Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

‘He was just tryin’ to get warm,’ Frankie told her in the darkness, fumbling about the gas plate in the corner.

‘Then why does he have to sneak about it, jumpin’ off ’n pertendin’ he been under the dresser the whole time we was gone?’

‘’Cause he’s scared he’ll get rapped in the snout with the hair curler like the other time he tried it,’ he reminded her.

‘I’ll rap him wit’ somethin’ more than a hair curler,’ she warned them both, ‘if he got rapped wit’ a little rat poison in his dirty beer we’d see how much sneakin’ he’d do then.’

A little blue flame spurted upward in the dark beneath Frankie’s hand.

‘You wanted a dog,’ he told her, ‘you got one.’ He sat on the bed’s edge and smoked a cigarette while Rumdum nuzzled between his knees. Once the latch rattled suddenly and he wondered why he could never get used to the way the El rattled it.

‘Wheel me a little, Frankie.’

That meant she would sleep in the chair tonight, and he wheeled her till her head slipped onto her shoulder in a light doze. Beside the gas plate’s feeble warmth she napped lightly, with the little blue flames playing on her nodding head; beneath the chair Rumdum shivered. The overhanging blankets kept the cold off his hide a bit down there.

From under the heaped army blankets on the bed – blankets stolen from army camps all the way from Fort Bragg to Camp Maxey – Frankie peered out, with one limp eye, upon the new year’s calendar: January 1, 1947. Outside the pane the year’s first snow turned into the year’s first rain.

Time, Frankie saw by that calendar, was some old man with a scythe. Time was always an old man with a scythe, for some reason. Yet as he drifted toward sleep it seemed that Time was really Antek the Owner’s great gray deaf-and-dumb cat, that simply sat all day on the bar and studied the barflies with such unwavering tolerance.

Everyone said the cat was dumb, all insisted he had never even been heard to purr. Antek alone knew differently; he alone had heard the old cat purr. ‘’N when you hear that one purr you’re through,’ Antek was convinced. ‘That one keeps track of how many shots you put down every day. So long as you’re just a sociable drinker he don’t purr. But when you take the one that puts you on the lush for keeps, then he knows you’ll never get off the bottle all your life,’ n he purrs once at you. He purred at me ’n he’ll purr at you ’n with my own ears I heard him purr at Rumdum.’

The old cat knew, Frankie realized dreamily, only the old cat knew. Watching and waiting for the finishing shot that each hustler came to with the cat-gray stroke of the years.

Dreamed he heard Molly-O cry out only one flight down; in a voice made remote by many walls. And muffled by a slow slant rain.

By walls, by rain and by years to be when he would hear no voice at all; muffled by the slow slant rain of a night he would never know.

Some rain that beat, like forgotten tears, against some other room’s single pane: the rain of that far-off night when his name would be the name of nobody at all, as the name of one who had never lived. Save in the memory of Molly-O, grown too old to remember.

Caught between the dealer’s slot and the cat-gray stroke of the years, Frankie saw a line of endless girders wet with the rain of those years to be. Where all night long, in that far time, the same all-night salamanders burned. Burned just as they had so long ago. Before the world went wrong. And any gray cat had purred at all.

The cold rain ran with the red-lit rain. Like years beating by on the wheels of an empty Loopbound El. Till his heart, that cried for a greater rest even in sleep, felt tattooed by that long rain’s beating. Why was it that within the voice of any woman crying at night he always heard an infant’s gasping cry?

As the first light began enfolding the signal towers with tourniquets of fog, a sounder sleep finally folded a tourniquet about the fever in Frankie’s brain. The slow heart stanched itself at last; though the rain ran on forever. And Molly-O, so far below, had yet such a long hard way to go.

‘Sophie knows,’ he mumbled in sleep, ‘she knows about Molly-O, but she don’t know about everything.’ Cause the cat won’t purr, the cat won’t tell. Nobody can tell which way the old cat’ll jump.’

And a dream cat leaped, in a slow and stiff-legged tableau, down a steep dark stair where paper daisies bloomed in an unabating rain.

Two hours later he felt himself being shaken awake by Record Head Bednar’s hand on his shoulder. He opened his eyes to see only Sophie shaking him. ‘What’s the matter? What’s up?’ he wanted to know irritably; yet relieved that it had only been Zosh after all.

‘Nuttin’, dummy,’ she scolded him. ‘You just look too lonesome when you sleep. I don’t like it when you look so lonesome, it makes me feel lonesome too – I’m here, ain’t I? If you got to sleep lookin’ like that get up ’n get dressed, it means you need a drink.’ Then, curiously, almost gently: ‘Why you look like that when you sleep, Frankie?’

‘Some cats just sleep like that,’ he told her without hearing his own voice. He was already purring, back in dreams, among all manner of other strange lost strays.

Time may well redeem the forger while leaving the bad checks unredeemed was how Antek Witwicki looked at it. And just to show how little trust he had in Time had had a fresh challenge painted above his register for all Tug & Maul employees to heed:

I’ll cash the checks here – Owner

Then, reminding himself that the only other employee of the place was Mrs Witwicki, had softened the alarm with a gentler admonition:

He who drinks and drinks with grace

Is ever welcome to this place

But he who drinks and starts to swear

Is never welcome anywhere.

Antek also expressed his faith in the high art of graceful drinking by sternly forbidding all strong-arming upon the immediate premises. ‘Take him out on the street,’ Owner would insist, ‘and I don’t mean in front of my doorway neither. The city put up a billboard for that purpose around the corner.’

His sense of justice was as decided as his love of graceful living. He backed up law and order with a wooden-handled plunger originally designed for the flushing of basement sewers. By reaching over the bar with the business end, to conk guilty and innocent alike, whichever happened to be nearest, he accounted for all sorts of unpaid sins. Although not so damaging as a blackjack or a rubber-handled gearshift, it was certainly more humiliating to be conked out of a tavern with a plumber’s plunger: there is scarcely more dignity to that than to being swept out, like a gum wrapper or a cigar band, in front of a janitor’s broom.

For the more serious brawls he went for a half-filled water bucket kept below the bar with a bottle of ammonia waiting beside it. A dash of ammonia in the water and a heave of the bucket over the bar would break up anything from bulldogs to men. He had used it with savage success on cats, bulldogs, torpedoes, ex-pugs, drunken paratroopers and cuckolds demanding satisfaction from their wives’ consorts. It had worked every time.

‘The only thing it ain’t worth a damn on is a woman under sixty or a girl over twelve,’ he conceded with some bewilderment. ‘We had a pair of biddies go after each other here one Easter morning – the one on top had her slipper off and was trying to get the other one’s eyes out with the heel – but that one got her teeth through the cheek ’n both ’em with their Easter dresses half ripped off. The toot’-holt one kept the shoe-holt one from gougin’ her but the shoe’s boy friend hollered somethin’ so she started rammin’ the slipper up between the toot’-holt’s legs – you ought to have heard the bloody screamin’ then – I figured it had gone far enough ’n went for the bucket ’n ammonia but it didn’t help a thing. I had to cold-caulk that one wit’ the slipper. What would you have done, you was me?’