' 'That's heavy duty.'
' 'I figure I'll do a little time,' he said. 'They want my ass.'
' 'Likewise,' I said and told him my story.
' 'What'd you do before you got in'?' he asks me and I tell him, 'I was a burglar.' He got a kick out of that because he done a bit for the same thing when he was a kid. So we talk and Jack gets a pint of whiskey from the corporal who made bedcheck. I don't drink that shit, so Jack asks me if I wanna drink some rain instead. It's raining out just like now, and Jack puts a cup out the window. Took about five minutes to fill it up part way, and by that time Jack's whiskey is most gone and he gets the cup of rain and gives it to me.
' 'I don't want no rain,' I says to him. 'It's dirty.'
' 'Who says it's dirty'?'
' 'Everybody says.'
' 'They're wrong,' he says. 'Best water there is.'
' 'You drink it,' I says, 'I don't want no part of any dirty, shitty rain.'
' 'Goddamn it, I told you rain wasn't dirty. You think I'd drink rain if it was dirty?' And he takes a drink of it.
' 'Anybody who'd drink rain'd shit in church,' I says to him.
' 'Did you say shit in church'?'
' 'Shit in church and then kick it out in the aisle.'
' 'That's a goddamn lie. I'd never shit in church.'
' 'If you'd drink rain, you'd shit in church all right.'
' 'Not me. I'd never shit in church. You hear that, goddamn it? Never!'
' 'All them rain drinkers. They all shit in church.'
' 'Not me, no sir. Why do you say that'?'
' 'I never knew an Irishman wouldn't shit in church if he thought he could get away with it.'
' 'Irishmen don't shit in church. I don't believe that.'
' 'I seen four Irishmen at the same time, all taking a shit in church.'
' 'Polacks shit in church.'
' 'I once seen an Irishman shit right in the holy water fountain.'
' 'That's a goddamn lie.'
' 'Then I seen two Irishmen takin' shits in the confessional boxes and about a dozen more takin' shits up on the altar all at once. I seen one Irishman shit during a funeral. Irishmen don't know no better.'
'I was layin' on my cot while this was going on. Then Jack got up and punched me in the right eye so hard I lost the sight of it. Jesus, that was a crazy thing to do. I didn't even see it comin'. I had to kick him all over the room, broke ribs and stuff. The guards pulled me off him. I woulda killed him if I knew the eye was gone, but I didn't know it then. When I saw him a week later he got down on his knees and asked me to forgive him what he done. I said, 'Fuck you, Jack,' and left him on his knees. But we shook hands before I left and I told him 'Okay, don't worry about it.' But I was still sore about it. I done six years because the MP I kicked died, and when I come out I looked Jack up because I figure he owes me a job. He thought he did a tough thing about the eye, but shit, once you get used to one eye it's just as good as two. And workin' for Jack, you get to do everything you got to do, so I got no complaints.'
We were about halfway down the mountain when Murray hit the brakes, but not soon enough, and we skidded into a rock slide and smashed into a boulder that must've just landed because other little rocks kept bouncing off the car. Both of us hit the windshield, and I got a hell of a bump and a four-day headache out of it. Murray's forehead was cut, a horizontal gash like a split seam.
'We better haul ass before another one falls on top of us,' Murray said, a thought I hadn't had yet since I was preoccupied with my pain. He tried backing up, but the car made a weird noise and was hard to move. He got out in the rain and so I got out after him. There was about one foot between me and about a four-hundred-foot drop, so I got carefully back inside and out Murray's door. He was pulling on the front left fender, which was smashed and rubbing against the wheel. Murray was a small man but a strong one, for the fender came almost straight at this tug. He cut his right hand on the edge of it, and when I offered him my pocket handkerchief, he shook his head and scooped up a handful of earth and grass and patted it on his forehead and then globbed a wad into his sliced right palm. 'Get in,' he said, his face and hand smeared and dripping with bloody mud.
'I'll drive,' I told him.
''No, I'll handle it.'
'You're in no shape to drive. '
'This is not your car, mister,' he said in a tone that was unarguably the last word.
'All right, then, back up and turn around. I'll direct you. You're damn near over the edge right there, and it's one hell of a long way down.'
It was dark now and I was wet to the underwear, standing in the middle of desolation, maybe about to be buried in a landslide, giving traffic directions to a bleeding, one-eyed psychopath who was, with one hand, trying to drive a mythic vehicle backwards up an enchanted mountain. I'd come a long way from the K. of C. library.
JOHNNY RAW, JACK GENTLEMAN
Jack came to Albany to see me four days after my time on the mountain. He was full of Europe and its glories, the spas at Bad Homburg and Wiesbaden, the roulette and baccarat in the casinos where croupiers spoke six languages, the eloquent slenderness of the Parisian whore. He came to my office with Fogarty; he was in town on other business we didn't discuss but which I presume was beer supply for his expanding clientele. He handed me five hundred cash as my initial retainer.
'What do I do for this?'
'Buy a ticket to Europe.'
'Jack, I've got no good reason to go to Europe.'
'You owe it to your body,' he said. 'All that great wine and great food.'
'All right, maybe,' I said. But what, really, did I need with this kind of action? Where was the profit? Jack merely said he'd be in touch within the week and that was that. Then I got a weird call at three the next morning from him, saying he'd decided to go to New York immediately instead of next week and leave for Europe in the afternoon if he got the booking, and was I ready, did I live in control of the quick decision or was I going to take a week to think it over? It meant being in Manhattan in about nine or ten hours and committing myself to the booking and turning off my practice. He kept saying, 'Well? Well? What do you think?' And so I said, 'All right, yes,' against all sane judgment, and he said, 'You're a winner, Marcus,' and I rolled over and went back for two more hours. Then I closed off my Albany life with four phone calls and caught the ten thirty train to New York.
A fox terrier leaped overboard, an apparent suicide, the day the news broke aboard ship that Charlie Northrup's bloodstained Buick was found in a Sixty-first Street garage near the Brooklyn Army Base. The garage was owned by Vannie Higgins, a pal of Jack's and the crown prince of Long Island rum-runners. Oxie and a Brooklyn couple, the wife a pal of Alice's, were arrested in their apartment with an arsenal: tear-gas grenades, ammo, flares, fountain- pen pistols, bulletproof vests, and enough explosives to blow up a city block. Brooklyn war with Capone, said the papers. Oxie said only that he was sleeping on Jack's porch at Acra when two men he wouldn't identify woke him and offered him fifty bucks to take the Buick to New York and dump it. Cops saw him and the other man near a Fifty-eighth Street pier acting suspiciously, and Oxie admitted that the blocks in the Buick were to be used to run it over the stringpiece.
We were two days out of New York on the Belgenland, bound for Plymouth and Brussels, and suddenly our
