Authors: William Kennedy

Tags: #Fiction, #General

Legs (29 page)

It has long been my contention that Jack was not only
a political pawn through Streeter, but a pawn of the entire decade.
Politicians used him, and others like him, to carry off any vileness
that served their ends, beginning with the manipulation of
strikebreakers as the decade began and ending with the manipulation
of stockbrokers at the end of the crash, a lovely, full, capitalistic
circle. Thereafter the pols rejected Jack as unworthy, and tried to
destroy him.

But it was Jack and a handful of others—Madden,
Schultz, Capone, Luciano—who reversed the process, who became
manipulators of the pols, who left a legacy of money and guns that
would dominate the American city on through the l970's. Jack was too
interested in private goals to see the potential that 1931 offered to
the bright student of urban life. Yet he was unquestionably an
ancestral paradigm for modern urban political gangsters, upon whom
his pioneering and his example were obviously not lost.

I hesitate to develop all the analogies I see in
this, for I don't want to trivialize Jack's achievement by linking
him to lesser latter-day figures such as Richard Nixon, who left
significant history in his wake, but no legend; whose corruption,
overwhelmingly venal and invariably hypocritical, lacked the
admirably white core fantasy that can give evil a mythical dimension.
Only boobs and shitheads rooted for Nixon in his troubled time, but
heroes and poets followed Jack's tribulations with curiosity,
ambivalent benevolence, and a sense of mystery at the meaning of
their own response.

* * *

Fogarty, sitting at a bar and waiting for a female
form to brighten his life, and meanwhile telling a story about a
gang-bang, felt alive for the first time in a week, for the first
time since they hauled Jack in and he took off up the mountain. A
week in a cabin alone, only one day out for groceries and the paper,
is enough to grow hair on a wart, shrivel a gonad.

Fogarty found solitude unbearably full of evaporated
milk and tuna fish, beans and cheese, stale bread and bad coffee,
memories of forced bed-rest, stultifying boredom with one's own
thought. And then to run out of candles. The old shack on stilts was
down the mountain from Haines Falls, half a mile in an old dirt road,
then a quarter of a mile walk with the groceries. He walked down from
the cabin to his old car every morning and every night to make sure
it was still there and to start it. Then he walked alone in the woods
looking at the same trees, same squirrels, same chipmunks and
rabbits, same goddamn birds with all that useless song, and came back
and slept and ate and thought about women, and read the only book in
the cabin, The World Almanac. He related to the ads—no end to
life's jokes:

Last Year's Pay Looks Like Small Change to
These Men Today; Raised Their Pay 500% When They Discovered
Salesmanship . . . Have YOU Progressed During the Past Three Years? .
. . Ask Your Dealer for Crescent Guns, 12-16-20-410 Gauge . . . A
Challenge Made Me Popular! . . . This Man Wouldn't Stay Down . . . It
Pays to Read Law . . . Success—Will You Pay the Price? . . . Finest
of All Cast Bronze Sarcophagi.

Fogarty closed the book, took a walk in the dark. A
wild bird call scared him, and he retreated to the cabin to find only
half a candle left, not enough to get him through the night. It's
time, he said. It was ten o'clock. The Top o' the Mountain House
would have some action and he needed a drink, needed people, needed a
look at a woman, needed news. His old relic of a Studebaker started
all right. Would he ever again see his new Olds, sitting back in the
shed behind his house in Catskill? No chance to take it when he left
Jack's in such a hurry.

There were four men at the bar, two couples at one
table in the back room. He checked them all, knew nobody, but they
looked safe. The bartender, a kid named Reilly he'd talked to, but
never pressured, was okay. Fogarty ordered applejack on ice. He made
it, sold it, liked it. Jack hated it. He had three and was already
half an hour into a conversation with Reilly, feeling good again,
telling about the night he and eight guys were lined up in a yard on
101st Street for a girl named Maisie who was spread out under a bush,
taking on the line.

