Legs (16 page)

"Nobody needs anything from you."

"Well, it was nice seeing you, Will. Give my
regards to the worms. "

"We know who the worm in this family is,
cousin."

And Jack got into the car.

"What do you think of the killing of the dry
agent yesterday at the Rising Sun Brewery in Newark?" a reporter
asked through the window.

"First I heard of it, but it's the most foolish
thing in the world. It'll cramp business for a month."

"Can you whistle for us?" another reporter
asked.

"Up your whistle, punk," Jack said, and the
reporter faded.

"How did you find Europe?"

"I got off the boat and there it was."

"Who was the blonde you were with in Hamburg?"

"A Red Cross nurse I hired to take my pulse."

"How well did you know Charlie Northrup'?"

"A personal friend."

"The police think you killed him."

"Never trust what a cop or a woman thinks. "

No longer amused, the cops shoved the reporters back
and made a path for the car. Jack waved to me as it pulled away,
smiling, happy to be vulnerable again. My subconscious works in
musical ways at times and as I wrote that last sentence I heard an
old melody iioat up and I couldn't say why. But I trust my music and
when I sang it all the way through I could hear a jazz band playing
it in raucous ragtime, Jack giving me that going—away smile on the
pier forty-two years ago, soothed by the music, which I hear clearly,
with a twist all my own:

It goes Na-Da, Na-Da ,
Na-Da-Na-Da
nil-nil-nil.

Jack was twenty hours in jail. His aunt sent him a
box of molasses cookies, and I sent him two corned beefs on rye.
Commissioner Devane in New York had asked Philadelphia to hold Jack,
but they found nothing to prosecute and by midmorning I'd worked out
a release arrangement. We'd announce we were leaving town, assuring
the citizenry that no carpetbaggers would invade the territory of the
local hoodlums. Jack wanted only two hours to visit relatives and the
judge said all right, so we went through a four-minute court ritual.
But the judge found it necessary to give Jack a dig: "This court
considers the attention you have received from the press and from the
vast numbers of people who gathered at the pier to witness your
arrival, to be twin aberrations of the public mind, aberrations which
find value in things that are worth nothing at all. I speak for the
decent people of this city in saying that Philadelphia doesn't want
you any more than Europe did. Get out of this city and stay out."

In the car, Jack looked like a man trying to see
through a rain of cotton balls. The reporters tailed us, so he said,
"Skip the relatives, head for New York." We lost the last
of the press about thirty miles out of the city. It was a decent fall
day, a little cloudy, but with a lot of new color in the world. But
then it started to drizzle and the road got foggy. The fog seemed to
buoy Jack's spirits and he talked about his women. He'd left his
canaries on the ship and now wanted to buy something for Alice and
Kiki, so we stopped at Newark, which he seemed to know as well as he
knew Manhattan.

"Dogs," he said. "Alice loves dogs."

We went to three pet shops before we found a pair of
gray Brussels griffons. They appealed to Jack because he could claim
he'd bought them in Belgium. There were four
in
the litter and I suggested another pair for Kiki.

"She'd lose them or let them die," he said,
and so we found a jewelry store and he bought her an
eight-hundred-dollar diamond, elaborately set ("A diamond from
my Diamond," she quickly dubbed it).

I'd expected him to emphasize one or the other woman
when he arrived, depending on his mood: horny or homey. But he
balanced them neatly, emphasizing neither, impatient to see them
both, moving neither away from one nor toward the other but rather
toting one on each shoulder into some imagined triad of love, a sweet
roundelay which would obviate any choice of either/or and would offer
instead the more bountiful alternative of both. More power to you,
old boy.

But his mood was not bountiful at the moment. We came
out of the jewelry store and got in the car, and he looked at me and
said, "Did you ever feel dead?"

"Not entirely. I woke up once and felt my leg
was dead. Not pins and needles but genuinely dead. But that's as far
as I ever got."

