Legs - William Kennedy

by William Kennedy

  the summer.

  Jack had been making plans to merge with Vincent Coll and Fats McCarthy, substitute their mob for his own, refurbish the Catskill scene, and maybe put a toe in the door of the Adirondacks. But Johnny Broderick and a squad of New York dicks followed Coll's crowd up from Manhattan and raided them in Coxsackie, hauling in about a dozen. They missed Coll and McCarthy, who along with a few stragglers holed up in an artist's home in Averill Park, a crossroads summer town east of Troy, where Jack and Coll occasionally met and tried to cook up a future for themselves.

  It was a depressing time for Jack. Kiki had to take an apartment away from the Kenmore when the state police began to breathe heavily around the lobby, and Alice was delighted to get rid of the competition. But Jack took Kiki out regularly and brought her back to the hotel for visits after the first trial, and Alice finally said good-bye forever, folks, and went to live in her Manhattan apartment on Seventy-second Street.

  The acquittal in Troy came in early July, the federal conviction in early August, and the state announced it would try Jack on a second Streeter charge, kidnapping, in December. It was a very long, very hot summer for all of us, but especially Jack, like the predator wolf pushed ever farther from civilization by angry men, who was learning the hard way how to die.

  * * *

  Jack's federal conviction drove a spike of gloom into everybody. Jack insisted on trying to buy a retrial, his hangover from the days when Rothstein had money in everybody's mouth, all the way up to the Presidential cabinet. That money had bought Jack a delay on a federal charge of smuggling heroin for Rothstein, the noted bowling pin case, and Jack died without ever having to face up to the evidence against him.

  "The fuckers are all the same, all the way to the top," he said to me one night. "They'll do you any favor you can pay for."

  But times had changed to a certain unpredictable degree in Manhattan, especially for people like Jack. The new federal crowd was young, imbued with Seaburyism, and still unbuyable. Even if we had found somebody to buy, there was the case of the diminishing bankroll. The first thing Jack did after he got out of the Catskill jail on bail was to take the one hundred and eighty thousand dollars I'd held for him in safe deposit. That still seemed like a lot of money to me, but it wasn't for Jack. He owed everybody: me, the hospital, the doc, his barber, his waiter, the hotel, his driver, Hubert the bodyguard, infinite numbers of bartenders who would now and in the future provide him with service. He was keeping apartments in Troy, Watervliet, Albany, East Greenbush, a house in Petersburg, and probably six or eight other cities I don't know about. He was keeping Kiki. He was subsidizing Alice in Manhattan. And, and most costly of all, he was paying off politicians everywhere to keep his freedom, keeping them from infecting him with further trouble. The one hundred and eighty thousand dollars went in a few months, or so Jack said, though I think he must have kept a secret nest egg somewhere, and if he did, of course, he kept it utterly to himself. He didn't leave the egg with me. I also know Vincent Coll offered him a loan of ten thousand dollars after a nifty Coll snatch of a Saratoga gambler, and a handsome ransom of sixty-five thousand dollars; and Jack took it.

  He coped with the money problem like the pragmatist he had come to be. He went back to work. I met him at the Albany Elks Club bar on a steamy August evening after a day at Saratoga had given me nothing but the aesthetic boredom of picking losers under the elms of the track's stylish old clubhouse and paddock. I came back to town alone, feeling curiously empty for no reason I could explain. The emptiness was a new development. I decided, after six beers, that I hadn't felt this way since that day I was sitting alone in the K. of C. library. And when this thought registered, I knew the problem was Jack-related. My life was far from empty professionally. Since Jack's acquittal in Troy the calls were flooding in and I could name my price for trial work. Was it, then, the loss of a political career? Like an amputated leg, that particular part of me did pain, even though it wasn't there, and yet I was simultaneously relieved at never having to be a politician. It was such a vapid way to spend your life, and a slavish game, too, slavish to the political clubroom crowd, even to the Elks Club where I was standing, a superb fragment of all I found stagnant, repulsive, and so smugly corrupt in Albany. The Democratic bagman, though it was two months till election, was already in his corner of the card room (two city detectives watching the door), accepting tithes from everybody who fed at the county courthouse or city hall troughs—janitors, lawyers growing fat from the surrogate court, vendors, bankers, cops, firemen, secretaries, clerks, contractors. The pattern was consistent with Jack's notion of how an empire should be run. Everybody pays.

