"Oh, shit, Jack. Shit, shit, shit."
"That's better. Have a sherry."
Fogarty finished his double rye and Jack swigged the
last of his coffee royal, and they went out the back door. Jack
stopped, said, "We'll take your car. Nobody'd look for me in
that jalop."
"Nobody looking for me at all?"
"Not yet, but that don't mean they won't be out
with a posse tomorrow. They'll get to you, all right, but tonight
you're a free citizen. Take it from me, and Marcus. He's down at the
Saulpaugh while this stuff is going on. We talked before you got
here. Joe, I'm glad you came down."
Jack clapped him on the shoulder. The old jalop was
wheezing along. Fogarty smiled, remembered his plan to break with
Jack. What a crazy idea.
Jack had taken a rifle from the hall closet, loaded
it with dum-dums, and thrown it on the back seat. He wouldn't carry a
pistol with all the heat on. He'd also put on his gray topcoat,
fedora, and maroon tie with a black pearl tie tack. Fogarty, you bum,
you wore a linty black sweater and those baggy slacks you slept in
all week.
"It's like a dog race," Jack said.
"What is?" Fogarty asked, thinking
immediately of himself as a dog.
"This thing. I'm the rabbit. And who'll get it
first?"
"Nobody gets those rabbits. The dogs always come
up empty."
"The feds are coming into it. The state, all the
goddamn cops in the East, Biondo and his guinea friends, Charlie
Lucky's pals, and now maybe Murray out there, driving around, trying
to make a plan. The good thing about Murray is he can never figure
out how to get near anybody. Once he gets near you, so long. But
unless you figured it out for him, he could think all month without
getting the idea to maybe ring the doorbell."
"Maybe you ought to get away from here."
"They're all keeping track of me. Let's see what
news we come up with. Hey, you're heating up."
The temperature gauge was near two twenty when they
pulled into the parking lot at Jimmy Wynne's Aratoga Inn on the
Acra-Catskill Road. Fogarty unscrewed the radiator cap and let it
breathe and blow, and then they went inside, Fogarty with his two
pistols Jack didn't even know he had. Fogarty was ready for Murray,
who was absent from the gathering of twelve at the bar. It was quiet,
the musicians on a break. Fogarty asked Dick Fegan, the bartender,
bald at twenty-five, if he'd seen Murray. Fegan said he hadn't seen
Murray in months, and Jack went for the telephone.
Fogarty dumped four quarts of water into the car
radiator and went back in to find Jack off the phone with a Vichy
water in front of him, talking about heavyweights to the clarinet
player.
Heavyweights. "I lost seven grand on Loughran,"
Jack was saying. "I thought he was the best, gave seven to five,
and he didn't last three rounds. Sharkey murdered him. He says, 'Let
me sit down, I don't know where I am,' and then he tried to walk
through the ropes. Last time I ever bet on anybody from
Philadelphia." Jack will talk to anybody about anything,
anytime. Why shouldn't people like him?
"Seven grand," said the clarinet player.
"Yeah, I was crazy."
It seemed like a slip, Jack mentioning money. He
never got specific about that, so why now? Must be nervous. Jack went
back to the phone and made another call.
"He said he lost seven grand on one tight,"
the clarinetist said to Fogarty.
"Probably did. He always spent."
"But no more, eh?"
It sounded to Fogarty like a line at a wake. That man
in the coffin is dead. Fogarty didn't like the feeling he got from
shifting from that thought to a thought about Murray walking in the
door. But Murray would have to come through the inn's glassed-in
porch. Plenty of time to see him. What made Fogarty think he'd pick
the one spot in the mountains where Jack happened to be at this odd
moment? Did he think maybe he followed the car? Or that he'd been
waiting near here for Jack to show up?
"He's probably still got a few dollars in his
pocket," Fogarty said to the clarinetist.
"I wouldn't doubt that."
"You sounded like you did. "
"No, not at all."
"You sounded like you were saying he's a
has-been."
"You got me wrong. I didn't mean that at all.
Listen, that's not what I meant. Dick, give us a drink here. I was
just asking a question. Hell, Jesus, it was just a goddamn silly
question."
