Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

Katz traded off his ‘glin wheel’ to a kitchen connection for a pound of lump sugar and gave it to Frankie. Frankie consumed it in a single day.

‘Wait till the applejack is ready,’ Applejack immediately promised him, ‘that’ll kill the chucks every time.’

‘Ain’t it ready yet?’ Frankie pleaded a little, he still felt so weak.

‘Give it just one more day,’ Applejack promised.

Katz could give anything he owned to anyone but the warden. Except that applejack. He was no more able to give that away than to give away his blood.

When the horrors had passed at last Frankie felt himself beginning to want Molly-O again. He hadn’t had one visitor, not so much as a letter or a card, in all those hard first two weeks.

But he’d gotten to know some of the boys who were neither trying to be good soldiers, like himself, nor bad ones like those upstairs.

These were the ones who just wouldn’t work. Yardbirds who couldn’t quite be trusted in a bakery or a laundry. They never disobeyed an order directly nor made trouble nor talked back. But time off for good conduct means little to men with no place to go and nothing in particular to do when they get there. They were men and youths who had never picked up any sort of craft – though most of them could learn anything requiring a mechanical turn with ease. It wasn’t so much lack of aptitude as it was simply the feeling that no work had any point to it. They lived in prison much as they had lived out of it, vaguely contented most of the time, neither hoping nor despairing, wanting nothing but a place to sleep and a tin pie plate with some sort of slop or other on it a couple times a day. They neither worried about the future, regretted the past nor felt concern for the present.

They were the ones who had never learned to want. For they were secretly afraid of being alive and the less they desired the closer they came to death. They had never been given one good reason for applying their strength. So now they disavowed their strength by all sorts of self-deceptions.

They gave nothing because nothing had been given them. If they lost their privileges they shrugged it off, they had lost certain privileges before; one way or another they had had always to forfeit any small advantage gained by luck, chance or stealth.

Some slept at the race-track barns all summer and crashed County in the winter, year after year. Getting back to the barns a week sooner or later didn’t mean much, it would probably be raining that week anyhow. So why get all steamed up in a laundry all winter for nothing? Where was the payoff?

They didn’t even read comic books. They had been bored to death by all that the day before they were born. The whole business between birth and death was a sort of inverted comic strip, too dull to read even if set right. So what was the difference whether a man slept on wood or hay?

‘Rubber heels ’n fisheyes again’ was the word on the meatloaf and tapioca, ‘but wait till we get that mountain goat’ – warless soldiers as indifferent to Sunday mutton as the walls were indifferent to themselves; yet feigning to look forward to a Sunday dinner as tasteless in the mouth as life was in their hearts.

Sometimes something wakened and flared feebly in one of these: he talked back and got to think it over in deadlock.

Deadlock was any cell with a red metal tag locked onto the bars to indicate the man was either a junkie or just out of line. As long as the tag stayed there it meant no yard privileges, no cigarettes, no newspapers and no mail; no candy, no card playing and the next time maybe you’ll keep that big trap buttoned.

Deadlock meant a monotony more deadly even than the regular abnormal monotony of jailhouse days and nights. For no one can sleep all the time and deadlock brought hours when memory caught up with a man at last. Hours in which to sit and remember that willing long-ago lovely who’d married some square after all; or a family that cared less than ever. Or how suddenly the rain had come one blue-and-gold Easter Sunday a dozen blue-gold Easters ago.

Thinking of release only slowed the hours down to the deadliest crawl of all – yet of what else was there to think? And what could freedom mean except a chance to get out of the state with one clean shirt on your back and jump back on the con the day it got dirty? You had to get across the state line to promote some decent clothes and enough change in the poke to take a woman to a movie or a bar.

So the deadlockers walked up and down till they grew weak at the knees, slept and rose to walk again till night and day and the weariness in the knees and the weariness of the mind all rolled together into one big cell-sized, life-sized weariness.

‘The day after I come out of deadlock the first time,’ Applejack Katz told Frankie, ‘I seen how they got all the clocks stopped at twelve o’clock ’n I realized I was in deadlock whether I was in a cell with a red tag on it or not.’

Till night and day were one and the heart itself felt like a clock stopped cold on a dead-cold hour.

The very hour that life was to begin; and would not tick again.

Yet even a stopped clock can be right for a while. If time moves slowly enough. And Frankie lived in a deadlock only somewhat darker and narrower than that deadlock in which all his days had been spent.

Just one bit lighter than the deadlock of the cells with the red metal tag.

To the tune of some old frayed song, offered over and over again by Applejack Katz in his horrible fifty-four-year-old squawk.

‘I’m a ding-dong daddy from Duma

’N you oughta see me do my stuff.’

Till all the other cots would howl him down.

‘That stuff ought to be about ready,’ Frankie hinted.

Applejack felt it wasn’t yet sufficiently fermented.

Though Frankie would hear him rise in the night, fumble about under the ventilator, hear the secret gulping in the dark and the sound of the cork being carefully replaced; and once, long after lights out, that querulous, quavering squawk.

‘I’d feel bad if you’d kissed too many

But I’d feel worse if you hadn’t kissed any.’

All the next day, working beside Frankie at the mangle roller, Katz murmured songs as frayed as his voice. There was a certain sly merriment about old Applejack. One felt that, secretly, he was convinced he’d already beaten the state on so many charges that there was no chance at all of the state getting it back in terms of timeserving. He could be in the rest of his life, he knew, and still end up far ahead of the game.

Down in the G-H blocks the punks from eighteen to twenty lived in shifts more sullen than that which Frankie shared with Katz. G was for the black punks and H for the whites. The whites went to school in the mornings and blacks in the afternoons. The sign in the mess-hall library said:

THINK

Read a good book

Which didn’t at all mean that a black punk should be caught reading a good book at the same time as a white punk; and didn’t say just what book. Each went to think separately, for the thinking of separate thoughts. For the black con’s brain, it appeared, was darker than the white con’s and therefore required the afternoon sunlight to assist the thinking of certain scheduled thoughts.

Yet, strangely enough, the chair in the basement accepted any color at all. Indeed, it was painted black just to show how little race feeling there was down there in the basement where the afternoon sunlight didn’t shine at all.

Nor did the big black sheriff’s wagon that pulled up for the haul to Stateville, St Charles, Dixon and Menard draw any particular color line.

The punks piled in it, leaping over each other as if going on a picnic, filled with a sudden brainless, coltish joy to be out of the cells and riding in the open air for the hour that took them down Route 66. One hour. The years to follow were forgotten in the brightness of the immediate sun.