Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

Though I think you’re perfectly swell

My heart belongs to Daddy,

Da-a-dee, Da-a-dee, Da-a-dee-’

At the bar there was such a crush that the liquor ran out three times and emergency rations had to be rushed in by a squad of four flying lushes. It was one of those nights when everyone felt, for some reason, he really never had to go to work again at all.

In one moment everyone had to have a drink on everyone else. Men who wouldn’t loan their mothers three dollars without an I.O.U. heard themselves telling ancestral foes, ‘Keep your money, Emil. Spend mine. I got too much.’ The orchestra got tight to a man so that the drummer stood up on his traps, alleged he was Gene Krupa and wanted to buy some cigarettes, then toppled into the sax man’s lap. Immediately the sax man began taking a collection for the drummer and turned it over to the pianist. Who promptly rose to spend every dime of it back on the dancers.

Frankie took over the drums. For half an hour, while everyone was helping to bring the drummer around, the dealer was a man in a dream: he was Dave Tough, he was Krupa, then he was Dave Tough again without missing a beat. ‘The kid can do it when he feels like it,’ somebody said, and everyone shook his hand to tell him he was as much in the slot with the traps as he was with a deck.

Cousin Kvorka held his hand last and longer than anyone. ‘You can do it when you want to, Dealer,’ Cousin told him.

‘Don’t call me “Dealer,” call me “Drummer,”’ Frankie asked: he never had it in him to answer Cousin in a really friendly way at all. He turned toward the bar. Cousin turned him back.

‘Before you start hittin’ the bottle over there I want to do you a small favor, if you’ll let me,’ the leathery little man asked Frankie with real humility, ‘for the way you’ve kept the wolves off Umbrellas at Schwiefka’s,’ he explained with the embarrassment of a man more accustomed to denying a favor than to be asking the privilege of doing one.

‘You don’t owe me no favors, Cousin,’ Frankie told him with a sullenness he could not keep out of his voice, ‘it’s my job to keep the game straight, it’s what Zero pays me to do. Umbrellas gets the same deal as everyone else.’

Cousin had maneuvered him into the corner of the men’s wardrobe within a few steps of a couple bucks trying to start a crap game. ‘I wouldn’t sleep tonight if I didn’t tip you, Frankie.’

Frankie had the feeling, cold and swift, that the party was over and the new year well begun. Through the hubbub and the laughter, the smoke, the music and the stomp of dancing feet, he sensed, for one moment, that 1947 was going to be a long, long year for Frankie Majcinek.

‘Spill it,’ he told Cousin Kvorka.

‘When we picked up Fomorowski he been layin’ there two days ’n if some potato peddler hadn’t stopped by the shed to pee he might be layin’ there yet. The guy was covered up. ’

‘You should of buried him deeper then,’ Frankie suggested without troubling to feign surprise. ‘Why you tellin’ me? ’

Kvorka bridled a bit. ‘He didn’t freeze to death, Dealer.’

Frankie waited.

‘I ain’t tryin’ to make no pinch, Frankie,’ Cousin assured him earnestly. ‘I ain’t even tryin’ to give you advice. But it would do you some good to know what the score is on Louie now.’

‘Sounds like the game’s over for Louie,’ was all Frankie had to say.

‘He’s at the morgue ’n there’ll be a coroner’s inquest. I can tell you the verdict now ’cause I tossed him in the wagon myself.’

It was Kvorka’s turn to wait. Either the dealer needed to know or he didn’t.

‘What’s the story, Cousin?’

‘“Death due to assault, assailant unknown.” His neck was broke, Frankie.’

‘If you ask me that’s a damned good thing ’n I’m happy to hear it,’ Frankie told him steadily.

The crap game was getting well started. ‘Only tryin’ to square a favor,’ Kvorka told him.

‘What do I need favors for?’ Frankie turned on his heel. What did the guy take him for? Some high school stub who’d break down ’n say, ‘Please don’t arrest me, Mister, I won’t do it again’? It would be a cold day in hell before Bednar would pin a rap like that on Frankie Machine. He stood watching the crapshooters until he saw Kvorka get his hat and overcoat out of the wardrobe and leave. ‘He could save his favors,’ Frankie repeated. Machine didn’t scare as easy as some aces might think, he told himself.

But when somebody offered him the dice he shook his head, No, and wandered off looking for Sparrow. He went around the hall twice and couldn’t spot him.

Wandered without noticing that everything everyone was doing around him was the funniest sort of thing anyone had ever yet done. The hall was jumping with comical fellows wearing their girls’ best hats and every man of them doing it like he was born for the stage.

Best of all, no one seemed to mind being outdone in anything. Though each tried to outsing, outdrink and outdance the next fellow, yet between the singing and the dancing and the drinking each conceded readily he didn’t do nearly as well as anyone else in the place might have. Each exhibited his humility and trust by offering his whisky, his counsel and his girl to whoever stood nearest.

‘Just everybody is feelin’ good tonight,’ Sophie laughed, and felt just as good as anybody. Following Frankie’s circuit of the floor, she wondered who he was looking for. If it was for whom she suspected, she determined, someone would learn that it was as easy to slap a face from a wheelchair as from a standing position. Her suspicion trailed along behind Frankie as she watched him, hatless, leave the hall.

For he knew where dark-haired Molly sat by herself, in the nest on the first floor front, and it wasn’t Sparrow he had to see most of all. Remembered where she sat counting the Els that passed in the night.

It was New Year’s Eve on the El, it was New Year’s Eve down Division Street, it was Happy New Year’s Eve for the boys from the Tug & Maul and the girls hustling drinks at the Safari. It was Happy New Year in Junkie Row at Twenty-sixth and California and Happy New Year for the Endless Belt & Leather Invincibles.

It was Happy New Year everywhere except in Molly Novotny’s heart; neither her heart nor her nest gave sign of the season. The stove was smoking again and she thought carelessly, ‘We get the ones the landlords buy up for old iron,’ of both the stove and her heart. The day comes when both feel past throwing heat.

It’s like that for all hustlers’ hearts: to pay the most and get the worst. The only thing a hustling girl has that doesn’t get stopped up is her purse. And that’s as full of holes as a married man’s promises.

Yet, when the El passed overhead, it drew the curtain up in that same passionate fluttering that had touched her heart so strangely the first night he’d come by – then died, as she felt her heart had died; and dwindled like any dying heart away. He would not be by again.

She tried to rouse herself, saying it would never do, letting herself feel so useless again. She had never understood why she had lived with a man like Drunkie John, for whom she had cared nothing at all, and found the answer now: when a woman feels useless she doesn’t think anything of throwing herself away. One way of doing it, with one man or another, was as good a way as any other then. She ought to be hustling drinks across the street this minute instead of letting herself feel that, unless one certain clown knocked soon, she would be useless all her life.

It seemed to her now that all she had ever wanted, with one man or another, one street or another or under any old moon at all, was simply this: a man to care for, and a child of her own. To nurse in the silver evening light and tend in the gilded morning. That was all she had ever wanted.