"I get you now," Fogarty said.
Wasn't it funny how fast Fogarty could turn
somebody's head around? Power in the word. In any word from Fogarty.
In the way people looked at him. But it was changing. Maybe you
wouldn't think so, sitting here at the Aratoga, and Jack being
respected and Fogarty being respected, with maybe that hint of new
tension in the air. But it definitely was changing. Little signs:
Jack's living room being different, messy, papers on the floor, the
chairs not where they used to be. Authority slipping away from
Fogarty, authority that he knew Jack well, could talk all about him,
talk for him. Dirty dishes on the dining room table. Picture of Eddie
on the coffee table never there before, which meant something Fogarty
didn't understand. The parties at Jack's; they were over too, at
least for now. Even priests used to come. Neighbors, sometimes a cop
or a judge from the city, actors and musicians and so many beautiful
women. Women liked Jack and the feeling rubbed off to the benefit of
Jack's friends. Jack the pivot man at every party. Funny son of a
bitch when he gets a few drinks in. Fogarty couldn't remember one
funny joke Jack ever told, but all his stories were funny. Just the
way he used his voice. Yes. The story about Murray shooting the wrong
man. Split your gut listening to Jack tell it. A good singing voice,
too. Second tenor. Loves barbershop. "My Mother's Rosary."
A great swipe in the middle of that. One of Jack's favorites.
"Well, that's some kind of news," Jack
said, sitting back down beside Fogarty. "Somebody saw him at the
Five O'Clock Club last night."
"Last night? He must've gone back down."
"If he was ever up here."
"Don't you think he must've been?"
"After this, maybe not. He's not the only
one-eyed bum in the state. The point is, where is he now? Last night
is a long time ago. He could be here in a few hours. They're still
checking him out. Give me a small whiskey, Dick."
And he went back to the phone. Everybody was watching
him now. Silence at the bar. Whispers. The clarinetist moved away and
stayed away. Dick Fegan set up Jack's drink and moved away. They're
watching you, too, Joe. Jack's closest associate. Fogarty drank alone
while Jack talked on the phone. The whiskey eased his tension, but
didn't erase it. Jack came back and sipped his whiskey, all eyes on
him again. When he looked up, they looked away. They always watched
him, but never with such grim faces. More finality. Man dying alone
in an alley. There's Jack Diamond over there, that vanishing species.
That pilot fish with him is another endangered item.
"I can't sit still," Jack said, and he
stood up behind the barstool. "I been like this for two days. "
"Let's go someplace else. "
"They're going to call me. Then we'll move."
The musicians started up, a decent sound. "Muskrat
Ramble." Sounds of life. Memories of dancing. Like old times.
Memories of holding women. Got to get back to that. Three-quarters of
an hour passed, with Jack moving back and forth between the bar and
the phone, then pacing up and down, plenty nervous. If Jack is that
nervous, it's worse than Fogarty thought. Pacing. Jack's all alone
and he knows it. And you know what that means, Joe? You know who else
is alone if Jack is?
On his deathbed, when
fibrosis was again relevant to him, Fogarty would recall how aware he
was at this moment, not only of being alone, but of being sick again,
of being physically weak with that peculiar early weakness in the
chest that he recognized so quickly, so intimately. He would recall
that he saw Dick Fegan pick up a lemon to squeeze it for a whiskey
sour a customer had ordered. The customer was wearing a sport coat
with checks so large Fogarty thought of a horse blanket. He would
remember he saw these things, also saw Jack move out of his sight,
out onto the porch just as the first blast smashed the window.
* * *
Fogarty ordered a hot dog and a chocolate milk and
watched a fly that had either survived the winter or was getting an
early start on the summer. The fiy was inspecting the open hot dog
roll.
"Get that goddamn fly off my bun," Fogarty
told the Greek.
