Legs - William Kennedy

by William Kennedy

  "You know the power you'd have, Jack?" Lew asked. "Hell, we might even get a new American church going. Sell stock in it. I'd buy some myself. A man like you carrying the word to America what the rackets are all about, giving people the lowdown on the secret life of their country. Jesus, I get the shivers thinking how you'd say it. Snarling, by God. Snarling at those suckers for God Almighty. Your stories don't have to be true but they'll sound true anyway. Jesus, it's so rich I can hear the swoons already. I could put together a team of writers'd give you the goddamnedest supply of hoopla America ever heard. Force-feed 'em their own home-grown bullshit. Tell 'em you've gotten inside their souls and know what they need. They need more truth from you, that's what they need. Can't you see those hicks who read everything they can lay hands on about crooks and killers? Organ music with it. 'The Star Spangled Banner', 'Holy, Holy, Holy.' You know what Oscar Wilde said, don't you? Americans love heroes, especially crooked ones. Twenty to one you'd get a movie. Maybe they'd even run you for Congress. A star, Jack, I mean a goddamn one hundred percent true-blue American star. How does it grab you?"

  Alice exploded before Jack could say anything at all. "John, it's absolutely perfect. Did you ever believe anybody'd ask you to do anything as marvelous as this? And you can do it. Everything he said was true. You'd be wonderful. I've heard you talk when you're excited about something and I know you can do it. You know you can act, you did it in high school, oh, I know it's right for you."

  Jack closed the newspaper and folded it. He crossed his legs, left foot on right knee and tapped the paper on his shoe.

  "You'd like to do a little barnstorming, would you?" he said to her.

  "I'd love to go with you."

  Alice's faith. Love alone. She really believed Jack could do anything. Such an idea also had pragmatic appeal: saving herself from damnation. Show business? So what? As to the stardom, well, the truth is, Alice could no longer get along without it. Yet this promised stardom without taint. Oh, it was sweet! The promise of life renewed for Alice. And her John the agent of renewal.

  "What's your reaction, Marcus?" Jack said. And when I chuckled, he frowned.

  "I can see it all. I really can see you up there on the altar, giving us all a lesson in brimstone. I think Lew is right. I think it'd work. People would pay just to see you sit there, but if you started saving their souls, well, that's an idea that's worth a million without even counting next month's house." And I laughed again. "What sort of robes would you wear? Holy Roman or Masonic?"

  Maybe that did it, because Jack laughed then too. He tapped Alice lightly on the knee with the newspaper and tossed it on the coffee table in front of her. It's curious that I remember every move that newspaper made, not that Alice would've missed its message without us, although I suppose that's possible. The point is that Lew and I, on our mission for American evangelism, were innocent bearers of the hot news.

  Jack stood up. "It's a joke," he said.

  "No," said Lew, "I'm being straight."

  "Make a funny story back in Lindy's if I said yes."

  "Jack," said Lew, who was suddenly drained of facial blood by the remark, "this is an honest-to-God idea I had and told nobody but Marcus and now you and your wife. Nobody else."

  Jack gave him a short look and figured out from his new complexion that he wasn't practical-joking.

  "'Okay, Lew. Okay. Let's say it's a nice try then. But not for me. Maybe it'd make a bundle, but it rubs me wrong. I feel like a stool pigeon just thinking about it."

  "No names, Jack, nobody's asking for names. Tell stories, that's all. It's what you know about how it all works."

  "That's what I mean. You don't tell the suckers how the game is played."

  Alice picked up the Mirror and slowly and methodically rolled it into a bat. She tapped it against her palm the way a cop plays with a sap. I thought she was going to let Jack have a fast one across the nose. Good-bye barnstorm. Good-bye private Diamond altar. Good-bye salvation, for now.

  Her crestfallen scene reveals to me at this remove that she really didn't understand Jack as well as I thought she did. She knew him better than anyone on earth, but she didn't understand how he could possibly be true to his nature. She really thought he was a crook, all the way through to the dirty underwear of his psyche.

