The Man With the Golden Arm (5 page)

Frankie noticed that John’s hair, thin as it was, had been parted so precisely in the middle it must have taken him ten minutes before the mirror to achieve the part. His comb hand trembled, even as Frankie watched, when reaching for his glass. The girl kept her own glass out of his reach. John’s own had certainly been emptied too often and Frankie heard her pleading, under the rise and fall of the uproar about them, to pick up his hat and come home with her, he had had enough.

Drunkie John never had enough. ‘The nuthouse is the best place for you,’ he began shouting at her for some reason, ‘babies your age ’r hoppin’ up ’n down out there!’ He reached for her glass just as she drew it back, his hand struck hers and sent the whisky trickling down the front of her flowered cotton dress.

‘Have your own way then, have your own way,’ she placated him, not even knowing what way he wished to have next: her days were made up trying to guess what he might want next, a thing John could never tell himself. For he was a man with certain fancies on his mind. Once he’d gotten Molly drunk in here and had decided that what he really wanted to do next was ‘to make the people laugh’ by pinning her dress up to the small of her back. She had staggered blindly about trying to unpin it while the barflies had snickered and she herself had laughed in a loose self-derision.

The next day John would have nothing to do with her, she had made such an exhibition of herself, how could a man like himself ever face his friends again?

John was as unpredictable as the weather in the streets. Sometimes he told her to put on her coat and leave him forever. And the minute she had it on would demand that she strip and get into bed right away, he was going to show her what a bull she had for a man. But once in bed the years of boozing would betray him and he would succeed only in showing her what a freak she had.

A good kicking around was what she had coming then, making a freak of a decent sort like himself. For he never used his hands on her. It was always a businesslike kick with the toe of his outworn dancing pumps, delivered not so much in rage as with a certain matter-of-factness, even a kind of contentment.

‘Don’t say you
won’t,
’ he warned her about something or other now. ‘Don’t
never
say you won’t
nothin
’.’

‘Just drink up,’ Molly pleaded, ‘the people ’r watchin’.’ She was trying to fit the nipple of a little blue balloon into the brown beer bottle beside her glass.

‘What
you
doin’ here anyhow?’ he wanted to know as if only now realizing who she was. Then grinned slyly, bringing his face so close to her own that she drew back a
bit. ‘You gettin’ drunkie too, honey?’ he asked insinuatingly, as if meaning that there was a great deal more between them than just getting drunk together again; and began shaking her by both shoulders in an access of drunken humor. ‘Now you’re a big-time entertainer!’

She protested with strained laughter. ‘Johnny!
Stop
it!’

‘Start singin’ ’n dancin’ ’n somethin’! Makin’ the people laugh! That’s right! Make the people laugh!’ He added reprovingly: ‘I can’t do it
all
myself, honey.’

‘Give that kid somethin’,’ Frankie told Sparrow, ‘I took her to a dance when she was fourteen ’n Soph slapped her face for goin’ around wit’ older men. I was twenty-one, I guess.’ He pushed Sparrow’s change toward Sparrow. ‘Put a dime in the juke ’n give her a dime to sing along with it, she used to be singin’ all the time.’

Sparrow cocked his head to one side, studying Frankie dubiously. ‘Give it to the kid yourself, I don’t interfere in fam’ly situations.’

Frankie rose, handed a dime to Molly, and Drunkie John slapped it out of her hand.

‘
I
pervide fer her,’ he told Frankie. ‘Who sent for
you?’
He really wanted to know. He wanted to know so badly that his head waggled weakly as he asked; and one shove, anyone could see, would send him sprawling. Frankie returned, red in the face from more than whisky, to his own table.

Down in the sawdust Molly saw the dime and studied it while Johnny studied her, waiting for her to make a move for it.

‘Go ahead,’ he encouraged her, ‘you got no more damned pride left than to go pickin’ up dimes off tavern floors – go ahead, the people know about you awready anyhow, what you are. They ain’t forgot the time you danced around here with your fatal ass stickin’ out – go on, let the people see how low a woman can get. It makes a man feel mighty fine, I
can tell you, to watch his girl crawlin’ on her hands ’n knees in a whisky tavern for a dime some cheap cardsharp tosses her. Go ahead, don’t mind
me
, you’re so low now you’re two floors under the basement.’ He was trying to work up his anger like a man pumping a dry well; she touched him with real gentleness.

