The Man With the Golden Arm (47 page)

Nobody laughed.

‘It’s the cocktail houah, cats,’ the high-yellow urged them all, ‘get drunk ’n
be
somebody.’

‘It’s better to be yourself, friend,’ Frankie thought mechanically, he’d been through that particular hope before. A pair of deadpan amber strippers waiting for a live one at the table beside his own purred softly in agreement.

The M.C. began a mock strip himself, down to a pair of lacy orange silk shorts, till some paid-by-the-shot-glass shill shouted, ‘Take ’em off, Mr Floor Show!’ And Mr Floor Show picked up the paid-in-full challenge by retorting, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t
dare!
’ And began an idiotic crooning with a wild backflinging of his head and a demented weaving of his arms. ‘Bless your little G strings,’ he called familiarly to the deadpan brass ankles waiting so quietly in the shadows, ‘you’re
so
sweet! And now we’ll have a little song entitled “Honey, If This Isn’t Love You’ll Have to Wait Till I Get More Sleep” – that’s right, we’re giving you the best show in the country. I don’t know about the city. And it’s all for youah benefit – most of you look like you need a benefit.’ And laughed with the lightest, most silvery sort of laugh to veil the whole wide gray world’s despair. ‘Get off youah hands! What youah want?
Blood?
’

Frankie got off his hands. ‘You tell ’em, Mr Floor Show,’ he applauded weakly; and drank on in the hope of somehow postponing the sickness. ‘Can’t afford to get sick now,’ he mourned the long-gone fiver.

‘I knew there was
somebody
out there,’ Mr Floor Show observed, squinting far over the little line of red-white-and-blue footlights, ‘I heard
breathing’
– and resumed his fluttering about in the orange shorts for want of anything better to do, like a crazed burlesque queen, pausing only to stamp his foot with a girlish petulance and assert, ‘I’ll have you know I’m every inch a man!’ Then, seeming suddenly to tire of
everything, began torturing himself in a voice full of a hoarse glee at its own pain: ‘Boop-de-oop-doop ’n razz-muh-tazz, kizz muh feet ’n kizz muh azz – interdoosin’ to you ouah supah-sulphous walkin’-talkin’ seeeepia doll, ouah tiny mite of dynamite –
Miss Dinah Mite!
Meet her ’n greet her! Come
out
, honey! Mello as a cello ’n merry as a berry – Boys! The strain from hernia!’ The three-piece band began beating it out while Miss Mite took over.

Yet the strange brown cats of the Kitten Klub all sat wanly smiling, like copper cats that never bled, whose blood was formed of others’ tears.

Copper cats out of some plastic jungle wherein only the neon kitten above the bar felt pain, only the Budweiser bottles sweated tears of joy, and only the monkeys overhead knew better.

the legend below the neon kitten commanded. Off and on, off and on, with a sort of metallic beggary unmatchable by any human panhandler.

An outsized octoroon venus began galloping about on spindle legs just to make her belly shake – it was distended as if with some malignant growth; her absurd finery flew behind her, she paused only to beg breathlessly:

Her G string was upheld by court plaster and a gilded cardboard crescent swung for some reason from her navel while she went into a convulsive series of bumps; like some dark Diamond Lil just fed on Spanish fly.

with the G string bounce-bounce-bouncing.

Frankie Machine squeezed his temples, to keep the panic down till it ebbed back down his nape. Leaving him a reasonless desire to go hurrying out through the snow to the nearest station, whatever the cost, in the hope of getting some sort of charge at County. ‘They
got
to give it to you when you’re really sick,’ he assured himself, ‘they can tell when a guy
got
to have it, doctors can tell, they ain’t like cops, they help a guy get to sleep.’

––and the ram-bam of the drums going into ‘Song of the Islands.’

Above the empty iron-banging din a waitress dropped a trayful of drinks. The shattering of the glass tinkled, in the sudden silence that followed, like an echo of soiled laughter along any soiled bar and Frankie applauded clumsily, numb with bar whisky and an utter weariness.

