The Man With the Golden Arm (41 page)

‘I didn’t know I was one of the kids any more,’ Frankie confessed in real bewilderment. ‘How can I be when I ain’t
even workin’ nowheres?’ He was filled with an aching drowsiness, but he was back on the ground.

‘You ain’t said nothin’ about wantin’ a job,’ Zygmunt decided, ‘Schwiefka says you walked out on him. But if you want to go back dealin’ Super’ll find you a loose slot to fill in.’

‘How can I be settin’ in a slot ’n settin’ in the bucket too?’ Frankie wanted to know.

‘You ain’t gonna be settin’ in the bucket,’ Zygmunt told him firmly, ‘you’re gonna cop out for this deal tonight. You’re gonna tell the judge you’re a user but it’s the first time. It’s no felony, Frankie. Not the first time. It’s a misdemeanor is all. Super’ll take care of that.’

‘Will Super take care of Solly too?’ Frankie asked with a long sense of regret. He’d given the punk a bad time all right.

‘The punk is a different case,’ Zygmunt advised his client sternly.

‘Maybe it’s none of my business,’ Frankie told Zygmunt when they paused on Ashland for the lights to change, ‘but I can tell Bednar if it’s the guy who pushes the junk around a certain corner he’s lookin’ for, he ain’t got him. All the punk ever done, since he took that bad fall by Gold’s, is steer guys into Schwiefka’s.’

There was a queer little silence. Zygmunt seemed to be trying to swallow something that wouldn’t quite go down.

Whatever it was, he got it down. Zygmunt could put anything down. ‘He delivered the stuff, that’s all the captain needs. He been waitin’ to get it on the punk a long time now.’

‘He certainly picked a funny night for it,’ Frankie brooded, dissatisfied with Zygmunt without knowing why. ‘Seems like he didn’t want to pinch the true peddler at all.’ He was groping through an uphill darkness toward some door that
must
be there; yet with an increasing feeling, the closer he came to it, of being hopelessly trapped. ‘Seems like what he wanted was the punk – with somethin’ that can’t be cut down to a misdemeanor.’ Cause if it was Pig he wanted all he had to do was pick him up, Bednar knows who the peddler is as well as you ’r me.’

‘You’re cuttin’ in too close, Dealer,’ Zygmunt warned him softly. ‘Why don’t you try to get some sleep? We’ll talk it all out in the morning. You ain’t yourself tonight.’ Frankie felt a touch at his sleeve so light he wasn’t sure whether it was the Prospector or the wind.

In front of the yellow door with the red tin 29 nailed to the wood, Zygmunt shook Frankie’s hand and counseled him warmly, ‘Don’t worry, Dealer. You still got friends.’

He had said something true at last. In his heart Frankie knew he still had friends. Two of them.

One who was lost somewhere beneath the web of the Lake Street El; and another lost behind bars.

Sophie was sleeping in the chair beside the window. The clock’s hands lay like a single horizontal cue across its face: a quarter to three. He fell across the bed without waking her.

He had been sleeping scarcely an hour when he sensed someone had just called up to him from the hall. But all the familiar sounds of night were missing below. He lay listening for the beating of the clock beside the cross.

The clock had stopped, he read its hands in the phosphorescent crucifix’s glow, right-angled now precisely upon the hour: three o’clock in the morning.

With no child’s voice down the steep dark stair nor one lonesome drunk singing out from the one long bar below.

By the glare of the great double-globed arc lamp filtering through the dark and battered shade he saw that Sophie had
left the chair at last and in its place had left a doll, some sort of mangy-looking straw-stuffed monkey of the kind that is won at street carnivals. Over its eyes and below them some mimic had painted in shadows of a purple harlotry with lipstick or rouge: the eyes surveyed the room gravely through its livid yet somehow dignified little mask. Like those of a child whose face, seared by disease, accepts the horror it reads in the eyes of others as its rightful heritage.

Pretending unconcern for its unwavering regard, he pulled the combat jacket’s collar up about his neck – and saw of what it was so terribly ashamed: the rip in his sleeve was still torn. Molly had broken her promise to sew it after all. Even the stripes on the sleeve seemed tattered. For he himself felt so frayed. Small wonder the thing in the chair felt ashamed of him. It wished him to be better dressed hereafter, always to be on time everywhere and not to be seen talking on corners at all hours of the night to people others didn’t even recognize at high noon.

