Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

That was it then. The fast shuffle-off on Damen and Division and the sudden turn of mood in the back booth at Antek’s. A guy as right as Frankie letting himself get hooked on a kick as wrong as that. It was Sparrow’s turn to feel a little sick.

‘Stick by me, Solly,’ Frankie pleaded exactly as if Sparrow had spoken aloud.

‘I’m stickin’, Frankie.’

Neither looked toward the woodshed shadowed by the wall of the Endless Belt & Leather Works as they returned down the alley through which they’d fled. A couple of Schwiefka’s dated racing forms scurried down the alley before them, pursued by a bitter wind; whipped past the woodshed’s corner and banked against the wood as though sent by the wind to cover something there. Neither spoke till they came to the darkened alley hall.

‘I hope you had sense enough to get our lucky buck back,’ Frankie remembered suddenly with a real sense of loss.

‘There wasn’t time for that, Frankie – it was pitch him by his ankles ’n run, you ought to be glad I didn’t just let him lay. You weren’t easy to catch. I still don’t know where you were headin’.’

‘I had a place all right, don’t worry,’ Frankie lied firmly. ‘Where the hell was I goin’?’ he had to ask himself. Then, begrudgingly: ‘You done awright for once.’

Outside the alley door Sparrow whispered pointedly. ‘I’m glad we were havin’ coffee when that guy Fomorowski Whatever His Name Is got slugged next door.’ He stooped, picked up a handful of Christmas Eve snow. When they walked in on the shills he shambled to the table, goggling dizzily, extending the snow and asking, ‘Who wants ice cream? Awready it’s t’ree inches deep!’

‘If Louie don’t come back it’s you guys’ fault,’ Schwiefka grumbled while Frankie, pale but steady, slid into the dealer’s slot. ‘You two guys gonna find yourselfs out of a good job one of these nights, treatin’ the customers like they was underground dogs.’

‘We’d be cheaper off wit’out this one,’ Sparrow told him.

‘Yeh,’ Frankie backed up the punk, ‘this is gettin’ to be a good place to hang away from, there’s too many arguments goin’ on.’

He looked around for Blind Pig as he riffled the deck.

But the peddler had left in the wind and the snow.

As the cards went around and around.

Stash was out of the bucket and all was forgiven. There would be a dance in the hall that stood in the shadow of Endless Belt & Leather and everyone would be there.

But right from his first hour back home he began giving Violet trouble again. Something had happened to the old man in his five days at Twenty-eighth and California, he’d gone a bit stir-crazy it began to appear.

First thing he shakes his head, No, to washing dishes after Violet had finished eating. So she cleaned them up herself and sent him down for a half gallon of beer – and here he comes back upstairs with nothing in his hand but five two-bit cigars and a dollar-fifty lighter. ‘Where’s my beer, Old Man?’ she wanted to know. But all Stash does is look about dreamily, like he thinks maybe he heard somebody ask him something, and lights up a fresh cigar.

‘No more day-old pompernickel,’ he gave her a reply at last and before she could realize just what he meant by that there was a taptapping at the door and there was Sparrow with a blue-and-white pencil-striped mattress on his back.

‘Got it in the section next to the ’lectric eye-rons,’ Sparrow boasted, dumping the mattress right in the middle of the floor, ‘just picked out the prettiest one, hauled it off the pile, told the girl I was from the basement, they got to have six down there right away to ship to the South Side store, special order, they got up here by mistake. She’s still waitin’ for me to come back ’n get the other five.’

‘Don’t tell Zosh how you got it,’ was Violet’s thought, ‘she’d be so ashamed.’

‘Yeh. But think how proud Frankie’s gonna be,’ Sparrow pointed out and turned to Old Husband. ‘I bought it for you, Old Man, it’s your comin’-home present to sleep on when I got to sleep in the bedroom. I don’t want you bein’ uncomfortable on the front-room couch.’

‘Don’t want.’ Stash kicked at the mattress petulantly.

‘ What don’t you want, Old Man?’ Sparrow demanded to know. ‘You’d rather sleep on the couch wit’out no mattress, you mean?’

‘You pay board , what I want.’

So that was it. Just like somebody owed him something. For a moment Sparrow was so hurt he thought of walking right out and leaving Stash to try to handle Violet himself awhile. It took more than a new mattress for that. He himself was being extended beyond his own powers, he knew. ‘You talk like a bolt from the blue, Stash,’ he counseled Old Husband, ‘you don’t get the idea at all. Times have changed. I live here now. You’re the boarder these days. It’s why you got to pay the rent.’

Stash grappled with his truss over the heavy, bleached-out underwear, got it straight all around at last and announced firmly: ‘Am hoosband. You pay rent.’

Violet, sprawled out on the mattress, her hands beneath her hennaed head and her legs spread a bit to explore its possibilities, rolled over and buried her face in her hands, laughter shaking her shoulders. ‘He says he’s my husband ,’ she managed to gasp, then dried tears of laughter out of her eyes, gathered the mattress in her arms and marched off to the bedroom with a low word to the punk: ‘I’ll be waiting, lover.’

In a minute she was back: ‘It’s too small for a double bed so I put it on your side – I got so much meat on me I could sleep on the floor ’n it’d feel like plush – but your poor little bones, the way they stick out-’

‘Ess,’ Old Man agreed with a malicious glee, ‘is good enough for Mrs No-good, on floor.’ He pointed commandingly to the sports section wadded into a hole in the battered couch. ‘ Mr No-good there .’ He got a good grip on the truss and stood right up to Sparrow. ‘Stash boss by howz now. Stash sleep on bed. ’

‘If you don’t stop tryin’ to make trouble around here you can’t tear no more days off my calendar,’ Violet told him, and went into the kitchen to see to the one small bottle of beer remaining there. Sparrow heard the tinkle of glass against the icebox door and followed. ‘We can’t afford to have you drinkin’ up our good beer on us, the way you’re actin’,’ he warned Stash, ‘you stay out.’

When Sparrow passed the bedroom door on the way downstairs for more beer he saw Stash stretched comfortably on the new mattress, working on a fresh cigar and with a half gallon all his own beside the bed. There was something wrong, Sparrow sensed, in the old man’s very posture. If he felt that relaxed today how could anyone be sure he’d feel like getting up at 5 A.M. to go to work tomorrow?

Stash got up in time to go to work the next morning – but Vi had to roll out first and get the coffee perking before he did it. ‘We can’t go on this way,’ Violet told him in the cold little kitchen, afraid to return to bed lest he return there too. ‘There got to be some changes made.’

‘Is right,’ Old Man agreed. ‘You go by job instead.’

Sure enough, he returned that same afternoon with his rusted ice tongs over his shoulder.

‘Did you quit or was you fired?’ she wanted to know before he had hung up his coat.

Stash made no reply. But he stayed home drinking beer the whole afternoon and in the evening Violet and Sparrow held an anxious conference in the kitchen.

‘He says he ain’t gonna do nothin’ but set around ’n read the temper’ture the rest of his life. Then he looks at the calendar like he wishes it was time awready to pull the date off for tomorrow.’