The Man With the Golden Arm (17 page)

‘It’s too cheap now,’ John renewed his ancient complaint, ‘when you done somethin’ in the old days you paid for it.’

‘The hell with the old days,’ Sparrow protested, looking resentfully at John. ‘I hope your batt’ry goes dead too.’

‘His battery’s been dead for twenty years,’ Frankie had to put in.

‘That’s all right,’ John pointed out, ‘the batt’ry may be dead but the brain is still workin’. What good is hot batt’ries when the radiator’s leakin’? Look at this punk – his tubes is boilin’ over but his connections is spillin’ like a secondhand Essex.’

‘I’m still on the legit,’ Sparrow answered without glancing at Louie, ‘compared to some people anyhow. There ain’t no joy-poppers waitin’ for
me
down by the Safari.’

It was the first time Frankie realized that the punk was on to Louie’s racket and he felt an unreasoning resentment of that knowledge. How much did the punk know? It must be just some word he’d overheard and was tossing around with no real knowledge of the accusation he was making, Frankie decided uneasily.

Sparrow had pressed the game too far. With the ace of clubs in his hand Louie asked, ‘You want to die in an alley?’ With all the jesting gone out of his voice.

Sparrow didn’t have the courage to defy Louie when Louie talked business – but he had an ace in the hole himself. He could throw out the knuckles of the index finger of his left
hand, broken in some childhood antic, bending it into a series of unnatural ridges which he could point at an opponent silently, thus avenging himself without risking provocative language.

‘I’ll make the ju-ju sign on you,’ he threatened Louie softly, and Louie overheard. ‘You point that freakin’ finger at me ’n you’re one dead pointer.’

It was a challenge. Everyone had seen him challenged. So the moment Louie’s eyes returned to his cards Sparrow pointed, swiftly and damningly – Louie heard the knuckles crack. Somebody laughed and Frankie felt his innards tighten with this night’s first intimation that God’s medicine might not choose to hold him together till morning.

‘Was you pointin’ that freakin’ finger at
me?
’ Louie just had to know.

‘I don’t point nobody but enemies,’ Sparrow appeased him hurriedly, ‘’n you ’n me ’r old buddies.’ And went lightly into some little nostalgic tune or other of his own.

‘The telephone’s goin’ to ring,’ Blind Pig suddenly shushed everybody, and before he’d finished his warning it rang. A trick which, like his other rare assets, didn’t mean much. Yet not even the punk could outguess a telephone. ‘Specially a phone wit’out a number,’ Pig boasted as if the fact that the phone had a blind number somehow made the trick tougher.

Its number was known only to the one who called, at the same hour, every Saturday night. Schwiefka would answer and his voice, slavish and greasy, had the politeness he reserved only for women of means. ‘Hold on good,’ he would be heard saying eagerly, ‘I’ll call him.’ Louie would take the
phone while Schwiefka returned to his seat beside Frankie. ‘You look like a cat eatin’ hot horse manure on a frosty morning,’ Frankie would tell him then.

‘I oney wisht I could get on a City Hall pay roll for tellin’ when somebody’s dirty phone is gonna ring,’ Pig lamented. ‘I hear it comin’ over the wires. I hear things before a dog could hear ’em.’

The allusion to a dog returned Frankie’s mind to the room where the hound cowered beneath the dresser, waiting for his return. Rumdum had feared Sophie from the first.

And after Louie’s return to the table all things began weighing namelessly upon the dealer till even the deck seemed heavy in his hand. For one moment that nerveless wrist trembled, then steadied for the rest of the night. Yet in that brief trembling Frankie knew what was wrong. He hadn’t expected to need another fix this soon.

As the cards went around and around, as if being dealt out of a machine, he saw again the narrow, uncarpeted stair that climbed two flights to a single room where a scarred practice board stood jammed under a sink full of dirty dishes and an older deck lay on the shelf above; the shelf that never got cleaned because Sophie couldn’t reach it from the chair.

‘Still, whenever I leave a bottle up there, there’s always a couple good nips gone out of it,’ he mused. ‘She can reach up high enough to get a bottle but not high enough to clean the shelf it’s standin’ on. She must use the pillow.’

‘Look at the mope – he’s dreamin’ he’s marryin’ a movie actress,’ Schwiefka said, and tossed the green silk bag to the dealer. The fun was over for the evening.

