'Well, that's some kind of news,' Jack said, sitting back down beside Fogarty. 'Somebody saw him at the Five O'Clock Club last night.'
'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
At last arousing from his dreams,
