Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

‘That ain’t the way I heard it. They tell me you’re spendin’ awful easy these last couple days. Did one of them easy bucks have a little blood on it, Solly?’

For one moment Sparrow didn’t really seem to get it: his jaw hung slack. Then his eyes sought something along the floor and he answered in a mumble without meeting Frankie’s eyes at all. ‘I had a couple bills Wednesday night but you wasn’t around. It was Stash’s Christmas bonus check ’n me ’n Vi was lookin’ for you to help us tear a hole in it. We come in here lookin’ for you ’n we drank half of it up waitin’ for you. You think I’d be drinkin’ Louie’s bloody bucks up in here? ’ His eyes met Frankie’s at last. And demanded an answer in turn.

‘I’m just askin’ whose dough you’re spendin’,’ Frankie heard himself apologizing and felt dismayed: he’d backtracked to everybody for years but never before to the punk.

‘Whose dough you think I was spendin’?’ Sparrow had the offensive at last. Everyone else made Frankie buckle – why shouldn’t he? Sparrow thought excitedly.

‘I thought maybe Antek was givin’ you credit again,’ Frankie said weakly.

‘You’re the only guy can run a tab on Owner these days,’ Sparrow pursued his victory. ‘You want to start a new one wit’ him now? I’ll call him over.’

It looked like Frankie had not only been outmaneuvered but was going to buy the drinks to boot. He pushed the bottle toward Sparrow and while the punk drank alone the dull drums of suspicion began beating another tune. Between the fumes of whisky there he began probing into darkened corners, like a man looking for a lost coin in an unlit steam room with the heat on full. Yet couldn’t quite touch anything that felt real for all his probing.

‘I’ll tell you somethin’ now,’ Sparrow decided after finishing a second shot, apparently not even noticing that he was drinking alone. ‘Pig is settin’ by the Safari in a new suit ’n really buyin’ – how come he couldn’t even get in there by the front door before ’n now it’s like he owns the joint?’

‘What good would it do Pig to strongarm Louie?’ Frankie asked foggily. ‘Who’d give him a square count? He wouldn’t know if he had forty bucks ’r four hundred.’

‘Owner’d give him some kind of count, Frankie,’ Sparrow decided. ‘You want to ask Owner if he give Pig a square count?’

‘Don’t pertend to be that dizzy,’ Frankie scolded him hotly. ‘Don’t think that dizzy act can get you out of everythin’. I know you better than you know yourself.’

‘All I want to know is this,’ Sparrow asked quietly, with no further dizziness at all. ‘Who’s wearin’ the new suit – me or Piggy-O?’

‘That doesn’t prove much,’ Frankie grumbled; but this time he filled both glasses. Then shifted his cigarette to the corner of his mouth till it dangled and Sparrow realized swiftly, ‘Now he’s gettin’ set to pull one of his corny movie acts on me.’

Frankie passed his hand ruminatively across his cheek just the way that Bogart did it when they were hunting him down and he needed a shave. Somebody had squealed, that was it, it was between himself and Edward G. Robinson now.

‘We could go look for Pig in the Coney Island Diner,’ Sparrow suggested, for he dearly loved this movie game. Like the reading of serial numbers on streetcar transfers, it was one game he played faster than Frankie.

‘What’s the use of goin’ to the Coney? You said he was at the Safari.’

‘That’s just why we should go to the Coney,’ cause he won’t be there. We just come in ’n look around at the menu ’n when the counter guy asks what do we want we tell him somethin’ that’s crossed out.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘You just don’t see the right movies then. We ask the counter guy what people do in this town ’n then you say, “They come in here to order the crossed-out dinner – ain’t that right, smart boy?”’

‘Does Pig eat there now?’ Frankie was at sea and not even drifting.

‘Forget it,’ Sparrow told him, ‘I’m just too educated for you. We can pick up Pig at the Safari if there’s somethin’ you want to see him about. You sure you want me along?’

‘You’re just the guy I want along,’ Frankie assured him.

‘I’d like to have a cam’ra ’n just go around gettin’ pictures when somethin’ big happens,’ Sparrow began daydreaming innocently as they came out on the street, but Frankie dismissed his innocence. ‘You may be the richest guy in the cemetery yet,’ he warned Sparrow.

They found Pig at the Safari with his face shaved and washed, a new haircut and wearing a new suit and new shoes. The suit was already crumpled about the thighs and the shoes were two-tone jobs such as Louie once had worn; but it was still Pig inside the glad rags all the same.

Pig smoking a cigarette through a holder.

‘Waitin’ for a live one, Pig?’

Pig smiled straight ahead with nothing abject in his smile at all. ‘Yeh. Who you guys waitin’ for? A dead one?’ His humility was gone with his half lisp. He talked like a man in the driver’s seat with one foot on the brake.

‘Bring it to the table,’ Sparrow told the bartender, preceding the peddler to the rear with Frankie following. In the corner, beneath a frosted bulb, Pig sat looking out upon that dark and wavering shore which only the eyeless may see and only the dead may wander.

‘They tell me you’re in the bucks these days, Peddler,’ Frankie attacked him directly.

‘I know who you guys are,’ Pig informed them in a dead-level tone.

‘Of course you do,’ Sparrow agreed. ‘I’m the steerer ’n my buddy’s the dealer, he got somethin’ he wants to find out.’

‘You’re the guys awright,’ Pig told them both in that same flat knowing voice.

Now it was time to say: ‘You heard Louie get slugged. Heard us run and tapped down the alley till the odor of violet after-shave talc hit you. You touched him where he lay, bent above him and found the heavy roll you’d heard him bragging about half an hour before. Then pushed a few papers above him and tapped away to someone who’d give you a square count.’

But there was no way of asking a thing, it dawned on Frankie at last, without betraying himself. As if sensing Frankie’s thought the blind man told him, ‘I believe in live ’n let live, Dealer. Nobody asks me questions, I don’t ask nobody questions. I got to live too.’

His fingers found Frankie’s knuckles and touched a ring, of heavy German gold, that Frankie had worn since returning from overseas. ‘I ain’t no big snitch, I ain’t puttin’ no finger on guys who don’t put no finger on me. It’s just live ’n let live, how I look at it.’

‘I think you got a good sense of direction some nights all the same,’ Frankie told him, but Pig didn’t seem to hear. ‘I’m just one more poor blind bummy peddlin’ pencils,’ he mourned, ‘just a poor old down-’n-out bummy ’n you two guys muscle me back in some corner ’n talk like I got to watch my step, like I’m some guy killed some guy ’r somethin’. A blind guy couldn’t even rob nobody, he wouldn’t know who was a-watchin’.’

Suddenly he lolled his tongue at them both: he’d been laughing at them the whole time he’d been pleading.

Noiseless laughter. Yet he laughed long. While Frankie watched, unable to move. Spittle flecked Pig’s lips. And still he had not finished.

‘You guys,’ he regained his breath at last, almost helpless with soundless glee, ‘you guys can’t fool me, I’m too ignorant. You gonna break my neck too, you guys? It hurts my feelin’s, how you talk to me. Why don’t you buy me a drink ’n talk nice -a good drink -’ n then let me alone. Ain’t I lettin’ you guys alone? Okay, you guys?’