Legs

'Everything was still incredible with me and Jack back then,' Kiki said to me much later, remembering the sweet time. 'It was thrilling just to see him from a new angle, his back, or his stomach, any part of his bare skin. He had gouges and scars from knife fights when he was a kid, and where he'd been shot and kicked and beaten with clubs and boards and pipes. I got sad up on the mountain one night looking at them all. But he said they didn't hurt him anymore, and the more I looked at them and touched them, the more they made his body special, the way his head was special. It wasn't an all white and smooth and fatty body like some I've seen but the body of a man who'd gone through a whole lot of hell. There was a long red scar on his stomach just above his belly button, where he'd almost died from a cut in a knife fight over a girl when he was fifteen. I ran my tongue over it and it felt hot. I could almost taste how much it hurt when he'd got it and what it meant now. To me it meant he was alive, that he didn't die easy. Some people could cut their little toe and give up and bleed to death. Jack never gave up, not his body, not anything.'

* * *

Well, we all did have dinner on the mountain, and then I insisted on leaving. 'It's been a special day,' I told Jack, 'but an odd one.'

'What's so odd about it?'

'Well, how about buying a paperweight for starters?'

'Seems like an ordinary day to me,' he said. I assumed he was kidding. But then he said, 'Come to dinner next week. I'll have Alice cook up another roast. I'll call you during the week to set it up. And think about Europe.' So I said I would and turned to Kiki, whom I'd spoken about forty words to all day. But I'd smiled her into my goodwill and stared her into my memory indelibly, and I said, 'Maybe I'll see you again, too,' and before she could speak Jack said, 'Oh you'll see her all right. She'll be around.'

'I'll be around he says,' Kiki said to me in a smart-ass tone, like Alice's whippy retort had been earlier in the day. Then she took my hand, a sensuous moment.

Everything seemed quite real as I stood there, but I knew when I got back to Albany the day would seem to have been invented by a mind with a faulty gyroscope. It had the quality of a daydream after eight whiskeys. Even the car I was to ride down in-Jack's second buggy, a snazzy, wire-wheeled, cream-colored Packard roadster The Goose was using to chauffeur Kiki around the mountains-had an unreal resonance.

I know the why of this, but I know it only now as I write these words. It took me forty-three years to make the connection between Jack and Gatsby. It's should have been quicker, for he told me he met Fitzgerald on a transatlantic voyage in 1926, on the dope-buying trip that got him into federal trouble. We never talked specifically about Gatsby, only about Fitzgerald, who, Jack said, was like two people, a condescending young drunk the first time they met, an apologetic, decent man the second time. The roadster was long and bright and with double windshields, and exterior toolbox, and a tan leather interior, the tan a substitute, for Gatsby's interior was 'a sort of green leather conservatory.' But otherwise it was a facsimile of the Gatsby machine, and of that I'm as certain as you can be in a case like this. Jack probably read Gatsby for the same reason he read every newspaper story and book and saw every movie about gangland. I know he saw Von Sternberg's Underworld twice; we did talk about that. It was one way of keeping tabs on his profession, not pretension to culture. He mocked Waxey Gordon to me once for lining his walls with morocco-bound sets of Emerson and Dickens.

'They're just another kind of wallpaper to the bum,' Jack said.

I accept Jack's Gatsby connection because he knew Edward Fuller, Fitzgerald's neighbor on Long Island who was the inspiration for Gatsby. Fuller and Rothstein were thick in stocks, bonds, and bucketshops when Jack was bodyguarding Rothstein. And, of course, Fitzgerald painted a grotesque, comic picture of Rothstein himself in Gatsby, wearing human molar cuff buttons and spouting a thick Jewish accent, another reason Jack would have read the book.

I rode with The Goose in Jack's roadster and tried to make a little conversation.

'You known Jack long?'

'Yeah,' said Murray, and then nothing for about three miles.

''Where'd you meet him?'

''Th'army,' said Murray, not spending two words where one would do.

'You've been working with him since then?'

'No, I did time. Jack, too.'

'Ah.'

'I got nine kids.'

Murray looked at me when he said this, and I guess I paused long enough before I said, 'Have you?' to provoke him.

'You don't believe me?'

'Sure I believe you. Why shouldn't I?'

''People don't believe I got nine kids.'

'If you say it, I believe it. That's a lot of kids. Nobody lies about things like that. '

'I don't see them. Once a year. Maybe, maybe not. But I send 'em plenty.'

''Uh-huh.'

'They don't know what I do for a living.'

'Oh?'

Then we had another mile or so of silence, except for the thunder and lightning and the heavy rain, which kept Murray creeping slowly along the snaky road down the mountain. I judged him to be about forty-five, but he was hard to read. He might've seemed older because of the menace he transmitted, even when he talked about his kids. His mouth curled down into a snarley smile, his lone eye like a flat spring, tightly coiled, ready to dilate instantly into violent glare. He was obviously the pro killer in the gang, which I deduced as soon as I saw him. Oxie may have had some deadly innings in his career, but he looked more like a strongarm who would beat you to death by mistake.

Murray's clothes were a shade too small for him, giving him a puffy, spaghetti-filled look. I thought I detected tomato sauce stains on his coat and pants and even his eyepatch. I choose to believe he was merely a slob rather than inefficient enough to walk around with bloodstains from his last victim. I doubt Jack would have approved of that sort of coarseness.

'You workin' for Jack now?' Murray asked me.

'Tentatively,' I said, wondering whether he understood the word, sol added, 'for the time being I guess I am.'

'Jack is a pisser.'

'Is he?'

'He's crazy. '

'Is that so?'

'That's why I work for him. You never know what'll happen next.'

'That's a good reason. '

'He was crazy in the Army. I think he was always crazy.'

'Some of us are.'

'I said to myself after he done what he done to me, this is a crazy guy you got to watch out for because he does crazy stuff. '

''What did he do to you?'

'What did he do to me'? What did he do to me?'

'Right.'

'I was in the stockade at Fort Jay for raping a colonel's wife, a bum rap. I only did her a favor after she caught me in the house and I rapped her one and she fell down. Her dress goes up and she says, 'I suppose you're gonna strip and rape me,' and I hadn't figured on it, but you take what comes. So I'm in for that, plus burglary and kickin' an MP when Jack comes in to wait for his court-martial.

' 'Whatcha in for?' I asked him.

' 'Desertion and carrying a pistol.'