Legs - William Kennedy

by William Kennedy

  "Herman, here beside me is the next welterweight champion of the world who's come to see us, and all you're doing is standing there making the wrong kind of noise."

  Herman put the money in a strongbox under the bar, then moved two couples away from a table. He gave them seats at the bar and bought them a bottle of champagne.

  "You feeling all right?" Jack asked Benny when they all sat down. "No damage?"

  "No damage, just a little headache."

  "Too much worrying about insurance. Don't worry anymore about shit like that. "

  "Maybe he's got a headache because he got hit in the head," Charlie Filetti said.

  "He didn't get hit in the head," Jack said. "Murphy couldn't find Benny's head. Murphy couldn't find his own ass with a compass. But Benny found Murphy's head. And his nose."

  "How does it feel to break a man's nose?" Elaine asked.

  "That's a funny question," Benny said. "But to tell the truth you don't even know you're doing it. It's just another punch. Maybe it feels solid, maybe it don't."

  "You don't feel the crunch, what the hell good is it?" Jack said.

  Filetti laughed. "Jack likes to feel it happen when the noses break, right Jack?"

  Jack mock-backhanded Filetti, who told him: "Don't get your nose out of joint, partner"—and he laughed some more. "I remember the night that big Texas oil bozo gave Jack lip. He's about six eight and Jack breaks a bottle across his face at the table, and then you couldn't stop laughing, Jack. The son of a bitch didn't know what hit him. Just sat there moppin' up his blood. Next day I go around to tell him what it costs to give lip to Jack and he says he wants to apologize. Gives me a grand to make Jack feel good. Remember that, Jack'?"

  Jack grinned.

  * * *

  The Reagans, Billy and Tim, came into the club and everybody knew it. They were brawny boys from the Lower West Side, dockworkers as soon as they knew they were men, that God had put muscles in their backs to alert them to that fact. Behind his back people called Billy The Omadhaun, a name he'd earned at seventeen when in a drunken rage he threw repeated football blocks at the crumbling brick tenement he lived in. Apart from the bleeding scrapes and gouges all over his body, an examination disclosed he had also broken both shoulders. His brother Tim, a man of somewhat larger wit, discovered upon his return from the Army in 1919 that beer-loading was no more strenuous than ship-loading, and far more lucrative. Proprietorship of a small speakeasy followed, as Tim pursued a prevailing dictum that to establish a speakeasy what you needed was one room, one bottle of whiskey, and one customer.

  "That's a noisy bunch," Elaine said when they came in.

  "It's the Reagans," said Filetti. "Bad news."

  "They're tough monkeys," Jack said, "but they're pretty good boys."

  "The big one's got a fist like a watermelon," Benny said.

  "That's Billy," Jack said. "He's tough as he is thick."

  Jack waved to the Reagans, and Tim Reagan waved and said, "Hello, Jack, howsa boy?"

  "How's the gin in this joint?" Billy asked Joe Vignola in a voice that carried around the room. Herman Zuckman looked up. Customers eyed the Reagans.

  "The best English gin is all we serve," Vignola told him.

  "Right off the boat for fancy drinkers like yourselves."

  "Right out of Jack's dirty bathtub," Billy said.

  "No homemade merchandise here," Vignola said. "Our customers get only the real stuff. "

  "If he didn't make it then he stole it," Billy said. He looked over at Jack Diamond. "Ain't that so, Jack?"

  "If you say so, Billy," Jack said.

  "Hey, he can get in trouble with that kind of talk," Filetti said.

  "Forget it," Jack said. "Who listens to a drunk donkey Irishman?"

  "Three of the good gins," Billy told Vignola. "Right away."

  "Comin' up," said Vignola, and he rolled his eyes, dropped the serving tray he carried under his arm, but caught it just before it hit the floor, then lofted it and caught it again, well over his head, and spun it on the index finger of his left hand: a juggler's routine. Others laughed. The Reagans did not.

  "Get the goddamn gin and never mind the clown act," Billy Reagan said. "You hear me, you waiter baloney? Get the gin."

  Jack immediately went to the Reagan table and stood over big-fisted Billy. He poked Billy's shoulder with one finger. "You got no patience. Make noise in your own joint, but have a little patience when you're in somebody else's."

  "I keep telling him he's ignorant," Tim Reagan said. "Sit down, Jack, don't mind him. Have a drink. Meet Teddy Carson from Philly. We been tellin' him about you, how you come a long way from Philadelphia."

