Legs (9 page)

* * *

A quick summer storm blew up and it started to rain
as Fogarty drove Kiki, Jack, and me back to Haines Falls after the
golf. There was talk of dinner, which I declined, explaining I had to
get back to Albany. But no, no, Jack wouldn't hear of my leaving.
Wasn't I done out of a champagne lunch by the canary scene? We went
to the Top o' the Mountain House to freshen up before we ate, and
Jack gave me the room The Goose had been using, next to Kiki's. Jack
joined Kiki in her room for what I presumed was a little mattress
action, and I pursued a catnap. But the walls were thin and I was
treated instead to a memorably candid conversation:

"I'm going back to New York," Kiki said.

"You don't mean it," Jack said.

"'
I don't care what you do. I'm not staying in
this prison with that goon. He never says a word."

"He's not good at talking. He's good at other
things. Like you."

"I hate having a bodyguard."

"But your body deserves guarding. "

"It deserves more than that. "

"You're very irritable tonight. "

"You're damn right I am."

"You've got a right to be, but don't swear. It's
not ladylike."

"You're not so particular in bed about
ladylike."

"We're not in bed now."

"Well, I don't know why we're not. I don't see
you for two days and you show up with a stranger and don't even try
to be alone with me."

"You want a bed, do you? What do you want to put
in it?"

"How's this? How does it look?"

"Looks like it's worth putting money into."

"I don't want money in it."

"Then I'll have to think of something else."

"I love to kiss your scars," Kiki said
after a while.

"Maybe you'll kiss them all away," Jack
said.

"I wouldn't want to do that. I love you the way
you are."

"And you're the most perfect thing I've ever
seen. I deserve you. And you don't have any scars."

"I'm getting one."

"Where?"

"Inside. You cut me and let me bleed, and then I
heal and you leave me to go back to your wife. "

"Someday I'll marry you."

"Marry me now, Jackie."

"It's complicated. I can't leave her. She's in a
bad way lately, depressed, sick."

"She goes to the movies. She's old and fat."

"I've got a lot of money in her name."

"She could run off with it, wipe you out."

"Where could she run I couldn't find her?"

"You trust her, but you don't trust me alone."

"She's never alone."

"What is she to you? What can she give you I
can't?"

"I don't know. She likes animals."

"I like animals."

"No, you don't. You never had a pet in your
life."

"But I like them. I'll get a pet. I'll get a
cat. Then will you marry me?"

"Later I'll marry you."

"Am I your real lay?"

"More than that."

"Not much more. "

"Don't be stupid. I could lay half the town if I
wanted to—Catskill, Albany, New York, any town. Unlimited what I
could lay. Unlimited."

"I want a set of those Chinese balls. The metal
ones."

"Where'd you hear about those?"

"I get around. I get left alone a lot now, but I
didn't always."

"What would you do with them?"

"What everybody does. Wear them. Then when
nobody's around to take care of me and I get all hot and bothered,
I'd just squeeze them and they'd make me feel good. I want them. "

"Will you settle for an Irish set?"

"Can I keep them with me?"

"I'll see they don't get out of range. "

"Well, see to it
then."

* * *

"Everything was still
incredible with me and Jack back then," Kiki said to me much
later, remembering the sweet time. "It was thrilling just to see
him from a new angle, his back, or his stomach, any part of his bare
skin. He had gouges and scars from knife fights when he was a kid,
and where he'd been shot and kicked and beaten with clubs and boards
and pipes. I got sad up on the mountain one night looking at them
all. But he said they didn't hurt him anymore, and the more I looked
at them and touched them, the more they made his body special, the
way his head was special. It wasn't an all white and smooth and fatty
body like some I've seen but the body of a man who'd gone through a
whole lot of hell. There was a long red scar on his stomach just
above his belly button, where he'd almost died from a cut in a knife
fight over a girl when he was fifteen. I ran my tongue over it and it
felt hot. I could almost taste how much it hurt when he'd got it and
what it meant now. To me it meant he was alive, that he didn't die
easy. Some people could cut their little toe and give up and bleed to
death. Jack never gave up, not his body, not anything."

* * *

Well, we all did have dinner on the mountain, and
then I insisted on leaving. "It's been a special day," I
told Jack, "but an odd one."

"What's so odd about it?"

"Well, how about buying a paperweight for
starters?"

"Seems like an ordinary day to me," he
said. I assumed he was kidding. But then he said, "Come to
dinner next week. I'll have Alice cook up another roast. I'll call
you during the week to set it up. And think about Europe." So I
said I would and turned to Kiki, whom I'd spoken about forty words to
all day. But I'd smiled her into my goodwill and stared her into my
memory indelibly, and I said, "Maybe I'll see you again, too,"
and before she could speak Jack said, "Oh you'll see her all
right. She'll be around."

"I'll be around he says," Kiki said to me
in a smart-ass tone, like Alice's whippy retort had been earlier in
the day. Then she took my hand, a sensuous moment.

Everything seemed quite real as I stood there, but I
knew when I got back to Albany the day would seem to have been
invented by a mind with a faulty gyroscope. It had the quality of a
daydream after eight whiskeys. Even the car I was to ride down
in—Jack's second buggy, a snazzy, wire-wheeled, cream-colored
Packard roadster The Goose was using to chauffeur Kiki around the
mountains—had an unreal resonance.

