The Man With the Golden Arm (29 page)

At the top of the second flight the bottom dropped out of the bag.

Frankie watched them tumbling down the narrow escalator stairs as if they were on rollers and wanted to laugh when one barely missed a salesgirl’s ankle – the bag slipped from his hand, he shouldered the girl to one side, saw her mouth widen with indignation and then knew it was no use running, no use at all: two floorwalkers, a house dick and a dozen bosomy saleswomen clamored around, pecking at him like over-fed hens.

‘They had an ace hidin’ in the drapes,’ Frankie realized wryly, ‘the punk caught somebody’s eye foolin’ wit’ that vegetable bin.’ And told the house dick quietly, ‘Let’s go where we’re goin’.’

They came down that littered aisle in a sort of carnival with the house dick holding his belt from behind and a floorwalker on either side holding his arms and the bosomy biddies following behind, cackling as they came. Under their feigned horror Frankie heard their easy laughter. He caught a glimpse of a butcher holding a broken-necked rooster, both butcher and rooster sliding one limp dark eye sidewise at him as he passed.

He felt the patrol car wheel out from the curb and saw the wan early January sun lying in a checkered pattern across the car’s scarred floor. It was evening, the snow was drifting a bit toward the curbs and when the car stopped for the lights he
heard the wind getting up all down the trolley tracks trying to hurry the patrol along a bit: it would be long melted before he saw any trolley run again.

‘The punk saw that ace ’n ducked without givin’ me the word,’ Frankie decided bitterly. ‘If I ever find out for sure it was him rolled Louie—’ He touched his left hand to his shoulder: in the excitement one of the biddies had torn the sleeve again.

The young men had engraved their bitterest disappointments upon the walls beside their fondest hopes. They had exposed their betrayers there, mocked their lawyers and doubted their wives. One had assured his sainted mother he was going straight the moment he could make bail and with the same stub end planned straight mayhem, the moment bail was made, upon one Crash Kolkowski. No reason was offered; yet the emergency stood plain:

The prospect of Kolkowski sweating out an eternity with his spine in a cast while all the good guys in purgatory stood around refusing him just one small snort was sufficiently dismal. Yet even sadder, it seemed to Frankie Machine, was another second guesser’s plea:

Had Dago Mary prepared the sodium amytal the night
before? Or was it only that the coils hadn’t been cleaned? A deed premeditated by midnight and executed with deadpan deliberation in the dangerous noon? Or some casual midweek evening’s error achieved in innocent merriment? Upon the gray confessional of the walls Frankie Machine found no answer at all.

With tedious attention to detail someone had illustrated precisely how a certain aging judge would look, gavel in hand, wearing nothing but high-button shoes and a flowered cravat, while sentencing a sensibly clothed civilian to the electric chair for indecent exposure: a single button had been found loose upon the offender’s fly.

To leave nothing to the imagination the chair, sizzling invitingly, had been sketched in beside his honor. To show how no time was lost, locally, in appeals for pardon, parole or probation, the judge had his hand in reaching distance of the switch and was sweating with impatience to fry this miserable joker personally. There would be no commutation of sentence here.

Chicago justice was in a bad way all right. One could see that at a glance: not a single finger of scorn was pointed at the judge for his own nakedness.

Indeed the Irony of It All had inspired another amateur to scratch a second portrait: a beat-out, tattered, crooked-limbed wreck, groping in two directions at once and captioned
Chicago Justice Deaf Dumb Blind and Falling Apart
.

In for a bum rap, one hand explained, I never rolled a drunk
in my life.

While another commented knowingly:
In for a bum rap too
I never rolled a sober one.

That’s how it is, another had confided, when you hit some lousy
bum the dough falls out of his pocket and you get the blame.

By the yellow night light’s glow Frankie saw how the four walls, as well as the floor – and by some frenzied acrobatics
the very ceiling – recorded with equal fame the damned and the saved: those who would surely ascend the golden escalator reserved for good guys and their true-blue pals, the real sports and square johns capable of breaking any Kolkowski’s back; while upon the rusty freight elevator clanking miserably downward forever would go all copper johns, double clockers, lush workers and mush workers, deadpickers and turncoats, rats, pigeons, stooges, short faders and crap catchers, deadheads and deadbeats who had ever stood drinks for Kolkowski, loaned him a dollar or applauded that big flannel mouth.

Frankie could smell the walls. They were closer now than they had ever been; they bent together above him till the door seemed a part of the walls.

Walls which revealed that, by and large, the young men preferred the simple, straight-from-the-shoulder take-it-or-leave-it sort of warning:

While at the very bottom of the cell some latter-day Moses had written off all preceding commandments:
Everybody shut
up. If you were any good you wouldn’t be in here.

In the growing light the wall legends continued like the continuation of a dream begun in another place: the legends that follow upon each other in all the tongues of man, from cell to cell and jail to jail, linking seas to cities and cities to plains, down the streets of all the world wherever a thief stands waiting behind steel bars and a turnkey waits by the wall.

In one corner some repentant bravo had inscribed a prayer
for the salvation of all such sinners as himself, recommending them to John 3:7, and adding piously that he’d leave his body to the Board of Health and his ivory-tipped cue, locked in the middle rack at Spongy Kaplan’s Snooker Palace and Pool Parlor, to Hines Memorial Hospital, providing such sacrifice would bring just a bit more sunshine into the lives of his fellow men.

Have Doc
Bunson
call for my body
personlly
, this soldier of the Lord had directed in a testament above the water bucket,
He is a personl friend of mine and no autotopsy is necessry
.

