The Man With the Golden Arm (49 page)

He squinted out across the littered Negro yard next door, where February’s first touch of thaw was glinting along the rubbled earth. A wheelless, one-fendered chassis of something
that might once have been a Chalmers or an Overland stood there with little puddles along its single fender. How many wheelless, one-fendered years it had rusted there no neighbor could have told.

‘I come in contack with that certain guy.’

He’d lost so much weight off his shoulders, face and forearms since that night, albeit his bit of a beer paunch had clung nicely to him through it all, that she really couldn’t imagine him knocking a fullgrown man down unless he were armed with a couple house bricks.

‘I slugged him.’ The toughness was still in the grin if not in the biceps, the arms making a loose, outswinging gesture which she took to mean he’d first tried shoving that certain guy off. ‘Then his neck made a sort of dead sound ’n I knew that was it.’

‘His mouth, you mean.’

‘No. His neck.’ Now the grin came one-sided, both tough and weak, like that of a fighter who knows he’s beat trying to convince everyone he can take still more. He lifted the thin wrists toward her as naïvely as a child. ‘Wit’ these.’ He locked the fingers till the knuckles cracked and the fingers reddened faintly at the tips. ‘It’s all in the wrists,’ he told her thinly, ‘I used to have the touch.’

She ran her hands over the locked fingers curiously, trying to feel what power had been in them that was there no more, then parting the fingers slowly; as though they had been manacled too long to open of themselves. They dropped onto his lap of their own weight and the very hopelessness of the way he’d let them fall reached at her heart. To put strength back into those fingers and the light back into those eyes was what Molly Novotny wanted and there was a gladness in her just at having such a chance.

‘When you feel useless you don’t think nothin’ of throwin’ yourself away,’ she’d once told him. ‘One way is as good as
another.’ She didn’t feel like throwing herself away any more, for she couldn’t do that and still be of use to Frankie Machine. ‘I never did somethin’ real good like this for anybody,’ she realized quietly, standing behind his chair with her hands on his shoulders, as he had too often stood behind Sophie. ‘Nobody give me the chance.’

He shut his eyes and put his head back and she held his face cupped in her palms a long time. At night he ground his teeth and jumped wide awake, jerking with fear, if she touched him.

One night he’d shaken her roughly. ‘Where’s the punk?’ he’d demanded.

‘In jail,’ she’d told him quickly.

‘Poor punk,’ he’d told her and lay back with his lips still moving in sleep.

Had they let the punk out on bond or had they put the hammers to him? Sleeping or waking, he was troubled not to know. ‘How can I know where
I’m
at when I don’t know where he’s at?’ he wanted to know of Molly-O.

‘You’ll never know where you’re at till you kick that habit – Jack the Rabbit,’ she teased him: it was a kinder nickname than his own of ‘Frantic McGantic.’

They could afford a thin little jest or two about the habit. It had been three full weeks since he’d been sick – she’d never want to see anyone that sick again all her life. She’d pulled him out of his last tailspin with nothing more than codeine.

He wouldn’t let her think for a minute that he’d kicked a thing. ‘I kicked it once,’ he told her, ‘’n nobody kicks it twice. You get off that hook once you’re the luckiest junkie in Junkietown – but nobody gets that lucky twice. You get hung up again you’re on the hook to stay. Jesus Christ hisself couldn’t come down off
that
cross.’

‘Why’d you get back on the stuff, Frankie?’ He irritated her at the way he still drove the nails into his palms.

‘The troubles started pilin’ up on me the day I got back in that room with Zosh,’ he remembered. ‘I didn’t know how to get out from under ’n the more they piled up the more it felt like it was all my fault, right from the beginning, when me ’n Zosh was little stubs together ’n I made her do the things she wouldn’t of done with nobody else. Whatever happened to me, it seemed like, was just somethin’ I had comin’ for a long time, I don’t know why. It’s why I rolled up all the little troubles into one big trouble.’

‘If you kicked it once you can kick it again,’ Molly decided firmly; it was in her nature to hope for others against all reason and against all odds. ‘God has more than He has spent,’ she liked to quote an old proverb; out of a ragbag of many old proverbs.

So all she’d do for him, when the cold sweats came, was to get him the codeine that kept the sickness down for an hour or two. It eased him a bit toward sleep if she sat beside him and eased him too.

