The Man With the Golden Arm (39 page)

Pig, wearing his everlasting smirk with that same air of fresh prosperity he’d worn ever since Nifty Louie had checked out, tapped on toward the eyeless juke without hearing a word, leaving behind the same old smell of unwashed underwear.

Tapped on more softly than before. Sparrow looked down. The big flat feet had been squeezed into a pair of long, narrow, two-tone jobs more fit for a race track in August than a bar in December. Nifty Louie’s very shoes: Sparrow could still see them coming down that long dark stair. ‘My God,’ he thought with something of awe, ‘I don’t think he even left Louie his socks.’

At the juke Pig turned his black snout up as if to identify the numbers on the box by smell; the very hairs within the nostrils seemed to quiver. And though his hands were as grimy as ever Sparrow saw that the nails had been manicured; to go with the suit that fitted him like a hide. He lifted the cane’s
begrimed tip till it touched the lowest of the box’s numbers, then moved upward, exactly like a nervous spider, in little leaps from one number to that above till it attained the top row and punched his favorite number at last. 

Sparrow waited till the juke had finished, then moved swiftly up to Pig’s ear: ‘Borrow me a dirty sawbuck, Piggy-O.’

Pig looked down at his hand, lying flat on the bar, just as though he could see the soot imbedded in the wrinkles there. Slowly it began to crawl with desires all its own, one manicured finger at a time, one inch at a time, to rest till the next finger caught up; then all went on together, in a miniature burlesque, till the bar’s very edge was reached, and returned to the exact spot from which they’d begun that neurotic carnival.

‘You made me dance to your music, brother – now you dance to mine,’ he told the punk at last.

‘I was just a guilty culprit them days, Piggy-O. Times is different now. I’m not takin’ no more gas off the dealer. Account of him I got the gate by Schwiefka. Hinges ’n all. What you think of a buddy who’ll turn on a fellow like that?’

Pig looked over Sparrow’s shoulder with a certain pursued look. ‘Schwiefka’s is a good place to hang away from these days anyhow,’ he confided in Sparrow.

‘You don’t look like you need to shag coffee ’n cigarettes for him no more.’ Sparrow admired Pig’s new look. ‘You look like you’re doin’ awright, Piggy-O.’

‘Even a blind guy can see an openin’ sometimes,’ Pig boasted a bit.

Louie must have left an opening big enough to shove a suitcase full of little brown drugstore bottles through, Sparrow decided to himself. ‘Blind guys can hear real good sometimes too,’ he ventured, studying Pig’s fat face. And saw the faintest sort of flattered smile stray a moment over those bloodless lips.

‘The dealer off you?’ Pig asked at last.

‘Like a filthy shirt,’ Sparrow assured him. ‘He makes me feel like a heel. Not even a heavy heel. Just a light heel.’

‘Why don’t you try steerin’ by Kippel’s, Steerer?’

‘By
Kippel’s?
’ Sparrow felt shocked at the idea. ‘Not for me, Piggy-O. That’s the sheenie cheaters’ joint. I’ll go on the legit before I go to work for sheenie cheaters.’

‘A guy workin’ for me gets his dough in advance – he can’t get cheated
that
way, can he?’

Sparrow’s heart took a small, tight stitch. ‘Couldn’t you just
borrow
me a sawbuck? It ain’t my line of work, what you got in mind.’

‘It’s up to you, Steerer,’ Pig told him coldly and turned to go. Sparrow caught the cane with real despair.

‘I got no place to sleep tonight, Piggy.’ And sensed, even as he held the cane and would not let it go, that Pig had come into the Tug & Maul looking for him. That he’d simply let the talk run on until it had been Sparrow doing the seeking. He should never have talked that hard about Frankie.

‘It’s two bucks a delivery, Steerer. All I can afford.’ Then hearing no reply other than that despairing grasp on his cane, brought out a tiny package, wrapped by cleaner hands, out of an unclean vest. ‘I got friends who get sick. It’s a good deed, deliverin’ medicine to sick people.’

the big brass juke agreed.

