The Man With the Golden Arm (10 page)

‘Warm. Make me warm.’

And still there was no rush, no hurry at all. Louie pressed the hypo down to the cotton; the stuff came too high these days to lose the fraction of a drop. ‘Don’t vomit, student,’ he taunted Frankie to remind him of the first fix he’d had after his discharge – but it was too cold to answer. He was falling between glacial walls, he didn’t know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-colored walls of Private McGantic’s terrible pit.

He couldn’t feel Louie probing into the dark red knot above his elbow at all. Nor see the way the first blood sprayed faintly up into the delicate hypo to tinge the melted morphine with blood as warm as the needle’s heated point.

When Louie sensed the vein he pressed it down with the certainty of a good doctor’s touch, let it linger a moment in the vein to give the heart what it needed and withdrew gently, daubed the blood with a piece of cotton, tenderly, and waited.

Louie waited. Waited to see it hit.

Louie liked to see the stuff hit. It meant a lot to Louie, seeing it hit.

‘Sure I like to watch,’ he was ready to acknowledge any time. ‘Man, their
eyes
when that big drive hits ’n goes tinglin’ down to the toes. They retch, they sweat, they itch – then the big drive hits ’n here they come out of it cryin’ like a baby ’r laughin’ like a loon.
Sure
I like to watch.
Sure
I like to see it hit. Heroin got the drive awright – but there’s not a tingle to a ton – you got to get M to get that tingle-tingle.’

It hit all right. It hit the heart like a runaway locomotive, it hit like a falling wall. Frankie’s whole body lifted with that smashing surge, the very heart seemed to lift up-up-up – then rolled over and he slipped into a long warm bath with one long orgasmic sigh of relief. Frankie opened his eyes.

He was in a room. Somebody’s dust-colored wavy-walled room and he wasn’t quite dead after all. He had died, had felt himself fall away and die but now he wasn’t dead any more. Just sick. But not too sick. He wasn’t going to be really sick, he wasn’t a student any more. Maybe he wasn’t going to be sick at all, he was beginning to feel just right.

Then it went over him like a dream where everything is love and he wasn’t even sweating. All he had to do the rest of his life was to lie right here feeling better and better with every beat of his heart till he’d never felt so good in all his life.

‘Wow,’ he grinned gratefully at Louie, ‘that was one good
whan.
’

‘I seen it,’ Louie boasted smugly. ‘I seen it was one good
whan
’ – and lapsed into the sort of impromptu jargon which pleases junkies for no reason they can say – ‘vraza-s’vrazas’vraza – it was one good
whan
-
whan
-
whan.
’ He dabbed a silk handkerchief at a blob of blood oozing where the needle had entered Frankie’s arm.

‘There’s a silver buck and a buck ’n a half in change in my jacket pocket,’ Frankie told him lazily. ‘I’m feelin’ too good to get up ’n get it myself.’

Louie reached in the pocket with the handkerchief bound
about his palm and plucked the silver out. Two-fifty for a quarter grain wasn’t too high. He gave Frankie the grin that drained through the teeth for a receipt. The dealer was coming along nicely these days, thank you.

The dealer didn’t know that yet, of course. That first fix had only cost him a dollar, it had quieted the everlasting dull ache in his stomach and sent him coasting one whole week end. So what was the use of spending forty dollars in the bars when you could do better at home on one? That was how Frankie had it figured
that
week end. To Louie, listening close, he’d already talked like a twenty-dollar-a-day man.

Given a bit of time.

And wondered idly now where in the world the dealer would get that kind of money when the day came that he’d need half a C just to taper off. He’d get it all right. They always got it. He’d seen them coming in the rain, the unkjays with their peculiarly rigid, panicky walk, wearing some policeman’s castoff rubbers, no socks at all, a pair of Salvation Army pants a size too small or a size too large and a pajama top for a shirt – but with twenty dollars clutched in the sweating palm for that big twenty-dollar fix.

‘Nothing can take the place of junk – just junk’ – the dealer would learn. As Louie himself had learned long ago.

Louie was the best fixer of them all because he knew what it was to need to get well. Louie had had a big habit – he was one man who could tell you you lied if you said no junkie could kick the habit once he was hooked. For Louie was the one junkie in ten thousand who’d kicked it and kicked it for keeps.

He’d taken the sweat cure in a little Milwaukee Avenue hotel room cutting himself down, as he put it, ‘from monkey to zero.’ From three full grains a day to one, then a half of that and a half of that straight down to zero, though he’d been half out of his mind with the pain two nights running
and was so weak, for days after, that he could hardly tie his own shoelaces.

