Death?
Joe Fogarty wasn't afraid of death anymore, only bleeding. He died every day for years. What he was afraid of was lying still and not dying.
"Remember your fibrosis," the nurses would say.
"Don't raise your arms above your head. Don't even move when you do pee-pee. "
The woodpeckers would come around and tap his chest with stethoscopes and fingers, listen to his percussion. "Cough and say ninety-nine." It must heal, you know. Give yourself a chance to heal. Terrific advice. Bring your tissue together. Heal. Oh, nice. Fight off the poison. Of course. Then show a streak in the sputum and they don't let you brush your teeth by yourself anymore. A long time ago, all that; and Fogarty finally got well. And met Jack. And did he then make up for those months in bed doing nothing? Ahhhhhh.
* * *
"So you think The Goose is back?" Jack said.
"Who else'?"
"Maybe you're right. But maybe it was just a one-eyed tourist. Tourists always asking about me. "
"You want to take that chance?"
"Not with The Goose. He'll find a way if he's up here. I should stay away from the window."
"You been going out?"
"No, just sticking close here. But we'll go out now."
"Take me with you," Kiki said. She was alone on the couch, knees visible, no stockings, slippers on. But sweeeet lover, did she look good to the Speeder.
"No," said Jack. "You stay home."
"I don't want to be here alone."
"I'll call the neighbor."
"That old cow, I don't want her here."
"She'll be company. We won't be long."
"Where you going?"
"Down the road, make some calls, then we'll be back."
"You'll be out all night."
"Marion, you're a pain in the ass."
"I'm going back to Chicago."
"That show closed."
"You think that show is the only offer I got out there?"
"You can't come with us. I'll bring home spaghetti."
"I want to do something."
"We'll do something when I get back. We'll eat spaghetti."
"I want to hear some music."
"Turn on the radio. Put on a record."
"Oh, shit, Jack. Shit, shit, shit."
"That's better. Have a sherry."
Fogarty finished his double rye and Jack swigged the last of his coffee royal, and they went out the back door. Jack stopped, said, "We'll take your car. Nobody'd look for me in that jalop."
"Nobody looking for me at all?"
"Not yet, but that don't mean they won't be out with a posse tomorrow. They'll get to you, all right, but tonight you're a free citizen. Take it from me, and Marcus. He's down at the Saulpaugh while this stuff is going on. We talked before you got here. Joe, I'm glad you came down."
Jack clapped him on the shoulder. The old jalop was wheezing along. Fogarty smiled, remembered his plan to break with Jack. What a crazy idea.
Jack had taken a rifle from the hall closet, loaded it with dum-dums, and thrown it on the back seat. He wouldn't carry a pistol with all the heat on. He'd also put on his gray topcoat, fedora, and maroon tie with a black pearl tie tack. Fogarty, you bum, you wore a linty black sweater and those baggy slacks you slept in all week.
"It's like a dog race," Jack said.
"What is?" Fogarty asked, thinking immediately of himself as a dog.
"This thing. I'm the rabbit. And who'll get it first?"
"Nobody gets those rabbits. The dogs always come up empty."
"The feds are coming into it. The state, all the goddamn cops in the East, Biondo and his guinea friends, Charlie Lucky's pals, and now maybe Murray out there, driving around, trying to make a plan. The good thing about Murray is he can never figure out how to get near anybody. Once he gets near you, so long. But unless you figured it out for him, he could think all month without getting the idea to maybe ring the doorbell."
"Maybe you ought to get away from here."
"They're all keeping track of me. Let's see what news we come up with. Hey, you're heating up."
The temperature gauge was near two twenty when they pulled into the parking lot at Jimmy Wynne's Aratoga Inn on the Acra-Catskill Road. Fogarty unscrewed the radiator cap and let it breathe and blow, and then they went inside, Fogarty with his two pistols Jack didn't even know he had. Fogarty was ready for Murray, who was absent from the gathering of twelve at the bar. It was quiet, the musicians on a break. Fogarty asked Dick Fegan, the bartender, bald at twenty-five, if he'd seen Murray. Fegan said he hadn't seen Murray in months, and Jack went for the telephone.