While dated in the same week some revived will to live and still to do great deeds had come into the same wavering hand. Couched there in formidable obscenities the repentant bravo promised that same Lord he’d burn his old man’s house to the ground within the hour he made the street and found the matches; adding an invitation to all rogue males within the city limits to enjoy his wife’s favors on their first night out of the clink.

Whether anyone like them onions or not, there they were, all ready for peeling.

Frankie rolled over onto his side to examine the opposite
wall in a sluggish hope that there might be some drawings of women there.

But any one side of any jailhouse wall is never much different than any other side. There are only the same old threadbare variations on the same age-old warnings against all the well-tried ancestral foes: whisky and women, sin and cigarettes, marijuana and morphine, marked cards and capped cocaine, dirty laughter and easy tears, engineered dice and casual disease, bad luck and adultery, old age and shyster lawyers, quack doctors and ambitious cops, crooked priests and honest burglars, lack of money and hard work.

Girls who would and girls who wouldn’t. If they did they were no good and if they didn’t what good were they? One biographer wanted to know and another replied smugly:

Yet went on to offer consolation for this blow:

And for further consolation to all of Circumstances’ victims:

While another hand countermanded all preceding instructions by commanding everyone, simply and to the point:

I’m just a jailbird
, one bird of passage mourned,
Give me
wings ’n I’ll fly out.

The only bird that flies out of here is a pigeon
, another pointed out.

Held Fri. 9 pm to Tuesday
showup
96 hours
, some green youth protested.

This place gives me the baloney blues
, yet another complained.

America the Anti-Christ Nation
, one announced obscurely.

Never again
, one promised forever.

Frankie examined the myriad dates, initials, and hearts pierced by a hundred unkept vows. Melancholy memories of men who had since gone down the city’s thousand ways like sparks off a State Street trolley, leaving only these few poor scribblings to prove it had not been, after all, but a nightmare within a nightmare.

Frankie searched carefully, hoping to find the name or initials of someone he knew or fancied he once had known. But the single arresting detail he discovered was a woman’s scratching, accomplished with a hairpin or barrette and almost obliterated with time, from years when the tier had been used for women.

Signed, one could see through the grime, painstakingly; certain that this inscription was all she would ever have to bequeath to all good hustlers who were to follow:

What had become of sweet Lucille? Frankie wondered wistfully. And what was to become of Frankie Machine? Had unbearable bad luck taken her, as it seemed by way of taking him, for a long slow walk down a short and downhill pier?
Or had it changed strangely, as his own was bound soon to change, just in the nick of time, on the night she’d met the Salvation Army drummer whose old man owned a Florida dog track? Had they truly reformed each other then? Had they, too, found, like Mr and Mrs Francis Majcinek would someday find, that everything turns out right after all? As everything always does? Had the dream man found his dream woman hadn’t, somehow, been soiled by a thousand and one nights on North Clark Street after all? Did they find that a million dollars really made a difference in the end? Had it really ended like all good double features ought?

Good luck or bad, faithless or true, Lucille was gone with the Pulaski’s tenderest close-ups, accompanied only by last night’s slenderest shadows. And the dead-cold fog of North Clark Street through which she tapped on through the mists of nights no man remembered.

Along the tier a hundred thieves argued in sleep with unseen turnkeys: the unseen pokies of all thieves’ dreams who stride, jangling the special keys to each thief’s private nightmare, down all the lonely corridors of despair. There was no delivery from the dead end of lost chance. No escape from the blue steel bars of guilt.

Somewhere far above a steel moon shone, with equal grandeur, upon boulevard, alley and park; flophouse and penthouse, apartment hotel and tenement. Shone with that sort of wintry light that makes every city chimney, standing out against it in the cold, seem a sort of altar against a driving sky.

Beyond the bars light and shadow played ceaselessly, as it had played beneath so many long-set moons, for so many that had lain here before Frankie: the carefree and the careful ones, the crippled and the maimed, the foolhardy phonies and the bitter rebels; each to go his separate way, under his own private moon. Against a driving sky.

Upon the walls, as morning moved from the women’s tiers down to where he lay, Frankie fancied many shadows: of Blind Pig with his cane stuck under his armpit; of Sparrow shuffling along with a shopping bag in his hand; of Sophie wheeling toward him and Nifty Louie, head hanging loosely, walking in sorrow away from everyone. Antek the Owner bent over his bar as if in prayer; Zygmunt the Prospector counting all his money; and Record Head Bednar studying two strays across his desk as if to say: ‘I figured you two’d be back.’

Saw again the green baize table as it had been the night of the argument over the soiled silver dollar: Schwiefka looking down at him with the green silk bag in one hand and the other extended toward Frankie for his take. Yes, and behind Schwiefka, Bednar’s shadow waiting forever for his take of Schwiefka’s take.

Frankie Machine wasn’t happy; yet Frankie wasn’t too sad. He felt oddly relieved now that, for a while at least, all things would be solved for him. There was nothing he could do now about Sophie, nothing he could do about Molly, nothing he could do about boozing. Not a thing he could do about hitching up the reindeers for a sleigh ride through drifting snow.

‘It’ll be my chance to kick the habit for keeps,’ he realized. Caught between the wheelchair and the first floor front, between Old Crow and a little brown drugstore bottle, between his need for Molly Novotny and his need for the man with the thirty-five-pound monkey on his back, the dealer had found an iron sanctuary.