Free Legs by William Kennedy Page B

still
incredible with me and Jack back then," Kiki said to me much
later, remembering the sweet time. "It was thrilling just to see
him from a new angle, his back, or his stomach, any part of his bare
skin. He had gouges and scars from knife fights when he was a kid,
and where he'd been shot and kicked and beaten with clubs and boards
and pipes. I got sad up on the mountain one night looking at them
all. But he said they didn't hurt him anymore, and the more I looked
at them and touched them, the more they made his body special, the
way his head was special. It wasn't an all white and smooth and fatty
body like some I've seen but the body of a man who'd gone through a
whole lot of hell. There was a long red scar on his stomach just
above his belly button, where he'd almost died from a cut in a knife
fight over a girl when he was fifteen. I ran my tongue over it and it
felt hot. I could almost taste how much it hurt when he'd got it and
what it meant now. To me it meant he was alive, that he didn't die
easy. Some people could cut their little toe and give up and bleed to
death. Jack never gave up, not his body, not anything."
    * * *
    Well, we all did have dinner on the mountain, and
then I insisted on leaving. "It's been a special day," I
told Jack, "but an odd one."
    "What's so odd about it?"
    "Well, how about buying a paperweight for
starters?"
    "Seems like an ordinary day to me," he
said. I assumed he was kidding. But then he said, "Come to
dinner next week. I'll have Alice cook up another roast. I'll call
you during the week to set it up. And think about Europe." So I
said I would and turned to Kiki, whom I'd spoken about forty words to
all day. But I'd smiled her into my goodwill and stared her into my
memory indelibly, and I said, "Maybe I'll see you again, too,"
and before she could speak Jack said, "Oh you'll see her all
right. She'll be around."
    "I'll be around he says," Kiki said to me
in a smart-ass tone, like Alice's whippy retort had been earlier in
the day. Then she took my hand, a sensuous moment.
    Everything seemed quite real as I stood there, but I
knew when I got back to Albany the day would seem to have been
invented by a mind with a faulty gyroscope. It had the quality of a
daydream after eight whiskeys. Even the car I was to ride down
in—Jack's second buggy, a snazzy, wire-wheeled, cream-colored
Packard roadster The Goose was using to chauffeur Kiki around the
mountains—had an unreal resonance.
    I know the why of this, but I know it only now as I
write these words. It took me forty-three years to make the
connection between Jack and Gatsby. It's should have been 
quicker, for he told me he met Fitzgerald on a transatlantic voyage
in 1926, on the dope-buying trip that got him into federal trouble.
We never talked specifically about Gatsby, only about Fitzgerald,
who, Jack said, was like two people, a condescending young drunk the
first time they met, an apologetic, decent man the second time. The
roadster was long and bright and with double windshields, and
exterior toolbox, and a tan leather interior, the tan a substitute,
for Gatsby's interior was "a sort of green leather
conservatory." But otherwise it was a facsimile of the Gatsby
machine, and of that I'm as certain as you can be in a case like
this. Jack probably read Gatsby for the same reason he read every
newspaper story and book and saw every movie about gangland. I know
he saw Von Sternberg's Underworld twice; we did talk about that. It
was one way of keeping tabs on his profession, not pretension to
culture. He mocked Waxey Gordon to me once for lining his walls with
morocco-bound sets of Emerson and Dickens.
    "They're just another kind of wallpaper to the
bum," Jack said.
    I accept Jack's Gatsby connection because he knew
Edward Fuller, Fitzgerald's neighbor on Long Island who was the
inspiration for Gatsby. Fuller and Rothstein were thick in stocks,
bonds, and bucketshops when Jack was bodyguarding Rothstein. And, of
course, Fitzgerald