Legs

by William Kennedy

  "You've been carrying that around?"

  "A fella needs a friend," he said.

  "That'd be lovely, picked up with a gun at this point. How many trials do you think you can take?"

  "Hey, Marcus, I'm tryin' to stay alive. You understand that?"

  "Let Hubert carry the weapons. That's what he's for."

  "Right. Soon as I hear The Goose is gone. Long as he's in town there's liable to be shooting, and I might stay alive if I can shoot back. You on tap for that?"

  He picked up the Smith and Wesson and handed it to me. "The Goose only wants me, but he'd shoot anything that moved or breathed. I don't want to make it tough for you, old pal, but that's where you're livin' right this minute. You're breathing."

  He had a point; I loaded the weapon. In a pinch I could say I pocketed the pistol when we all fled from the maniac. Jack fell backward on Flossie's dusty cot and said to me, "Marcus, I decided something. Right now there's nothing in the whole fucking world I want to steal. "

  I thought that was a great line and it was my turn to laugh. Jack laughed, too, then said, "Why is that so funny?"

  "Why? Well, here I am, full of beer and holding a gun, joined up with a wild man to hide from a psychopath, watching the stars, staring at a red-eyed rat, and listening to Jack Diamond, a master thief of our day, telling me he's all through stealing. Jesus Christ, this is an insane life, and I don't know the why of any of it."

  "Well, I don't either. I don't say I'm swearing off, because I am what I am. But I say I don't want to steal anything now. I don't want to make another run. I don't want to fight The Goose. I suppose I will, sooner or later, him or some other bum they send."

  "Who is they?"

  "Take your pick. They get in line to shoot at me."

  "But you won't shoot back anymore?"

  "I don't know. Maybe, maybe not."

  "The papers would eat this up. Jack Diamond's vengeance ends in peanut butter factory."

  "Anybody can get revenge. All it costs is a few dollars. I don't want to touch it anymore, not personally."

  "Are you just tired? Weary?"

  "Maybe something like that."

  "You don't believe in God, so it's not your conscience."

  "No."

  "It's caution, but not just caution."

  "No."

  "It's self-preservation, but not just that either."

  "You could say that. "

  "Now I've got it. You don't know what's going on either."

  "Right, pal."

  "The mystery of Jack Diamond's new life, or how he found peace among the peanut shells."

  I was too tired, too hot, too drunk to sit up any longer. I slid off the chair onto the floor, clutching the remnants of my beer in my left hand, the snotty little Smith and Wesson in my right, believing with an odd, probably impeachable faith, that if I survived this night I would surely become rich somehow and that I would tell the story of the red-eyed rat to my friends, my clients and my grandchildren. The phrase "If I survived" gave me a vicious whack across the back of the head. That was a temporary terror, and it eventually left me. But after this night I knew I would never again feel safe under any circumstances. Degeneration of even a marginal sense of security. Kings would die in the bedchambers of their castles. Assassination squads would reach the inner sanctum of the Presidential palace. The lock on the bedroom window would not withstand the crowbar. Such silly things. Of course, this goes on, Marcus, of course. Mild paranoia is your problem.

  Yes. That's it. It goes on and finally I know it. I truly know it and feel it.

  No. There is more to it than that. Jack knows more. Flossie came running. Cops down in the street. Taking Goose away. You can come down. Packy's buying. Milligan got through.

  Six detectives, oh, yes. How lovely.

  Jack leaped off the bed and was gone before I could sit up.

  "Are you comin' too, love? Or can't you move?" the Floss asked me. In my alcoholic kerosene light she was the Cleopatra of peanut-butterland. Her blond hair was the gold of an Egyptian sarcophagus, her eyes the Kohinoor diamond times two.

  "Don't go, Flossie," I said and stunned her. I'd known the Floss now and again, sumptuous knowledge, but not in a couple of years. It was past, my interest in professionals. I had a secretary, Frances. But now Flossie's breasts rose and fell beneath her little cotton transparency in a way that had been inviting all of us all night long, and when she had half turned to leave, when my words of invitation stopped her, I caught a vision of her callipygian subtleties, like the ongoing night, never really revealed to these eyes before. She came toward me as I lay flat on my back, ever so little bounce in the splendid upheaval of her chest, vision too of calf without blemish, without trace of muscular impurity. None like Floss on this earth tonight, not for Marcus.

