The Man With the Golden Arm (25 page)

He didn’t draw a tear. Everyone knew he got maudlin as regularly as he had a good week and was locked out till he sobered up. Locking him out, after a good week, was the only thing that sobered him. He had a crying need for pity and could never understand why no one sympathized with a man robbed, overnight, of wife, home, family, honor and his lifetime savings.

When Owner wanted to cry, he cried, and anything at all did for an excuse. What really mattered with Owner wasn’t on the tongue but in the heart; since he had no words for his heart, he wept.

‘I’m not cryin’ for my own trouble,’ he confided in Frankie, leaning so heavily across the wheelchair’s arm that Frankie had to brace it with his foot to keep it from being rolled backward, ‘I’m cryin’ for everybody’s.’ He took off his glasses to cry the better for everyone; for the lenses were so splashed with tears they were indistinguishable from the beads of sweat about his round bald brow.

‘You’re cryin’ from the skull now, Owner,’ Frankie informed him. ‘When it starts comin’ out of your ears it’s time to use the handkerchief.’ And assured Sophie from where he stood behind her, ‘He’ll be back behind his bar Monday morning.’

They wandered in from all over the ward, the invited and the uninvited, the wary and the seeking, the strayed, the frayed, the happy and the hapless, the lost, the luckless, the lucky and the doomed. Some, on the assumption that if anyone were getting out of jail it must be the punk again, to congratulate Sparrow; only to find all the more reason for celebration when they learned that, just for this once, it wasn’t the punk at all.

Everyone got congratulated for something or other whether
he deserved it or not. Everyone but Old Man, who couldn’t even get congratulated on his new socks. So he tried going about announcing ‘Stash boss by howz’ while clutching a week’s worth of calendar dates; and still no one paid him any mind.

And some came just to celebrate the season with Frankie Machine.

Yes, and one blind peddler so drunk he merely sat in a corner and called out, from time to time, that he, alone of all good hustlers, had come to mourn a hustler.

To mourn for Fomorowski, Blind Pig defied them all.

While the whole long hall rejoiced.

And Violet, finding pity at the bottom of a whisky glass, began making every stewbum, who came up to kiss her, shake hands with Old Husband first and admire his socks. Till the old man, clutching his calendar dates like so many retrieved hours, felt the party must really be for him after all.

Meter Reader kept running back and forth in the center of the floor scooping up an imaginary grounder he’d missed in some long-gone summer’s double header. For Meter Reader didn’t know a meter from an egg beater: it was only that long ago he had come into a meter reader’s cap. It had lost the insignia above the peak, but still served when he coached the Endless Belt & Leather Invincibles. He was still trying to explain Endless Belt’s 19–1 loss to Lefkowicz Fast Freight and the boys were egging him on.

‘I’m
proud
of my boys,’ Meter Reader insisted, ‘proud of every man of them.’ He still lived over that overwhelming defeat though it had been achieved on the Fourth of July and the year was running out with the hour. He still had to establish that he felt no shame in that defeat. When Meter Reader grew excited he couldn’t see he was being jived a bit.

The phone rang and someone said it was Owner Budzban
of Endless Belt wanting to talk to his coach about spring training. Of course it was only Sparrow phoning from across the street, but the hall grew quiet so Meter Reader could hear the message better. Out of the corner of the eye everyone watched him listening so humbly, head sinking slowly in despair while the punk told him he was through at Endless Belt – his check would be mailed to him Monday morning. No, there was nothing wrong with his work at Endless Belt, it was just that the company couldn’t afford to back a losing team any longer. Feeling was running pretty strong, the boys wanted a winner this year so it had been decided to let Coach go with the best of New Year’s wishes.

Meter Reader came out of the booth looking broken-hearted. Losing the job was nothing, he had held onto it only because it had made a coach of him with each returning spring. ‘One hell of a New Year’s resolution they made
there
, it’s all I got to say,’ he mourned. ‘But I seen it coming since July. Well, I’ll find something else’ – then as if suddenly jolted by the full truth of what had happened to him he seized Frankie by the sleeve and shouted right in his ear, ‘I’m
proud
of my boys! Every fool man of them!’

‘Meter Reader!’ someone called, ‘there’s a Mexican out here wants you to coach for Vera Cruz next season – can you talk Mex? What should we tell him?’

