Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

Yet, after the manner of simple hearts, Violet was confident that her secret was buried as deep as God’s toenails. Scarcely a living soul in the whole great gray frame hotel nor in the one long bar below knew, she was sure. Except, of course, Sparrow’s buddy Frankie and her own best friend Sophie and trusty old Antek the Owner and one or two of the Tug & Maul’s more reliable barflies. She could swear that scarcely anyone from the Safari knew a thing – and who cared what those swishes thought anyhow? Unless that long, lean, lanky, sidewinding Fomorowski had picked up a whisper. At any rate Stash never spent in either bar, so it made no difference at all. They were all good guys by Antek the Owner and wouldn’t want to make trouble for a girl.

Though what in the world any redhead stacked like Vi could see in a shapeless bag of bones like the punk was one of those things those same good guys marveled upon. If one asked, Violet always made the same reply ‘What does any Division Street woman see in any Division Street punk?’

The fact was that to the Tug & Maul boys the punk sometimes seemed something clean off Division Street, if not out of the world. The only routine work he’d ever performed successfully was the window-peeping routine, conducted between 10 P.M. and midnight of midsummer evenings, which he’d called his ‘scraunching route.’

The scraunching route had had seven stops, each timed for the most rewarding moment and requiring anywhere from ten minutes to half an hour of hanging from a limb, crouched on somebody’s porch or leaning, with a telephone directory underfoot, against a pane whose shade reached only to two inches of the sash.

‘I’ve seen a thing or two in my time,’ he still liked to boast, ‘that was how I found out the best place for wolfin’ ain’t the taverns. It ain’t in dance halls ’r on North Clark on Saturday night. It’s in the front row in Sunday school on Sunday mornin’. Oh yeh, I know a thing or two, I been around.’

The punk knew a thing or two all right. He knew almost everything except how to stay out of jail. For jail was the one place he’d been most around. He’d been around jails so much that, as Violet never wearied of promising him, ‘someday you’ll be in so long you’ll get to thinkin’ you’re the warden.’

It had been Violet who had first diverted him from the scraunching route. He had been boasting, to a small but select circle at the Tug & Maul, of what he’d seen the night before, when Violet, uninvited, had interrupted to observe that if she were his girl friend she’d be so ashamed she wouldn’t be able to hold up her head on a lighted street.

‘’Shamed ’cause a fellow like me is studyin’ to be a Pinkerton?’ He had feigned amazement. ‘Don’t you think I want to make somethin’ of myself? Don’t you think there’s big money in detectin’ things people ’r doin’ when they don’t know anybody’s lookin’? How you suppose Pinkies get trainin’ – in classrooms?’

‘I know you don’t get detective trainin’ doin’ a dry waltz with yourself on somebody else’s fire escape,’ she assured him. ‘If I was your girl friend ’n caught you on my fire escape I’d testify up against you myself, so help me.’

‘If you was my girl friend,’ he whispered in his special inside-info whisper, ‘I wouldn’t be playin’ Pinkie wit’ myself.’

It had begun as simply as that. He’d given up his scraunching route for her. He’d given up almost everything that makes life worth while, it seemed. Everything but stealing dogs and telling lies and keeping one eye peeled for stray change along bar rails.

The bigger the lies he told her the tenderer Violet had felt toward him. The dizzier he appeared the more deeply he’d endeared himself to her warm round arms. ‘He’s not a Polak, he’s not a Hebe, he’s just nobody’s poor sparrow at all – who’s to take care of him if not me?’ She really wondered who.

‘I can’t stand a liar myself,’ Sophie answered that one virtuously.

‘Lies are just a poor man’s pennies,’ Violet told her. ‘Fact is, that’s just how he started out with me – tellin’ lies. I didn’t know him so good then, only from seein’ him by Antek’s ’r standin’ on the corner of Damen ’n Division in them same old baggy pants ’n perfesser’s glasses, holdin’ a dog on a leash ’n both lookin’ like they been in a battle. I didn’t know about his window peepin’ till he starts braggin’ by Antek that time. He was just so afraid he wasn’t good enough for me, that’s all his braggin’ was,’ Violet explained. ‘He didn’t think he was good enough for any body, he was tryin’ so hard to show he was some body. So it was up to me to show him he was somebody all by hisself – that’s the first thing a woman got to do for a man.’ N of course there’s no sense tryin’ to prove somethin’ like that standin’ up. The least a girl owes to herself is to be comfortable about it.’

‘It’s what they call syko-ology,’ Sophie informed her loftily.

‘That ain’t what I call it, Sissie. I just call it savin’ poor man’s pennies.’ Cause that’s all his big lies are, Zosh. Just a poor punk’s pennies.’

‘You leave me agasted,’ Sophie told her, knotting her babushka under chin with impatience in every fingertip, ‘I just don’t see how some of you Division Street women live, that’s all. ’

‘Well,’ Violet reflected a long minute, ‘I guess it’s like Frankie says: some cats just swing like that, Zosh.’

It was Violet who’d gotten Sparrow right side up the time he was put on probation ‘just for settin’ in a corner drinkin’ a couple beers. Some fella come in pertendin’ like he’s drunk, buys me a couple cheap shots ’n says there’s guys followin’ him, they’re after his watch, would I hold it for him. I got such a honest puss. So I done the guy the favor ’n sure enough, one more shot ’n the bum starts to holler somebody copped his watch.

‘It all just goes to show you, don’t try to do too much for people or you’ll wind up in the short end of the funnel. It’s my one big weakness, helpin’ guys who can’t help theirselves.’

‘Yeh,’ Violet reminded him dryly, ‘I guess you thrun the pop bottle through Widow Wieczorek’s window that time just to let in a little air too. You know,’ she added before he could answer, ‘it ain’t that I love you so much, it’s more that I’m sorry for you because your mind is so weak.’

‘I see what you mean,’ Sparrow decided, ‘I’m the first person you ever met with a mind weaker than yours – is that it?’

‘Not en tire ly. What I really like about you is you’re so mercenary.’

‘And what I really like about you is that if you had a hummingbird’s brains you’d fly backerds,’ the punk forgave her for everything she’d done for him.

She’d kept him out of trouble then until he’d slipped on the ice one January night and that had been the worst rap of all. The sidewalk was like the dance floor at Guyman’s Paradise, anyone could have fallen. And have one elbow go through a window. A jewelry-store window. In the dark a thing like that could happen to a Park District policeman.

Frankie had gotten Zygmunt to put in the fix, the charge had been changed to drunk and disorderly, and Sparrow had gotten two years probation. But it had cost Violet one hundred silver dollars of old Stash’s money. So the least the punk could do for her, he felt, was to stay out of further trouble.

The only time in those whole two years that the police had persecuted him was when he’d taken a short cut on his way to putting a potted geranium on his mother’s grave.

He had to take a short cut through an alley toward the florist’s when the squadrol slid up beside him. All they wanted to know, after he’d explained his business, was how he expected any florist to be open at 4 A.M.