Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

‘You better,’ Louie counseled him, ‘you’re likely to get so hungry around one o’clock you won’t be able to steal enough for another fix.’

Louie busied himself over the little gas plate in the corner and didn’t look around till he heard the dealer move. Frankie was swaying but he was on his feet and he’d make it fine, all night. All night and maybe the whole week end. It was hard to tell with these joy-poppers. ‘That stuff cost me more than the last batch,’ he said indifferently.

‘I know,’ Frankie grinned, ‘you told me,’ sounding bored while he used a dish towel on his chest beneath the soiled undershirt. ‘Keeps goin’ up all the time, like a kite with the string broke off.’ His eyes were growing heavy, the towel slipped out of his fingers and caught under his arm, hanging there like a flag at half-mast. The junkies’ flag of truce, to guard him as he slept. There beneath a single bulb, flat on his feet, the knees bending a little, the slight body swaying a bit, the flat-bridged nose looking peaked. Hush: he is sleeping the strange light sleep.

‘I can’t help it when they up the price on me,’ Louie added. ‘They got me, Dealer, that’s all.’

‘The way you got me,’ Frankie murmured knowingly. Then he smelled the coffee, got down to the table in front of a cup, took one sip and, smiling softly, started to let his head fall toward his chest. Louie got the cup out of the way of that blond mop before it bent to the table.

‘Now look at him sleep, with all his woes,’ Louie teased him almost tenderly; and Frankie heard from a dream of falling snow.

The snow fell in a soft, suspended motion, as snow does in dreams alone. He coasted without effort around and around and down a bit and then up like that kite with the broken string and came coasting, where all winds were dying, back down to the table where Fixer sat waiting.

‘I got no woes,’ he laughed among slow-falling flakes, seeing Louie smiling through the snow. ‘You got a woe, Fixer?’ he asked. ‘It’s what I been needin’ – a couple good old secondhand woes.’

‘You’ll have a couple dozen if you ain’t boxin’ that deck by Schwiefka’s suckers in half an hour,’ Louie reminded him.

Frankie got the rest of the coffee down. ‘Squarin’ up, Fixer,’ he assured Louie. He held the cup out at arm’s length. ‘Look at that.’ Not a tremor from shoulder to fingertip. ‘The sheep ’r gonna get a fast shearin’ t’night, Fixer,’ he boasted with a strange and steady calm.

‘I think you’re one of the weaker sheep yourself,’ Louie decided silently.

She remembered the years of their courtship like remembering an alien land. Years of the white wafer of friendship broken on Boze Narodzenie and its brittle fragments (that broke, like so many friendships, at the touch) being passed from hand to hand across the straw-strewn tablecloth. Years of the soft and wild ancestral songs: ‘ Chlopek ’ sung in the evergreen’s light. And on the tree’s very top a single star to which all good children must say: ‘ Gwizadka tam na niebie. ’ A starlet there on the heavens. Feasts of Epiphany, when she and Frankie together had marked neighbors’ doorways with the letters that remembered ancestral kings, K, M, and B, with tiny crosses between; that neighbors on waking might remember how Kasper, Melchior and Balthasar had borne gifts to Bethlehem.

Years when everything was so well arranged. When people who did right were rewarded and those who did wrong were punished. When everyone, in the long run, got exactly what was coming to him, no more or no less. God weighed virtue and sin then to the fraction of the ounce, like Majurcek the Grocer weighing sugar.

Together she and Frankie had carried Easter lamb to Old St Stephen’s for Father Simon’s blessing – could it really be so long? How had they both forgotten God so soon? Or had God forgotten them? Certainly God had gone somewhere far away at just the time when she’d needed Him most. Perhaps He too had volunteered and just hadn’t gotten His discharge yet. Perhaps He had been a full colonel and still felt the need of keeping His distance. If He had been only a private, then He must have re-enlisted. Or else the world had gone wrong all by itself.

He had been closer on those far-gone forenoons when she and Frankie had followed the malt-hop trucks down the horse-and-wagon alleys of home, each with a tin can to catch the malt-dripping. That was forbidden drink, the trucks hauled it out to the farmers for pig food. But one morning she and Frankie had drunk from the same can and gotten as stewed, all by themselves, as any two twelve-year-olds in a West Side horse-and-wagon alley can get.

Yet even then Frankie’s indifference had tortured her. So free and easy he’d been, into their free-and-easy teens, in a way she herself could never be and not like a really decent fellow ought to be at all. As careless of her love as if it were something he could pick up in any old can just by following a malt-hop truck.

‘I never run for streetcars,’ he’d had the brassbound nerve to tell her the year she was seventeen, after standing her up for half an hour in front of the Pulaski. ‘What’s the use? There’s always another big red rollin’ along right behind. Just like you dames – soon as a guy misses with one all he has to do is look back over his shoulder ’n here comes another down the block pullin’ up for a fast pickup.’

‘I just won’t stand for that kind of talk,’ she’d told him flatly, stamping with rage. ‘I want you to be where you’re supposed to be when you’re supposed to be ’n dressed like you’re goin’ to the Aragon, not to shoot six-no-count pool by Wieczorek – that’s what I want.’

‘There’s people in hell want ice water too,’ he’d grinned at her. That unforgivable, careless grin that she couldn’t get out of her system and had to have all for herself and couldn’t ever quite seem to get all for her very own for keeps.

It had almost seemed at times that he didn’t really care what she thought in those years. When she’d reproach him for going with other girls he’d confirm anything she chose to suspect with that quick, confident grin. How could anyone make a fellow like that ashamed of himself? She didn’t know how. It hadn’t seemed to make any difference to him whether he dated a schoolgirl, a nurse, a dimwit, a shimmy dancer, a hillbilly, a married woman, an aging whore, a divorcee or just some poor tired trampie: he dated everything he saw in skirts and gave each the same corny play.

One afternoon he’d been promenading down Augusta Boulevard with some good-natured piece of trade who liked to say, ‘I was a lily of the valley in my time, now I’m just Lily of the Alley. Say – didn’t I turn out to be a beauty?’

Sophie had confronted him the very next morning with the fact that her very own father had seen him with the lily. For a moment Frankie hadn’t even seemed to remember. ‘Oh yeh,’ he’d recalled at last, ‘you mean Lily Splits. Yeh, sure, we lifted a few, we always do. Splits likes me. Well, I like Splits. Poor kid was born with one foot in a cathouse, I knew her when she first started travelin’ the bars. But you know she’s a funny little bum at that – they say she still won’t do it with two guys in the same room. What she really likes best is just clownin’ around.’

‘Is that all you were doin’ – clownin’ around?’

‘Not just clownin’ – Splits got her serious side too. Just like me. We were talkin’ on that Chester Shudefski – Shudefski from Viaduct not Shudefski by Whisky Taverns – you know, the real muscle-built one, not Old Uncle. That Shudefski, that was Splits’ fee-an-say, he was bartender by Widow Wieczorek then. When she went to see him she had to sit by the bar ’n have a double shot, all Widow served them days was doubles. Only Shudefski ratted on Splits, he went into the Marines. That wasn’t so good for Splits.’