The Man With the Golden Arm (21 page)

Poor Peter’s pious regard subdued Violet and on the final flight she shushed Sparrow though he was making no sound at all. ‘Hard-workin’ people. Mustn’t wake up hard-workin’ people.’ So both felt very sad, all the way down the hall to her door, for hard-working people everywhere that mustn’t be waked up in the middle of the night. They stood together one moment in the threatening dimness, like the dimness in which all their lives had been lived – and decided to laugh together like that just once more. He threw back his head like a demented spaniel and howled,
‘Whaaaat?’

‘Works too hard.’

Only this time it wasn’t funny at all.

For all the doors belonged to hard-working people. All the doors of both their lives and nobody laughs at a thing very long when he’s drunk out of bleakest loneliness. Behind her door yesterday’s empties crouched beneath a single-faucet sink: they were lined up there like a scoreboard recording the emptiness of her hours. For in the room beside the sink an old man slept her sweetest hours away.

‘Open the door, Richard,’ she giggled unhappily, handing
him the key. He took it without putting it in the lock while she studied him. ‘Honey,’ she asked solemnly, ‘how come you never met Stash
form’lly?
’

‘How come I’m s’pposed to – form’lly?’

‘How come you ain’t s’ppose to, what I want to know,’ she insisted, feeling the whisky move. When she put it that way Sparrow realized he was supposed to meet Old Husband all along. It seemed then that Old Husband had been waiting politely to meet Solly Saltskin a long time and now was his big chance to give the old man the break he deserved. Old Man worked too hard, he deserved something to happen to him in his declining years. All the people worked too hard, all the people deserved something nice in their declining years. He ought to do more for the people, they had such a hard way to go.

‘That’s right,’ he agreed at length, ‘form’l obligation.’

‘Shamed myself, you never met Old Man,’ Vi confessed, taking the key and opening the door herself.

Inside she threw off her coat, unmindful that she wore only a sheer nightgown underneath; but then it was so warm and everyone was such old friends. From the bedroom came a low warning rumbling as if the Garfield Park Express were running straight through the house.

‘Change cars in there!’ she called good-naturedly. Yet something about Old Husband sleeping in there like a child, so alone, filled her with such a rush of tenderness for him as she had never before felt. As soon as she had finished making a sandwich for Sparrow she made one for Stash out of the crusts, so that it would look like a big bargain. He had to wake up pretty soon anyhow if he were ever to meet Sparrow.

‘Look, it’s Christmas awready!’ she cheered Old Husband awake. ‘We got Sparrow for comp’ny ’stead of Santa Claus – ain’t that
wonderful?
’

He wasn’t yet sufficiently wide awake to tell how wonderful it all was. Just poked his frightened old eyes about the room, so suddenly filled with light and harsh cries that had been so dark and still with sleep but one moment before.

‘Where you gone?’ he asked at last.

‘Ain’t gone, been awready,’ she saw him start at something over her shoulder, then droop one eyelid to see the apparition better. ‘What
is?
’ Old Husband wanted to know.

‘That’s
him
, that’s
Sparrow
, honey – didn’t I ever tell you about
Sparrow?
Sparrow! I never even to-old him a
thingg
.
’ Her giggle alone would have betrayed more than whisky to anyone but Old Creep Stash.

While Sparrow, with the light from the night-bulb against his glasses making his face strangely featureless, was saying something real nice, anyone could see. It wasn’t clear just what because his mug was stuffed with Polish sausage and its string was dangling from the corner of his mouth. A fellow could choke that way, just saying something nice.

‘Shall I make you another, lover?’ Violet wanted to know.

Under the night light’s pale green glow Lover nodded. ‘Yup.
Two
more. Wit’ little ginny pigs ’n ketchup all togedder.’

‘Dronk t’ings,’ Old Creep disapproved, scraping his toes about the carpet in a vague hope of finding slippers there. ‘Is
bad,
not
drassed
,’ he added, reddening at the spectacle of his own wife cavorting about before a stranger in nothing but a sheer nightgown. What kind of big bargain was
that?

‘You boys talk over old times together,’ Violet suggested lightly, making another dash for the kitchen.

Sparrow sat on the bed’s edge beside this Stash, feeling remotely troubled. Then realized where his trouble lay and removed one slice of bread off the sandwich, wiped the mustard off carefully upon Stash’s sheet, gave the opposing
slice the same treatment and resumed chewing. ‘Don’t like mustard,’ he explained.

