Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

Sparrow made it fine, clear to the top of the first flight all by himself; and stood trying to focus his eyes behind the shell-rimmed glasses until she’d made it all the way too.

‘Poor old Stash,’ she giggled, ‘he works too hard.’ That set them both to tittering as if it had been the funniest thing they’d heard in a month.

‘You know what?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘Works too hard.’ This time it was even funnier, she had to hold the banister to keep from falling back downstairs.

As they wove past the second-floor desk Poor Peter Schwabatski looked upon them reverently from beneath half-lowered lids: he saw strange angels passing all night long. These two seemed holier, somehow, than any that yet had passed. The Jailer planted his horse-faced dimwit behind the desk each night in the hope he might be mistaken for a watchman; the boy passed the creaking midnight hours by planting paper daisies. Two of these grew out of a long crack in the desk to embroider the dusty old legend, Quiet or Out You Go Too . To which no guest had as yet offered the slightest deference.

Poor Peter’s pious regard subdued Violet and on the final flight she shushed Sparrow though he was making no sound at all. ‘Hard-workin’ people. Mustn’t wake up hard-workin’ people.’ So both felt very sad, all the way down the hall to her door, for hard-working people everywhere that mustn’t be waked up in the middle of the night. They stood together one moment in the threatening dimness, like the dimness in which all their lives had been lived – and decided to laugh together like that just once more. He threw back his head like a demented spaniel and howled, ‘Whaaaat?’

‘Works too hard.’

Only this time it wasn’t funny at all.

For all the doors belonged to hard-working people. All the doors of both their lives and nobody laughs at a thing very long when he’s drunk out of bleakest loneliness. Behind her door yesterday’s empties crouched beneath a single-faucet sink: they were lined up there like a scoreboard recording the emptiness of her hours. For in the room beside the sink an old man slept her sweetest hours away.

‘Open the door, Richard,’ she giggled unhappily, handing him the key. He took it without putting it in the lock while she studied him. ‘Honey,’ she asked solemnly, ‘how come you never met Stash form’lly? ’

‘How come I’m s’pposed to – form’lly?’

‘How come you ain’t s’ppose to, what I want to know,’ she insisted, feeling the whisky move. When she put it that way Sparrow realized he was supposed to meet Old Husband all along. It seemed then that Old Husband had been waiting politely to meet Solly Saltskin a long time and now was his big chance to give the old man the break he deserved. Old Man worked too hard, he deserved something to happen to him in his declining years. All the people worked too hard, all the people deserved something nice in their declining years. He ought to do more for the people, they had such a hard way to go.

‘That’s right,’ he agreed at length, ‘form’l obligation.’

‘Shamed myself, you never met Old Man,’ Vi confessed, taking the key and opening the door herself.

Inside she threw off her coat, unmindful that she wore only a sheer nightgown underneath; but then it was so warm and everyone was such old friends. From the bedroom came a low warning rumbling as if the Garfield Park Express were running straight through the house.

‘Change cars in there!’ she called good-naturedly. Yet something about Old Husband sleeping in there like a child, so alone, filled her with such a rush of tenderness for him as she had never before felt. As soon as she had finished making a sandwich for Sparrow she made one for Stash out of the crusts, so that it would look like a big bargain. He had to wake up pretty soon anyhow if he were ever to meet Sparrow.

‘Look, it’s Christmas awready!’ she cheered Old Husband awake. ‘We got Sparrow for comp’ny ’stead of Santa Claus – ain’t that wonderful? ’

He wasn’t yet sufficiently wide awake to tell how wonderful it all was. Just poked his frightened old eyes about the room, so suddenly filled with light and harsh cries that had been so dark and still with sleep but one moment before.

‘Where you gone?’ he asked at last.

‘Ain’t gone, been awready,’ she saw him start at something over her shoulder, then droop one eyelid to see the apparition better. ‘What is? ’ Old Husband wanted to know.

‘That’s him , that’s Sparrow , honey – didn’t I ever tell you about Sparrow? Sparrow! I never even to-old him a thingg. ’ Her giggle alone would have betrayed more than whisky to anyone but Old Creep Stash.

While Sparrow, with the light from the night-bulb against his glasses making his face strangely featureless, was saying something real nice, anyone could see. It wasn’t clear just what because his mug was stuffed with Polish sausage and its string was dangling from the corner of his mouth. A fellow could choke that way, just saying something nice.

‘Shall I make you another, lover?’ Violet wanted to know.

Under the night light’s pale green glow Lover nodded. ‘Yup. Two more. Wit’ little ginny pigs ’n ketchup all togedder.’

‘Dronk t’ings,’ Old Creep disapproved, scraping his toes about the carpet in a vague hope of finding slippers there. ‘Is bad, not drassed ,’ he added, reddening at the spectacle of his own wife cavorting about before a stranger in nothing but a sheer nightgown. What kind of big bargain was that?

‘You boys talk over old times together,’ Violet suggested lightly, making another dash for the kitchen.

Sparrow sat on the bed’s edge beside this Stash, feeling remotely troubled. Then realized where his trouble lay and removed one slice of bread off the sandwich, wiped the mustard off carefully upon Stash’s sheet, gave the opposing slice the same treatment and resumed chewing. ‘Don’t like mustard,’ he explained.

‘I got hard day,’ Stash asserted, eying the string dangling so unevenly from the corner of the punk’s mouth; as if that held some solution for the peculiar way in which things were being run by Stash Koskozka’s house this night.

‘ You like mustard?’ Sparrow asked, to keep the conversation sprightly.

‘Don’t like mustard, don’t like sandrich, don’t like comp’ny,’ Stash challenged him boldly, ‘all too t’in.’

Sparrow shifted the string a bit to show he was thinking that over. Then let it down and rolled it neatly back up to show he was shrugging, sustaining this yo-yo-like indifference until Violet returned with his second sandwich.

‘Don’t want sandrich,’ Stash persisted, growing petulant – then saw it hadn’t ever been intended for him and, perversely as a child, just to keep Sparrow from having it, grabbed at it so abruptly that the sausage slid out and slipped down his winter underwear to lodge loosely into the top of his heavy winter socks, making a bulge there the size of an ankle and leaving a light trail, like an insect’s trail, down the underwear.

‘Goofy t’ing, you make clomsy by me,’ Stash scolded the spot Sparrow had left on the sheet. It was, he perceived, Polish sausage that was to blame for everything tonight.

‘You shouldn’t wear your underwear to bed anyhow,’ Violet reproached the old man, ‘you’d sleep better in pajamas.’

‘After all,’ Sparrow mocked him, ‘he ain’t so young you should wake him four o’clock by morning, he should make glad for you because pretty soon is Christmas, ain’t it?’

Stash chose to overlook the mockery. With unruffled poise he fitted his upper plate into place and shuffled it loosely about a moment to make it fit securely. The sucking sounds he made to get it into place irritated Violet like fingernails screeching down a blackboard.