All night, each night, waiting for Frankie in dry weather or wet, whether the moon held to the farther crosslights or to the near-at-hand signal tower, the vigil lights burned faithfully to guard a night gone false. They seemed so right, so dependable and true, in a world gone wrong, all wrong. It made her want to cry out for everyone locked in some tenement’s pit on any long and littered street.
Till darkness brought her sleep on a weary handcar, switching her onto a nowhere train that curved and descended, softly and endlessly, out upon the vast roundhouse of old El dreams.
She was a girl again sitting on Frankie’s doorstep watching the sluggish late-summer flies settling heavily against the screens. The last leaves of some sultry September hung stiffly, like leaves pressed between the pages of an old catechism. Along the arc-lit parks and playgrounds the trees were still as shadows of trees down some picture-postcard street.
She had come to borrow his roller skates and he was telling her, ‘You can only have one and you have to do what I do.’ Then rolling away on his single skate down the darkening boulevard the old terror that he was going away forever shook her and she had to follow – he was so far ahead, the night was so dark, the trees stood so stiffly and so tall while the arc lamps watched too steadily – yet somehow with light about him so that she could see every turn he made and did each one exactly as he’d said she must all the way up to that old leaf-covered porch of which he’d taught her to be afraid because no one lived there any more. She was careful to go through the broken latticework left leg first as he had done and down into the dangerous hide-out lit only by a single broken ray from the arc lamp’s eye across a leaf-strewn darkness where other lovers had lain. Here, where the earth held like a pang the odor of dry leaves, night dew, and faintly the scent of sometime lovers’ sweat, he had said, ‘Lie down, Zosh.’
The yellow arc lamp’s single eye found them out. To watch unwinking while the bells of Old St Stephen’s rang out a warning right overhead, shaking the picture-postcard trees till the brittle leaves fell stiffly down and flies fell off lattice, window and screen.
She wakened in the chair to hear the last echo of St Stephen’s fading across this present midnight’s dreaming roofs. And her whole life, from her careless girlhood until this crippled night, seemed caught within that fading chime. For now, as though no time had passed but the time it had taken to dream it, the leaves were stiff with age again, sultry September had come and gone and the wind was blowing the flies away.
‘God has forgotten us all,’ Sophie told herself quietly.
For the rain would come straight down forever and nothing would ever change at all. Save the picture on the calendar. And a long nerve in each thigh.
The mousetrap in the closet clicked. She felt it close as if it had shut within herself, hard and fast forever. Heard the tiny caught thing struggling, slowly tiring, and at last become still.
The wind was blowing the flies away. God was forgetting His own.
A single wire was strung tautly across the room, bearing a wooden marker for remembrance of a time when the place had been a poolroom. Beneath it a circle of red leather and chrome chairs, a splash of yellow ties and sallow faces wavered about a horseshoe-shaped table.
The evening’s first cigar smoke moved below the single light like the opening shot of battle upon a long green meadowland. All the day’s horses had made money or run out hours ago; there was nothing left on the wall, where they had drummed up the dust of Bowie and Tanforan, but tomorrow’s possibilities:
TRACK: Fast. Heavy. Muddy.
The dealer placed a new deck in front of Schwiefka for cutting and, while Schwiefka cut, took time to wind his PX wrist watch carefully; as if setting it to keep time, this whole long night to come, to the players’ troubled hearts.
No confedence games aloud
a red legend warned everyone above the dealer’s head. Strung from that same taut wire that held the poolroom marker, it would waver a bit and darken as the smoke grew heavier. On the other side of the marker hung a meaningless little green invitation as dated as last year’s calendar:
SHORT CARDS
60c per hour
No one had played short cards here since Pearl Harbor. Schwiefka, and Schwiefka’s shills, killed the hours before the suckers’ hours with call-rummy and no-peek between themselves while listening to each other’s boasts and complaints.
‘I went to five taverns ’n a guy bought me a drink in every one,’ Sparrow reported with real pride.
‘The same guy?’ Frankie asked, riffling the deck.
‘Differ’nt guys,’ Sparrow explained indulgently. ‘Now I ain’t even got for a bottle wine -’ n you sayin’ I ain’t really broke.’
‘You’re always broke,’ Nifty Louie observed, ‘I think when you were born your old man was out of work.’