Back on the street at last, he’d gotten the chuck horrors: for two full days he’d eaten candy bars, sweet rolls and strawberry malteds. It had seemed that there would be no end to his hunger for sweets.

Louie never had the sweet-roll horrors any more. Yet sometimes himself sensed that something had twisted in his brain in those nights when he’d gotten the monkey off his back on Milwaukee Avenue.

‘
Habit? Man
,’ he liked to remember, ‘I had a great
big
habit. One time I knocked out one of my own teet’ to get the gold for a fix. You call that bein’ hooked or not?
Hooked?
Man, I wasn’t hooked, I was
crucified
. The monkey got so big he was carryin’
me
.’ Cause the way it starts is like this, students: you let the habit feed you first ’n one mornin’ you wake up ’n you’re feedin’ the habit.

‘But don’t tell
me
you can’t kick it if you
want
to. When I hear a junkie tell me he wants to kick the habit but he just can’t I know he lies even if
he
don’t know he does. He
wants
to carry the monkey, he’s punishin’ hisself for somethin’ ’n don’t even know it. It’s what I was doin’ for six years, punishin’ myself for things I’d done ’n thought I’d forgot. So I told myself how I wasn’t to blame for what I done in the first place, I was only tryin’ to live like everyone else ’n doin’ them things was the only way I had of livin’. Then I got forty grains ’n went up to the room ’n went from monkey to nothin’ in twenny-eight days ’n that’s nine-ten years ago ’n the monkey’s dead.’

‘The monkey’s never dead, Fixer,’ Frankie told him knowingly.

Louie glanced at Frankie slyly. ‘You know that awready, Dealer? You know how he don’t die? It’s what they say awright, the monkey never dies. When you kick him off
he just hops onto somebody else’s back.’ Behind the film of glaze that always veiled Louie’s eyes Frankie saw the twisted look. ‘
You
got my monkey, Dealer? You take my nice old monkey away from me? Is that my monkey ridin’ your back these days, Dealer?’

The color had returned to Frankie’s cheeks, he felt he could make it almost any minute now. ‘No more for me, Fixer,’ he assured Louie confidently. ‘Somebody else got to take your monkey. I had the Holy Jumped-up-Jesus Horrors for real this time –’ n I’m one guys knows when he got enough. I learned my lesson but
good
. Fixer – you just give the boy with the golden arm his very lastest fix.’

‘What time you have to be by Schwiefka?’ Louie wanted to know.

Frankie brushed the hair, matted by drying sweat, off his forehead and glanced at his watch. Sweat had steamed the crystal, he couldn’t read the hands. He dried it on the bedcover, for his shirt was still wringing damp. ‘Nine-thirty – I got an hour and a half. I’ll make it.’

‘Crawl your dirty gut over to the table,’ Louie advised him. ‘Can you take coffee?’

Frankie thought it over carefully. ‘In a couple minutes,’ he decided. ‘Half a cup anyhow.’

‘You better,’ Louie counseled him, ‘you’re likely to get so hungry around one o’clock you won’t be able to steal enough for another fix.’

Louie busied himself over the little gas plate in the corner and didn’t look around till he heard the dealer move. Frankie was swaying but he was on his feet and he’d make it fine, all night. All night and maybe the whole week end. It was hard to tell with these joy-poppers. ‘That stuff cost me more than the last batch,’ he said indifferently.

‘I know,’ Frankie grinned, ‘you told me,’ sounding bored while he used a dish towel on his chest beneath the soiled
undershirt. ‘Keeps goin’ up all the time, like a kite with the string broke off.’ His eyes were growing heavy, the towel slipped out of his fingers and caught under his arm, hanging there like a flag at half-mast. The junkies’ flag of truce, to guard him as he slept. There beneath a single bulb, flat on his feet, the knees bending a little, the slight body swaying a bit, the flat-bridged nose looking peaked. Hush: he is sleeping the strange light sleep.

‘I can’t help it when they up the price on me,’ Louie added. ‘They got me, Dealer, that’s all.’

‘The way you got me,’ Frankie murmured knowingly. Then he smelled the coffee, got down to the table in front of a cup, took one sip and, smiling softly, started to let his head fall toward his chest. Louie got the cup out of the way of that blond mop before it bent to the table.

‘Now look at him sleep, with all his woes,’ Louie teased him almost tenderly; and Frankie heard from a dream of falling snow.

