The Man With the Golden Arm (52 page)

‘I’ll tell the precinct captain,’ Cooky Duster assured her, his grave gray eyes never leaving her face for a moment. ‘I’ll tell him you’re moving to another precinct.’

She looked at them both then, with such seeming trust, that something of pity stirred beneath the white-starched hospital jackets. For they saw a child’s face, puffed by some muted suffering she could never tell. The face she had rouged, from
the nurse’s compact, so it was that of a child painted to look like a clown’s.

And the eyes so dark and buttoned so tightly. So pinched by that private, midnight-colored grief.

The doctor nodded to the nurse, saying something Sophie wasn’t supposed to hear at all. So she spoke right up and told them to their faces, ‘You can just tell them the whole business is a dirty lie and everyone has to stop pretending it isn’t right this minute.’ She saw their look of genuine amazement and paused in a quick fear that somehow she had given herself away and would not be going home after all. For both at once urged her to say more, say something more, anything more. She made a slow, weaving motion then with her hand and sang teasingly, just for Cooky Duster to hear: ‘Oh,
Doctor
– you do me
so
much good.’ Then hid herself behind her eyes and grew so rigid, under the nurse’s stroking, that the doctor had to tell the woman to stop.

‘There’s
real
spite for you,’ Sophie heard the nurse decide.

That night, just to show what she thought of them both, Sophie went down the street lined with the picture-postcard trees, pushing herself on the single skate; trying to keep the skater ahead in view all the way to the porch with the leaves strewn along the arc lamp’s broken light.

But there, for the first time, she was left all alone in the dark. It was later than ever before and he had not waited to show her the way back. So dark, so cold, so far to go with leaves rustling so darkly all around. Till the chimes of old St Stephen’s rang once and the wind began blowing the flies away. The lights went on and a voice said right in her ear: ‘What are you thinking of right now, Sophie?’

She drew her knees to her chin and showed the voice what it was like to be dead.

Whenever they peered into the whitewashed room after
that they saw only a gently rocking shadow in a long gray nightgown on the built-in cot, her head in her hands and her knees to her chin with the playing cards scattered and forgotten. Like everything else she had scattered and forgotten, across the cold gray concrete at her feet.

When they gathered the cards off the floor at last and took them away in a neat little box she said in a whisper, for she knew then she had won: ‘The wind is blowing the flies away. God has forgotten us all.’

Nor ever asked again for anything more but a sense of a white-washed stillness about her rising each day higher and more white.

The everlasting walls of Nowhere Land, higher than any hospital wall.

From which is no returning.

The wind had blown the summer flies away. God had forgotten His own.

As soon as he got the shoe off he pried at the naked heel with a razor blade to get at the lead in the flesh. But the blood began again, the wrist went weak as water and he lay back with the blood-smeared paw across his forehead and the naked foot resting upon the crumpled tabloids with the pain beating straight through the morning line to the unclean cover on which he lay. He felt the blood drying on the dated headline under his ankle.

Once he got up, fetched a scrap of soap off the washstand and began rubbing it across the ankle to get the blood off. But the light was too strong and he fell back on the bed with his checkered cap doubled under his head for a pillow, still clutching the sliver of soap in his hand. He wished that somebody would make the light stop swinging or shade it.

A red paper poppy clung to the chicken wire directly overhead and he couldn’t remember tying it there at all.
‘Must of been drunk again last night,’ he decided vaguely. Unless that Peter had tied it there. He must still be drunk, he needed a drink so bad, a drink of anything at all and all the way down. His throat felt like that left foot looked – smeared with something dark, stale and brown. Something that had to be washed off and not a blessed drop for throat, foot, or tongue. ‘Fightin’ again,’ he decided about the blood. ‘Who was I battlin’ this time?’

He sat up suddenly. What was he doing here lying flat on his pratt when there was so much to be done? It was late, it was almost too late, there was just time left to pull back the last open chair and say, ‘Deal me in.’

It was blackjack and the dealer’s eyeshade was pulled down too far over the eyes just as he had always liked to wear the shade himself; while the sucker to whom he dealt wore his own checkered cap. He stood aside and watched them both. He was both sucker and dealer; yet felt he cared nothing for what happened to either. Under the night light’s feral glare a single soiled silver dollar lay stained with his own wet blood.

