The Man With the Golden Arm (34 page)

There were no luminous Christs for Lester. Neither Christs nor clocks nor calendars.

Yet each man knew the hour. As each man knew the day.

But what if the laces broke on the way? Would he stop to tie them – or demand a new pair before he took another step? It seemed so wrong to trouble tying laces at such an hour, to comb and oil your hair and make corny jokes about going to the dentist’s chair. It seemed so wrong to laugh because you caught a winning deuce against one of the men who was going to help strip you for the cold white slab. To brush your teeth or write a letter to your mother in California.

‘If that letter goes out tonight,’ Frankie reckoned, ‘he’ll be buried by the time his old lady reads it ’n he
knows
that when he’s writin’ it ’n when he tells the screw to send it air mail ’n seal it good – “it’s somethin’
personal
.”’

Would he have to add that same old crack, used twice
already in that same cell, ‘This is certainly going to be a good lesson to me’?

‘One more white shirt is all you’ll wear,’ Frankie told Lester, though Lester lay many cells away. ‘Shine your shoes like you’re goin’ to get married. Five’ll get you ten, you forget your act when they fit you into them tight black tights.’

Frankie lay on his cot half fevered with the idea of Lester’s trip to the chair, suddenly uncertain that he himself had really missed it after all. In his mind Little Lester and himself had merged.

‘Let’s see you trot through the little white door,’ he challenged this Frankie-Lester: ‘Three steps to the right ’n now take a load off your feet and don’t let the smell of vinegar bother you either. That’s only a couple drops on the sponge that fits between the voltage ankle and the clamp to keep the sponge from burning – all for your own good you know. Now just put your nose through the little black helmet. That’s right –
now
let’s hear you wisecrack, wise guy.’

The wise guy of Frankie’s fantasy had no word that one could hear through that dead-black hood.

Some other con, with his own private burden of guilt, cried out, in sleep or waking, and the lights in the corridor seemed to flicker a moment. The sleepers wakened, a long murmur went like a wave from wall to wall. It was that hour when men cried out in voices not their own.

For each man knew the hour. As each man knew the day.

They said, between the bakery, the laundry and the mess, between the printshop, the library and the little white infirmary, they said he’d come out of the death cell hooded all in black. The black tights shimmering under the lights, that final white shirt buttoned over one shoulder like a fencing master’s, he had stepped forth into that hooded hour. They
said it had taken a full minute and a half, from the moment he’d stepped into the big glass cage to the moment the switch had been pulled.

Some said it had taken nearer two. The voltage clamp had required adjustment after he was in the chair and there had been no smell of vinegar after all. They told just how it had been.

Between the darkened infirmary and the clean, well-lighted mess, between the sweating boiler room and the cool dry dorm – ‘the left knee kicked up, just once, after the switch was thrown.’ The voltage clamp behind the neck had fitted nicely on the very first try – only the one on the pale right ankle had seemed a trifle loose – but the
laces, the laces
– Frankie had to know – had he tied them up first or had he just let them loose? Did one of the screws tie them for him so that he wouldn’t trip and skin his knee? The
laces,
the laces––

But no one had noticed if the laces were tied at all.

The single shoulder button had been stripped off when the shirt had been ripped down to expose the flesh above the poor seared heart. Five doctors – which one had pulled the button off? No – it certainly had been six – had pronounced the heart as dead as any hustler’s heart can get: a charred lump of ashy flesh that sagged where the living heart had burned.

There had been one hundred and twenty men and two women on the witness benches, they said. It had all been spick and span behind the glass, everything had gone off in tiptop order, there had been not even the telltale flickering of the lights throughout the building.

Four buttons had been pushed by four unnamed men. They said. Yet only one of these had pushed the live one. None would ever have to think it was himself had sparked the living flame.

But the
laces
, the
laces
––

They had used an amperage of eight, everyone knew, because that was the usual amperage for a white man. Everyone said. Just as the usual amperage for a Negro was seven and a half.

Everyone knew.

Then they’d thrown him nine hundred extra volts just to make certain. Everyone knew about that too. Everyone told everyone else just how it had gone off. Everyone but Frankie had been there it seemed.

