Legs - William Kennedy

by William Kennedy

  Music greeted us when we walked through the old swinging doors, original doors that led to the Delaney time capsule. We walked under a four-globed chandelier and a four-bladed ceiling fan, past photos on the walls of old railroad men, old politicians, old bare-knuckle fighters, dead Maud Gonne's likeness sketched on a handbill announcing her appearance at Hibernian Hall to raise funds for a free Ireland, defunct Hibernian Society marching down State Street on a sunny Saint Patrick's Day in '95, disbanded private fire companies standing at attention in front of their pumpers, K. of C. beer drinkers, long in their graves, tapping a keg at a McKown's Grove clambake. I went back to Packy's now and again until the place burned down in 1942, when fire dumped all that old history of faces into the powdery ashpit. Nothing ever changed there, till then.

  Flossie was making the music when we walked in, the piano being her second talented instrument of pleasure. Flossie was a saucy blond cupcake then, not working directly out of Packy's, where sins of the flesh were traditionally prohibited on premises. But she was advertising from the piano bench and specializing in private sessions to augment her income after her musical workday. Ah, Floss. How well I remember your fingers, so educated to the music of joy.

  She was jangling away at the keyboard while Packy and another man delivered up some two-part harmony, not half-bad, of "Arrah-Go-On, I'm Gonna Go Back to Oregon," a song from the war years.

  "Now this is something like it," Jack said, and he walked ahead of me past the crowded bar toward an empty back table that gave a view of the door. Hubert, having deposited the truck for unloading inside Packy's garage, followed us; but Jack told him, "Watch the door and the street." And without a word Hubert went to the end of the bar and stood there alone while Packy pined for Oregon, where they'd call him Uncle Pat, not Uncle John. He gave Jack a smile on that line and an extended left arm that welcomed and introduced the hero to the customers who hadn't yet recognized him; Jack waved to half a dozen men at the bar looking our way.

  "You know those fellows?" he asked me.

  "I guess I've seen one or two around town."

  "All thieves or hustlers. This is a good place to buy yourself a new suit or a new radio cheap."

  Jack bought the drinks himself at the bar, then settled into a chair and gave full attention to Flossie's piano and Packy's baritone. Packy came to the table when his harmony ran out.

  "Fellow singing with me says he knows you, Jack."

  "I don't place him. "

  "Retired railroad cop and not a bad fellow for a cop. Nice tenor too, and he carries a tune. Hey, Milligan."

  The tenor came over and looked at us through cataract lenses. His hair was pure white and standing tall, and his magnified eyes and cryptic smile gave him the look of a man in disguise.

  "You don't remember me," he said to Jack.

  "Give me a clue."

  "Silk. New Jersey. l924."

  "Ah, right. I make you now. You pinched me."

  "You've got it. You were stealing the railroad blind, you and your brother."

  "I remember. You were in the house when I came home. Sure, I remember you now, you son of a bitch. You sapped me."

  "Only after you tried to kick me in the balls."

  "I forgot that."

  "You were out of jail quicker than I put you in."

  "I had some classy political connections in those days."

  "I know all about it. You remember anything else about that night? Remember singing a song coming up the stairs'?"

  "A song."

  "It was a favorite of mine and I said to myself, now this can't be such a bad fellow if he knows a song like that. Just about then you saw me and tried to kick me in the crotch."

  "I can't remember any song, Milligan, that your name?"

  "Milligan's right. You were drunk and howling it out like a banshee. Listen, see if you remember."

  He backstepped and put his hand on his stomach, then gave us:

  There's an old time melody,

  I heard long ago . . .

  "l damn well remember that," Jack said. '"One of my

  favorites."

  Mother called it the rosary,

  She sang it soft and low . . .

  Jack nodded, grinned, sat back, and listened as most of the customers were also listening now, not merely to Milligan, but to Milligan singing for Legs Diamond.

  Without any rhyme,

  I mean without any prose,

  I even forgot

  How the melody goes . . .

  Flossie found Milligan's key and trilled some soft background chords, a flicker of faint melody.

  But ten baby fingers . . .

