William Kennedy - Legs

"How's your buddy Joe Vignola?" he asked me. And he grunted a laugh, which went like this:"Hug, hug,hug."

"Joe is recovering nicely," I said, an exaggeration. Joe was in awful shape. But I should give Jimmy Biondo satisfaction?

"Dumb," said Jimmy. "Dumb, dumb, dumb."

"He never hurt anybody," I said.

"Dumb," said Jimmy, shaking his head, drawing out the sound like a short siren. "Dumb waiter," he said, and he laughed like a sneeze.

"I felt so sorry for his family," Alice said.

"Feel sorry for your own family," Jack said. "The son of a bitch was a stool pigeon."

"I'll feel sorry for anybody I feel like feeling sorry for," Alice said in modified spitfire manner, a trait I somehow didn't expect from the wife of Jack Diamond. Did I think he'd marry a placid cow? No. I thought he'd dominate any woman he chose to live with. We know from the movies, don't we, that one well-placed grapefruit in the kisser and the women learn who's boss? Public Enemy, the Cagney movie with that famed grapefruit scene, was touted as the real story of Jack Diamond when it played Albany. The advertising linked it unmistakably to his current escapades: "You read about him on yesterday's front pages in this newspaper. Now see the story behind the headlines," etc. But like everything else that ever had anything to do with Jack in the movies, it never had anything to do with Jack.

Well, we got past Joe Vignola as a topic, and then after a few anxious grunts from Jimmy ("Guh, guh, guh,"), he got up and announced his departure. Fogarty would take him to Hudson, across the river, and he'd take a train to Manhattan. His and Jack's presence on this front porch was not explained to me, but I didn't pry. I didn't know until much later that they were partners of a kind. His departure improved the conversation, and Alice said she and Jack had been to mass over at Sacred Heart in Cairo where she, and once in a while he, went on Sunday, and that Jack had given money for the new church organ and that she brought up Texas Guinan one summer to raise money at a church lawn party and Jack was going to bring Al Jolson up and so on. Revelatory.

An old colored man came to the foot of the front steps and said to Jack, "The tahger's ready, Mist' Jack." Tahger? Tiger? Could he be keeping a tiger'? Was that what he wanted to show me'?

"Okay, Jess," Jack said. "And will you bring out two quarts of rye and two quarts of champagne and leave 'em here on the porch?"

Jesse nodded and moved off slowly, a man who looked far older than his years, actually a stoop-backed fifty, a Georgia cotton chopper most of his days and then a stable hand. Jack met him in '29 through a Georgia horse breeder who had brought him to Churchill Downs as a stable boy. Jack heard Jesse had made moonshine back home and hired him on the spot at a hundred a week, a pay raise of about eight hundred percent, to come north with his two teen-aged sons and no wife and be plumber for an applejack still Jack and Biondo owned jointly, and which, since that time, had functioned night and day in a desolated patch of woods a quarter of a mile from the patch of porch on which I was rocking.

So the old man went for the rye and champagne, and I mentally alerted my whistle to coming attractions. Then Alice looked at Jack and Jack looked at me and I looked at both of them, wondering what all the silent looking was for. And then Jack asked me a question: "Ever fire a machine gun. Marcus?" ·

We walked to the garage-cooler, which is what it turned out to be, as luxuriously appointed a tumbledown barn as you'd be likely to find anywhere in America, with a beer refrigeration unit; a storage room for wine and champagne, paneled in knotty pine; a large area where three trucks could comfortably park; and a total absence of hay, hornets, barnsmell, cowflop, or chickenshit.

"No." I had told Jack, in answer to his question, "I am a machine-gun virgin."

"Time you shot the wad," Jack said, and he went dancing down the stairs and around the corner toward the barn, obviously leading both me and Alice, before we were out of our chairs.

"He's a nut on machine guns," Alice said. "He's been waiting till you got here to try it out. You don't have to do it, you know, just because he suggests it."

I nodded my head yes, shook it no, shrugged, and, I suppose, looked generally baffled and stupid. Alice and I walked across the side lawn to the barn where Jack had already pried up a floorboard and was lifting out a Thompson submachine gun, plus half a dozen boxes of bullets.

"Brand-new yesterday from Philadelphia," he said. "I been anxious to test it." He dislodged the magazine, loaded it, replaced it with what, despite my amateurism in the matter, I would call know-how. "I heard about a guy could change one of these drums in four seconds," he said. "That's handy in a tight spot."

He stood up and pointed it at the far end of the barn where a target was tacked on a windowless wall. The target was a crudely drawn face with the name Dutch Schultz lettered beneath.

"I had a couple of hundred of these printed up a few years ago,” he said, "when Schultz and me weren't getting along. He looks just like that, the greedy prick. I drew it myself."

"You get along all right now with him?"

"Sure. We're pals again," Jack said and he let go with a long blast that nicked the Schultz forehead in two or three places.

"A little off," Jack observed, "but he'd have noticed."

"Let me try," Alice said. She took the gun from Jack, who parted with it reluctantly, then fired a long burst which roamed the wall without touching the target. With a second burst she hit the paper's edge, but not Schultz.

"I'm better with a rifle."

"You're better with a frying pan," Jack said. '"Let Marcus try it."

"It's really out of my line," I said.

"Go on," Jack said. "You may never get another chance, unless you come to work for me."

"I've got nothing against Mr. Schultz."

"He wouldn't mind. Lotsa people shoot at him."

Jack put the gun in my hands, and I held it like a watermelon. Ridiculous. I put my right hand on the pistol grip, grabbed the other handgrip with the left, and raised the stock into my armpit. Absurd. Uncomfortable.

"Up a little," Jack said. "Against the shoulder."

I touched the trigger, raised the gun. Why'? It was wobbly, cold. I pointed it at Schultz. Sunday morning. Body of Christ still undigested in some internal region, memory of prayer and holy bacon grease on my tongue. I touched the trigger seriously, pulled the gun tighter to my shoulder. Old feeling. Comfortable with a weapon against the pectoral. Like Army days, days in the woods as a kid. Put it down, fool.

'"For chrissake, Marcus, give it a blast," Jack said.

Really childish not to. Raising the flag of morality. Powerful Irish Catholic magic at work that prohibits shooting effigies on the side of a barn. Bless me Father for I have sinned. I shot at Mr. Schultz's picture. And did you hit it, son? No, Father I missed. For your penance say two rosaries and try again for the son of a bitch.

"Honest, Marcus," Alice said, "it won't bite."

Ladies' Auxiliary heard from. Altar Rosary Society Member attends machine-gun outing after mass, prods lawyer to take part. What a long distance between Marcus and Jack Diamond. Millenniums of psychology, civilization, experience, turpitude. Man also develops milquetoasts by natural selection. Would I defend him if some shooters walked through the barn door? What difference from defending him in court? And what of Jack's right to justice, freedom, life? Is the form of defense the only differentiating factor? What a morally confounded fellow Marcus is, perplexed by Mr. Thompson's invention. I pressed the trigger. Bullets exploded in my ears, my hands, my shoulders, my blood, my brain. The spew of death was a personal tremor that even jogged my scrotum.