Legs (26 page)

In a small way this was about to be demonstrated.

Shirtsleeved, Jack shook our hands, walked us to the
front door, apologized for not standing there with us, but said he
didn't want to make it too easy for any passing shooters, and thanked
us for livening up his afternoon.

The liveliness was just
beginning.

* * *

The Winchell item in the
Mirror read: "Stagehands in the Chicago theater where Kiki
Roberts is dancing in 'Flying High' under the name of Doris Kane can
set their watch by the phone call she gets every night at 7:30. You
guessed the caller: Legs Diamond .... "

* * *

"You son of a bitch, you said you weren't
talking to her. "

"Don't believe everything you read."

"You're always out of the house at that hour."

"Doesn't mean a thing."

"You promised me, you bastard. You promised me."

"I talked to her once in four months, that's
all."

"I don't believe that either. "

"Believe Winchell then."

"I thought you were being straight with me."

"You were right. I was. I didn't see her, I
didn't see nobody."

"After all the goddamn nursing and handholding."

"I'm fond of the girl. I heard she was having
some trouble and I called her. She's all right."

"I don't believe that. You're a liar."

"What's that on your housedress'?"

"Where'?"

"By the pocket."

"A spot. "

"A spot of what?"

"What's the difference what the spot is. It's a
spot."

"I paid to have that housedress cleaned and
pressed and starched. The least you could do is keep it clean."

"I do keep it clean. Shut up about the
housedress."

"I pay for the laundry and you put these things
on and dirty them up. Goddamn money going down the goddamn laundry
sink.

"I'm leaving."

"What's that in your hair?"

"Where?"

"Behind your right ear. There's something white.
Is that gray hair?"

"It might be. God knows I've got a right to
some."

"Gray hair. So that's what you've come to. I
spend money so you can get your hair bleached half the colors of the
goddamn rainbow and you stand there and talk to me with gray hair."

"I'm going upstairs to pack."

"What's that on your leg?"

"Where?"

"Right there on the thigh."

"Don't touch me. I don't want you to touch me."

"What is it?"

"It's a run in my stocking."

"'
Goddamn money for silk stockings and look what
happens to them."

"Get your hand away. I don't want to feel you.
Go on, get it away. I don't want your hand there. No. Not there
either. No. You won't get it that way anymore. Not after this. No.
Don't you dare do that to me with Cordelia in the kitchen and after
what I just read. You've lied once too often. I'm packing and nobody
on God's earth can do anything to stop me."

"What if I moved her in with us?"

"Oh."

"We could work it out."

"Oh!"

"She's a great girl
and she thinks the world of you. Sit down. Let's talk about it."

* * *

Kiki lay naked on the bed that was all hers and which
stood where Alice's had stood before Jack had it taken out and bought
the new one. She was thinking of the evening being unfinished, of the
fudge that hadn't hardened the last time she touched it, and of Jack
lying asleep in his own room, his heavy breathing audible to Kiki,
who could not sleep and who resented the uselessness of her
nakedness.

They had been together in her bed at early evening,
hadn't eaten any supper because they were going to have dinner out
later. The fudge was already in the fridge then. Jack was naked too,
lying on his back, smoking and staring at the wall with the prints of
the Michelangelo  ketches, the punishment of Tityus and the head
of a giant, prints Jack told her he bought because Arnold Rothstein
liked them and said Michelangelo was the best artist who ever brushed
a stroke. Jack said Kiki should look at the pictures and learn about
art and not be so stupid about it. But the giant had an ugly head and
she didn't like the one with the bird in it either, so she looked at
Jack instead of dopey pictures. She wanted to touch him, not look at
him, but she knew it wouldn't be right because there was no spark in
him. He was collapsed and he had tried but wasn't in the mood. He
started out in the mood, but the mood left him. He needed a rest,
maybe.

He wouldn't look at her. She kept looking at him but
he wouldn't look back, so she got up and said, "I'm going
downstairs and see if that fudge is hard yet."

"Put something on."

"I'll put my apron on."

"Take a housecoat. There may be somebody on the
porch."

"They're all out in the cottage playing pool or
in the car watching the road. I know they are."

"I don't want you showing off your ass to the
hired help."

She put on one of Alice's aprons, inside out so it
wouldn't look too familiar to Jack, and went downstairs. She looked
in the mirror and knew anybody could see a little bit of her tail if
there was anybody to see it, but there wasn't. She didn't want
clothes on. She didn't want to start something and then have to take
the clothes off in a hurry and maybe lose the spark, which she would
try to reignite when she went back upstairs. She wanted Jack to see
as much of her as he could as often as he could, wanted to reach him
with all she could reach him with. She had the house now. She had
beaten Alice. She had Jack. She did not plan to let go of him.

The fudge was still soft to her touch. She left
another fingerprint in it. She had made it for Jack, but it wasn't
hardening. It had been in the fridge twenty-eight hours, and it
wasn't any harder now than it was after the first hour.

"What do you like—chocolate or penuche?"
she had asked him the day before.

"Penuche's the white one with nuts, right?"

"Right."

"That's the one."

"That's the one I like too. "

"How come you know so much about fudge?"

"It's the only thing I ever learned how to cook
from my mother. I haven't made it in five or six years, but I want to
do it for you."

