The Man With the Golden Arm (40 page)

Sparrow waited. He wanted to know all right. ‘I don’t know why you done that to me, Frankie.’

‘’Cause you double-crossed me on the streetcar the time Cousin Kvork picked us up on Damen ’n Division for nothin’ ’n Schwiefka sprung us the next day. You didn’t have no two pair on that transfer. So I owe you nineteen more.’

Sparrow goggled, he was really stunned. He couldn’t remember the game played in the cell nor how he’d evened the score on the trolley.

‘Don’t give
me
the goof act,’ Frankie threatened him, ‘hearts for noses –’ n you losed both games.’

Sparrow got it then all right. ‘I don’t remember what I had ’r what you had, Frankie,’ he answered honestly. ‘But if you think I’m settin’ here while you try knockin’ my nose off you’re gonna get your own bust in a brand-new place.’ His hand touched the glass ash tray on the arm of his chair.

And felt hardly afraid at all. For the first time in his life he looked at Frankie with the knowledge that it wasn’t himself who would have to back down. ‘It’s the new way of doin’ things, you might call it,’ he explained.

Frankie tried to grin but the grin was weak. He scattered the deck across the bed in a gesture of surrender. ‘Maybe you won anyhow, I don’t know,’ he confessed. ‘I don’t even know what put it in my head. All kinds of things go through my head these days, how they get in there there’s no tellin’ any more. It’s just the way everythin’ is, I guess – you know how everythin’ is, Solly? Let me tell you how everythin’ is.’ He sounded like a man talking on and on for dread of something that will move through his brain the moment the tongue ceases its babble.

‘I can see how everythin’ is awright,’ Sparrow assured him.

‘No, you can’t see. Nobody can. Nobody knows, just junkies. Just junkies know how everythin’ is. Sit down, Solly –
please.
’

The light was fading in his eyes now, they were sinking into
his head and the freshness the drug had brought to his cheeks had turned into a dull putty-gray. He said ‘please’ like a man begging for a dime and just the way he said it left Sparrow feeling that he himself had just swallowed a mouthful of dust. ‘If it’ll do you good to talk,’ he thought with the taste of dust on his tongue, ‘I’ll listen this one time. Because I knew you when you were the best sport I knew my whole life. What’s your story, cousin?’ he offered aloud.

Frankie coughed into his palm. ‘It’s like this, Solly. You put it down for months ’n months, you work yourself down from monkey to zero. You beat it. You got it beat at last.’ He was talking low and breathlessly, like one who fears that, if he doesn’t get his story told quickly it will never be told at all; like one who believes he is the only one who knows. Really knows. ‘You
know
you got it beat. You got it beat so stiff when the fixer says, “It ain’t gonna cost you a dime this time, I got some new stuff I just want to try,” you tell him, “Try it yourself,” ’n give him the laugh. When he tells you, innocent-like, “The hypo is in the top drawer over there, help yourself any time,” just to put it in your head how easy it’d be, you turn him down flat. Because gettin’ fixed is the one thing you’ll never need again all your life.

‘Three weeks later you wake up, it’s dark out but not like night ’n it ain’t morning neither – it’s just Fix Time. It’s comin’ on like a wave way out there, bigger ’n bigger ’n comin’ right at you till it’s big as this hotel, it hits you ’n you’re gone. You’re so sick you’re just turnin’ around down there under that wave not carin’ who knows, your mother ’r your sister ’r your buddy ’r your wife – anythin’ just so’s you can stop drownin’ for a minute.

‘Nobody can stand gettin’ that sick ’n live, Solly. You have to puke ’n you can’t. You just heave ’n heave ’n sweat ’n heave ’n still nothin’ happens – then somebody turns on the faucet in the sink or the bathtub down the hall ’n just the sound of
water runnin’ rolls your whole stomach over on top of itself ’n you got to puke ’r die.

‘Then you don’t even know no more
where
you’re sick – if you think just for one second, “It’s my poor gut” – it starts bustin’ your brains out the back of your head just to show you. So you think it’s your head ’n it slams you a dirty one in the stones – it’s here ’n it’s there ’n you’re shaggin’ it in a dream, tryin’ to pin it down to some place you can feel it so you can fight it.

‘But it won’t stay still ’n you can’t get hold ’n if you don’t pin it in a minute you’re dead’ – he brushed the buffalo-colored shag of hair out of his eyes – ‘that’s all. There ain’t no “will power” to it like squares like to say. There ain’t that much will power on God’s green earth. If you had that much will power you wouldn’t be a man, you’d be Jesus Christ.’ He began drying the sweat out of his armpits with the pillow-case. ‘You know what you brought me in that little bottle, Solly?’

