Legs (6 page)

"They'd be all week," said the old man.
"Might be it's got the rabies."

"How'll we find him?" Jack asked.

"l chased him with the pitchfork and he ran in
the barn. I locked him in. "

"Is the cow in there?"

"No. Cow's out in the field."

"Then he can't get at the cow. You got him
trapped."

"He might get out. That's a right old barn."

Jack turned to Eddie, and they smiled at the prospect
of making a mad cat hunt together, the way they had once hunted rats
and woodchucks in the Philadelphia dumps. But Eddie could not walk
all the way to the farmer's house, and so they went back and got
Jack's car, and with old man Van Wie they drove to the barn which had
not yet had its eyes gouged out or holes made in its roof. And with
guns drawn and the farmer behind them with his pitchfork, they
entered the barn.

"What's going to stop him from biting hell out
of us?" Jack said.

"I expect you'll shoot him 'fore he gets a
chance at that," the old man said.

Jack saw the cat first, yellowish orange and brown
and curled up on some hay, and quiet. It looked at them and didn't
move, but then it opened its mouth and hissed without sound.

"That don't look like a mad cat to me,"
Jack said.

"You didn't see it bite on my wife or leap on
the lampshade and then try to run up the curtain. Maybe it's quiet
'cause I whacked it with the fork. Maybe I knocked it lame."

"It looks like Sugarpuss," Eddie said.

"I know," Jack said. "I'm not going to
kill it."

The mad cat looked at the men, orange and silent and
no longer disturbed by their intrusion or fearful of their menace.

"You shoot it if you want," Jack said.

"I don't want to shoot it," Eddie said.

"Look out," old man Van Wie said, pushing
past the brothers and sticking his pitchfork through the cat, which
squealed and wriggled and tried to leap off the fork. But it was
impaled and the farmer held it out to the brothers, an offering.

"Now shoot it," the old man said.

Jack kept his arm at his side, pistol down, watching
the cat squeal and squirm upside down on the fork. Eddie put three
bullets in its head, and the old man, saying only "Obliged"
and grabbing a shovel off a nail, carried the carcass out to the yard
to bury what remained of madness. And Jack then was triggered into
his second cat memory of eighteen years before, when he was twelve,
when he said to Eddie that he wanted to furnish the warehouse and
Eddie did not understand. The warehouse was enormous, longer than
some city blocks, empty for as long as they had been , alive. It's
was made of corrugated metal and wooden beams and had scores of
windows that could be broken but not shattered. Jack discovered it,
and with Eddie, they imagined its vast empty floor space full of
automobiles and machinery and great crated mysteries. At one end an
office looked down on the emptiness from second-story level. 
There was no staircase to it, but Jack found a way. He rigged a
climbing rope, stolen from a livery stable, over a wooden crossbeam,
the stairway's one remnant. He worked two hours to maneuver a loop
upward that would secure the rope, then shinnied up. It was 1909 and
his mother had been dead two months. His brother was eight and spent
two days learning how to shinny up to the office. The brothers looked
out the office windows at a fragment of Philadelphia's freight yards,
at lines of empty boxcars, stacks of crossties, piles of telegraph
poles covered with creosote. They watched trains arrive and then
leave for places they knew only from the names painted on the
cars—Baltimore and Ohio, New York Central, Susquehanna, Lackawanna,
Erie, Delaware and Hudson, Boston and Albany—and they imagined
themselves in these places, on these rivers. From the windows they
saw a hobo open a freight-car door from inside, and they assumed he'd
just awakened from a night's sleep. They saw him jump down and saw
that a bull saw, too, and was chasing him. The hobo had only one
shoe, the other foot wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. The
bull outran him and beat him with a club, and when the hobo went
down, he stayed down. The bull left him where he fell.

"The bastard," Jack said. "He'd do the
same to us."

But the Diamond brothers always outran the bulls. Out
scrambled them beneath the cars.