‘Don’t excite yourself, Johnny.’

With the pointed toe of the dancing pump he kicked at her ankle, skinning the defenseless flesh. She turned and, with no further word, walked toward the door, bending once to rub the ankle as she went.

At the door bald Antek, with a plumber’s plunger in his hand, blocked Drunkie John from following her onto the street. ‘All I ask is you give her a head start,’ he told Johnny. ‘I’d give a dog that much.’

‘You callin’ my Molly a
dawg?’

‘No. I’m just calling you one.’

‘That’s better, that’s all right,’ Johnny assured him, actually gratified. ‘I don’t care what you call
me
. I’m no good. But that girl is a queen, there’s nothin’ she don’t deserve: I just hope I never catch her.’

‘I think what you need is a steady job hustlin’ pins in the bowlin’ alley,’ Antek judged him. ‘All that’s wrong with you is you don’t know what to do with yourself so you take picks on that girl. Why she puts up with you you’ll never make me understand.’ He let John pass to the street at last.

It was true. He was simply a man who didn’t know what to do with himself, for he didn’t yet know who he was. It’s sometimes easier to find a job than to find oneself and John hadn’t yet gotten around to doing the first. How could he know who he was? Some find themselves through joy, some through suffering and some through toil. Johnny had till now tried nothing but whisky. A process which left him feeling like somebody new every day.

There were days when he haunted the bookies without a dime in his pocket but with a pair of street-carnival binoculars, a child’s toy strung by a cord about his throat: a big-time horse player but business had kept him in the city, he’d just dropped in to see how his stable was doing out there at Hawthorne.

Other days he sat at Antek’s with a golf bag containing a single club between his scrawny knees. He had just come from the links, it had been too hot out there, he’d had to quit on the seventh hole.

In his room hung a yellowing photograph, thumbtacked to the wall, of a slack-jawed youth in loose black wrestler’s trunks in the attitude of an advancing wrestler. He had been a wrestler in his youth, he would have the nerve to say while standing under this image, the proof lying in the signature below the picture. The photograph was without doubt of himself; no other could boast of a mouth as loose as the trunks themselves, those billiard-cue arms and that face of an underfed wanderoo.

He was many men and no man at all. He was a hysterical little bundle of possibilities that could never come true. He was a mouth at the end of a whisky glass, a knock-kneed shuffle in dancing pumps. Pumps – ‘for when I used to win them marathons all the time’ – kept with the semblance of a shine by a girl with a heart-shaped face and the wonder gone out of her eyes.

‘She got too big a heart, that girl,’ Antek explained of Molly when John had left. ‘A guy can walk into her heart with army boots on.’

Frankie and Sparrow sat silently a moment after Antek had passed. Until Frankie said at last, ‘There ain’t many hearts like that no more, Sparrow.’

‘Sophie’s gonna be real worried about you, Frankie,’ Sparrow chose the moment to remind the dealer. Frankie
rose and pushed back his chair as though he thought it might somehow be Molly Novotny to whom he was going home tonight.

To the tenants of 1860 West Division Street Landlord Schwabatski was seldom referred to as the landlord. He was Schwabatski the Jailer. Though his only uniform was a pair of faded army fatigues and his only weapon a hammer with which he pretended, from time to time, to repair a loose tread on the stairs. To prove he really was the landlord he had hung a sign above his desk on the second floor:

But both the desk and the sign seemed somehow lopsided. The whole vast frame rooming house, and Schwabatski as well, seemed lopsided. If the desk leaned a bit to one side it only went to show that the Jailer was no more skilled in carpentry than at playing landlord.

He certainly appeared the kind of man more likely to be found behind cell bars than the one turning the key in the lock. Yet he had to be a door-shutter and key-turner for guests who insisted, summer or winter, on leaving doors ajar. It was true that most of the rooms were small and close; but Schwabatski felt it wasn’t always for lack of air that tenants left doors a bit open.

‘Maybe you mean to have only a little air all right,’ he would argue for understanding, ‘but always somebody thinks it’s an invitation and then comes big fight, up and down, and who pays policemens for me then? If you want to make carryings-on, please do in
family
way, door always
closed
.’

