‘I’m no good but my wife’s a hundred per cent,’ somebody down the tier confided aloud to everyone in hearing distance.
‘Mine stinks,’ Frankie Machine thought softly; immediately his conscience kicked him in the shin. ‘I got a good one too,’ he answered loudly to make up for everything.
And his conscience kicked him in the other shin for lying.
The night’s first shadows, nudging each other down the corridors, slipped quietly aside to let a paunch draped in a candy-striped shirt and a greasy black mortician’s suit pass by: Zero Schwiefka threw out his big flat feet so that the soles squeaked painfully, like little live things being crunched beneath the full burden of his weight.
He stood before Frankie’s cell rubbing his hands together breathlessly, clear to the elbows, like a great bluebottle fly preening its front legs, then tilting its head and body forward to preen the back ones; the hand-rubbing became an arm-rubbing, his head tilted darkly forward from the dark and twisted lapels till one almost expected him to tilt forward on his palms and start pressing his legs together with the same mechanical insectlike intent.
‘Where you been, cabbagenose?’ Frankie greeted him, sitting up. ‘Gettin’ married?’
‘Who’d marry that?’ Sparrow asked from the cell’s safety – ‘A woomin?’
‘Got here as soon as I could, Dealer,’ Heavy-belly apologized, holding the belly up with the hamlike hands. Between his jowls, loosened by idleness and drink, the bulbous nose overhung a mouth like a half-healed knife wound. ‘You’ll be out in half an hour, Dealer – leave Non Compis here till the dogcatchers go home.’ And spat to show his contempt for Division Street punks.
Sparrow spat in turn. Right into the water bucket where the roach now floated passively. ‘We ain’t eat since last night,’ he accused Schwiefka. ‘How many suppers you eat tonight, Mr Barrymore?’
‘Do they have a charge?’ Frankie interrupted politely.
‘I made ’em put it down a misdemeanor. It’ll be dismissed in the morning. They been holding it open.’
‘I’ll still be open after they let me out,’ Sparrow pointed out, ‘open for anythin’. You got somebody’s legs you want bust, spigothead? T’ree-fifty fer one ’n two fer five – you save a deuce gettin’ ’em both done at once ’n it’s easier on the mark, too. He oney got to go to the hospital once, my way.’
‘When I want to hear from you I’ll holler,’ Schwiefka advised the punk sternly, ‘and when I holler you come in on a shovel.’
Nobody took Solly Saltskin seriously any more.
‘You think I’m gonna sleep in this crum dump tonight again?’ Frankie wanted to know. ‘Get us out tonight if you have to get Zygmunt to do it.’
‘Where you sleep is your own business,’ Schwiefka reproached him mildly. ‘What I said was you’re gettin’ out in half a hour ’n the super hisself couldn’t put the fix in faster. The case’ll be dismissed by noon whether you’re in court or not. Depend on Big Zero.’
‘The oney place you’re big is in the belly, bakebrain,’ Sparrow told him from behind Frankie, ‘you’re the guy put his mother on a meathook for a quarter one time, I heard all about it from your old man, he was sore you wouldn’t split wit’ him.’
‘If your old man hadn’t been out of work you’d never been born,’ Schwiefka told him, and lit a cigarette for Frankie, through the bars, with a silver lighter.
‘Don’t worry, Sparrow,’ Frankie spoke assuringly, ‘we can depend on Zero – he’ll get us out if it takes ten years.’
‘I don’t even ask how come you’re in,’ Schwiefka complained, ‘I just come to spring you – what’s the big squawk?’
‘You know all right why we’re in, that’s the big squawk,’ Frankie let Schwiefka know. ‘Every time you duck Kvorka for his double sawzie he cruises down Division till he spots me or the punk ’n pulls us in on general principles. This time he caught us together. The next time it happens you’re payin’ me off ’n the punk too.’
‘Next time they’ll hang me,’ Sparrow put in moodily.
‘We’re layin’ low a couple days,’ Schwiefka evaded the accusation, ‘till I get the tables moved back to the alley joint. We ought to get a loose crowd up there Saturday night. What time you be around?’
‘Not early enough to move no tables, that’s a lead-pipe cinch,’ and turned away.