But codeine had no drive, no tingle. ‘The stuff don’t
hit
,’ he complained like a child.

‘It ain’t supposed to, fool,’ she reminded him. ‘That’s the point. We can’t afford no more tingles ’n drives.’

There were days when he needed and wanted to bathe, yet couldn’t stand the idea of water touching his skin. It was one of those mysteries of the ever-changeful blood. He would sit saying wanly, ‘I’d like to take a bath, Molly-O – but I couldn’t stand the touch.’ Then he would get up to straighten a skirt or a jacket hanging crookedly on the back of a chair: ‘I can’t stand things to hang crooked.’ A drawer left open a minute troubled him till it was shut. A light bulb left swinging touched panic in him till it was stopped.

At night she walked him around the block as if she were walking a dog, staying close to him for fear he’d try to duck her and score somewhere for morphine. For she knew he
wasn’t telling her how really badly he was needing it; it troubled her that, after all this time, she had not yet gained his trust. She had to lock him in, when she left for the club, with his codeine, his deck and a couple dated copies of
Downbeat
.

She hadn’t let him come near the club since that first night, for the police knew the place too well. The law was always seeking someone beneath the sign of the neon cat.

One night she brought him home a practice board she’d bought off one of the drummers, more battered even than his old one had been. The next morning he wakened her early, tapping lightly on it. All that day he kept hard at it with the radio murmuring the beat beside him; and no lush at all, not even a glass of beer. He didn’t even go for the codeine.

When she returned that midnight he looked happier than she’d seen him since the long-ago time when he’d taken her to the dance at St Wenceslaus. ‘You look like it’s going good, Dealer.’

‘Call me “Drummer,”’ he asked her, ‘’cause I’ll never deal another hand. I’m really gettin’ the swing of these sticks now.’ He turned the radio on to a program of dance recordings and followed the record all the way without missing a beat. Just to show her.

Yet hadn’t told her the best thing about it: that he had used both hands all day and the right had been as steady as the left. All day.

‘Once you got the touch it never leaves you,’ he boasted to her like a boy.

He passed the first week of March between the practice board and the bed. He would simply go at the board till he was too tired to work longer and would fall into the sack and sleep, only to return to the board on waking. On the first sunny day of that month he made up his mind. ‘I got to get out ’n get a drummin’ job,’ he declared, ‘this practicin’ thing
is goin’ on long enough. If things ain’t blowed over now they never will.’

‘There ain’t a safe job for you in this town, Drummer.’

‘I’ll drive a cab then. Hack all day ’n get a drum job nights.’

‘They’ll print you the first day ’n fire you the second ’n here comes the man on the third.’ She crossed her wrists to indicate the man from the law.

‘I’ll hustle freight by Kinzie Street.’

‘They’ll print you.’

‘I’ll drive a truck. I’ll go to work in a factory. I’ll get a mill job in Gary.’

‘They’ll print you.’

‘We’ll case out of town then.’

‘We can’t blow town on nothin’, Frankie.’

She never mentioned Drunkie John.

Yet, when she tried telling him she’d lost ten dollars of her pay playing twenty-six, he asked her simply: ‘You mean John is cuttin’ in again?’

‘He wants me to come back to him.’

‘Why lie?’ Frankie wanted to know. ‘You know as well as I do John don’t want you or any woman. You’re payin’ him ’cause he’s found out I’m sleepin’ here ’n he’s promised to button up. Why not just say it straight, Molly-O?’

‘I didn’t see what good makin’ things worse for you’d do,’ she confessed miserably. ‘Just when you’re startin’ to get back on your feet, lookin’ like you used to look the night we went dancin’.’ Suddenly she dropped the past and all its broken promises. ‘I’m afraid
not
to give him the money, Frankie.’

‘What good is any lush’s promise?’ he asked her. He was lying stretched out on the army cot and she sat on its edge with her hand holding the hair back out of his eyes. ‘You can’t keep payin’ him off all your life, Molly-O.’

‘I got to cut your hair tonight,’ she told him, and put a
finger to his lips. ‘I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t waitin’ for me when I come back at night.’

‘You’d be back on the lush yourself,’ he told her truthfully. And saw how the past months had tired her. She was twenty-four and looked thirty, with a sort of unsatisfied compassion in her eyes he had never seen before. It made him want to fathom the dark well of her love. ‘What makes you take care of a no-good guy like me, Molly-O?’ was the only way he had of putting it.