  And then Jack could hold it back no longer and added a spoken line: "And ten baby toes . . ." And then together he and Milligan finished the song:

  She'd watch them by the setting sun,

  And when her daily work was done,

  She'd count them each and every one,

  That was my Mother's ro—sa-reeeeeeee.

  Flossie gave them a re-intro, and with Jack on melody, Milligan on first tenor, and Packy on baritone, the harmonizers sang mournfully, joyously, and profoundly out of the musical realm of their Irish Catholic souls. They sang for all the children who ever had mothers, for all the mothers who ever had children, and when it was over, Jack called out, "Flossie, love, let's do it again."

  "Anything for you, Jack. Anything you want."

  And the harmonizers moved closer together, their arms on each other's shoulders, and began once more:

  There's an old time melody,

  I heard long ago . . .

  We sang songs that way for three hours and drove everybody out of the bar, including the bartender. Packy made our drinks and Flossie stayed and played for us, long after her advertising day had ended without a client. But I think the Floss anticipated things to come, and rejected all Johns who had no hint of transcendence about their requests. I was drinking beer and Jack was not quite reckless, but was at the boilermakers. And so both of us were a little slow on the uptake when Hubert, back in from a reconnaissance walk up the block, quick-stepped over to our table and spoke his first words of the musical evening:

  "There's a guy in a car across the street, Jack. Two guys, in fact. One at the wheel looks like he's got that eyepatch you been looking for."

  * * *

  "Would that be The Goose?" Packy asked. "I heard he was around asking questions about you. "

  "Probably him," Jack said.

  "Then we've got to get you out of here," said The Pack. Of our little group of six, only Milligan did not know The Goose. But he asked no questions. The song was over, and Flossie's face showed it. Jack, on the other hand, seemed without tension, which, of course, he was not. Yet his control under the circumstances was almost equal to having none.

  "It's tricky with The Goose," he said. "He might break in here any minute and start blasting. That's nonprofessional, but he's crazy all the way now. People have to remember that."

  "Sure he's crazy," said Packy. "In and out of town all summer asking questions. "

  "He's made a game of it," Jack said. "He wants me to sweat."

  "But now he's outside," Hubert said, understandably perplexed by a discussion at such a moment. My own first thoughts were to evacuate the uninvolved from the premises, myself included. Yet it seemed cowardly to think of running away from only the possibility of somebody else's trouble. Yet there was the Hotsy to recall, where innocents were nicked by crossfire. So if you didn't run away, you might eventually be obliged to duck. It was the price of being Jack's companion.

  "Oh, sweet mother," Flossie said when the reality of The Goose hit her. Her face collapsed then, perhaps into a vision of Billy Blue. She was having a good time just before Billy got it, too.

  "I'll call the dicks, have 'em come down and pick him up," said Packy, nerve ends flaring, spinning on a proprietor's understandable confusion.

  "Pick him up for what?" Jack said. "Sitting in a car?"

  "I can
think of half a dozen charges if necessary," I said. "Getting them here seems to be the priority."

  Packy was already at the phone. Hubert locked the front door and said the two men were still in the maroon sedan, fifty feet from The Parody, across the street.

  "Maybe you should just stay here all night," I said. Jack nodded, aware of that possibility. Milligan pushed his chair away from the table, but didn't get up, an ambiguous gesture which suited an ex-cop in such a situation.

  "You don't know if they'll come or not," Packy said after his call. "I got Conlon on the desk, the prick. You never know what they're gonna do for you. Or to you. He said the lieutenant was at a big fire up in the West Albany railroad shops. He'll try to tear a car loose. The prick, the prick."

  "They want me dead, too," Jack said.

  "I never liked that Conlon," Milligan said, "but I never took a backstep from him or any of them up there. I'll call him."

  "It's not your problem, Milligan," Jack said, amused by the old man's concern.

  "'I always try to keep down violence in the city," said Milligan. "Valuable citizens involved here"—and he gave me a quick eye and a wink and went to the phone. I was left to look at Jack, who'd barely been able to move a shotglass with his left arm all night. He was living mainly by the use of one hand, a liability, should he be forced to confront The Goose in any physical way. Hubert was a good shot, which was one reason Jack hired him; but so was The Goose, and who knew about his faceless helper? Jack would be on the short end of any fight. a fact I was just coming to understand.