‘I s’ppose I have to get dressed ’n go down ’n set on the curb like some bum to get a breath of air,’ some stray
would huff at him. But the strays were forever huffing and the Jailer’s argument never varied.

‘You want to go out, go out. But you’re in, don’t be just
half
in – be
all
in. You ain’t in till door is
close
. A old man like me can’t be run up, down stairs every five minutes, see what goes on. Got work to do.’

Schwabatski had work to do all right. He had a dim-witted, oversized, twenty-one-year-old of a son whose sole and simple pleasure it was to plant paper daisies in the cracks of the dark old stairs. Schwabatski never gave up hope of being able to teach the boy carpentry; so brought him each day, with hammer and pencil and nail, to watch the way in which a broken stair should be repaired.

The old man’s patience was inexhaustible. How many times had that same tread been pulled out and the work begun again because the boy’s attention wandered from the hammer’s tapping to his precious daisies? Yet the boy’s patience surpassed even his father’s. He waited as hopefully for the daisies to take root as the old man hoped for some light to come into Peter’s brain. Poor Peter – he touched each daisy to his heavy underlip before each planting: he prayed for rain to come to the dark stairwell.

There was nothing seriously wrong with the boy’s understanding, the old man felt. It was just that, whenever the boy began to get the idea of the hammer and nails, one of those strays would start some uproar or other and hammer and nails and stair and son would have to be forgotten while he rushed to make peace at his own price before the Saloon Street aces made it at theirs.

Why would anyone want to eat peanuts in the dark with the door exactly two inches ajar? Yet there it was, the door open and swinging a little and a sound of peanuts being crushed and the shells tossed onto a newspaper in the darkened room. He couldn’t tell whether
it was a man or a woman, so he called in a voice good for either:

‘That don’t seem right to me in there! You like peanuts – eat them right. Turn on light. Close door.’

A woman’s voice answered, heavy with drink or sarcasm, ‘You got a house rule says I got to have the light on when I eat peanuts?’

‘I’m an old man, I can’t stay up all night to stop funny business.’

‘Nobody sent for you.’

‘Nobody sent for you, neither, lady.
Keep closed
.’

He would close it and closed it would remain, though he had to lock it himself from the outside and keep the key in his pocket all night.

Hardly a week passed but someone, on one of the floors commanding a view of the street, seeing a pair of aces from the Saloon Street Station making for the entrance, would give the old man joyous warning over the banister: ‘Visitors, Jailer! Company!’

And always it was the new ones who gave the most trouble. The old-timers, like the dealer and his wife, battled, like respectable people should, behind closed doors. Schwabatski’s ears had long ago turned out the sort of roarer that the dealer and his Sophie sometimes put on. To a stranger it would have sounded like one word short of murder; but the Jailer would shuffle past, explaining it to himself: ‘They want to love each other – but they don’t know how.’ And shrug upon his way.

It was the rooms from which no sound came at all, while man and wife were together in there, that caught Schwabatski’s ear. It was from such rooms that real trouble came, the sudden glass-splintering crash, the moment of panting stillness and then the unspeakable flat-level scream of straight terror as the woman stumbled out of the room
with the blood down the side of her face and her particular prize behind her with the broken bottle in his hand.

Schwabatski never worried about the dealer’s yellow door. There Sophie sat, her ash-blond hair in pin curls, one hand on the wheelchair’s arm and her army blanket across her knees, toying aimlessly with a combination flashlight-pencil, pressing the tiny light off and on, on and off. A dog howling down Schwabatski’s shadowed stairs recalled a casual promise made down her memory’s spiraled stairwell.

‘When you gonna get me the dawg you promised?’ she asked as Frankie closed the door carefully behind him. ‘You promised me you was sure gonna bring me a sweet lit-tul dawg. Well, I’m still settin’ ’n waitin’ but I don’t see
no
damned kind of dawg except a jailhouse dawg ’n that’s you.
Why
you always promisin’: “I’m gonna bring you the cutest puppy-pup” –’ n then a beat-out deck ’n a dirty shirt is what you really bring – I suppose you think I don’t even know where you was again?’