She laughed a pleased little laugh, shrugged and told him, ‘I don’t know, Frankie. Some cats just swing like that.’

But her face looked careworn.

A short, cold spring. By morning a musk-colored murmuring drifted down from all the flats above and the amber afternoons passed with music-making: a snatch of rhythm by the door, shouts from porch to porch and laughter rocking down the stairs. Till all the weekday morning murmurs, all the back-porch calls and all the laughter on the stairs mounted to a single Saturday night shout, when the whole house shook with Negro roistering. To the din above his head Frankie would tap away on his practice board though hardly able to hear the radio’s beat for the slap and slam, the shambling and the clattering of heavy feet, right overhead all night long.

He slept on the army cot and Molly on a couch which served, by day, as his orchestra pit. On nights when his single blanket wasn’t enough to keep him warm she took him beside her on the couch and kept him warm till morning.

A listless sort of light seeped in, toward noon ice would be melting down the windows. He kept the little fuel-oil stove going most of the day but shut it off, for economy’s sake, as soon as the nights began growing a bit less cold. At noon they used it for heating coffee or a can of soup or beans. The only sink was out in the hall, it was there she washed
the plates and forks; she felt it unsafe for him to be seen in the hall. Sometimes one of the Negro women came out of her own private cavern with a couple cracked plates and a handful of tarnished silver to say ‘Good morning, ma’am,’ and share the sink. Molly kept such conversations down to the barest formalities.

As his restlessness grew he took to sneaking out for round-the-block walks while she slept. When she wakened she would see the mud on his shoes and would realize he couldn’t be pent up much longer. Once, when he returned smelling like a brewery, she became the outraged mother, locked him in and wouldn’t take him for their evening walk between shows by way of punishment. ‘Remember that the first time you’re picked up for drunk ’n disorderly you’re on your way to where you won’t come back,’ she scolded him. ‘Why
do
you take such chances, hon?’ His face lighted up with that half-malicious little grin. ‘Some cats just swing like that, Molly-O.’

He knew. He knew, yet each day wandered nearer the haunts of home. He had to get to someone who knew the score on the punk before he could make another move. He had to get it off his mind and thought of walking straight up Schwabatski’s steps and asking for Vi.

On the first warm day of March, while Molly was washing dishes in the common sink, he took off without a word, but she saw him leaving and called to him.

‘I’m just gonna look around, the places where the people are,’ he reported over his shoulder.

‘When you get enough of them on your tail run the other way,’ she offered her final warning.

On Damen and Division he spotted Meter Reader, empty-eyed and empty-handed, and ducked him; he didn’t want to hear how proud Meter Reader was of his boys. Instead he slipped around to Antek the Owner’s side door and waited
just inside the door till Antek motioned him toward the back room and followed Frankie there. Antek’s short-haired wife nodded to Frankie sullenly and went up to take care of the bar while Antek filled two shot glasses and drank off his own before looking straight at Frankie.

‘You’re hotter than ever, Dealer,’ Antek told him at last, ‘you won’t cool off till after the elections. They got out another handbill about “Alderman’s Sluggers Go Free in Strongarm Murder,” somethin’ like that. What I know is the super is gonna lose his job if Record Head don’t clear the books on Louie. They’re pertendin’ now that somebody got paid off to slug Louie ’n you’re the guy Bednar needs to clear hisself.’

‘Skip the politics, Owner,’ Frankie cut him short. ‘What’s the score on the punk?’

‘It’s the punk who’s in the crack, Dealer. That’s for sure. Bednar got him thinkin’ he can beat the rap if he plays along. He’s had two continuances ’n he’s out stealin’ everythin’ in sight to pay off the lawyers. They don’t want him in a jacket till after he’s fingered you, so the aces got him out stealin’ everythin’ layin’ loose, they know what’s layin’ loose ’n it’s up to him to snatch it ’n turn it over. Every time he tries to holler about somethin’ they got lined up for him, they got to go through it all over again for him, how one more conviction adds up to life ’n no parole –’ n all the time they’re gettin’ so much on him he
can’t
say no. They got enough on him now to hang him – but what’s the punk gonna do? Either he goes along or he’s gone for keeps.’