Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

Screwy punks and tough punks, wise punks and dumb punks, dirty punks and clean punks, little punks and big punks, skinny punks and fat punks: here comes the wagon and we’ll all take a ride.

Here comes the sheriff’s wagon, punks, and you’ll be a long time gone.

While all clocks will remain forever, however long you serve, precisely at twelve o’clock.

‘A.M. or P.M.?’ Frankie Machine wondered idly, as if it really made some difference. If you wanted to know the time you asked the screw and were told, inevitably: ‘Forget it. You ain’t goin’ nowheres.’

The time the clockmakers had locked into the stopped clocks of these corridors was a different kind of time, Frankie felt, than that they had put into the clocks outside. Just as there was a different sort of time for cripples than for junkies, and a different kind of time than either for dealers, there was a special kind of time for convicts too.

On Sundays he went to Mass, in the pink-and-white chapel lined with portrayals of the Stations of the Cross, fashioned by some forgotten felon. He always knelt beneath one labeled Jesus Falls the First Time , he didn’t know why. Yet that one touched him most.

He would cross himself, genuflect and assure himself mystically, ‘Zosh’ll be so much better when I get out I’ll be able to tell her about me ’n Molly-O myself, I won’t have to let Vi do the dirty job for me.’ On some Sunday morning dream train with the incense in his nose.

When his next ten days had passed without any recurrence of the sickness he began drawing fresh courage with the passing of each new day. ‘The hell with Nifty Louie ’n Private McGantic, too,’ he told himself one night, refusing either to see Louie ‘on his bedpost’ as Bednar had put it or to worry about McGantic’s terrible monkey. ‘Louie was a long time livin’ and he’ll be a long time dead and there’s more people better off for his bein’ out of the way than not.’ And the memory of that hallway blow returned to him like the memory of a blow by which he had freed himself from McGantic’s monkey. He felt not the faintest flutter of remorse for his part in the passing of Louie F. Remorse touched his memory of the fixer only when he recalled that, by losing his head, he had lost the fixer’s big fat roll.

From the passage of the nights now he gained more strength than he had ever gained from a hypo. He felt himself getting over the roughest point of the hump without so much as a quarter grain to help him over. And knowing how proud Molly-O was going to be for him, felt proud of himself.

The pride he’d abandoned in the ward tent on the narrow Meuse. Through the open laundry window the first cold hint of spring touched him as had that other spring on that cold and alien river.

‘I got the second paw off,’ he confided to Katz; like a man who’d seen a festering wound in his flesh dry before his eyes and slowly start to heal.

For now all things healed strangely well within him, as though by grace of his punishment. He was paying off for smashing up Sophie, the irons had only been God’s means to let him, a priest told him; so that when he was released everything he’d done would be paid for and he’d be truly free at last.

‘I feel like, someday, I’m gonna shine again,’ he told old Applejack.

And heard, through walls as high as tenement walls, a long, slow, dull whirr-whirr.

As of a heavy sewing machine being pedaled by some lame and sweating con.

Ten o’clock in the morning. Above the visitors’ cage burned one small dull red bulb and right below it, peering through the glass with the prison pallor on his face but the shadows gone from under his eyes, Frankie Machine waited for his first visitor; though they hadn’t told him who it was. Certainly the punk wouldn’t have the nerve to come around after the way he’d pulled out of the deal with the irons, ducking without a warning word so that Frankie might have gotten rid of that damned bag.

Then spotted Molly Novotny far down the line, trying to see over the heads of the other visitors like a child trying to see the animals in the zoo over the heads of the adults and saw him at last.

She took his breath away with her pertness: a neat dark suit and little silver-heeled slippers that tap-tapped right on up to him just as she’d tapped into his arms on the first floor front.

They had only fifteen minutes and he didn’t know what to ask first. There was so much he had to know and she had so much to tell.

‘That poor old man of Vi’s is gone,’ was the first thing she reported. ‘He leaned out the window too far.’

‘So long as he wasn’t pushed,’ Frankie told her.

‘No, Vi just forgot to lock the window.’

And they passed over Poor Old Husband as indifferently as life itself had passed Poor Husband by. ‘How’s Zosh?’ he wanted to know.

‘Gettin’ fatter than ever, Frankie,’ and heard the ancient malice in her voice.

‘How are things going at the Safari?’ As soon as he asked that he knew he shouldn’t have. For she didn’t lower her eyes, she simply curtained them from him and he’d never seen her look so hard.

‘I ain’t there no more, Frankie,’ she told him defensively. ‘I don’t live downstairs no more.’

‘Where you livin’, Molly?’ A leaden fear had him. He had to ask her twice before she could hear through the glass. Or just didn’t want to hear.

‘Just around, Frankie. I’m just livin’ around. You know.’

The red bulb winked, the whistle blew, Visitors’ Day was over.

And knew in his bones she wouldn’t return on any Visitors’ Day to come.

‘Little Lester,’ he called himself. ‘Little Lester the Money Waster and Woman Chaser’ and he lived up there in the bug cells with all appeals but the last one gone.

Down where Frankie lived below rumors came each night of Little Lester’s latest piece of arrogance in the very face of the big black chair. But Frankie never got to lay eye on the fellow till, on the Saturday afternoon of Frankie’s sixth week, he caught a detail with Katz.

‘You two get the Susie-Q wagon ’n get up there to the fourth floor,’ Screw told them, ‘there’s a ticket on both of you for talkin’ in line.’

There wasn’t much to the detail. The Susie-Q wagon was the little white cart on which mops and buckets were borne. The fourth-floor boys themselves couldn’t be trusted with buckets and mops. Half of them were in deadlock and those that weren’t never moved without a screw’s eyes following. They were the sullen jug-heavies and the loudmouthed torpedoes, the gaunt jungle buzzards and the true assassins.

‘Me ’n you ’r just punks up against some of these birds,’ Applejack reminded Frankie in secret admiration of all assassins and Frankie was glad, in that moment, to be on the books as only one more jerk who’d tried to cop a piece of tin out of a West Side department store. He felt a clandestine thrill at recalling the thinness of the hair which had kept him out of the bug cells. ‘I almost made it up here myself,’ he boasted to Applejack, ‘when I was on the junk I pulled lots of jobs.’ And hastened to add, ‘I got it kicked for keeps now.’

‘It’s what they all say,’ Applejack answered skeptically, and Frankie was too superstitious to boast further. ‘The smarter a guy is the harder he gets hooked,’ Katz observed, ‘I’ve seen ’em hittin’ C, I’ve seen ’em hittin’ M, I’ve seen ’em hittin’ the H ’n I’ve seen ’em shootin’ speedballs – half a cap of C ’n half a cap of H together. C is the fastest, it’s what they start on when they’re after a gentleman’s kick. M is slower ’n H is the slowest ’n cheapest of all, it’s what they wind up on when they’re just bummies tryin’ to knock theirselves out without no kick at all. But I’ll tell you one kick to lay off ’n that’s nembutal. If you miss the vein you get an abscess ’n the shade comes down. Lay off the nembie is my advice to you, Polak.’