William Kennedy - Legs

"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.

"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.