Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

‘Okay,’ Frankie conceded with his hand around the deck, ‘maybe it’s time we both started forgettin’, Louie.’

Louie nodded and held his peace. ‘The price just went up on you, Dealer,’ he told himself confidently. ‘That stuff is gonna be awful hard to get around the middle of next week.’

‘Deal, deal,’ Schwiefka demanded uneasily, sensing something old, unspoken and violent in the air, and the players all began wheedling the dealer at once. ‘Give us somethin’ to remember you by, Dealer – we’re gettin’ quartered to death here.’

‘Toward morning the farmer gets lucky,’ Frankie assured every farmer present. And the cards went around and around.

Thus in the narrowing hours of night the play became faster and steeper and an air of despair, like a sickroom odor where one lies who never can be well again, moved across the light green baize, touched each player ever so lightly and settled down in a tiny whiff of cigar smoke about the dealer’s hands.

Now dealer and players alike united in an unspoken conspiracy to stave off morning forever. Each bet as if the loss of a hand meant death in prison or disease and when it was lost hurried the dealer on. ‘ Cards, cards. ’ For the cards kept the everlasting darkness off, the cards lent everlasting hope. The cards meant any man in the world might win back his long-lost life, gone somewhere far away.

‘Don’t take it hard, your life don’t go with it,’ was the philosophy of the suckers’ hour.

But each knew in his heart, when he said that, that he lied: each knew that his life was reshuffled here with every hand.

Till the last fat red ten had been dealt, the final black jack had fallen, the case deuce hadn’t helped after all and the queen of spades had been hooked, by somebody, just one hand too late.

‘If it hadn’t been for me – if it hadn’t been for me-’

And the last discouraged sucker had thrown in his cards to the biggest sucker of them all.

‘What’s right is right,’ Frankie decided as the last hand was dealt around, ‘you can’t go smashin’ up a woman ’n then make a fool of her on top of it with another woman. A guy got to draw the line somewheres on how bad he can treat somebody who can’t help herself no more just account of him.’

Walking home with Sparrow where the long arc-lamp shadows slanted across the snow-wet walk, as on any lost corner at 4 A.M., they heard a switch engine’s burdened coughing.

‘Trying to get up steam,’ Sparrow whispered as confidentially as if he had just had it straight from the engineer.

But to Frankie Machine it sounded more like a man trying to cough with a thirty-five-pound monkey on his back. One breath to the second, no more and no less, as the hairy little paws tightened about his shoulders to get set for just one more ride. Under the shoulders, deep in the stomach’s pit, some tiny muscle like a small cold claw probed upward toward his heart, didn’t quite reach it and contracted again, leaving the heart fluttering with anxiety for the whole stomach to turn over: he retched, wanted to vomit and had nothing to vomit at all. That small cold claw would reach again, in its own good time, as mechanically as he himself could shuffle a cold deck at will. It would reach. It would get there and he’d fight it down.

It was just so damned hard to fight alone, that was all, with so little to fight for. A half pint of good whisky would keep it down until he could get to sleep; but only for an hour. Then he’d waken and no whisky would do him good in that hour. He’d need Molly-O to hold him then. It would be Molly-O or a quarter-grain fix, he’d never make it alone.

Every time he got sick lately it seemed the damned punk was on his heels, staring at him through those foggy glasses, trying to pretend he didn’t know a junkie when he saw one. Why didn’t the little chiseler speak out?

At the corner of Damen and Division he turned abruptly on Sparrow. ‘Which way you goin’?’ Just like that.

‘Why – home, Frankie. Same as you.’

‘You tellin’ me where I’m suppose to go now?’

Sparrow saw Frankie’s face then, peaked with suffering in the arc lamp’s feeble glow, and wanted to help and didn’t know how and didn’t want to understand.

‘I got business.’ Frankie let him have the edge of the knife turning in his breast. ‘Case out.’

Twice now within the week Frankie had turned on him like this, he was beginning almost to expect these sudden changes, meaningless and swift. With no further word the punk turned, feeling there was no place for him in any joint on Division Street, nor in the whole wide world, without Frankie Machine.

Shuffling down the shadowed street, Sparrow hoped a squadrol would pick him up just so that he could feel, for ten minutes, that he was going somewhere . He wanted to feel walls and safety about him, needed to be inside something. Frankie had been his wall and the wall was gone, leaving him as defenseless as he had been in the years before he’d hooked up with the dealer. When he reached Paulina he realized Frankie must be kidding, wanting to teach him a lesson for something, making him walk just to see how far he’d go before looking back – Frankie would be standing there waving to him to come back and get shoved around, pretending he was mad about something – Sparrow turned with swift hope.

But no one waved in the arc lamp’s feeble glow for any punk’s returning.

No one stood waiting under any arc lamp for any lost sparrow at all.

Something tugged just hard enough at her foot to waken her; the army blanket had fallen across her toes. Yet she sensed a secret message in being awakened so: someone was trying to tell her she must not sleep tonight.

Down both sides of Division Street the occasional arc lamps burned and it was late, so late, there should be a light step on the long dark stair and someone to cry out that the night was too long.

And come up to wheel her a little while.

Whatever time it was, he was long past due. Unless there were two kinds of time in the world these days: Gamblers’ Time and Cripples’ Time and cripples must now set their watches by gamblers.

All her life, it seemed in this winter hour, he’d been standing her up somewhere. This time would count against him like the others, not one time would be forgotten. He’d go to purgatory with what he had done to her on his soul and she’d sit there then just as she sat here now. He wouldn’t be getting rid of her in the hereafter, if there were any sort of justice at all, any easier than he could get rid of her on West Division. And wondered cloudily how she’d get the chair into purgatory. It would be shipped right along with her best clothes, she supposed, and the Special Dispensation showing she really didn’t belong in purgatory herself, she was just there to make sure that that Frankie Majcinek paid off.

‘He’s fixed me so’s I can’t have no kid,’ she pitied herself for the thousandth time, ‘that counts against him just as much as if he’d killed somebody. He got to be fait’ful now ’r he won’t even get as high as purgatory,’ she assured herself confidently, and a twinge of perverse pleasure took her, twisting her lips into a loose and sensual line. ‘A man just got to stick by a wife who can’t stand on her own two feet five minutes at a time,’ she felt with the same sense of a long-stale triumph.

For if she’d made a secret bargain with herself, in that darkened corner of the mind where all such bargains are made, she would stand by the deal. She was bound now by it as irrevocably as Frankie was bound to her and she was bound to the chair: she would not now return to that corner except in dreams. Not to that curtained hide-out, not to that secret place. She had gone to that bookie in the brain where hustlers’ hearts pay off to win, place or show. She had bet her health on a long one and waited each night to be paid off in her turn.