The Man With the Golden Arm (23 page)

‘He’s just puttin’ that on. All he is is thirsty again ’n he knows the place he gets took care of. Say, I’m sort of dry myself. How about a little Christmas cheer? You dry?’ And fetched Rumdum a sharp kick to make him leave off growling long enough so a person could make himself heard. ‘I guess he’s likely to go on like that till he gets some beer in him.’

She opened the door just wide enough so that he could brush past, if he pleased to, or stay where he was. Yet gave him the benefit of both breasts against his arm as he passed.

He sat down in the big red upholstered chair in the corner, looking shabbier than ever in his stained field jacket. While Rumdum swished about his legs, suddenly coy after all his growling threats about what was going to happen to her if he ever got within paws’ reach of her lovely flanks.

Girlie, snarling defensively down at the oversized mongrel from her sanctuary in Molly’s arms, seemed to share some of those reservations about Rumdum which Molly held for Frankie. Whose big dog had
he
been lately?

‘I’ll tie her up,’ Molly announced, and when she returned to her guests: ‘I left her a saucer of milk. She isn’t old enough for beer.’

‘If she hangs around this one she won’t drink nothin’ else,’ Frankie bragged when Molly came to sit beside him on the chair’s broad arm. To study him with her direct child’s gaze.

‘You didn’t come back,’ she reminded him. ‘You went ’n got fixed again ’n was too ashamed to come back.’

Her directness shook him, he hadn’t had time to lie.

‘It was the last one, Molly-O.’

She’d been planning for three days to give him the sharpest dressing down she’d ever given anyone. Yet now that he was here, with the tired look under his eyes, all she could think of was, ‘I threw myself away on a man worth nothing at
all. I can’t lose now by going along with one that’s worth something.’ And took his head to her breast.

‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ he told her without raising his head from the clean milk-and-fur odor of her. ‘All I hear up there is how I smashed her up a-purpose. If just she didn’t think
that.
’

‘She’s got you thinkin’ you done it a-purpose, is that it?’

‘All I know is she got me stonin’ myself. How does a guy know what he was
really
thinkin’ when he was stewed?’

‘You can’t take what she says now like it’s somethin’ real, Frankie – Sophie ain’t been right in the head since the accident, everybody knows that.’

‘But it was me made her wrong in the head then,’ n everythin’ I do since makes it worse for her, I don’t know why. What if one of them pin-curl biddies upstairs seen me come in here?’

Molly lifted his chin until his eyes were forced to meet her own. He read an ancient anger there. ‘I ain’t forgot the time I was just a kid ’n she cracked me in front of everybody –’ n you backed off ’n let me go bawlin’ home by myself. You was that scared of her even then.’ Cause you didn’t want to go home with her that night. You wanted to go home with me. It was how I wanted it too – things would have been better for me since then if you’d done like you felt instead of like other people told you you got to.’

He pressed her hands to his shoulders and turned his eyes away; but she brought him back.

‘You know why Zosh slapped me that night?’ Cause she was wrong in the head awready, that was why. She was evenin’ up on you way back then. You wouldn’t fall in love with her the way she wanted you to, the way she was in love, she had to get even with you for that. She never got another chance till the accident. That was her one big chance ’n she took it without even carin’ what she was doin’ to herself. It’s all she
ever tried to do for you was to get even.’ N you’re lettin’ her do it every time you knock on that Fomorowski’s door or sneak up to see Blind Pig. You know it in your heart ’n you’re backin’ down from admittin’ it to yourself just like you backed down that other night.’

Rumdum, jealous of Molly’s arms about Frankie, padded up and put his head on Frankie’s knee and Frankie caressed the big ugly muzzle absent-mindedly.

Molly wouldn’t let him go.

‘If you want that girl to get well you ain’t going to do it by gettin’ as sick in the head as she is. It’s what you’re doin’ every single time you pay off Louie to use that dirty hypo on you—’

‘It ain’t just that, Molly, it’s that lead I got in my gut, it still hurts sometimes.’

