Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

A quarter of a mile away the Loopbound El sent the curtain stirring and as the cars clattered overhead it bloomed, passionately and white. Then slowly fell and went limp. With his face buried between her breasts he heard the city beyond the window stir like a sleeper with the first rumors of evening.

When evening came taxiing in under the arc lamps she rose, while he still slept, and sewed his sleeve with love. ‘I’m patchin’ his heart,’ she told herself quietly.

She didn’t sew well. By the time she was through, and pleased with her handiwork, it still looked as if it were hooked with a pin. She had been loved, before the world went wrong, and now was loved again.

All through that night, long after he had left for work, she remembered how he had been before and how he was now. And a tenderness mixed of pity and love shook her like the wind off the tracks at midnight.

Till tenderness turned into sleep; as night turned into morning.

Later on that Sunday forenoon Frankie lay again on his own bed up on the second floor front trying to believe that, if there had been no war at all, if he hadn’t volunteered, if there had been no accident, if there hadn’t been this and there hadn’t been that, then everything would certainly have turned out a lot better for Frankie.

Violet had wheeled Sophie to Mass – if he could only believe that going to Mass might help undo what he had done he might even go himself. If only it might make a little bit of the might-have-been still come true perhaps it would be worth while to go sometime again. Maybe if he went along some Sunday, suddenly right there by the altar rail Sophie would get up on her feet and tell him, ‘Nobody’ll have to wheel me here no more, Frankie. Let’s go dancin’ by Guyman’s Paradise t’night.’

But Sunday morning was always pretty rugged for anything but sleep. All the miracles were performed on Saturday night, it seemed. Down on the first floor front.

‘I’ll say one Hail Mary, one Our Father,’ n one Act of Contrition,’ he compromised with himself, ‘just as soon as Vi ’n Zosh get back.’

So the first thing he did when they returned was to reach for the bottle on the shelf above the bed.

And the second thing he did was to go back to sleep.

Yet there was a difference now to the dealer’s nights. He had found that, with Molly Novotny’s arms around him, he could resist the sickness and the loneliness that drove him to the room above the Safari. He had confessed the whole business to her, she had half guessed the truth before he had told it.

‘I could tell somethin’ was wrong the minute you put your head in that door the other evening, Frankie. I said to myself, “This guy got somethin’ eatin’ on him, he got that beat look them Safari junkies got.” Frankie – the next time you start gettin’ sick you come to me instead of to Louie. I’m better for you. And I’ll lock you in here if I have to but I’ll get you off that dirty stuff.

‘If I just knew you a couple days I wouldn’t care, it wouldn’t be none of my business. But I knew you when you were the best guy I ever knew ’n I want you to be the best guy again.’

He had fought off the sickness four nights running and on the fifth it was no worse than being hungry all night. ‘I got one of that monkey’s paws off my back,’ he bragged to Molly.

In the dealer’s slot his old confidence ebbed back a bit, until he could again assure himself, ‘It’s all in the wrist ’n I got the touch.’

Only the blurred image of a woman in a wheelchair remained to darken his moods: that was the monkey’s other paw.

Each night he slipped singles and fives and deuces into the green silk bag. Frankie dealt the fastest game in the Near Northwest Side when he was right, and he was more right now with every night; at moments it seemed to him he was faster and steadier than he had ever been. At any second, through all the hours, he knew to a nickel how the pot stood and controlled the players like the deck. They too were aces and deuces, they too were at his fingertips once more.

For like the deuces and aces they all came home to him toward closing time. Turned face up at last, their night-long secret bluffing was exposed at last: the fat florid kings, the lean and menacing black jacks and those sneaky little gray deuces, all betrayed the sucker by morning.

In the early light Schwiefka, with his fry-cook’s complexion, called ‘Change it up!’ to the steerer for the last time. And went south with the bundle.

There had been only one serious argument at Schwiefka’s while Frankie was in the slot, for Frankie had the knack of anticipating funny business. He sensed the sort of desperation which would tempt a man to slip a single exposed ace around the hole card, flashing it so fast it gave the impression of a pair. It had been that one pulled, for the sake of caution, on the slow-witted umbrella man, in which Frankie had trapped Louie cold.

Everyone knew immediately what had happened – everyone but Umbrellas. All Umbrellas knew was that Louie had said ‘bullets’ and reached for the pot. Frankie had flipped Louie’s cards open before the fixer had had time to get them back into the deck.

‘I swear I seen bullets,’ Louie had pretended casually, and nobody told him he lied. But Umbrellas had gotten the pot and Louie had never quite forgiven the dealer for exposing him. ‘You’d think it was comin’ out of his own pocket,’ he complained later of Frankie.

Since that time there came a moment every night, before the first suckers started knocking, when Frankie would look uneasily at Louie and say, ‘I call the hands. What I say goes. That’s how it’s always been ’n that’s how it’s gonna stay ’n nobody’s gonna change it.’ He told Louie that exactly as some sergeant had once told it to him when he’d questioned an order. It had worked on Private Majcinek. So ex-Private Majcinek assumed it had an effect on the fixer’s narrow head.

And studied each fresh sucker with a practiced eye. Schwiefka sent occasional stooges into the game to keep his dealer straight – usually one wearing a loudly flowered tie and sideburns; with a habit of finding the dealer’s toe under the table to indicate that a bit of co-operation with that deck wouldn’t go unappreciated. Good-time Charlies with the usual whisky glass in the middle of the forehead and that certain faraway look which never troubled to count a winning pot to see whether it was right. ‘ We trust each other, Dealer,’ was the implication of that look.

The dealer trusted no man on the other side of the slot. He had outlasted forty such touts. They didn’t call him Machine just because he was fast. They called him Machine because he was regular.

He couldn’t risk being anything else; dealing was the sole skill he owned. ‘The day I get my musician’s union card is the day I’ll steal Schwiefka blind,’ he planned in his tough-skinned larcenous little heart. Until that day he would be as straight as one of Widow Wieczorek’s ivory-tipped cues.

One by one Schwiefka’s shills would give place; as the winter night wore on, the stakes would grow higher as the air grew heavier and the marks grew lighter; to be replaced, one by one, like so many sausages into the same sure grinder.

While at the door Sparrow urged losers and winners alike: ‘Tell ’em where you got it ’n how easy it was.’

Till Frankie would sit back wearily, sick of seeing them come on begging to be hustled, wondering where in the world they all came from and how in the world they all earned it and what in the world they told their wives and what, especially, they told themselves and why in the world they always, always, always, always came back for more.

‘More, more, I keep cryin’ for more more-’