Legs by William Kennedy Read Free Book Online

with old man Van Wie they drove to the barn which had
not yet had its eyes gouged out or holes made in its roof. And with
guns drawn and the farmer behind them with his pitchfork, they
entered the barn.
    "What's going to stop him from biting hell out
of us?" Jack said.
    "I expect you'll shoot him 'fore he gets a
chance at that," the old man said.
    Jack saw the cat first, yellowish orange and brown
and curled up on some hay, and quiet. It looked at them and didn't
move, but then it opened its mouth and hissed without sound.
    "That don't look like a mad cat to me,"
Jack said.
    "You didn't see it bite on my wife or leap on
the lampshade and then try to run up the curtain. Maybe it's quiet
'cause I whacked it with the fork. Maybe I knocked it lame."
    "It looks like Sugarpuss," Eddie said.
    "I know," Jack said. "I'm not going to
kill it."
    The mad cat looked at the men, orange and silent and
no longer disturbed by their intrusion or fearful of their menace.
    "You shoot it if you want," Jack said.
    "I don't want to shoot it," Eddie said.
    "Look out," old man Van Wie said, pushing
past the brothers and sticking his pitchfork through the cat, which
squealed and wriggled and tried to leap off the fork. But it was
impaled and the farmer held it out to the brothers, an offering.
    "Now shoot it," the old man said.
    Jack kept his arm at his side, pistol down, watching
the cat squeal and squirm upside down on the fork. Eddie put three
bullets in its head, and the old man, saying only "Obliged"
and grabbing a shovel off a nail, carried the carcass out to the yard
to bury what remained of madness. And Jack then was triggered into
his second cat memory of eighteen years before, when he was twelve,
when he said to Eddie that he wanted to furnish the warehouse and
Eddie did not understand. The warehouse was enormous, longer than
some city blocks, empty for as long as they had been , alive. It's
was made of corrugated metal and wooden beams and had scores of
windows that could be broken but not shattered. Jack discovered it,
and with Eddie, they imagined its vast empty floor space full of
automobiles and machinery and great crated mysteries. At one end an
office looked down on the emptiness from second-story level. 
There was no staircase to it, but Jack found a way. He rigged a
climbing rope, stolen from a livery stable, over a wooden crossbeam,
the stairway's one remnant. He worked two hours to maneuver a loop
upward that would secure the rope, then shinnied up. It was 1909 and
his mother had been dead two months. His brother was eight and spent
two days learning how to shinny up to the office. The brothers looked
out the office windows at a fragment of Philadelphia's freight yards,
at lines of empty boxcars, stacks of crossties, piles of telegraph
poles covered with creosote. They watched trains arrive and then
leave for places they knew only from the names painted on the
cars—Baltimore and Ohio, New York Central, Susquehanna, Lackawanna,
Erie, Delaware and Hudson, Boston and Albany—and they imagined
themselves in these places, on these rivers. From the windows they
saw a hobo open a freight-car door from inside, and they assumed he'd
just awakened from a night's sleep. They saw him jump down and saw
that a bull saw, too, and was chasing him. The hobo had only one
shoe, the other foot wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. The
bull outran him and beat him with a club, and when the hobo went
down, he stayed down. The bull left him where he fell.
    "The bastard," Jack said. "He'd do the
same to us."
    But the Diamond brothers always outran the bulls. Out
scrambled them beneath the cars.
    Jack brought a chair to the office and a jug of water
with a cork in it, candles, matches, a slingshot with a supply of
stones, half a dozen pulp novels of the wild West, a cushion, and,
when he could steal it from his father's jug, some dago red. He kept
the hobo's hat, which was worn through at the crown from being
fingered and had spots of blood on the