Sparrow needed a shot and a beer. But Pig let him sit feeling that his tongue was drying onto the roof of his mouth.

‘This one needs it real bad, and a hot little piece, I heard – if she wants to show you she’s grateful it’s awright – but get the sawbuck first – bring it back ’n you get the deuce for delivery – Antek’ll break the ten for me awright, he gives a guy a square count ’n don’t ask questions neither. Yeh,’ n I’ll buy you a double shot too. You stick with me you’ll have your own sawbuck by twelve o’clock.’

‘Is it real far, Piggy-O?’ It felt very far indeed.

And yet – how unlucky could one punk get in just one night? He’d had all the bad luck there was already and enough left over for a month to come. The image of the kite caught on the wires returned.

‘It’s a couple dirty miles for me but it’s only around the corner for a guy with eyes. Kosciusko Hotel. I’ll wait in the back boot’.’

And the little drugstore package lay on the scarred bar between them. Pig moved it with the cane’s curved handle toward Sparrow. If that Frankie wasn’t so stubborn, it was all that Frankie’s fault. As it moved toward him Sparrow saw, irrelevantly, that for some reason Pig had wrapped the cane’s handle in tinfoil. When Frankie found out how mean he’d been he’d be real sorry.

The cane’s bright silver luster had been stained, by those same hot blind hands, into a gutter-colored gray. ‘The dealer was laughin’ in here today,’ Pig reminisced, ‘he was tellin’ Owner how you couldn’t pick up a dime no more ’cause you lost his backin’. He said it was gonna get pretty rough for you when the Jailer moved in by Violet. He said––’

‘Don’t tell me what nobody said,’ Sparrow interrupted him, ‘let’s have the dirty bottle.’

‘T’ree-fifteen B,’ Blind Pig directed. ‘Go around the side door ’n use the elevator.’

Sparrow yanked the baseball cap down over his eyes – it would be just his hundred-to-one luck to have Cousin Kvorka pick him up on general principles at the corner.

But at the corner there was only the amputee who sold papers there, his cap wrapped in the
Daily News
and folded into his crutch’s handle to rest his armpit while he whooped, ‘Graziano suspended!’

Somebody was always suspending somebody, the punk reflected moodily. And the way the arc lamp swung one moment over newsstand and car line and curb gave a lilt of fear to his heart.

The lights were against him crossing Ashland but he wove in and out till he gained the opposite curb, keeping close to the store windows down to Cortez, and turned down a gangway where half-soled poverty has so long sought hotel side doors that Sparrow could feel, beneath his own thin uppers, the worn places in the walk’s cold stone. He remembered it was the hotel at which he had first registered with Violet as man and wife and no more luggage between them than that carried by the pigeons drowsing in the eaves.

Now the first full moon of December burned with a steady yellow fury, the way a night light once had burned above the dealer’s head. A pang of regret caught the punk unaware: that such nights could not come again.

Pausing to light a cigarette, the pang clung to his heart like the mist about the bulb at the gangway’s end. ‘I must be cheatin’ on somebody,’ he told himself uneasily, ‘I got that guilty-culprit feelin’, like somethin’s goin’ to happen.’

As he stepped inside the side door of the bright little lobby the elevator starter beckoned to him.

Sparrow didn’t name the floor: he simply stood eying that starter until the cage paused on the third level and the fellow slammed the door open with confidence that it was the third
floor the shabby little man in the baseball cap wanted. It came on Sparrow like a voice. ‘Go back, Solly. Go back or you’ll never get back.’ But there was no place to go but out of the cage and into the long red-carpeted lobby.