"I was about fourth and didn't even know who she
was. We just heard it was on and got in line. Then when I saw her, I
said to myself, 'Holy beazastards,' because I knew Maisie, and her
brother Rick is my pal and he's in line right behind me. So I said to
him, 'I just got a look, she's a dog, let's beat it,' and I grabbed
his arm and pulled, but he was ready, you know, and I couldn't talk
him out of it. He had to see her for himself. And when he saw her, he
pulled off the guy on her and whipped him, and then beat hell out of
Maisie. Next day everybody had trouble looking Rick in the eye. Guys
he knew were there all said they were behind him in the line and
didn't know who she was either. Maisie was back a couple of nights
later, and we all got her without Rick breaking it up. "

Fogarty paused nostalgically. "I got in line
twice."

The barman liked the story, bought Fogarty a drink,
and said, "You know, was a guy in here last night askin' about
your friend Diamond. Guy with a bandage on his eye."

"A bandage? You don't mean an eyepatch?"

"No, a bandage. Adhesive and gauze stuff."

"What'd he want?"

"Dunno. Asks has Jack Diamond been in much and
when was the last time."

"You know him?"

"Never seen him before."

"You remember a guy named Murray? Called him The
Goose."

"No."

"Nuts."

"You know this guy with the eye?"

"'
I don't know. Could be he's a friend of ours.
Your phone working?"

"End of the bar."

Fogarty felt the blood rise in his chest, felt
needed. Reilly had told him Jack was out on bail, so it was important
for him to know Murray was around, if he was. All week in the woods
Fogarty had cursed Jack, vowed to quit him, leave the country; that
if this thing straightened out, he'd find a new connection; that he
couldn't go on working with a man who wasn't playing with a full
deck. Northmp first, then Streeter. Crazy. But now that feeling was
gone, and he wanted to talk to Jack, warn him, protect his life.

"Don't touch that phone."

Fogarty turned to see old man Brady, the owner,
standing alongside him with his hand on a pistol in his belt.

"Get out of here," Brady said.

"I just want to make a call."

"Make it someplace else. You or none of your
bunch are welcome here. We're all through kissing your ass."

Brady's beer belly and soiled shirt pushed against
the pistol. The spiderweb veins in Brady's cheeks Fogarty would
remember when he was dying, for they would look like the crystalline
glaze that covered his own eyes in his last days. Brady with the
whiskey webs. Old lush. Throwing me out.

"If it wasn't for your father," Brady said,
"I'd shoot you now. He was a decent man. I don't know how in the
hell he ever got you."

Fogarty would remember that drops of sweat had run
off Brady's spiderwebs one day long ago, the day Fogarty stood in
front of him at the bar and told him how much of Jack's beer he would
handle a week. Told him. Two of Jack's transient gunmen stood behind
him to reinforce the message.

"You're lucky I don't call the troopers and turn
you in," old Brady said to him now, "but I wouldn't do that
to a son of your father's. Remember the favor that decent man did for
you from his grave, you dirty whelp. You dirty, dirty whelp. Go on,
get out of here."

He moved his fingers
around the butt of his pistol, and Fogarty went out into the night to
find Jack.

* * *

Fogarty stopped the car and loaded his pistol, Eddie
Diamond's .32. If he saw Murray, he would shoot first, other things
being equal. He wouldn't shoot him in public. Fogarty marveled at his
own aggression, but then he knew The Goose, knew Jack's story of how
The Goose stalked a man once who went to the same movie house every
week. The Goose sat in the lobby until the man arrived, then shoved a
gun in his face, and blew half the head off the wrong man. A week
later he was in the same lobby when the right man arrived, and he
blew off half the correct head. Jack liked to tell Goose stories, how
Goose once said of himself: "I'm mean as a mad hairy." What
would The Goose have done to Streeter? Old man'd be stretched now,
and the kid too. Was Fogarty the difference between life and death on
that night?

