Legs (4 page)

"We just came from church, too," Alice
said.

Oh? But I didn't say oh. I just repeated the story
about my speech on the scourge of gangsterism. Jack listened with
straight face, and I thought, Oh Christ, another humor
failure.

"I know what you mean," he said. "Some
of my best friends have been taken by that scourge." Then he
smiled, a very small smile, a smile you might call wry, or knowing,
or ironic, or possibly ominous, which is how I looked at it and was
why I laughed my courtroom laugh. That laugh, as they used to say in
the Albany papers, is booming and infectious, and it had the effect
of making Jack's line seem like the joke of the year. Jack responded
by standing up and jiggling, a moving glob of electricity, a live
wire snaking its way around the porch. I knew then that this man was
alive in a way I was not. I saw the vital principle of his elbow, the
cut of his smile, the twist of his pronged fingers. Whatever you
looked at was in odd motion. He hit you, slapped you with his palm,
punched you with a light fist, clapped you on the shoulder, ridding
himself of electricity to avoid exploding. He was conveying it to
you, generating himself into yourself whether you wanted to receive
him or not. You felt something had descended upon him, tongues of
fire maybe or his phlogiston itself, burning its way into your own
spirit.

I liked it.

It was an improvement on pinochle.

I mounted the steps and shook hands with Biondo and
told him how overjoyed I was to see him again. He gave me a nod and
an individualized twitch of each nostril, which I considered high
graciousness. I would describe Jimmy as a giant maggot, an abominable
toad with twelve-ounce eyelids and an emancipated nose that had
nothing to do with the rest of his face. He was a globular figure of
uncertain substance. Maybe all hotdog meat, goat's ears and pig's
noses inside that salmony, shantung sportshirt. You said killer as
soon as you looked at him, but he was not a killer. He was more
complex than that.

"How's your buddy Joe Vignola?" he asked
me. And he grunted a laugh, which went like this:"Hug, hug,hug."

"Joe is recovering nicely," I said, an
exaggeration. Joe was in awful shape. But I should give Jimmy Biondo
satisfaction?

"Dumb," said Jimmy. "Dumb, dumb,
dumb."

"He never hurt anybody," I said.

"Dumb," said Jimmy, shaking his head,
drawing out the sound like a short siren. "Dumb waiter," he
said, and he laughed like a sneeze.

"I felt so sorry for his family," Alice
said.

"Feel sorry for your own family," Jack
said. "The son of a bitch was a stool pigeon."

"I'll feel sorry for anybody I feel like feeling
sorry for," Alice said in modified spitfire manner, a trait I
somehow didn't expect from the wife of Jack Diamond. Did I think he'd
marry a placid cow? No. I thought he'd dominate any woman he chose to
live with. We know from the movies, don't we, that one well-placed
grapefruit in the kisser and the women learn who's boss? Public
Enemy, the Cagney movie with that famed grapefruit scene, was touted
as the real story of Jack Diamond when it played Albany. The
advertising linked it unmistakably to his current escapades: "You
read about him on yesterday's front pages in this newspaper. Now see
the story behind the headlines," etc. But like everything else
that ever had anything to do with Jack in the movies, it never had
anything to do with Jack.

Well, we got past Joe Vignola as a topic, and then
after a few anxious grunts from Jimmy ("Guh, guh, guh,"),
he got up and announced his departure. Fogarty would take him to
Hudson, across the river, and he'd take a train to Manhattan. His and
Jack's presence on this front porch was not explained to me, but I
didn't pry. I didn't know until much later that they were partners of
a kind. His departure improved the conversation, and Alice said she
and Jack had been to mass over at Sacred Heart in Cairo where she,
and once in a while he, went on Sunday, and that Jack had given money
for the new church organ and that she brought up Texas Guinan one
summer to raise money at a church lawn party and Jack was going to
bring Al Jolson up and so on. Revelatory.

An old colored man came to the foot of the front
steps and said to Jack, "The tahger's ready, Mist' Jack."
Tahger? Tiger? Could he be keeping a tiger'? Was that what he wanted
to show me'?