She shoved him away from her. ‘Don’t give me that Purple Heart romance. It’s nothin’ of the kind ’n you know it. If things were right with you you wouldn’t be runnin’ to Louie because you got a pain in the belly. You’re runnin’ over there because you get to thinkin’ the whole thing is all your fault, that you smashed her up on purpose. She’s got you lyin’ to
yourself
, Frankie. You
got
to believe that that girl was wrong before the accident and the accident was just somethin’ that could have happened to anybody who’d had one too many.

‘It happens every day, there wasn’t anythin’ special about yours – you think your accident was like made in heaven? Can that bull. It was made right down at the Tug & Maul at the bottom of a whisky glass ’n you better start pickin’ up the pieces ’n start livin’ again with what’s left over. If she don’t want to put the pieces together for herself you got to do it for yourself.’

Her hand, with its wrist as thin as a child’s, lay firmly upon his own.

‘Things have sure went to hell on a handcar since the accident,’ he acknowledged.

‘Were they ever the way they should be between you ’n Zosh? Before the accident, Frankie. That’s somethin’ I got to know.’

He shook his head. No. It never had been. It hadn’t ever been right. ‘She never trusted me.’ He’d brought it out at last, avoiding Molly’s eyes.

‘Look at me. You think
I
can?’

It had been a long time since Frankie had looked at anyone steadily. How could he expect anyone to trust him who could not trust himself?

‘I always trusted you, Frankie, from way back. I trust you now.’

‘I trust you too, Molly-O,’ he said mechanically, and she let his eyes go at last. She unbuttoned his field jacket, he looked so warm, and tripped the knot of the little blue jazzbow about his throat like tripping the knot which held his innards so tightly of late. He felt the knot within loosen with the realization that he could talk straight to somebody at last.

For how does any man keep straight with himself if he has no one with whom to be straight? He had never fully trusted Sparrow, the punk thought too fast for him. In their world of petty cheats, phony braggarts, double clockers, elbow sneaks, small-time chiselers, touts and stooges and gladhand-shakers, one had always to be on guard. He had been on his guard since the day he’d been chiseled out of two steel aggies back of the Mc Andrew School, when he was nine. He had been on guard with everyone since and with Sophie most of all. He had a blurred, reasonless conviction now that, somehow, it had been she who had stolen his two steel aggies, never to be replaced.

She’d never given his aggies back. He lost them anew to her every day. Well, let her keep them then, let her keep
everything. Let it be as she said, all his fault, and let him go at last. He felt an almost animal-like yearning to let his guard down and take all the blows there were in the world till there were no blows left: to sink under them in utter weariness into sleep and wake up being the real Frankie Majcinek. The Frankie who was straight with himself as he was with the world. The Frankie he had never been.

To sleep a bit in this small room and waken to see the curtain flutter and feel a trust of all things near. To sleep so long, on this small woman’s olive breast, feeling her trust of him binding him like her arms, that he would waken to become what Molly once had glimpsed in him. What she knew he yet might be.

He had never been trusted. He had never trusted himself. The thought of being trusted hit him like a double shot on an empty stomach. He wasn’t ready for anyone’s trust. He had been too long trained in wariness to drop his guard that low. That low, and that fast.

Wary of all straight answers. On all the backstreets of home he had learned how a straight answer could land a man in the lockup while the boy with the quickest lie stayed on the street. Yet – if there were just one person to whom one’s answers were always straight, just that might make the whole twisted world come straight – he looked up to see Molly reading him like reading yesterday’s race results.

‘All we done, from the first time we went roller skatin’ together, was fight,’ he told her. ‘We battled all the time we went steady, we battled the weddin’ night till 4
A.M
., we started in again when we woke up ’n kept it up till I went in the army ’n started all over the day I got discharged. We kept it up till the night of the accident ’n we ain’t quit yet.’