But the laces––

What
laces? You think they let him walk in there with
shoes
on? Those tights cover your feet like an acrobat’s tights, there aren’t any shoes to it. Just a strip of black cloth sheared neatly halfway around the right ankle.

It wasn’t until weeks after he’d been released that Frankie learned Little Lester had died on his bunk with eleven hours yet to live.

A heart attack, the warden had concluded.

Arsenic, the coroner’s physician had insisted.

His heart had stopped beating too soon, the afternoon papers had reported.

And neither the evening nor the morning press would ever be able to prove a thing, one way or another, under any old buffalo of a moon, by flat-nosed, buffalo-eyed Frankie Machine.

Now, as the moon of other nights mounted the arch of June, he felt the touch of other Junes along the bars. Remembered how the orange Blatz signs of Wolcott Street would be glowing now each night more softly as the brief month passed trailing smoke, and July came on in a haze. And every arc lamp’s reflection along the rain-wet, moon-wet, sun-wet, and summer-dusted walks would burn more deeply as the days burned longer.

Frankie could tell himself at last that he had buried his monkey as deeply as the county had buried Little Lester.

Each Saturday afternoon now the good soldiers were led into the yard for a game of softball. Whenever he found himself out there in the open, after the long week in the laundry, he was seized with the need of hearing Molly Novotny’s teasing voice and a longing for the dark appeal of her eyes. He felt he didn’t care whether he dealt another hand of stud in his life or not.

Playing first base on the last Saturday in August, he took off his shirt in the fading West Side sunlight and a swift squall, as if waiting all the bright afternoon behind the sentry box for some fool to do just that, swept the field in chilling gusts. By the time they’d played out the inning he was sneezing and by the time he got back to his cot he was in a wringing sweat. The laundry had weakened his resistance more than he’d known.

By chow time he was rocking down Fever Street in a sidecar attached to some Good Humor vendor’s bicycle, racing east down Division with little pennants whirling in the white-walled wheels and the vendor, wearing a meter reader’s cap and waggling a finger at Frankie to sentence him to life imprisonment in a broom closet for stealing Captain Bednar’s only electric iron.

Sitting upright there among the brooms was good old McGantic wearing a sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve, dead as a doornail in line of duty. Dead for days. The face had withered to a monkey’s face, one dead brown paw pointed to where, upon an empty beer case, lay the same old hypo and two new quarter grains.

‘If he wants water give him water,’ the major was telling Applejack, ‘and water is all he gets. He’s still tryin’ to kick the habit. Let him sweat it out. If his ticker ain’t bad he’ll make it.’

Intern Katz understood. He knew how to get a half a cap of morphine out of the infirmary as well as how to fashion a needle out of a common pin. But he believed in Frankie Machine as he believed in his own applejack. ‘It won’t be me to put him back on, Major,’ he promised. Then he was left to watch alone beside the narrow cot in the narrow little infirmary. Because its looseness seemed to be causing Frankie distress, Katz rolled up the nightshirt’s sleeve.

Frankie felt McGantic rolling his sleeve to give him the one big fix that would fix him forever and for keeps. With all his remaining strength he pried at those fingers to get them off his precious arm. But the fingers had no strength left at all, something that was surely a hypo glinted in the light and in an access of hopeless dread Frankie cried like a sick baby for help: ‘Molly! Molly!’

But no Molly was near to reply. Only the sheet roller rumbling down the tier to punish him for what he’d done to Zosh. He ducked down Schwiefka’s alley and around the shed to pick up an armful of kindling for Jailer. Deep under the wood lay a soft green hat with a small red feather in its brim.

Strong hands held him down while others fastened the voltage clamp to the back of his neck but he was too smart for all of them – he rested one moment to make them think he had really given in at last and then shouted out of his very bones, ‘A Polak never gives in!’ – and kicked off all the hands at once. But it was all up with Frankie – the sponge was pressing his forehead and a voice was warning him through glass – ‘Don’t let your life go with it, Dealer.’

He opened his eyes and through the sweat saw Applejack Katz’s good tough mug studying him gravely. And Applejack’s long, hard hand drying the tears, fears and sweat away.

