Nelson Algren - The New Black Mask Quarterly (№ 1)

“Those are letters my sister received from Abe Steinmetz when he was serving time in Jackson prison for Eckleberg’s murder,” she said. “In them he explains how Leo Goldblum paid him to confess to the murder. He promised him he wouldn’t serve more than two years and that there would be lots more waiting when he got out. Only he never got out. He was stabbed to death in a mess room brawl six months before his parole.

“I was the one who was dating Abe, Mr. Walker; not my sister. I was seeing him at the same time I was seeing Leo. He swore her to secrecy in the letters, believing I wouldn’t understand until he could explain things in person. The money would start our marriage off right, he said. But instead of waiting I married Leo.”

She wet her lips. I lit a Winston and gave it to her. She inhaled deeply, her fingers fidgeting and dropping ash on the carpet. “My sister kept the secret all these years. It wasn’t until she died and I opened her safety deposit box and read the letters—” She broke off and mashed out the cigarette in a copper ashtray atop the bureau. Do I have time to get dressed and put on lipstick before the police arrive? They never even gave Leo time to grab a necktie whenever they took him in for questioning.”

I told her to take as much time as she needed. At the bedroom door she paused. “I don’t regret it, you know. Maybe I wouldn’t have been happy married to Abe. But when I think of all those wasted years — well, I don’t regret it.” She went through the door.

Waiting, I pocketed the letters, shook the last cigarette out of my pack, and struck a match. I stared at the flame until it burned down to my fingers.

He had all the handguns in the suitcase except one or two.

I dropped the match and vaulted to the bedroom door. Moving too damn slowly. I had my hand on the knob when I heard the shot.

The temperatures soared later in the month, and with them the crime statistics. The weatherman called it the hottest July on record. The newspapers had another name for it, but it had already been used.

Though he never wrote mystery stories, Nelson Algren shared with hard-boiled detective writers a fascination for the inhabitants of the backstreets. His ability to understand his grotesque characters allowed him to sympathize without sentimentalizing them. “Say a Prayer for the Guy ” combines two of his favorite subjects — saloons and poker. This uncollected story first appeared in 1958 — nine years after The Man with the Golden Arm.

Nelson Algren died in 1981 at the age of seventy-nine.

That game began as it always began, the drinkers drank what they always drank. The talkers said what they always said, “Keep a seat open for Joe.”

Frank, John, Pete, and I, each thinking tonight might be the night he’d win back all he’d lost last week to Joe. Yes, and perhaps a little more.

Joe, poor old Joe, all his joys but three have been taken away. To count his money, play stud poker, then secretly to count it once more — and the last count always the best — that there is more there than before is no secret.

Joe, old Joe, with his wallet fat as sausage and his money green as leaves. Who needs sports, cats, them like that? That call for mixed drinks and blame God if they’ve mixed too much? Who needs heavy spenders, loudmouth hollerers, them like that? Drinking is to make the head heavy, not the tongue loose. Drinking is for when nobody shows up to play poker. You want to make the feet light? Go dancing. Dance all night.

“Here come Joe,” Phil, the bartender, told us, and sure enough, here he came. With his wallet full.

“Joe, you don’t look so good,” John told him as soon as he sat down, “you look so peckid.”

“I don’t feel so good,” the old man told us, “I feel peckid.”

“You feel peckid, take it easy,” advised Frank.

I put a dime in the juke, all on Perry Como. I don’t care what Ferry sings, so long as he sings. The box coughed once and gave me back my dime. It doesn’t like Perry. Well, it was my dime. I put it right back. I like Perry.

This time it didn’t cough. It picked Elvis Presley singing All Shook Up. I got nothing against Elvis. It was just that it was my dime.

But that Frank began humming and shaking along with the song as if it had been his money.

Then the game went as it always went, the drinkers drank what they always drank, the talkers said what they always said, “Looks like Joe’s night again.”

Yet, just as Joe reached for the deck, as the juke cried out I Need Your Love , everything went strange.

The juke coughed on a note, and went on coughing, how it does when someone leans against it. I saw Joe’s hands shuffling, but he shuffled too slow. A red deuce twisted out of the deck and dropped to the floor like a splash of blood. Joe fell forward onto the table, without a gasp, without a sound.

Up jumped Frank, the first to realize. “Joe! Wake up!” He seized Joe’s wrists and began massaging them. I opened the old man’s collar and his head flopped like a rooster’s. O, I didn’t like the looks of things in the least. Now I wanted the juke to play anything.

“Please wake up,” Frank pleaded. “Old friend! My one true friend!”

But his one true friend didn’t hear.

So we lifted Joe, old Joe, onto the long glass of the shuffleboard. We lay him down gently under the lights that say GAME COMPLETED. Frank began to massage his heart.

“I saw something wrong the second he sat down,” John boasted. “I told him.”

“Now you look a little peckid yourself,” I told him. He didn’t like that.

“You typewriter pounder,” he told me, “how some clay you look,” and drew back his lips in a grin almost as bad as Joe’s.

“How you look, too, someday, old dummy John,” little Pete suddenly took my part, and stretched his mouth back and made a horrible face, so that he looked even worse than Joe. Then he ducked under the table to gather the cards.

“Give up,” I told Frank, “if he comes to now, he’d be an idiot the rest of his days. When the breath stops the brain starts to melt, right that same second.” It was something I’d read somewhere.

“That would be all right,” Pete said from under the table, “maybe that way we’d win some of our money back.”

“He was my one friend, my only friend,” Frank reminded us, and went right on massaging. Yet more in sorrow than in hope of winning back his friend. He didn’t give up till the pulmotor squad arrived. How they found out I still don’t know. I think they just stopped in for a drink on the way home from some job and found another.

They tossed a coin, and the one who lost hauled the inhalator over to the shuffleboard.

“One side, buddy,” he told Frank, but our Frank stood his ground. After all, he’s from this neighborhood.

“Let him try, too, Frank,” I told him. “We stand for fair play.” Actually it wasn’t fair play I wanted to see so much. It was just that it had been some time now since anyone raised anyone from the dead and I wanted to be on hand if it happened again.

But that Frank, he wouldn’t give up. He went to the other side of the shuffleboard, yet he kept his hand on the old man’s heart. I figured he figured that, if the old man did come around, he’d get at least half the credit. If he had we would have given him all of it. After all, he’s from this neighborhood.

“If you’d stop blowing cigar smoke in his face,” the fireman told me, “he’d stand a better chance.”

“Where does it say NO SMOKING?” I asked him to show me. Why should I take stuff off him ?