The naked bulb that burned overhead, by night, by noon, by twilit hours, hung like a little bald yellow skull on a chain like a twisted rope. Below it she had a candle burning, a candle
red as wine. Its tiny flame pointed, upon the yellow wall, to the skull burning overhead: it glinted a bit on the bottle of cheap cologne and in the depths of dark-haired Molly’s eyes. On the other side of the window a prairie snow fell across backstreet and tenement, looking for dry leaves upon which to rest and finding only concrete and steel.

‘I know,’ Molly laughed with that laugh so soft one hardly heard the small rasp in it. ‘I heard you two goin’ at it one night, it sounded like all the dishes in the place gettin’ bust. I had to hold my ears. What went on?’

‘“What went on?” Why, that’s just
what
went on: all the dishes in the joint gettin’ bust. She started it just to show me she didn’t care one way or another, for dishes ’r me ’r anythin’ no more. So I helped her out to show her I didn’t neither. I don’t.’

‘You just think you don’t,’ Molly decided. ‘So now you’re eatin’ out of paper plates?’

‘
I
ain’t eatin’ up there at all. Vi brings her soup in a bowl ’n I eat by Messinger’s on Milwaukee, it’s where you can lay your dirty head right down on the table ’n go to sleep ’n they don’t bother you if they seen you spent for coffee.’

‘I like Violet,’ Molly told him as if thinking of something else, then said what she was trying to say. ‘Don’t go by Messinger’s no more when you want to put your dirty head down somewheres. I got a table ’n you don’t have to buy coffee to put it there. I’m settin’ here three days now waitin’ for you, listenin’ to the Els go by, countin’ how many cars it sounds like. You don’t know how lonely it gets, waitin’ for El cars. Frankie, let’s
both
quit stonin’ ourselves.’

He didn’t know she was crying till her tears touched his lips.

‘I know how lonely it gets waitin’ for Els,’ Frankie Machine told dark-haired Molly.

Frank
ie sat in the dealer’s slot but he did not see the players. He saw only their shadows along the pale green baize and he dealt only to shadows.

For each sat in the same seat every night and he knew each shadow well. The heavily crouching one to his left was Schwiefka’s, the trembling, pinheaded one was Sparrow’s; the humble, headless and hunched-up one was Umbrellas’, bent as though still carrying his daytime burden. And the ever-shifting, wavering one, that seemed to change shape as its owner reached in a shadow pocket for the shadow of a single cigarette, was the tallest, leanest shadow of all.

‘Louie’s all dressed up tonight,’ Sparrow feigned admiration of Louie’s soft green fedora with the red feather in the brim and his polopony shirt. ‘You goin’ cabaretin’ for Christmas Eve, Louie?’

‘No, I just got tired of winnin’ in my old clothes,’ Louie explained confidently, and shifted the fedora onto the back of his head so that everyone might see he had just had two bits worth of Division Street sun tan and a Paradise Ballroom haircut. The man would never see fifty again, yet dandied about as if he were twenty-two, whistling at the girls and fingering his American Legion button – a habit derived after six months spent in Stateside army camps in 1918.

‘I could of got ten to one in 1924,’ he announced. But no one asked him ten to one on what. Everyone knew. They’d heard it all before.

‘Ten to one I wouldn’t live out the year ’n that was only May,’ he answered himself as though someone had asked, as if anyone cared. ‘Standin’ right there by the Four-Corner Tap I told Red Laflin he’d be dead before I was ’n he lived twenny years ’n his best rod man is buyin’ me a shot every time I stop by the Four-Corner just to say hello, just for old time’s sake. “You was Red’s best friend,” he tells me,’ n puts the bottle on the bar.’

‘’N you’re just the
schleck
to kill the bottle wit’out layin’ out a dime, too,’ Sparrow observed. ‘Red must be turnin’ over when he sees his best rod man settin’ that big free bottle down.’

‘I mix it wit’ lemon,’ Louie explained smugly, ‘it don’t burn up your insides that way.’