  Milligan came back. "I called Cap Ronan, but no answer. Maybe he's out at the fire, too. Then I called Conlon again and told him the trouble here personally. He got the message." Milligan sat down and waited, though he was free to leave. But he would then miss how it all came out, miss the test of cop-to-cop influence. No police came. Sorry, Milligan.

  I've since concluded Jack was right. They would have welcomed his assassination, were perhaps even aware one was impending. The police were called often about Jack during this period: Did Diamond get it yet? . . . He's going to get it tonight. I sensed then, my innocence on such matters at last thinning out, that Jack was not really an enemy of the police as much as he was an object of their envy. I can imagine a roomful of them talking about ways to annihilate his privilege.

  Hubert announced from the door: "They put their headlights on. They're moving."

  "Thank God," said the Floss.

  "They're probably not going anyplace," Jack said. And he was right again. Within a few minutes they had parked facing the opposite direction, on The Parody side of the street now, still about fifty feet away.

  "They just wanted to look in," Jack said.

  The car movement prodded all of us except Jack into standing up and moving around. We turned our attention to each other, and finally, one by one, to Jack for the decision was his alone. Go or stay? Barricade or open season? Packy would probably resent, but maybe not resist a barricade fight. Damage would be minimal, apart from any death, but the legend would be immortal, a shrine of gold established in perpetuity.

  Only Hubert lacked doubt about what he was to do. His pistol was already part of our little group because of the way he kept fingering it inside his coat pocket. Jack knew what he was doing when he hired Hubert.

  "You have an extra pistol?" Jack asked Packy.

  "How many? I got a collection."

  "Two then, and shells."

  Packy unlocked a closet beneath the back bar and brought out a pair of unmatched handguns, one an old Smith and Wesson .32 which I came to know well, its patent dating to 1877, an ugly little bone-handled, hammerless bellygun that was giving in to rust and had its serial number at the base of the butt filed away. No serious gunfighter would have given it room in the cellar. Packy had probably bartered it for beer. Useless, foolhardy, aggravating weapon. It had a broken mechanism behind the firing pin then and still has, but under ideal circumstances it would fire, and it still will. Ugly, deformed little death messenger, like a cobra on a crutch.

  "This is insane," I finally said. "We sit here watching a man prepare for a gun battle, and we know damn well there are other ways to solve the problem. The whole world hasn't gone nuts. Why not call the state police?"

  "Call the governor," Jack said. "He'll want to keep me healthy."

  "Not a bad idea," I said.

  "Call my relatives in Philadelphia," Jack said. "Call your own relatives. Call all your friends and tell them we've got an open house here, free booze. Build up a mob in fifteen minutes. "

  "Another brilliant idea," I said.

  "But what do I do tomorrow night'?" Jack said.

  He loaded one of Packy's pistols while we thought about that one. Flossie decided she was not ready for fatalism.

  "If you go upstairs, he'll never find you," she said.

  "Where upstairs?"

  "My upstairs. Where I go in a pinch."

  "You got a place upstairs?"

  "A place, yeah. But not really a place."

  "He comes in here, don't you figure he'll look upstairs?"

  "He'd never find my place, that's the whole point. If you're up there and we go, and the place is dark, he'd never find you in a thousand years. It ain't even in this same building."

  "The Goose is thick, but thorough," Jack said. "I wouldn't trust him not to find it."

  "Then let's go meet the Polack son of a bitch on the street," Hubert said. "Goddamn fucking sitting ducks here, the hell with it."

  "None of this makes sense," I said. "Going, staying, not getting any help, not even trying to get any."

  "One night at a time," Jack said. "You work it out slow. I know a lot of dead guys tried to solve a whole thing all at once when they weren't ready. And listen. It's also time you all cleared out."

  '"I think I'll have another beer," I said, and I sat down at the end barstool farthest from the door. Milligan sat alongside me and said, "I'll have one for the road."