  Just as I liked Jack, I also liked the old bagman. He was a dandy and a curmudgeon and a wily and wise old Irishman who had read his Yeats and Wilde as well as his Croker and Tweed. I also liked the men who were next to me at the bar. They were men I'd been raised with, men who knew my father and my uncles: tradesmen and sportswriters and other lawyers and politicians and factory hands who liked pinochle and euchre and salesmen who liked to bowl and drink beer, and, of course, of course, Jack.

  Most of the Elks who talked frankly with me were confused by his presence. They knew what his minions had done at the Elks Club in Catskill, which bothered them far more than the kidnapping of Streeter or making Charlie Northrup disappear. They didn't really want Jack around. But they were also awed when he walked in, flattered when he bought them a drink, and marked forever when he put his arm on their shoulder and talked baseball with them. Hello, Bill! Hello, Jack! Brotherrrrrrrrrrrrr!

  "Counselor," Jack said to me when he moved in alongside me at the bar, "I'm going to buy you a new hat."

  "'So you're at that again," I said.

  "The heat must've got to it, Marcus. It's dead for sure. Take a look."

  I looked at my trusty old Panama, which had aged considerably since I last examined it, I must admit. "Well, it's getting old, Jack, but then so are we all. And I do feel compassion for things that are deteriorating visibly."

  "Whataya say, you want to take a ride?"

  "Sounds sinister, Jack. My father warned me about taking rides with strange gangsters. "

  "Little business trip, and what the hell, it's too goddamn hot to stand here smelling armpits. The air'll do you good. Blow the stink off you. "

  "You're right, I could stand a change. Who's driving?"

  "Hubert."

  "Ah, Hubert. I still find it hard to believe you've got somebody named Hubert in your employ."

  "Good kid, Hubert. Does what he's told."

  We left the bar and walked out to the top of the club's stone stoop, which faced on State Street. It was middle evening, the streetlights on, but the sun still making long shadows. We looked up toward Capitol Park, where Hubert went for the car, where General Philip Sheridan, another Albany Irishman, sat astride his horse, riding into eternity. There were only the two of us on the stoop, which struck me as unnecessarily foolish, given the recurring rumor of gunmen out to get Jack.

  "We make nice targets for your friends here," I said.

  "Fuck it. You can't live like a rat in a hole forever."

  I could only agree with that, which straightened my back. How little encouragement it takes to place oneself in jeopardy.

  "What's this business trip you've got planned?"

  "A small delivery to a customer."

  "You don't mean you want me to join you on a booze run."

  "Relax, would I do that to you? We won't be in the same vehicle with the stuff. And it's only beer. We'll follow the truck, well back. Plenty safe. Up to Troy, back down to Packy Delaney's. It's a favor for Packy and I'm glad to do it. I like The Pack."

  "I do myself."

  "I'm glad for the ride, too," Jack said. "Jesus, I get bored easy lately. "

  "We've got the same affliction."

  Hubert pulled up and we headed for Stell's, a busy Troy brewery run by a gang of beer-savvy Dutchmen Jack had been doing business with for years.
But the pickup and delivery of the moment would be a departure for Jack: made in a borrowed truck by the man himself, notable status reduction. His excuse was he was doing Packy a favor. "He's in a bind with his Albany supplier, hates the beer he has, but he's gotta take it." It proved to be the other way around, Packy responding to Jack's request for a loan with a pragmatic substitute—a deal. Packy would buy the beer at Jack's price, even though he didn't need it; Jack would show a profit, Packy would avoid making a cash loan that would probably never be repaid, and Packy would have the beer, at least, to show for his investment.