‘If yours’d ever had a steady job you never would of been borned at all,’ Sparrow retorted.
‘Trouble with both you guys is you spend your dough on foolish things,’ Frankie counseled them both in all seriousness and Louie, who had followed Frankie in tonight, asked too casually, ‘What you spend yours on, Dealer?’
Frankie dealt around for reply, skipping Sparrow, who professed to be too broke to play. When Drunkie John came up with an unlabeled half pint off the hip and offered it to the punk for consolation, Sparrow eyed it sadly and mourned, ‘Boy oh boy, the bottle wit’out a name.’ In a tone so melancholy it sounded like, ‘Boy oh boy, the Christ wit’out a cross.’ Drank without pleasure, handed it back to Drunkie John and sat back unhappily. ‘Borrow me a dirty sawbuck, I wanna play too,’ he asked the players on either side of him, twice each.
Each time each answered, looking straight ahead at the dealer’s eyeshade, ‘Never play against my own money.’
‘Then borrow me a dirty deuce.’
Sparrow was always careful to identify any money he was able to borrow as dirty, suspecting that he thus reduced the obligation slightly. It troubled him to see the cards going around, skipping only himself. Yet he didn’t like to ask money of Frankie, it seemed like Frankie never had a dime any more. And looked so pale, so pale.
‘Let me deal,’ he begged Frankie, ‘let me relieve you two bucks wort’ – go pertend you got a date wit’ a movie actress ’n don’t come back till the marks start knockin’.’
The dealer made no reply and didn’t look as though he cared one way or another. If Schwiefka wanted to let the punk fool around for half an hour it was all right with Frankie.
But Schwiefka paid no heed and Sparrow waited miserably.
‘Well, should I start washin’ my hands to get ready?’ he wanted to know after a minute.
‘Yeh,’ Schweifka deigned to answer at last. ‘’N wash yer face too.’
‘Let him deal,’ Nifty Louie urged, ‘he can’t steal no more than Machine.’
Nifty Louie’s roll carried weight with Schwiefka. He shrugged uncertainly. Sparrow nudged Frankie out of the slot and the players tossed in a nickel ante each.
‘Look at the Jewish deal,’ Louie marveled, for the punk dealt lefthanded.
Sparrow dealt swiftly, sometimes with the right hand and sometimes with the left, sometimes beginning with the player to his right and the next time to his left, it was all one to Sparrow. But all the while watching that pot like a mangy chicken hawk. There was four dollars and twenty cents in it for the winner – the player he’d just asked for the loan of a two-spot. The punk knew when he had a good thing. He shoved seventy-five cents of the four-twenty to the winner, put a single lonely dime in the big green bag and got the rest in his own shirt pocket all in a single scoop of those ragged little claws.
The winner looked down in cold horror: he’d spent over two dollars to win a four-dollar pot and had six bits of it in front of him. ‘Back off if you don’t like how we deal here,’ Sparrow anticipated his protest. ‘Should I deal you out?’
The others cheered wildly, they hadn’t lost a dime on the deal. ‘Ataboy, Sparrow, you�
�re in the driver’s seat now.’
They didn’t cheer for long. The next pot held three dollars, of which the dealer got a dollar-forty for his trouble, the house earned thirty cents and the winner the crumbs.
Oddly, there weren’t many players for the next hand. Only forty-five cents lay in the kitty and Sparrow got two bits of that before Schwiefka had him by the neck. Before the punk could squawk so much as once he was sitting on the other side of the table right where he’d started. Only this time with nearly five dollars before him and there wouldn’t be any getting him out of the game till it was gone.
‘I’m supposed to be dead in 1921,’ Louie began confiding in Drunkie John. ‘Here it is almost ’47 ’n I’m still pumpin’ water.’
Louie could never quite get over his feat of having pumped water so long. ‘The guys who were lookin’ for me in the old days ’r gone: dead ’r drunk ’r dyin’. Them was the ones rubbed garlic on the shells – I’m suppose to have a garlic slug in my head twenny-six years ’n all I got was a toenail yanked off with a red-hot pintsers.’ Under the light, perspiration had dried the violet talc into the corners of his lips and the lips barely moved when he spoke. ‘Doin’ time ’r lushin’, dead ’r drunk ’r dyin’.’
