Legs Read Free Page A

apologize. Gives me a grand to make Jack feel good.
Remember that, Jack'?"
    Jack grinned.
    * * *
    The Reagans, Billy and Tim, came into the club and
everybody knew it. They were brawny boys from the Lower West Side,
dockworkers as soon as they knew they were men, that God had put
muscles in their backs to alert them to that fact. Behind his back
people called Billy The Omadhaun, a name he'd earned at seventeen
when in a drunken rage he threw repeated football blocks at the
crumbling brick tenement he lived in. Apart from the bleeding scrapes
and gouges all over his body, an examination disclosed he had also
broken both shoulders. His brother Tim, a man of somewhat larger wit,
discovered upon his return from the Army in 1919 that beer-loading
was no more strenuous than ship-loading, and far more lucrative.
Proprietorship of a small speakeasy followed, as Tim pursued a
prevailing dictum that to establish a speakeasy what you needed was
one room, one bottle of whiskey, and one customer.
    "That's a noisy bunch," Elaine said when
they came in.
    "It's the Reagans," said Filetti. "Bad
news."
    "They're tough monkeys," Jack said, "but
they're pretty good boys."
    "The big one's got a fist like a watermelon,"
Benny said.
    "That's Billy," Jack said. "He's tough
as he is thick."
    Jack waved to the Reagans, and Tim Reagan waved and
said, "Hello, Jack, howsa boy?"
    "How's the gin in this joint?" Billy asked
Joe Vignola in a voice that carried around the room. Herman Zuckman
looked up. Customers eyed the Reagans.
    "The best English gin is all we serve,"
Vignola told him.
    "Right off the boat for fancy drinkers like
yourselves."
    "Right out of Jack's dirty bathtub," Billy
said.
    "No homemade merchandise here," Vignola
said. "Our customers get only the real stuff. "
    "If he didn't make it then he stole it,"
Billy said. He looked over at Jack Diamond. "Ain't that so,
Jack?"
    "If you say so, Billy," Jack said.
    "Hey, he can get in trouble with that kind of
talk," Filetti said.
    "Forget it," Jack said. "Who listens
to a drunk donkey Irishman?"
    "Three of the good gins," Billy told
Vignola. "Right away."
    "Comin' up," said Vignola, and he rolled
his eyes, dropped the serving tray he carried under his arm, but
caught it just before it hit the floor, then lofted it and caught it
again, well over his head, and spun it on the index finger of his
left hand: a juggler's routine. Others laughed. The Reagans did not.
    "Get the goddamn gin and never mind the clown
act," Billy Reagan said. "You hear me, you waiter baloney?
Get the gin."
    Jack immediately went to the Reagan table and stood
over big-fisted Billy. He poked Billy's shoulder with one finger.
"You got no patience. Make noise in your own joint, but have a
little patience when you're in somebody else's."
    "I keep telling him he's ignorant," Tim
Reagan said. "Sit down, Jack, don't mind him. Have a drink. Meet
Teddy Carson from Philly. We been tellin' him about you, how you come
a long way from Philadelphia."
    "How you makin' out, Jack?" Teddy Carson
said, another big fist. He shook Jack's hand, cracking knuckles.
"Some boys I know in Philly talk about you a lot. Duke Gleason,
Wiggles Mason. Wiggles said he knew you as a kid."
    "He knocked a tooth out on me. I never got
even."
    "That's what he told me."
    "You tell him I said hello."
    "He'll be glad to hear that."
    "Pull up a chair. Jack," Tim said.
    "I got a party over there."
    "Bring 'em over. Make the party bigger."
    Saul Baker left his post by the door when Jack went
back to his own table. "That's a bunch of shitheads, Jack. You
want 'em thrown out'?"
    "It's all right, Saul." Pudgy little Saul
Baker, chastising three elephants.
    "I hate a big mouth. "
    "Don't get excited."
    Jack said he wanted to have a drink with the Reagans.
"We'll all go over," he said to Filetti, Elaine, and Benny.
    "What the hell for?" said Filetti,
    "It'll keep 'em quiet. They're noisy, but I like
them. And there's a guy from Philly knows friends of mine."
    Jack signaled