  We drove up Broadway and through North Albany, past the streets of my own neighborhood: Emmett, Albany, Mohawk, Genesee, Erie, then the park in front of Sacred Heart Church on Walter and North Second Streets, a view which provided me with a pang of recognition and a sliver of insight which made this trip worth recording. I remembered how my father looked, sitting on a park bench in the years just before his death, teeth too prominent, like a skull's mindless grin, his brain almost as white as his hair, watching the trolleys go to Troy and back. I tried to imagine what that man, who never stole a nickel in his life, would make of his son being on Jack's payroll, a speculation which, I know, reveals more of me than of the old man.

  My father was not a religious man in his youth and middle years. He routinely did his Easter duty, kept the Commandments, but often slept through the Sunday slate of masses. Yet he ended his days at daily mass, even serving for the priest when the altar boy of the day overslept. I've long tried to persuade myself that his final conversion to piety was more than simplistic fear of the next, for my father was complex, a teacher, a Latin scholar who named me for his favorite Stoic. Remembering him, then, at that moment by the park when I was also conscious of how Jack was regularly telling his beads, and when l was questioning my own irrational reading of Aquinas long after I'd lost my faith, I knew all three of us were hounded by religious confusion: Jack out of Saint Anne's, both my father and I out of Sacred Heart, products all of the ecclesiastical Irish sweat glands, obeisant before the void, trying to discover something.

  And as we passed Sacred Heart, I looked at Jack and said to him, "My old man used to sit in that park and watch the world go by when he got old."

  Jack craned his neck for a look, smiling at the thought. His own yellowing skin, and his teeth with too much prominence, gave me back the face of my father. And thought then that I knew what they were both looking for. I thought: They have misplaced tomorrow and are looking for it. And the search is ruining today.

  * * *

  We stopped at a garage on Fourth Street in Troy to pick up the truck Jack was borrowing from a fellow named Curley, who once drove for him. Curley had gone off on his own and now had a fleet of Macks and Reos which did heavy duty on the highways on behalf of public thirst. Hubert got the keys for our truck and drove it from a back lot to the gas pump in front of the garage, where a kid attendant in overalls gassed us up with Socony.

  "You want any cupcakes tonight, Legs?" the kid asked. "Why not?" Jack said and gave him a ten-dollar bill. When the tank was full, the kid ran across the street to an old lady's grocery and came back with three cupcakes in cellophane and an opened bottle of sarsaparilla. Jack ate a cake and sucked at the soda for the kid, who wanted to be near Jack, do things for him.

  "You think you can beat that federal rap on an appeal, Legs?"

  "A sure thing, kid. Don't bet against me."

  The kid—with his freckles, his large Irish teeth, and a cowlick his barber didn't understand—laughed and said, "Bet against you? Never do that."

  "Listen, kid," Jack said, and I can hear Cagney telling Billy Halop almost the same thing years later, "don't get the wrong idea about me. I'm not going to live much longer. I got more metal in me than I got bones. Stay in school. The rackets are a bum life. There ain't no heroes in the rackets."

  "I heard you were on the spot," the kid said. "That true?"

  Jack gave him a happy grin. "I been on the spot all my life."

  "I heard a rumor there's guys around want to get you."

  "The word's even out to the kids," Jack said to me.

  "I wouldn't tell 'em nothing if they come here," the kid said.

  "Attaboy," Jack said.

  "You know I didn't say nothin' about the panel truck."

  "I know that."

  "I heard one of the guys looking for you is called Goose."

  "Yeah'? What else do you hear?"

  "That they were asking questions up in Foley's last week."

  "Nothing since then?"

  "Nothing."

  "I heard about that," Jack said. "It's all over with. The Goose flew south."

  "It's okay then," the kid said. "Good news."

  "Give your old lady some good news, kid. Don't mess in the rackets."

  "Okay, Legs."