Fogarty dumped four quarts of water into the car radiator and went back in to find Jack off the phone with a Vichy water in front of him, talking about heavyweights to the clarinet player.
Heavyweights. "I lost seven grand on Loughran," Jack was saying. "I thought he was the best, gave seven to five, and he didn't last three rounds. Sharkey murdered him. He says, 'Let me sit down, I don't know where I am,' and then he tried to walk through the ropes. Last time I ever bet on anybody from Philadelphia." Jack will talk to anybody about anything, anytime. Why shouldn't people like him?
"Seven grand," said the clarinet player.
"Yeah, I was crazy."
It seemed like a slip, Jack mentioning money. He never got specific about that, so why now? Must be nervous. Jack went back to the phone and made another call.
"He said he lost seven grand on one tight," the clarinetist said to Fogarty.
"Probably did. He always spent."
"But no more, eh?"
It sounded to Fogarty like a line at a wake. That man in the coffin is dead. Fogarty didn't like the feeling he got from shifting from that thought to a thought about Murray walking in the door. But Murray would have to come through the inn's glassed-in porch. Plenty of time to see him. What made Fogarty think he'd pick the one spot in the mountains where Jack happened to be at this odd moment? Did he think maybe he followed the car? Or that he'd been waiting near here for Jack to show up?
"He's probably still got a few dollars in his pocket," Fogarty said to the clarinetist.
"I wouldn't doubt that."
"You sounded like you did. "
"No, not at all."
"You sounded like you were saying he's a has-been."
"You got me wrong. I didn't mean that at all. Listen, that's not what I meant. Dick, give us a drink here. I was just asking a question. Hell, Jesus, it was just a goddamn silly question."
"I get you now," Fogarty said.
Wasn't it funny how fast Fogarty could turn somebody's head around? Power in the word. In any word from Fogarty. In the way people looked at him. But it was changing. Maybe you wouldn't think so, sitting here at the Aratoga, and Jack being respected and Fogarty being respected, with maybe that hint of new tension in the air. But it definitely was changing. Little signs: Jack's living room being different, messy, papers on the floor, the chairs not where they used to be. Authority slipping away from Fogarty, authority that he knew Jack well, could talk all about him, talk for him. Dirty dishes on the dining room table. Picture of Eddie on the coffee table never there before, which meant something Fogarty didn't understand. The parties at Jack's; they were over too, at least for now. Even priests used to come. Neighbors, sometimes a cop or a judge from the city, actors and musicians and so many beautiful women. Women liked Jack and the feeling rubbed off to the benefit of Jack's friends. Jack the pivot man at every party. Funny son of a bitch when he gets a few drinks in. Fogarty couldn't remember one funny joke Jack ever told, but all his stories were funny. Just the way he used his voice. Yes. The story about Murray shooting the wrong man. Split your gut listening to Jack tell it. A good singing voice, too. Second tenor. Loves barbershop. "My Mother's Rosary." A great swipe in the middle of that. One of Jack's favorites.
"Well, that's some kind of news," Jack said, sitting back down beside Fogarty. "Somebody saw him at the Five O'Clock Club last nig
ht."
"Last night? He must've gone back down."
"If he was ever up here."
"Don't you think he must've been?"
"After this, maybe not. He's not the only one-eyed bum in the state. The point is, where is he now? Last night is a long time ago. He could be here in a few hours. They're still checking him out. Give me a small whiskey, Dick."
And he went back to the phone. Everybody was watching him now. Silence at the bar. Whispers. The clarinetist moved away and stayed away. Dick Fegan set up Jack's drink and moved away. They're watching you, too, Joe. Jack's closest associate. Fogarty drank alone while Jack talked on the phone. The whiskey eased his tension, but didn't erase it. Jack came back and sipped his whiskey, all eyes on him again. When he looked up, they looked away. They always watched him, but never with such grim faces. More finality. Man dying alone in an alley. There's Jack Diamond over there, that vanishing species. That pilot fish with him is another endangered item.
