"A fella needs a friend," he said.
"That'd be lovely, picked up with a gun at this
point. How many trials do you think you can take?"
"Hey, Marcus, I'm tryin' to stay alive. You
understand that?"
"Let Hubert carry the weapons. That's what he's
for."
"Right. Soon as I hear The Goose is gone. Long
as he's in town there's liable to be shooting, and I might stay alive
if I can shoot back. You on tap for that?"
He picked up the Smith and Wesson and handed it to
me. "The Goose only wants me, but he'd shoot anything that moved
or breathed. I don't want to make it tough for you, old pal, but
that's where you're livin' right this minute. You're breathing."
He had a point; I loaded the weapon. In a pinch I
could say I pocketed the pistol when we all fled from the maniac.
Jack fell backward on Flossie's dusty cot and said to me, "Marcus,
I decided something. Right now there's nothing in the whole fucking
world I want to steal. "
I thought that was a great line and it was my turn to
laugh. Jack laughed, too, then said, "Why is that so funny?"
"Why? Well, here I am, full of beer and holding
a gun, joined up with a wild man to hide from a psychopath, watching
the stars, staring at a red-eyed rat, and listening to Jack Diamond,
a master thief of our day, telling me he's all through stealing.
Jesus Christ, this is an insane life, and I don't know the why of any
of it."
"Well, I don't either. I don't say I'm swearing
off, because I am what I am. But I say I don't want to steal anything
now. I don't want to make another run. I don't want to fight The
Goose. I suppose I will, sooner or later, him or some other bum they
send."
"Who is they?"
"Take your pick. They get in line to shoot at
me."
"But you won't shoot back anymore?"
"I don't know. Maybe, maybe not."
"The papers would eat this up. Jack Diamond's
vengeance ends in peanut butter factory."
"Anybody can get revenge. All it costs is a few
dollars. I don't want to touch it anymore, not personally."
"Are you just tired? Weary?"
"Maybe something like that."
"You don't believe in God, so it's not your
conscience."
"No."
"It's caution, but not just caution."
"No."
"It's self-preservation, but not just that
either."
"You could say that. "
"Now I've got it. You don't know what's going on
either."
"Right, pal."
"The mystery of Jack Diamond's new life, or how
he found peace among the peanut shells."
I was too tired, too hot, too drunk to sit up any
longer. I slid off the chair onto the floor, clutching the remnants
of my beer in my left hand, the snotty little Smith and Wesson in my
right, believing with an odd, probably impeachable faith, that if I
survived this night I would surely become rich somehow and that I
would tell the story of the red-eyed rat to my friends, my clients
and my grandchildren. The phrase "If I survived" gave me a
vicious whack across the back of the head. That was a temporary
terror, and it eventually left me. But after this night I knew I
would never again feel safe under any circumstances. Degeneration of
even a marginal sense of security. Kings would die in the bedchambers
of their castles. Assassination squads would reach the inner sanctum
of the Presidential palace. The lock on the bedroom window would not
withstand the crowbar. Such silly things. Of course, this goes on,
Marcus, of course. Mild paranoia is your problem.
Yes. That's it. It goes on and finally I know it. I
truly know it and feel it.
No. There is more to it than that. Jack knows more.
Flossie came running. Cops down in the street. Taking Goose away. You
can come down. Packy's buying. Milligan got through.
Six detectives, oh, yes. How lovely.
Jack leaped off the bed and was gone before I could
sit up.
"Are you comin' too, love? Or can't you move?"
the Floss asked me. In my alcoholic kerosene light she was the
Cleopatra of peanut-butterland. Her blond hair was the gold of an
Egyptian sarcophagus, her eyes the Kohinoor diamond times two.