  "It'd be fun, Lew," Jack said, starting to pace now himself, relaxed that it was over and he could talk about it and add it to his bag of offers. "It'd be a hell of a lot of fun. New kind of take. And I know I got a little ham in me. Yeah, it'd be a good time, but I couldn't take it for long. I couldn't live up to the part."

  Alice left the room and carried the newspaper with her. It looked like a nightstick now. I can see her unrolling it and reading it in the kitchen, although I was not in the kitchen. She turns the pages angrily, not seeing the headlines, the photos, the words. She stops at Winchell because everybody stops there and reads him. She is not really reading. Her eyes have stopped at his block of black and white, and she stares down at it, thinking of getting off the train in Omaha and Denver and Boston and Tallahassee and spreading the word of John and God and standing in the wings holding her John's robe, making him tea, no more whiskey, washing his socks, answering his mail, refusing interviews. Damn, damn, damn, thinks Alice, and she sees his name in Winchell.

  In the living room, standing on his purple Turkish rug, framing himself against the blue silk he'd stolen from a Jersey boxcar eight years before, Jack was saying he couldn't be a hypocrite.

  "That sound funny coming from me, Lew?"

  "Not a bit, Jack. I understand." But I could see Lew too, watching a million-dollar idea curl up in the smoke of another Broadway pipe dream.

  " 'Hypocrite? What the hell was he talking about'?" Lew asked me later when we were on the way back to the Hudson station. "Does he think I don't know who he is?"

  "He had something else in mind, I'm sure," I said. "He knows you know who he is. He knows everybody knows. But he obviously doesn't think what he's doing is hypocritical."

  Lew shook his head. "All the nuts ain't on the sundaes."

  Lew too. Victim of tunnel vision: A man's a thief, he's dishonest. What we didn't know as we listened to Jack was that he was in the midst of a delicate, supremely honest balancing act that would bring his life together if it worked, let it function as a unified whole and not as warring factions. Maybe Jack thought he was being honest in his retreat from page one, in his acquiescence to Alice's implorings that he become a private man, a country man, a home man, a husband. This behavior generated in Lew's head the idea that if Jack could only stay down long enough, he was fodder for American sainthood.

  But Lew's conversion plan was false because Jack's behavior in retreat was false. Jack wasn't a private but a public man, not a country squire but a city slicker, not a home but a hotel room man, not a husband but a cocksmith, not an American saint but an insatiable extortionist. ("Fuck 'em," he said when I told him about Warren Van Deusen's vigilantes.) And he was not the sum of all these life-styles either, but a fusion beyond them all.

  In a small way this was about to be demonstrated.

  Shirtsleeved, Jack shook our hands, walked us to the front door, apologized for not standing there with us, but said he didn't want to make it too easy for any passing shooters, and thanked us for livening up his afternoon.

  The liveliness was just beginning.

  * * *

  The Winchell item in the Mirror read: "Stagehands in the Chicago theater where Kiki Roberts is dancing in 'Flying High' under the name of Doris Kane can set their watch by the phone call she gets every night at 7:30. You guessed the caller: Legs Diamond .... "

  * * *

  "You son of a bitch, you said you weren't talking to her. "

  "Don't believe everything you read."

  "You're always out of the house at that hour."

  "Doesn't mean a thing."

  "You promised me, you bastard. You promised me."

  "I talked to her once in four months, that's al
l."

  "I don't believe that either. "

  "Believe Winchell then."

  "I thought you were being straight with me."

  "You were right. I was. I didn't see her, I didn't see nobody."

  "After all the goddamn nursing and handholding."

  "I'm fond of the girl. I heard she was having some trouble and I called her. She's all right."

  "I don't believe that. You're a liar."

  "What's that on your housedress'?"

  "Where'?"

  "By the pocket."

  "A spot. "

  "A spot of what?"

  "What's the difference what the spot is. It's a spot."

  "I paid to have that housedress cleaned and pressed and starched. The least you could do is keep it clean."

  "I do keep it clean. Shut up about the housedress."

  "I pay for the laundry and you put these things on and dirty them up. Goddamn money going down the goddamn laundry sink.

  "I'm leaving."

