The Ballad of Jerry Curran
by Andrew L. Wilson

Andrew L. Wilson lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He holds a B.A. in English literature from the
University of Tennessee, and a Ph.D. in
English literature from Boston College. He has published
poems and fiction in a number of
print and Web magazines, including New Letters,
In Posse, The Paumanok Review, The Wag, Mudlark,
La Petite Zine, Still, LIBIDO and Exquisite
Corpse, which is now serializing his novel, CLEVER.
He edits Linnaean Street: A Web Literary Quarterly
www.linnaeanstreet.com
©Copyright 2001
Andrew L. Wilson

As soon as I get out of the pen, I go to see Jerry Curran. He sits
there across from me in the booth in the Midnight Oil Diner,
watching my face as I talk. Hugo, his bodyguard, is at the counter
forking steak into his mouth.
It’s late and the traffic lights have stopped blinking from red to
yellow to green to yellow again. They’re just shining yellow,
swinging a little in the dry wind that blows down across the desert
from the mountains.
He has slicked back dark hair and large eyebrows. His features
are almost delicate. I don’t know how to describe him. Maybe the
essence of the man, if it’s anywhere, is in his name. Jerry Curran.
I tell him bits of my life story. I tell him that it was Old Zeke that
told me to look him up. Jerry Curran’s a man who will respect you if
you say your piece and then shut up to let him get a word in
edgewise.
He tells me to come by the machine plant in the morning. Do I
have a place to stay in town yet? I shake my head. He takes out a
fat fountain pen and jots down an address on a napkin and slides it
over to me. The Bradford Arms.
Every week morning I rise to my alarm clock at six AM, wash up,
put on my coveralls and go into work. I learn how to operate a drill
press.
Most nights I stay in my room, smoking and reading comics.
This one Saturday afternoon I go out for a cup of coffee and a
sandwich at the corner drugstore. There’s a girl working the
counter, slim and smiling in an apron stained with mustard and
coffee. She shouts the orders back to a Greek in the kitchen.
“What’ll you have?” she asks.
I ask her name when she comes back with the cup and saucer.
“Angel,” she says.
“Angel. Like in Heaven?”
She laughs.
“That’s right.”
I start to come in every Saturday, and soon I realize all I’m
thinking about during the week is seeing my Angel. One Saturday I
don’t make it until late. She’s just standing there staring out the plate
glass window, a blank expression on her face. But when she sees
me, she comes alive.
I ask her if she’d like to go to the movies. She says yes, she’d like
that.
Later, I take her home and kiss her outside her rooming house,
and she clings to me.
One night there’s a knock on the door, and when I answer it the
old lady hands me a folded slip of paper. I think about tossing it
into the trash. But instead, I open it and see: Jerry Curran, 9PM.
Midnight Oil Diner. I get to the window in time to see Hugo drive
off.
We’re sitting in a back booth. Hugo is at the counter eating the
steak special. Jerry Curran is telling me how it is.
“It’s all about convincing people you can deliver on your
promises. If they think you can’t deliver, they’ll try to take you
down fast.”
I don’t say a word: a nod here, a frown there.
He takes something from under a folded newspaper, puts it under
the table, and nudges my knee with it.
“Take it. Put it in your belt,” he says. “For Christ’s sake.”
I unwrap it under the table, drop the napkin, and stick the gun
under my belt.
“Down in the warehouse district, there’s a meatpacking plant.
There’s an office in the plant, upstairs. The guy there works late.
He’s been getting in the way of our union drive. After you’ve done
the job, toss the pistolo down a storm drain.”
He gives me the run down of specifics - the man’s name, what
he looks like, a warehouse door that’s going to be left unlocked so
I can slip in and out.
I don’t show any emotion. Maybe I frown a little deeper than
usual.
“Are you still here?” Jerry Curran finally asks, his blue eyes flat.
I walk out of the Midnight Oil Diner onto Elm Street and turn
right across the parking lot. I cross the railroad tracks and soon I’m
in the warehouse district. There’re still some faint smudges of light
in the sky.