Sparrow didn’t know. Frankie knew he didn’t know. He wanted to tell Sparrow so that the punk would never forget. So that everyone in the world who didn’t know would know forever and always what Solly had brought him in the little brown bottle.

‘I knew, Frankie,’ Solly admitted. ‘I knew what was in the dirty bottle awright. I guessed when Pig asked me––’

‘You didn’t know a thing. You didn’t have no idea at all. You still don’t know. You just think you know. You think you know everything.’

Sparrow wanted to go now, he could scarcely sit still for restlessness. And yet it was so hard, it was just too damned hard, to leave Frankie talking to himself all alone up here like this. ‘What was in it, Frankie?’ he humored the man on the bed while watching him hopefully for signs of sleepiness. He could get Frankie’s shoes off if he’d just
drowse a bit, then turn off the light and by morning they’d both feel better.

But Frankie didn’t look sleepy at all. A smile both benign and wan wandered across his lips and a look of childlike wisdom entered his eyes. ‘I’ll tell you what was in the bottle, Solly.’ He looked demure, he looked so sly, his eyes sought the floor in a womanish sort of coyness completely strange to Sparrow.

‘A itty-bittsy little old monkey, Solly, that’s what you brought me in the bottle. Such a little feller he can hide hisself right inside there. You know where my itsy-monkey is now, Solly?’

These changes in mood, so swift and strange in one always so slow in all moods, brought a cold tug of fear to Sparrow’s heart.

‘I guess he was just too little for me to see then,’ he humored Frankie again.

‘It’s just what I thought you’d say’ – Frankie looked triumphant – ‘’cause he ain’t little at
all
no more. He’s growed up into a real great big feller just since you been settin’ there, Solly. He weighs thirty-five pounds ’n he’s settin’ right here on my back usin’ all his weight ’cause he knows I got to carry him around wherever I go so’s I don’t get lonesome for nobody no more. Can
you
see him, Solly?’

‘Why don’t you try to sleep awhile, Frankie?’

But Frankie was wound up like a clock and there was nothing to do but listen to him till he ran down.

‘Some weeks he only weighs twenty-six pounds, that’s when I cut him down a little. Once I cut him down to zero, I starved the poor little feller to death. They buried him out at Twenty-sixth ’n Cal.’ N
that’s
a funny thing right there.’

‘It don’t seem so funny to me, Frankie.’

‘What I mean is so funny is when he come back to me last
week he weighed forty-four pounds – where’d he put on all that weight, Solly?’

‘It must of been another monkey, Frankie.’

‘Can you see him yet, Solly?’

‘I think I can see him a little now, Frankie.’

Frankie grew cunning. ‘Want to take him a little walk yourself, Solly? There’s still two quarter grains in the bottle – you fixed me so I’ll fix you ’n then we’ll be buddies again like we used, helpin’ each other out ’n hustlin’ some mark so fast he can’t figure which one of us hustled him ’n then we get together afters in the back booth by Antek ’n nobody knows what we’re laughin’ about, just you ’n me, the good old buddies again ’cause bygones is bygones. What you say, Solly? A free pop on me? Just to see what it
really
feels like? Then you’ll know, you’ll be more broadminded like.’

‘I got enough worries without that, Frankie.’

‘That’s just the point, buddy.’ His voice began drifting somewhere the other side of the room, the other side of the curtained window, the other side of the street and the other side of the world. ‘There’s so many little worries floatin’ around ’n floatin’ around, why not roll ’em all up into one big worry? Just like goin’ by the loan shark ’n gettin’ enough to pay off all the little debts with one big one? That’s where I’m bein’ smarter than you, it shows I’m gettin’ out of the hole, it’s what you ought to do too so’s we can be buddies again: roll ’em all up into one big one like me, Solly.’

‘I don’t have that many, Frankie.’

Frankie laughed derisively, with a sort of loose contempt for himself and Sparrow and everyone. The only man Sparrow had ever heard laugh like that had been Louie Fomorowski. ‘You got more worries than you think, punk,’ Frankie told him. ‘You got more worries than Dick Tracy. Compared to you I’m little Orphan Annie.’ Cause my little worries ’r almost over but yours ’r just beginnin’.’

