The Man With the Golden Arm (14 page)

A few other items were missing from the plumber’s. In fact the faster he talked the more the squad found missing. What worried them most was the flashlight and crowbar, they seemed to think the punk had something to do with those too. But the plumber dropped charges when Violet took care of him and Stash did without Polish sausage at all for a while.

The court put it down as malicious mischief and Sparrow had gone away for thirty days.

The day the wagon took Sparrow out to Twenty-eighth and California Violet got roaring drunk in the Tug & Maul. And, as always when she had too much, upbraided all the males in sight just for being males. She wasn’t going to live with old Stash another day, she told the house. ‘Or any other of you godamned hairy-ass morphodyke booze bums who think a girl got to be grateful when her old man brings home bargains from Nostriewicz’s Hi-Klass Bakery – they ain’t even got good
freshy
stuff by Nostriewicz ’n here
he
comes bringin’ me the day-olds that’s a day old when they’re freshy even ’n tells me I should sew buttons on his pants ’n sell the zippers to Efjievicz the Tailor because all the young guys are bringin’ Efjievicz pants to take off the buttons ’n put on zippers ’n Efjievicz don’t have enough zippers ’n Stash is too old for a zipper anyhow, it’s just for young guys in a big hurry, he ain’t never in a hurry
for nothin’ but bargains by Nostriewicz no more –
he’s
tellin’
me.
’

The barflies applauded timidly, they felt she deserved applause.

‘
He
’
s
tellin’
me
he’s not so young no more. Godamnit,
am
I married ’r ain’t I?’ she demanded to know, steadying herself against the bar.

‘Don’t sound like you are,’ Meter Reader, with the holes in his cap and whisky in his hand, felt obliged to reply.

‘That’s just
your
opinion,’ Violet almost blasted him off the stool. ‘Who ast
your
dirty opinion anyhow? Who you think
you’re
tellin’ what to do? Who
you
married to?’ She sized him up with growing contempt. ‘Hell, you’re in worse shape than my old man – you’re married to your dirty fist, that’s who
you’re
married to – where you get off anyhow tellin’ other people what to do ’n how to live? Ever try mindin’ your own business, you moldy-lookin’ sandlot spigotheaded bakebrain? I’ll use your dirty skull for a bar towel, you tellin’
me
what to do ’n what not to do ’n all that
kapustka
—’ Violet wasn’t big, but she looked big enough to do it – at such moments the helmet of her hennaed hair and the wide-set gray eyes flared with a single flame. Meter Reader took up his glass quietly and retired to the rear of the bar. Meter Reader was saving himself for the exigencies of his coaching position with the Endless Belt & Leather Invincibles.

That thirty days had taught the punk a lesson. It had made him feel badly, costing Violet all that money. Every time she’d had enough saved to divorce Old Man she’d have to spend it putting in the fix for him. He’d brooded about it the whole thirty days, and made up his mind that the first thing he’d do when he got out would be to steal the divorce money for her.

He’d picked on Gold’s Department Store when a goodly crowd was there.

Sparrow had been stealing odds and ends off Gold’s counters since he was in short pants. He knew that the only gun in the store was an ancient cow pistol carried by the old man who runs the freight elevator. The elevator man is even older than old Gold; all he does is lean against the shaft, half asleep all day. It’s like a pension.

Sparrow had felt that if he could get the gun off the old man without getting himself shot straight through the head the rest should be fairly easy. He began drinking on the notion next door to Gold’s and, as the afternoon wore on, the more natural the notion had appeared. He wasn’t able to understand why he hadn’t thought of it long before.

But when he’d shuffled out of the bar and had seen how swiftly the long street was darkening, he’d gone cold sober with the recollection of his recent thirty-day stretch and had had to return, in a hurry, to the bar.

He’d gotten drunk all over again on Vi’s credit, which was good so long as Stash held down his icehouse job. But by nine o’clock the credit gave out and he’d been brooding on the idea so long he couldn’t back out. To falter would have been to reneg on Frankie as well as on Violet, he felt. Both had done so much for him – and what had he ever done for either? Nothing. Not a thing. He never did anything for his friends but use up their credit and get them in trouble. He’d do something big for them all. Right now.