"I feel like I died last week."

"You've had a pretty negative experience. It's
understandable."

"I didn't even feel like this when I was dying."

"Go someplace and sleep it off. Always works for
me when I hit bottom."

"Some cocaine would fix my head."

"I'll stop at the next drugstore."

"Let's get a drink. Turn right, we'll go to
Nannery's"—and we hunted down a small speakeasy where Jack
knew the doorman and got the biggest hello of the week from half the
people in the place.

"I just heard about you on the radio ten minutes
ago," Tommy Nannery told him, a spiffy little bald-headed
Irishman with oversize ears. He kept clapping Jack on the back and he
put a bottle of rye in front of us. "They sure gave you a lot of
shit over there, Jack," Nannery said.

"It wasn't so bad," Jack said. "Don't
believe all that horseshit you read in the papers. I had a good time.
I got healthy on the ocean. "

"I didn't believe any of it," Nannery said.
"Talkin' here the other night about it I says to a fellow, they
don't shove Jack Diamond around like that, I don't care who they are.
Jack has got friends a way up. Am I right?"

"You're right, Tommy. Here's to my friends."

Jack drank about three straight ones while I was
getting halfway through my first. He put a twenty on the bar and said
he'd take the bottle.

"My treat, Jack, my treat," Nannery said.
"Glad to see you back in Newark."

"'
It's nice to have good friends," Jack
said. "Tommy, it's nice."

He had another two fast ones before we left, and in
the car he sat with the bottle between his legs, swilling it as we
went. When I got into Manhattan, he was out of his depression with a
vengeance, also out of control with good old Marcus at the wheel. I'd
every intention of dropping him in the city and going straight on to
Albany with a demarcating flourish. The end. For the peculiar vanity
that had first sent me to Catskill on that odd summer Sunday, the
need for feeding the neglected negative elements of my too-white
Irish soul, the willful tar-and-feather job on my conscience, all
that seemed silly now. Childish man. Eternal boy. Bit of a rascal.
Unpredictable Marcus. The wiping away of my political future, however
casually I'd considered it in the past, the prospect of
assassination, and my excursion into quasi-rape convinced me my life
had changed in startling ways I wouldn't yet say I regretted. But
what would I do with such developments? Underneath, I knew I was
still straight, still balancing the either/or while Jack plunged
ahead with diamonds and doggies toward the twin-peaked glory of
bothness. I felt suddenly like a child.

I looked at Jack and saw him whiten. Was that a bad
bit of barley he was swilling? But the bottle was two-thirds down. He
was suddenly quite drunk, and without a sound or a move toward the
door, he puked in his lap, onto the seat, onto the gearshift, the
floormat, the open ashtray, my shoes, my socks, my trousers, and the
Philadelphia Inquirer I'd bought before going to court, Jack's face
in closeup staring up from it at Jack, receiving mouth-to-mouth
vomit.

"Fucking ocean," Jack said, and he
collapsed backward with his eyes closed, lapsing into a ragged flow
of mumbles as I looked frantically for a gas station. He rattled on
about being offered fifteen hundred a month to perform in a German
cabaret, and twenty-five thousand by an English news syndicate for
his life story and a blank check by the Daily News for the same
thing. I'd heard all this in Germany and was now far more interested
in any sign of the flying red horse on Eleventh Avenue, steed that
would deliver me from puke.

" 'Magine 'em asking Rothstein?" Jack said,
eyes closed, words all tongued." 'Magine him packin' 'em in?"

"No, I can't imagine it," I said,
distracted still. Jack opened his eyes when I spoke.

"Wha'?"

"I said I couldn't imagine it."

"'Magine wha'?"

"Rothstein onstage."

"Where?"

"Forget it."