‘I got hard day,’ Stash asserted, eying the string dangling so unevenly from the corner of the punk’s mouth; as if that held some solution for the peculiar way in which things were being run by Stash Koskozka’s house this night.

‘
You
like mustard?’ Sparrow asked, to keep the conversation sprightly.

‘Don’t like mustard, don’t like sandrich, don’t like comp’ny,’ Stash challenged him boldly, ‘all too t’in.’

Sparrow shifted the string a bit to show he was thinking that over. Then let it down and rolled it neatly back up to show he was shrugging, sustaining this yo-yo-like indifference until Violet returned with his second sandwich.

‘Don’t
want
sandrich,’ Stash persisted, growing petulant – then saw it hadn’t ever been intended for him and, perversely as a child, just to keep Sparrow from having it, grabbed at it so abruptly that the sausage slid out and slipped down his winter underwear to lodge loosely into the top of his heavy winter socks, making a bulge there the size of an ankle and leaving a light trail, like an insect’s trail, down the underwear.

‘Goofy t’ing, you make clomsy by me,’ Stash scolded the spot Sparrow had left on the sheet. It was, he perceived, Polish sausage that was to blame for everything tonight.

‘You shouldn’t wear your underwear to bed anyhow,’ Violet reproached the old man, ‘you’d sleep better in pajamas.’

‘After all,’ Sparrow mocked him, ‘he ain’t so young you should wake him four o’clock by morning, he should make glad for you because pretty soon is Christmas, ain’t it?’

Stash chose to overlook the mockery. With unruffled poise he fitted his upper plate into place and shuffled it loosely about a moment to make it fit securely. The sucking sounds he made to get it into place irritated Violet like fingernails screeching down a blackboard.

‘After all the work I went to,’ she mourned her marriage tardily now, ‘gettin’ out of bed in the middle of the night to make my husband a snack ’n what does he do but slap it out of my hand ’n call me “goofy t’ing” – I got a good Polish education ’n I married the biggest dummy ever walked in shoeleather’ – she turned on Stash – ‘get up ’n wash the peanuts off! Get up ’n take last mont’s bat’!’

Yes, it had been just about the finest sandwich a loyal little wife could make her man but instead of thanking a person he just sat sucking his teeth in front of the first real company she’d had in days.

‘No-good t’ing,’ Stash insisted, distressed by the mild itching of the mustard drying between his toes, and brought his knee up to investigate that itch at the precise moment that Vi bent to retrieve the sandwich. The bone caught her over the eye.

That did it. That was all she had, subconsciously, been waiting for since her unconsummated honeymoon.

‘You done that a-purpose!’ she gasped, and cracked him across the upper plate with the flat of the carpet slipper. ‘Let’s
see
who’s the clumsy t’ing,’ she challenged him, feeling the whisky rise in her throat with her rage, and Sparrow shifted a bit to give Stash room enough to fling the retrieved sandwich, mustard, ketchup, pickles and all straight into Violet’s face and down the shadowed hollow of her gown.

Sparrow looked
so
sorry. He didn’t like to see food wasted that way. Before he could recover even a small section of the sausage Vi gave the old man the slipper again, the upper plate popped out and he yelped like a lashed pup expecting more. You could see Stash’s lip beginning to swell, he put a hand to it tentatively but she slapped the hand down. He clasped the pillow about his ears protectively. You couldn’t treat a hard-working man this way.

‘Work
all
day, seven days, no days off, buy nize t’ings
by howz,’ he sobbed brokenly, ‘pay
grocernia
, pay
buczernia
, pay mens I don’t even know what’s for, comes time to sleep everyt’ing all paid ’n nize clean howz so ever’body sleep – who comes by howz from whisky tavern?’ A drop of blood mixed with sweat and tears dropped down the point of his tiny chin. ‘Mrs No-good wit’ dronk pocket-picker! Should be in bed by
hoo
sband, hits by
hoo
sband instead on head ’n makes funny: “Is Christmas, now we fight all night!” Is somethin’ got to happen, is
all.
’

He dropped the pillow, reached for the dresser drawer, came up with his .38 and banged Violet across her new permanent with the butt.

Sparrow watched the sausage slide at last out of the depths of the gown and saw, with a melancholy regard, a fine round piece roll beneath Stash’s heel – a heel stained yellow with mustard or indignation where the sock was torn. Sparrow felt a twinge of disgust at the way everything in the joint, bedclothes, underwear, curtains and walls, was daubed with fresh mustard. One hell of a way to run a house.