  "I'll be closing up after one drink," Packy said, going behind the bar. "I'll put the lights out and leave. I'll get a cop down here if I have to drag him down with a towrope."

  Jack shrugged.

  "Upstairs then," he said to Flossie. "I guess that's the place."

  "Follow me," she said.

  "Is there a way back down except through here?"

  "Two stairways," Packy said. "It's an old loft. They used to have a peanut butter factory up there."

  "Jesus, a peanut butter factory?"

  "It faces the other side, on Dongan Avenue, and there's no windows. Flossie is right. Nobody'd ever think we were connected to it. Just a quirk of these antique buildings.

  They made connections you wouldn't believe in these old relics."

  "Nothing'll happen if The Goose doesn't come in here," I said. "Isn't that right?"

  "I don't think he'll come inside anyplace," Jack said, "and he don't want to hurt anybody but me. But he's a maniac, so how do you know anything he'll do? You all should wait for Flossie to come back down and then clear the hell out of here. Hubert and I can wait it out."

  That seemed workable. But I said, "I'll keep you company," and Jack laughed and laughed. I didn't think it was that funny, but he said, "All right, let's move," and I took my bottle of beer and followed him and Hubert to the place where there was no longer any peanut butter.

  * * *

  Flossie led us up an unsafe staircase, through musty corridors, through a rough doorway in the brick wall of another building, and through still more corridors, all in darkness, each of us holding the hand of the other. When she finally lit a kerosene lamp, we were in the loft, a large empty space with a warped floor, a skylight with some of its panes broken and now an access route to a pigeon perch. The pigeons had created a pair of three-inch stalagmites with their droppings, rather brilliant aim, as I remember it. The room held only an old Army cot with an olive-drab blanket and a pillow without a pillowcase. A raw wooden box stood alongside the bed for use as a table
, and a straight-back wooden chair stood alongside that. There was nothing else in the room except for the cobwebs, the dust, the rat leavings, and a plentiful scatter of peanut shells.

  "You know, Jack," Flossie said, "I never use this place except in special emergencies that can't wait. I keep a sheet downstairs. I could go get it."

  "Maybe another time, kid," Jack said, and squeezed her rump with his good hand.

  "You haven't grabbed me in years, Jack."

  "I'd love to think about getting back to that."

  "Well, don't you neglect it. Oh, sweet Jesus, look at that."

  She pointed to a wall behind Jack where an enormous rat, bigger than a jackrabbit I'd say, looked out at us, his eyes shining red in the light, white markings under his jaw. He was halfway out of a hole in the wall, about four feet from the floor. He looked like a picture on the wall. As the light reached him, we could see he was gray, brown, and white, the weirdest, handsomest rat I ever saw, and in the weirdest position. A bizarre exhibit, if stuffed, I thought.

  "I never saw him up here before," Flossie said.

  The rat watched us with brazen calm.

  "He was here first tonight," Jack said, and he sat on the bed and took off his suit coat. Flossie put the lamp on the box table and told us, "I'll come back and let you know what's going on. I don't know if Delaney's going out, but I'm damn well staying."

  "Lovely, Flossie, lovely," said Jack.

  "He'd never find his way up here, Jack," she said. "Just stay put."

  "I want Hubert to check all the stairs. Can he be seen from outside if he walks with the lamp?"

  "Not a chance."

  Flossie took the lamp, leaving Jack and me in darkness, the stars and a bright moony sky the only source of our light.

  "Some great place to wind up," Jack said.

  "I'm sitting down while I consider it," I said and groped toward the chair. "I mean while I consider what the hell I'm doing here. "

  "You're crazy. I always knew it. You wear crazy hats."

  Flossie came back with the kerosene lamp and put it back on the box.

  "I lit one of my candles and gave it to Hubert," she said. "I'll be back."

  Some moths joined us in the new light and Jack sat down on the cot. The rat was still watching us. Jack put the two pistols Packy gave him on the box. He also took a small automatic out of his back pocket. It fit in his palm, the same kind of item he fired between Weissberg's feet in Germany.