"Don't go, Flossie," I said and stunned
her. I'd known the Floss now and again, sumptuous knowledge, but not
in a couple of years. It was past, my interest in professionals. I
had a secretary, Frances. But now Flossie's breasts rose and fell
beneath her little cotton transparency in a way that had been
inviting all of us all night long, and when she had half turned to
leave, when my words of invitation stopped her, I caught a vision of
her callipygian subtleties, like the ongoing night, never really
revealed to these eyes before. She came toward me as I lay flat on my
back, ever so little bounce in the splendid upheaval of her chest,
vision too of calf without blemish, without trace of muscular
impurity. None like Floss on this earth tonight, not for Marcus.
"Do you want something from me?" she said,
bending forward, improving the vision fiftyfold, breathing her sweet,
alcoholic whore's breath at me. I loosened my hand from the beer and
reached for her, touched her below the elbow, first flesh upon first
flesh of the evening. Client at last.
"Come up on the cot, love," she said, but I
shook my head and pulled the blanket to the floor. She doubled it as
the moon shone on her. The rat was watching us. I raised the pistol
and potshot it, thinking of it dying with a bullet through its head
and hanging there on the wall; then thinking of framing it or
stuffing it in that position, photographing the totality of the
creature in its limp deathperch and titling it "Night Comes to
the Peanut Butter Factory."
My shot missed and the rat disappeared back into the
wall.
"Jesus, Mary, and Holy Saint Joseph,"
Flossie said at the shot, which sounded like a cannon. "What are
you doing?"
"Potting the rat."
"Oh, honeyboy, you're so drunk. Give us that
pistol."
"Of course, Flossie"—and she put it on
the table out of my reach. The stars shone on her then as she
unbuttoned her blouse, unhooked her skirt, folded the clothes
carefully and lay them at the foot of the cot. She wore nothing
beneath them, the final glory. She helped prepare me as the men moved
in with the peanut butter machine and the women arrived to uncrate
the nuts.
"It's been a while, hasn't it?" the Floss
said to me.
"Only yesterday, Floss, only yesterday."
"Sometimes I feel that way, Marcus, but not
tonight."
"It's always yesterday, Floss. That's what's so
great."
"Tonight is something else. "
"What is it?"
"It's better. It's got some passion in it."
"Lovely passion."
"I don't get at it very often."
"None of us do."
The rat came back to his perch and watched us. The
sodden air rose up through the skylight and mated with the nighttime
breezes. The machine began to whirr and a gorgeous ribbon of golden
peanut butter flowed smoothly out of its jaws. Soon there were jars
of it, crates of jars, stacks of crates.
"Isn't it lovely?" said Flossie, flat on
her back.
"
It's the most ineffable of products," I
said. "The secret substance of life. If only the alchemists knew
of this. "
"Who were the alchemists?" she asked.
"Shhhh," I said.
And instead of talking, Flossie made me a peanut
butter sandwich, and we fortified ourselves against the terror.
JACK O' THE CLOCK
Jack walked up Second Street in Troy, dressed in his
double-breasted chinchilla coat and brown velour fedora, walked
between his attorney and his wife, a family man today, Kiki
discreetly tucked away in the love nest. Jack walked with his hands
in his pocket, the press swarming toward him as he was recognized.
How do you feel, Legs? Any statement, Mr. Gorman? Do you have faith
in your husband's innocence, Mrs. Diamond?
"You guys are responsible for all this,"
Jack said to the newsmen. "I wouldn't be in trouble if it wasn't
for you sonsabitches."
"Keep out the cuss words, boys," I said to
the press. I smiled my Irish inheritance, easing the boys.
"What'll you make your case on, counselor?"
Tipper Kelly said. "Same as the first trial? An alibi?"
"Our case is based wholly on self-defense,"
I said. Self-defense against a kidnapping charge. Jack laughed. His
loyal wife laughed. The newsmen laughed and made notes. A
bon
mot
to start the day.
"How do you feel about all this, Mrs. Diamond?"
"I'll always be at his side," said Alice.
"Don't bother her," said Jack.
"She's just a loyal wife to a man in trouble,"
I said.
"That's why she's here."