  "How you makin' out, Jack?" Teddy Carson said, another big fist. He shook Jack's hand, cracking knuckles. "Some boys I know in Philly talk about you a lot. Duke Gleason, Wiggles Mason. Wiggles said he knew you as a kid."

  "He knocked a tooth out on me. I never got even."

  "That's what he told me."

  "You tell him I said hello."

  "He'll be glad to hear that."

  "Pull up a chair. Jack," Tim said.

  "I got a party over there."

  "Bring 'em over. Make the party bigger."

  Saul Baker left his post by the door when Jack went back to his own table. "That's a bunch of shitheads, Jack. You want 'em thrown out'?"

  "It's all right, Saul." Pudgy little Saul Baker, chastising three elephants.

  "I hate a big mouth. "

  "Don't get excited."

  Jack said he wanted to have a drink with the Reagans. "We'll all go over," he said to Filetti, Elaine, and Benny.

  "What the hell for?" said Filetti,

  "It'll keep 'em quiet. They're noisy, but I like them. And there's a guy from Philly knows friends of mine."

  Jack signaled Herman to move the table as Joe Vignola finally brought drinks to the Reagans.

  "You call this gin'?" Billy said to Vignola, holding up a glass of whiskey. "Are you tryna be a funny guy? Are you lookin' for a fight?"

  "Gin's gone," Vignola said.

  "I think you're lookin' for a fight," Billy said.

  "No, I was looking for the gin," Vignola said, laughing, moving away.

  "This is some dump you got here, Jack," Billy called out.

  Herman and a waiter moved Jack's table next to the Reagans, but Jack did not sit down.

  "Let me tell you something, Billy," Jack said, looking down at him. "I think your mouth is too big. I said it before. Do I make myself clear?"

  "I told you to shut your goddamn trap," Tim told Billy, and when Billy nodded and drank his whiskey, Jack let everybody sit down and be introduced. Charlie Filetti sat in a quiet pout. Elaine had swallowed enough whiskey so that it made no difference where she sat, as long as it was next to Jack. Jack talked about Philadelphia to Teddy Carson, but then he saw nobody was talking to Benny.

  "Listen," Jack said, "I want to raise a toast to Benny here, a man who just won a battle, man headed for the welterweight crown."

  "Benny?" said Billy Reagan. "Benny who?"

  "Benny Shapiro, you lug," Tim Reagan said. "Right here. The fighter. Jack just introduced you."

  "Benny Shapiro," Billy said. He pondered it. "'That's a yid name." He pondered it further. "What I think is yids make lousy fighters. "

  Everybody looked at Billy, then at Benny.

  "The yid runs, is how I see it," Billy said. "Now take Benny there and the way he runs out on Corrigan. Wouldn't meet an Irishman."

  "Are you gonna shut up, Billy?" Tim Reagan said.

  "What do you call Murphy?" Benny said to Billy. "'Last time I saw him tonight he's got rosin all over his back. "

  "I seen you box, yid. You stink."

  "You dumb fucking donkey," Jack said. "Shut your stupid mouth. "

  "You wanna shut my mouth, Jack? Where I come from, the middle name is fight. That's how you shut the mouth."

  Billy pushed his chair away from the table, straddling it, ready to move. As he did, J
ack tossed his drink at Billy and lunged at his face with the empty glass. But Billy only blinked and grabbed Jack's hand in flight, held it like a toy. Saul Baker snatched a gun from his coat at Jack's curse and looked for a clear shot at Billy. Then Tim Reagan grabbed Saul's arm and wrestled for the gun. Women shrieked and ran at the sight of pistols, and men turned over tables to hide. Herman Zuckman yelled for the band to play louder, and customers scrambled for cover to the insanely loud strains of the "Jazz Me Blues." Elaine Walsh backed into a checkroom, Benny Shapiro, Joe Vignola, and four others there ahead of her. The bartenders ducked below bar level as Billy knocked Jack backward over chairs.

  "Yes, sir," Billy said, "the middle name is fight."

  Tim Reagan twisted the pistol out of Saul Baker's grip as Teddy Carson fired the first shot. It hit Saul just above the right eye as he was reaching for his second pistol, on his hip.

  The second shot was Charlie Filetti's. It grazed Billy's skull, knocking him down. Filetti fired again, hitting Carson, who fell and slithered behind a table.

