of Christ still undigested in some internal region, memory of prayer and holy bacon grease on my tongue. I touched the trigger seriously, pulled the gun tighter to my shoulder. Old feeling. Comfortable with a weapon against the pectoral. Like Army days, days in the woods as a kid. Put it down, fool.
''For chrissake, Marcus, give it a blast,' Jack said.
Really childish not to. Raising the flag of morality. Powerful Irish Catholic magic at work that prohibits shooting effigies on the side of a barn. Bless me Father for I have sinned. I shot at Mr. Schultz's picture. And did you hit it, son? No, Father I missed. For your penance say two rosaries and try again for the son of a bitch.
'Honest, Marcus,' Alice said, 'it won't bite.'
Ladies' Auxiliary heard from. Altar Rosary Society Member attends machine-gun outing after mass, prods lawyer to take part. What a long distance between Marcus and Jack Diamond. Millenniums of psychology, civilization, experience, turpitude. Man also develops milquetoasts by natural selection. Would I defend him if some shooters walked through the barn door? What difference from defending him in court? And what of Jack's right to justice, freedom, life? Is the form of defense the only differentiating factor? What a morally confounded fellow Marcus is, perplexed by Mr. Thompson's invention. I pressed the trigger. Bullets exploded in my ears, my hands, my shoulders, my blood, my brain. The spew of death was a personal tremor that even jogged my scrotum.
'Close, off the right ear,' Jack said. 'Try again.'
I let go with another burst, feeling confident. No pain. It's easy. I leveled the weapon, squeezed off another.,
'Got him. Eyeball high. No more Maggie's Drawers for Marcus. You want a job riding shotgun?'
Jack reached for the gun, but I held onto it, facing the ease with which I had become new. Do something new and you are new. How boring it is not to fire machine guns. I fired again and eliminated the Schultz mouth.
'Jesus, look at that,' Jack said.
I gave him the gun and he looked at me. Me. Sandlot kid hits grand slam off thirty-game winner, first time at bat.
'How the hell did you do that?' Jack asked me.
'It's all a matter of the eyeball,' I said. 'I also shoot a pretty fair game of pool.'
'I'm impressed,' Jack said. He gave me another amazed look and put the weapon to his shoulder. But then he decided the shooting was over. What if he missed the target now? Bum of bums.
'Let's have lunch and toast your sharpshooting,' he said.
'Oh nonsense,' Alice said, 'let's toast something important, like the beautiful day and the beautiful summer and having friends to dinner. Are you our friend, Marcus?'
I smiled at Alice to imply I was her friend, and Jack's, too. And I was then, yes I was. I was intuitively in sympathy with this man and woman who had just introduced me to the rattling, stammering splatter of violent death. Gee, ain't it swell?
We walked back to the porch where Fogarty was reading Krazy Kat.
'I heard the shooting,' Fogarty said, 'who won?'
'Marcus won,' Alice said.
'I wiped out Mr. Schultz's mouth, if that's a win.'
'Just what he deserves. The prick killed a kid cousin of mine last week in Jersey.'
And so I had moral support for my little moral collapse-which sent a thrill through me, made me comfortable again on this glorious Sunday in the mountains.
We got into the car and left the Biondo place, Alice and I in the back seat, Jack up front with Fogarty. Alice previewed our Sunday dinner for me: roast beef and baked potatoes, and did I like my beef rare the way Jack liked it, and asparagus from their own garden, which Tamu, their Japanese gardener, had raised, and apple pie by their colored maid, Cordelia.
Alice bulged out of her pink summer cotton in various places, and my feeling was that she was ready instantly to let it all flop out whenever Jack gave the signal. All love, all ampleness. all ripeness, would fall upon the bed, or the ground, or on him, and be his for the romping. Appleness, leaves, blue sky, white sheets, erect, red nipples, full buttocks, superb moistness at the intersection, warm wet lips, hair flying, craziness of joy, pleasure, wonder, mountains climbable with a stride after such sex. I like her.
