Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

‘My old man? His one big trouble is he’s always a pallbearer ’n never a corpse. He’d look better to me wit’ his dirty head off five inches beneat’ the shoulders. You know what I told him that time he called the aces on me for sellin’ the icebox while he was out stiffin’ some piece of trade? I told him, “Daddy darlin’, you been workin’ for me for twenny-two years. Now go out ’n get a job fer yourself.” It’s what I told him, he’s a stinkin’ squeala too.’

Applejack Katz looked at Frankie Machine and Frankie Machine looked at Applejack Katz. ‘Let’s get the detail done,’ Applejack urged, ‘I got a deal on with a guy who got his hands on six bennies.’

‘ What a loudmouth,’ Frankie whispered of Little Lester.

That was the name by which the screws knew Lester too.

Yet, when on the last Saturday afternoon in April Frankie sat for an hour at the same dayroom table where Little Lester sat, the punk spoke softly all the while. This was an assigned group permitted to write letters or play cards under the eyes of two screws, between four and five o’clock. If you didn’t have a letter to write and didn’t care for cards you went all the same. Neither Frankie nor Lester wrote letters. They sat across from each other with a soiled deck between them while Frankie showed him some of the tricks which had once seemingly confounded Sparrow.

‘It took me ten years to learn this one,’ Frankie explained, ‘pick a card.’

‘Show me one that don’t take so long,’ Lester reminded him humbly. Once away from his cell bars, he abandoned his tough-guy act; exactly as if he needed it only when locked behind steel for others to stare at and question.

He was only days from the chair if his last appeal were denied, yet slept and ate much as Frankie slept and ate. Therein lay a horror and a marvel for Frankie. Each saw the same gray corridors all night, each night, with the same yellowish fog wadded about the night lights. Each wakened from dreams of lifelong deadlock to the same muffled sounds: down the tier the long day was beginning.

Something of this awe was in Frankie’s eyes when he noticed how neatly combed and oiled Lester’s dark hair looked, and Lester caught Frankie’s glance. ‘I’ll have to wash the oil out the night before,’ he explained earnestly, not even in the same voice he had used for the reporters at all. ‘Oil leaves a burn ’n they don’t like to leave a man burned even from sweat.’

He spoke without any challenge to the world beyond the bars. ‘Here,’ Frankie insisted, wanting to do something for Lester, ‘here’s one it only takes two weeks to learn. Pick a card.’

But Little Lester had lost interest in cards and without a word picked up a book in which he sat immersed, not once raising his eyes till their hour was done. A book called How to Write Better Business Letters.

Frankie didn’t see Lester again for several weeks, though he once or twice saw the boy’s lawyer swinging down the corridor on that business of the last appeal.

Then, on a morning early in April, Frankie came out of the laundry with Applejack Katz to see two guards bringing Lester, uncuffed, to some unknown destination. He turned cheerfully toward Frankie as he passed.

‘Hi, Dealer!’ he greeted Frankie. ‘Take a look at a man on his way to the chair!’ and sounded really deeply relieved.

A face like any stranger’s face, slightly slant-eyed in the Slavic way. A face at once as old as the moons of Genghis Khan and as youthful as a child’s playground in May. He seemed smaller than Frankie had remembered him. It had seemed, in the weeks since, that he was a big man. Small but rugged and built all in one piece, with a heavy-legged stride, a little bowlegged as if he had learned to walk too early about the West Side’s broken walks.

Frankie noticed that he was wearing bowling shoes with both laces neatly tied.

‘They ain’t takin’ him no place but the dentist’s chair,’ Applejack grumbled irritably at Frankie’s side.

Yet Frankie was to recall with awe, months later, those neatly tied bowling-league shoes still faintly touched with chalk.

‘A guy got somethin’ like that on his mind ’n he jokes about goin’ to the chair ’n ties his laces like he had a big-league bowlin’ match comin’ up,’ Frankie complained to Katz.

‘He has,’ Applejack decided dryly, ‘he got to bowl over six thousand volts from a settin’ position. They’re puttin’ him down in the deadhouse Monday week.’

Little Lester’s last appeal had been denied.

When, two days later, Lester was taken into the prison yard for a workout Frankie and Applejack watched, from the ground-level laundry window. Lester and three others were being marched out there like stock. It was strange that the other three, though only small-time thieves, would draw a certain prestige about the prison for having been exercised beside the condemned youth.

It was three o’clock of a May afternoon, the hour when school doors open and the city’s children ramble home down a thousand walks with books and crayons under their arms and their shoelaces tied into small, neat bows. A few more days till summer vacation and out in the prison yard a great crane, straining skyward to see the first sign of summer, caught only a glint of rusted iron sunlight instead. These were days of clouds swollen gray with promise of rain – only to burst emptily and reveal the deepest sort of blue drifting there all the time. Against the concrete wall Frankie saw a single con sitting on an upturned orange crate looking, under his winter pallor, like someone who’d seen all there was to see of grief, in prison or out.

That yard is laid out like somebody’s country garden; there’s a duck pond and a chicken house and a pale blue birdhouse. Beyond the wall rises a two-story-high legend:

BUDINTZ COAL

One Price to All

While directly across the way from Budintz that company’s chief competitor offers its own appeal:

RUSHMOORE COAL

Fastest Delivery

Cheapest in Years

Along rows where, in summer, vegetables would grow, the four cons stood under the eyes of four guards. Behind them a machine gun’s eyes peered from the sentry’s tower.

Without uniformity the cons touched their toes with their fingertips, bending awkwardly from the waist. Three of them had to stand spread-legged to do so. Lester, Frankie saw with an odd pride, touched the toes without either bending the knees or spread-legging. Touched the tips of the shoes’ neat bows with the condemned tips of condemned wrists.

A man no taller, not so old, neither uglier nor handsomer than himself. A man like any man, with a bit less luck than most. A punk like any punk. Clean-shaven, vain of his heavy head of hair. A youth much like any youth who has seen night games at Comiskey Park, shot six-no-count pool, applauded a strip tease on South State, played nickel-and-dime poker in the back of a neighborhood bar, crapped out on an eight-dollar pass or carried a girl’s photograph in his wallet one whole spring. Who perhaps had had a drink on the house from time to time and worn bright new swimming trunks to the Oak Street Beach some summer afternoon when he’d owned lake, water, sky, beach, sand, sun, the bright blue weather and every girl of all the girls that had passed so yearningly by.

‘He just does caliskonectics is all,’ Applejack informed Frankie. ‘Don’t worry, they ain’t gonna let him climb the horizontal bars. He might get too good at it.’

‘If it was me I’d tell ’em to let me skip the rope,’ Frankie said, because he wanted to say something funny too. Only Applejack didn’t see anything funny. ‘What good would that do?’ he demanded to know. ‘You’d still have to beat the chair. Nobody gets the rope in Illinois any more.’