The Man With the Golden Arm (24 page)

‘I had a place all right, don’t worry,’ Frankie lied firmly. ‘Where the hell
was
I goin’?’ he had to ask himself. Then, begrudgingly: ‘You done awright for once.’

Outside the alley door Sparrow whispered pointedly. ‘I’m glad we were havin’ coffee when that guy Fomorowski Whatever His Name Is got slugged next door.’ He stooped, picked up a handful of Christmas Eve snow. When they walked in on the shills he shambled to the table, goggling dizzily, extending the snow and asking, ‘Who wants ice cream? Awready it’s t’ree inches deep!’

‘If Louie don’t come back it’s you guys’ fault,’ Schwiefka grumbled while Frankie, pale but steady, slid into the dealer’s slot. ‘You two guys gonna find yourselfs out of a good job one of these nights, treatin’ the customers like they was underground dogs.’

‘We’d be cheaper off wit’out this one,’ Sparrow told him.

‘Yeh,’ Frankie backed up the punk, ‘this is gettin’ to be a good place to hang away from, there’s too many arguments goin’ on.’

He looked around for Blind Pig as he riffled the deck.

But the peddler had left in the wind and the snow.

As the cards went around and around.

Stash was out of the bucket and all was forgiven. There would be a dance in the hall that stood in the shadow of Endless Belt & Leather and everyone would be there.

But right from his first hour back home he began giving Violet trouble again. Something had happened to the old man in his five days at Twenty-eighth and California, he’d gone a bit stir-crazy it began to appear.

First thing he shakes his head, No, to washing dishes after Violet had finished eating. So she cleaned them up herself and sent him down for a half gallon of beer – and here he comes back upstairs with nothing in his hand but five two-bit cigars and a dollar-fifty lighter. ‘Where’s my beer, Old Man?’ she wanted to know. But all Stash does is look about dreamily, like he thinks maybe he heard somebody ask him something, and lights up a fresh cigar.

‘No more day-old pompernickel,’ he gave her a reply at last and before she could realize just what he meant by that there was a taptapping at the door and there was Sparrow with a blue-and-white pencil-striped mattress on his back.

‘Got it in the section next to the ’lectric eye-rons,’ Sparrow boasted, dumping the mattress right in the middle of the floor, ‘just picked out the prettiest one, hauled it off the pile, told the girl I was from the basement, they got to have six down there right away to ship to the South Side store, special order, they got up here by mistake. She’s still waitin’ for me to come back ’n get the other five.’

‘Don’t tell Zosh how you got it,’ was Violet’s thought, ‘she’d be so ashamed.’

‘Yeh. But think how proud Frankie’s gonna be,’ Sparrow pointed out and turned to Old Husband. ‘I bought it for you, Old Man, it’s your comin’-home present to sleep on when I got to sleep in the bedroom. I don’t want you bein’ uncomfortable on the front-room couch.’

‘Don’t want.’ Stash kicked at the mattress petulantly.

‘
What
don’t you want, Old Man?’ Sparrow demanded to know. ‘You’d rather sleep on the couch wit’out no mattress, you mean?’

‘You pay
board
, what
I
want.’

So that was it. Just like somebody owed him something. For a moment Sparrow was so hurt he thought of walking right out and leaving Stash to try to handle Violet himself awhile.
It took more than a new mattress for that. He himself was being extended beyond his own powers, he knew. ‘You talk like a bolt from the blue, Stash,’ he counseled Old Husband, ‘you don’t get the idea at all. Times have changed. I
live
here now. You’re the boarder these days. It’s why you got to pay the rent.’

Stash grappled with his truss over the heavy, bleached-out underwear, got it straight all around at last and announced firmly: ‘Am hoosband.
You
pay rent.’

Violet, sprawled out on the mattress, her hands beneath her hennaed head and her legs spread a bit to explore its possibilities, rolled over and buried her face in her hands, laughter shaking her shoulders. ‘He says he’s my
husband
,’ she managed to gasp, then dried tears of laughter out of her eyes, gathered the mattress in her arms and marched off to the bedroom with a low word to the punk: ‘I’ll be waiting, lover.’

