Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

A shock-haired razorback with a bright Bull Durham string hanging over his shirt pocket’s edge: ‘Just throwed a rock at a wall ’n it happened to go through a window instead. So I followed through. But I didn’t have no in tent of stealing.’

‘You never have. But you’re in and out like a fiddler’s elbow all the same. What was the stretch in the Brushy Mountain pen for?’

‘I got the wrong number was all.’

‘I think you did. The wrong house number.’

‘That’s right. The people were home. I was drinking pretty heavy.’

‘What do you do when you’re drinking light?’

‘Mind my own business.’

‘You haven’t got any business. For a quarter you’d steal the straw out of your mother’s kennel.’

The razorback tossed his tawny shock and his face in that light looked tawny too. ‘What I’d do for a quarter you’d do for a dime.’ And held the captain’s gaze to prove it.

Record Head’s heart felt suddenly as if it were beating without love for any man at all. The finger of accusation leveled at him so steadily by a shock-haired boy revived in him the dream in which he was the pursued.

‘How’d you like it in the pen?’ he asked in old routine.

‘I didn’t.’

‘Why not? Wouldn’t the warden give you his job?’ That was always the answer to that one. They always stepped into it the same way.

Yet the light titter of lip laughter that followed, as it was always so sure to follow, didn’t fill the emptiness down the dry well of the captain’s heart. He listened to the next youth, an epileptic in a dark green wool sweater and a stocking cap, without really hearing the boy’s words at all.

‘Just havin’ fun with a little girl – I was in Dixon but my old man got me out, I was gettin’ worse. When I fool around a little I get better.’

‘Well,’ the captain thought absently, ‘we all feel better if we fool around a little’ – and caught himself up sharply. ‘I need a rest is all,’ he decided, and forgave himself uneasily.

As he could not forgive one of those up there under the lights.

‘A friend of mine went to sleep and I took his money before somebody else did.’ ‘For unbecoming words to a lady, I think it’s called.’ ‘For tryin’ to talk a friend out of trouble – he was settin’ in a patrol wagon, I told him to come out of there, so they put me in with him.’ ‘Went down to the West Side to round up bums for a labor gang ’n got picked up for one myself.’ ‘Picked up at an unreasonable hour.’

Of late all hours to the captain seemed unreasonable. ‘I know you,’ he thought cunningly of all outlaws. ‘I know you. I know you all.’

Till the next line’s shadows came on, and the outlaws followed their shadows.

Followed their shadows into the glare; and left the glare once more to shadows.

It made the captain want to shield his own eyes; for a moment he looked ready to cup his head in his hands. ‘The old boy is drivin’ himself as hard as he’s drivin’ the bums,’ Frankie thought with a certain malice. Then the glare hit his own eyes.

A glare that made any man look like a plastic job with a prefabricated expression grafted on, according to some criminologist’s graph or other, to fit the crime of which the captain’s charge sheet had him accused: here was a pickpocket’s deadpan mask and here a shoplifter’s measured manner. Here the brutal lines of the paid-in-full premeditated murderer and there the coneroo’s cynical leer.

Yet the man behind the murderer’s mask was under the lights for stealing a bushel of mustard greens and the coneroo’s leer had been picked up for oversleeping in a Halsted Street hallway.

‘Why you living on Skid Row?’

‘’Cause I’m on the skids. That’s plain enough.’

And the black and bitter orange of the brownskin buck’s sweater standing out so strongly and strangely against the fluffy white and pale blue of the aging white beside him.

The listeners watched the captain survey the next man, up and down, head to toe and back again, to ask at last: ‘Where’s your shoes, boy?’

‘Left ’em in the tavern.’

‘Hadn’t there been a fight in there?’

‘Lord, there’s always a fight in there. ’

‘Then you know the place.’

‘Sure. I hang in there.’

‘Where? On a hook?’

‘No. By the bar. I preach salvation there.’

‘Where were you ordained?’

‘I just have a local preacher’s license.’

‘How do you get one of those?’

‘You have to see the pastor and the deacon.’

‘How about the precinct captain?’

‘He’s in jail.’

‘I think that’s where you get most of your philosophy yourself.’

‘That’s where I took up the ministry all right.’

‘Can’t you preach salvation with your shoes on? Is that some Hindu cult out there says you have to take off your shoes?’

‘No, sir. I was collectin’.’

‘But couldn’t you collect with your shoes on ?’ The captain sounded determined.

‘It was my shoes I was trying to collect.’

The captain leaned forward, steadied his head with both hands and pleaded as if already fearing the reply: ‘Just tell me one thing – who had your shoes?’

‘Why, the precinct captain, of course. That’s what I been tryin’ to tell you.’

The captain shook his head with the melancholy manner of any man who knows he can’t win and motioned wearily for the mike to be moved on.

‘Next man, what for?’

‘For standin’ by watchin’.’

‘Watchin’ what? ’

‘The officers linin’ up the boys on Thirty-first Street.’

Bednar took a moment to raise himself slowly onto his toes to make certain that this one was wearing sandals or any sort of footwear at all. ‘I don’t want to go through that again,’ he cautioned himself aloud. ‘They lined you up too?’

‘One of the officers called me “boy” and I told him I was a man so I had to come along.’

‘The milk’s still wet behind your ears, a boy is all you are. But you’ll be Joliet-bound before they’re dry ’n they’ll make a man of you there. Next.’

‘I’m accused of rape.’

‘How old was that child?’

‘Thirty-seven. She volunteered her services.’

‘She volunteer her ring and watch too?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What a man. Weren’t you the one who was in here last August for assaulting your baby?’

‘That’s some misidentity. All that happened was I dropped the lid when the Mrs slugged me with the fuel-oil can.’

‘What about that gun charge in 1944? Was that “some misidentity”?’

‘I was a janitor then ’n had to protect myself from tenants.’

‘Making you a janitor is like putting an automobile thief in charge of a parking lot. You’re the biggest misidentity ever walked in shoe leather.’

The captain’s eyes went down the line. The masks were managing to change, slowly and ever so slyly, to look less like plastic men and more like some plastic zoo: animals stuffed for some State Street Toyland the week before Christmas. Here was the toothless tiger and here the timid lion, here the bull that loved flowers and there some lovelorn moose.

The toothless tiger stood in a faded yellow hat from some long-faded summer, his stripes blurred by the city jungle’s dust and sprayed blood dried on the hat’s stiff brim: but still trying to look like a tiger. It always seemed some long-faded summer for those who lived in that feral glare under one hard straw kelly or another; or any old hat at all.

‘My buddy hit me wit’ a Coca-Cola bottle,’ the toothless tiger explained, ‘so I bust his plate-glass window.’