It’s the last daylight that warehouse manager is ever going to see.
I’m sweating as I climb a steep staircase, going slowly so as not
to make clink clink noises. At the top of the staircase I turn left. I
can see a light shining through the pebbled glass of a door at the
end of this hallway. The transom’s open. I hear a cough. Some
papers shuffling.
I put my hand on the textured grip of the pistol and slip it out
from under my belt. A .38 Police Special, untraceable to me or to
Jerry Curran.
I’ve already checked the load - I’m not stupid.
I push open the door slowly with the point of my shoe and see
him, hunched over a ledger in the weak light of a desk lamp. He
coughs, looks around and sees me. He drops the pencil and stands.
I breathe out; in. The pencil rolls slowly from the ledger. As it hits
the floor, I squeeze the trigger.
That one takes him in the chest, knocks him flat. I go over to
him. He’s lying still, lungs wheezing. His eyes are wide open -
blink blink, as if to say, I can’t believe it. He’s got a bullet lodged
close to his heart and he can’t speak to beg for his life.
(Listen. Listen. I’ve got five thousand in the bank. It’s all yours. I’ll
get on a bus and go somewhere where you’ll never hear from me
again -)
I put the barrel inches from his head and pull the trigger once
more. His breathing stops, and there’s just a sharp ringing in my
ears and smoke floating in the light from the green shaded desk
lamp. I slide the gun back under my belt - it’s hot - and walk out
of there without looking back.
I toss the .38 into a storm drain and hear it splash in the sewer
below. Then I walk over to Angel’s rooming house and stand across
the street watching the dim light on inside her window. Finally, it
goes off.
At the end of the week there’s a hundred dollar bill folded in my
pay envelope with an unsigned note in blue fountain pen ink: My
sincerest thanks and regards.
Saturday, Angel and I go out to the State fairgrounds to ride the
Ferris wheel and to see the Tattooed Lady and the Snake Man. I
keep thinking about Old Zeke, sitting on his cot with the dictionary
spread open on his lap: Webster’s College Edition. Zeke and his big 
words!
“By the time I get paroled to the street,” he used to say, “I’ll know
more words than Shakespeare did. You supercilious hyenas will be
chortling about something else that strikes you as anomalous. But
there ain’t nothing risible about being in possession of a copious
lexicon.”
Then I’m thinking about someone I haven’t thought of for more
years than I can stand to count. I’m thinking about my Uncle John,
who died in State custody.
• • •
I go downstairs one night, late, for a glass of milk and Uncle John
is sitting at the table. He’s taken off his fedora and set it on the
sideboard and he’s putting his fork into a big slice of Mom’s deepdish
apple pie. I stand there in my pajamas until he sees me and
motions me over with a jerk of his thumb. I go over and pull out a
chair and sit across from Uncle John. I watch him eating.
“It’s damn good,” he says. “Want me to cut you a sliver?”
I nod, wide eyed. He goes into the kitchen and I hear him cutting
then lifting pie out of the pan onto a plate. Then I hear him open the
refrigerator and take out a milk bottle. It clinks on the rim of a glass.
He comes back in carrying the plate, a fork and a glass of milk and
sets them in front of me. I stare at it.
“Whets matter?” Uncle John asks. “Cat got your tongue? Either talk
or eat. I don’t much care which you do as long as it’s one or the
other.”
I pick up the fork and bend over the plate and begin shoving pie
into my mouth and washing it down with gulps of milk. He chuckles.
• • •
One day a man in horn rimmed glasses, with halitosis and strands
of lank hair plastered to his skull, comes over to me in the
lunchroom and says he wants to talk. When I ask him about what,
he looks over at another man sitting nearby - a long, somber face.
They both smile.
The line whistle blows that instant.
He puts his mouth close to my ear and gives me an address for
that night, late. He tells me to come around to the back.