In a minute she was back: ‘It’s too small for a double bed so I put it on
your
side – I got so much meat on me I could sleep on the floor ’n it’d feel like plush – but your poor little bones, the way they stick out—’

‘Ess,’ Old Man agreed with a malicious glee, ‘is good enough for Mrs No-good, on floor.’ He pointed commandingly to the sports section wadded into a hole in the battered couch. ‘
Mr
No-good
there
.’ He got a good grip on the truss and stood right up to Sparrow. ‘Stash boss by howz now. Stash sleep on
bed.
’

‘If you don’t stop tryin’ to make trouble around here you can’t tear no more days off my calendar,’ Violet told him, and went into the kitchen to see to the one small bottle of beer remaining there. Sparrow heard the tinkle of glass against the icebox door and followed. ‘We can’t afford to have you drinkin’ up our good beer on us, the way you’re actin’,’ he warned Stash, ‘you stay out.’

When Sparrow passed the bedroom door on the way downstairs for more beer he saw Stash stretched comfortably on the new mattress, working on a fresh cigar and with a half gallon all his own beside the bed. There was something wrong, Sparrow sensed, in the old man’s very posture. If he felt that relaxed today how could anyone be sure he’d feel like getting up at 5
A.M
. to go to work tomorrow?

Stash got up in time to go to work the next morning – but Vi had to roll out first and get the coffee perking before he did it. ‘We can’t go on this way,’ Violet told him in the cold little kitchen, afraid to return to bed lest he return there too. ‘There got to be some changes made.’

‘Is right,’ Old Man agreed. ‘You go by job instead.’

Sure enough, he returned that same afternoon with his rusted ice tongs over his shoulder.

‘Did you quit or was you fired?’ she wanted to know before he had hung up his coat.

Stash made no reply. But he stayed home drinking beer the whole afternoon and in the evening Violet and Sparrow held an anxious conference in the kitchen.

‘He says he ain’t gonna do nothin’ but set around ’n read the temper’ture the rest of his life. Then he looks at the calendar like he wishes it was time awready to pull the date off for tomorrow.’

‘He’ll get tired of settin’ ’n settin’. He’ll go back to work just to have somethin’ to do,’ Sparrow hoped vaguely.

Old Man never wore pants or shoes or shirt about the house. When ready to eat he simply thrust knife and fork into the truss and sat wiggling his toes, in their heavy socks, till food was put before him. He broke in upon the conference, shuffled his upper plate into position and said, ‘Ready.’

‘Ready for
what?
’ Violet wanted to know in alarm. She had set plates for only two. Stash reached over and placed Sparrow’s plate in front of himself.

‘This stuff ain’t for you, Old Man,’ Sparrow pointed out, ‘this is
fresh
stuff. You couldn’t digest it. It’ll be ripe for you tomorrow, there’ll be lots left over.’

‘I digest awright,’ Stash assured him. ‘
Now
I’m eat. Ever’tin’ frash. Tomorrow you eat, little bits left all over.’

Sparrow and Violet watched the old man spreading creamery butter upon fresh rolls with something akin to horror. He helped himself to her dollar-twenty-a-pound ham.

‘Pick the strorberries,’ she commanded Sparrow, ‘I got to see how far this thing is going to go.’ But her voice faltered.

It went as far as the ‘strorberries.’ Stash poured half a pint of whipping cream over them and lit a tailor-made cigarette out of Sparrow’s pack, left lying carelessly beside the sugar bowl.

‘Why don’t you finish the cream, Old Man?’ Sparrow asked. ‘It might go sour.’

‘Is for coffee,’ Stash explained regally, shoving his cup toward the perking Silex. Violet filled it with a strange docility.

‘Now Stash gone by bed some more –
ever
’tin’ be nice, quiet,’ he warned them both after the very last of the cream had gone into his coffee and the last of the coffee had gone down his throat.

The fact that the right-hand button of the underwear’s trap had now loosened didn’t in the least detract from the dignity of the old man’s exit. They heard the closing of the bedroom door, the sighing of the new mattress giving surcease to his brittle old bones and the first gentle snore before either dared to speak.

‘It looks like our move,’ Violet said dismally, after the dishes were washed and they had returned to the front-room couch; there was scarcely room for both of them to lie comfortably on its worn springs.

‘Don’t say “our,”’ Sparrow reminded her, ‘say “yours.”
You
married him.’

‘Yeh, but I wouldn’t have had to hang onto him this long if you went out ’n got a steady job,’ she pointed out. ‘You could make it on the legit if you really wanted.’

‘Sure. I could get a Number Two shovel ’n get on a blast-furnace shift in Indiana Harbor ’n come home nights in the same shape as Stash is now ’n be snorin’ here on the front-room couch while you’re—’ He stopped himself.