Meter Reader, to whom all things were possible, waddled out to see what kind of offer Vera Cruz had for him. Before he reached the door the phone rang for him once more and the same voice came on again: ‘Is Owner Budzban. You could have job back but we got to get new coach. Is okay?’

So he smelled the punk at last and came out of the booth this time refusing to talk to anyone. He got a good hold of the bar and wouldn’t let go. It took Meter Reader some time to grow suspicious – but once he became so he overdid it. When the phone rang and he was told his
girl was on the line he refused unconditionally to answer. For a week now he wouldn’t be believing the simplest sort of neighborhood gossip.

While Sophie sat so flushed with excitement that she looked ready to get up and start dancing herself any minute. Sparrow wheeled her under the mistletoe and kissed her, and all the boys kissed her, till it hardly felt that she was just somebody in a wheelchair at all.

High atop the Christmas tree a single tinsel star looked down and Old Husband, weaving a little in the middle of the floor, pointed the neck of an empty whisky bottle at it and shouted, ‘
Aj´ Za stary jestem popatrzyc´ na gwiazdyck
.
’ He had grown too old to look at stars. And fell back, exhausted, into many waiting arms.

With Blind Pig looking up at the great load of silver icicles and artificial snow borne by the tree just as if he could see it all; and his eyes still red from weeping.

For everyone who really mattered had come by now. Chester from Conveyor, Chester from Viaduct, Oseltski from Post Office, Shudefski from Poolroom, Shudefski from Marines, Szalapski from Dairy, Widow Wieczorek and Umbrella Man’s brother, Kvorka from Saloon Street. And Sophie’s own bright little grandmother with a bottle all her very own. Everybody who counted, a few who just imagined they counted, and a couple dozen more who knew well they never had, never would, never could and had never been intended to count at all.

Now began the midnight uproar to welcome the new year in. In the middle of the
Swiateczyna
Polka
the younger couples began jitter-bugging, and Sophie’s grandmother shook her wise old head to see. She liked all things young people did, so long as it wasn’t something old people did better, like counting their money. She liked it so well that she shook Umbrella Man awake, where he slept a drunken sleep in the
chair beside her own, till he sat up and asked, ‘How far are we?’ And promptly returned to sleep.

Violet, pickled to the point of elegance, strolled like a lady in her fancy, fancy gown, dragging cigarette butts in her train, gesturing artistically and asking everyone, ‘I do carry myself nice – don’t you really think?’ Right up to Sparrow to take him dancing around, singing hoarsely into his ear at every turn.

At the bar there was such a crush that the liquor ran out three times and emergency rations had to be rushed in by a squad of four flying lushes. It was one of those nights when everyone felt, for some reason, he really never had to go to work again at all.

In one moment everyone had to have a drink on everyone else. Men who wouldn’t loan their mothers three dollars without an I.O.U. heard themselves telling ancestral foes, ‘Keep your money, Emil. Spend mine. I got too much.’ The orchestra got tight to a man so that the drummer stood up on his traps, alleged he was Gene Krupa and wanted to buy some cigarettes, then toppled into the sax man’s lap. Immediately the sax man began taking a collection for the drummer and turned it over to the pianist. Who promptly rose to spend every dime of it back on the dancers.

Frankie took over the drums. For half an hour, while everyone was helping to bring the drummer around, the dealer was a man in a dream: he was Dave Tough, he was Krupa, then he was Dave Tough again without missing a beat. ‘The kid can do it when he feels like it,’ somebody said, and
everyone shook his hand to tell him he was as much in the slot with the traps as he was with a deck.

Cousin Kvorka held his hand last and longer than anyone. ‘You can do it when you want to, Dealer,’ Cousin told him.

‘Don’t call me “Dealer,” call me “Drummer,”’ Frankie asked: he never had it in him to answer Cousin in a really friendly way at all. He turned toward the bar. Cousin turned him back.

‘Before you start hittin’ the bottle over there I want to do you a small favor, if you’ll let me,’ the leathery little man asked Frankie with real humility, ‘for the way you’ve kept the wolves off Umbrellas at Schwiefka’s,’ he explained with the embarrassment of a man more accustomed to denying a favor than to be asking the privilege of doing one.

‘You don’t owe me no favors, Cousin,’ Frankie told him with a sullenness he could not keep out of his voice, ‘it’s my job to keep the game straight, it’s what Zero pays me to do. Umbrellas gets the same deal as everyone else.’