So shuffled, cap yanked low, straight down the middle aisle – Ladies’ Hose and Fancy Footwear – to the freight elevator where the ancient house dick lounged in dreams of long-lost daily doubles. Sparrow shoved his combination flashlight pencil into the small of the old man’s back, grabbed the gun, shoved him into the lift and snarled just like Edward G. Robinson, ‘Into the basement wit’ the rest of the rats –
copper.
’

His glasses had clouded up, but he heard the door of
the lift crash shut and the cables whining downward and the dozen-odd customers began turning slowly toward him like people in a slow-motion movie. In that moment he saw himself through all their eyes: a cardboard cowboy in horn-rimmed spectacles waving an oversized cow gun. He heard his own shrill voice carried away down endless nylon aisles on the scudding of the overhead fans.

‘Face the waw-awls, every
body!’

He saw them turning, by ones and twos, old Gold with a steel washboard under his arm and the cashier’s face white as a split apple against the parched black line of her brows just as she took a header and he hollered, ‘Leave her lay! She oney fainted!’

Leaning across the counter he banged the cash drawer open and saw bills stacked there just for Sparrow. Tens and twenties and singles and fives rubbing rawly against the icy sweat of his palm – and the shining dimes and quarters in the last drawer over! He reached so far he tottered, the liquor came up in his throat and his lips moved with whisky or greed; heard a quarter go tinkling along the floor toward Fancy Footwear and followed it anxiously, a dozen pairs of eyes following it with him, to a rack bearing spring topcoats. Pocketed the lucky quarter, pulled the flashiest coat of all off the rack and was struggling into it when old Gold’s nose appeared above the cosmetics counter between two jars of cold cream, the washboard glinted one moment as it trembled in his hand and the momentum of his swing carried him half across the counter, sent the cold cream jars and a stack of blue-boxed Kotex into the aisle as the board caught Sparrow spam behind the left ear.

He went down as if he’d been shot; the cow gun went clattering down those endless nylon aisles.

Half the crowd began shoving the other half aside for the distinction of being the first to sit on the gangster while others
bound him with clotheslines and a couple cooler heads used the excitement to snatch such small items as happened to be lying loose and near at hand. In the haste of binding the punk old Gold became securely tied to him; the punk reared his head groggily to protest something or other and someone promptly banged him back to sleep with that same washboard. When the aces arrived old Gold was still trying to free himself.

In front of the store half the neighborhood waited to see who the cops would bring out this time. They came out carrying something that looked like a giant beehive with old Gold in tow. For all you could see of Sparrow in the yards of clothesline circling him from forehead to ankles was the point of his pale nose sticking out of the coils. The aces shoved old Gold into the wagon with him – if he wasn’t an accomplice what was he doing tied up with a gangster?

Some gangster. At the Saloon Street Station it took the officers ten minutes to unwind the punk and ten more to loosen old Gold. Sparrow sat up blinking, looking for his glasses, and Sergeant Kvorka immediately poured a bucket of ice water on the punk’s head so he could see more clearly.

The first person he’d recognized was Violet. He blinked up at her with his shortsighted eyes, waiting resignedly for her to explain
this
caper to him. ‘Well?’ the punk demanded.

‘Ask him what he thought he was trying to do,’ the bewildered aces urged her. They wanted to know too.

‘I went in there to try on a topcoat,’ he explained haughtily, without taking those accusing eyes off her, ‘because I wanted to look nice just for
you
. I took the gun off that old man ’cause he got a old grudge against me. I was gonna give it back to him right after I paid for the coat. But when I had it on, all of a sudden they wouldn’t give me a chance to pay for a thing,
just like they been layin’ for me all along. You know as well as I do, honey, I’m not the kind goes around tryin’ to get somethin’ fer nothin’.’

The aces looked at Violet and Violet looked at the aces.

‘We’ll have to get another kind of lawyer now,’ she sighed. ‘Here goes the divorce again. It looks like the oney honeymoon you ’n me’ll ever have’ll be in the Bridewell.’

‘I’ll defend myself,’ Sparrow announced, ‘it was self-defense. That makes it false arrest.’ He just couldn’t get that false arrest notion out of his offbalanced skull.

‘If you don’t button up I’ll sue you for breach of promise even if I
am
married,’ she threatened him, getting angry with him at last. ‘You’re goin’ to cop a plea ’n get paroled to me – if I ain’t gonna be your wife I’ll just be your dirty guardian.’ Abruptly her anger turned to tears and he’d never seen her cry before. ‘Then I can arrest you myself when you get out of line – I’ll arrest you every night just to keep the aces from doin’ it.’

