Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

Frankie rose, handed a dime to Molly, and Drunkie John slapped it out of her hand.

‘ I pervide fer her,’ he told Frankie. ‘Who sent for you?’ He really wanted to know. He wanted to know so badly that his head waggled weakly as he asked; and one shove, anyone could see, would send him sprawling. Frankie returned, red in the face from more than whisky, to his own table.

Down in the sawdust Molly saw the dime and studied it while Johnny studied her, waiting for her to make a move for it.

‘Go ahead,’ he encouraged her, ‘you got no more damned pride left than to go pickin’ up dimes off tavern floors – go ahead, the people know about you awready anyhow, what you are. They ain’t forgot the time you danced around here with your fatal ass stickin’ out – go on, let the people see how low a woman can get. It makes a man feel mighty fine, I can tell you, to watch his girl crawlin’ on her hands ’n knees in a whisky tavern for a dime some cheap cardsharp tosses her. Go ahead, don’t mind me , you’re so low now you’re two floors under the basement.’ He was trying to work up his anger like a man pumping a dry well; she touched him with real gentleness.

‘Don’t excite yourself, Johnny.’

With the pointed toe of the dancing pump he kicked at her ankle, skinning the defenseless flesh. She turned and, with no further word, walked toward the door, bending once to rub the ankle as she went.

At the door bald Antek, with a plumber’s plunger in his hand, blocked Drunkie John from following her onto the street. ‘All I ask is you give her a head start,’ he told Johnny. ‘I’d give a dog that much.’

‘You callin’ my Molly a dawg?’

‘No. I’m just calling you one.’

‘That’s better, that’s all right,’ Johnny assured him, actually gratified. ‘I don’t care what you call me . I’m no good. But that girl is a queen, there’s nothin’ she don’t deserve: I just hope I never catch her.’

‘I think what you need is a steady job hustlin’ pins in the bowlin’ alley,’ Antek judged him. ‘All that’s wrong with you is you don’t know what to do with yourself so you take picks on that girl. Why she puts up with you you’ll never make me understand.’ He let John pass to the street at last.

It was true. He was simply a man who didn’t know what to do with himself, for he didn’t yet know who he was. It’s sometimes easier to find a job than to find oneself and John hadn’t yet gotten around to doing the first. How could he know who he was? Some find themselves through joy, some through suffering and some through toil. Johnny had till now tried nothing but whisky. A process which left him feeling like somebody new every day.

There were days when he haunted the bookies without a dime in his pocket but with a pair of street-carnival binoculars, a child’s toy strung by a cord about his throat: a big-time horse player but business had kept him in the city, he’d just dropped in to see how his stable was doing out there at Hawthorne.

Other days he sat at Antek’s with a golf bag containing a single club between his scrawny knees. He had just come from the links, it had been too hot out there, he’d had to quit on the seventh hole.

In his room hung a yellowing photograph, thumbtacked to the wall, of a slack-jawed youth in loose black wrestler’s trunks in the attitude of an advancing wrestler. He had been a wrestler in his youth, he would have the nerve to say while standing under this image, the proof lying in the signature below the picture. The photograph was without doubt of himself; no other could boast of a mouth as loose as the trunks themselves, those billiard-cue arms and that face of an underfed wanderoo.

He was many men and no man at all. He was a hysterical little bundle of possibilities that could never come true. He was a mouth at the end of a whisky glass, a knock-kneed shuffle in dancing pumps. Pumps – ‘for when I used to win them marathons all the time’ – kept with the semblance of a shine by a girl with a heart-shaped face and the wonder gone out of her eyes.

‘She got too big a heart, that girl,’ Antek explained of Molly when John had left. ‘A guy can walk into her heart with army boots on.’

Frankie and Sparrow sat silently a moment after Antek had passed. Until Frankie said at last, ‘There ain’t many hearts like that no more, Sparrow.’

‘Sophie’s gonna be real worried about you, Frankie,’ Sparrow chose the moment to remind the dealer. Frankie rose and pushed back his chair as though he thought it might somehow be Molly Novotny to whom he was going home tonight.

To the tenants of 1860 West Division Street Landlord Schwabatski was seldom referred to as the landlord. He was Schwabatski the Jailer. Though his only uniform was a pair of faded army fatigues and his only weapon a hammer with which he pretended, from time to time, to repair a loose tread on the stairs. To prove he really was the landlord he had hung a sign above his desk on the second floor:

QUIET

Or out you go too

But both the desk and the sign seemed somehow lopsided. The whole vast frame rooming house, and Schwabatski as well, seemed lopsided. If the desk leaned a bit to one side it only went to show that the Jailer was no more skilled in carpentry than at playing landlord.

He certainly appeared the kind of man more likely to be found behind cell bars than the one turning the key in the lock. Yet he had to be a door-shutter and key-turner for guests who insisted, summer or winter, on leaving doors ajar. It was true that most of the rooms were small and close; but Schwabatski felt it wasn’t always for lack of air that tenants left doors a bit open.

‘Maybe you mean to have only a little air all right,’ he would argue for understanding, ‘but always somebody thinks it’s an invitation and then comes big fight, up and down, and who pays policemens for me then? If you want to make carryings-on, please do in family way, door always closed .’

‘I s’ppose I have to get dressed ’n go down ’n set on the curb like some bum to get a breath of air,’ some stray would huff at him. But the strays were forever huffing and the Jailer’s argument never varied.

‘You want to go out, go out. But you’re in, don’t be just half in – be all in. You ain’t in till door is close . A old man like me can’t be run up, down stairs every five minutes, see what goes on. Got work to do.’

Schwabatski had work to do all right. He had a dim-witted, oversized, twenty-one-year-old of a son whose sole and simple pleasure it was to plant paper daisies in the cracks of the dark old stairs. Schwabatski never gave up hope of being able to teach the boy carpentry; so brought him each day, with hammer and pencil and nail, to watch the way in which a broken stair should be repaired.

The old man’s patience was inexhaustible. How many times had that same tread been pulled out and the work begun again because the boy’s attention wandered from the hammer’s tapping to his precious daisies? Yet the boy’s patience surpassed even his father’s. He waited as hopefully for the daisies to take root as the old man hoped for some light to come into Peter’s brain. Poor Peter – he touched each daisy to his heavy underlip before each planting: he prayed for rain to come to the dark stairwell.

There was nothing seriously wrong with the boy’s understanding, the old man felt. It was just that, whenever the boy began to get the idea of the hammer and nails, one of those strays would start some uproar or other and hammer and nails and stair and son would have to be forgotten while he rushed to make peace at his own price before the Saloon Street aces made it at theirs.