Schwiefka was long used to the turned back. He had brought news of salvation to men before. Frankie listened to the retreating shuffle of those big flat feet in the oncoming gloom, testing each iron step of the stairwell as if each might be the last iron step of all.
‘We won’t have to see the old toad for a couple days, anyhow,’ Frankie sighed.
‘You told him off just right, Dealer,’ Sparrow assured him. ‘He took off like a scalded dog. I guess you scared him, Frankie.’
‘Ain’t nobody scared of me my whole life,’ Frankie conceded regretfully.
‘Them Krauts was scared of you, Frankie,’ Sparrow reminded him in his rasping whisper, ‘you were a big man in the army.’
‘I was a big man awright – I was the guy had to pick the fly crap out of the pepper with boxin’ gloves,’ Frankie mocked himself.
‘’N that Nifty Louie been scared of you, too, ever since you caught him that time, tryin’ to sell Soph them funny kind of cigarettes.’
‘Funny cigarettes ain’t all that one pushes, it ain’t no big secret,’ Frankie observed and thought bitterly: ‘If I didn’t need a fix now ’n then I wouldn’t even let that creeper take a hand at the table I’m dealin’.’
‘How’d you catch him that time, Frankie?’ Like a child asking for some familiar bedtime tale.
‘It wasn’t him. It was Piggy-O. He wasn’t sellin’ ’n I didn’t catch him.’ There was an old defeat in Frankie’s voice now. ‘I just smelled ’em ’n asked her ’n she told me, “Piggy give me four sticks,” that’s all. So I told him to lay off her.’ Adding to himself: ‘One customer in the family is all we can afford.’
‘Tell you what’s funny, Frankie,’ Sparrow promised, ‘Louie bein’ scared of you, Zero bein’ so scared of Louie, ’n you bein’ scared of me – how come a little guy like me runs all you cheap hoods around, Frankie? How come a little guy like me bein’ such a little vterrer?’
‘Just because you’re so strong, I guess,’ Frankie conceded absently, his mind still occupied with Louie and Louie’s many moods.
He’d been in short pants in the days when Louie Fomorowski was beating two murder raps. They’d gotten a one-to-life jacket on him for the second one, of which he’d served nine months in privileged circumstances.
Yet now Nifty Louie was pushing a heavily cut grade of morphine and having his own troubles pushing it. Where he got it only the blind bummy called Pig, who peddled it for him, might have guessed. Pig never cared to guess. ‘How could I tell where the stuff comes from when I can’t even see where it goes?’ he’d put it to Frankie. ‘It’s why I’m the peddler,’ cause I can’t see what the people ’r doin’.’
‘I never asked you where the stuff comes from,’ Frankie reminded him, ‘but I’ll tell you one place where it ain’t goin’, ’n that’s upstairs where I live. I’m kickin’ the stuff altogether this week end, I don’t want you hustlin’ Soph onto no kick like that. I can’t afford.’
Blind Pig always agreed. ‘I never come around with the stuff till you send to Louie for me to come, Dealer,’ he pointed out. ‘If you’re kickin’ it I wish you luck. I hope you go from monkey to zero ’n never get hooked again.’
Both Blind Pig and Louie knew there was no harm in wishing any man luck. They called those using the stuff only occasionally ‘joy-poppers’ and wished them all great joy. For the joy-poppers had no intention of becoming addicts in the true sense. They had the will power, they felt, to use God’s medicine once or twice a month and forget it the rest of the time.
Nor did Louie acknowledge that a student had ceased to be a joy-popper because he had reached a once-a-week comp
romise with his need. Once a week wasn’t being hooked in Fomorowski’s book. On a quarter grain a week a man was still just a student. It wasn’t till a man needed a quarter of a grain a day that Louie felt the fellow was safely in the vise. ‘You’re not a student any more,’ he would offer his felicitations. ‘You just graduated. Junkie – you’re hooked.’
‘C’mon’ – Frankie roused Sparrow – ‘hearts for noses,’ and they squatted together over the battered deck. Sparrow always played with some trepidation. For the winner was privileged to slap the loser across the nose with five of the cards ten times and Sparrow always lost. He would take his punishment then almost – but never quite – without flinching, trying very hard not to let the tears come into his eyes at the swift sting of the cards. For it always seemed a punishment, the way Frankie would slap him then, for something unspoken which Frankie held against him secretly.