I know the why of this, but I know it only now as I
write these words. It took me forty-three years to make the
connection between Jack and Gatsby. It's should have been 
quicker, for he told me he met Fitzgerald on a transatlantic voyage
in 1926, on the dope-buying trip that got him into federal trouble.
We never talked specifically about Gatsby, only about Fitzgerald,
who, Jack said, was like two people, a condescending young drunk the
first time they met, an apologetic, decent man the second time. The
roadster was long and bright and with double windshields, and
exterior toolbox, and a tan leather interior, the tan a substitute,
for Gatsby's interior was "a sort of green leather
conservatory." But otherwise it was a facsimile of the Gatsby
machine, and of that I'm as certain as you can be in a case like
this. Jack probably read Gatsby for the same reason he read every
newspaper story and book and saw every movie about gangland. I know
he saw Von Sternberg's Underworld twice; we did talk about that. It
was one way of keeping tabs on his profession, not pretension to
culture. He mocked Waxey Gordon to me once for lining his walls with
morocco-bound sets of Emerson and Dickens.

"They're just another kind of wallpaper to the
bum," Jack said.

I accept Jack's Gatsby connection because he knew
Edward Fuller, Fitzgerald's neighbor on Long Island who was the
inspiration for Gatsby. Fuller and Rothstein were thick in stocks,
bonds, and bucketshops when Jack was bodyguarding Rothstein. And, of
course, Fitzgerald painted a grotesque, comic picture of Rothstein
himself in Gatsby, wearing human molar cuff buttons and spouting a
thick Jewish accent, another reason Jack would have read the book.

I rode with The Goose in Jack's roadster and tried to
make a little conversation.

"You known Jack long?"

"Yeah," said Murray, and then nothing for
about three miles.

'"
Where'd you meet him?"

"'
Th'army," said Murray, not spending two
words where one would do.

"You've been working with him since then?"

"No, I did time. Jack, too."

"Ah."

"I got nine kids."

Murray looked at me when he said this, and I guess I
paused long enough before I said, "Have you?" to provoke
him.

"You don't believe me?"

"Sure I believe you. Why shouldn't I?"

"'
People don't believe I got nine kids."

"If you say it, I believe it. That's a lot of
kids. Nobody lies about things like that. "

"I don't see them. Once a year. Maybe, maybe
not. But I send 'em plenty."

"'
Uh-huh."

"They don't know what I do for a living."

"Oh?"

Then we had another mile or so of silence, except for
the thunder and lightning and the heavy rain, which kept Murray
creeping slowly along the snaky road down the mountain. I judged him
to be about forty-five, but he was hard to read. He might've seemed
older because of the menace he transmitted, even when he talked about
his kids. His mouth curled down into a snarley smile, his lone eye
like a flat spring, tightly coiled, ready to dilate instantly into
violent glare. He was obviously the pro killer in the gang, which I
deduced as soon as I saw him. Oxie may have had some deadly innings
in his career, but he looked more like a strongarm who would beat you
to death by mistake.

Murray's clothes were a shade too small for him,
giving him a puffy, spaghetti-filled look. I thought I detected
tomato sauce stains on his coat and pants and even his eyepatch. I
choose to believe he was merely a slob rather than inefficient enough
to walk around with bloodstains from his last victim. I doubt Jack
would have approved of that sort of coarseness.

"You workin' for Jack now?" Murray asked
me.

"Tentatively," I said, wondering whether he
understood the word, sol added, "for the time being I guess I
am."

"Jack is a pisser."

"Is he?"

"He's crazy. "

"Is that so?"

"That's why I work for him. You never know
what'll happen next."

"That's a good reason. "

"He was crazy in the Army. I think he was always
crazy."

"Some of us are."

"I said to myself after he done what he done to
me, this is a crazy guy you got to watch out for because he does
crazy stuff. "

"'
What did he do to you?"

"What did he do to me'? What did he do to me?"

"Right."

"I was in the stockade at Fort Jay for raping a
colonel's wife, a bum rap. I only did her a favor after she caught me
in the house and I rapped her one and she fell down. Her dress goes
up and she says, 'I suppose you're gonna strip and rape me,' and I
hadn't figured on it, but you take what comes. So I'm in for that,
plus burglary and kickin' an MP when Jack comes in to wait for his
court-martial.

" 'Whatcha in for?' I asked him.

" 'Desertion and carrying a pistol.'

" 'That's heavy duty.'

" 'I figure I'll do a little time,' he said.
'They want my ass.'

" "Likewise,' I said and told him my story.

" 'What'd you do before you got in'?' he asks me
and I tell him, 'I was a burglar.' He got a kick out of that because
he done a bit for the same thing when he was a kid. So we talk and
Jack gets a pint of whiskey from the corporal who made bedcheck. I
don't drink that shit, so Jack asks me if I wanna drink some rain
instead. It's raining out just like now, and Jack puts a cup out the
window. Took about five minutes to fill it up part way, and by that
time Jack's whiskey is most gone and he gets the cup of rain and
gives it to me.

" 'I don't want no rain,' I says to him. 'It's
dirty.'

" 'Who says it's dirty'?'

" 'Everybody says.'

" 'They're wrong,' he says. 'Best water there
is.'

" 'You drink it,' I says, 'I don't want no part
of any dirty, shitty rain.'

" 'Goddamn it, I told you rain wasn't dirty. You
think I'd drink rain if it was dirty?' And he takes a drink of it.

" 'Anybody who'd drink rain'd shit in church,' I
says to him.

" 'Did you say shit in church'?'

" 'Shit in church and then kick it out in the
aisle.'

" 'That's a goddamn lie. I'd never shit in
church.'

" 'If you'd drink rain, you'd shit in church all
right.'