"They wouldn't put that bum onstage," he
said and he closed his eyes. He snapped to when I hosed down his lap
and shoes at the gas station, and by the time we got to the
Monticello Hotel where Kiki was waiting, he was purged, stinking and
still drunk but purged of salt air and European poisons, cured by
America's best home remedy. And good old Uncle Marcus was still
there, guiding him with as little guidance as possible toward the
elevator. Upstairs, Jack could lie down and think about puke and
poison. He could discover in quiet what his body already understood:
that his fame hadn't answered the basic question he had asked himself
all his life, was still asking.
 

PLAYING THE JACK

Jimmy Biondo visited Kiki three hours before we
knocked on her door. The result was still on her face. She'd met him
with Jack frequently, and so, when he knocked, she let him in. He
then dumped his froggy body into the only easy chair in the room,
keeping his hat on and dripping sweat off his chin onto his bow tie.

"Where's your friend Diamond?"

"He hasn't called me yet."

"Don't lie to me, girlie."

"I don't lie to people and don't call me girlie,
you big lug."

"Your friend's got trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

"He's gunna grow great big holes in his belly."

"He better not hear you say that."

"He'll hear it all right. He'll hear it."

"Listen, I don't want to talk to you and I'll
thank you to leave."

"I'll tank you to leave."

"So get lost."

"Shut up, you dumb cunt."

"Oh! I'm tellin' Jack. "

"Just right. And tell him I want my money and
tell him he shouldn'a done what he done to Charlie Northrup."

"He didn't do anything to Charlie Northrup."

"You dumb cunt, what do you know? You think he's
a nice guy, wouldn't hurt anybody? I wanna tell you what a nice guy
your boyfriend is and what nice guys he's got workin' for him. You
ever hear of Joe Rock? Your boyfriend's pals took him up inna woods,
and when he said he wooden pay off the ransom, Murray the Goose pulls
himself off inna cloth and rubs it in Joe's eyes and ties the rag on
the eyes and Joe goes bline because The Goose has got the clap and
the syph, both kinds of diseases, and that's your. boyfriend Jack
Diamond. I tell you this because Joe Rock was a business associate of
mine. And after your boyfriend burns up Red Moran inna car over inna
Newark dump and finds out Moran's girl knows who done it, he ties her
up with sewer grates and dumps her inna river while she's still
kickin'. That's your boyfriend Jack Diamond. How you like your
boyfriend now, you dumb cunt?"

"Oh, oh, oh!"
said Kiki as Joe left the room.

* * *

After we heard her story Jack shoved a fifty into my
hand with the suggestion: "How you like to take a pretty girl
out to dinner?" He called somebody and went out with word to us
that he'd be back in a few hours and was gone before I found the way
to tell him we were quits. I can't say the idea of Kiki's company
repelled me, but I was intimidated. I've talked about her beauty, and
it was never greater than at that moment. She'd been primping for
Jack, calling up all her considerable wisdom of sex and vanity, and
had created a face I've since thought of as The Broadway Gardenia. It
was structured with eyebrow pencil, mascara, an awareness of the
shape of the hairline and the fall of the loose curl. It was beauty
that was natural and artificial at once, and the blend created this
flower child of the Follies. No carefree Atlanta belle, no windblown,
wheat-haired Kansas virgin, no Oriental blossom, or long-stemmed
Parisian rose could quite match her. Beauty, after all, is regional.
I remember the high value the Germans put on their rose-cheeked
Frauleins. And to me the cheeks were just blotchy.

"Are you leaving me alone?" Kiki said as
Jack kissed her.

"I'll be back." He had sobered considerably
in less than ten minutes.

"I don't want to be alone anymore. He might come
in again."

"Marcus is here."

That's when he gave me the fifty and left. Kiki sat
on the bed looking at the door, and when she decided he was
definitely gone, she said, "All right, goddamn it," and
went to the mirror and looked at her face and took out some black wax
I've since learned is called beading and heated it in a spoon and
dabbed it on her eyelids with a toothpick.  Her eyes didn't need
such excess, but when she looked at me, I saw something new: not
excess but heightening.