  "Do you want something from me?" she said, bending forward, improving the vision fiftyfold, breathing her sweet, alcoholic whore's breath at me. I loosened my hand from the beer and reached for her, touched her below the elbow, first flesh upon first flesh of the evening. Client at last.

  "Come up on the cot, love," she said, but I shook my head and pulled the blanket to the floor. She doubled it as the moon shone on her. The rat was watching us. I raised the pistol and potshot it, thinking of it dying with a bullet through its head and hanging there on the wall; then thinking of framing it or stuffing it in that position, photographing the totality of the creature in its limp deathperch and titling it "Night Comes to the Peanut Butter Factory."

  My shot missed and the rat disappeared back into the wall.

  "Jesus, Mary, and Holy Saint Joseph," Flossie said at the shot, which sounded like a cannon. "What are you doing?"

  "Potting the rat."

  "Oh, honeyboy, you're so drunk. Give us that pistol."

  "Of course, Flossie"—and she put it on the table out of my reach. The stars shone on her then as she unbuttoned her blouse, unhooked her skirt, folded the clothes carefully and lay them at the foot of the cot. She wore nothing beneath them, the final glory. She helped prepare me as the men moved in with the peanut butter machine and the women arrived to uncrate the nuts.

  "It's been a while, hasn't it?" the Floss said to me.

  "Only yesterday, Floss, only yesterday."

  "Sometimes I feel that way, Marcus, but not tonight."

  "It's always yesterday, Floss. That's what's so great."

  "Tonight is something else. "

  "What is it?"

  "It's better. It's got some passion in it."

  "Lovely passion."

  "I don't get at it very often."

  "None of us do."

  The rat came back to his perch and watched us. The sodden air rose up through the skylight and mated with the nighttime breezes. The machine began to whirr and a gorgeous ribbon of golden peanut butter flowed smoothly out of its jaws. Soon there were jars of it, crates of jars, stacks of crates.

  "Isn't it lovely?" said Flossie, flat on her back.

  "It's the most ineffable of products," I said. "The secret substance of life. If only the alchemists knew of this. "

  "Who were the alchemists?" she asked.

  "Shhhh," I said.

  And instead of talking, Flossie made me a peanut butter sandwich, and we fortified ourselves against the terror.

  JACK O' THE CLOCK

  Jack walked up Second Street in Troy, dressed in his double-breasted chinchilla coat and brown velour fedora, walked between his attorney and his wife, a family man today, Kiki discreetly tucked away in the love nest. Jack walked with his hands in his pocket, the press swarming toward him as he was recognized. How do you feel, Legs? Any statement, Mr. Gorman? Do you have faith in your husband's innocence, Mrs. Diamond?

  "You guys are responsible for all this," Jack said to the newsmen. "I wouldn't be in trouble if it wasn't for you sonsabitches."

  "Keep out the cuss words, boys," I said to the press. I smiled my Irish inheritance, easing the boys.

  "What'll you make your cas
e on, counselor?" Tipper Kelly said. "Same as the first trial? An alibi?"

  "Our case is based wholly on self-defense," I said. Self-defense against a kidnapping charge. Jack laughed. His loyal wife laughed. The newsmen laughed and made notes. A bon mot to start the day.

  "How do you feel about all this, Mrs. Diamond?"

  "I'll always be at his side," said Alice.

  "Don't bother her," said Jack.

  "She's just a loyal wife to a man in trouble," I said.

  "That's why she's here."

  "That's right," said Alice. "I'm a loyal wife. I'll always be loyal, even after they kill him."

  "We mustn't anticipate events," I said.

  The gray neo-classical Rensselaer County courthouse, with its granite pillars, stood tall over Legs Diamond: legs of Colossus, as this peanut man walked beneath them.

  Birds roosted on the upper ledges. A stars and stripes snapped in the breeze. As Legs brushed the wall with his shoulder, dust fell from the pillars.