“Do I look like I want trouble?” I ask.
“Suit yourself,” he says.
There’s a card table set up under a bare bulb in a room full of
junk. Since neither of the two men offers me a name, I decide to
think of them as Glasses and Lisp. 
Glasses stands by the door with his arms folded. Lisp sits and
spreads out the drawings he’s made. He points out the location of
the safe and describes the payroll.
“Easy,” Lisp says. “It’s an easy job. In and out. There’s a security
man, but he’s old and he doesn’t pay much attention. We need you
to stand guard for us while we work. So if anyone comes along, we
can get out fast. That’s the whole plan. We go in knowing exactly
what we want, we take it. We leave.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
I shrug and say I guess I’m in.
“You won’t regret this,” says Glasses.
“Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. I just hope what we’re doing
doesn’t get back to Jerry Curran, because if it does he’ll be wanting
a big slice of the take, and he’s not a man you want to refuse
anything to.”
They look at each other, smile.
Lisp says, “Jerry Curran’ll never know, because nobody outside
this room knows or is going to know about this job. So relax. “
The security man is dozing in the office, a newspaper spread
open on his lap. This is too easy.
Once we’re in, I take up lookout on the shop floor and Glasses
and Lisp go to work on the safe, Glasses handing Lisp the tools
from a canvas bag and holding the flashlight. Lisp makes some
noise with the drill. I hear a heavy, resonating clang as the iron
door falls. They come striding out with the canvas bag and a flat
leather case.
As we step out into the parking lot, a flashlight shines on us and
there’s the sound of a hammer sliding back. Glasses heaves the
canvas bag full of tools at the flashlight beam - the flashlight falls,
the glass in it breaking. Glasses and Lisp take off at a sprint. I start
after them, but get whacked in the shin by something. I drop to my
hands and knees, and the gun barrel hits me again on the shoulder
and I roll over and grab for it with both hands. Finally, I get a knee
up between the guard’s legs. That makes him go limp. I smack him
on the skull with the barrel of his weapon a few times before
spinning it away into the darkness.
Outside the Bradford Arms, two plainclothesmen step out from
behind a parked car. They shine a light on me and order me to go
over and stand against the wall. They pat me down, then turn me to
face them. The small one holds up a clanking canvas bag.
“Forget something?”
“I never saw that before in my life.”
“Are you sure? Maybe you dropped it.” 
“I told you. I never saw it before.”
The big one hits me in the side of the head with the butt of his
gun. I slide down the wall. I come to as they put the handcuffs on,
racheting them so tight they draw blood. They turn me over with a
kick and the big one unzips his fly and yanks out his cock and
urinates all over me. I shut my eyes and mouth when the splattering
stream reaches my face.
“We could just kill you and no one would ever know the
difference,” the small one with the slicked back hair says when the
big cop’s stream has slowed to a drizzle.
I sweat it out in the holding cell thinking about Jerry Curran. I
don’t care what the cops do to me. It’s him I’m worried about. And
soon it’s like I’m arguing with the man himself, sitting across from
him in the Midnight Oil Diner. He’s smiling at my talk. He raises his
palm to stop me in the middle of a sentence.
“Stop,” he says. “Stop lying to me. I’m disappointed. Yes. I’m
disappointed. See here, Dan. It’s not that you pulled the job. I can
excuse that. I can even excuse the fact that you screwed it up
royally, because I know you’re a sad excuse for a thief. No. The
thing that sadly disappoints me is that you tried to cut me out on a
percentage of the take. This in my town - in a place where I’m
known and, so far, respected one hundred percent. So how do you
think I’d look if I ignored a slight like that?”
“Please, Jerry,” I say.
He stands up. Hugo brings his overcoat. He throws a few bills on
the table.
“Please,” I beg.
“No, Dan. The time for Please is over. Do you know what time it
is now? I’ll tell you. Now’s the time for I’m Sorry.”