‘I always wondered who burned down Laflin’s joint,’ Sparrow wondered idly, and added hurriedly, ‘I know it wasn’t no guy from around
here
.’

‘Back off, Jewboy,’ Louie told him, sounding bored, ‘your job is by the door.’

‘Zero’ll tell the steerer when to get by the door,’ Frankie put in quietly.

And the cards went around and around.

‘He’s just afraid I’ll win his dollar-twenny before the suckers start comin’,’ Sparrow explained of Louie.

‘Quit waspin’ him,’ Frankie ordered.

But Louie opened his wallet and started counting just to show how many ‘dollar-twennies’ he was holding. There was a c-note right on top, then a couple fifties, then so many twenties and tens that Sparrow figured it, just offhand, at better than half a grand.

‘Thanks, Louie,’ he offered, ‘I was just wonderin’ what you were holdin’ – which alley you go home by? I’ll walk you down.’

‘I could buy a hundred Jewboys,’ Louie told no one in particular, and returned the bills to his poke.

‘We know where you get it, too,’ Frankie said boldly, seeing nobody’s shadow at all.

‘We give the public what it asks for,’ Louie smirked.

‘Be careful the public don’t give you what you’re askin’ for,’ Frankie told him. And thought to himself, ‘This joker thinks he still got me on the hook, he’ll find out nobody needs him.’

And the cards went around and around.

There came a scratching like a cat’s scratching at the metal door, but Sparrow did not rise.

‘It’s just that blind hyena again,’ he said, ‘let him wait.’

‘Let him in,’ Frankie asked, ‘I need coffee.’

Sparrow rose, and a moment later the greasy white cane and the gamy odor of the peddler moved across the table like a cloud off the canal.

‘Sit next to me,
prosiak
,’ Nifty Louie ordered, pulling the peddler around into the empty chair beside him. ‘You want a hand of no-peek? I heard you was pretty good at it.’

‘Can’t deal no blind guy,’ Frankie protested, ‘I’ll do everythin’ but that.’

‘Blind guys are the
betht
to deal,’ Pig himself pointed out politely, ‘they can’t tell what they’re holdin’.’

‘I’ll read his hand,’ Louie explained.

‘Blind, bummy ’r beggars,’ Frankie insisted, ‘no two guys holdin’ one hand.’

‘I’m goin’ to Stickney to play,’ Louie announced, ‘this is Clark Street poker – hobo gamblers, hobo steerer, hobo dealer.’

‘If he stands behind Pig it’s awright, Frankie,’ Schwiefka compromised anxiously, ‘it’ll be Louie’s hand, only Piggy-O holdin’ it. Be sociable.’

‘Why can’t he play it hisself?’

‘I believe in blind man’s luck is why,’ Louie told everyone, fingering the yellowed Legion button. And placed a silver dollar in front of Pig.

Frankie reached over, tested the dollar against the metal shade of the night light, then peered more closely at its stain.

‘I seen that dirty buck somewheres before,’ he decided, returning it to begin boxing the cards. ‘Somewheres before. That’s bloodstains on that dirty buck.’

‘The bank’ll cash it,’ Schwiefka put in, ‘deal us a round of blackjack, make everybody happy.’

‘It’s my good-luck piece,’ Louie told them all, ‘I’m always superstitious as a whorehouse rat toward Christmas.’

Umbrella Man rose uneasily and shuffled, still half crouching, into his coat, fearing the air of challenge going around the board. When Sparrow returned, after letting him out, the soiled dollar lay in front of Frankie: he had dealt himself a winner.

‘Gimme back the silver.’ Louie was laying down a crisp new single in exchange. ‘I wasn’t bettin’ the silver one, it was just to bring the old luck around.’

‘It’s
my
good-luck piece now,’ Frankie said, with a low, soft malice in his voice, ‘I get superstitious myself around New Year’s.’

‘Change it for him,’ Schwiefka ordered his dealer.