Cousin had maneuvered him into the corner of the men’s wardrobe within a few steps of a couple bucks trying to start a crap game. ‘I wouldn’t sleep tonight if I didn’t tip you, Frankie.’

Frankie had the feeling, cold and swift, that the party was over and the new year well begun. Through the hubbub and the laughter, the smoke, the music and the stomp of dancing feet, he sensed, for one moment, that 1947 was going to be a long, long year for Frankie Majcinek.

‘Spill it,’ he told Cousin Kvorka.

‘When we picked up Fomorowski he been layin’ there two days ’n if some potato peddler hadn’t stopped by the shed to pee he might be layin’ there yet. The guy was
covered up.
’

‘You should of buried him deeper then,’ Frankie suggested without troubling to feign surprise. ‘Why you tellin’
me?
’

Kvorka bridled a bit. ‘He didn’t freeze to death, Dealer.’

Frankie waited.

‘I ain’t tryin’ to make no pinch, Frankie,’ Cousin assured him earnestly. ‘I ain’t even tryin’ to give you advice. But it would do you some good to know what the score is on Louie now.’

‘Sounds like the game’s over for Louie,’ was all Frankie had to say.

‘He’s at the morgue ’n there’ll be a coroner’s inquest. I can tell you the verdict now ’cause I tossed him in the wagon myself.’

It was Kvorka’s turn to wait. Either the dealer needed to know or he didn’t.

‘What’s the story, Cousin?’

‘“Death due to assault, assailant unknown.” His neck was broke, Frankie.’

‘If you ask me that’s a damned good thing ’n I’m happy to hear it,’ Frankie told him steadily.

The crap game was getting well started. ‘Only tryin’ to square a favor,’ Kvorka told him.

‘What do I need favors for?’ Frankie turned on his heel. What did the guy take him for? Some high school stub who’d break down ’n say, ‘Please don’t arrest me, Mister, I won’t do it again’? It would be a cold day in hell before Bednar would pin a rap like
that
on Frankie Machine. He stood watching the crapshooters until he saw Kvorka get his hat and overcoat out of the wardrobe and leave. ‘He could save his favors,’ Frankie repeated. Machine didn’t scare as easy as some aces might think, he told himself.

But when somebody offered him the dice he shook his head, No, and wandered off looking for Sparrow. He went around the hall twice and couldn’t spot him.

Wandered without noticing that everything everyone was doing around him was the funniest sort of thing anyone had
ever yet done. The hall was jumping with comical fellows wearing their girls’ best hats and every man of them doing it like he was born for the stage.

Best of all, no one seemed to mind being outdone in anything. Though each tried to outsing, outdrink and outdance the next fellow, yet between the singing and the dancing and the drinking each conceded readily he didn’t do nearly as well as anyone else in the place might have. Each exhibited his humility and trust by offering his whisky, his counsel and his girl to whoever stood nearest.

‘Just
everybody
is feelin’ good tonight,’ Sophie laughed, and felt just as good as anybody. Following Frankie’s circuit of the floor, she wondered who he was looking for. If it was for whom she suspected, she determined, someone would learn that it was as easy to slap a face from a wheelchair as from a standing position. Her suspicion trailed along behind Frankie as she watched him, hatless, leave the hall.

For he knew where dark-haired Molly sat by herself, in the nest on the first floor front, and it wasn’t Sparrow he had to see most of all. Remembered where she sat counting the Els that passed in the night.

It was New Year’s Eve on the El, it was New Year’s Eve down Division Street, it was Happy New Year’s Eve for the boys from the Tug & Maul and the girls hustling drinks at the Safari. It was Happy New Year in Junkie Row at Twenty-sixth and California and Happy New Year for the Endless Belt & Leather Invincibles.

It was Happy New Year everywhere except in Molly Novotny’s heart; neither her heart nor her nest gave sign of the season. The stove was smoking again and she thought carelessly, ‘We get the ones the landlords buy up for old iron,’ of both the stove and her heart. The day comes when both feel past throwing heat.

It’s like that for all hustlers’ hearts: to pay the most and
get the worst. The only thing a hustling girl has that doesn’t get stopped up is her purse. And that’s as full of holes as a married man’s promises.