way to the edge.”

I said, “Shouldn’t one of us get out and check?”

“Nah.”

In decades past, the foot of the trail had provided a gentle grade for launching sleighs and barges loaded with logs bound for Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo; but the lake had receded since that time. Our front tires dropped from earth to ice with a sickening lurch, answered by a groan that seemed to issue from the depths of the lake and made my heart skip. But the ice held. After a moment Jack slipped the clutch again and the rear tires bumped down the bank and plunged with a jingling of bottles. The chains munched at the frozen surface. Behind us, the second car made a similar descent. The lamps of the third swayed, flickered, and then jolted into a frightening forty-five-degree angle, but righted themselves, and within minutes the entire procession had quit land. Anyone watching would have seen what looked like a ghost convoy rolling across the water, a Second Coming with backfires.

Papery flakes had been fluttering down when we left shore, but now a shrapnel moon glinted through an unpredicted hole in the clouds, causing the lake to glow under its layer of white, except in dark ominous patches.

“Fucking radio creeps,” said Kramm. “Couldn’t tell you it’s raining if they was standing up to their ass in a puddle.”

Jack was sanguine. “Don’t get your balls in an uproar. Nobody knows we’re out.”

“What are those dark spots?” I asked.

“Shoals. Current flows over them and hollows out the ice on top. Little Augie drove smack across one and that’s how come he’s down there looking up.” As Jack spoke he corrected his course to circle a patch larger than most.

After that I relaxed by degrees. We were in expert hands. Even the creaking and groaning of the ice, paralyzing at first, ceased to worry me as the others ignored it. The car was swaddled in black silence, heightened by the sight of the distant lights of Monroe beyond the windshield and the burbling of the engine under the cowl-shaped hood. The black box heater beneath the dashboard, little more than an extension of the manifold, didn’t reach past the front seat, leaving the back cold and dank, but I felt safely cocooned, even drowsy. It was well past one.

Conversation—the first in many minutes—awakened me. The shore lights appeared much closer. I had done more than just doze.

“I didn’t see nothing,” Springfield was saying. “Maybe it was just your reflection.”

Jack said, “Maybe not.”

The Hudson was equipped with a police spotlight on the driver’s side. Jack twisted it up by its chrome handle and switched it on. A hard white shaft rammed a hole through the darkness. I saw shapes of cars two hundred yards ahead, strung out in a horizontal line. Their lamps were dark.

Jack’s eyes sought mine in the rearview mirror. “You tell anybody about this run?”

“Not a soul.”

Something struck the post to the left of the windshield. Sparks sprayed. The report followed an instant later, a hollow plop.

“They’re trying for the light!” Kramm cranked down his window hurriedly, letting in a blast of arctic air. He poked the machine gun’s snout out the window.

Jack killed the spot and headlamps. Behind us the lamps of the other cars in our party broke formation in both directions and blinked out raggedly. I wondered how they could avoid the shoals without light. Then Jack hurled the Hudson into a skidding turn that barked my ribs against the crate of whiskey, and I wondered about
us.

All the windows were down now except mine. Something buzzed past the car on the passenger’s side, a hornet in January. Kramm nestled the Thompson’s butt into his shoulder and squeezed the trigger. The pounding shook the car, spent shells bounced against the seat and floor, brimstone fouled the air.

I heard two spaced shots in reply, then I saw a spot of bright light flickering, the reports hammering behind the flashes like an out-of-sync soundtrack. My eyes were growing accustomed to the moonlight. The bursts came from the backseat of a long, light-colored sedan with dark fenders and running boards.

Something thudded against the side of the Hudson. I felt a hot wind on my face and my window disintegrated. I slumped down in the seat. For the next few moments I heard more than I saw.

Springfield leaned out his window and fired his .45 pistol, the shots pounding at a stately pace. I heard a burp that had to be Jack’s goosed Luger disgorging the contents of its clip in a heartbeat. The other cars in our party joined the fight with automatic and single fire. A shotgun boomed. I hoped everyone knew where his friends were.

Jack said, “What color’s that Packard?”

“If you’re thinking of buying it, you better wait till the owner stops shooting at us.” Kramm rattled the Thompson’s breech. It had jammed.

“Don’t Pete Rosenstein own a yellow-and-black Packard?”

“Black and tan.” Kramm paused. “Holy shit, no wonder I couldn’t do anything to it. That car’s armor-plated.”

“It must weigh three tons.”

“Pete always did think with his prick.”

“Next swing I make I want you to shoot at the ice under that Packard.”

“It won’t do nothing. It’s froze two feet thick.”

“Hang on. Don’t fire till I say.” Jack threw open the throttle.

I barely got upright when the Hudson swung into a sharp turn and I felt the wheels on my side leave the ice. They came back down with a bang and my head hit the roof. I snatched hold of the leather strap by my window. The lights of Monroe—or maybe they were the lights of Leamington; I had lost all bearings—went past in a streak. Our slipstream stiffened my face and numbed my ears.

We flashed past something metallic on my side. I hoped it was one of our cars, but I knew better. I heard shots, warped and curved like a train’s whistle as it rackets past, saw muzzles flare. We executed a sliding turn, changed gears, and made another pass. As the other car swelled inside the frame of the windshield I recognized it as the two-toned sedan with the backseat gunner. A medieval-looking louvered visor covered the radiator.