Jack brought a chair to the office and a jug of water
with a cork in it, candles, matches, a slingshot with a supply of
stones, half a dozen pulp novels of the wild West, a cushion, and,
when he could steal it from his father's jug, some dago red. He kept
the hobo's hat, which was worn through at the crown from being
fingered and had spots of blood on the brim. Jack took it off the
hobo after he and Eddie went down to help him and found he was dead.
The hobo was a young man, which shocked the brothers. Jack hung the
hat on a nail in the office and let no one wear it. The brothers were
asleep in the office the day the orange cat came in. It had climbed
one of the wooden pillars and found its way along a crossbeam. A dog
was after it, barking at the foot of the pillar. Jack gave it water
in the candle dish, petted it, and called it Sugarpuss. The dog kept
barking and Jack fired stones at it with his slingshot. When it
wouldn't leave, Jack shinnied down, clubbed it with a two-by-four,
cut its throat, and threw it out by the crossties.

Sugarpuss remained the
mascot of the brothers and the select group of friends they allowed
up the rope. It lived in the warehouse, and all the gang brought it
food. During the winter Jack found Sugarpuss outside, frozen in the
ice, its head almost eaten off where another animal had gotten it. He
insisted it be given a decent burial and immediately got another cat
to replace it. But the second cat ran away, an early lesson in
subtraction for Jack.

* * *

We came out of the woods onto the highway and walked
back toward Jack's house. A car passed us, and a middle-aged man and
woman waved and tooted at Jack, who explained they were neighbors and
that he'd had an ambulance take their kid to Albany Hospital, some
thirty miles away, about six months back when the local sawbones
didn't know what ailed the boy. Jack footed the bill for examinations
and a week's stay in the hospital, and the kid came out in good
shape. An old woman down the road had a problem with her cow after
her shed collapsed, and so Jack paid for a new shed. People in Acra
and Catskill told these stories when the papers said Jack was a
heartless killer.

Jack's Uncle Tim was working on the rosebushes when
we reached the house. The lawn had been freshly cut, some grass raked
into piles on the front walk. Tamu was watering the flower beds of
large and small marigolds, dahlias, snapdragons, on the sunny side of
the brown shingled house. The Bowers reached up toward a second-story
window where, it was authoritatively reported in the press at a later
date, Jack had his machine guns mounted. The fortress notion was
comic but not entirely without foundation, for Jack did have
floodlights on the house to illuminate all approaches, and the maple
trees on the lawn were painted white to a point higher than a man, so
anyone crossing in front of one was an instant target. Jack installed
the lights back in l928 when he was feuding with Schultz and
Rothstein, right after a trio of hirelings tried to kill Eddie in
Denver. Eddie went to Denver because the Catskills hadn't solved his
lung problems, and Denver must have helped, for when they shot at him
he leaped out of his car and outran the killers. One killer, when he
saw Eddie'd gotten away, grabbed a bull terrier pup in front of
somebody's house and shot off one of its paws, an odd substitute for
murder. But then I guess in any realm of life you solve your needs
any way you can.

Jack and I stood on the lawn and watched the grooming
of the landscape. Domestic felicity. Back to the soil. Country
squirearch. It didn't conform to my preconceptions of Jack, but
standing alongside him, I had to admit it didn't sit so badly on him
either.

"Pretty good life you've got here," I told
him. He wanted to hear that.

"Beats hell out of being at the bottom of the
river," he said.

"A striking truth."

"But this is nothing, Marcus, nothing. Give me a
year, maybe even six months, you'll see something really special."

"The house, you mean, the purple house?"

"The house, the grounds, this whole goddamn
county."

He squinted at me then and I waited for
clarification.

"It's a big place, Marcus, and they pack in the
tourists all summer long. You know how many speakeasies in this one
county? Two hundred and thirty. I don't even know how many hotels
yet, but I'm finding out. And every goddamn one of them can handle
beer. Will handle beer."

"Who's servicing them now?"

"What's the difference'?"

"I don't know what the difference is, except
competition."

"We'll solve that," Jack said. "Come
on, let's have some champagne."