  "What's that in your hair?"

  "Where?"

  "Behind your right ear. There's something white. Is that gray hair?"

  "It might be. God knows I've got a right to some."

  "Gray hair. So that's what you've come to. I spend money so you can get your hair bleached half the colors of the goddamn rainbow and you stand there and talk to me with gray hair."

  "I'm going upstairs to pack."

  "What's that on your leg?"

  "Where?"

  "Right there on the thigh."

  "Don't touch me. I don't want you to touch me."

  "What is it?"

  "It's a run in my stocking."

  "'Goddamn money for silk stockings and look what happens to them."

  "Get your hand away. I don't want to feel you. Go on, get it away. I don't want your hand there. No. Not there either. No. You won't get it that way anymore. Not after this. No. Don't you dare do that to me with Cordelia in the kitchen and after what I just read. You've lied once too often. I'm packing and nobody on God's earth can do anything to stop me."

  "What if I moved her in with us?"

  "Oh."

  "We could work it out."

  "Oh!"

  "She's a great girl and she thinks the world of you. Sit down. Let's talk about it."

  * * *

  Kiki lay naked on the bed that was all hers and which stood where Alice's had stood before Jack had it taken out and bought the new one. She was thinking of the evening being unfinished, of the fudge that hadn't hardened the last time she touched it, and of Jack lying asleep in his own room, his heavy breathing audible to Kiki, who could not sleep and who resented the uselessness of her nakedness.

  They had been together in her bed at early evening, hadn't eaten any supper because they were going to have dinner out later. The fudge was already in the fridge then. Jack was naked too, lying on his back, smoking and staring at the wall with the prints of the Michelangelo ketches, the punishment of Tityus and the head of a giant, prints Jack told her he bought because Arnold Rothstein liked them and said Michelangelo was the best artist who ever brushed a stroke. Jack said Kiki should look at the pictures and learn about art and not be so stupid about it. But the giant had an ugly head and she didn't like the one with the bird in it either, so she looked at Jack instead of dopey pictures. She wanted to touch him, not look at him, but she knew it wouldn't be right because there was no spark in him. He was collapsed and he had tried but wasn't in the mood. He started out in the mood, but the mood left him. He needed a rest, maybe.

  He wouldn't look at her. She kept looking at him but he wouldn't look back, so she got up and said, "I'm going downstairs and see if that fudge is hard yet."

  "Put something on."

  "I'll put my apron on."

  "Take a housecoat. There may be somebody on the porch."

  "They're all out in the cottage playing pool or in the car watching the road. I know they are."

  "I don't want you showing off your ass to the hired help."

  She put on one of Alice's aprons, inside out so it wouldn't look too familiar to Jack, and went downstairs. She looked in the mirror and knew anybody could see a little bit of her tail if there was anybody to see it, but there wasn't. She didn't want clothes on. She didn't want to start something and then have to take the clothes off in a hurry and maybe lose the spark, which she would try to reignite when she went back upstairs. She wanted Jack to see as much of her as he could as often as he could, wanted to reach him with all she could reach him with. She had the house now. She had beaten Alice. She had Jack. She did not plan to let go of him.

  The fudge was still soft to her touch. She left another fingerprint in it. She had made it for Jack, but it wasn't hardening. It had been in the fridge twenty-eight hours, and it wasn't any harder now than it was after the first hour.

  "What do you like—chocolate or penuche?" she had asked him the day before.

  "Penuche's the white one with nuts, right?"

  "Right."

  "That's the one."

  "That's the one I like too. "

  "How come you know so much about fudge?"

  "It's the only thing I ever learned how to cook from my mother. I haven't made it in five or six years, but I want to do it for you."

  The kitchen had all the new appliances, Frigidaire, Mixmaster, chrome orange juice squeezer, a machine for toasting two slices of bread. But, for all its qualities, Kiki couldn't find the ingredients she remembered from her mother's recipe. So she used two recipes, her own and one out of Alice's Fanny Farmer Cook Book, mixed them up together and cooked them and poured it all into a tin pie plate and set it on the top shelf of the fridge. But it didn't harden. She tasted it and it was sweet and delicious, but it was goo after an hour. Now it was still goo.

