William Kennedy - Legs

"We know who the worm in this family is, cousin."

And Jack got into the car.

"What do you think of the killing of the dry agent yesterday at the Rising Sun Brewery in Newark?" a reporter asked through the window.

"First I heard of it, but it's the most foolish thing in the world. It'll cramp business for a month."

"Can you whistle for us?" another reporter asked.

"Up your whistle, punk," Jack said, and the reporter faded.

"How did you find Europe?"

"I got off the boat and there it was."

"Who was the blonde you were with in Hamburg?"

"A Red Cross nurse I hired to take my pulse."

"How well did you know Charlie Northrup'?"

"A personal friend."

"The police think you killed him."

"Never trust what a cop or a woman thinks. "

No longer amused, the cops shoved the reporters back and made a path for the car. Jack waved to me as it pulled away, smiling, happy to be vulnerable again. My subconscious works in musical ways at times and as I wrote that last sentence I heard an old melody iioat up and I couldn't say why. But I trust my music and when I sang it all the way through I could hear a jazz band playing it in raucous ragtime, Jack giving me that going-away smile on the pier forty-two years ago, soothed by the music, which I hear clearly, with a twist all my own:

It goes Na-Da, Na-Da,

Na-Da-Na-Da nil-nil-nil.

Jack was twenty hours in jail. His aunt sent him a box of molasses cookies, and I sent him two corned beefs on rye. Commissioner Devane in New York had asked Philadelphia to hold Jack, but they found nothing to prosecute and by midmorning I'd worked out a release arrangement. We'd announce we were leaving town, assuring the citizenry that no carpetbaggers would invade the territory of the local hoodlums. Jack wanted only two hours to visit relatives and the judge said all right, so we went through a four-minute court ritual. But the judge found it necessary to give Jack a dig: "This court considers the attention you have received from the press and from the vast numbers of people who gathered at the pier to witness your arrival, to be twin aberrations of the public mind, aberrations which find value in things that are worth nothing at all. I speak for the decent people of this city in saying that Philadelphia doesn't want you any more than Europe did. Get out of this city and stay out."

In the car, Jack looked like a man trying to see through a rain of cotton balls. The reporters tailed us, so he said, "Skip the relatives, head for New York." We lost the last of the press about thirty miles out of the city. It was a decent fall day, a little cloudy, but with a lot of new color in the world. But then it started to drizzle and the road got foggy. The fog seemed to buoy Jack's spirits and he talked about his women. He'd left his canaries on the ship and now wanted to buy something for Alice and Kiki, so we stopped at Newark, which he seemed to know as well as he knew Manhattan.

"Dogs," he said. "Alice loves dogs."

We went to three pet shops before we found a pair of gray Brussels griffons. They appealed to Jack because he could claim he'd bought them in Belgium. There were four in the litter and I suggested another pair for Kiki.

"She'd lose them or let them die," he said, and so we found a jewelry store and he bought her an eight-hundred-dollar diamond, elaborately set ("A diamond from my Diamond," she quickly dubbed it).

I'd expected him to emphasize one or the other woman when he arrived, depending on his mood: horny or homey. But he balanced them neatly, emphasizing neither, impatient to see them both, moving neither away from one nor toward the other but rather toting one on each shoulder into some imagined triad of love, a sweet roundelay which would obviate any choice of either/or and would offer instead the more bountiful alternative of both. More power to you, old boy.

But his mood was not bountiful at the moment. We came out of the jewelry store and got in the car, and he looked at me and said, "Did you ever feel dead?"

"Not entirely. I woke up once and felt my leg was dead. Not pins and needles but genuinely dead. But that's as far as I ever got."

"I feel like I died last week."

"You've had a pretty negative experience. It's understandable."

"I didn't even feel like this when I was dying."

"Go someplace and sleep it off. Always works for me when I hit bottom."

"Some cocaine would fix my head."

"I'll stop at the next drugstore."

"Let's get a drink. Turn right, we'll go to Nannery's"-and we hunted down a small speakeasy where Jack knew the doorman and got the biggest hello of the week from half the people in the place.

"I just heard about you on the radio ten minutes ago," Tommy Nannery told him, a spiffy little bald-headed Irishman with oversize ears. He kept clapping Jack on the back and he put a bottle of rye in front of us. "They sure gave you a lot of shit over there, Jack," Nannery said.

"It wasn't so bad," Jack said. "Don't believe all that horseshit you read in the papers. I had a good time. I got healthy on the ocean. "

"I didn't believe any of it," Nannery said. "Talkin' here the other night about it I says to a fellow, they don't shove Jack Diamond around like that, I don't care who they are. Jack has got friends a way up. Am I right?"

"You're right, Tommy. Here's to my friends."

Jack drank about three straight ones while I was getting halfway through my first. He put a twenty on the bar and said he'd take the bottle.

"My treat, Jack, my treat," Nannery said. "Glad to see you back in Newark."

"'It's nice to have good friends," Jack said. "Tommy, it's nice."

He had another two fast ones before we left, and in the car he sat with the bottle between his legs, swilling it as we went. When I got into Manhattan, he was out of his depression with a vengeance, also out of control with good old Marcus at the wheel. I'd every intention of dropping him in the city and going straight on to Albany with a demarcating flourish. The end. For the peculiar vanity that had first sent me to Catskill on that odd summer Sunday, the need for feeding the neglected negative elements of my too-white Irish soul, the willful tar-and-feather job on my conscience, all that seemed silly now. Childish man. Eternal boy. Bit of a rascal. Unpredictable Marcus. The wiping away of my political future, however casually I'd considered it in the past, the prospect of assassination, and my excursion into quasi-rape convinced me my life had changed in startling ways I wouldn't yet say I regretted. But what would I do with such developments? Underneath, I knew I was still straight, still balancing the either/or while Jack plunged ahead with diamonds and doggies toward the twin-peaked glory of bothness. I felt suddenly like a child.

I looked at Jack and saw him whiten. Was that a bad bit of barley he was swilling? But the bottle was two-thirds down. He was suddenly quite drunk, and without a sound or a move toward the door, he puked in his lap, onto the seat, onto the gearshift, the floormat, the open ashtray, my shoes, my socks, my trousers, and the Philadelphia Inquirer I'd bought before going to court, Jack's face in closeup staring up from it at Jack, receiving mouth-to-mouth vomit.

"Fucking ocean," Jack said, and he collapsed backward with his eyes closed, lapsing into a ragged flow of mumbles as I looked frantically for a gas station. He rattled on about being offered fifteen hundred a month to perform in a German cabaret, and twenty-five thousand by an English news syndicate for his life story and a blank check by the Daily News for the same thing. I'd heard all this in Germany and was now far more interested in any sign of the flying red horse on Eleventh Avenue, steed that would deliver me from puke.

" 'Magine 'em asking Rothstein?" Jack said, eyes closed, words all tongued." 'Magine him packin' 'em in?"