she had half turned to leave, when my words of invitation stopped her, I caught a vision of her callipygian subtleties, like the ongoing night, never really revealed to these eyes before. She came toward me as I lay flat on my back, ever so little bounce in the splendid upheaval of her chest, vision too of calf without blemish, without trace of muscular impurity. None like Floss on this earth tonight, not for Marcus.
'Do you want something from me?' she said, bending forward, improving the vision fiftyfold, breathing her sweet, alcoholic whore's breath at me. I loosened my hand from the beer and reached for her, touched her below the elbow, first flesh upon first flesh of the evening. Client at last.
'Come up on the cot, love,' she said, but I shook my head and pulled the blanket to the floor. She doubled it as the moon shone on her. The rat was watching us. I raised the pistol and potshot it, thinking of it dying with a bullet through its head and hanging there on the wall; then thinking of framing it or stuffing it in that position, photographing the totality of the creature in its limp deathperch and titling it 'Night Comes to the Peanut Butter Factory.'
My shot missed and the rat disappeared back into the wall.
'Jesus, Mary, and Holy Saint Joseph,' Flossie said at the shot, which sounded like a cannon. 'What are you doing?'
'Potting the rat.'
'Oh, honeyboy, you're so drunk. Give us that pistol.'
'Of course, Flossie'-and she put it on the table out of my reach. The stars shone on her then as she unbuttoned her blouse, unhooked her skirt, folded the clothes carefully and lay them at the foot of the cot. She wore nothing beneath them, the final glory. She helped prepare me as the men moved in with the peanut butter machine and the women arrived to uncrate the nuts.
'It's been a while, hasn't it?' the Floss said to me.
'Only yesterday, Floss, only yesterday.'
'Sometimes I feel that way, Marcus, but not tonight.'
'It's always yesterday, Floss. That's what's so great.'
'Tonight is something else. '
'What is it?'
'It's better. It's got some passion in it.'
'Lovely passion.'
'I don't get at it very often.'
'None of us do.'
The rat came back to his perch and watched us. The sodden air rose up through the skylight and mated with the nighttime breezes. The machine began to whirr and a gorgeous ribbon of golden peanut butter flowed smoothly out of its jaws. Soon there were jars of it, crates of jars, stacks of crates.
'Isn't it lovely?' said Flossie, flat on her back.
'It's the most ineffable of products,' I said. 'The secret substance of life. If only the alchemists knew of this. '
'Who were the alchemists?' she asked.
'Shhhh,' I said.
And instead of talking, Flossie made me a peanut butter sandwich, and we fortified ourselves against the terror.
JACK O' THE CLOCK
Jack walked up Second Street in Troy, dressed in his double-breasted chinchilla coat and brown velour fedora, walked between his attorney and his wife, a family man today, Kiki discreetly tucked away in the love nest. Jack walked with his hands in his pocket, the press swarming toward him as he was recognized. How do you feel, Legs? Any statement, Mr. Gorman? Do you have faith in your husband's innocence, Mrs. Diamond?
'You guys are responsible for all this,' Jack said to the newsmen. 'I wouldn't be in trouble if it wasn't for you sonsabitches.'
'Keep out the cuss words, boys,' I said to the press. I smiled my Irish inheritance, easing the boys.
'What'll you make your case on, counselor?' Tipper Kelly said. 'Same as the first trial? An alibi?'
'Our case is based wholly on self-defense,' I said. Self-defense against a kidnapping charge. Jack laughed. His loyal wife laughed. The newsmen laughed and made notes. A bon mot to start the day.
'How do you feel about all this, Mrs. Diamond?'
'I'll always be at his side,' said Alice.
'Don't bother her,' said Jack.
'She's just a loyal wife to a man in trouble,' I said.
'That's why she's here.'
'That's right,' said Alice. 'I'm a loyal wife. I'll always be loyal, even after they kill him.'
'We mustn't anticipate events,' I said.
The gray neo-classical Rensselaer County courthouse, with its granite pillars, stood tall over Legs Diamond: legs of Colossus, as this peanut man walked beneath them.
Birds roosted on the upper ledges. A stars and stripes snapped in the breeze. As Legs brushed the wall with his shoulder, dust fell from the pillars.
The Pathe News cameraman noted the action and the consequence and asked Legs to come back and do it again. But, of course, Legs could not commit precisely the same act a second time, since every act enhanced or diminished him as well as the world around him. Yet it was that precise moment, that push, that almost imperceptible fall of dust, the cameraman wanted on film.
As the crowd moved into the courtroom the cameraman exercising a bit of creative enterprise, lifted Legs Diamond's coat and hat from the cloakroom. He dressed his slightly built assistant cameraman in the garments and sent him up the stairs to brush the wall for a repeat performance. The Pathe News cameraman then filmed it all. Inspecting the floor for a closeup, he discovered that the dust that fell was not dust at all, but pigeon shit.
In the crowded hallway of the courthouse, during a brief moment when no one was holding his arm, a youth Jack did not know separated himself from the mob and whispered, 'You're gonna get it, Diamond, no matter what happens here. Wanna take it now?' Jack looked at the kid-maybe nineteen, maybe twenty-two, with a little fuzz on his lip and a bad haircut-and he laughed. The kid eased himself back into the crowd, and Jack, pulled by me toward the courtroom, lost sight of him.
'Kid was braggin',' Jack said, telling me about the threat. 'He looked like a hundred-dollar pay killer. Too green to be in the big money.' Jack shook his head in a way I took to be an amused recognition of his own lowly condition. They send punk kids after me.
But I also saw a spot of white on his lower lip, a spot of bloodlessness. He bit at the spot, again and again. The bite hardened his face, as if he were sucking the blood out of the point of his own fear, so that when the threat became tangible it would not bleed him into weakness. It struck me as a strange form of courage, but not as I knew it for myself: no intellectual girding, but rather a physiological act: a Jack Diamond of another day, recollected not by the brain but by the body, his back to a cave full of unexplored dangers of its own, staring out beyond a puny fire, waiting for the unspecified enemy who tonight, or tomorrow night, or the next, would throw a shadow across that indefensible hearth.
By eight o'clock on the evening of the first day of Jack's second Troy trial, both the prosecution and the defense attorneys had exhausted their peremptory challenges and the final juror was at last chosen. He was an auto mechanic who joined two farmers, a printer, an engineer, a mason, a lumber dealer, an electrical worker, two