"Okay, Jess," Jack said. "And will you
bring out two quarts of rye and two quarts of champagne and leave 'em
here on the porch?"

Jesse nodded and moved off slowly, a man who looked
far older than his years, actually a stoop-backed fifty, a Georgia
cotton chopper most of his days and then a stable hand. Jack met him
in '29 through a Georgia horse breeder who had brought him to
Churchill Downs as a stable boy. Jack heard Jesse had made moonshine
back home and hired him on the spot at a hundred a week, a pay raise
of about eight hundred percent, to come north with his two teen-aged
sons and no wife and be plumber for an applejack still Jack and
Biondo owned jointly, and which, since that time, had functioned
night and day in a desolated patch of woods a quarter of a mile from
the patch of porch on which I was rocking.

So the old man went for
the rye and champagne, and I mentally alerted my whistle to coming
attractions. Then Alice looked at Jack and Jack looked at me and I
looked at both of them, wondering what all the silent looking was
for. And then Jack asked me a question: "Ever fire a machine
gun. Marcus?" ·

* * *

We walked to the garage-cooler, which is what it
turned out to be, as luxuriously appointed a tumbledown barn as you'd
be likely to find anywhere in America, with a beer refrigeration
unit; a storage room for wine and champagne, paneled in knotty pine;
a large area where three trucks could comfortably park; and a total
absence of hay, hornets, barnsmell, cowflop, or chickenshit.

"No." I had told Jack, in answer to his
question, "I am a machine-gun virgin."

"Time you shot the wad," Jack said, and he
went dancing down the stairs and around the corner toward the barn,
obviously leading both me and Alice, before we were out of our
chairs.

"He's a nut on machine guns," Alice said.
"He's been waiting till you got here to try it out. You don't
have to do it, you know, just because he suggests it."

I nodded my head yes, shook it no, shrugged, and, I
suppose, looked generally baffled and stupid. Alice and I walked
across the side lawn to the barn where Jack had already pried up a
floorboard and was lifting out a Thompson submachine gun, plus half a
dozen boxes of bullets.

"Brand-new yesterday from Philadelphia," he
said. "I been anxious to test it." He dislodged the
magazine, loaded it, replaced it with what, despite my amateurism in
the matter, I would call know-how. "I heard about a guy could
change one of these drums in four seconds," he said. "That's
handy in a tight spot."

He stood up and pointed it at the far end of the barn
where a target was tacked on a windowless wall. The target was a
crudely drawn face with the name Dutch Schultz lettered beneath.

"I had a couple of hundred of these printed up a
few years ago,” he said, "when Schultz and me weren't getting
along. He looks just like that, the greedy prick. I drew it myself."

"You get along all right now with him?"

"Sure. We're pals again," Jack said and he
let go with a long blast that nicked the Schultz forehead in two or
three places.

"A little off," Jack observed, "but
he'd have noticed."

"Let me try," Alice said. She took the gun
from Jack, who parted with it reluctantly, then fired a long burst
which roamed the wall without touching the target. With a second
burst she hit the paper's edge, but not Schultz.

"I'm better with a rifle."

"You're better with a frying pan," Jack
said. '"Let Marcus try it."

"It's really out of my line," I said.

"Go on," Jack said. "You may never get
another chance, unless you come to work for me."

"I've got nothing against Mr. Schultz."

"He wouldn't mind. Lotsa people shoot at him."

Jack put the gun in my hands, and I held it like a
watermelon. Ridiculous. I put my right hand on the pistol grip,
grabbed the other handgrip with the left, and raised the stock into
my armpit. Absurd. Uncomfortable.

"Up a little," Jack said. "Against the
shoulder."

I touched the trigger, raised the gun. Why'? It was
wobbly, cold. I pointed it at Schultz. Sunday morning. Body of Christ
still undigested in some internal region, memory of prayer and holy
bacon grease on my tongue. I touched the trigger seriously, pulled
the gun tighter to my shoulder. Old feeling. Comfortable with a
weapon against the pectoral. Like Army days, days in the woods as a
kid. Put it down, fool.

'"
For chrissake, Marcus, give it a blast,"
Jack said.

