is hard out here and you have to be tough to stay alive, but I’m doing fine. Hope to be home for a visit soon.” On December 22, 1939, Father met him at the station. Two railroad hands lifted the box out of the freight car and set it on the platform. Tickie unfastened the letter held by three achromatic thumbtacks from the lid and gave it to Father.
L. Sledge, Mang.
Des Moines Depot
Des Moines, Iowa
Dear Sir:
We regret to inform you that on November 19, 1939, John Charles Sledge was found guilty of Section 31 of Chapter 18 of the Missouri Penal Code, Judge Garnold presiding. Executed at 5:10 A.M., December 21, 1939, Missouri State Penitentiary and pronounced dead by State Coronor Bill Mallory.
(Casket and shipping charges paid by the State of Missouri)
Elliot Winfield
Public Relations Dir.
St. Louis, Missouri.
Father and Tickie carried John Charles inside the depot and Father took him home in the pickup after work. He showed Andrea the letter and she read it. Nellie cried while she held me against her in the rocking chair. From her bed Mother looked at Luke and then he went into the living room. Walt and Will were not at home yet and Paul played his guitar until Father told him that if he wanted to play it to go out on the porch. Then Paul began to cry.
Many years later Nellie told me all she could remember about John Charles; the rest I have learned from the people who knew and remembered him from Des Moines and from St. Louis, back issues of the St. Louis Daily, and finally what I was led to believe must have happened — those magicless, empty (re)constructions of real people, real things, and real movement — thin lines that can never even hope to approximate the color they are to represent.
John Charles and Hermie Huber drove to Missouri in a blue Plymouth. It took John C. two months to steal enough gasoline for the trip, which he stored in five-gallon milk cans and put in the trunk. Hermie had fourteen dollars and John had six. Just into Missouri they broke down because of the fan blade cutting into the radiator. John C. purchased the parts from a junkyard and repaired the car. This made them nervous because they hadn’t counted on it and also because it was bad.
In St. Louis John Charles located Tommy Robinson, who oddly enough was there and helped him obtain a job at the quarry. This was a sign, a good omen. John C. and Hermie rented a trailer house in Eastown Court. Things had worked out. John C. sold the Plymouth to a “fish” living next to him. They bought a new car. They had done the things that they had planned in Des Moines to do — reached the goal they had imagined for themselves in the several months before and sat now, in their imagined blue trailer house, looking at each other and trying to be gentle. Perhaps that was it, limited expectations, that caused what later happened; but things are never that simple, and you must see for yourself.
John Charles worked for a little under three years as a dynamiter at the Rocky Edge Quarry. There was satisfaction in this. He learned quickly and an offhand manner soon characterized his work, which some of the men there called “dangerous.” But the beginning novelty of his work drained away and he found himself left with the remains of a noisy boredom — his job. The safety regulations were obscure and as he had long ago discovered, no one really even cared about those. No, he was too much to be confined in such a way. He had expected more than this. After thirty months he quit his job at the quarry and became a bartender at the D & D Bar.
The new position was better — more than he could have hoped it to be. Missouri was a dry state then and only beer could be purchased and consumed in a public building. John Charles was inspired. He worked hard. He was a good bartender and the customers enjoyed his manner and conversation. He bought half interest in the bar and renamed it Dirty John’s. Twice a month he drove over the state line into Iowa and bought thirty quarts of good bourbon and drove back to St. Louis. He never kept more than four or five bottles behind the counter and in the case of a raid would throw them out the window he kept open in the back, overlooking a steep hill which was used as a garbage dump by the people in the neighborhood.
Mr. Meadon, characteristically a regular, said that John Charles did a good business and was looked up to by the young boys in the area. And the only complaint he mentioned was with John C.’s “lack of discretion: There was nothing he liked better than to pull out a bottle of booze and set it on the counter in front of a new customer, and while his eyes bulged out of his head say, ‘What can I do for you?’ like it was an everyday thing to see booze for sale in public. It made the rest of us uneasy.”
John Charles carried a small nickel-plated revolver in a special pocket he had fashioned for himself from a description in one of his paperbacks about the old West — Two Gun Lust (1929, J. Fellows) — where Lance turns to face the sheriff after emptying both his Peacemakers into the sheriff’s deputies, who clutter the saloon floor below and around him, and silently takes a derringer from the pocket that kept it pressed against the small of his back, saying, “Sheriff, there ain’t no man alive can arrest me.” The sheriff answers, “You’re looking at him, Lance. Your days are through.” Lance fires the derringer from his hip and the sheriff falls dead across the doorway. “Sucker,” mumbles Lance to himself as he steps over the sheriff’s body and walks outside (page 123).1
John Charles was an exciting bartender because he was able to transpose these episodes into real events acted out by many of his friends in Texas and Wyoming. His voice was dynamic and during the climax of a story he would whip out his pistol (learned from many hours of practicing in front of the bedroom mirror at home, with the help of Hermie, who sat on the bed and commented on the dramatic impact of each draw), and from a semicrouching position deliver the end of the tale and replace the revolver in its secret pocket. In a special sling around his arm he kept what he called a “stiletto,” a knife he had paid over fifteen dollars for at a pawnshop owned by a man considering himself to be a shrewd judge of character, and when you pushed the button on its side a six-inch blade was ejected straight out the front end. He would take the knife out while no one was watching (he was never quite as good with his knife drawing) and shove it into the ribs of his victim, saying, “You’re dead, pal,” then pull the knife out in front of him and push the button, sending the blade zinging out into the open air.
For Hermie, St. Louis was not a particularly rough town. She grew tired of living in a trailer and so they moved into a large house closer to the tavern. John C. was sure it had been an old “hothouse.” Hermie also grew tired of having nothing more to order than some fifteen pieces of furniture and three meals a day, two or three of which she ate by herself; so instead of simply waiting for her child to be born she sectioned off the upstairs rooms and took in boarders.
John Charles was quick to notice the change in his house and was even pleased. He returned home earlier in the evenings and sat in his living room with his boarders and told stories of what had happened at Dirty John’s that night — the fights, the gambling, the raids, and the women. Many times he would follow an interested boarder to his room after the rest had gone to bed and stay up the entire night telling stories and drinking whiskey . . . or until Hermie came, demanding that he come to bed. But John Charles was more than this.
Alice Van Hooser had lived in St. Louis ten years and was a secretary for Eponic Business Forms, Inc. She was thirty-five, slightly heavy, with natural brown hair, a remarkable Indiana accent, and an image of herself that had become ever since high school increasingly fantastic. Together with a friend of hers of roughly the same potential, she decided to tempt the wheel of fortune and chance a beer at a bar they had heard about called Dirty John’s.
The bar was very dark when they entered and everyone had stopped talking. But as soon as they had shut the