Now the suckers would start dropping in, look absently at the day-old
Racing Forms
for a minute pretending they’d just dropped in to get the results; then each would sit in for ‘just half an hour, to kill the time – this is the night I take the old lady out steppin’.’ It was a common device,
calculated to leave an opening by which one might, in event of unusual early luck, go south gracefully with a small, but tidy, bundle.

In half an hour anybody’s old lady was forgotten, the bets were up to a dollar and two, the cut was five per cent up to fifteen dollars and at the door Sparrow was letting the first live ones in. The five per cent went into the green silk bag and when one of the winners tossed the dealer a quarter for himself, Frankie rang it on the metal shade of the light above his head to indicate – whether Schwiefka was there to see or not – that it was his and not the house’s.

If the punk was dubious of some stranger’s face he opened the door only wide enough to say, ‘Nothin’ like that goin’ on in here, Mister. This is Endless Belt ’n Leat’er Specialties – you want to buy a endless belt?’

Thus to the man who sometimes called himself a ‘traveling dealer,’ whom others called Frankie Machine, life was pretty much of an allnight stud session. With himself in the dealer’s slot and Zero Schwiefka getting the take.

Steps on the stairs and a light tapping at the door.

‘It’s a sucker, I can tell how he knocks, so light,’ Sparrow said, rising to let the mark in.

The only time Frankie saw Drunkie John of late was at Schwiefka’s table. For the Jailer had gotten rid of him at last and Molly-O lived on alone in the room they once had shared.

Dark-haired Molly’s little nest lay in the darkness of the first floor front, its only window opening out onto the unpaved tunnel below the cross-steeled El. Yet she kept the window’s single curtain fresh, to hang as white and limply as a curtain overlooking a country lawn.

It never hung limply for long. When the Loopbound express was still a quarter of a mile away the curtain would
stir uneasily with the rumor of its approach, flutter and billow tensely while the room shook a little and then a little more till the curtain bulged out in a rigid and frenzied whiteness, straining and beating furiously at the sill as the cars hurtled overhead; to flutter once and sink back limply at last.

Drunkie John had left her for his first and truest love: the bottle without a name. He would return when the bottle went dry, and if he came when the Jailer wasn’t by to protect her she would give him a dollar or two. She drew a percentage of every forty-cent drink she hustled, there were nights when she made as much as ten dollars; and nights when she wound up without a dime and owing the house five dollars to boot. ‘I’d be cheaper off livin’ somewheres where you couldn’t find me,’ she had complained to John the last time he’d called.

‘I’d find you all the same,’ he’d assured her.

She was happy to be rid of him at any cost. Now in the mornings she would waken, her head on the small red pillow, to see the curtain’s whiteness veiling the room. Behind it the dresser would seem strangely unreal, as it might appear to a waking infant: veiled by light flowing from another world.

Veiled too by a new contentment in waking without John beside her; a contentment forever tinged by dread of his return.

Two lamps stood on the dresser, one with a red bulb and one with a blue. Between them, for some reason, a magazine cover had been thumbtacked to the wall bearing the momentous query:
Is Jazz Going
Hibrow
?

The blue bulb burned, the red bulb burned: the curtain stirred and slow steps passed. It didn’t look like much of a Christmas in dark-haired Molly’s nest.

Nor any season for merrymaking in Frankie Machine’s heart. On the night following the great dish-breaking on the second floor front he stood outside her door looking quietly down at Rumdum’s equally quiet mug. About the dog’s throat
Sparrow had tied a blue ribbon bearing a red, heart-shaped tag with the simplest sort of appeal:
Have a Heart.

‘I’ll take him here,’ Frankie told the punk. ‘Zosh is sleepin’. I’ll see you at the joint around ten.’

‘I gotta go up to see Vi,’ Sparrow explained, moving toward the stairs, ‘Stash is hittin’ the hay early these nights.’

Without turning his head Frankie said, ‘Don’t knock on my door. Zosh is sleepin’ too.’