‘I’m going to Stash’s New Year’s party,’ he apologized.

Of course everyone had already left the hall. Except a woman sleeping, head heavily upon her hands, below the sign that read NO REFUNDS. When she raised her head he saw it was Molly, drunk as always. Drinking all day and drunk once more.

She must be back with John, he heard the wind pick up in the street. Heard himself call some name in sleep and across his brain the dream flowed back like the flow of a wide wave over sand.

A faded trinket of a hat, topped by two paper daisies and soiled by a decade of free beers and dollar-a-minute love, lay beneath Molly’s soiled hand: the hand of an aging woman. Someone had scattered a handful of change, halves and quarters and dimes and one silver dollar, beside the hat. Louie had forgotten his change – the
hat, the hand, the daisies and the dollar were all so darkly soiled.

He knew she had been waiting for him here for ever so long. For news of some new hope. And he had come to her, as always, broke and hunted. Broke, beat and hunted, needing her help. So touched the paper daisies just to please her.

When she raised her eyes he hardly knew her, so careworn had she become, and a nameless regret touched him because she followed his fingers with her own with such ineffable tenderness, not blaming him, even now, for the way he’d made everything turn out for her after all.

‘Them flowers been beat out for some time,’ she apologized for the daisies.

‘You been a beat-out flower yourself awhile, looks like, Molly-O,’ he told her gently so that by his tone she would understand it made no real difference: she would always be a flower to him.

‘We only bloom once,’ she told him in a voice that sorrowed because it wished for nothing any more except that she might bloom just once for him again.

Then tapped his fingers too familiarly. ‘Buy me one short beer, sport, I’m on my final uppers.’ And lifted the sole of her shoe to show him she wore only a pair of bowling shoes, still marked, in chalk, with the price it had once cost to rent them for a single hour: 10¢. With both bows so neatly tied, though the soles were worn to the ball of the foot and a line of dirt encircled the naked ankle like a chain.

‘I think you turned out to be one of them kind after all,’ he reproved her.

‘I always was one of them kind except with you,’ she admitted cheerfully and from somewhere the other side of the wall a low, agonized laugh, hoarse and significant, made him feel that some young girl was being either transported with rapture or murderously beaten in there.

‘That’s the other side of the wall, poor thing,’ he heard Molly telling him, ‘he does that to her every night, some nights it’s worse’n others. Some nights, though, there ain’t a sound – that’s when it’s worst of all.’

‘Does
what
to her?’ Frankie asked with a certain fear.

Molly looked up at him with a dumb appeal, like a beaten animal’s. ‘There ain’t words for some things any more, Frankie,’ she told him with an effort. ‘There ain’t no key to
that
room and all sorts hear about it. They come in at any hour at all ’n do whatever they want with her – she don’t seem to care for nothin’ since you went away like that.’ The fingers upon his own were chilled. It must take a whole lifetime for a woman’s fingers to grow that cold, he thought as they listened together to the silence from the other side of the wall.

There that tortured laugh had rung. And Frankie understood slowly. ‘It’s true. It’s worse now when it’s still.’

So wakened to the silence on his own dark walls and Sophie’s chill fat hand flat upon his own.

His own dark walls where a battered clock still beat the listening hours out. And an empty wheelchair stood beside a dark and battered shade. ‘It’s worse when it’s still,’ he repeated, wading heavily toward shore through the ebbing shallows of sleep.

The radiator began squealing as the heat strove to drive the night air out of the coils, like an uncovered child crying with sudden cold.

Coming out of the coils of his dream, with only a faint trace of morphine lingering along the edges of the brain, Frankie dismissed his nightmare for the more imminent one being woven, by hands as hard to grasp as those of any dream, about his waking hours.

He wrapped his shoulders in a blanket and sat by the window overlooking the abandoned tracks. ‘It’s Louie that
Record Head got on his mind awright,’ he decided with an odd lack of dread at the realization.

Somewhere a single warning bell, by dock or crosslight or bridge, yapped like a farm dog far away and went yammering into nothingness till the velvet dark surged back.

No, it hadn’t been any accident that it had been the punk to whom Pig had passed the bottle. No accident, either, that Bednar had let him walk out of the station so easily while holding the punk so hard.