Angel confirms that I was with her on the night of the
safecracking job. They don’t believe her, but they don’t have any
evidence that says otherwise. Every hour or so the detectives come
into the bare cell and go to work on me.
Jack Hoda, my court appointed lawyer, recoils when he sees my
face.
“Christ. You look awful. I’ve never seen anything like this in all
my professional career. I’m going to help you file a complaint. We’ll
get an injunction against the police ordering them to cease and
desist from such behavior in the future.”
“Forget it,” I tell him, my voice still sounding funny. “Just give me
cigarette, will ya?”
As soon as I get out, I check at the drugstore, but the Greek 
hasn’t seen Angel in a few days. The landlady hasn’t seen her
around, either.
My stomach turning to ice, I ask her if she can please open up
Angel’s door just to check. She’s about to say no, but she looks at
my face and says, “OK.”
She comes down the stairs slowly, keeping her balance by
pressing her hands to the wall on either side. I dash past her up the
stairs through the open door.
She’s in the bathtub. There’s an empty bottle of horse
tranquilizers on the floor. Her wrists are cut open. When the police
come, they make me leave while they take photographs.
Verdict: suicide.
Sure. Why not?
Still, I can’t stop thinking about Mr. Jerry Curran and his friend
Hugo and that little talk we never had in the Midnight Oil Diner
while I was shivering naked on the concrete floor of my holding
cell waiting for the next round of rubber hose therapy.
I look at the papers and see that Glasses and Lisp have been
found at the city dump, both shot “execution style.” It’s a phrase the
reporters all love - they salivate at the chance of working it into an
article.
In my room at the Bradford Arms, I sag on an edge of my
stripped and slashed open mattress, staring at the wall.
The bag of savings I’d hidden under the light fixture is gone.
There’s an unsigned note on my pillow in blue fountain pen ink:
My condolences.
It’s not hard getting the gun - two stops.
Jerry Curran’s got a penthouse with a view of the river. I take a
cab over there. I’m in my good suit and an overcoat with the collar
turned up. My shoes are polished to a shine. I’ve just been
downtown for a haircut and I told the barber to use a lot of
pomade, to really slick it down. There’s enough of a resemblance
between me and Jerry Curran that, dressed in a nice suit and
sporting a slick haircut, I might be able to confuse some people.
Like the doorman who buzzes me into the lobby.
Hugo answers the knock. He’s taken aback long enough by my
appearance for me to shoot him between the eyes - yes, Mr.
Reporter, “execution style”. His brains spill out onto the tiles of the
foyer.
I step over him. To the left, a large rubber plant. To the right, a
painting that looks like something you smear on a sidewalk trying
to get off your shoe. Somewhere in the big bright penthouse 
apartment is Jerry Curran. I’m not admiring his view of the polluted
river or the fabulous sunset as I step into what I’m sure Jerry Curran
calls his living area. I’m not interested in any more of life’s little
ironies.
When I catch a flash of movement in my peripheral vision, I drop
behind the leather couch. Boom. Boom. Boom. It’s the 12-gauge
shotgun he uses to hunt grouse up at his wilderness cabin. The
cotton wad stuffing of the couch flutters around the room like snow
in one of those glass globes.
I lie still, laughing a little, as he blows his Italian sofa all to hell.
As soon as he clicks on an empty chamber, I’m up. I walk toward
him with the gun extended. He drops the shotgun and backs away
with his arms held wide, smiling.
“Come on, Dan. We can still get along. You can have Hugo’s job.
He was getting too old for this work anyhow. You were right to put
him down like the rabid dog he’d turned into after all these years in
my employ. He was out of control on that business with your girl. I
didn’t tell him to do it. In fact, I’m glad he got his.”
I slide the hammer back with my thumb.
He jumps.
“Stop it,” I say. “Stop lying to me.”
“Please,” he says, holding both hands spread in front of his
sweating face.
“No, Jerry,” I say. “The time for Please is over. Do you want to
know what time it is now? I’ll tell you. Now’s the time for I’m
Sorry.”