‘You told me that twice awready,’ Sparrow reminded Frankie. ‘She can sleep all night if she wants, I got nuttin’ to bother your Zosh about.’ He sensed that Frankie was trying to tell him that no one had seen Frankie outside the door of the first floor front. What kind of bull was Frankie feeding Zosh now that she wasn’t even supposed to know he was in the building? ‘Frankie’s in the switches,’ the punk brooded, ‘it’s like he wants to run somewheres ’n can’t make up his mind which way to head.’

As he passed the second flight he heard Sophie wheeling across the room. If it was just a matter of giving that Molly Novotny a play, Frankie ought to know by now he could trust a guy who’d never given him away yet. ‘You’d think it was a big deal, tryin’ to make a chick, the way
he’s
goin’ about it,’ Sparrow decided with something of scorn; he’d always been a swifter and surer operator with women than Frankie.

Frankie waited till he heard Sparrow’s steps fade out on the third floor, then touched the bottle on his hip and knocked lightly at the first floor front. He had to knock twice, he knocked so lightly, before she replied.

And managed to look just a little surprised when she did. ‘You knocked so light,’ she told him, and through his mind went Sparrow’s warning: ‘It sounds like a sucker, he knocks so light.’

‘I wasn’t sure it was
any
body.’ She looked from the tired-looking man to the demented-looking hound. This
time she was protected against the light, standing in her fresh white dress and the little blood-red earrings against the sallow olive of her cheeks and the midnight darkness of her hair. The hair that swept down over her shoulders as if touched by the wind that drove the curtains aside when the long Els stormed overhead. She was looking less careworn since John had left her.

‘I just thought you’d like to see a dog that drinks beer,’ Frankie apologized, ‘you told me to get one of my own to kick.’

‘I didn’t say nothin’ about a beer-drinkin’ one, Frankie,’ she protested as gravely as a child. ‘But if you want we’ll try him out.’ Rumdum, at first listening only listlessly, picked up suddenly and hauled Frankie forward into the room.

‘The smell of Budweiser makes him powerful,’ Frankie explained. Before she could get the saucer filled Rumdum had licked the saucer dry and Frankie had to clamp his snout with both hands, the great hound whimpering brokenheartedly, till she could get it filled again without losing a finger.

‘He ain’t had a drink all day,’ Frankie sympathized with all dry throats. ‘Fact is, I ain’t neither.’ He pulled the bottle off his hip with feigned surprise at finding it there. ‘Look what some guy stuck in my pocket!’

‘I’ll stick to beer,’ Molly told him cautiously. ‘I been on the wagon since John’s gone.’ She turned to the little combination record player on the dresser while he drank.

the record complained drowsily.

‘I got Girlie tied up in the pantry,’ Molly reported. ‘I really don’t have room for her in here but I can’t find nobody to take her off my hands.’

‘I know a party might be some help that way,’ Frankie
offered, while Rumdum’s tongue lolled at the half-empty bottle on the table. Molly poured him another saucer and herself a glass – before the foam had settled he was lolling up at her for a refill. While from the pantry, muted and miserable, Girlie moaned a melancholy protest. Rumdum’s left ear perked to half-mast.

‘Don’t let her loose,’ Frankie counseled Molly. ‘She might remember me ’n take a bite.’ 

the singer counseled both Frankie and Rumdum,

‘I just bought this one,’ Frankie indicated the half-perked ear with the point of his shoe, ‘to give Zosh somethin’ to do beside stone me.’

‘I remember Zosh from the old days, Frankie. Remember the time you took me to the dance by St Wenceslaus ’n she come right across the floor ’n slapped me a good one, right in front of everybody – you wasn’t supposed to go dancin’ with nobody but Zosh?’ N look at her now. Such a
shame.
’

But couldn’t keep the small note of triumph out of her tone. Frankie didn’t have to have Molly Novotny remind him that Zosh didn’t talk to just anybody in those years.

‘She’s still pretty, too,’ Molly added hurriedly, and picked up some song or other in her hoarse, wise, taunting voice, letting her eyes remember the one night they had danced together.

Rumdum barked weakly, more like a dream than a dog, scratched himself feebly and folded up onto his forepaws to sleep the sleep of the just.

‘A dog should have fleas once in a while,’ Molly told Frankie seriously. ‘He ain’t a real dog if he don’t. I don’t know why.’

‘Them little fox terrors is good,’ Frankie informed her. ‘Out West they carry them on a saddle ’n when they see the fox the little terror leads all the other hounds to it.’