  Jack Diamond, rising slowly with his pistol in his hand, looked at the only standing enemy, Tim Reagan, who was holding Saul's pistol. Jack shot Tim in the stomach. As Tim fell, he shot a hole in the ceiling. Standing then, Jack fired into Tim's forehead. The head gave a sudden twist and Jack fired two more bullets into it. He fired his last two shots into Tim's groin, pulling the trigger three times on empty chambers. Then he stood looking down at Tim Reagan.

  Billy opened his eyes to see his bleeding brother beside him on the Floor. Billy shook Tim's arm and grunted "Timbo," but his brother stayed limp. Jack cracked Billy on the head with the butt of his empty pistol and Billy went flat.

  "Let's go, Jack, let's move," Charlie Filetti said.

  Jack looked up and saw Elaine's terrified face peering at him from the checkroom. The bartenders' faces were as white as their aprons. All faces looked at Jack as Filetti grabbed his arm and pulled. Jack tossed his pistol onto BilIy's chest and it bounced off onto the floor.

  JACK,

  OUT Of DOORS

  Jack lived the fugitive life after the Hotsy, the most hunted man in America, and eventually he wound up in the Catskills. I don't think I'd have ever seen him again if the 1925 meeting in the Kenmore had been our only encounter. But I know my involvement in the Hotsy case brought me back to his mind, even though we never met face to face during it. And when the heat was off in midsummer of 1930, when the Hotsy was merely history, Jack picked me out of whatever odd pigeonhole he'd put me in, called me up and asked me to Sunday dinner.

  "I'm sorry," he said when he called, "but I haven't seen you since that night we talked in the Kenmore. That's been quite a while and I can't remember what you look like. I'll send a driver to pick you up, but how will he recognize you?"

  "I look like St. Thomas Aquinas," I said, "and I wear a white Panama hat with a black band. Rather beat up, that hat. You couldn't miss it in a million."

  "Come early," he said. "I got something I'd like to show you."

  * * *

  Joe (Speed) Fogarty picked me up at the Catskill railroad station, and when I saw him I said, "Eddie Diamond, right?"

  "No," he said. "Eddie died in January. Fogarty's the name."

  "'You look like his twin."

  "So I'm told."

  "You're Mr. Diamond's driver—or is he called Legs?"

  "Nobody who knows him calls him anything but Jack. And I do what he asks me to do."

  "Very loyal of you."

  "That's the right word. Jack likes loyalty. He talks about it."

  "What does he say?"

  "He says, 'Pal, I'd like you to be loyal. Or else I'll break your fucking neck.' "

  "The direct approach."

  We got into Jack's custom, two-tone (green and gray) Cadillac sedan with whitewalls and bulletproof glass, armor panels, and the hidden pistol and rifle racks. The latter were features I didn't know existed until the following year when Jack had the occasion to open the pistol rack one fateful night. Now what I noticed were the black leather seats and the wooden dashboard with more gauges than any car seemed to need.

  "How far is it to Jack's house?" I asked.

  "We're not going to Jack's house. He's waiting for you over at the Biondo farm."

  "That wouldn't be Jimmy Biondo, would it?"

  "You know Jimmy'?"

  "I met him once."

  "Just once? Lucky you. The bum is a throwback. Belongs in a tree."

  "I'd tend to sympathize with that view. I met him during the Hotsy Totsy business. We swapped views one day about a client of mine, Joe Vignola."

  "Joe. Poor Joe"—and Fogarty gave a sad little chuckle.

  "Some guys'd be unlucky even if they were born with rabbits' feet instead of thumbs."

  "Then you knew Joe."

  "I used to go to the Hotsy when I was in New York even before I knew Jack. It was quite a place before the big blowup. Plenty of action, plenty of gash. I met my wife there, Miss Miserable of 1929."

  '"So you're married."

  "Was. It broke up in four months. That dame would break up a high mass."

  It was Sunday morning, not quite noon, when Fogarty left the station in Catskill and headed west toward East Durham, where Jimmy Biondo lived. My head was full of Catskill images, old Rip Van Winkle who probably would have been hustling applejack instead of sleeping it off if he'd been alive now, and those old Dutchmen with their magical ninepins that lulled you into oblivion and the headless horseman riding like a spook through Sleepy Hollow and throwing his head at the trembling Ichabod. The Catskills were magical for me because of their stories, as well as their beauty, and I was full of both, despite the little crater of acid in the pit of my stomach. After all, I was actually going to Sunday dinner with one of the most notorious men in America. Me. From Albany.

