Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

‘You’re mixed up with so many busted windows you ought to join the fire department. Ever do time?’

‘Just a week once, for robbery.’

‘Only a week? ’

Frankie had to crane his head to get a glimpse of this one. For every time the audience snickered Frankie snickered too. He’d have to remember all the things these fools said to tell Molly-O some day.

‘It was just a small robbery.’

The captain’s eyes besought the darkened rows for help but the rows only looked back at him bleakly. Till the next odd fish stood forth.

‘Officers don’t like my looks is all. I sell strictly American merchandise and don’t have no complaints.’

‘If they don’t complain it’s because they’re ashamed to admit buying the stuff. You sneak up and offer them phony jewelry as if it were hot stuff,’ the captain accused him.

‘It ain’t phony, it’s American-made,’ the coneroo begged off.

‘Well,’ the captain pondered, ‘you been acting funny since 1919 and most of the cops who used to arrest you are dead. How’d you beat that federal rap? You must have had a good lawyer.’

‘No lawyer at all.’

‘Who prepared the writ?’

‘Another con. He shuffled off a little time for me.’

A nerve tugged suddenly at the captain’s left wrist as if someone unseen were trying to cuff it to the mike. ‘You another one of them window smashers?’ he asked the boy in the black-and-white lumber-jack.

‘No, sir. I’m a seaman.’

‘Then how’d the window get broken?’

‘Knocked my old man through it.’

‘You’re a seaman all right. On the Humboldt Park lagoon.’

The Humboldt Park salt snickered. ‘Very funny,’ he observed. ‘Captain, you’re killing me.’

The flat-nosed, square-faced, tousled blond with the dark lines under the eyes was next. With his left sleeve slit to the shoulder. As if his life, like his knife, had been turned upon himself at last.

‘Francis Majcinek, Div ision Arms Hot el,’ and added indulgently: ‘That’s on Div ision.’

‘Thank you. I always thought it was on Eighth and Wabash – where’s the punk?’

‘Wasn’t picked up with no punk.’

‘Talk into the mike, not at me. And get off that back rail. What were you up to with the shopping bag at Nieboldt’s, Dealer?’

‘Went to buy an eye-ron.’

‘With a shopping bag?’

‘Had to stop by the butcher’s on the first floor.’

‘You should of stayed on the first floor. Those weren’t lamb chops fell out of the bag.’

Frankie grinned. He could still see those damned irons bouncing.

‘Get that grin off your puss – what else did you boost over the holidays?’

Frankie managed a look of blandest innocence. ‘You got me wrong, Captain. I was lookin’ around for the cashier-’

‘When the bag broke,’ the captain finished for him. And eyed him broodingly. ‘I like liars,’ he decided at last, ‘but you suit me too well. What did you need six irons for? I don’t suppose you were planning on selling them?’

‘No, nothing like that, Captain,’ Frankie assured Bednar earnestly, ‘I needed one for the wife ’n the others were for when that one wore out. They make things so cheap these days.’

‘I don’t know who you think you’re kidding or whether you’re trying to be funny,’ Bednar told him, studying him to find out what was really the matter. There was something wrong all right, the dealer really wasn’t trying to be funny at all; his face had somehow altered in the past month. At the moment it looked both pious and weak. ‘Come down off that cross ’n give me a straight story,’ the captain pleaded – and as he asked it he got it – in one moment he knew beyond any doubt at all. ‘How long you been on the stuff, Frankie?’

Frankie heard the small, reluctant note of surprised sympathy under Record Head’s voice.

‘Not too long,’ he acknowledged easily, coming down off the cross in return for that small reluctant note. ‘I’ve kicked it.’

‘Where you’re going you’ll have to kick it. You think you can straighten up out there?’ ‘I’m straight now.’

‘And you won’t go right back on it when you make the street again?’

‘I’ve learned my lesson, Captain.’

‘I hope to God you have.’

The captain took off his glasses and covered his eyes, to rest them from the light a moment. When he replaced them he studied Frankie’s charge sheet a long minute, while Frankie shifted restlessly in the glare and wished they’d move the damned mike away from his chin. When he heard the captain’s voice again he turned his head attentively toward the shadow out of which the voice came at him.

‘Here’s a man with thirty-six months service and the Purple Heart,’ he heard Bednar telling the listeners, ‘he was a fast hustler with a deck when he went in the service and he’s probably faster now. Are you one of Kippel’s torpedoes now, Frankie?’

‘All I do is deal, Captain.’

‘How long you been out of the army?’

‘Over a year.’

‘And Louie Fomorowski been dead how long?’

‘I didn’t even know the fellow was sick, Captain.’

‘Then you did know the man?’

‘Heard of him.’

‘Seen him on your bedpost lately?’

‘I sleep pretty sound.’

‘You don’t look it. Frankie, you don’t look like you slept in a month.’ And never took his eyes off Frankie all the while the mike was being moved. While Frankie looked straight ahead.

‘Not a nerve in his body,’ the wondering listeners heard the captain murmur at last.

In the brief interval between the departure of one line and the arrival of the next the captain leaned forward on his elbows and spread his fingers gently across his temples; the light kept hurting his eyes. And didn’t feel he had heart enough left to face one more man manacled by steel or circumstance until his own heart should stop hurting.

Yet they come on and come on, and where they come from no captain knows and where they go no captain goes: mush workers and lush workers, catamites and sodomites, bucket workers and bail jumpers, till tappers and assistant pickpockets, square johns and copper johns; lamisters and hallroom boys, ancient pious perverts and old blown parolees, rapoes and record-men; the damned and the undaunted, the jaunty and condemned.

Heartbroken bummies and the bitter rebels: afternoon prowlers and midnight creepers. Peeping Toms and firebox pullers. The old cold-deckers and the young torpedoes coming on faster than the law can pick them up.

The unlucky brothers with the hustlers’ hearts.

‘It says here you were annoying a ten-year-old girl.’

‘I beg your pardon. ’

‘Beg my pardon for what? ’

‘It was a ten-year-old boy.’

The captain crossed himself. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he apologized, adding under his breath, ‘through your jugular vein.’ The captain felt ready for almost anything tonight, in the weariest sort of way. For knowing the answers to every alibi and having a tailor-made quip ready for every answer only seemed to make him wearier than ever of late.

‘Snatched a purse where Sinatra was singing.’

‘Do you swoon too?’ The captain was weary tonight all right.

Worst of all were the witnesses who snickered after every questioning. If only, just once, one of them would laugh out from the heart.

And felt the finger of guilt again tap his forehead and the need of confession touch his heart like touching a stranger’s heart. A voice like his own voice, confident and accusing: ‘That’s your man, Captain. That’s your man.’ A voice like his own voice. Yet a heart like a hustler’s heart.