‘Keep your muscles in your pockets, bakebrain,’ Frankie answered, ‘I make the change around here.’

Louie rose. ‘If I once quit a joint I never come back in it ’n neither do my friends,’ he threatened Schwiefka’s purse.

‘Nobody sent for you in the first place,’ Frankie assured him.

‘
I
sent for him,’ Schwiefka decided, and reached for the blood-stained buck.

Sparrow’s narrow hand got it first and had it pocketed by the time Frankie had pushed back his chair. ‘If you sent for him you deal to him,’ and sent the deck flying across the board, aces and kings and deuces scattering across the floor. Schwiefka, bending heavily, went in pursuit of his sixty-cent deck while Frankie followed Sparrow down the steep stairwell to the street.

‘He’s gettin’ too big for his britches,’ Schwiefka complained peevishly to Louie when he’d gotten his deck together again. ‘In the old days for a dealer to walk out on me like that,
he wouldn’t be dealin’ no place for life. He’d be spottin’ pins in a bowlin’ alley ’n lucky to get that, it’d be just ’cause I was sorry for him.’

Louie wasn’t hearing Schwiefka. He was hearing only the dealer’s footsteps walking away with Louie’s special luck. With the dealer’s every step Louie felt one step unluckier. He had never felt so unlucky so fast in all his life.

It was the sort of night he went to a dance or stuck close to the bars and wouldn’t let himself glance at a deck or a pair of dice or a cue. Just like that, only worse. All his luck stepping down a staircase inside of the luckiest buck in the world. ‘I got careless, teasin’ him wit’ that dirty buck,’ he realized with a strange despair. Then slapped his fedora forward onto his skull and hurried after his dollar.

At the top of the stairs Schwiefka heard him call down; they all heard him call down.

‘Dealer! I want to talk to you!’

Everyone there heard Louie ask that. But not one heard the dealer reply. Then the upstairs door closed behind Louie; and none had heard the door downstairs open at all.

All heard a long, steep, waiting silence there, where the dealer and the steerer waited within the stairwell’s high-walled pit, for someone coming down to them from above.

The dealer and the steerer heard the upstairs door open and close; like a door shutting upon some long-lost argument. Both watched Louie’s lean dark figure coming down, the sparkler in his tie glinting like a one-eyed cat, one step down and one step down. He was a long dark time coming down.

Laughing nervously to himself as he came. ‘I’m givin’ you a buck fer a buck,’ he repeated his offer, sticking a folded single into Frankie’s jacket pocket. ‘No more ’n no less.’

‘Don’t buckle, Frankie,’ Sparrow encouraged him. If Frankie buckled now he’d buckle for keeps, he’d buckle in everything, the punk sensed.

‘I don’t want trouble, I got enough,’ Frankie mumbled his apologies with all his defiance swept under. ‘Give him his dirty buck back, Solly. He worked for it.’

Sparrow stalled, fishing for it in all the wrong pockets at once. Frankie unfolded the single just to be sure it wasn’t a phony.

‘It’s good awright,’ Louie laughed, ‘it come from the same place as the silver buck. You give it to me yerself last week – remember?’

‘I remember –’ cause it was the last one you’re gettin’
that
way off me.’

‘Wrong again, Dealer. You’ll look me up ten thousand times to come.’ N on yer knees to beg me to take your money too.’

‘
What
way, Frankie?’ Sparrow put in innocently, pretending to forget all about the silver in his watch pocket.

‘None of yer sheenie business,’ Louie told him. ‘Come up, Jewboy – the buck, the lucky buck.’

Sparrow offered it to Louie’s reaching hand, then let it slip through his fingers deliberately and stepped back just in time to let the back of Louie’s hand whizz past his lips.

‘A Jew trick,’ Louie laughed derisively, and the odor of violet talc touched the air. Sparrow opened the door to the alley so that he could kick the coin out into the alley’s darkness if he spotted it first; and retrieve it in the morning. Through the open door the arc lamp’s light fell across Louie’s face.