He wanted to buy a paper, find out what was
happening. He hadn't asked many questions at the bar, didn't want to
seem ignorant. But he knew from a conversation with Marcus after
Jack's arrest, plus something Reilly said, that the state was sitting
heavily on Jack. Old man Brady's behavior meant everybody'd be tough
now. Jack is down and so is Fogarty, so put on your kicking shoes,
folks.

Was it all over? No more money ("The boss needs
a loan") coming in from the hotels and boardinghouses? No more
still? Yes, there would be beer runs. There would always be beer
runs. And there were the stashes of booze, if nobody found them.
Reilly said four of Jack's men, all picked up at the cottage, were
booked on vagrancy, no visible income. But they couldn't say that
about Fogarty with his three bank accounts, fifteen thousand dollars
deposited in one during the past six months. But he couldn't go near
them until he knew his status.

Yet he knew what that had to be. Fugitive. They'd try
to hang him by the balls. Jack's closest associate. Jack's pal.
Jack's bodyguard. A laugh. But he did carry a loaded gun, finally,
just for Jack. Why did Joe Fogarty feel the need to protect Jack
Diamond? Because there was a bond.

Friendship. Brothers, in a way. Jack talked about
Eddie, gave him Eddie's pistol, and they swapped TB stories. Eddie
was a bleeder. Always had the streak in his sputum the last year of
his life, almost never out of bed or a wheelchair except when he came
to New York to help Jack during the Hotsy. No wonder Jack loved him.
Jack cried when he talked about Eddie: "He used to bleed so bad
they put ice on his chest, made him suck ice too, and the poor guy
couldn't move."

Fogarty knew. He'd seen all that, spent five and a
half years in sanitariums, twenty-eight months in bed for twenty-four
hours a day. Got up only when they made the bed, a bed bath twice a
week. Galloping TB is what Fogarty had, and if they hadn't used the
pneumo he'd have been dead long ago. Blew air into his lungs,
collapsed it, pushed up the poison. Hole in the bronchus, and when
the air went in, the pus came up and out his mouth. A basinful of
greenish-yellow pus. But after five months that didn't work anymore
and the pus stayed in, and he had to lie still for those years.

Death?

Joe Fogarty wasn't afraid of death anymore, only
bleeding. He died every day for years. What he was afraid of was
lying still and not dying.

"Remember your fibrosis," the nurses
would say.

"Don't raise your arms above your head. Don't
even move when you do pee-pee. "

The woodpeckers would come
around and tap his chest with stethoscopes and fingers, listen to his
percussion. "Cough and say ninety-nine." It must heal, you
know. Give yourself a chance to heal. Terrific advice. Bring your
tissue together. Heal. Oh, nice. Fight off the poison. Of course.
Then show a streak in the sputum and they don't let you brush your
teeth by yourself anymore. A long time ago, all that; and Fogarty
finally got well. And met Jack. And did he then make up for those
months in bed doing nothing? Ahhhhhh.

* * *

"So you think The Goose is back?" Jack
said.

"Who else'?"

"Maybe you're right. But maybe it was just a
one-eyed tourist. Tourists always asking about me. "

"You want to take that chance?"

"Not with The Goose. He'll find a way if he's up
here. I should stay away from the window."

"You been going out?"

"No, just sticking close here. But we'll go out
now."

"Take me with you," Kiki said. She was
alone on the couch, knees visible, no stockings, slippers on. But
sweeeet lover, did she look good to the Speeder.

"No," said Jack. "You stay home."

"I don't want to be here alone."

"I'll call the neighbor."

"That old cow, I don't want her here."

"She'll be company. We won't be long."

"Where you going?"

"Down the road, make some calls, then we'll be
back."

"You'll be out all night."

"Marion, you're a pain in the ass."

"I'm going back to Chicago."

"That show closed."

"You think that show is the only offer I got out
there?"