Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

Along the tier a hundred thieves argued in sleep with unseen turnkeys: the unseen pokies of all thieves’ dreams who stride, jangling the special keys to each thief’s private nightmare, down all the lonely corridors of despair. There was no delivery from the dead end of lost chance. No escape from the blue steel bars of guilt.

Somewhere far above a steel moon shone, with equal grandeur, upon boulevard, alley and park; flophouse and penthouse, apartment hotel and tenement. Shone with that sort of wintry light that makes every city chimney, standing out against it in the cold, seem a sort of altar against a driving sky.

Beyond the bars light and shadow played ceaselessly, as it had played beneath so many long-set moons, for so many that had lain here before Frankie: the carefree and the careful ones, the crippled and the maimed, the foolhardy phonies and the bitter rebels; each to go his separate way, under his own private moon. Against a driving sky.

Upon the walls, as morning moved from the women’s tiers down to where he lay, Frankie fancied many shadows: of Blind Pig with his cane stuck under his armpit; of Sparrow shuffling along with a shopping bag in his hand; of Sophie wheeling toward him and Nifty Louie, head hanging loosely, walking in sorrow away from everyone. Antek the Owner bent over his bar as if in prayer; Zygmunt the Prospector counting all his money; and Record Head Bednar studying two strays across his desk as if to say: ‘I figured you two’d be back.’

Saw again the green baize table as it had been the night of the argument over the soiled silver dollar: Schwiefka looking down at him with the green silk bag in one hand and the other extended toward Frankie for his take. Yes, and behind Schwiefka, Bednar’s shadow waiting forever for his take of Schwiefka’s take.

Frankie Machine wasn’t happy; yet Frankie wasn’t too sad. He felt oddly relieved now that, for a while at least, all things would be solved for him. There was nothing he could do now about Sophie, nothing he could do about Molly, nothing he could do about boozing. Not a thing he could do about hitching up the reindeers for a sleigh ride through drifting snow.

‘It’ll be my chance to kick the habit for keeps,’ he realized. Caught between the wheelchair and the first floor front, between Old Crow and a little brown drugstore bottle, between his need for Molly Novotny and his need for the man with the thirty-five-pound monkey on his back, the dealer had found an iron sanctuary.

‘When I get out I’ll be straight as a cue,’ n Molly-O’ll be so proud we’ll stick together the rest of our lives ’n everythin’ on the legit,’ Frankie assured himself.

And meant every word of it, too.

It was during that loneliest of all jailhouse hours, the hour between chow time and Lights-On, when empty pie plates stand in a double row, one or two before each cell waiting for a trusty to return them to the kitchen. Those within the cells slept the uneasy evening sleep till a buzzer sounded a measured warning and the sleepers wakened. Then all said at once that there, out there, just the other side of the green steel door, the snickerers were coming in. To accuse someone of everything and almost everyone of something and snicker at everyone in between.

A holiday air seemed suddenly to festoon the tier, as if a play for which all had rehearsed many times was to have an audience on the other side of the footlights at last. No one seemed worried about catching a finger out there. Everybody was in on a bad rap so how could anyone get fingered?

Already the snickerers were waiting restlessly, in darkened rows, to identify the man who’d slugged the night watchman and the one who’d snatched the purse through the window of the moving El; for he who’d chased somebody’s virgin daughter down a blind alley or forged her daddy’s signature; tapped a gas main or pulled a firebox; slit the janitor’s throat in the coalbin or performed a casual abortion on the landlord’s wife in lieu of paying the rent. All the things that had to be done to help someone else out of a jam. The little things done in simple fun and the big things done for love.

The snickerers were really too serious-minded. They suspected everybody and helped no one; they were afraid of one another and had almost no fun at all.

Frankie, offstage among other bit players, heard the voice of the evening’s star and caught glimpses of that noble brow whenever the door opened and shut: Record Head Bednar lowering the mike to question a cap the color of any district-station corridor above a shirt broken out with blood spots.

‘What you cuffed for?’ Record Head longed to know.

‘Took a cab home was all,’ Frankie heard Blood-Spots explain.

‘That’s no crime. Did you pay the driver?’

‘I couldn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘He wasn’t in the cab.’

‘That’s the chances you take. Next man.’

The mike was moved before an old hallroom boy who stepped forward as proudly as a newly appointed ward committeeman at a politician’s banquet, quavering importantly.

‘Now I realize the true wort’ of friendship – if a man has friends that’s all he needs.’

‘You weren’t looking for friends with a nine-inch file in a dentist’s office. You were prospecting.’

‘I’m a maintenance engineer at Thompson’s.’ As if that explained the file.

‘You mean you have charge of the doughnuts?’

‘I got a good record there.’

‘You got a good one here too.’ The captain waved the charge sheet before the mike and passed on to the next funny fellow.

‘Back so soon, Julius?’

‘ Back? I ain’t even been gone. ’

‘Silly Willie here hustles schoolboys out of their lunch money with phony dice,’ Record Head explained and returned his attention to Julius. ‘What were you carrying a pistol for?’

‘For pertection.’

‘Protection from who? Those seventh-graders?’

‘I brought it back from the service.’

‘How long were you in?’

‘Thirty-eight days.’

‘How many times were you wounded?’

Julius permitted himself a derisive little one-sided smile, faintly contemptuous of all non-combatants, and let the listeners wait.

‘Okay,’ Record Head forgave him impulsively, ‘we’ll lock up the officer who pinched you. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Then we’ll give you back the gun and an extra box of shells if you promise not to sue the city. Promise?’

‘Suits me fine.’

It suited Julius fine.

As the first line was led off the line behind the green steel door inched up a few feet and Frankie stood with a backstage view of the rows where, here and there among the listeners, a police badge glistened and all faces were dark and featureless. While upon the stage all faces were lined up under a glare that brought out every wrinkle, pimple and scar. A girl in plaid slacks was being urged forward by a police matron. Casting her eyes downward, the black arrows of the girl’s lashes became dipped in two great tears.

‘Save it for the jury, Betty Lou,’ the captain counseled her and turned to the listeners. ‘This is the slickest little knockout broad in seventeen states. How come you always pick on married men, Betty Lou?’

Betty Lou lifted the long damp lashes: the eyes held a wry and mocking light.

‘They’re the ones who don’t sign complaints,’ she explained softly. And gave the audience a hard profile.

So the men came on again: the ragged, crouching, slouching, buoyant, blinking, belligerent, nameless, useless supermen from nowhere. ‘For climbin’ a telephone pole at t’ree A.M. wit’ a peanuts machine on my back.’ ‘For makin’ anon’mous phone calls to call my wife dirty names.’ ‘Twice as big a crowd as here ’n a woman picked on me.’ ‘Went upstairs with a girl ’n came down with a cop.’