Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

The question wakened Rumdum. He rose, stretched his flanks, licked the cat tolerantly while it arched its back in feigned fright, and shuffled into the dim blue gleam cast by the juke box’s dreaming glow.

Frankie felt a choking sensation as he surveyed this scandalous-looking freak. The dog was both bloated and ravenous-looking.

‘He’s a real pedigreed, Frankie,’ Sparrow asserted, reading Frankie’s dismay, ‘a Polish airedale, sort of,’ n every crawlin’ hair of him mine. I wouldn’t trust him to nobody but you.’

‘I’ll say he’s a pedigreed – a pedigreed trampo. I couldn’t keep a brewery horse like that unless I want to go to work days too.’

‘He’ll bring back empties, Frankie. I got him trained how to do it.’ He whistled softly and the dog ambled toward him, one blear red eye showing like a warning signal in a fog – Frankie felt the cold and dripping nose shoved into his hand and heard the great hound break wind discreetly, then hiccough apologetically.

‘Here, beauty,’ Sparrow ordered, and crouched with an empty in his hand for the hound to retrieve. Rumdum got the bottle securely between his jaws and lurched dutifully about in an erratic circle, like a circus pony with a fixed idea, for Frankie’s admiration.

‘He’s one fourt’ retriever is why he does that so good,’ the punk explained.

‘Yeh.’ N three fourths stewbum,’ Frankie added. ‘He thinks he’s earnin’ a drink on the house.’

‘That ain’t nothin’ to be ashamed of, is it?’ Sparrow reproached him.

‘Maybe if he had a home he’d settle down,’ Frankie guessed hopefully.

‘Maybe if I did I would too,’ Sparrow agreed wistfully, thinking of the Division Street kennel he called a room. Although he had abandoned his dog-stealing racket, save for an occasional foray ‘just to keep in shape,’ that room still smelled of the transients it had sheltered in the days before he had met Frankie. The room still held an assortment of secondhand dog collars, stolen dog tags, moldy muzzles and greasy leashes.

He remembered; while Rumdum went around and around, breaking wind politely with every step.

All it took, in the old days, to place an order with Sparrow for anything from a Pekingese to a sled dog was a fifty-cent deposit. ‘It ain’t that your credit ain’t red-hot wit’ me,’ he apologized to a client, ‘it’s all account of the hamburger shortage. You say you want to buy me a drink?’

He had never wheedled more than two shots out of a customer before he’d be on his casual way to the nearest hamburger stand. It had never occurred to the punk to go to a butchershop. ‘What’s the hamburg stands for then? Besides, I like the fresh-ground kind myself. Leave the onions off one.’ He was fond of onions himself but had learned that some dogs, particularly chows, disdained them. Toward dark he would start tiptoeing down alleys, his eyes just over the back-yard fences and the single onionless hamburger in his hand.

‘I knew the alleys pretty good when I had my dog-stealin’ route,’ he told Frankie now, ‘I knew all the best windows, them days,’ n the quick short cuts to get there, account I run a peepin’-tom route before I caught on to how to snatch hounds. That’s how I got to know the yards that had dogs in ’em ’n the ones that just had signs sayin’ they did but they really didn’t.’

He would unlatch a gate quietly in the violet twilight and silently permit the hound to start snooping anxiously for the hamburger’s scent. One glance would tell him whether the hound was bribable: he had yet to meet man or dog that wasn’t. The animal’s snout would trail the meat around the corner and up to the very door of the drafty old five-story frame tenement he called home.

Coaxed five flights up, an amiable puppy could be scooped up like a tired baby and softly encouraged to forget his past. But Sparrow had never forgiven the cynical, double-crossing spitz that had consumed three whole hamburgers, pickle and all, before he’d gotten it forty feet off its home grounds – then had sunk its teeth in his hand and set up a hysterical barking as if Sparrow had bitten it, bringing its mistress onto the punk’s heels. He’d spent that night in the Saloon Street Station booked for dog theft until Record Head had advised the woman to drop charges and Sparrow to ‘stay in the light where we can see what you’re up to after this.’

Sparrow had planned to poison the dog’s mistress after that one; but had ultimately contented himself with poisoning the spitz.

Once inside the room, any hound, regardless of pedigree, had become half drugged by the odors of the hundred breeds that had preceded him there. That close little room had never lost the special smell of shanghaied dogflesh: the captives had snuggled down on the shedded hair of some wayward collie to snooze like lotus-eaters. Sparrow would remove the collar and tag, substitute a less incriminating one and go for the shears. By dint of ingenuous hair clipping, a daub of black paint there and daub of white there, French poodles had come to impersonate ‘Cocky Spaniards’ and Irish pointers had become ‘daubered-up pinchers.’

A two-month-old poodle would waken looking like a debauched terrier: adhesive over a telltale marking on the left foot, dark circles under the eyes and the tip of one ear in the sink. Such a betrayed pup had passed for any breed the market might demand.

Sparrow had sold them, crossbred them, clipped their tails until each had emerged, no matter how many mongrel strains had brought him forth, a ‘pedigreed blood-typed turo-breed.’

His masterpiece, the unholy freak now making circles in the hope of a short beer, was a cross between ‘an English sheepy ’n a Division Street beagle – only I call him a square-snapper for short. What he’s best for is catchin’ squirrels ’n shakin’ the dirty walnuts out of ’em,’ the punk explained earnestly. ‘In his native hab’tat you got to have a dog like this if you’re out to pick up a sack of walnuts. But the trouble is he’s just trained to chase them one kind of squirrels ’n they’re gettin’ kind of rare over here account of the climate changin’ so fast. So he don’t have nothin’ to do but hang around taverns ’n wait for the climate to change back a little.’

Certainly Rumdum was the luckiest hound in Chicago. For he alone, of all the city’s countless dogs, had received Professor Saltskin’s postgraduate course in square-snapping. He had studied at the feet of the philosophers who lounged out their lives on the curb in front of the Tug & Maul waiting for a live one. He had earned his degree by snapping suspiciously at all uniformed toilers: mailmen, milkmen, Good Humor men on bicycles, streetcar conductors and anyone carrying a lunch bucket – everyone, indeed, who didn’t smell of beer or unemployment. Rumdum could tell a square with nostrils so clogged he had once mistaken molasses for beer.

‘He got a degree what I call D.D.S. – Doctor of Dirty Square-snapping,’ Sparrow liked to boast. ‘Here’s a dog got a better start in life than most humans. I named him Rumdum when he was two mont’s old ’n told him straight out, “I ain’t givin’ you no water ’cause I don’t want to raise you prej’diced against somethin’ better.” Too many dogs get offsteered onto water right off, they don’t get no chance to make up their own minds what they really like best, beer ’r water ’r just plain whisky. The people should let a helpless beast make up his own opinions, otherwise it’s croolty to our weak-minded friends, like takin’ advantage of little birds, they ain’t even learned how to fly yet. Today you could put Rummy in the bat’tub ’n he keeps his dirty snout up so’s he don’t have to taste that other stuff.