Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

‘After all the work I went to,’ she mourned her marriage tardily now, ‘gettin’ out of bed in the middle of the night to make my husband a snack ’n what does he do but slap it out of my hand ’n call me “goofy t’ing” – I got a good Polish education ’n I married the biggest dummy ever walked in shoeleather’ – she turned on Stash – ‘get up ’n wash the peanuts off! Get up ’n take last mont’s bat’!’

Yes, it had been just about the finest sandwich a loyal little wife could make her man but instead of thanking a person he just sat sucking his teeth in front of the first real company she’d had in days.

‘No-good t’ing,’ Stash insisted, distressed by the mild itching of the mustard drying between his toes, and brought his knee up to investigate that itch at the precise moment that Vi bent to retrieve the sandwich. The bone caught her over the eye.

That did it. That was all she had, subconsciously, been waiting for since her unconsummated honeymoon.

‘You done that a-purpose!’ she gasped, and cracked him across the upper plate with the flat of the carpet slipper. ‘Let’s see who’s the clumsy t’ing,’ she challenged him, feeling the whisky rise in her throat with her rage, and Sparrow shifted a bit to give Stash room enough to fling the retrieved sandwich, mustard, ketchup, pickles and all straight into Violet’s face and down the shadowed hollow of her gown.

Sparrow looked so sorry. He didn’t like to see food wasted that way. Before he could recover even a small section of the sausage Vi gave the old man the slipper again, the upper plate popped out and he yelped like a lashed pup expecting more. You could see Stash’s lip beginning to swell, he put a hand to it tentatively but she slapped the hand down. He clasped the pillow about his ears protectively. You couldn’t treat a hard-working man this way.

‘Work all day, seven days, no days off, buy nize t’ings by howz,’ he sobbed brokenly, ‘pay grocernia , pay buczernia , pay mens I don’t even know what’s for, comes time to sleep everyt’ing all paid ’n nize clean howz so ever’body sleep – who comes by howz from whisky tavern?’ A drop of blood mixed with sweat and tears dropped down the point of his tiny chin. ‘Mrs No-good wit’ dronk pocket-picker! Should be in bed by hoo sband, hits by hoo sband instead on head ’n makes funny: “Is Christmas, now we fight all night!” Is somethin’ got to happen, is all. ’

He dropped the pillow, reached for the dresser drawer, came up with his.38 and banged Violet across her new permanent with the butt.

Sparrow watched the sausage slide at last out of the depths of the gown and saw, with a melancholy regard, a fine round piece roll beneath Stash’s heel – a heel stained yellow with mustard or indignation where the sock was torn. Sparrow felt a twinge of disgust at the way everything in the joint, bedclothes, underwear, curtains and walls, was daubed with fresh mustard. One hell of a way to run a house.

‘Bein’ unsanit’ry is worse’n bein’ goofy,’ he philosophized softly while recovering the remains. ‘Funny I done like mustard’ – wiping the bread clean on a handy corner of the dresser scarf. Heard the bathroom door slam and glanced up to see why all these people were so excited. Stash was in a neutral corner, breathing hard and looking beat to the floor. Sparrow saw him lay the.38 back in the drawer, put his head between his hands and whimper.

Must be crying because he was so hungry, Sparrow reasoned. ‘You want a bite, Old Man?’ he asked consolingly. ‘Anybody could have a appetite after all the exercise you just done. How come you don’t take it easy nights after the way you work all day? You burnin’ the candle at bot’ ends? You like a nice piece sandrich?’

Stash shook his head; he was too miserable to raise it.

‘You don’t relax enough,’ Sparrow counseled him. ‘You’re not so young like you think no more. If you don’t take things a little easier you’ll lose your stren’t, you won’t be able to do your fam’ly duty. You might even lose your job. After all you got responsibilities, Old Man.’

‘ How can sleep?’ Stash pleaded with a ptomaine eye. ‘Is too much gone on. I’m tellin’! Pretty soon hoos band gone by brooms closet.’

‘Don’t bother,’ Sparrow reassured him, ‘we still got two flutes from Old McCall left.’

‘Is not for drinkin’, by brooms closet – is for some place sleepin’! Sleepin’!’ His voice rose in a plaintive wail for peace and understanding, trying to make someone on Division Street remember what sleep was. Nobody seemed to need sleep any more on Division but poor old Stash Koskozka.

Sparrow studied him calmly, with a steerer’s clammy eye. ‘What you hollerin’ at me like I was a unnerground dog? You tryin’ to make trouble for me?’

‘All he is to me is trouble,’ Violet affirmed loudly from the bathroom.

‘You must be siko-static, Old Man,’ Sparrow decided with his best bedside manner, ‘you should go by a sikostat. He’ll take yer temper’ture. He’ll patch yer dirty roof where it’s leakin’ a little. You look like somethin’ the cat never buried.’

In the bathroom Violet studied her image with a rising dismay: a thin streak of drying blood soiled her ten-dollar one-day-old permanent. Her hair would have to be shampooed and hennaed and there went the sawbuck she’d been a full month chiseling off Old Husband. She strode back into the bedroom and jerked the old man’s head up with a neat rap under the chin with the hairbrush.

‘Look, you. You rurned my perm’nent. You gonna give me a tenner for another.’ She began hauling him by brute strength as if to the nearest cashier’s window; at the bathroom door he broke free.

‘I’m gone!’ he shrieked, breaking blindly for cover down the hall, bumping from doorway to wall all the way down to the broom closet, pausing there to fumble down the sides of his long underwear. The closet key was in his pants, the pants were hanging on the bedpost and he couldn’t understand why he couldn’t find any pockets now.

For the closet was his sanctuary, where a chair and an army blanket, kept in reserve for storms like this, would lend him a brief security, if not sleep, before morning lighted the way toward his icehouse refuge. But something about his feeble fumbling at the closet door enraged her anew. ‘You ain’t even man enough to get into a closet,’ she taunted him brutally.

Stash turned in the dim-lit hall in all the chaste white pride of his long drawers and told her, like a saucy child, ‘Who wants? I’m not tell Mrs No-good where at is chippest restaurant-bakeree on Division. Ha! Ha! ’

‘Go on! ’ Violet commanded. ‘Get in there! Who wants you ’n your secondhand pumpernickel? You’re bot’ dried up! Lock the door after you, go croak under the scrub pail, it’s where you was born! You ’n the rest of the brooms!’ Abruptly, inflamed by a memory of day-old beef stew, she bore down upon him.

Stash wheeled and made for the fire escape, one side of the hall to the other like a rider on a trick bicycle, trying to ward off her blows with his thin little elbows. Down the hall a woman with her hair in crimpers opened her door just the tiniest crack.

‘Don’t excite yourself, honey,’ she advised Violet.

Immediately Vi raced back – for what she wasn’t certain – till she saw the.38 lying where Stash had tossed it so wearily. Sparrow stepped lightly to one side to let her pass on the return trip. ‘Where’d that motherless animal go?’ she wanted to know. Just like that: ‘Where’s that motherless animal hiding?’