The snow fell in a soft, suspended motion, as snow does in dreams alone. He coasted without effort around and around and down a bit and then up like that kite with the broken string and came coasting, where all winds were dying, back down to the table where Fixer sat waiting.

‘I got no woes,’ he laughed among slow-falling flakes, seeing Louie smiling through the snow. ‘You got a woe, Fixer?’ he asked. ‘It’s what I been needin’ – a couple good old secondhand woes.’

‘You’ll have a couple dozen if you ain’t boxin’ that deck by Schwiefka’s suckers in half an hour,’ Louie reminded him.

Frankie got the rest of the coffee down. ‘Squarin’ up, Fixer,’ he assured Louie. He held the cup out at arm’s length. ‘Look at that.’ Not a tremor from shoulder to fingertip. ‘The sheep ’r gonna get a fast shearin’ t’night, Fixer,’ he boasted with a strange and steady calm.

‘I think you’re one of the weaker sheep yourself,’ Louie decided silently.

She remembered the years of their courtship like remembering an alien land. Years of the white wafer of friendship broken on
Boze Narodzenie
and its brittle fragments (that broke, like so many friendships, at the touch) being passed from hand to hand across the straw-strewn tablecloth. Years of the soft and wild ancestral songs: ‘
Chlopek
’ sung in the evergreen’s light. And on the tree’s very top a single star to which all good children must say: ‘
Gwizadka tam na niebie.
’ A starlet there on the heavens. Feasts of Epiphany, when she and Frankie together had marked neighbors’ doorways with the letters that remembered ancestral kings, K, M, and B, with tiny crosses between; that neighbors on waking might remember how Kasper, Melchior and Balthasar had borne gifts to Bethlehem.

Years when everything was so well arranged. When people who did right were rewarded and those who did wrong were punished. When everyone, in the long run, got exactly what was coming to him, no more or no less. God weighed virtue and sin then to the fraction of the ounce, like Majurcek the Grocer weighing sugar.

Together she and Frankie had carried Easter lamb to Old St Stephen’s for Father Simon’s blessing – could it really be so long? How had they both forgotten God so soon? Or had God forgotten them? Certainly God had gone somewhere far away at just the time when she’d needed Him most. Perhaps He too had volunteered and just hadn’t gotten His discharge yet. Perhaps He had been a full colonel and still felt the need of keeping His distance. If He had been only a private, then He must have re-enlisted. Or else the world had gone wrong all by itself.

He had been closer on those far-gone forenoons when
she and Frankie had followed the malt-hop trucks down the horse-and-wagon alleys of home, each with a tin can to catch the malt-dripping. That was forbidden drink, the trucks hauled it out to the farmers for pig food. But one morning she and Frankie had drunk from the same can and gotten as stewed, all by themselves, as any two twelve-year-olds in a West Side horse-and-wagon alley can get.

Yet even then Frankie’s indifference had tortured her. So free and easy he’d been, into their free-and-easy teens, in a way she herself could never be and not like a really decent fellow ought to be at all. As careless of her love as if it were something he could pick up in any old can just by following a malt-hop truck.

‘I never run for streetcars,’ he’d had the brassbound nerve to tell her the year she was seventeen, after standing her up for half an hour in front of the Pulaski. ‘What’s the use? There’s always another big red rollin’ along right behind. Just like you dames – soon as a guy misses with one all he has to do is look back over his shoulder ’n here comes another down the block pullin’ up for a fast pickup.’

‘I just won’t
stand
for that kind of talk,’ she’d told him flatly, stamping with rage. ‘I want you to be
where
you’re supposed to be
when
you’re supposed to be ’n dressed like you’re goin’ to the Aragon, not to shoot six-no-count pool by Wieczorek – that’s what
I
want.’

‘There’s people in hell want ice water too,’ he’d grinned at her. That unforgivable, careless grin that she couldn’t get out of her system and had to have all for herself and couldn’t ever quite seem to get all for her very own for keeps.

It had almost seemed at times that he didn’t really care what she thought in those years. When she’d reproach him for going with other girls he’d confirm anything she chose to suspect with that quick, confident grin. How could anyone make a fellow like that ashamed of himself? She didn’t know
how. It hadn’t seemed to make any difference to him whether he dated a schoolgirl, a nurse, a dimwit, a shimmy dancer, a hillbilly, a married woman, an aging whore, a divorcee or just some poor tired trampie: he dated everything he saw in skirts and gave each the same corny play.