The kitchen had all the new appliances, Frigidaire,
Mixmaster, chrome orange juice squeezer, a machine for toasting two
slices of bread. But, for all its qualities, Kiki couldn't find the
ingredients she remembered from her mother's recipe. So she used two
recipes, her own and one out of Alice's
Fanny
Farmer Cook Book
, mixed them up together and
cooked them and poured it all into a tin pie plate and set it on the
top shelf of the fridge. But it didn't harden. She tasted it and it
was sweet and delicious, but it was goo after an hour. Now it was
still goo.

"It's all goo," she told Jack when she went
back upstairs. She stood alongside him and took off her apron.

He didn't reach for her.

"Let's go out," he said, and he rolled
across the bed, away from her, and stood up. He put on his robe and
went into his own room to dress. Even when Alice was there he had had
his own room. Even at the hotel he had kept his own room to go to
when he and Kiki had finished making love.

"Are you angry because the fudge didn't harden?"

"For crissakes, no. You got other talents."

"Do you wish I could cook?"

"No. I cook good enough for both of us."

And he did, too. Why Jack made the best chicken
cacciatore Kiki ever ate, and he cooked a roast of lamb with garlic
and spices that was fantastic. Jack could do anything in life. Kiki
could only do about three things. She could dance a little and she
could love a man and she could be pretty. But she could do those
things a thousand times better than most women. She knew about men,
knew what men told her. They told her she was very good at love and
that she was pretty. They also liked to talk about her parts. They
all (and Jack too) told her she was lovely everyplace. So Kiki didn't
need to learn about cooking. She wasn't going to tie in with anybody
as a kitchen slave and a fat mommy. She wore an apron, but she wore
it her way, with nothing underneath it. If Jack wanted a cook, he
wouldn't have got rid of Alice. Kiki would just go on being Kiki,
somebody strange. She didn't know how she was strange. She knew she
wasn't smart enough to understand the reasons behind that sort of
thing. I mean I know it already, she said to herself. I don't have to
figure it out. I know it and I'm living it.

Kiki thought about these things as she was lying
naked in her bed wishing the fudge would harden. Earlier in the
night, after Jack had rolled out of her bed, they'd gone out, had
eaten steaks at the New York Restaurant in Catskill, one of the best,
then had drinks at Sweeney's club, a good-time speakeasy. It was on
the way home that everything was so beautiful and quiet. She felt
strange then. She and Jack were in the back seat and Fogarty was
driving. She was holding Jack's hand, and they were just sitting
there, a little glassy-eyed from the booze, yes, but that wasn't the
reason it was so beautiful. It was beautiful because they were
together as they deserved to be and because they didn't have to say
anything to each other. She remembered looking ahead on the road and
looking out the window she'd rolled down and feeling the car was
moving without a motor. She couldn't hear noise, couldn't see
anything but the lights on the road and the darkened farmhouses and
the open fields that were all so brightly lighted by the new moon.
The stars were out too, on this silent, this special night. It was
positively breathtaking, is how Kiki later described the scene and
the mood that preceded the vision of the truck.

That damn truck.

Why did it have to be there ahead of them?

Why couldn't Joe have taken another road and not seen
it?

Oh, jeez, wouldn't
everything in her whole life have been sweet if they just hadn't seen
that truck?

* * *

When he saw the old man in the truck, got a good look
and saw the side of his face with its bumpkin stupid smile, Jack felt
his heart leap up. When Fogarty said, "Streeter from Cairo—he
hauls cider, but we never caught him with any," Jack felt the
flush in his neck. He had no pistol with him, but he opened the gun
rack in the back of the front seat and unclipped one of the .38's. He
rolled down the window on his side, renewed.

"Jack, what's going to happen?" Kiki asked.

"Just a little business. Nothing to get excited
about."

"Jack, don't get, don't get me, don't get . . ."

"Just shut up and stay in the car. "

They were on Jefferson Avenue, heading out of
Catskill when the trucker saw Jack's pistol pointing at him. Fogarty
cruised at equal speed with the truck until Streeter pulled to the
side of the road across from a cemetery. Jack was the first out, his
pistol pointed upward. He saw the barrels on the truck and
quick-counted more than fifteen. Son of a bitch. He saw the
shitkicker's cap, country costume, and he hated the man for wearing
it. Country son of a bitch, where Jack had to live.

"Get down out of that truck. "

Streeter slid off the seat and stepped down, and Jack
saw the second head, another cap on it, sliding across the seat and
stepping down, a baby-faced teen-ager with a wide forehead, a widow's
peak, and a pointy chin that gave his face the look of a heart.

"How many more you got in there?" Jack
said.

"'
No more. Just me and the boy."

"Who is he?"

"Bartlett, Dickie Bartlett."

"What's he to you?"

"A helper."

Streeter's moon face was full of rotten teeth and a
grin.

"So you're Streeter, the wise guy from Cairo,"
Jack said.

Streeter nodded, very slightly, the grin stayed in
place and Jack punched it, cutting the flesh of the cheekbone.

"Put your hands up higher or I'll split your
fucking head."

Jack poked Streeter's chest with the pistol barrel.
The Bartlett boy's hands shot up higher than Streeter's. Jack saw
Fogarty with a pistol in his hand.

"What's in the barrels?"

"Hard cider," said Streeter through his
grin.

"Not beer or white?"

"I don't haul beer, or white either. I ain't in
the booze business."

"You better be telling the truth, old man. You
know who I am?"

"Yes, I know."

"I know you too. You been hauling too many
barrels."

"Haulin's what I do."

"Hauling barrels is dangerous business when they
might have beer or white in them."