‘It ain’t the punk he wants, that’s plain enough.’ Nobody needed any punk that badly. ‘All Record Head needs him for is to testify up on who slugged Louie. Clearin’ that one up’ll get Super off Record Head’s neck.’ But how much pressure could the punk stand? How long would he be able to stand being wakened in the middle of the night and wheeled to a different station two nights a week without being booked in any?

‘He either got to take a rap for peddlin’ or finger me. He got to see it’s his turn to take a rap for me like I took one for him. Or he got to cry off.

‘Solly said he run from those irons before he had a chance to think,’ Frankie brooded. Well, now the kid was going to get all the time in the world to get things clear in his head. He would have to see it, Bednar wouldn’t be able to move until Solly saw it as clearly as the captain. As clearly as Frankie himself saw it now.

‘I got to sweat it out till I hear what the punk does,’ Frankie cautioned himself. ‘Settin’ my bond at a hundred bucks – it’s almost like the man
wants
me to jump bond.’

There’d always be time to jump it. If he ran now, leaving Zygmunt to forfeit the hundred, he’d have to stay on the run. It would be the super’s c-note Zygmunt had put up, he wouldn’t be able to go back to work on Division Street till he’d squared that hundred.

While Bednar would have captain’s men looking in every
back-room slot on the Near Northwest Side for a dealer with needle marks on his arm and a slight squint in his eye.

He caught a picture of himself, wearing a little blond mustache and evening clothes, beating the drums with a big-name band on one of the revolving stages he’d seen in short features at the Pulaski – taking the bobby soxers’ applause with Carmen Bolero. ‘I’ll call myself Jack Duval ’r somethin” – the fantasy collapsed of its own weight and he straightened himself out with bitter counsel. ‘A better name’d be Jack McGantic.’

Someone turned on the water down the hall and all the second-floor faucets chirped at once, like so many crickets in a row.

It was too soon to run. For if the punk could take the punch there would be no need of running at all. He’d be clean of everything but possession of a hypo and it would be up to Zygmunt to put in the fix for that. If he ran too soon the game was lost before that last card had been dealt. ‘It’s that last card that counts,’ he recalled.

Yet his heart was running already.

Down some rickety backstreet fire escape, his feet in heavy army brogans feeling, step by step, for the iron leading downward into some basement doorway, down any old dead-end alley at all. Headlong and heartsick down into any dark-curtained sanctuary where no one could find him at all.

No one but Sergeant McGantic.

It was always December in the query room. A light like a mustiness left over from another century filtered through the single window, far above, too high for anyone but a fireman to wash. It had been so long since it had been cleaned that, even on summer noons with the sun like a brass bell across pavement and rooftop and wall, the light sifted down here
with a chill autumnal hue. It was always December in the query room.

When someone yanked the cord of the unshaded night bulb suspended from the ceiling like an inverted question mark – it had once held a gas flare instead of a Mazda – shadows would leap from the corners in a single do-or-die try for the window; only to subside and swing awhile with the bulb’s slow swinging.

Then the wooden benches along the walls, where so many outcasts had slept, would be lit by a sort of slow, clocked lightning till the bulb steadied and fastened its tiny feral fury upon the center of the room like a single sullen and manic eye. To burn on there with a steady hate. Till morning wearied and dimmed it away to nothing more than some sort of little old lost gray child of a district-station moon, all its hatred spent.

It was not so much a room as a passage wherein were conveyed the pursued, by squadrol, panel wagon and Black Maria, out of the taverns, into the cells and thence swiftly down all the narrowing corridors of tomorrow.

Belonging, as it did, to no one and everyone, a place through which all passed and not one stayed, no one knew what it really looked like. Not even Record Head could have told its color, not even men who had confessed premeditated murder in it could have said whether its ceiling was low or high. Yet exactly as in the cells below, idlers wrote upon its walls:
This is my first affair. So please be kind.
Never once seeing how the walls upon which they wrote had been hallowed by pain. Only that bleak autumnal light, that had drifted down on so much anguish, told how these walls had been thus made holy.

For these were the very walls men meant when they said of another that he had his back to the wall. Here it was that they put their stubborn necks hard up against the naked
brick, lied first to the right and then to the left, denying everything, explaining with scorn, swearing truth was truth and all falsehood wicked: and every word, from the very first burning oath, one long burning lie.