Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

She wakened in the chair to hear the last echo of St Stephen’s fading across this present midnight’s dreaming roofs. And her whole life, from her careless girlhood until this crippled night, seemed caught within that fading chime. For now, as though no time had passed but the time it had taken to dream it, the leaves were stiff with age again, sultry September had come and gone and the wind was blowing the flies away.

‘God has forgotten us all,’ Sophie told herself quietly.

For the rain would come straight down forever and nothing would ever change at all. Save the picture on the calendar. And a long nerve in each thigh.

The mousetrap in the closet clicked. She felt it close as if it had shut within herself, hard and fast forever. Heard the tiny caught thing struggling, slowly tiring, and at last become still.

The wind was blowing the flies away. God was forgetting His own.

A single wire was strung tautly across the room, bearing a wooden marker for remembrance of a time when the place had been a poolroom. Beneath it a circle of red leather and chrome chairs, a splash of yellow ties and sallow faces wavered about a horseshoe-shaped table.

The evening’s first cigar smoke moved below the single light like the opening shot of battle upon a long green meadowland. All the day’s horses had made money or run out hours ago; there was nothing left on the wall, where they had drummed up the dust of Bowie and Tanforan, but tomorrow’s possibilities:

TRACK: Fast. Heavy. Muddy .

The dealer placed a new deck in front of Schwiefka for cutting and, while Schwiefka cut, took time to wind his PX wrist watch carefully; as if setting it to keep time, this whole long night to come, to the players’ troubled hearts.

No confedence games aloud

a red legend warned everyone above the dealer’s head. Strung from that same taut wire that held the poolroom marker, it would waver a bit and darken as the smoke grew heavier. On the other side of the marker hung a meaningless little green invitation as dated as last year’s calendar:

SHORT CARDS

60c per hour

No one had played short cards here since Pearl Harbor. Schwiefka, and Schwiefka’s shills, killed the hours before the suckers’ hours with call-rummy and no-peek between themselves while listening to each other’s boasts and complaints.

‘I went to five taverns ’n a guy bought me a drink in every one,’ Sparrow reported with real pride.

‘The same guy?’ Frankie asked, riffling the deck.

‘Differ’nt guys,’ Sparrow explained indulgently. ‘Now I ain’t even got for a bottle wine -’ n you sayin’ I ain’t really broke.’

‘You’re always broke,’ Nifty Louie observed, ‘I think when you were born your old man was out of work.’

‘If yours’d ever had a steady job you never would of been borned at all,’ Sparrow retorted.

‘Trouble with both you guys is you spend your dough on foolish things,’ Frankie counseled them both in all seriousness and Louie, who had followed Frankie in tonight, asked too casually, ‘What you spend yours on, Dealer?’

Frankie dealt around for reply, skipping Sparrow, who professed to be too broke to play. When Drunkie John came up with an unlabeled half pint off the hip and offered it to the punk for consolation, Sparrow eyed it sadly and mourned, ‘Boy oh boy, the bottle wit’out a name.’ In a tone so melancholy it sounded like, ‘Boy oh boy, the Christ wit’out a cross.’ Drank without pleasure, handed it back to Drunkie John and sat back unhappily. ‘Borrow me a dirty sawbuck, I wanna play too,’ he asked the players on either side of him, twice each.

Each time each answered, looking straight ahead at the dealer’s eyeshade, ‘Never play against my own money.’

‘Then borrow me a dirty deuce.’

Sparrow was always careful to identify any money he was able to borrow as dirty, suspecting that he thus reduced the obligation slightly. It troubled him to see the cards going around, skipping only himself. Yet he didn’t like to ask money of Frankie, it seemed like Frankie never had a dime any more. And looked so pale, so pale.

‘Let me deal,’ he begged Frankie, ‘let me relieve you two bucks wort’ – go pertend you got a date wit’ a movie actress ’n don’t come back till the marks start knockin’.’

The dealer made no reply and didn’t look as though he cared one way or another. If Schwiefka wanted to let the punk fool around for half an hour it was all right with Frankie.

But Schwiefka paid no heed and Sparrow waited miserably.

‘Well, should I start washin’ my hands to get ready?’ he wanted to know after a minute.

‘Yeh,’ Schweifka deigned to answer at last. ‘’N wash yer face too.’

‘Let him deal,’ Nifty Louie urged, ‘he can’t steal no more than Machine.’

Nifty Louie’s roll carried weight with Schwiefka. He shrugged uncertainly. Sparrow nudged Frankie out of the slot and the players tossed in a nickel ante each.

‘Look at the Jewish deal,’ Louie marveled, for the punk dealt lefthanded.

Sparrow dealt swiftly, sometimes with the right hand and sometimes with the left, sometimes beginning with the player to his right and the next time to his left, it was all one to Sparrow. But all the while watching that pot like a mangy chicken hawk. There was four dollars and twenty cents in it for the winner – the player he’d just asked for the loan of a two-spot. The punk knew when he had a good thing. He shoved seventy-five cents of the four-twenty to the winner, put a single lonely dime in the big green bag and got the rest in his own shirt pocket all in a single scoop of those ragged little claws.

The winner looked down in cold horror: he’d spent over two dollars to win a four-dollar pot and had six bits of it in front of him. ‘Back off if you don’t like how we deal here,’ Sparrow anticipated his protest. ‘Should I deal you out?’

The others cheered wildly, they hadn’t lost a dime on the deal. ‘Ataboy, Sparrow, you’re in the driver’s seat now.’

They didn’t cheer for long. The next pot held three dollars, of which the dealer got a dollar-forty for his trouble, the house earned thirty cents and the winner the crumbs.

Oddly, there weren’t many players for the next hand. Only forty-five cents lay in the kitty and Sparrow got two bits of that before Schwiefka had him by the neck. Before the punk could squawk so much as once he was sitting on the other side of the table right where he’d started. Only this time with nearly five dollars before him and there wouldn’t be any getting him out of the game till it was gone.

‘I’m supposed to be dead in 1921,’ Louie began confiding in Drunkie John. ‘Here it is almost ’47 ’n I’m still pumpin’ water.’

Louie could never quite get over his feat of having pumped water so long. ‘The guys who were lookin’ for me in the old days ’r gone: dead ’r drunk ’r dyin’. Them was the ones rubbed garlic on the shells – I’m suppose to have a garlic slug in my head twenny-six years ’n all I got was a toenail yanked off with a red-hot pintsers.’ Under the light, perspiration had dried the violet talc into the corners of his lips and the lips barely moved when he spoke. ‘Doin’ time ’r lushin’, dead ’r drunk ’r dyin’.’

‘I remember Frank the Enforcer,’ Drunkie John boasted, showing his blackened teeth, ‘he was the kind who’d blow half a hundred over the bar but wouldn’t spend for a pack cigarettes. He’d smoke yours.’ And drank. From the bottle without a name. ‘Them was the good old days, when a guy got thirteen years for a misdemeanor. When you done somethin’ then you paid for it,’ he mourned. ‘It ain’t like now. It’s too cheap now.’ The marks of debauchery were seamed across his face like a chronic disease.