Oxie was asleep on the enclosed porch when we arrived, more formally known as Mendel (The Ox) Feinstein, one of the permanent cadre. Oxie was a bull-necked weightlifter with no back teeth, who'd done a four-year stretch for armed robbery of a shoe store. The judge specified he do the full four because, when he held up the lady shoe clerk, he also took the shoes she was wearing. Justice puts its foot down on Oxie.
He got up immediately when the key turned in the front door. We all watched as Alice stopped to coo at two canaries in a silver cage on the porch. When she went on to the kitchen, Fogarty sat down on the sofa with Oxie, who made a surreptitious gesture to Jack.
'Marion called about a half hour ago,' he whispered. 'Here'?'
Oxie nodded and Jack made facial note of a transgression by Marion.
'She wants you to see her this afternoon. Important, she said.'
'Goddamn it,' Jack said, and he went into the living room and up the stairs two at a time, leaving me on the porch with the boys. Fogarty solved my curiosity, whispering: 'Marion's his friend. Those two canaries there-he calls one Alice, one Marion.' Oxie thought that was the funniest thing he'd heard all week, and while he and Fogarty enjoyed the secret, I went into the living room, which was furnished to Alice's taste: overstuffed mohair chairs and sofa; walnut coffee table; matching end tables and table lamps, their shades wrapped in cellophane; double-thick Persian rug, probably worth a fortune if Jack hadn't lifted it. My guess was he'd bought it hot; for while he loved the splendid things of life, he had no inclination to pay for them. He did let Alice pick out the furniture, for the hot items he kept bringing home clashed with her plans, such as they were. She'd lined the walls with framed calendar art and holy pictures-a sepia print of the Madonna returning from Calvary and an incendiary, bleeding sacred heart with a cross blooming atop the bloody fire. One wall was hung with a magnificent blue silk tapestry. a souvenir from Jack's days as a silk thief. Three items caught my eye on a small bookshelf otherwise full of Zane Grey and James Oliver Curwood items: a copy of Rabelais, an encyclopedia of Freemasonry, and the Douay Bible sandwiched between them.
When he came down. I asked about the books. The Freemasonry? Yeah, he was a Mason. 'Good for business,' he said. 'Every place you go in this country, the Protestant sons of bitches got the money locked up.'
And Rabelais? Jack picked up the book, fondled it. 'A lawyer gave it to me when I had my accident in l927.' (He meant when he was shot three times by the Lepke mob when they ambushed and killed Little Augie Orgen.) 'Terrific book. You ever read it? Some screwball that Rab-a-lee.'
I said I knew the book but avoided mentioning the coincidence of Rabelais being here and also in the K. of C. library. where I made my decision to come here, and in the additional fact that a lawyer had given the book to Jack. I would let it all settle, let the headiness go out of it. Otherwise, it would sound like some kind of weird, fawning lie.
Alice heard us talking and came into the living room in her apron. 'Those damn Masons,' she said. 'I can't get him away from that nonsense.'' To rile her, Jack kept a picture of an all-seeing eye inside a triangle, a weird God- figure in the Masonic symbology, on the wall in the upstairs bathroom. Alice raised this issue, obviously a recurring one.
'It sees you, Alice,' Jack told her, 'even when you pee.'
''My God doesn't watch me when I pee,' Alice said. 'My God is a gentleman. '
'As I get it,' Jack said, 'your God is two gentlemen and a bird.'
He opened the Rabelais to a page and began reading, walking to the kitchen doorway to serenade Alice with the flow. He read of Gargantua's arrival in Paris, his swiping of the Notre Dame Cathedral bells for his giant horse, and then his perching on the cathedral roof to rest while mobs of tiny Parisians stared up at him. And so he decided to give them wine.
' 'He undid his magnificent codpiece' '-Jack read with mock robustness; his voice was not robust but of a moderately high pitch, excitable, capable of tremolos-'and bringing out his john-thomas, pissed on them so fiercely that he drowned two hundred and sixty thousand, four hundred and eighteen persons, not counting the women and