His voice returned from the other side of the world to stir the curtain a moment and came right up to Sparrow. ‘Why you think Pig sent
you?
’ Frankie pressed both hands to his temples as if trying to hold his mind onto a single big idea. ‘Get out of here, punk. I had it figured the minute you walked in that door, I just been tryin’ to hold you to see if I was right. Now I don’t care if I’m wrong ’r right no more––’

Sparrow didn’t figure it – he only felt it. He was at the door and the knob was in his hand – it was turned for him from the other side and he had to step back to keep from getting banged by the door, they came in that fast, and he hadn’t even heard a house key in the lock.

Bednar behind Kvorka. Both in citizen dress and their hats on their heads. With nothing in their hands.

Bednar put his back to the door. ‘Get the hypo, Sergeant,’ he told Kvorka.

‘Now you know why Pig sent you?’ Frankie taunted everyone. ‘This time you’re comin’ with me, punk.’

‘’N we hope you’ll stay longer this time than the last,’ Bednar assured Sparrow with one hand in the punk’s narrow belt.

Frankie rose, forever yawning, and studied Kvorka tearing up the bedclothes. ‘Holy Mother, look at that cop go,’ he laughed shrilly. ‘They still payin’ sixteen bucks for turnin’ in a hypo, Cousin? Make the cap split it with you – it’s in the cigar box on the radiator, right there under your nose, it ain’t even dry yet.’

‘On your feet, Dealer,’ Bednar scolded him. ‘We’re takin’ a little ride.’

Some poolroom sharpie lounging in the lobby came to a sitting position when he spotted two hustlers being pulled in by a couple soft-clothes dicks and looked like he wanted to help get them to the station. But Bednar guided his little caravan unobtrusively out the side entrance and into the
panel wagon waiting in the alley and wheeled away without a witness. It wasn’t the sort of pinch to which Bednar wanted a witness.

As the wagon wheeled around the corner newsstand Sparrow heard the amputee, still pushing his papers there, call into him confidentially: ‘Graziano reinstated!’

Someone was always reinstating somebody. And all the way to the station listened to Frankie, still jabbering away, catching at all sorts of ragtags as if the stuff had given him some kind of delayed kick or other. He was going to beat the tubs with a big-time band, he was on his way now to the La Salle Street Station to catch ‘the fastest flier they got there, I ride it lots of times, they call it the Twentieth-Century Note, somethin’ ’r other.’ Then he had just bought out Schwiefka and was adding four tables and a line direct from the track – ‘Now’s your chance to talk payoff,’ he told Bednar and when Cousin Kvorka urged him, ‘Take it easy, Dealer, we’re still for you,’ he answered Cousin quickly: ‘How’d you like to transfer up to Evanston, Cousin? Just say the word.’

He was buying a new Nash, he was getting divorced, he was sending Sophie to ‘Myer brothers,’ and he was getting married as soon as ‘all the dough I got outstandin’ starts comin’ in.’

‘Outstandin’ is right,’ Sparrow put in. ‘Standin’ out in the alley, you mean.’

‘Yeh,’ Frankie agreed strangely, ‘’n then I wonder why I feel so cold the next day.’

Whatever he meant by that, his tongue had ceased to rattle. The rest of the way to the station he diverted himself simply by rapping the bench between his knees with his knuckles and humming idly.

till he sensed just by the way Sparrow sat so stiffly across from him that the punk was freezing with fear.

‘Looks like you’re goin’ to move out of this crummy neighborhood just like you always said you was goin’ to,’ Frankie mocked him.

‘I always try to keep my word, Frankie,’ Sparrow told him miserably.

Zygmunt the Prospector’s full-moon face and Zygmunt the Prospector’s full-moon smile lit up the query room for Frankie Machine without letting its mellow glow waste itself on Sparrow Saltskin. He took Frankie firmly right below the elbow; for a second Frankie fancied the other hand was trying for the pocket.

‘Could you set bond for our friend here tonight, Captain?’ Zygmunt had his hand around Frankie’s shoulder now and Frankie felt himself coasting in at last.

‘I’ll set his bond at a hundred bucks right now,’ Bednar replied before Zygmunt had finished asking. ‘I’ll let the court set bond for the guy who peddled it to him.’

‘Sounds like it was the punk Bednar was really layin’ for,’ Frankie figured foggily. Something was awfully wrong, Bednar sticking it to Solly that hard. Bond in court would be a grand and a half if it were a dime.

‘We’re not interested in anyone but Mr Majcinek,’ Zygmunt informed the captain blandly, clutching furtively at Frankie’s sleeve. Frankie shook his head to clear it.
Whoof
. And just that fast felt someone had winked.

‘Don’t worry about a thing,’ Zygmunt confided in Frankie on their way back to West Division. ‘I signed for you on the super’s orders. He takes care of his kids in the clutch.’