Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

‘Gimme back the silver.’ Louie was laying down a crisp new single in exchange. ‘I wasn’t bettin’ the silver one, it was just to bring the old luck around.’

‘It’s my good-luck piece now,’ Frankie said, with a low, soft malice in his voice, ‘I get superstitious myself around New Year’s.’

‘Change it for him,’ Schwiefka ordered his dealer.

‘Keep your muscles in your pockets, bakebrain,’ Frankie answered, ‘I make the change around here.’

Louie rose. ‘If I once quit a joint I never come back in it ’n neither do my friends,’ he threatened Schwiefka’s purse.

‘Nobody sent for you in the first place,’ Frankie assured him.

‘ I sent for him,’ Schwiefka decided, and reached for the blood-stained buck.

Sparrow’s narrow hand got it first and had it pocketed by the time Frankie had pushed back his chair. ‘If you sent for him you deal to him,’ and sent the deck flying across the board, aces and kings and deuces scattering across the floor. Schwiefka, bending heavily, went in pursuit of his sixty-cent deck while Frankie followed Sparrow down the steep stairwell to the street.

‘He’s gettin’ too big for his britches,’ Schwiefka complained peevishly to Louie when he’d gotten his deck together again. ‘In the old days for a dealer to walk out on me like that, he wouldn’t be dealin’ no place for life. He’d be spottin’ pins in a bowlin’ alley ’n lucky to get that, it’d be just ’cause I was sorry for him.’

Louie wasn’t hearing Schwiefka. He was hearing only the dealer’s footsteps walking away with Louie’s special luck. With the dealer’s every step Louie felt one step unluckier. He had never felt so unlucky so fast in all his life.

It was the sort of night he went to a dance or stuck close to the bars and wouldn’t let himself glance at a deck or a pair of dice or a cue. Just like that, only worse. All his luck stepping down a staircase inside of the luckiest buck in the world. ‘I got careless, teasin’ him wit’ that dirty buck,’ he realized with a strange despair. Then slapped his fedora forward onto his skull and hurried after his dollar.

At the top of the stairs Schwiefka heard him call down; they all heard him call down.

‘Dealer! I want to talk to you!’

Everyone there heard Louie ask that. But not one heard the dealer reply. Then the upstairs door closed behind Louie; and none had heard the door downstairs open at all.

All heard a long, steep, waiting silence there, where the dealer and the steerer waited within the stairwell’s high-walled pit, for someone coming down to them from above.

The dealer and the steerer heard the upstairs door open and close; like a door shutting upon some long-lost argument. Both watched Louie’s lean dark figure coming down, the sparkler in his tie glinting like a one-eyed cat, one step down and one step down. He was a long dark time coming down.

Laughing nervously to himself as he came. ‘I’m givin’ you a buck fer a buck,’ he repeated his offer, sticking a folded single into Frankie’s jacket pocket. ‘No more ’n no less.’

‘Don’t buckle, Frankie,’ Sparrow encouraged him. If Frankie buckled now he’d buckle for keeps, he’d buckle in everything, the punk sensed.

‘I don’t want trouble, I got enough,’ Frankie mumbled his apologies with all his defiance swept under. ‘Give him his dirty buck back, Solly. He worked for it.’

Sparrow stalled, fishing for it in all the wrong pockets at once. Frankie unfolded the single just to be sure it wasn’t a phony.

‘It’s good awright,’ Louie laughed, ‘it come from the same place as the silver buck. You give it to me yerself last week – remember?’

‘I remember -’ cause it was the last one you’re gettin’ that way off me.’

‘Wrong again, Dealer. You’ll look me up ten thousand times to come.’ N on yer knees to beg me to take your money too.’

‘ What way, Frankie?’ Sparrow put in innocently, pretending to forget all about the silver in his watch pocket.

‘None of yer sheenie business,’ Louie told him. ‘Come up, Jewboy – the buck, the lucky buck.’

Sparrow offered it to Louie’s reaching hand, then let it slip through his fingers deliberately and stepped back just in time to let the back of Louie’s hand whizz past his lips.

‘A Jew trick,’ Louie laughed derisively, and the odor of violet talc touched the air. Sparrow opened the door to the alley so that he could kick the coin out into the alley’s darkness if he spotted it first; and retrieve it in the morning. Through the open door the arc lamp’s light fell across Louie’s face.

Frankie felt his own back pressed hard against the hallway wall knowing neither God nor Molly-O could save him from going to Louie on his knees with ten dirty thousand more. ‘There’s people ought to be knocked on the head,’ he told Louie without hearing his own voice at all. ‘I want people like you knocked on the head.’

‘You couldn’t knock nobody’s head,’ Louie laughed at him, ‘all you can knock around is that beat-out hustler John brushed off, the piece of trade with the pinned-up skirt.’ Then spotted the buck, trapped upright under the door’s lower hinge, and bent swiftly for it.

Frankie locked his fingers to stop their shaking. If the shaking didn’t stop he was going to cry in front of the punk and a flame of cold shame for having lain in a cold and secret sweat begging for morphine charged the fingers with a pride of their own. He rose on the balls of his toes and came down with all his weight full upon that white defenseless nape.

The throat made a single startled gurgle.

Then the neck flopped forward like a hen’s with the ax half through it.

An irregular thunder beat in his ears and a whitish lightning hurt his eyes till he felt Sparrow’s hand on his arm and Sparrow’s inside-info voice near at hand. ‘Take it easy, Frankie, we’re in the clear.’ The irregular thunder became a bowling alley’s harmless roar and the lightning steadied to the alley’s unquestioning glare. ‘I didn’t even hear him fall,’ he heard his own voice returning.

‘You keep sayin’ that, Frankie. Quit sayin’ that. We got to be upstairs before the aces pick him up.’

‘Did you run too?’ Frankie asked, feeling the first recession of the shock that had blacked him out.

‘Sure I run,’ Sparrow reported with pride, ‘after I hauled him out of the hall. He’s behind Schwiefka’s woodshed, it’ll be morning before anybody spots him – can you handle the deck?’

‘I can do anythin’,’ Frankie decided firmly. ‘All I need is one quick one. You think maybe it was just his ticker give out?’

‘His ticker give out awright’ – Sparrow gave a little chortle of hoarse glee – ‘whose ticker wouldn’t give out when a boxcar lands on the back of his neck?’

At the bowling-alley bar Sparrow surveyed the dealer from behind his great glasses, trying to hurry him without rushing him back into panic. ‘He hit the floor like Levinsky,’ Sparrow told him, covering Frankie’s glass with his palm. ‘You got to get back to the slot, Dealer.’

At the prospect of returning Frankie felt something that had been holding him together open and let his stomach slip through. Sparrow saw him pale, yet kept the glass covered.

‘You got to make it, Frankie.’

‘I can make it. One more and I make it.’

‘One more and you’ll never make it.’ Sparrow was firm. He saw Frankie’s hand tremble as he lifted the empty glass to his lips in the hope of finding one last small drop. ‘Steady hand ’n steady eye,’ Sparrow told him.

But what was it Louie had told Frankie? ‘You’ll come beggin’ on your knees.’