Soul of a Whore and Purvis (19 page)

Now—tell me how you murdered Pretty Boy.

If this is an actual conversation in my house,

If this is something other than a dark

Senility I've wandered into dying,

Do you dream I'd come here carrying my sins

To lay at your feet? In any case, I'm clean.

And Pretty Boy was stretched out wounded when

You told a cop to blow his brains away.

In essence.

To the words?

My freedom, where my human gist resides,

In that freedom God put out of reach

Even of his own fingertips,

There is where I choose and where I'm judged.

I am not a mystery to myself.

…But I seem to have gotten turned around in all

This darkness…Have I committed suicide?

Do you know who you are?

Before you ask: I'm Dillinger, I'm quite

Alive, this is a dream, it's not your dream,

It's my dream, you have blown your head off,

And you're following it into the afterworld.

Because I had a hand in your dying?

Do you offer to guide me down? Or do you stand as obstacle?

I'm very much alive.

I'm napping on my porch in Portland, Oregon.

It isn't what I do that counts; it's why.

It isn't what I've done; it's what I meant.

It isn't how I act, but only how

I'm thinking while I'm acting—Yes, I know,

It terrifies the heart to learn that good

And bad come down to infinitely

Subtle motions of the will, but I've

Used many years to think on this, I, I—

…WE JUST COLLARED DILLINGER!

This puts our division on the map!

We had him in the alley. I said,

“Drop it, Johnny,” I said, “we've got you covered.”

He turned, unfurled his coat, went for his gun.

Hollis opened fire, the others too.

I never even flicked my safety off.

He dropped like a puppet with his strings cut.

Dead before he hit the grease!

I have a headache!

Get out of my dream!

Last night I saw Director Hoover

Gloating over my death, dressed as a woman,

Perched like a black crow above my grave.

Through this labyrinth with half a head…

[
DILLINGER
fades from view.
PURVIS
alone in the void.
]

Lay the cinder of your life across

From mine on the balance, and you'll see which rises.

Witness the consolations of faith—

Where's God? In death it just goes on: still less

And less of anything and more of nothing.

We are the gods, immortal, helpless infants

Watching our minds paint themselves on blackness.

…Whom do I have the honor of addressing?

I feel we're lacking.

…It must have been something, fighting those evil gangsters.

Happy…no doubts…evil versus good…

To be able to see it all as black or white.

But isn't that a sort of gift

Of circumstance or something, circumstance,

When right and wrong come clear?

Beyond unbearably beyond for instance

I don't know. Sometimes, to jump on any

Means for stealing satisfaction from

This harlot earth, it just about feels sensible.

Or anyway it sort of sometimes I don't know.

I shouldn't talk. The dirty harlot world

Has never stressed my character or tried

My soul with anything more than office supplies.

We mix the two and things get murky, don't they?

For me to use, and so I lug some home,

Because I work at home, you see, sometimes,

So it's not who or where but
how
you use

A stapler or—you see how it gets tricky

Just by being stuff don't hardly count,

Just nickels from the coffee fund to plink

For Coca-Cola, which is practically

The
same
as coffee, only colder, till

A three-cent stamp grows complicated and

This feeling grabs you that you're
doing
something,

Something, yes, murky.—Come to murk:

My daddy used to give this lecture where

He'd talk of cleaning up our insides, pouring

The clarity of goodness over the bilge

And swill—well,
you
know, kind of like you'd lavish

Good water into a glass of dirty water?—

Until we're filling up and spilling over?—

And just keep pouring till we stand there clean?

And then God lifts us to his lips, I guess…

He doesn't lecture quite so much these days.

He is, barely!…How'd we get on
this
?

—At least the ice is busted anyways!

Soun' like time to crack this li'l ol' flask!

To land employment here at—

As far as I'm concerned, the job is yours.

I don't have
final
say, but pretty doggone

Near to that, and I say: “Hire the man

Who collared Dillinger.”

We might as well see every applicant,

But we won't see a better—no, you're welcome—

…Mr. Purvis, just this very morning

I poked around—my kid's got this old lunch box,

Old box full of odds and ends, his wealth:

A beat-up Hohner brand harmonica,

A half a pliers—you know, just one, just one

Plier
you know…rocks that must have winked

Beside the crick, but dried off they're just dull,

Doodads, thingums, hoojiemajiggers,
stuff
,

Which I was stirring my curious nosy finger

Around amongst, and just you look at this.

Must be—twenty-some-odd—twenty-what—

Was quite an admirer or something.

A Melvin Purvis Junior G-man badge.

America's prairie states in the 1930s—

Blood-blind murder-mongers with a thirst

For roadhouse hootch and hungering for cash,

Writing their names in America's headlines

With bullets from their tommy guns—against

These outlaw cutthroats ONE MAN STANDS TALL—

A G-man's G-man and a he-man's he-man,

Melvin Purvis, dedicated agent

Of Uncle Sam's new law-enforcement army,

The Federal Division of Investigation,

Later to become the FBI.”

They showed a rousing good short subject all

About you in a theater in London—

Or, anyways, about the FBI.

Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, also watched

Bavaria from a train after the war.

Snapshots of a land defeated passing…

Yep. I fished it from the cereal.

“Melvin Purvis Junior G-man Corps.”

I was quite an admirer of—you.

I didn't know who Melvin Purvis
was
,

Or what he
did
, I just assumed you were

The emperor of all the G-men—well,

I found out later on—the history,

You wouldn't even call it history,

I mean it seems so fresh and so alive,

And even to this day, John Dillinger

And Legs and Dutch and Bugsy, names

Like Pretty Boy, Machine Gun, Baby Face…

And I was a Junior G-man and believed

That Melvin Purvis was our king.

Not king. The king was Hoover. Was and is.

The king of the G-men, lord of the Junior G-men,

Generalissimo of all the girls

In the Special Junior G-man Girls' Division;

We all were the trembling subjects of J. Edgar,

Immortal Emperor of Is and Was.

Didn't I read somewhere you caught him, too?

I'll do everything I can. I'll go to bat

With all my might and see what we can do.

With all your might you'll see what you can do.

…ONE MAN STANDS TALL.

…You went to war?

The European theater—but never

Witnessed or experienced actual—

Participated in
hostilities
—

I have a marksman's badge. It's not a medal,

Just a, just a badge. For hitting targets.

In Illinois…Wisconsin…In Ohio

Pretty Boy Floyd lay down in a field and died,

Not like an outlaw monster but like any

Baffled youngster with a punctured belly,

Died as I imagine he might have died

In service of his country, that's to say

I saw the same expression in his eyes

I would have seen if we two had enlisted

And shipped for France together at eighteen

Like some of the boys I went to high school with,

And he'd got shot beside me, and I'd held

His fingers and talked happy while the mud

Engrossed him. No, I never saw a war,

But I saw something real.

At my behest he dispatched Charles A. Floyd

With a bullet to the head while Floyd lay helpless.

At my express command.

To
say
a thing like that! It's scandalous.

He stains your name!

He tells the truth.

Excuse the color of my speech! But say!

—But coming back to black and white: the notion

This
one inhabits goodness,
that
one's veins

Beat with Satan's blood, I mean—

Of course the certainty drains slowly away.

It's as if the battleground surfaces from the ocean

Of gore and the droplets drain from the faces and then

What you have are silly Midwestern boys

And arrogant men with badges on our breasts.

…My qualifications as a broadcaster—

Fact is I studied with an eye on law.

Went to the local college, just three years.

That college right there…