Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

‘Was you pointin’ that freakin’ finger at me? ’ Louie just had to know.

‘I don’t point nobody but enemies,’ Sparrow appeased him hurriedly, ‘’n you ’n me ’r old buddies.’ And went lightly into some little nostalgic tune or other of his own.

‘I used to work in Chicago

In a big department store.’

‘The telephone’s goin’ to ring,’ Blind Pig suddenly shushed everybody, and before he’d finished his warning it rang. A trick which, like his other rare assets, didn’t mean much. Yet not even the punk could outguess a telephone. ‘Specially a phone wit’out a number,’ Pig boasted as if the fact that the phone had a blind number somehow made the trick tougher.

Its number was known only to the one who called, at the same hour, every Saturday night. Schwiefka would answer and his voice, slavish and greasy, had the politeness he reserved only for women of means. ‘Hold on good,’ he would be heard saying eagerly, ‘I’ll call him.’ Louie would take the phone while Schwiefka returned to his seat beside Frankie. ‘You look like a cat eatin’ hot horse manure on a frosty morning,’ Frankie would tell him then.

‘I oney wisht I could get on a City Hall pay roll for tellin’ when somebody’s dirty phone is gonna ring,’ Pig lamented. ‘I hear it comin’ over the wires. I hear things before a dog could hear ’em.’

The allusion to a dog returned Frankie’s mind to the room where the hound cowered beneath the dresser, waiting for his return. Rumdum had feared Sophie from the first.

And after Louie’s return to the table all things began weighing namelessly upon the dealer till even the deck seemed heavy in his hand. For one moment that nerveless wrist trembled, then steadied for the rest of the night. Yet in that brief trembling Frankie knew what was wrong. He hadn’t expected to need another fix this soon.

As the cards went around and around, as if being dealt out of a machine, he saw again the narrow, uncarpeted stair that climbed two flights to a single room where a scarred practice board stood jammed under a sink full of dirty dishes and an older deck lay on the shelf above; the shelf that never got cleaned because Sophie couldn’t reach it from the chair.

‘Still, whenever I leave a bottle up there, there’s always a couple good nips gone out of it,’ he mused. ‘She can reach up high enough to get a bottle but not high enough to clean the shelf it’s standin’ on. She must use the pillow.’

‘Look at the mope – he’s dreamin’ he’s marryin’ a movie actress,’ Schwiefka said, and tossed the green silk bag to the dealer. The fun was over for the evening.

Now the suckers would start dropping in, look absently at the day-old Racing Forms for a minute pretending they’d just dropped in to get the results; then each would sit in for ‘just half an hour, to kill the time – this is the night I take the old lady out steppin’.’ It was a common device, calculated to leave an opening by which one might, in event of unusual early luck, go south gracefully with a small, but tidy, bundle.

In half an hour anybody’s old lady was forgotten, the bets were up to a dollar and two, the cut was five per cent up to fifteen dollars and at the door Sparrow was letting the first live ones in. The five per cent went into the green silk bag and when one of the winners tossed the dealer a quarter for himself, Frankie rang it on the metal shade of the light above his head to indicate – whether Schwiefka was there to see or not – that it was his and not the house’s.

If the punk was dubious of some stranger’s face he opened the door only wide enough to say, ‘Nothin’ like that goin’ on in here, Mister. This is Endless Belt ’n Leat’er Specialties – you want to buy a endless belt?’

Thus to the man who sometimes called himself a ‘traveling dealer,’ whom others called Frankie Machine, life was pretty much of an allnight stud session. With himself in the dealer’s slot and Zero Schwiefka getting the take.

Steps on the stairs and a light tapping at the door.

‘It’s a sucker, I can tell how he knocks, so light,’ Sparrow said, rising to let the mark in.

The only time Frankie saw Drunkie John of late was at Schwiefka’s table. For the Jailer had gotten rid of him at last and Molly-O lived on alone in the room they once had shared.

Dark-haired Molly’s little nest lay in the darkness of the first floor front, its only window opening out onto the unpaved tunnel below the cross-steeled El. Yet she kept the window’s single curtain fresh, to hang as white and limply as a curtain overlooking a country lawn.

It never hung limply for long. When the Loopbound express was still a quarter of a mile away the curtain would stir uneasily with the rumor of its approach, flutter and billow tensely while the room shook a little and then a little more till the curtain bulged out in a rigid and frenzied whiteness, straining and beating furiously at the sill as the cars hurtled overhead; to flutter once and sink back limply at last.

Drunkie John had left her for his first and truest love: the bottle without a name. He would return when the bottle went dry, and if he came when the Jailer wasn’t by to protect her she would give him a dollar or two. She drew a percentage of every forty-cent drink she hustled, there were nights when she made as much as ten dollars; and nights when she wound up without a dime and owing the house five dollars to boot. ‘I’d be cheaper off livin’ somewheres where you couldn’t find me,’ she had complained to John the last time he’d called.

‘I’d find you all the same,’ he’d assured her.

She was happy to be rid of him at any cost. Now in the mornings she would waken, her head on the small red pillow, to see the curtain’s whiteness veiling the room. Behind it the dresser would seem strangely unreal, as it might appear to a waking infant: veiled by light flowing from another world.

Veiled too by a new contentment in waking without John beside her; a contentment forever tinged by dread of his return.

Two lamps stood on the dresser, one with a red bulb and one with a blue. Between them, for some reason, a magazine cover had been thumbtacked to the wall bearing the momentous query: Is Jazz Going Hibrow?

The blue bulb burned, the red bulb burned: the curtain stirred and slow steps passed. It didn’t look like much of a Christmas in dark-haired Molly’s nest.

Nor any season for merrymaking in Frankie Machine’s heart. On the night following the great dish-breaking on the second floor front he stood outside her door looking quietly down at Rumdum’s equally quiet mug. About the dog’s throat Sparrow had tied a blue ribbon bearing a red, heart-shaped tag with the simplest sort of appeal: Have a Heart.

‘I’ll take him here,’ Frankie told the punk. ‘Zosh is sleepin’. I’ll see you at the joint around ten.’

‘I gotta go up to see Vi,’ Sparrow explained, moving toward the stairs, ‘Stash is hittin’ the hay early these nights.’

Without turning his head Frankie said, ‘Don’t knock on my door. Zosh is sleepin’ too.’

‘You told me that twice awready,’ Sparrow reminded Frankie. ‘She can sleep all night if she wants, I got nuttin’ to bother your Zosh about.’ He sensed that Frankie was trying to tell him that no one had seen Frankie outside the door of the first floor front. What kind of bull was Frankie feeding Zosh now that she wasn’t even supposed to know he was in the building? ‘Frankie’s in the switches,’ the punk brooded, ‘it’s like he wants to run somewheres ’n can’t make up his mind which way to head.’

As he passed the second flight he heard Sophie wheeling across the room. If it was just a matter of giving that Molly Novotny a play, Frankie ought to know by now he could trust a guy who’d never given him away yet. ‘You’d think it was a big deal, tryin’ to make a chick, the way he’s goin’ about it,’ Sparrow decided with something of scorn; he’d always been a swifter and surer operator with women than Frankie.