Legs (42 page)

"Thanks for coming," she said, and I didn't
know whether to leave or not. Then she said, "I could've made it
with you, Marcus. I think I could've. But he spoiled me, you know."

"Sometimes friends should just stay friends."

"He spoiled me for so many men. I never thought
any man could do that to me."

"You'll never be spoiled for me."

"Come and see me again, Marcus. Next time you
see me on a marquee someplace."

"You can bank on that," I said.

But I never did. Her name
turned up in the papers when she married a couple of times, never
with success. About 1941 a patient treated in Bellevue's alcoholic
ward gave the name of Kiki Roberts, but the story that it was the
real Kiki was denied in the press the next day. She was hurt in a
theater fire in Newark somewhere around that time, and a friend of
mine from Albany saw her back in Boston in a small club during the
middle years of the war, still known professionally as Jack's
sweetheart, not stripping any longer, just singing torch songs, like
"Broken Hearted," a tune from '27, the year they killed
Little Augie and shot Jack full of holes, the year he became famous
for the first time for not dying. You can't kill Legs Diamond. I've
heard Kiki died in Detroit, Jersey, and Boston, that she went crazy,
broke her back and had a metal backbone put in, got fat, grew old
beautifully, turned lesbian, and that she still turns up in Troy and
Catskill and Albany bars whose owners remember Jack. I don't believe
any of it. I don't know what happened to her.

* * *

That isn't the end of the story, of course. Didn't I,
like everybody else who knew him, end up on a barstool telling Jack's
tale again, forty-three years later, telling it my own way? And
weren't Tipper and The Pack and Flossie there with me, ready, as
always with the ear, ready too to dredge up yet another story of
their own? The magazines never stopped retelling Jack's story either,
and somebody put it out in book form once, a silly work, and somebody
else made a bum movie of it. But nobody ever came anywhere near
getting it right, and I mean right, not straight, for accuracy about
Jack wasn't possible. His history was as crooked as the line between
his brain and his heart. I stand on this: that Packy's dog story was
closer to the truth about Jack and his world than any other word ever
written or spoken about him.

We were all there in the dingy old Kenmore when Packy
told it, old folks together, wearying of talk of any kind by now, all
of us deep into the drink, anxious to move along to something else,
and yet not quite able to let go. I remember I was winding up,
telling what happened to The Goose, who at age sixty-eight
homosexually assaulted a young boy in a prison shower and was stabbed
in his good eye for his efforts. And Oxie, who did seven long ones
and then dropped dead of a heart attack on a Bronx street corner
after a month of freedom. And Fogarty, who was let out of jail
because of his sickness and wasted away with TB in the isolation ward
of the Ann Lee Home in Albany, and who called me at the end to handle
his legacy, which consisted of Big Frenchy DeMange's diamond
wristwatch. Jack gave it to him as a souvenir after the Big Frenchy
snatch, and Fogarty kept it in a safe-deposit box and never sold it,
even when he didn't have a dime.

My three old friends didn't know either that Jack
never paid me for the second trial, nor had he ever paid Doc Madison
a nickel for all the doc's attention to his wounds.

"He stole from us all, to the very end," I
said.

"Yes, Marcus," said Flossie, the loyal
crone, misty-eyed over her wine, profoundly in love with all that was
and would never be again, "but he had a right to. He was magic.
He had power. Power over people. Power over animals. He had a tan
collie could count to fifty-two and do subtraction."

"I wrote a story about his dog," said the
Tipper. "It was a black and white bull terrier named Clancy. I
went and fed him when they all left Acra and forgot he was there.
Smartest dog I ever saw. Jack taught him how to toe dance."

"It was a white poodle," said Packy. "He
brought it with him right here where we're sitting one night in the
middle of '31. There was a bunch of us and Jack decides he'll take a
walk, and we all say, okay, we'll all take a walk. But Jack says he
needs his sweater because the night air gets chilly, and we all say,
you're right, Jack, it sure gets chilly."

"Jack could turn on the electric light
sometimes, just by snapping his fingers," Flossie said.

"So Jack says to the white poodle, 'Listen here,
dog, go up and get my black sweater,' and that damn dog got up and
went out to the lobby and pushed the elevator button and went up to
Jack's suite and barked, and Hubert Maloy let him in."

"Jack could run right up the wall and halfway
across the ceiling when he got a good running start," Flossie
said. "We all waited, but the poodle didn't come back, and Jack
finally says, 'Where the hell is that dog of mine?' And somebody says
maybe he went to the show to see the new Rin-Tin-Tin, and Jack says,
'No, he already saw it.' Jack got so fidgety he finally goes upstairs
himself and we all follow, and Jack is sayin' when he walks into his
room, 'Come on, you son of a bitch, where's my goddamn sweater?' "

"Jack could outrun a rabbit," Flossie said.