He walked slowly, pretending to look for a certain door but only listening for the shutting of the cage behind him so that he could get rid of the bottle in his pocket anywhere at all. When he turned to see what was keeping the cage on the third-floor level that fishy-eyed starter pointed to 315B and called out in a soft-clothes man’s command: ‘
Knock!
’

In a kind of paralysis, afraid to knock and afraid not to, fearing the ones who’d open the door when he did and fearing fast footsteps down the carpet behind him and the flash of a badge, he raised his ragged little claws to the indifferent wood.

And never knocked at all. The door opened to him.

Frankie.

With a line of sweat under his hair line and looking so sick Sparrow could only stammer, ‘I didn’t know who I was comin’ to.’ Frankie yanked him inside, slammed the door, took the bottle out of the punk’s pocket and unwrapped it with fumbling fingers while Sparrow protested his innocence. ‘Honest to Jesus, Frankie, I didn’t know it was fer you ’n it begun to feel like a dirty frame ’n I got scared.’

‘You always get scared too soon. You got the bull horrors. Hand me the hypo, I’m hitchin’ up the reindeers.’

The needle lay in a cigar box above the radiator and Sparrow brought it over box and all as if fearing to touch the needle itself. Frankie was swinging his arm to get the blood moving, but his legs went weak and he had to sit on the bed’s very edge. His fingers faltered on his sleeve and then pointed. ‘Roll it up, Solly. I’m in a deadly spin.’

Sparrow rolled the sleeve neatly and backed off. He wanted to go now. There was an odor near Frankie he couldn’t name.
Frankie smelled
green.
And he didn’t want to see Frankie using that dirty stuff.

‘I don’t know if I can make it by myself,’ Frankie pleaded. ‘Don’t chill on me. Stick with me just this one time.’

But somehow had still enough toughness left to grin weakly at the fright in Sparrow’s eyes. ‘You look as sick as I feel,’ he teased Sparrow. ‘Maybe you need a charge yourself. There’s enough for us both – we’ll jump together.’

‘I ain’t jumpin’ nowheres but home, Frankie,’ Sparrow told him just as if he had one.

Frankie sucked the air out of the medicine dropper, then held a match to the morphine in the tiny glass tube. But his hand shook so that he couldn’t steady the flame. ‘Melt it,’ he pleaded with the punk, ‘melt me God’s medicine,’ and lay back with the one bared arm upflung and the light overhead making hollows of anguish under his eyes. His whole broad forehead glistened whitely with sweat and the throat so stretched with suffering that it shone bloodlessly.

A dead man’s throat.

When the cap had melted Sparrow asked, ‘What do I do now, Frankie?’ Frankie put a hand to his mouth, coughed the little dry addict’s cough and pointed to his arm. ‘Tie it.’

Sparrow took the tie off the bedpost and bound it about the naked biceps.

‘Tighter,’ Frankie begged. ‘Tight as you can pull it.’

When it was tight as a vise Sparrow took the tie’s dangling end and, involuntarily, daubed the tears out of Frankie’s eyes. ‘You’re sweatin’ awful hard,’ he pretended.

Frankie sniffled. Sweat or tears, it made no difference, all that mattered was to make the sickness stop.

‘It kills me in the heart, how you are now,’ Sparrow couldn’t keep from saying. ‘It just ain’t like bein’ Frankie no more.’

‘That’s the hardest thing of all for me to be, Solly,’ Frankie
told him with a strange gentleness. ‘I’m gettin’ farther away from myself all the time. It’s why I have to have a charge so bad, so I can come back ’n be myself a little while again. But it’s a longer way to go every time. It keeps gettin’ harder ’n harder. It’s gettin’ so hard I can’t hardly afford it.’ He laughed thinly. ‘I can’t hardly afford to be myself no more, Solly, with the way Piggy-O is peggin’ the price up on me. I got to economize ’n be just Mr Nobody, I guess.’ He looked at Sparrow curiously. ‘Who
am
I anyhow, Solly?’