‘Go ahead – finish what you started to say.’ Her eyes had darkened dangerously. ‘I s’ppose I’m in heat every time I see a pair of pants hangin’ on the line? All I think about, I guess, is that velvet-lined meat grinder?’

‘That about sizes it up,’ Sparrow thought discreetly. But all he said aloud was, ‘All I meant was if I had a full-time job I couldn’t do my fam’ly duty so good.’

‘You’re not breakin’ no records as it is,’ she assured him, ‘’n anyhow I’m not tellin’ you to start swingin’ no shovel. You could be a Western Union messenger ’n drop in to see me between messages.’

‘I’d never get back to the office on time,’ he predicted, ‘I’d be fallin’ off the bike. Why don’t you go by Western Union yourself?’ And added silently, ‘Then I could rest up between messages.’

‘Fat chance
I
got of goin’ to work,’ Violet complained as might anyone unjustly deprived of the inalienable right to work for a living. ‘Who’d take care of Zosh ’n that oversize fart hound you palmed off on Frankie? If I didn’t get down there ’n sweep the floor the bottles’d be overflowin’, they’d be up to the sink.’

‘So long as they don’t go no higher,’ Sparrow philosophized, ‘if they did they’d get in the way of the dishes.’

‘Frankie’s got her so spoiled she won’t even put the dishes on the sink, she waits for me to pick them up now, just like
she’s tryin’ to see how much I can take off her. I’m glad they only got one room ’cause she eats all over the place. I find dishes in the drawer, they must of been there since Frankie was in the army.’

‘It don’t look like you’ll have time to be cleanin’ up down there any more,’ Sparrow reminded her, ‘the way Old Man is actin’ you’ll have to start in up here first.’

‘He’ll come to his senses when I won’t let him tear the days off the calendar ’r read the temper’ture.’

‘How you gonna stop him?’

‘I’ll put the calendar up where he can’t reach it ’n lock the window so he can’t lean out. He can’t open it by hisself, the lock gets stuck. He has to holler for me to come unlock it.’

‘Don’t let him lean out too far.’

‘That’s what scares me, he leans out too
damned
far.’

‘Hold his legs.’

‘
That’s
the part that scares me, it’s when I’m holdin’ his legs. What if I let go?’

‘You won’t let go.’

‘I know I won’t.’

‘But you might forget to lock the window – well, I’m glad tearin’ days off the calendar is all he wants to tear off.’ Sparrow spoke with an uneasy gratitude. He wasn’t as certain, as he once had been, that Violet was an unmixed blessing.

‘Hurry up, honey,’ she panted in his ear, ‘we got to get dressed pretty soon ’n get down to the hall. I got to get Old Man dressed ’n shaved ’n clean socks on him. After all, the New Year’s party is for him.’

‘
This
one ain’t,’ Sparrow commanded her, ‘quit quackin’ ’n get to work.’

That was as far as Violet and the punk ever did get in resolving the problem of having a husband in the home. Had it not been for chance and an icy pane, old Stash
might in time have driven them both to carrying messages for Western Union.

The first guest to arrive at the New Year’s Eve ball was Umbrella Man and as soon as he came in it was apparent that the occasion had been misunderstood. He carried a rebuilt umbrella ‘for bride-lady’ under his arm, his pants were pressed and no one could convince him that it was just a coming-out party for Old Husband because Old Husband had just come out.

Then Meter Reader the Baseball Coach came bringing a third baseman’s mitt with the signature of Stanley Hack autographed into the leather for Sparrow; and a book on how to throw your voice for Violet. He pretended never to have heard of anyone called Old Husband at all and had just dropped in to kiss the bride. So all he’d do when they tried to explain things to him was to say, ‘Don’t thank
me
, thank my boys.’

So they guessed somebody had been going around saying Violet had finally divorced Old Husband at last and was getting hitched to the punk. Which, with all the presents the rumor had brought in, didn’t do any particular harm. So everyone had a long pull of
wiśniowa
on it while Stash went about showing his clean socks to everyone and pointing with pride toward Violet, to show it was Mrs Him had given them to him.

Then Antek the Owner arrived with a bruised cheek. He’d been drinking his own whisky all day, till Mrs Owner had locked him out in order to have something left for Monday’s customers. Owner was on the verge of tears. ‘Married fourteen years ’n never a harsh word – now she bats me with the mattress board ’n locks me out of my own home. I got no home no more, fellas. I got nothin’, it’s all in her name. Owner’s out in the cold world all alone,
can’t even get in to see his own little girl – isn’t that a
shame
, fellas?’