Legs by William Kennedy Read Free Book Online Page A

brim. Jack took it off the
hobo after he and Eddie went down to help him and found he was dead.
The hobo was a young man, which shocked the brothers. Jack hung the
hat on a nail in the office and let no one wear it. The brothers were
asleep in the office the day the orange cat came in. It had climbed
one of the wooden pillars and found its way along a crossbeam. A dog
was after it, barking at the foot of the pillar. Jack gave it water
in the candle dish, petted it, and called it Sugarpuss. The dog kept
barking and Jack fired stones at it with his slingshot. When it
wouldn't leave, Jack shinnied down, clubbed it with a two-by-four,
cut its throat, and threw it out by the crossties.
    Sugarpuss remained the
mascot of the brothers and the select group of friends they allowed
up the rope. It lived in the warehouse, and all the gang brought it
food. During the winter Jack found Sugarpuss outside, frozen in the
ice, its head almost eaten off where another animal had gotten it. He
insisted it be given a decent burial and immediately got another cat
to replace it. But the second cat ran away, an early lesson in
subtraction for Jack.
    * * *
    We came out of the woods onto the highway and walked
back toward Jack's house. A car passed us, and a middle-aged man and
woman waved and tooted at Jack, who explained they were neighbors and
that he'd had an ambulance take their kid to Albany Hospital, some
thirty miles away, about six months back when the local sawbones
didn't know what ailed the boy. Jack footed the bill for examinations
and a week's stay in the hospital, and the kid came out in good
shape. An old woman down the road had a problem with her cow after
her shed collapsed, and so Jack paid for a new shed. People in Acra
and Catskill told these stories when the papers said Jack was a
heartless killer.
    Jack's Uncle Tim was working on the rosebushes when
we reached the house. The lawn had been freshly cut, some grass raked
into piles on the front walk. Tamu was watering the flower beds of
large and small marigolds, dahlias, snapdragons, on the sunny side of
the brown shingled house. The Bowers reached up toward a second-story
window where, it was authoritatively reported in the press at a later
date, Jack had his machine guns mounted. The fortress notion was
comic but not entirely without foundation, for Jack did have
floodlights on the house to illuminate all approaches, and the maple
trees on the lawn were painted white to a point higher than a man, so
anyone crossing in front of one was an instant target. Jack installed
the lights back in l928 when he was feuding with Schultz and
Rothstein, right after a trio of hirelings tried to kill Eddie in
Denver. Eddie went to Denver because the Catskills hadn't solved his
lung problems, and Denver must have helped, for when they shot at him
he leaped out of his car and outran the killers. One killer, when he
saw Eddie'd gotten away, grabbed a bull terrier pup in front of
somebody's house and shot off one of its paws, an odd substitute for
murder. But then I guess in any realm of life you solve your needs
any way you can.
    Jack and I stood on the lawn and watched the grooming
of the landscape. Domestic felicity. Back to the soil. Country
squirearch. It didn't conform to my preconceptions of Jack, but
standing alongside him, I had to admit it didn't sit so badly on him
either.
    "Pretty good life you've got here," I told
him. He wanted to hear that.
    "Beats hell out of being at the bottom of the
river," he said.
    "A striking truth."
    "But this is nothing, Marcus, nothing. Give me a
year, maybe even six months, you'll see something really special."
    "The house, you mean, the purple house?"
    "The house, the grounds, this whole goddamn
county."
    He squinted at me then and I waited for
clarification.
    "It's a big place, Marcus, and they pack in the
tourists all summer long. You know how many speakeasies in this one
county? Two hundred and thirty. I don't even know how many hotels
yet, but I'm