He really didn’t know any longer. From one day to the next, he no longer knew. For he answered himself in an oddly altered little voice, a voice Sparrow had never before heard. ‘Meet Sergeant McGantic, Solly – the guy they give the stripes to ’cause he got the golden arm. It’s all in the wrist ’n he got the touch, it’s why they had to give him the stripes. See them little red pinholes, Solly – it’s the new kind of stripes us sergeants are pinnin’ on the arm these days. The new way of doin’ things we got, you might call it. You know who I am? You know who you are? You know who
anybody
is any more?’

‘I don’t know, Frankie.’

‘Tell me just one thing you do know then.’

Sparrow watched closely to see whether Frankie was putting on a bit of an act, to get at something he still wanted to find out. It was hard to tell. ‘I’ll tell you if I know, Frankie,’ he offered.

‘Then tell me just this – why do some cats swing like this?’

Solly didn’t know that either. He didn’t know what to make of the answer any more than he’d known what to make of the question. Yet Frankie was laughing, weakly on and on, just as if he’d said something funny. While that naked arm looked far too white to have any gold left in its veins.

‘You know the heartaches, Solly, I’ll say that for you,’
Frankie took breath long enough to say. ‘You always knew the heartaches. Why don’t you learn the good kicks too?’ Then the weak laughter began again, with something almost convulsive in it now, as though he lacked the strength to laugh but somehow felt he had to – till it ran into tears of such a barbed despair that Sparrow called to him like calling to someone far away, ‘Be yourself, Frankie!’ For a second he thought he was going to have to slap him to bring him back.

Frankie came back to himself, brushed the sweat off his forehead with the back of his arm and began flattering Sparrow. The punk heard the false note clearly now. ‘It ain’t just knowin’ the heartaches you’re good for, Solly. You know how to do a thing, too. I’ll say that much for a kid like you.’ Cause you’re the one kid knows how to fix the old junkie when Old Junkie needs a little fix.’ He shook his head like a drunk. ‘Wh
oo
f! Old Junkie’s spinnin’ like never before. Hit the main stem ’n make me right.’

Across the disheveled bed a new deck lay scattered. ‘He must of been shufflin’ a few hands to hisself just to keep in shape,’ Sparrow deduced and told Frankie, ‘I don’t know if I can find it, Frankie, it ain’t my line of work.’ But felt Frankie’s hand, cold as a surgeon’s glove, guiding his fingers. ‘There. Press. Slow.
Now
.’

Frankie clenched his fist tightly to bring out the vein. Above the elbow a little inflamed knot began to point right at the needle. ‘Operation McGantic,’ Sparrow heard him murmur.

Sparrow saw the blood spray faintly, tingeing the morphine pink – and pressed while his own eyes went blind. ‘It feels like I’m puttin’ it right into your poor heart,’ he thought. As the needle came out a slow trickle of blood followed halfway to the elbow.

Frankie lay sprawled loosely with his eyes shuttered; but
with the first faint flush touching the pallor of his cheeks. As the pale morphine had been tinged by the suffering blood.

‘How’s my complexion?’ he asked teasingly, without opening his eyes at all.

‘Your complexion’s awright, Frankie. But you can’t deal on that stuff. Remember “Steady hand ’n steady eye. It’s all in the wrist ’n you got the touch”? Remember, Frankie?’

‘It’s all above the elbow now,’ Frankie answered, scratching his calf indolently. ‘I’m out of the slot,’ he assured Sparrow with a fresh confidence in his voice. The stuff was starting to hit, his eyes were dew-bright and the glow of health was on his cheeks. ‘Didn’t I tell you I got a chance to start beatin’ the tubs at a hundred-fifty a week? Krupa been askin’ around at the Musicians’ Club where can he get in touch with me, I guess some guys told him about that night at St Wenceslaus when I got everybody goin’ like fools the way I was in the groove. I may take it, I’ll have to see what he got.’ He went right into some little old tune or other, rapping his knees with his knuckles, tongue between his teeth and his neck waggling an imagined rhythm.