  The Pathé News cameraman noted the action and the consequence and asked Legs to come back and do it again. But, of course, Legs could not commit precisely the same act a second time, since every act enhanced or diminished him as well as the world around him. Yet it was that precise moment, that push, that almost imperceptible fall of dust, the cameraman wanted on film.

  As the crowd moved into the courtroom the cameraman exercising a bit of creative enterprise, lifted Legs Diamond's coat and hat from the cloakroom. He dressed his slightly built assistant cameraman in the garments and sent him up the stairs to brush the wall for a repeat performance. The Pathé News cameraman then filmed it all. Inspecting the floor for a closeup, he discovered that the dust that fell was not dust at all, but pigeon shit.

  * * *

  In the crowded hallway of the courthouse, during a brief moment when no one was holding his arm, a youth Jack did not know separated himself from the mob and whispered, "You're gonna get it, Diamond, no matter what happens here. Wanna take it now?" Jack looked at the kid—maybe nineteen, maybe twenty-two, with a little fuzz on his lip and a bad haircut—and he laughed. The kid eased himself back into the crowd, and Jack, pulled by me toward the courtroom, lost sight of him.

  "Kid was braggin'," Jack said, telling me about the threat. "He looked like a hundred-dollar pay killer. Too green to be in the big money." Jack shook his head in a way I took to be an amused recognition of his own lowly condition. They send punk kids after me.

  But I also saw a spot of white on his lower lip, a spot of bloodlessness. He bit at the spot, again and again. The bite hardened his face, as if he were sucking the blood out of the point of his own fear, so that when the threat became tangible it would not bleed him into weakness. It struck me as a strange form of courage, but not as I knew it for myself : no intellectual girding, but rather a physiological act: a Jack Diamond of another day, recollected not by the brain but by the body, his back to a cave full of unexplored dangers of its own, staring out beyond a puny fire, waiting for the unspecified enemy who tonight, or tomorrow night, or the next, would throw a shadow across that indefensible hearth.

  * * *

  By eight o'clock on the evening of the first day of Jack's second Troy trial, both the prosecution and the defense attorneys had exhausted their peremptory challenges and the final juror was at last chosen. He was an auto mechanic who joined two farmers, a printer, an engineer, a mason, a lumber dealer, an electrical worker, two laborers, a merchant, and a plant foreman as the peers, the twelve-headed judge, of Legs Diamond. I had sought to relieve the maleness by accepting two female jurors, but Jack's appeal to women had been too widely documented for the prosecution to take such a risk, and both were challenged. The prosecution's chief trial counsel was a man named Clarence Knought, who wore a gray, hard-finish, three-button herringbone with vest, gray tie, watch chain, and rimless glasses. His thin lips, receding hairline, gaunt figure, and voice, which lacked modulation but gained relentless moral rectitude through its monotony, provided the jury with the living image of New York State integrity, American Puritanism, and the Columbian quest for perfect justice. He spoke for twenty minutes, outlining the case against Legs Diamond, whom he called Diamond. He recapitulated the kidnapping of Streeter and Bartlett in his opening summary, savoring the punching of Streeter, the death threats, the burning and the hanging, details which landed on the jurors' faces like flying cockroaches. The recapitulation set off an uncontrollable twitching in one juror's cheek, dilated just about every eye, wrinkled eyebrows, and dried up lips. Having filled the jurors with terror, Knought congratulated them.

  "You are privileged," he told them. "You have the chance to rid this nation of one of its worst scourges. You have the chance to put behind bars this man Diamond, this figure of unmitigated evil, this conscienceless devil who has been arrested twenty-five times for every crime from simple assault to foul, vicious murder, whose association with the worst men of our time has been widely reported in the press and whose record of having cheated justice again and again is an appalling blot on our national image. Shall this nation be ruled by the rod? Shall this ogre of bestial behavior paralyze every decent man's heart? You twelve can end this travesty, put him in the penitentiary where he belongs."

  Knought breathed fury, thumped the railing of the jury box with his fist, then walked to his chair and sat down in a cloud of legitimized wrath.