"I can't sit still," Jack said, and he stood up behind the barstool. "I been like this for two days. "
"Let's go someplace else. "
"They're going to call me. Then we'll move."
The musicians started up, a decent sound. "Muskrat Ramble." Sounds of life. Memories of dancing. Like old times. Memories of holding women. Got to get back to that. Three-quarters of an hour passed, with Jack moving back and forth between the bar and the phone, then pacing up and down, plenty nervous. If Jack is that nervous, it's worse than Fogarty thought. Pacing. Jack's all alone and he knows it. And you know what that means, Joe? You know who else is alone if Jack is?
On his deathbed, when fibrosis was again relevant to him, Fogarty would recall how aware he was at this moment, not only of being alone, but of being sick again, of being physically weak with that peculiar early weakness in the chest that he recognized so quickly, so intimately. He would recall that he saw Dick Fegan pick up a lemon to squeeze it for a whiskey sour a customer had ordered. The customer was wearing a sport coat with checks so large Fogarty thought of a horse blanket. He would remember he saw these things, also saw Jack move out of his sight, out onto the porch just as the first blast smashed the window.
* * *
Fogarty ordered a hot dog and a chocolate milk and watched a fly that had either survived the winter or was getting an early start on the summer. The fiy was inspecting the open hot dog roll.
"Get that goddamn fly off my bun," Fogarty told the Greek.
The Greek was sweaty and hairy. He worked hard. He worked alone in the all-night EAT. Fogarty has a loaded pistol in his pocket, which is something you don't know about Fogarty, Greek. The fly could be a cluster fly. Crazy. Flies into things. Fast, but drunk. Few people realize where the cluster fly comes from. He comes from a goddamn worm. He is an earthworm. A worm that turns into a fly. This is the sort of information you do not come by easily. Not unless you lie on your back for a long, long time and read the only goddamn book or magazine or newspaper in the room. And when you've read it all and there's nobody to talk to you, you read it again and find plenty of things you missed the first time around. All about worms and flies. There is no end to the details of life you can discover when you are flat on your back for a long, long time.
"That goddamn fly is on my bun."
There is a certain amount of sadness in an earthworm turning into a fly. But then it is one hell of a lot better than staying an earthworm or a maggot.
"You gonna let that goddamn fly eat my bun, or do I have to kill the goddamn thing myself ?"
The Greek looked at Fogarty for the first time. What he saw made him turn away and find the flyswatter. Naturally the goddamn fiy was nowhere to be found.
Fogarty had parked his 1927 Studebaker in front of the EAT, which was situated on Route 9-W maybe eight or nine miles south of Kingston at a crossroads. The name of the EAT was EAT, and the Greek was apparently the one-man Greek EAT owner who was now looking for the fiy while Fogarty's hot dog was being calcified.
"That's enough on the dog," Fogarty said to the Greek, who was at the other end of the counter and did not see the fly return to the bun. Fogarty saw and he heard his pistol go off at about the same moment the bullet flecked away slivers from the EAT'S wooden cutting board. There was a second and then a third and a fourth report from the pistol. The fourth shot pierced the hot dog roll. None of the shots touched the fly. The Greek fled to a back room after the first shot.
Fogarty rejected the entire idea of a hot dog and left the EAT. He climbed into his Studebaker and nosed onto 9-W, destination Yonkers, his sister Peg's, which he knew was a bad idea, but he'd call first and get Peg's advice on where else he might stay. He could stay nowhere in the Catskills. That world exploded with the ten shotgun blasts from a pair of Browning automatic repeaters, fired at Jack as he paced in and out of the porch of the Aratoga. A pair of shooters fired from the parking lot, then stopped and drove away. Somebody snapped out the lights inside at the sound of those shots and everybody hit the floor. Fogarty heard: "Speed, help me," and he crawled out to the porch to see Jack on his stomach, blood bubbling out of holes in his back.
"Bum shooting," Jack said. "Better luck next time."
But he was flat amid the millions of bits of glass, and hurting, and Fogarty got on the phone and called Padalino, the undertaker, and told him to send over his hearse because he was not calling the cops in yet.