The Greek was sweaty and hairy. He worked hard. He
worked alone in the all-night EAT. Fogarty has a loaded pistol in his
pocket, which is something you don't know about Fogarty, Greek. The
fly could be a cluster fly. Crazy. Flies into things. Fast, but
drunk. Few people realize where the cluster fly comes from. He comes
from a goddamn worm. He is an earthworm. A worm that turns into a
fly. This is the sort of information you do not come by easily. Not
unless you lie on your back for a long, long time and read the only
goddamn book or magazine or newspaper in the room. And when you've
read it all and there's nobody to talk to you, you read it again and
find plenty of things you missed the first time around. All about
worms and flies. There is no end to the details of life you can
discover when you are flat on your back for a long, long time.
"That goddamn fly is on my bun."
There is a certain amount of sadness in an earthworm
turning into a fly. But then it is one hell of a lot better than
staying an earthworm or a maggot.
"You gonna let that goddamn fly eat my bun, or
do I have to kill the goddamn thing myself ?"
The Greek looked at Fogarty for the first time. What
he saw made him turn away and find the flyswatter. Naturally the
goddamn fiy was nowhere to be found.
Fogarty had parked his 1927 Studebaker in front of
the EAT, which was situated on Route 9-W maybe eight or nine miles
south of Kingston at a crossroads. The name of the EAT was EAT, and
the Greek was apparently the one-man Greek EAT owner who was now
looking for the fiy while Fogarty's hot dog was being calcified.
"That's enough on the dog," Fogarty said to
the Greek, who was at the other end of the counter and did not see
the fly return to the bun. Fogarty saw and he heard his pistol go off
at about the same moment the bullet flecked away slivers from the
EAT'S wooden cutting board. There was a second and then a third and a
fourth report from the pistol. The fourth shot pierced the hot dog
roll. None of the shots touched the fly. The Greek fled to a back
room after the first shot.
Fogarty rejected the entire idea of a hot dog and
left the EAT. He climbed into his Studebaker and nosed onto 9-W,
destination Yonkers, his sister Peg's, which he knew was a bad idea,
but he'd call first and get Peg's advice on where else he might stay.
He could stay nowhere in the Catskills. That world exploded with the
ten shotgun blasts from a pair of Browning automatic repeaters, fired
at Jack as he paced in and out of the porch of the Aratoga. A pair of
shooters fired from the parking lot, then stopped and drove away.
Somebody snapped out the lights inside at the sound of those shots
and everybody hit the floor. Fogarty heard: "Speed, help me,"
and he crawled out to the porch to see Jack on his stomach, blood
bubbling out of holes in his back.
"Bum shooting," Jack said. "Better
luck next time."
But he was flat amid the millions of bits of glass,
and hurting, and Fogarty got on the phone and called Padalino, the
undertaker, and told him to send over his hearse because he was not
calling the cops in yet.
When it was obvious the shooting was over, the
musicians and customers came out to look at Jack on the floor of the
porch and Dick Fegan went for the phone. But Fogarty said, "No
cops until we get out," and everyone waited for Padalino.
"Find Alice, keep an eye on her," Jack said
to Fogarty. "Sure, Jack. Sure I will."
"They're putting me in the meat wagon,"
Jack said when Fogarty and Fegan lifted him gently, carefully into
the hearse. By then Fogarty had cut Jack's shirt away and tied up the
wounds with clean bar towels. He kept bleeding, but not so much.
"I'll follow you," Fogarty told Padalino,
and when they were near Coxsackie, he parked his Studebaker at a
closed gas station and got into the hearse alongside Jack. He fed
Jack sips of the whiskey he had the presence of mind to take from the
bar, tippled two himself, but only two, for he needed to be alert. He
kept watching out the window of the rear door. He thought the hearse
was being followed, but then it wasn't. Then it was again and then,
outside Selkirk, it wasn't anymore. He sat by the rear door of the
hearse with a gun in each hand while Jack bled and bled. I know
nothing about shooting left-handed, Fogarty thought. But he held both
guns, Jack's and Eddie's, a pair. Come on now, you bastards.
"Hurts, Speed. Really hurts. I can't tell where
I'm hit."
They'd hit him with four half-ounce pellets. They'd
fired ten double-ought shells with nine pellets to a shell. Somebody
counted eighty some holes in the windows, the siding, and the inside
porch walls. Ninety pellets out of two shotguns, and they only hit
him with four, part of one shell. It really was bum shooting, Jack.
You ought to be dead, and then some.