‘You’re toughin’ it through the hardest sort of way, Dealer,’ he heard Katz telling him. ‘Quit stonin’ yourself.
You ain’t
that
sick. How many guys you fightin’ anyhow? Be yourself, Dealer. Be yourself.’

‘That’s not so easy,’ Frankie whispered weakly. ‘I got to get straight first.’

‘It’s the same thing,’ Katz told him quietly.

At Applejack’s feet Frankie saw the infirmary’s gray cat sitting upon its haunches. It purred, just once, to affirm Applejack’s counsel.

As the fever lowered Frankie dreamed of someone folding and refolding bundles of newspapers right beside his cot and forced himself awake to see who it was this time.

Only the old woman of the wind, there on the other side of the pane, wrapping the great sheets of the rain.

Indian summer came and September drew toward its close. It closed in a green half-twilight, like the half-twilight of the heart. In this green-gray late September light the Prager beer signs gleamed redly as soon as the arc lamps gleamed yellow. Then the arrows of all the Old Style Lager signs began working anxiously back and forth till the yellow arc lamps dimmed and died, the scarlet Prager bulbs signed off and the overworked Lager arrows went to bed. Only the green-gray light was left, like a light left burning in a hallway entrance all night long. To light the morning’s earliest peddler waking the tenements with one clear call: ‘
Kartofflee! Kartofflee!
’

Then the trolleys, like mild-tempered elephants, approached each other slowly and paused, with a primitive graciousness, to let each other pass; and went shambling forward once more upon their predestined jungleways as though the pause had lent each a greater understanding of all things.

Frankie came down Division Street, where only arc lamps and fire hydrants grow, wearing the same woolen army trousers and the combat jacket – its sleeve patched so neatly, by a county sewing machine, the old tear was
scarcely detectable. With a new checkered cap on his head and feeling as if some tightly wound spring within himself had slackened, never to stand taut winding again.

Back in the city’s littered bivouac he walked among the tenements of home like an awol private returning to barracks from which his old outfit had long ago convoyed and scattered for keeps. He felt both weakened and strengthened by his stretch. His hands hung heavily, the fingers felt like thumbs for lack of use with deck, cue, dice or drum. But he’d beaten McGantic and McGantic’s terrible monkey.

He’d paid in full. He didn’t have to punish the blood and bone any longer. Molly-O had shown him what was gnawing at his heart and the long stretch had forced him to the fight.

‘Once you got the touch it’s always with you,’ he remembered, and passed the Safari without looking in. There was no longer anyone there he needed to see.

‘When a cripple leads a cripple it doesn’t amount to much,’ he recalled someone telling him as he turned into his own dark hall.

In the dimness someone was shouting threats to someone far above. Halfway up the first flight he made out the hulking raincoated figure of Poor Peter Schwabatski pushing an artificial daisy into a crack of the stair. How long was it now he’d been trying to make them grow there? Since before that middle tread had come loose, Frankie remembered. When the dimwit had once asked his papa why his flowers never grew, Frankie remembered the Jailer saying, ‘Because it never rains indoors.’

That was a hard thing for Peter to understand. It seemed to him it rained all day indoors. All day it rained in Poor Peter’s mind upon the paper daisies of his brain: a paper garden in a paper rain. It was the reason he always wore a raincoat, sun or rain; dust storm, blizzard or summer hail.

It was of this same Poor Peter Frankie had heard the Jailer speak mournfully once, after the Jailer had been openly boasting to Violet, ‘I know how to hit them ovalries: the right one makes a boy, the left one a girl, right square in the middle is what we call a murphydyke.’

‘Where’d
you
hit it?’ Violet had asked.

‘I missed altogether, I guess,’ Jailer had acknowledged then with a smile so wan Frankie had wished Vi hadn’t asked that that time.

For the boy had been sitting then where he sat now, moving humbly aside as always for traffic, too absorbed in his dusty flowers to lift his half-bald head. He was not more than twenty but had been losing his hair since he’d been twelve.

As he stepped past Peter, Frankie heard Violet and the Jailer really going at it.

‘No hammering on Sunday!’ Violet was demanding. ‘Go to sleep, drunk! Get a wife and hammer in bed!’