When it was obvious the shooting was over, the musicians and customers came out to look at Jack on the floor of the porch and Dick Fegan went for the phone. But Fogarty said, "No cops until we get out," and everyone waited for Padalino.
"Find Alice, keep an eye on her," Jack said to Fogarty. "Sure, Jack. Sure I will."
"They're putting me in the meat wagon," Jack said when Fogarty and Fegan lifted him gently, carefully into the hearse. By then Fogarty had cut Jack's shirt away and tied up the wounds with clean bar towels. He kept bleeding, but not so much.
"I'll follow you," Fogarty told Padalino, and when they were near Coxsackie, he parked his Studebaker at a closed gas station and got into the hearse alongside Jack. He fed Jack sips of the whiskey he had the presence of mind to take from the bar, tippled two himself, but only two, for he needed to be alert. He kept watching out the window of the rear door. He thought the hearse was being followed, but then it wasn't. Then it was again and then, outside Selkirk, it wasn't anymore. He sat by the rear door of the hearse with a gun in each hand while Jack bled and bled. I know nothing about shooting left-handed, Fogarty thought. But he held both guns, Jack's and Eddie's, a pair. Come on now, you bastards.
"Hurts, Speed. Really hurts. I can't tell where I'm hit."
They'd hit him with four half-ounce pellets. They'd fired ten double-ought shells with nine pellets to a shell. Somebody counted eighty some holes in the windows, the siding, and the inside porch walls. Ninety pellets out of two shotguns, and they only hit him with four, part of one shell. It really was bum shooting, Jack. You ought to be dead, and then some.
But maybe he is by this time, Fogarty thought, for he'd left Jack at the Albany Hospital, checked him into emergency under a fake name, called Marcus and got Padalino to take him back to his car at Coxsackie, Then, with the leftover whiskey in his lap, he headed south, only to have a fly land on his hot dog bun. Bun with a hole in it now.
The temperature gauge on the Studebaker was back in the red, almost to 220 again. He drove toward the first possible water, but saw no houses, no gas station. When the needle reached the top of the gauge and the motor began to steam and clank, he finished the whiskey dregs, shut off the ignition, threw the keys over his shoulder into the weeds and started walking.
Four cars passed him in fifteen minutes. The fifth picked him up when he waved his arms in the middle of the road, and drove him three miles to the roadblock where eight state troopers with shotguns, rifles, and pistols were waiting for him.
Poem from the Albany Times-Union
Long sleeping Rip Van Winkle seems
&
nbsp; At last arousing from his dreams,
And reaching for the gun at hand
To drive invaders from his land.
The Catskills peace and quiet deep
Have been too much disturbed for sleep.
The uproars that such shootings make
Have got the sleeper wide awake.
Fogarty called me and asked me to appear for him at the arraignment, which I did. The charges had piled up: Kidnapping, assault, weapons possession, and, in less than two weeks, the federal investigators also charged both him and Jack with multiple Prohibition Law violations. His bail was seventeen thousand five hundred dollars and climbing. He said he knew a wealthy woman, an old flame who still liked him and would help, and I called her. She said she'd guarantee five thousand dollars, all she could get without her husband knowing. Fogarty had more in the bank, enough to cover the bail, but unfortunately his accounts, like Jack's and Alice's, were all sequestered.
Two of Jack's transient henchmen—a strange, flabby young man who wore a black wig that looked like linguine covered with shoe polish, and a furtive little blond rat named Albert—also inquired after my services, but I said I was overloaded.
"What are you going to do about bail?" I asked Fogarty, and he suggested Jack. But Jack was having trouble raising his own, for much of his cash was also impounded. Beyond Jack, the woman, and his own inaccessible account, Fogarty had no idea where to get cash. His new Oldsmobile was repossessed for nonpayment a week after his arrest.
"How do you plan to pay me?" I asked him.
"I can't right now, but that money in the bank is still mine."
"Not if they prove it was booze profits."
"You mean they can take it?"
Legs - William Kennedy Page 21