Pistol, who had followed us out of the woods and
along the road, pounced on a mole that made the mistake of coming out
of his tunnel. The cat took him to the back steps and played with him
alongside the carcass of the squirrel, who had died of wounds. Or
perhaps Pistol had finished him off when he decided to take a walk
with us. He let the mole run away a little, just as he'd let the
squirrel, then he pounced.

'We were hardly inside the house when Alice called
out to Jack, "Will you come here please?" She was on the
front porch, with Oxie and Fogarty still on the sofa. They were not
moving, not speaking, not looking at Alice or at Jack or at me either
when we got there. They both stared out toward the road.

Alice opened the canary cage and said to Jack, "Which
one do you call Marion'?"

Jack quickly turned to Fogarty and Oxie.

"Don't look at them, they didn't tell me,"
Alice said. "I just heard them talking. Is it the one with the
black spot on its head ?"

Jack didn't answer, didn't move. Alice grabbed the
bird with the black spot and held it in her fist.

"You don't have to tell me—the black spot's
for her black hair. Isn't it? Isn't it?"

When Jack said nothing, Alice wrung the bird's neck
and threw it back in the cage. "That's how much I love you,"
she said and started past Jack, toward the living room, but he
grabbed her and pulled her back. He reached for the second bird and
squeezed it to death with one hand, then shoved the twitching,
eyebleeding corpse down the crevice of Alice's breasts. "I love
you too," he said.

That solved everything for
the canaries.

* * *

We left the house immediately, with a "Come on,
Marcus" the only words Jack said. Fogarty followed him
wordlessly, like Pistol. "Haines Falls," Jack said in a
flat hostile voice.

Fogarty leaned over the seat to tell Jack, "'We
didn't know she was listening or we . . ."

"Shut your fucking mouth."

We drove a few miles in silence, and then Jack said
in as tone that eliminated the canary episode from history, "I'm
going to Europe. Ever been to Europe?"

"I was there with the AEF," I said. "But
it was a Cook's Tour. I was in a headquarters company in Paris. Army
law clerk."

"I was in Paris. I went AWOL to see it."

"Smart move."

"When they caught up with me, they sent me back
to the States. But that was a long time ago. I mean lately. You been
to Europe lately?"

"No, that was the one and only."

"Fantastic place, Europe. Fantastic. I'd go all
the time if I could. I like Heidelberg. If you go to Heidelberg, you
got to eat at the castle. I like London, too. A polite town. Got
class. You want to go to Europe with me, Marcus?"

"Me go to Europe? When? For how long?"

"What the hell's the difference? Those are old
lady questions. We go and we come back when we feel like it. I do a
little business and we have ourselves some fun. Paris is big fun, I
mean big fun."

"What about your business here? All those
hotels. All those speakeasies."

"Yeah, well, somebody'll look after it. And it
won't be all that long of a trip. Goddamn it, a man needs change. We
get old fast. I'm an old son of a bitch, I feel old, I could die any
time. I almost died twice already, really close. So goddamn stupid to
die when there's so many other things to do. Jesus, I learned that a
long time ago; I learned it in Paris from an old crone—old Algerian
chambermaid with her fingers all turned into claws and her back
crooked and every goddamn step she took full of needles. Pain. Pain
she wanted to scream about but didn't. Tough old baby. I think she
was a whore when she was young, and me and Buster Deegan from
Cleveland, we went AWOL together to see Paris before they shot us in
some muddy fucking trench, and we wind up talking every morning to
this old dame who spoke a little English. She wore a terrycloth
robe—maybe she didn't even own a dress—and a rag on her head and
house slippers because her feet couldn't stand shoes. We
double-tipped her every day and she smiled at us, and one day she
says to me, 'M'sieur, do you have fun in Paris?' I said I was having
a pretty good time. 'You must, M'sieur,' she said to me. 'It is
necessary.' Then she give me a very serious look, like a teacher
giving you the word, and she smiled. And I knew she was saying to me,
yeah, man, I got pain now, but I had my day long, long ago, and I
still remember that, I remember it all the time."