‘Bein’ unsanit’ry is worse’n bein’ goofy,’ he philosophized softly while recovering the remains. ‘Funny I done like mustard’ – wiping the bread clean on a handy corner of the dresser scarf. Heard the bathroom door slam and glanced up to see why all these people were so excited. Stash was in a neutral corner, breathing hard and looking beat to the floor. Sparrow saw him lay the .38 back in the drawer, put his head between his hands and whimper.

Must be crying because he was so hungry, Sparrow reasoned. ‘You want a bite, Old Man?’ he asked consolingly. ‘Anybody could have a appetite after all the exercise you just done. How come you don’t take it easy nights after the way you work all day? You burnin’ the candle at bot’ ends? You like a nice piece sandrich?’

Stash shook his head; he was too miserable to raise it.

‘You don’t relax enough,’ Sparrow counseled him. ‘You’re not so young like you think no more. If you don’t take things a little easier you’ll lose your stren’t, you won’t be able to do your fam’ly duty. You might even lose your job. After all you got responsibilities, Old Man.’

‘
How
can sleep?’ Stash pleaded with a ptomaine eye. ‘Is too much gone on. I’m tellin’! Pretty soon
hoos
band gone by brooms closet.’

‘Don’t bother,’ Sparrow reassured him, ‘we still got two flutes from Old McCall left.’

‘Is not for drinkin’, by brooms closet – is for
some place
sleepin’! Sleepin’!’
His voice rose in a plaintive wail for peace and understanding, trying to make someone on Division Street remember what sleep was. Nobody seemed to need sleep any more on Division but poor old Stash Koskozka.

Sparrow studied him calmly, with a steerer’s clammy eye. ‘What you hollerin’ at me like I was a unnerground dog? You tryin’ to make trouble for me?’

‘All he is to
me
is trouble,’ Violet affirmed loudly from the bathroom.

‘You must be siko-static, Old Man,’ Sparrow decided with his best bedside manner, ‘you should go by a sikostat. He’ll take yer temper’ture. He’ll patch yer dirty roof where it’s leakin’ a little. You look like somethin’ the cat never buried.’

In the bathroom Violet studied her image with a rising dismay: a thin streak of drying blood soiled her ten-dollar one-day-old permanent. Her hair would have to be shampooed and hennaed and there went the sawbuck she’d been a full month chiseling off Old Husband. She strode back into the bedroom and jerked the old man’s head up with a neat rap under the chin with the hairbrush.

‘Look, you. You rurned my perm’nent. You gonna give me a tenner for another.’ She began hauling him by brute strength
as if to the nearest cashier’s window; at the bathroom door he broke free.

‘I’m gone!’ he shrieked, breaking blindly for cover down the hall, bumping from doorway to wall all the way down to the broom closet, pausing there to fumble down the sides of his long underwear. The closet key was in his pants, the pants were hanging on the bedpost and he couldn’t understand why he couldn’t find any pockets now.

For the closet was his sanctuary, where a chair and an army blanket, kept in reserve for storms like this, would lend him a brief security, if not sleep, before morning lighted the way toward his icehouse refuge. But something about his feeble fumbling at the closet door enraged her anew. ‘You ain’t even man enough to get into a closet,’ she taunted him brutally.

Stash turned in the dim-lit hall in all the chaste white pride of his long drawers and told her, like a saucy child, ‘Who
wants? I’m
not tell Mrs No-good where at is chippest restaurant-bakeree on Division. Ha!
Ha!
’

‘Go
on!
’ Violet commanded. ‘Get in there! Who wants you ’n your secondhand pumpernickel? You’re bot’ dried up! Lock the door after you, go croak under the scrub pail, it’s where you was born! You ’n the rest of the brooms!’ Abruptly, inflamed by a memory of day-old beef stew, she bore down upon him.

Stash wheeled and made for the fire escape, one side of the hall to the other like a rider on a trick bicycle, trying to ward off her blows with his thin little elbows. Down the hall a woman with her hair in crimpers opened her door just the tiniest crack.

‘Don’t excite yourself, honey,’ she advised Violet.

Immediately Vi raced back – for what she wasn’t certain – till she saw the .38 lying where Stash had tossed it so wearily. Sparrow stepped lightly to one side to let her pass on the return trip. ‘Where’d that motherless animal go?’ she
wanted to know. Just like that: ‘Where’s that motherless animal hiding?’