Really childish not to. Raising the flag of morality.
Powerful Irish Catholic magic at work that prohibits shooting
effigies on the side of a barn. Bless me Father for I have sinned. I
shot at Mr. Schultz's picture. And did you hit it, son? No, Father I
missed. For your penance say two rosaries and try again for the son
of a bitch.

"Honest, Marcus," Alice said, "it
won't bite."

Ladies' Auxiliary heard from. Altar Rosary Society
Member attends machine-gun outing after mass, prods lawyer to take
part. What a long distance between Marcus and Jack Diamond.
Millenniums of psychology, civilization, experience, turpitude. Man
also develops milquetoasts by natural selection. Would I defend him
if some shooters walked through the barn door? What difference from
defending him in court? And what of Jack's right to justice, freedom,
life? Is the form of defense the only differentiating factor? What a
morally confounded fellow Marcus is, perplexed by Mr. Thompson's
invention. I pressed the trigger. Bullets exploded in my ears, my
hands, my shoulders, my blood, my brain. The spew of death was a
personal tremor that even jogged my scrotum.

"Close, off the right ear," Jack said. "Try
again."

I let go with another burst, feeling confident. No
pain. It's easy. I leveled the weapon, squeezed off another.,

"Got him. Eyeball high. No more Maggie's Drawers
for Marcus. You want a job riding shotgun?"

Jack reached for the gun, but I held onto it, facing
the ease with which I had become new. Do something new and you are
new. How boring it is not to fire machine guns. I fired again and
eliminated the Schultz mouth.

"Jesus, look at that," Jack said.

I gave him the gun and he looked at me. Me. Sandlot
kid hits grand slam off thirty-game winner, first time at bat.

"How the hell did you do that?" Jack asked
me.

"It's all a matter of the eyeball," I said.
"I also shoot a pretty fair game of pool."

"I'm impressed," Jack said. He gave me
another amazed look and put the weapon to his shoulder. But then he
decided the shooting was over. What if he missed the target now? Bum
of bums.

"Let's have lunch and toast your sharpshooting,"
he said.

"Oh nonsense," Alice said, "let's
toast something important, like the beautiful day and the beautiful
summer and having friends to dinner. Are you our friend, Marcus?"

I smiled at Alice to imply I was her friend, and
Jack's, too. And I was then, yes I was. I was intuitively in sympathy
with this man and woman who had just introduced me to the rattling,
stammering splatter of violent death. Gee, ain't it swell?

We walked back to the porch where Fogarty was reading
Krazy Kat.

"I heard the shooting," Fogarty said, "who
won?"

"Marcus won," Alice said.

"I wiped out Mr. Schultz's mouth, if that's a
win."

"Just what he deserves. The prick killed a kid
cousin of mine last week in Jersey."

And so I had moral support
for my little moral collapse—which sent a thrill through me, made
me comfortable again on this glorious Sunday in the mountains.

* * *

We got into the car and left the Biondo place, Alice
and I in the back seat, Jack up front with Fogarty. Alice previewed
our Sunday dinner for me: roast beef and baked potatoes, and did I
like my beef rare the way Jack liked it, and asparagus from their own
garden, which Tamu, their Japanese gardener, had raised, and apple
pie by their colored maid, Cordelia.

Alice bulged out of her pink summer cotton in various
places, and my feeling was that she was ready instantly to let it all
flop out whenever Jack gave the signal. All love, all ampleness. all
ripeness, would fall upon the bed, or the ground, or on him, and be
his for the romping. Appleness, leaves, blue sky, white sheets,
erect, red nipples, full buttocks, superb moistness at the
intersection, warm wet lips, hair flying, craziness of joy, pleasure,
wonder, mountains climbable with a stride after such sex. I like her.

Oxie was asleep on the enclosed porch when we
arrived, more formally known as Mendel (The Ox) Feinstein, one of the
permanent cadre. Oxie was a bull-necked weightlifter with no back
teeth, who'd done a four-year stretch for armed robbery of a shoe
store. The judge specified he do the full four because, when he held
up the lady shoe clerk, he also took the shoes she was wearing.
Justice puts its foot down on Oxie.