William Kennedy - Legs

Jack gave it a few seconds, letting it all settle, watching those electric eyes under Weissberg's bushy black brows. Then he went over to The Count's table and came back with The Count's small.25-caliber pistol half-concealed from the two dozen customers who sat in the garden's magical twilight, letting Strauss, the gentle swaying of the potted palms, and the intoxicating mellowness of the afternoon's first drinks lull them into sweet escape. Jack pulled his chair close to Weissberg's until they were knee to knee, and he then showed the playwright the pistol, holding it loosely in his palm. He said nothing at all for perhaps a minute, only held the weapon as a display item. Then suddenly and with eyes turned snakish, with a grimace of hate and viciousness whose like I had never seen before on his face, he nosed the barrel downward and fired one shot into the grass between Weissberg's feet, which were about six inches from each other. The downward course of the firing, the small caliber of the weapon, the shot muffled by pants legs and overwhelmed by music, created a noise that did not disrupt. A few people turned our way, but since we seemed at ease, no disturbance in process, the noise was assumed to be something as trivial as a broken glass. Jack took no notice of any external reaction. He said to Weissberg, "You're a kid, a fool. "

The pistol was already in his pocket as he stood up and tossed a handful of deutsche marks on the table to pay for the drinks.

"My beautiful shithead," said the dirty little whore, stroking Weissberg's mustache, which by then was wet with tears, as wet as the front of his pants. Weissberg, the young playwright, had very suddenly liquefied.

Jack was two days out of Hamburg on the freighter Hannover, the only passenger, before he heard the strange melodic chaos coming up from below. He went through corridors and down a stairway where he found the forty-five hundred canaries the Hannover was bringing to the American bird-cage crowd. The Hartz Mountain birds, yellow and green, stopped singing when Jack entered their prison, and he thought: They've smelled me. But canaries are idiots of smell and wizards of hearing and love. The prison was moist and hot and Jack began to sweat. A sailor feeding the birds looked up and said, "I'm feedin' the birds."

"So I see."

"If you don't feed 'em, they drop dead."

"Is that so?"

"They eat a lot of food."

"You wouldn't think it to look at them."

"They do, though. "

"Everybody needs a square meal," Jack said.

"Canaries especially."

"Can I help you feed them?"

"Nah. They wouldn't like you."

"What makes you think they wouldn't like me?"

"They know who you are. "

"The canaries know me?"

"You saw the way they quit singin' when you come in?"

"I figured they were afraid of people. "

"They love people. They're afraid of you. "

"You're full of shit," Jack said.

"No, I'm not," said the sailor.

Jack opened a cage to gentle one of the birds. It pecked once at his knuckle. He lifted the bird out and saw it was dead. He put it in his pocket and opened another cage. That bird flew out, silently, and perched on top of the highest stack of cages, beyond Jack's reach unless he used the sailor's ladder. The bird twisted its tail and shat on the floor in front of Jack.

"I told you," the sailor said. "They don't want nothin' to do with you. "

"What've they got against me?"

"Ask them. If you know what music is all about, you can figure out what they're sayin'. You know how they learn to sing so good? Listenin' to flutes and fiddles."

Jack listened, but all he heard was silence. The bird shat at him again. Jack yelled, "Fuck you, birdies," to the canaries and went back topside.

Jack heard from the radio operator that he was still steady news across the world, that now everyone knew he was on a ship with forty-five hundred canaries and that the corpse of Charlie Northrup had still not turned up. The sailor who fed the birds came up from below one morning, and Jack detected traces of the Northrup mouth on the man, a semitaut rubber band with the round edges downward turning. No smile, no smile. When the sailor opened the hatch, Jack heard the music of the birds. He inched toward it as it grew more and more glorious. The song heightened his sense of his own insignificance. What song did he sing? Yet it unaccountably pleased him to be nothing on the high seas, a just reward somehow; and now the birds were singing of justice. Jack remembered how satisfying it was to be shot and to linger at the edge of genuine nothingness. He remembered touching the Kiki silk and strong Alice's forehead. How rich! How something! And the vibrancy of command. Ah yes, that was something. Get down, he said to a nigger truck driver one night on the Lake George road; and the nigger showed him a knife, stupid nigger, and Jack fired one shot through his forehead. When Murray opened the door, the nigger fell out. Power! And when they got Augie-the lovely pain under Jack's own heart. Bang! And in the gut. Bang! Bang! Fantastic! Let us, then, be up and doing, with a heart for any fate.

"How's all the birdies?" Jack asked the sailor.

"Very sad," said the sailor. "They sing to overcome their sadness."

"That's not why birds sing," Jack said.

"Sure it is."

"Are you positive?"

"I live with birds. I'm part bird myself. You should see my skin up close. Just like feathers."

"That's very unusual," Jack said.

The sailor rolled up his sleeve to show Jack his biceps, which were covered with brown feathers.

"Now do you believe me?" the sailor asked.

"I certainly do. It's absolutely amazing.

"I used to be a barn swallow before I became a sailor."

"You like it better as a bird or this way?"

"I had more fun as a bird."

"I would've given nine to five you'd say that," Jack said.

A sailor told me a story when I boarded the Hannover back in the States.

"A strange man, der Schack, und I like him," the sailor said. "Good company, many stories, full of the blood that makes a man come to life as thousands around him become dead. A natural man. A man who knows where to find Canis Major. I watch him by the railing, looking out at the waves, not moving. He looks, he trembles. He holds himself as you hold a woman. He is a man of trouble. The captain sends me to his cabin when he does not come to breakfast, und on the table by the bed are three birds, all dead. Der Schack is sick. He says he vill take only soup. For three days he stays in the room und just before Philadelphia he comes to me und says he wants to buy three birds to take home. 'They are my friends,' he says. When I get the birds for him, he wants to pay me, but I say, 'No, Schack, they are a gift.' In his cabin I look for the three dead ones, but they are gone. "

I beat Jack home, caught a liner a day and a half after he left Hamburg, and probably passed his floating birdhouse before it was out of the English Channel. The money passed back to America with me without incident, and so, I thought, had I, for I had been a passive adjunct to Jack's notoriety, a shadowy figure in the case, as they say. But my shadow ran ahead of me, and when I returned to Albany and rented a safe-deposit box for the cash, I found I was locally notorious. My picture had been taken in Germany with Jack, and it had smiled all over the local papers. My legal maneuvering on the Continent, however marginal and unpublic, had been ferreted out by German newsmen and duly heralded at home.

I'd told Jack in Hamburg, when we shook hands at the gangplank, that I'd meet him when he docked in the U. S. and I'd bring Fogarty with me. But Fogarty, I discovered, couldn't leave the state, and Jack was coming in to Philadelphia. The federals had Fogarty on three trivial charges while they tried to link him to a rum-boat raid they'd made at Briarcliff Manor, a hundred and twenty-five thousand-dollar haul of booze, the week before we left for Europe. This was the first I'd heard of the raid or of Fogarty's arrest. He'd been waiting in a truck as the boat docked, and when he spotted a cop, he tried to make a run. They charged him with vagrancy, speeding, and failing to give a good account of himself, my favorite misdemeanor.