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The
advertising linked it unmistakably to his current escapades: "You
read about him on yesterday's front pages in this newspaper. Now see
the story behind the headlines," etc. But like everything else
that ever had anything to do with Jack in the movies, it never had
anything to do with Jack.
    Well, we got past Joe Vignola as a topic, and then
after a few anxious grunts from Jimmy ("Guh, guh, guh,"),
he got up and announced his departure. Fogarty would take him to
Hudson, across the river, and he'd take a train to Manhattan. His and
Jack's presence on this front porch was not explained to me, but I
didn't pry. I didn't know until much later that they were partners of
a kind. His departure improved the conversation, and Alice said she
and Jack had been to mass over at Sacred Heart in Cairo where she,
and once in a while he, went on Sunday, and that Jack had given money
for the new church organ and that she brought up Texas Guinan one
summer to raise money at a church lawn party and Jack was going to
bring Al Jolson up and so on. Revelatory.
    An old colored man came to the foot of the front
steps and said to Jack, "The tahger's ready, Mist' Jack."
Tahger? Tiger? Could he be keeping a tiger'? Was that what he wanted
to show me'?
    "Okay, Jess," Jack said. "And will you
bring out two quarts of rye and two quarts of champagne and leave 'em
here on the porch?"
    Jesse nodded and moved off slowly, a man who looked
far older than his years, actually a stoop-backed fifty, a Georgia
cotton chopper most of his days and then a stable hand. Jack met him
in '29 through a Georgia horse breeder who had brought him to
Churchill Downs as a stable boy. Jack heard Jesse had made moonshine
back home and hired him on the spot at a hundred a week, a pay raise
of about eight hundred percent, to come north with his two teen-aged
sons and no wife and be plumber for an applejack still Jack and
Biondo owned jointly, and which, since that time, had functioned
night and day in a desolated patch of woods a quarter of a mile from
the patch of porch on which I was rocking.
    So the old man went for
the rye and champagne, and I mentally alerted my whistle to coming
attractions. Then Alice looked at Jack and Jack looked at me and I
looked at both of them, wondering what all the silent looking was
for. And then Jack asked me a question: "Ever fire a machine
gun. Marcus?" ·
    * * *
    We walked to the garage-cooler, which is what it
turned out to be, as luxuriously appointed a tumbledown barn as you'd
be likely to find anywhere in America, with a beer refrigeration
unit; a storage room for wine and champagne, paneled in knotty pine;
a large area where three trucks could comfortably park; and a total
absence of hay, hornets, barnsmell, cowflop, or chickenshit.
    "No." I had told Jack, in answer to his
question, "I am a machine-gun virgin."
    "Time you shot the wad," Jack said, and he
went dancing down the stairs and around the corner toward the barn,
obviously leading both me and Alice, before we were out of our
chairs.
    "He's a nut on machine guns," Alice said.
"He's been waiting till you got here to try it out. You don't
have to do it, you know, just because he suggests it."
    I nodded my head yes, shook it no, shrugged, and, I
suppose, looked generally baffled and stupid. Alice and I walked
across the side lawn to the barn where Jack had already pried up a
floorboard and was lifting out a Thompson submachine gun, plus half a
dozen boxes of bullets.
    "Brand-new yesterday from Philadelphia," he
said. "I been anxious to test it." He dislodged the
magazine, loaded it, replaced it with what, despite my amateurism in
the matter, I would call know-how. "I heard about a guy could
change one of these drums in four seconds," he said. "That's
handy in a tight spot."
    He stood up and pointed it at the far end of the barn
where a target was tacked on a windowless wall. The target was a
crudely drawn face with the name Dutch Schultz lettered beneath.
    "I had a couple of hundred of