"Well, let me tell you, it took the wind right
out of Jack when he saw that damn dog sitting on the sofa with the
sweater, sewin' on a button that was missin' off the pocket."

"Jack could tie both his shoes at once,"
Flossie said.
 

JACKED UP

Jack (Legs) Diamond, aged thirty-four years, five
months, seven days, and several hours, sat up in bed in his underwear
and stared into the mirror at his new condition: incipiently dead.

"Those simple bastards," he said, "they
finally did it right."

He moved without being able to move, thought out of
his dead brain, smiled with an immobile mouth, his face intact but
the back of his head blown away. Already aware he was moving outside
time, he saw the yellow fluid coming to his eyes, trickling out his
nose, his ears, down the corners of his mouth. He felt tricklings
from his rectum, his penis, old friend, and knew those too were the
yellow. He turned his head and saw the yellow coming out his wounds,
on top of his congealing blood. He had known the yellow would come,
for he had been at the edge before. But he always failed to
understand the why of it. The wisdom of equality, the Book of the
Dead said, but that made no sense. Death did make sense. It was a
gift. The dead thanked you with stupid eyes.

"Do you think I worry because I'm dead?"
Jack asked aloud.

The yellow oozed its curious answer.

The press of death was deranging. He was fully aware
of the pressure, like earth sinking into water. Yet there was time
left for certain visitors who were crowding into the room. Rothstein
stepped out of the crowd and inspected the crown of Jack's head. He
fingered that bloody skull like a father fondling the fontanel of his
infant son—and who with a better right? He pulled out two hairs
from the center of the scalp.

"What odds that I find the answer, big dad?"
Jack said. Rothstein mulled the question, turned for an estimate to
Runyon, who spoke out of a cancerously doomed larynx.

"I've said it before," said Damon. "All
life is nine to five against."

"You hear that?" A. R. asked.

"I hear it."

"I must call against."

"Then up yours," said Jack. "I'll make
it my way."

"Always headstrong," said A. R.

I took Jack by the arm, guided him back from the
mirror to lie on his right side, the lying posture of a lion. I
pressed my fingers against the arteries on both sides of his throat.

"It's time, Jack," I said. "It's
coming."

"I'm not sure I'll know it when it comes."

"I'll tell you this. It looks like a thought,
like a cloudless sky. It looks like nothing at all."

"Like nothing?"

"Like nothing."

"I'II recognize it," Jack said. "I
know what that looks like."

"Say a prayer," I suggested.

"I did."

"Say another."

"I knew a guy once had trouble cheating because
his wife was always praying for him."

"Try to be serious. It's your last chance."

Jack concentrated, whispered, "Dear God, turn me
onto the Great White Way." He felt the onset of clammy coldness
then, as if this body were fully immersed in water. He remembered
Rothstein's prayer and said that too, "O Lord, God of Abraham,
keep me alive and smart. The rest I'll figure out for myself."

"Perfect." said A. R.

"Dummy," I said, "you're dead. What
kind of a thing is it, asking to stay alive?"

I eased the pressure on Jack's arteries and pressed
his nerve of eternal sleep. Then I knelt beside him, seeing the water
of his life sinking into fire, waiting for his final exit from that
useless body. But if Jack left his body through the ear instead of
the top of the head where Rothstein had pulled out the hairs, he
might come back in the next life as a fairy musician.

"Jesus," Jack said when I told him,
"imagine that?"

"Easy, now," I said, "easy. Out
through the top."

Then he was out, just line, standing in front of the
mirror, seeing no more blood, no more yellow.

"Am I completely dead'?" he asked, and knew
then his last human feeling: his body being blown to atoms, the
feeling of fire sinking into air. He looked around the room, but
could see no one any longer, though we were all there, watching. He
felt his absent pupils dilate to receive the light, which was his own
light as well as everyone else's. When the light came, it was not the
brilliant whiteness Jack expected, but a yellowish, grayish light
that made no one blink. The motion of the light was perceptible. It
swirled around Jack's neck like a muffler, rose up past his eyes and
hairline like a tornado in crescendo, spun round his entire head with
what was obviously a potentially dazzling ferocity, reduced in effect
now by the horrendous life-tone of Jack Diamond. It was obvious to
everyone that given propitious conditions it could centripetally
slurp the entire spirit of Jack into the vortex and make off with it
forever; but now it moved only like a bit of fog on a sunny morning,
coiled by a frolicsome breeze, then gone, with not enough force to
slurp up a toupee.

As Jack's awareness of the light peaked, he was
already falling backward. Though he had no arms, he waved them
frantically to right himself, and as he fell, twisting and flailing
against this ignominious new development, he delivered up one, final,
well-modulated sentence before he disappeared into the void, into the
darkness where the white was still elusive.

"Honest to God, Marcus," he said going
away, "I really don't think I'm dead."