‘Tough it out, kid, tough it out,’ he tried to urge himself, feeling the first line of sweat forming along his forehead. But the whole business of escape seemed so hard, so useless, so endless and so long, a voice like another’s voice answered his anguished blood: ‘Tough it out for what? What for? What’s it all for anyhow?’

A brownskin buck feigning drunkenness bumped the edge of his table, upsetting his beer, then pretended to apologize by
wiping it all into Frankie’s lap with a blue silk handkerchief. Frankie stood up weaving. ‘What you up to, cousin?’

‘I wasn’t lookin’, man,’ the buck apologized, ‘I’m tryin’ to get my bearin’s, where the people are.’ He went off waving the silk handkerchief as if trying to dry it on the drifting smoke.

Then the noise came on again, the juke began, the singing seemed more shrill, the lights changed from a delicate nursery pink to a raw and bleeding scarlet so that the barflies’ faces beamed, one moment, like so many tawny-pink cooks in a Cream of Wheat ad and in the next were flushed by an apopleptic light as though caught, in the very instant of the hemorrhage that bathes the brain without warning, into so many cream-colored plastic horrors.

The monkeys above the clamor regarded each other in genuine fright, for the octoroon war horse was on the loose again, charging furiously about in a skirt of pale pink grass while Mr Floor Show pursued her playfully, bounding like a man trying to goose a butterfly and finally leaning over the piano to deal the pianist a blow as weak as his humor. ‘I could just
smaaash
you!’ In one corner somebody sniggered.

the war horse went into some two-year-old novelty tune,

‘We go till gangrene sets in!’ Mr Floor Show threatened
everyone with ferocious gaiety and under the curtain of perfume and smoke, under the pall of all their lives, poisoned by the shame they had somehow been taught to feel at not being white, their voices ceased altogether, the singing and the laughter ceased; and only the dead-flat whirring of the fans came on like a wind rising from the world they had left behind their tenement doors. In the sudden silence one of the brass ankles at the next table put her palm slantwise beneath her nose, sniffed once and said with prim pride: ‘This is
one
thing you don’t see
me
do’ and right outside the door someone smashed a bottle on the walk, the juke cried out, the music went on, the laughter picked up in the very teeth of that dead-flat warning wind.

While out of the years when the world had gone only half wrong the juke picked up a faded and raggedy tune.

Till the strange cats looked all around.

It was time to be going home, if he could just find out where one was. It was time for bed, time for a drink, time for a charge and time to give himself up. There was nothing left for Frankie Machine, with his hands pressed so hard to his temples, but the bottles behind the bar, the age-old monkeys above the bottles, and the voice of the wind, bringing snow, rain and sleet, down all the streets where the squadrols sought him.

‘Nobody can stand gettin’ this sick,’ Frankie told himself. ‘Nobody can stand gettin’ this sick ’n not havin’ no place to go.’

Afraid to stay and afraid to leave, afraid of those at the tables about him and wanting to fight them all, he sat on with his right hand trembling so that he had to use the left
to bring a glass of beer to his lips; he tried to keep the tiny stage in focus as he drank on.

A white girl with a mouth like a baby carp’s was trotting around up there as though being moved on strings, singing in a tinny little sing-song.

with three sets of lights and carrying the battery concealed in one hand. ‘Take ’em off, honey,’ someone called. ‘The war’s over!’

But all she did was to prance like a little circus pony with the light on her navel flickering weakly, like a symbol of all such purchased humanity: purchased, marked-down, remaindered and sold out.

In the uproar and the odor, in the heavy sweat and the crash of bottles, within the smash of the drums and Mr Floor Show’s incessant shrieking, watching the passion of the octoroon venus and studying Frankie Machine’s dead-cold despair, the two amber strippers sat wanly on and on.