  "It's all goo," she told Jack when she went back upstairs. She stood alongside him and took off her apron.

  He didn't reach for her.

  "Let's go out," he said, and he rolled across the bed, away from her, and stood up. He put on his robe and went into his own room to dress. Even when Alice was there he had had his own room. Even at the hotel he had kept his own room to go to when he and Kiki had finished making love.

  "Are you angry because the fudge didn't harden?"

  "For crissakes, no. You got other talents."

  "Do you wish I could cook?"

  "No. I cook good enough for both of us."

  And he did, too. Why Jack made the best chicken cacciatore Kiki ever ate, and he cooked a roast of lamb with garlic and spices that was fantastic. Jack could do anything in life. Kiki could only do about three things. She could dance a little and she could love a man and she could be pretty. But she could do those things a thousand times better than most women. She knew about men, knew what men told her. They told her she was very good at love and that she was pretty. They also liked to talk about her parts. They all (and Jack too) told her she was lovely everyplace. So Kiki didn't need to learn about cooking. She wasn't going to tie in with anybody as a kitchen slave and a fat mommy. She wore an apron, but she wore it her way, with nothing underneath it. If Jack wanted a cook, he wouldn't have got rid of Alice. Kiki would just go on being Kiki, somebody strange. She didn't know how she was strange. She knew she wasn't smart enough to understand the reasons behind that sort of thing. I mean I know it already, she said to herself. I don't have to figure it out. I know it and I'm living it.

  Kiki thought about these things as she was lying naked in her bed wishing the fudge would harden. Earlier in the night, after Jack had rolled out of her bed, they'd gone out, had eaten steaks at the New York Restaurant in Catskill, one of the best, then had drinks at Sweeney's club, a good-time speakeasy. It was on the way home that everything was so beautiful and quiet. She felt strange then. She and Jack were in the back seat and Fogarty was driving. She was holding Jack's hand, and they were just sitting there, a little glassy-eyed from the booze, yes, but that wasn't the reason it was so beautiful. It was beautiful b
ecause they were together as they deserved to be and because they didn't have to say anything to each other. She remembered looking ahead on the road and looking out the window she'd rolled down and feeling the car was moving without a motor. She couldn't hear noise, couldn't see anything but the lights on the road and the darkened farmhouses and the open fields that were all so brightly lighted by the new moon. The stars were out too, on this silent, this special night. It was positively breathtaking, is how Kiki later described the scene and the mood that preceded the vision of the truck.

  That damn truck.

  Why did it have to be there ahead of them?

  Why couldn't Joe have taken another road and not seen it?

  Oh, jeez, wouldn't everything in her whole life have been sweet if they just hadn't seen that truck?

  * * *

  When he saw the old man in the truck, got a good look and saw the side of his face with its bumpkin stupid smile, Jack felt his heart leap up. When Fogarty said, "Streeter from Cairo—he hauls cider, but we never caught him with any," Jack felt the flush in his neck. He had no pistol with him, but he opened the gun rack in the back of the front seat and unclipped one of the .38's. He rolled down the window on his side, renewed.

  "Jack, what's going to happen?" Kiki asked.

  "Just a little business. Nothing to get excited about."

  "Jack, don't get, don't get me, don't get . . ."

  "Just shut up and stay in the car. "

  They were on Jefferson Avenue, heading out of Catskill when the trucker saw Jack's pistol pointing at him. Fogarty cruised at equal speed with the truck until Streeter pulled to the side of the road across from a cemetery. Jack was the first out, his pistol pointed upward. He saw the barrels on the truck and quick-counted more than fifteen. Son of a bitch. He saw the shitkicker's cap, country costume, and he hated the man for wearing it. Country son of a bitch, where Jack had to live.

  "Get down out of that truck. "

  Streeter slid off the seat and stepped down, and Jack saw the second head, another cap on it, sliding across the seat and stepping down, a baby-faced teen-ager with a wide forehead, a widow's peak, and a pointy chin that gave his face the look of a heart.