‘That’s the best way to do, Frankie,’ Sparrow agreed earnestly. ‘Don’t let them get you cheap.’ After all it’s quite a trick to lose your strength and get a better job into the bargain. ‘Maybe you could get me somethin’ to do with one of them orchester leaders,’ Sparrow offered his services as innocently as he was able. ‘It sort of looks like I’m in that line now anyhow.’

Frankie yawned hugely. ‘Come here ’n scratch my back.’ And while Sparrow scratched his back he turned and twisted, with an animal’s ice-cold joy. ‘I’ve said it a hundred times,’ he
told Sparrow after the punk had been permitted to leave off scratching at last, ‘this one time and I’ll kick it for keeps.’ He bent over to scratch his ankles and toes right to the nails.

‘And?’ Sparrow wanted to know.

Frankie looked up at him from where he bent his head over his shoeless feet. ‘I’m hooked, ain’t I?’

He sat up then, making a deck of the scattered cards in complete absent-mindedness, his hands straying blindly for the cards while his eyes searched, on the other side of the pane, for something far out upon the shoreless waters of the night.

‘I can’t do much for you in that line, Solly,’ he decided, still riffling the deck idly. ‘About the only thing I have open is a watcher’s job.’

‘A lookout, you mean, Frankie?’ It was time to start taking Frankie seriously again, he was coming down out of the clouds. ‘I’d sure like steerin’ better’n what I’m doin’ tonight. I’d rather have a square job than what I’m doin’ tonight.’

‘It’s not steerin’ exactly. It’s watchin’. Indian-watchin’, I think they call it. A little different but you’ll pick it up. It’s a new angle that’s just comin’ on.’

‘I’ll take anythin’, Frankie. Me ’n Vi ’r quits. Who’ll tell me what to do?’

‘Nothin’ to it, Solly. All you do is, first thing you get up tomorrow morning you climb that big hill they have out there ’n when you see the Indians comin’ you run right back down ’n tell the settlers. Nothin’ to it so long as you don’t fall asleep on the job.’

The light broke over Sparrow as the cheap gag was driven home. ‘I know,’ he admitted forlornly, ‘I listen to the radio sometimes myself.’ His face was peaked with disappointment as he waited now only for Frankie to pay him off for the delivery.

‘It’s your chance to tell him who rolled Louie that night,’ he told himself – and let the chance pass. What was the difference what Frankie thought any more? He rose to go.

‘Don’t go,’ Frankie begged him.

‘I got to,’ Sparrow realized, ‘I’m gettin’ that guilty feelin’ again, like the aces ’r gonna bust down the door.’

Without a warning Frankie leaned forward and slapped the punk squarely across the nose with the flat of the deck. The punk sat down. ‘What the hell
is
gettin’ into you, Frankie? I don’t have to take
that
off you.’

‘You got that comin’ for a long time, Solly.’

‘I tried to tell you once you got me wrong about Louie, Frankie. You wouldn’t listen. I wasn’t the guy got his roll. If I had we would of split like always. You can believe me ’r not.’

‘I know who got the roll now awright. But you still had it comin’.’

‘Awright – I ran ’n you got busted. I know I done bad then – but can’t you figure I got scared just like you done the night by Schwiefka’s hall? Can’t you figure what another department-store rap’d do to me, Frankie? I couldn’t even get paroled. Don’t that give me the right to get scared too?’

Frankie listened with his head moving a bit from side to side, unable to decide whether to listen a while longer or just to use the deck again. It had felt pretty good for a minute there. ‘It ain’t for that neither,’ he cut Sparrow short.

Sparrow watched the hand on the deck. ‘I won’t take another crack off you,’ he told Frankie quietly.

The hand drummed the deck a moment, thinking that over, then moved off the cards. ‘You want to
know
what for?’ Frankie demanded. And answered himself, ‘I’ll tell you what for.’