"That's right," said Alice. "I'm a
loyal wife. I'll always be loyal, even after they kill him."
"We mustn't anticipate events," I said.
The gray neo-classical Rensselaer County courthouse,
with its granite pillars, stood tall over Legs Diamond: legs of
Colossus, as this peanut man walked beneath them.
Birds roosted on the upper ledges. A stars and
stripes snapped in the breeze. As Legs brushed the wall with his
shoulder, dust fell from the pillars.
The Pathé News cameraman noted the action and the
consequence and asked Legs to come back and do it again. But, of
course, Legs could not commit precisely the same act a second time,
since every act enhanced or diminished him as well as the world
around him. Yet it was that precise moment, that push, that almost
imperceptible fall of dust, the cameraman wanted on film.
As the crowd moved into
the courtroom the cameraman exercising a bit of creative enterprise,
lifted Legs Diamond's coat and hat from the cloakroom. He dressed his
slightly built assistant cameraman in the garments and sent him up
the stairs to brush the wall for a repeat performance. The Pathé
News cameraman then filmed it all. Inspecting the floor for a
closeup, he discovered that the dust that fell was not dust at all,
but pigeon shit.
* * *
In the crowded hallway of the courthouse, during a
brief moment when no one was holding his arm, a youth Jack did not
know separated himself from the mob and whispered, "You're gonna
get it, Diamond, no matter what happens here. Wanna take it now?"
Jack looked at the kid—maybe nineteen, maybe twenty-two, with a
little fuzz on his lip and a bad haircut—and he laughed. The kid
eased himself back into the crowd, and Jack, pulled by me toward the
courtroom, lost sight of him.
"Kid was braggin'," Jack said, telling me
about the threat. "He looked like a hundred-dollar pay killer.
Too green to be in the big money." Jack shook his head in a way
I took to be an amused recognition of his own lowly condition. They
send punk kids after me.
But I also saw a spot of
white on his lower lip, a spot of bloodlessness. He bit at the spot,
again and again. The bite hardened his face, as if he were sucking
the blood out of the point of his own fear, so that when the threat
became tangible it would not bleed him into weakness. It struck me as
a strange form of courage, but not as I knew it for myself : no
intellectual girding, but rather a physiological act: a Jack Diamond
of another day, recollected not by the brain but by the body, his
back to a cave full of unexplored dangers of its own, staring out
beyond a puny fire, waiting for the unspecified enemy who tonight, or
tomorrow night, or the next, would throw a shadow across that
indefensible hearth.
* * *
By eight o'clock on the evening of the first day of
Jack's second Troy trial, both the prosecution and the defense
attorneys had exhausted their peremptory challenges and the final
juror was at last chosen. He was an auto mechanic who joined two
farmers, a printer, an engineer, a mason, a lumber dealer, an
electrical worker, two laborers, a merchant, and a plant foreman as
the peers, the twelve-headed judge, of Legs Diamond. I had sought to
relieve the maleness by accepting two female jurors, but Jack's
appeal to women had been too widely documented for the prosecution to
take such a risk, and both were challenged. The prosecution's chief
trial counsel was a man named Clarence Knought, who wore a gray,
hard-finish, three-button herringbone with vest, gray tie, watch
chain, and rimless glasses. His thin lips, receding hairline, gaunt
figure, and voice, which lacked modulation but gained relentless
moral rectitude through its monotony, provided the jury with the
living image of New York State integrity, American Puritanism, and
the Columbian quest for perfect justice. He spoke for twenty minutes,
outlining the case against Legs Diamond, whom he called Diamond. He
recapitulated the kidnapping of Streeter and Bartlett in his opening
summary, savoring the punching of Streeter, the death threats, the
burning and the hanging, details which landed on the jurors' faces
like flying cockroaches. The recapitulation set off an uncontrollable
twitching in one juror's cheek, dilated just about every eye,
wrinkled eyebrows, and dried up lips. Having filled the jurors with
terror, Knought congratulated them.