  Jack tipped him five and got behind the wheel of his Lincoln, which he was buying on time. Within a month he'd be too broke to keep it. I got in and we followed Hubert to the brewery, where Jack paid for the beer and saw it loaded. Then we headed for Packy's in downtown Albany. We took a back road from Troy through North Greenbush and into Rensselaer, a town like Albany, where Jack was safe passing through with wet goods, across the Dunn Bridge and up to Packy's on Green Street.

  "What was that panel truck the kid mentioned?" I asked when we were rolling again.

  "Heavy load of booze. We parked it there one night we were being chased. Oxie sat in it all night with a machine gun."

  "That was nice advice you gave the kid. But I can't believe you don't want disciples in your own image, like the rest of us."

  "Kid's too soft," Jack said. "If he was tougher, I'd tell him, 'Go ahead kid, see how tough you really are,' line him up behind all the other tough guys waiting to die young, let him take his chances. Sure I'd tell him about the easy money, easy pussy, living high. But I like that kid. "

  "You liked Fogarty too. Why'd you take him in?"

  "He reminded me of Eddie."

  "But you let him sink."

  "Did I? You had more say over that than me."

  "I told you I get paid for what I do. And it was you who said the hell with him, that he was never any good."

  "He wasn't. You saw he turned stool pigeon. He was a weak sister. What'd he expect me to do, mother him? Rothstein not only dumped me, he tried to kill me. But I never blew the whistle on him. Never trust a pussy freak. Fogarty's cock ran ahead of him like a headlight. Made a sucker of a good guy. Why not let him sink? I'd let anybody sink except Eddie. And Alice and Marion. I'd even let you sink, Marcus."

  "I know. And I'd do the same for you, Jack. But the difference is that I'm just a businessman and you're a prick in your heart."

  "Pricks are the only ones got it made in this world."

  "That's a chump's line."

  "Maybe. I look like a chump these days."

  "Chumps never know who their real friends are. "

  "Friends," said Jack. "I got no friends. You and me, we're just knockin' around, passing the time. You're all right, Marcus, and I always said so, but I only had one friend my whole goddamn life. My brother Eddie. Came down from Saranac when he was dying to help me during the Hotsy thing. Christ, we set up a meeting in the subway, Twenty-eighth Street, and he was all dressed up, coconut straw, brown palm beach, and a new white silk shirt with a lemon tie, looked like a million except you could've got two other guys inside the suit with him. He wanted to make collections for me, wanted to run the operation while I was hiding out. Said he'd do anything and the poor bastard could hardly breathe. We talked an hour, and when we got up to go, I was holding him and he started giving me the Holy Roller malarkey. He got religion up in Saranac and they were calling him The Saint. Used to go around visiting in his wheelchair, seeing guys who couldn't move a muscle, who were afraid to fucking breathe. Really selling me hard, and so I said to him, forget that guff, Ed, it's not my style. You'll come around, he said, and I say in a pig's whistle, and he keeps a
t it, so I finally say will you for crissake shut up about it? And we're up in the street by then, so I hailed a taxi to get him back to the Commodore where he had a room. And when I let go of his arm, he fell down and Christ Jesus, he let out a cough I thought his whole insides was liquid. Death rattle is what it was. Fantastic horrible goddamn gurgle. He only lasted a couple of months more. Shortened his life coming down to help me out. Couldn't do a goddamn thing for anybody, but he tried, the son of a bitch tried with all he fucking had. That's what's friends, Marcus. That's what I call friends."

  Jack, the gush, was crying.

  * * *

  Old Joe Delaney opened The Parody Club in 1894 to appease a capricious thirst that took hold of him at odd hours, often after the city's saloons had closed. He ran it until 1919 and dated his retirement to the day a hod carrier swooned at the bar and crumpled like a corpse. Delaney's son Packy (né Patrick), apprenticing as a bartender after a stint with the AEF, looked the hoddy over, kicked his ass, and yelled in his ear, "Get up and go home, you stewbum."

  "A born saloonkeeper," the elder Delaney rejoiced, yielding swiftly then to the pull of retirement in his favorite chair, where he died five years later with a bent elbow and foam on his handlebars.