Frankie felt his own back pressed hard against the hallway wall knowing neither God nor Molly-O could save him from going to Louie on his knees with ten dirty thousand more. ‘There’s people ought to be knocked on the head,’ he told Louie without hearing his own voice at all. ‘I want people like you knocked on the head.’

‘You couldn’t knock nobody’s head,’ Louie laughed at him, ‘all you can knock around is that beat-out hustler John brushed
off, the piece of trade with the pinned-up skirt.’ Then spotted the buck, trapped upright under the door’s lower hinge, and bent swiftly for it.

Frankie locked his fingers to stop their shaking. If the shaking didn’t stop he was going to cry in front of the punk and a flame of cold shame for having lain in a cold and secret sweat begging for morphine charged the fingers with a pride of their own. He rose on the balls of his toes and came down with all his weight full upon that white defenseless nape.

The throat made a single startled gurgle.

Then the neck flopped forward like a hen’s with the ax half through it.

An irregular thunder beat in his ears and a whitish lightning hurt his eyes till he felt Sparrow’s hand on his arm and Sparrow’s inside-info voice near at hand. ‘Take it easy, Frankie, we’re in the clear.’ The irregular thunder became a bowling alley’s harmless roar and the lightning steadied to the alley’s unquestioning glare. ‘I didn’t even hear him fall,’ he heard his own voice returning.

‘You keep sayin’ that, Frankie. Quit sayin’ that. We got to be upstairs before the aces pick him up.’

‘Did you run too?’ Frankie asked, feeling the first recession of the shock that had blacked him out.

‘Sure I run,’ Sparrow reported with pride, ‘after I hauled him out of the hall. He’s behind Schwiefka’s woodshed, it’ll be morning before anybody spots him – can you handle the deck?’

‘I can do anythin’,’ Frankie decided firmly. ‘All I need is one quick one. You think maybe it was just his ticker give out?’

‘His ticker give out awright’ – Sparrow gave a little chortle of hoarse glee – ‘whose ticker wouldn’t give out when a boxcar lands on the back of his neck?’

At the bowling-alley bar Sparrow surveyed the dealer from behind his great glasses, trying to hurry him without rushing him back into panic. ‘He hit the floor like Levinsky,’ Sparrow told him, covering Frankie’s glass with his palm. ‘You got to get back to the slot, Dealer.’

At the prospect of returning Frankie felt something that had been holding him together open and let his stomach slip through. Sparrow saw him pale, yet kept the glass covered.

‘You
got
to make it, Frankie.’

‘I can make it. One more and I make it.’

‘One more and you’ll never make it.’ Sparrow was firm. He saw Frankie’s hand tremble as he lifted the empty glass to his lips in the hope of finding one last small drop. ‘Steady hand ’n steady eye,’ Sparrow told him.

But what was it Louie had told Frankie? ‘You’ll come beggin’ on your knees.’

That was it then. The fast shuffle-off on Damen and Division and the sudden turn of mood in the back booth at Antek’s. A guy as right as Frankie letting himself get hooked on a kick as wrong as that. It was Sparrow’s turn to feel a little sick.

‘Stick by me, Solly,’ Frankie pleaded exactly as if Sparrow had spoken aloud.

‘I’m stickin’, Frankie.’

Neither looked toward the woodshed shadowed by the wall of the Endless Belt & Leather Works as they returned down the alley through which they’d fled. A couple of Schwiefka’s dated racing forms scurried down the alley before them, pursued by a bitter wind; whipped past the woodshed’s corner and banked against the wood as though sent by the wind to cover something there. Neither spoke till they came to the darkened alley hall.

‘I hope you had sense enough to get our lucky buck back,’ Frankie remembered suddenly with a real sense of loss.

‘There wasn’t time for that, Frankie – it was pitch him by his ankles ’n run, you ought to be glad I didn’t just let him lay. You weren’t easy to catch. I still don’t know where you were headin’.’