‘I remember Frank the Enforcer,’ Drunkie John boasted, showing his blackened teeth, ‘he was the kind who’d blow half a hundred over the bar but wouldn’t spend for a pack cigarettes. He’d smoke yours.’ And drank. From the bottle without a name. ‘Them was the good old days, when a guy got thirteen years for a misdemeanor. When you done somethin’ then you paid for it,’ he mourned. ‘It ain’t like now. It’s too cheap now.’ The marks of debauchery were seamed across his face like a chronic disease.
The only one here who seemed to have no memories of torture, murder and grand larceny was Umbrella Man, who walked about the streets smiling gently, day after day, tinkling an old-fashioned school bell and bearing a battered umbrella strapped to his back. He could not look on violence without panic, so it was always told of him with surprise: ‘That fool with the umbrellas – you know who he is? He’s the brother by the smartest cop on the street. You know Cousin Kvorka, the captain’s man? He’s everybody’s cousin – for a double saw that is. He’s over there shakin’ down the greenhorns ’n the biggest greener on his beat is his own brother. The mutt is suppose to fix umbrellas but he ain’t gonna fix mine. He don’t act like he could heat water for a scab barber.’
Beside Umbrellas, the one called Meter Reader had once played sandlot baseball and now coached his employers’ team, the Endless Belt & Leather Invincibles, an aggregation that hadn’t won a game since Meter Reader had taken it over.
‘Next time you come up here after raidin’ the five-’n-ten I’m gonna turn you in to Record Head myself,’ Louie warned Sparrow just to start the evening rolling.
‘The day you turn him in I’ll have you deported,’ Frankie put in quietly. ‘The dealer has got hold of hisself real fine,’ Louie thought just as softly.
‘You can’t do that to him, Frankie,’ the punk objected, ‘he ain’t got a country.’
Yet no one had to be a Pinkerton to tell that Sparrow had been raiding the five-and-ten again. He was wearing half a dozen red-white-and-blue mechanical pencils, each containing a tiny battery and having a tiny bulb at the point commonly occupied by an eraser. He had seen the one Sophie toyed with and had decided he needed a handful of them himself.
‘What the hell good is a pencil with a flashlight on it?’ Louie wanted to know. As Frankie’s grip on himself tightened Louie felt increasingly restless.
‘They’re good for writin’ in blackouts, brother,’ the punk explained.
‘You hit him from this side, I’ll hit him from this,’ Louie exclaimed in disgust at Sparrow’s argument. ‘The war’s over -’ n don’t call me “brother.”’
‘Still, they’re good on dark nights to save ’lectricity,’ Sparrow persisted. ‘You could write all night ’n it’s easier on the eyes too.’
Louie rolled a quarter toward the punk, received one of the pencils and warned him, ‘You got to replace the battery when it burns out, for free.’
‘For a quarter?’ Sparrow was indignant. ‘Don’t you figure I got labor costs? Replacements is free just wit’ the fifty-cent deal. You want another one ’n get free batt’ries the rest of yer life?’
‘When the battery wears out you’ll replace it – or eat the pencil,’ he advised Sparrow matter-of-factly.
‘How can I refill it if the five-’n-dime puts somethin’ else on the batt’ry counter?’ Sparrow pleaded.
‘Don’t ask me how to run your business. This thing is guaranteed for life so far as I’m concerned.’
‘Here’s yer two bits back,’ Sparrow offered to return the coin.
‘Keep your money, Solly,’ Frankie suggested, ‘if that battery lasts three days it’ll prob’ly outlive Louie.’ As though secretly convinced of Frankie’s prophecy, Louie reached anxiously for the coin as if for his very own life being held, just out of reach, in a stranger’s hand. Sparrow thrust it deep into is watch pocket. ‘I just realized how right Dealer could be,’ he told Louie, and saw the pallor of Louie’s flesh under the violet talc. ‘You look like if the batt’ry lasts the night it’s a lifetime guarantee in yer case.’
‘I’ll die like Machine deals,’ Louie conceded, abandoning the argument in a surge of weariness – ‘fast.’
‘It’s how you’ve lived,’ Schwiefka told him.