So he stalled, knowing the turnkey was due with the keys, yet owed Frankie two games – twenty slaps – before the pokey appeared at last.
‘Up in there!’
‘I’ll collect sometime when you got it comin’ ’n I got more time,’ Frankie assured the punk as they reached for their caps. And Sparrow knew that, for no real reason he could name, Frankie had the right to collect, game or no game: that the game was really only an excuse to exact some ancestral tribute he owed the dealer.
At the open door Frankie remembered something. He grinned wryly with his flat pug’s mug under the tawny tousle of his hair and went to the water bucket. ‘I promised to give him a hand when I got out of the bucket myself,’ he explained softly, eying the roach while the turnkey eyed him with deadpan suspicion. ‘Only look – it’s too late awready.’
It was too late all right. Too late for roaches or old Skid Row rumdums; it was even getting a little late for cripples and junkies and punks too long on the same old hustle. The water-soaked corpse was only half afloat, the head submerged and the rear end pointing to the ceiling like a sinking sub when the perpetual waters pull it downward and down forever. ‘I could have saved him,’ Frankie realized with a faint remorse. ‘It’s all my fault again.’
‘Guys like you,’ the turnkey warned him, ‘I handle them every day,’ and watched the pair mounting the narrow steps toward a narrower freedom. On the street they waited for a northbound car.
A car that came on slowly, but not too slowly for Frankie Machine. If it would just sort of keep on coming forever, like streetcars sometimes did for him in dreams, without ever really arriving, he wouldn’t have to go anywhere any more. The dealer didn’t want to go home. Sophie did all the dealing there.
‘Mama, deal yourself another hand,’ he hummed idly, deciding to himself, ‘If she starts that screaming about What was it for this time Why don’t I get a broom in my tail ’n go to work on the legit Why don’t we move out of the neighborhood the spades are moving in it’s gettin’ smokier every day ’n if it wasn’t for me she wouldn’t be strapped to no wheelchair when she could be out dancin’ – Come on upstairs with me,’ he asked Sparrow, out of need of a barrier between himself and Sophie’s crossfire.
Sparrow shook his head. He’d been trapped in that barrage before. She gave it to him first and hottest because she got so few chances at him. ‘I got to look for a job,’ he explained. Frankie understood.
Just as the street lamps came on the streetcar paused and went dark half a block down. It had slipped its trolley and against the last light of evening the pole groped blindly for the wire overhead, found it at last and came on again, slowly, but with all self-confidence gone; yet bearing its precious load of light caught from that magic wire with a sort of tenderness. And screeched to a stop like Sophie’s opening volley.
Frankie boarded it feeling done up and Sparrow followed whispering hoarsely: ‘You want to bet on the transfer numbers?’ Trolley transfers had a serial number on the lower right-hand corner that could be bet on like a stud-poker hand, the loser paying both fares. It was the one game which the punk won more often than he lost against Frankie.
But Frankie held his transfer listlessly, unaware that he held it at all. Sparrow slipped it out of his hand.
‘Beat you again, Frankie, I got two pair. You owe me eight centses.’
‘You owe me twenty slapses.’
‘Call it square, Frankie?’ He held onto Frankie’s transfer.
‘All square.’
Both had won.
Yet, all the way home, Sparrow had the restless feeling that someone must have lost.
‘I’ll buy you a drink by Antek,’ Sparrow offered suddenly when they reached Milwaukee Avenue and Division Street.
They entered Antek Witwicki’s Tug & Maul Bar together. At the corner table the little terrier called Drunkie John was scolding Molly Novotny, a girl scarcely out of her teens who supported both herself and John hustling drinks at the Club Safari in the early morning hours. A small girl with a heart-shaped face and eyes dark with exhaustion, she sat listening to John, a man close to forty, with a sort of dull hopelessness. Each evening she had to listen here, while paying for the drinks, to all the things she had done wrong since morning. She herself sat without drinking and without once moving her eyes off his bitter mouth as if fearing to miss a single word.
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.
The Man with the Golden Arm Page 4