  "You know, two and a half hours ago I was talking to a whole roomful of cops."

  "Cops? I didn't know cops worked in Albany on Sunday."

  "Communion breakfast. I was the speaker and I told them a few stories and then looked out over their scrubbed faces and their shiny buttons and explained that they were our most important weapon in saving the nation from the worst scourge in its history."

  "What scourge?"

  "Gangsterism."

  Fogarty didn't laugh. It was one of his rare humor failures.

  * * *

  Fogarty was the only man I ever met through Jack who wasn't afraid to tell me what was really on his mind. There was an innocence about him that survived all the horror, all the fear, all the crooked action, and it survived because Jack allowed it to survive. Until he didn't allow it anymore. Fogarty told me he was eleven when he understood his own weak spot. It was his nose. When tapped on the nose in a fight, he bled, and the sight and feel of the blood made him vomit. While he vomited, the other guy punched him senseless. Fogarty avoided fistfights, but when they were unavoidable he packed his nose with the cotton he always carried. He usually lost his fights, but after he understood his nose, he never again bled to the vomit point.

  He was thirty-five when I got to know him, pretty well recovered from a case of TB he'd picked up during his last year of college. He had a Fordham stringency that had gone sour on religion, but he still read books, liked O'Neill, and could talk a little Hamlet, because he'd played Laertes once in school. Jack used him as a driver but also trusted him with money and let him keep the books on beer distribution. But his main role was as Jack's sidekick. He looked like Eddie. And Eddie had died of TB.

  Fogarty was working as a bartender for Charlie Northrup when he first met Jack. He talked flatteringly about Jack's history when they sat across from each other at Northrup's roadhouse bar. Jack was new in the mountains and he quizzed Fogarty on the scene. What about the sheriff and the judges? Were they womanizers? Gamblers? Queers? Drunks? Merely greedy? Who ran beer in the mountains besides Northrup and the Clemente brothers?

  Fogarty gave Jack the answers, and Jack hired him away from Nor
thrup and gave him the pearl-handled .32 Eddie Diamond once owned. Fogarty carried it without loading it, giving it the equivalent menace of a one-pound rock. "You boys don't know it, but I've got you all covered with a one-pound rock. "

  "I don't want to get into any heavy stuff" is what he explained to Jack when he took the pistol.

  And Jack told him: "I know you better than that, Speed. I don't ask my tailor to fix my teeth."

  This arrangement suited Fogarty down to his socks. He could move among the big fellows, the tough fellows, without danger to himself. If he did not fight, he would not bleed.

  * * *

  Fogarty turned onto a winding narrow dirt road that climbed a few minor hills and then flattened out on a plateau surrounded by trees. Jimmy Biondo's place was an old white farmhouse with green shutters and green shingled roof. It sat at the end of the drive, and behind it stood a large unpainted barn as dilapidated as the house was elegant. Three moving shapes sat on the long front porch, rocking in green wicker rockers, their faces hidden from me by the newspapers they were all reading. The faces opened themselves to us when Fogarty stopped on the grass beside the house, and Jack, the first to stand, threw down the paper and bounded down the stairs to greet me. The woman, Alice, held the paper in her lap and looked at me with a smile. The second man was Jimmy Biondo, who owned the place but no longer used it, and rented it to Jack. He detached himself from Andy Gump to give me a look. "Welcome to God's country, Marcus," Jack said. He was in white ducks, brown and white wing tips, and a yellow silk sport shirt. A tan blazer hung on the back of his rocker.

  "God's country?" I said. "Fogarty told me Jimmy Biondo owned this place."

  Jack laughed and Jimmy actually smiled. A smile from Jimmy lit up the world like a three-watt bulb.

  "Look at this guy," Jack said to his wife and Jimmy, "a lawyer with a sense of humor. Didn't I tell you he was beautiful?"

  "I only let my mother call me beautiful," I said.

  What can I say? Jack laughed again. He liked my lines. Maybe it was my delivery or my funny old hat. Fogarty recognized me from the hat as soon as he saw me. It was all discolored at the front from where I touched it, crown and brim; the brim was split on the side and the black band raveling a little. It happened to be my favorite hat. People don't understand that some men need tradition as much as others need innovation. I doffed the hat when Alice came down the steps and characteristically asked me after our handshake, "Are you hungry? Have you had breakfast?"