  I rose slowly from my chair alongside Jack, this thought in my head as I did: O priggish stringbean, thank you for befouling my client with your excremental denunciation, with the ordurous funk of your morality, for you now give me the opportunity to wipe this beshitted countenance clean and show the human face beneath the fetid desecration. My image before the jury was calculatedly bumpkinish, my clothes workingman's best, aspiring to shabby genteel. I tweaked my bow tie and ran my fingers through my unruly head of hair, which I was told, seemed as gifted with wild statement as the brain it covered. The head was leonine, the mane controlled just this side of bushy frazzle. I wore an apple-red vest, high contrast to my baggy-kneed brown tweed suit. I tucked thumbs in vest and unleashed the major weapon of the defense—my voice—that timbre of significance, that resonant spume of the believer, that majestic chord of a man consecrated to the revelation of boilingly passionate truths. I said:

  "I expect low blows from the prosecution's lawyers—all seven of them. Are you aware, my friends, that the state has seven lawyers climbing over one another in a frantic effort to railroad one frail man into jail? Yes, I expected their low blows, but never such base name calling as we have just heard—'figure of unmitigated evil,' 'conscienceless devil,' 'ogre of bestial behavior.' I would never have dreamed of telling you what I am about to tell if this champion of self-righteousness had not been so vitriolic a few moments ago, so full of acid and poison toward my client. But I will tell you now. I will tell you of the little old lady—no, I won't disguise her vocation, not now. A little old Catholic nun, she was, and she came to this courtroom less than an hour ago to talk with Jack Diamond, only a few steps from where you are seated. She didn't see him, for he was otherwise occupied. She saw me, however, and I will see to it that she gets her wish, for she came here for one reason only—to see the man who was once a boy at her knee. Jackie Diamond was the name she knew him by, a boy she described as one of the most devout Catholic children she has ever known. She sees that boy still in the face of the man you know as Legs Diamond, that mythical figure of unmitigated evil the prosecutor has invented. This woman had heard such cruel insults hurled before at the boy she knew. She had heard them for years. She had read them in the newspapers. But that little old woman, that creature of God Almighty's very own army, sat down in that room with me for five minutes and talked to me about Jackie Diamond's prayers, his prayers for his mother, a woman who died too early, about the Diamond home and family in Philadelphia. And when she was through with her reminiscing she told me precisely what she thought about all those accusations against the boy whose gaunt, troubl
ed face she hardly recognized when she saw it across the room. 'They're all lies. Mr. Gorman,' she said to me, 'fiendish lies! Now that I have seen his face for myself I know those were lies, Mr. Gorman. I teach children, Mr. Gorman, and I have boys and girls in my charge who delight in drowning puppies and stabbing cats and watching them slowly perish, and I know evil when I see it in the eyes of a human being. I came here today to see for myself whether my memory had deceived me, whether I knew good when I saw it, whether I knew evil. I have now seen the eyes of Jack Diamond in this room and I am as certain as I am of God's love that whatever on earth that man may have done, he is not an evil man. I have verified this for myself, Mr. Gorman. I have verified it.' "

  When I finished the rest of my oratory and sat down at the table, Jack leaned over and whispered: "That nun business was terrific. Where did you dig her up?"

  "She wandered in during the recess," I said, eyes downcast, scribbling a businesslike doodle on a yellow pad.

  "She's a regular in the courthouse. Collects nickels for the poor."

  "Does she really know anything about me?"

  I looked at my client, astounded.

  "How the hell should I know?" I retorted.

  * * *

  The trial proceeded as the first one had in July, with two parades of witnesses for and against Jack. We used fewer for the defense, treading lightly after the perjury indictment from the first trial.

  I made two points I remember fondly. The first was a countercharacterization of Streeter, who had been dubbed "a son of the soil," by the prosecution. I had not thought to say it in July, but we rise to our challenges, and I said he might better be called a son of the apple tree, which once again reduced the kidnapping to a bootleggers' feud. I also asked a juror, a wretched little popinjay, whether he thought God loved Legs Diamond. "God made little green apples," he said to me crisply, "but he also put worms in 'em." He got a laugh at Jack's expense, but I liked his theology and kept him. He wore an orange shirt and I knew my man. He'd have been in line for Jack's autograph if he hadn't been on the jury. He turned out to be a vigorous partisan for acquittal. Jack was, of course acquitted, December 17, 1931 , at 8:03 P.M. The crowd in the street sent up its usual cheer.