Once one laughed restlessly while the other drank without pleasure. Idling over the amber glasses, both were careful, Frankie saw, to put the glasses down softly after drinking so as not to clink them vulgarly upon the table; both drank and put them down together, in some sort of cunning pact, then raised their brown eyes each to each.

And both sat wanly smiling.

the baby carp bawled to the neon cat.

and went up so high on ‘down’ that the neon kitten closed his eyes, drew in his ears and arched his back a bit to indicate his suffering. For only the neon cat felt pain and only the bottles wept small tears. Only the monkeys yearned for home.

While all sat wearily, wisely, wanly. All sat faintly smiling.

A brown and white chorus came out one by one, seemingly too indifferent toward each other to come out together, till there were five. Though each wore only slippers and a G string, all seemed overdressed, so studiously had their nakedness been donned. Each pore powdered, each taut pink nipple tinted with fingernail polish and dusted with some mauve talc, the armpits shaven and deodorized, each navel dusted and the hair swept back behind each small catlike ear.

The last one came out shading her eyes with her hand while bumping listlessly, as if half in shame. It was only the glare in her eyes and a general indifference to her public. When she’d bumped out of the glare she dropped her hands, wetted the fingertips with her tongue in a gesture Frankie knew so well that his hands came away from his temples – it took his heart in a single hot, tightening stitch and would not let the taut heart go and would not let him breathe. She daubed each naked nipple moistly, threw back her head and began stroking the hair coiled on her nape in a slow and sensual indolence. He brushed his shot glass off the table and stood up.

Molly could not see him weaving against the table out there in the dark while he was trying to understand to himself
whether it was time for him to leave, before she saw him, or time to go to her before he lost her again.

He felt a sickening sort of shame, this was just the way he wished not to be in finding her again: broke, sick and hunted. What was it someone had said of her long ago? ‘She’s the kind got the sort of heart you can walk in ’n out of with boots on.’

Then the act was done and she was gone, they were all gone as if they hadn’t been there at all. As though the whole act had been a kickback from an overcharge, something he’d formed in his brain out of beer fumes and smoke.

Yet went weaving heavily through smoke and fumes toward the tiny dressing room offstage.

Wearing army brogans on his feet.

All that day, aslant the window, a long-forgotten, tangled black aerial wire touched continually at the pane as if Poor Peter had at last found another game than that of planting paper daisies to pass his days. He was jerking it from the roof just to taunt her – who else would be up there in such weather, with the wind like a whip and the ice on the walks? She turned on the radio to muffle its constant tap-tap-tapping; but all she could get was some fire-eating preacher offering her a choice of salvation or brimstone and even that was better than the tapping. What troubled her most was that, even when the wind seemed still, yet the wire tapped on.

She pried the sash up an inch with a shoehorn. But it dangled on just out of her reach. So she shut the window, realizing it was just one more trick they were playing on her.

And that Vi was no better than the rest of them any more. For all her fine talk about poor man’s pennies, the way she was carrying on with the Jailer, it seemed she thought more of landlord’s nickels these days.

Vi and the Jailer and that Frankie, leaving without so much
as a word of good-by, all he ever thought of was himself. The preacher, droning eternally on and on, began hinting certain things about certain people, he was worse than any of them and in sudden fitlike fury she pulled the radio off the dresser, wheeled into the hall and dropped it over the rail without so much as looking to see whether someone might be coming up the stairs to catch damnation on the point of his skull.

She heard the crash below and the Jailer’s startled voice: ‘Who t’rows t’ings?’ The set had missed him by inches.

‘It’s that priest talkin’ against me again,’ Sophie explained, knowing she’d done just right, and wheeled back into the room, locking the door behind her. Then called, to answer the Jailer’s angry rapping, ‘You’ll all get just what you got coming! I’m giving it to all of you now!’

There was no further knocking at her door all that endless afternoon. Only, toward evening, the rapping of Jailer’s hammer where he was putting a couple final raps to the radio. ‘He’s always better at knockin’ somethin’ apart than puttin’ somethin’ together anyhow,’ Sophie told herself with pleasure.