William Kennedy - Legs

"Here's to a fruitful legal relationship," Jack said, rather elegantly, I patronizingly thought. I sipped and he gulped and poured himself another. That disappeared and another followed that, two and a half glasses in one minute.

"Thirsty," he explained, "and that's prime stuff." But he was getting outside his skin. He finished what was in his glass and then stared at me while I drank and told him my experiences with bad champagne. He interrupted me, perfectly, at a pause, with obvious intentions of letting me continue, and said: "I don't want to interrupt your story, but how about a walk? It's a great day and I want to show you a piece of land."

He led the way out the back door and along a stream that ran parallel to the highway, and at a narrow point we leaped across the stream and into the woods, all soft with pine needles, quiet and cool, a young forest with the old granddaddy trees felled long ago by loggers, and the new trees-pines, white birches, maples, ash-tall but small of girth, reaching up for sunlight. A cat named Pistol followed at Jack's heel like an obedience-trained dog. He was an outdoor cat and had picked us up as we left the back steps, where he'd been sitting, gnawing gently on a squirrel that wasn't quite dead and that still had the good sense to run away whenever Pistol relaxed his teeth. But that old squirrel never got far from the next pounce.

Jack walked rapidly, stepping over the carcasses of old trees, almost running, moving uphill, slipping but never falling, surefooted as the cat. He turned around to check me out and at each turn motioned to me with his right hand, backs of fingers upright toward me, bending them toward himself in a come-on gesture. He said nothing, but even today I can remember that gesture and the anxious look on his face. He was not mindful of anything else except me and his destination and whatever obstacle he and the cat might have to dodge or leap over: an old log, jutting rocks, half-exposed boulders, fallen limbs, entire dead trees, the residual corpses of the forest. Then I saw a clearing and Jack stopped at its edge to wait for me. He pointed across a meadow, a golden oval that rolled upward, a lone, dead apple tree in the center like the stem and root of a vast yellow mushroom turned upside down. Beyond the tree an old house stood on the meadow's crest and Jack said that was where we were going.

He walked with me now, calmed, it seemed, by the meadow or perhaps the sight of the house, all that speed from the forest faded now into a relaxed smile, which I noticed just about the time he asked me: "Why'd you come down here today. Marcus?"

'"I was invited. And I was curious. I'm still curious."

"I thought maybe I could talk you into going to work for me."

"As a lawyer or riding shotgun?"

"I was thinking maybe you'd set up a branch of your office in Catskill."

That was funny and I laughed. Without even telling me what he wanted of me, he was moving me into his backyard.

"That doesn't make much sense," I said."My practice is in Albany and so is my future. "

"What's in the future?"

"Politics. Maybe Congress, if the slot opens up. Not very complicated really. It's all done with machinery."

"Rothstein had two district attorneys on his payroll."

"Rothstein?"

"Arnold Rothstein. I used to work with him. And he had a platoon of judges. Why did you get me a pistol permit?"

"l don't really have a reason."

"You knew I was no altar boy. "

"It cost me nothing. I remember we had a good conversation at the Kenmore. Then you sent me the Scotch."

He clapped me on the shoulder. Electric gesture. "I think you're a thief in your heart, Marcus."

"No, stealing's not my line. But I admit to a corrupt nature. Prolligacy, sloth, licentiousness, gluttony, pride. Proud of it all. That's closer to my center."

"I'll give you five hundred a month."

"To do what?"

"Be available. Be around when I need a lawyer. Fix my traffic tickets. Get my boys out of jail when they get drunk or go wild."

"How many boys?"

"Five, six. Maybe two dozen sometimes."

"Is that all? Doesn't seem like a full-time job."

'"You do more, I pay you more."

"What more might I do?"

"Maybe you could move some money for me. I want to start some accounts in other banks up this way, and I don't want to be connected to them. "

"So you want a lawyer on the payroll."

"Rothstein had Bill Fallon. Paid him a weekly salary. You know who Fallon was?"

"Every lawyer in the U. S. knows who Fallon was."

"He defended me and Eddie when we got mixed up in a couple of scrapes. He wound up a drunk. You a drunk?"

"Not yet."

"Drunks are worthless. "

We were almost at the old house, a paintless structure with all its windows and doors boarded up and behind it a small barn, or maybe it was a stable, with its eyes gouged out and holes in its roof. The panorama from this point was incredible, a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree vision of natural grandeur. I could see why Jack liked the spot.

"I know the old man who owns this," he said. "He owns the whole field, but the son of a bitch won't sell. He owns half the mountainside. A stubborn old Dutchman, and he won't sell. I want you to work on him. I don't care what the price is."

"You want the house? The field? What?"

"I want all you can get, the whole hill and the forest. I want this yellow field. Everything between here and my place. Things are going good now and they can only get better. l want to build up here. A big place. A place to live good. I saw one in Westchester, a great place I liked. Roomy. A millionaire owned it. Used to work for Woodrow Wilson. Had a big fireplace. Look at this rock."

He picked up a purple stone lying at our feet.

"Plenty of this around," he said. "Have the fireplace made out of it. Maybe face part of the house with it. You ever see a house faced with purple rock?"

"Never."

"Me either. That's why I want it."

"You're settling in here in the Catskills then, permanently?"

"Right. I'm settling in. Plenty of work around here." He gave me a conspiratorial smile. "Lots of apple trees. Lots of thirsty people." He looked over at the house. "Van Wie is his name. He's about seventy now. He used to farm a little up here a few years ago." Jack walked over to the shed and looked inside. Grass was growing inside it, and hornets, birds, and spiders were living in the eaves. Birdshit and cobwebs were everywhere.

"Eddie and me did the old man a favor in here one day," Jack said, reminding me and himself, and, in his way, reminding me to remind the old man too that when Jack Diamond did you a favor, you didn't turn your back on him. He turned suddenly to me, not at all relaxed now, but with that anxious face I saw as he was moving through the forest.

"Are you with me?"

"I could use the money," I said. "I usually lose at pinochle."

I can recall now the quality of the light at that moment when I went to work for Jack. The sun was dappling his shoulders as he peered into the shadows of the empty stable with its random birdshit, with his faithful cat Pistol (Marion later had a poodle named Machine Gun), rubbing its sides against Jack's pants legs, his head against Jack's shoe, the sun also dappling the black and white of Pistol's tiger tom fur as it sent its electricity into Jack the way Jack sent his own vital current into others. I mentioned to Jack that he looked like a man remembering something a man doesn't want to remember and he said yes, that was a thousand percent, and he told me the two interlocking memories he was resisting.

One was of another summer day in 1927 when old man Van Wie came down the meadow past the apple tree, which was not dead then, and into the forest where Jack and Eddie Diamond were firing pistols at a target nailed to a dead, fallen tree, recreation therapy for Eddie, for whom the house, which would later be described as Jack's fortress, had been purchased: mountain retreat for tubercular brother.