Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

The naked bulb that burned overhead, by night, by noon, by twilit hours, hung like a little bald yellow skull on a chain like a twisted rope. Below it she had a candle burning, a candle red as wine. Its tiny flame pointed, upon the yellow wall, to the skull burning overhead: it glinted a bit on the bottle of cheap cologne and in the depths of dark-haired Molly’s eyes. On the other side of the window a prairie snow fell across backstreet and tenement, looking for dry leaves upon which to rest and finding only concrete and steel.

‘I know,’ Molly laughed with that laugh so soft one hardly heard the small rasp in it. ‘I heard you two goin’ at it one night, it sounded like all the dishes in the place gettin’ bust. I had to hold my ears. What went on?’

‘“What went on?” Why, that’s just what went on: all the dishes in the joint gettin’ bust. She started it just to show me she didn’t care one way or another, for dishes ’r me ’r anythin’ no more. So I helped her out to show her I didn’t neither. I don’t.’

‘You just think you don’t,’ Molly decided. ‘So now you’re eatin’ out of paper plates?’

‘ I ain’t eatin’ up there at all. Vi brings her soup in a bowl ’n I eat by Messinger’s on Milwaukee, it’s where you can lay your dirty head right down on the table ’n go to sleep ’n they don’t bother you if they seen you spent for coffee.’

‘I like Violet,’ Molly told him as if thinking of something else, then said what she was trying to say. ‘Don’t go by Messinger’s no more when you want to put your dirty head down somewheres. I got a table ’n you don’t have to buy coffee to put it there. I’m settin’ here three days now waitin’ for you, listenin’ to the Els go by, countin’ how many cars it sounds like. You don’t know how lonely it gets, waitin’ for El cars. Frankie, let’s both quit stonin’ ourselves.’

He didn’t know she was crying till her tears touched his lips.

‘I know how lonely it gets waitin’ for Els,’ Frankie Machine told dark-haired Molly.

Frankie sat in the dealer’s slot but he did not see the players. He saw only their shadows along the pale green baize and he dealt only to shadows.

For each sat in the same seat every night and he knew each shadow well. The heavily crouching one to his left was Schwiefka’s, the trembling, pinheaded one was Sparrow’s; the humble, headless and hunched-up one was Umbrellas’, bent as though still carrying his daytime burden. And the ever-shifting, wavering one, that seemed to change shape as its owner reached in a shadow pocket for the shadow of a single cigarette, was the tallest, leanest shadow of all.

‘Louie’s all dressed up tonight,’ Sparrow feigned admiration of Louie’s soft green fedora with the red feather in the brim and his polopony shirt. ‘You goin’ cabaretin’ for Christmas Eve, Louie?’

‘No, I just got tired of winnin’ in my old clothes,’ Louie explained confidently, and shifted the fedora onto the back of his head so that everyone might see he had just had two bits worth of Division Street sun tan and a Paradise Ballroom haircut. The man would never see fifty again, yet dandied about as if he were twenty-two, whistling at the girls and fingering his American Legion button – a habit derived after six months spent in Stateside army camps in 1918.

‘I could of got ten to one in 1924,’ he announced. But no one asked him ten to one on what. Everyone knew. They’d heard it all before.

‘Ten to one I wouldn’t live out the year ’n that was only May,’ he answered himself as though someone had asked, as if anyone cared. ‘Standin’ right there by the Four-Corner Tap I told Red Laflin he’d be dead before I was ’n he lived twenny years ’n his best rod man is buyin’ me a shot every time I stop by the Four-Corner just to say hello, just for old time’s sake. “You was Red’s best friend,” he tells me,’ n puts the bottle on the bar.’

‘’N you’re just the schleck to kill the bottle wit’out layin’ out a dime, too,’ Sparrow observed. ‘Red must be turnin’ over when he sees his best rod man settin’ that big free bottle down.’

‘I mix it wit’ lemon,’ Louie explained smugly, ‘it don’t burn up your insides that way.’

‘I always wondered who burned down Laflin’s joint,’ Sparrow wondered idly, and added hurriedly, ‘I know it wasn’t no guy from around here .’

‘Back off, Jewboy,’ Louie told him, sounding bored, ‘your job is by the door.’

‘Zero’ll tell the steerer when to get by the door,’ Frankie put in quietly.

And the cards went around and around.

‘He’s just afraid I’ll win his dollar-twenny before the suckers start comin’,’ Sparrow explained of Louie.

‘Quit waspin’ him,’ Frankie ordered.

But Louie opened his wallet and started counting just to show how many ‘dollar-twennies’ he was holding. There was a c-note right on top, then a couple fifties, then so many twenties and tens that Sparrow figured it, just offhand, at better than half a grand.

‘Thanks, Louie,’ he offered, ‘I was just wonderin’ what you were holdin’ – which alley you go home by? I’ll walk you down.’

‘I could buy a hundred Jewboys,’ Louie told no one in particular, and returned the bills to his poke.

‘We know where you get it, too,’ Frankie said boldly, seeing nobody’s shadow at all.

‘We give the public what it asks for,’ Louie smirked.

‘Be careful the public don’t give you what you’re askin’ for,’ Frankie told him. And thought to himself, ‘This joker thinks he still got me on the hook, he’ll find out nobody needs him.’

And the cards went around and around.

There came a scratching like a cat’s scratching at the metal door, but Sparrow did not rise.

‘It’s just that blind hyena again,’ he said, ‘let him wait.’

‘Let him in,’ Frankie asked, ‘I need coffee.’

Sparrow rose, and a moment later the greasy white cane and the gamy odor of the peddler moved across the table like a cloud off the canal.

‘Sit next to me, prosiak ,’ Nifty Louie ordered, pulling the peddler around into the empty chair beside him. ‘You want a hand of no-peek? I heard you was pretty good at it.’

‘Can’t deal no blind guy,’ Frankie protested, ‘I’ll do everythin’ but that.’

‘Blind guys are the betht to deal,’ Pig himself pointed out politely, ‘they can’t tell what they’re holdin’.’

‘I’ll read his hand,’ Louie explained.

‘Blind, bummy ’r beggars,’ Frankie insisted, ‘no two guys holdin’ one hand.’

‘I’m goin’ to Stickney to play,’ Louie announced, ‘this is Clark Street poker – hobo gamblers, hobo steerer, hobo dealer.’

‘If he stands behind Pig it’s awright, Frankie,’ Schwiefka compromised anxiously, ‘it’ll be Louie’s hand, only Piggy-O holdin’ it. Be sociable.’

‘Why can’t he play it hisself?’

‘I believe in blind man’s luck is why,’ Louie told everyone, fingering the yellowed Legion button. And placed a silver dollar in front of Pig.

Frankie reached over, tested the dollar against the metal shade of the night light, then peered more closely at its stain.

‘I seen that dirty buck somewheres before,’ he decided, returning it to begin boxing the cards. ‘Somewheres before. That’s bloodstains on that dirty buck.’

‘The bank’ll cash it,’ Schwiefka put in, ‘deal us a round of blackjack, make everybody happy.’

‘It’s my good-luck piece,’ Louie told them all, ‘I’m always superstitious as a whorehouse rat toward Christmas.’

Umbrella Man rose uneasily and shuffled, still half crouching, into his coat, fearing the air of challenge going around the board. When Sparrow returned, after letting him out, the soiled dollar lay in front of Frankie: he had dealt himself a winner.