‘It’s how we’ve all lived,’ Drunkie John reminded them all, speaking as if it were over and done with for everyone. Everyone’s chickens would be coming home to roost soon enough, John felt.
Sparrow, studying Louie’s ravaged face in the greenish light, suddenly relented. ‘I’ll refill it any time it goes dead, even if I have to sneak in the warehouse to do it.’
‘You keep hangin’ around that warehouse after dark you’ll end up on a slab before he will,’ Frankie put in nervously. But Sparrow shook off the warning.
‘I’m a businessman,’ the punk explained with dignity. ‘I fulfill my obligations even if I have to rob a warehouse to do it. You think I want my credit to lapse? That’s the difference between a businessman like me ’n a cheap hustler like you – you hustlers got no credit.’
Frankie shuffled the deck slowly, stalling in the hope that the suckers might start knocking to get the night over and done and forgotten. ‘That’s the trouble with the whole country, all you businessmen cheatin’ the peoples so fast ’n hard there’s nothin’ left for an honest hustler to steal.’
‘I’ll tell you what I think for true,’ Sparrow offered seriously, ‘I don’t think there’s any difference: a businessman is a hustler with the dough to hustle on the legit ’n a hustler is a businessman who’s either gone broke or never had it. Back me up with five grand tonight ’n tomorrow mornin’ I get a invitation to join the Chamber of Commerce ’n no questions asked.’
‘Record Head’ll get you first,’ Louie repeated his warning to Sparrow.
‘Yeh,’ everyone agreed at once, their spirits improved by the punk’s prospects for a long-term jacket, ‘by the time he gets out Kvorka’s kid’ll be wearin’ the old man’s badge.’
‘It’s too cheap now,’ John renewed his ancient complaint, ‘when you done somethin’ in the old days you paid for it.’
‘The hell with the old days,’ Sparrow protested, looking resentfully at John. ‘I hope your batt’ry goes dead too.’
‘His battery’s been dead for twenty years,’ Frankie had to put in.
‘That’s all right,’ John pointed out, ‘the batt’ry may be dead but the brain is still workin’. What good is hot batt’ries when the radiator’s leakin’? Look at this punk – his tubes is boilin’ over but his connections is spillin’ like a secondhand Essex.’
‘I’m still on the legit,’ Sparrow answered without glancing at Louie, ‘compared to some people anyhow. There ain’t no joy-poppers waitin’ for me down by the Safari.’
/> It was the first time Frankie realized that the punk was on to Louie’s racket and he felt an unreasoning resentment of that knowledge. How much did the punk know? It must be just some word he’d overheard and was tossing around with no real knowledge of the accusation he was making, Frankie decided uneasily.
Sparrow had pressed the game too far. With the ace of clubs in his hand Louie asked, ‘You want to die in an alley?’ With all the jesting gone out of his voice.
Sparrow didn’t have the courage to defy Louie when Louie talked business – but he had an ace in the hole himself. He could throw out the knuckles of the index finger of his left hand, broken in some childhood antic, bending it into a series of unnatural ridges which he could point at an opponent silently, thus avenging himself without risking provocative language.
‘I’ll make the ju-ju sign on you,’ he threatened Louie softly, and Louie overheard. ‘You point that freakin’ finger at me ’n you’re one dead pointer.’
It was a challenge. Everyone had seen him challenged. So the moment Louie’s eyes returned to his cards Sparrow pointed, swiftly and damningly – Louie heard the knuckles crack. Somebody laughed and Frankie felt his innards tighten with this night’s first intimation that God’s medicine might not choose to hold him together till morning.
‘Was you pointin’ that freakin’ finger at me?’ Louie just had to know.
‘I don’t point nobody but enemies,’ Sparrow appeased him hurriedly, ‘’n you ’n me ’r old buddies.’ And went lightly into some little nostalgic tune or other of his own.
‘I used to work in Chicago
In a big department store.’
‘The telephone’s goin’ to ring,’ Blind Pig suddenly shushed everybody, and before he’d finished his warning it rang. A trick which, like his other rare assets, didn’t mean much. Yet not even the punk could outguess a telephone. ‘Specially a phone wit’out a number,’ Pig boasted as if the fact that the phone had a blind number somehow made the trick tougher.
The Man with the Golden Arm Page 14