‘If I win that buck they’ll find out I killed some guy,’ the sucker realized as the dealer flipped him the ace of diamonds. The dealer was laughing behind the eyeshade and around the board many Bednars smiled behind their cards; each holding them before his mouth so that no sucker might guess they were on to the dealer’s game: to stick the sucker with the bad-luck buck that meant one to twenty and maybe life.

‘Don’t take
everything
you can get,’ Molly-O told him ever so softly from just the other side of the wall and the girl knew what she was saying all right because the bad-luck buck lengthened under the light into a glistening new hypo with two full caps beside it. About the board, behind their cards, all those sly fat Bednars smiled: they hadn’t come here to play blackjack at all.

They had come to watch Frankie Machine take the one big fix and someone began pumping his arm to get the slow blood moving. He wakened with the desk clerk tugging at his wrist. ‘What’s wrong in here?’ he wanted to know right away. ‘Where’d you get hurt?’

‘I stepped on a nail is all.’ Frankie grinned weakly through the smear of blood across his cheek. ‘I’m not the kind makes trouble, Doc,’ he pleaded feebly. ‘Can I get a drink of water?’

But there was nobody there any more and he could not tell whether he had really seen or merely imagined the clerk. It made no difference, he had to get up and phone Antek to come and get him. Antek would get here in no time at all to help him downstairs into the car so there wasn’t any use worrying, everything was as good as done, he’d just float on his back a minute to let all the little waves wash him clean. The sun hurt his eyes, he was getting too far out, he could hardly see the beach for the glare. He sat up shaking his head to clear it.

About the bulb a little rainbow-colored halo burned, the bulb swinging a bit in its colored shell as though someone had been in here and set it swinging again while he’d floated off. He mustn’t float off again that way, he had to hold on. Hold on hard and figure out how much time he had. What was it the fellow had asked: ‘How did you get hurt?’ He sat up with sweat ringing his throat, it slid like the beads of a rosary about his neck when he turned his head; and wished to Christ the bulb would stop its endless swinging. It hurt his eyes yet he had to follow its tiny arc. There was something about it he needed to understand and slowly he saw it: framed within that rainbow-colored halo Frantic McGantic looked down with gentle mockery in his eyes.

Sergeant McGantic had come to call and the sergeant brought his own small mercies. The sergeant wasn’t one to
let a good junkie down. Frankie’s eyes went seeking about the room to see what the sergeant had brought him and found it at last. It didn’t make any real difference now that there was no hypo to this fix at all.

It was enough that the sergeant had tossed, across the bedpost and in a reach of a good junkie’s hand, one thin double strand of yellow newspaper twine.

Leaning upon one elbow, there on the bed soiled by sweat and blood, Frankie asked himself aloud, squinting at the brassy glint of the bedpost beneath that swinging bulb, ‘What am I waitin’ for?’ For the roll of the squadrol’s tires? For the ice in the blood to reach the heart? Or for the tread of heavy boots following a flashlight up the stairs?

‘I hope Molly-O stays clear of John after she does her time,’ he made a bit of a prayer for Molly – but there was even less time for praying than for hoping. He got off the bed, favoring the naked left foot, and supported himself against the brass of the bedpost: he felt the chill that years of flophouse nights had trapped in the metal like the chill trapped deep in his own bones. Who was it had told him, ‘That’s the other side of the wall – it’s worse there when it’s still’?

One flight below a Madison Street trolley charged past in a streamlined, cat-howling fury that left him strengthened by an odd excitement. Before the trolley’s scream had died he had the double strand in his hands and his fingers working on it as surely and steadily as if making paper jazzbows for Solly Saltskin out of yesterday’s
Form
.

‘It’s all in the wrist ’n I got the touch,’ he told himself in a surge of ice-cold confidence and far, so far it told him he was still seconds ahead of them all, the siren’s first metallic cry fluttered the shade, whimpering faintly along the chicken wire and then a bit louder till it was a moaning telegraphic code shaking a wavering message across the waves of the
brain – ‘Have a good dream you’re dancin’, Zosh’ – and the words were whirled like leaves in a dead-cold wind blowing up from the other side of the wall. Into one brief strangled whimpering.

To rustle away down the last dark wall of all.

Transcript of the testimony taken and the proceedings had at an inquest held upon the body of the above-named deceased, before WILLIAM HACKETT, a DEPUTY CORONER OF COOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS, and a jury, duly impaneled and sworn, at 199 N. Ashland Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, April 1, 1948. At the hour of 3
P.M.

LORRAINE REPORTING SERVICE

R. Jackson, stenographer.