‘I’ll have to look up the law on that,’ he dismissed her. ‘I don’t think they got me yet.’

They hadn’t. The two analysts who questioned him at Central Police turned in reports at such variance that Zygmunt was able to put in the fix with almost no trouble at all.

Violet had to pay Zygmunt off in installments, out of Stash’s hoarded checks. Every time she’d get the Prospector paid off she’d have to start chiseling on Old Husband again. It made her pretty mad at Old Husband sometimes.

Just the way he kept hanging on, month after month, was enough to wear away any woman’s patience. ‘I wouldn’t mind his hangin’ on to me if it
meant
anythin’,’ she complained to Sophie, ‘but I don’t have to tell
you
it don’t mean a thing, the shape he’s in.’

Old Husband, it seemed, had added one more trick to
the repertoire of his senility. When he brought home his bargains of late he locked them up in the broom closet for fear Vi might throw them in the garbage can as she had so often threatened. He was getting so he locked up everything. He had a lock put on the pantry, leaving what he judged was just enough food for one healthy woman on the kitchen table before he left for work. Vi was embarrassed, when she went to get the punk a slab of Polish sausage, to find herself literally locked out of her own home while remaining inside it. She took a hammer to the lock and tossed the punk the entire sausage, not even salvaging the butt end for Stash. For two nights thereafter Stash slept, bargains and all, in the broom closet.

Strangely, he hadn’t seemed to mind it there particularly. If it hadn’t been for the Jailer’s protest, because of the difficulty the situation gave him in getting to his mops and buckets, it might have developed into a permanent arrangement. As it was the Jailer drove the old man, in his long underwear and holding his pants in his hand, back to his proper home. ‘And keep door closed,’ was Jailer’s final word. It had become an obsession to Schwabatski: before a tenant could step through his own doorway Jailer was telling him to close the door behind him.

Violet reported to Sophie, with a certain hopelessness, ‘He
liked
livin’ in the broom closet wit’ the rest of the mops.’

Sometimes, watching unsmiling while Stash beat his gums around the evening pumpernickel, she would urge him to eat a bit faster; without adding that Sparrow waited for her in the bar below. The old man would pay no attention at all, his battle was with the dark and bitter bread as he sopped it about a beef stew that wasn’t any fresher. For the address where the latter delicacy was available was a secret locked, as he’d locked the pantry door upon her, deep within the darkest recesses of his day-old, half-price soul.

His secondhand, rabbitty, battered, bruised and terribly defenseless soul.

‘All bein’ married to Old Man means is lettin’ him tear the date off the calendar every night ’n lettin’ him read the thermometer every morning,’ Violet explained to Sophie, ‘he gets a kick out of little things like that – it’s like a thrill to him, sort of, to tell me what the temper’ture is outside. I got to pertend I didn’t have no idea it was that hot ’r that cold. I’ll tell you what, he leans out that window so far some mornings, just so’s he can surprise me, it scares me. Then I got to pertend I’m sleepin’ so’s he can wake me up ’n tell. He don’t mean a bit of harm, that good old man. Just trusts me all down the line like a baby. In a way it is like takin’ care of a baby.’ Cause he don’t come on wit’ no lies like that conniving punk.’ Violet sighed reminiscently. ‘
Such
big wonderful lies.’

Up the stairwell they heard Blind Pig come tapping, tapping. Pausing only to touch the latch of the dealer’s narrow door as though accidentally and then pass on and up two flights: tapping, tapping. All the way up to a curtainless, lightless, windowless corner where he sat in the endless dark with his cane between his knees and said softly over and over: ‘I’ll take all I can get.’

‘He does that a-purpose to let us know he’s upstairs,’ Sophie told Violet of the light tap on the latch. ‘What the hell does he think Frankie’d want to see
him
about?’ she suddenly wondered aloud.

A cold wind followed the blind man up the stairs and Violet folded the blanket snugly about Sophie’s legs. ‘That crummy deadpicker left the downstairs door open again,’ she sympathized with Sophie as though the door had been left wide just to make Sophie shiver a bit. ‘Now I got to go see what’s goin’ on upstairs, what the people ’r up to.’