Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

Yet Frankie wasn’t quite as wrong as Applejack Katz thought. There was still one fugitive on Illinois’s books that would die by the rope when he was caught. Down in the sheriff’s basement, among slot machines confiscated from half a hundred roadhouses and roulette wheels that once had whirled for Guzik, Nitti and Three-Fingered White, stood the gallows that waited, year in and year out, for Terrible Tommy O’Connor’s return.

Not many knew that still, behind the Board of Health Building, where once the County Jail had stood, the death house from which Terrible Tommy had escaped remained. Though the building about it had long been demolished, the little brick room waited, in the middle of a parking lot, for Tommy to come back. The law forbade the room, as it forbade the gallows, to be demolished until O’Connor was hanged. It looked like a long wait.

For it well might be that the little room would be the great city’s most immemorial monument, more lasting than the Art Institute lions on the boulevard, Bushman in his cage near the Lincoln Park Lagoon or Colonel McCormick in his bomb shelter below the river.

‘Just tryin’ to make a little joke,’ Frankie apologized for his reference to skipping the rope. And the pale gray laundried light wavered, with an unwavering wonder, along the laundered walls.

‘I think the stuff is almost done,’ Applejack confided that night to Frankie after a long visit to the ventilator. ‘Give it one more day.’

With the pungent reek of the stuff on his breath as he spoke.

Each man knew the hour. Each man knew the day. Lester had not slept well the night before, the word was going about. He had wakened and played casino with the night screw through the bars. The night screw had taught him the game, the punk had grown to like it. Somebody who had it right from the night screw himself said that Lester had had one good last laugh at some misplay the guard had made. He’d been happy because he’d beaten the guard at the guard’s own game.

Yet when the warden had gone to the death cell, the word went around, to read the death warrant, Lester had looked at him without fear and said, ‘Wait a minute, Frank, I want to finish this cup of coffee.’

Such calmness seemed somehow more terrible to Frankie than if they’d said Lester was lying on his bunk in a dead-cold nightmare sweating out the hours. Instead he was sitting there killing the hours with cards just as Frankie had killed so many; while a clock had ticked away below a luminous crucifix.

There were no luminous Christs for Lester. Neither Christs nor clocks nor calendars.

Yet each man knew the hour. As each man knew the day.

But what if the laces broke on the way? Would he stop to tie them – or demand a new pair before he took another step? It seemed so wrong to trouble tying laces at such an hour, to comb and oil your hair and make corny jokes about going to the dentist’s chair. It seemed so wrong to laugh because you caught a winning deuce against one of the men who was going to help strip you for the cold white slab. To brush your teeth or write a letter to your mother in California.

‘If that letter goes out tonight,’ Frankie reckoned, ‘he’ll be buried by the time his old lady reads it ’n he knows that when he’s writin’ it ’n when he tells the screw to send it air mail ’n seal it good – “it’s somethin’ personal .”’

Would he have to add that same old crack, used twice already in that same cell, ‘This is certainly going to be a good lesson to me’?

‘One more white shirt is all you’ll wear,’ Frankie told Lester, though Lester lay many cells away. ‘Shine your shoes like you’re goin’ to get married. Five’ll get you ten, you forget your act when they fit you into them tight black tights.’

Frankie lay on his cot half fevered with the idea of Lester’s trip to the chair, suddenly uncertain that he himself had really missed it after all. In his mind Little Lester and himself had merged.

‘Let’s see you trot through the little white door,’ he challenged this Frankie-Lester: ‘Three steps to the right ’n now take a load off your feet and don’t let the smell of vinegar bother you either. That’s only a couple drops on the sponge that fits between the voltage ankle and the clamp to keep the sponge from burning – all for your own good you know. Now just put your nose through the little black helmet. That’s right – now let’s hear you wisecrack, wise guy.’

The wise guy of Frankie’s fantasy had no word that one could hear through that dead-black hood.

Some other con, with his own private burden of guilt, cried out, in sleep or waking, and the lights in the corridor seemed to flicker a moment. The sleepers wakened, a long murmur went like a wave from wall to wall. It was that hour when men cried out in voices not their own.

For each man knew the hour. As each man knew the day.

They said, between the bakery, the laundry and the mess, between the printshop, the library and the little white infirmary, they said he’d come out of the death cell hooded all in black. The black tights shimmering under the lights, that final white shirt buttoned over one shoulder like a fencing master’s, he had stepped forth into that hooded hour. They said it had taken a full minute and a half, from the moment he’d stepped into the big glass cage to the moment the switch had been pulled.

Some said it had taken nearer two. The voltage clamp had required adjustment after he was in the chair and there had been no smell of vinegar after all. They told just how it had been.

Between the darkened infirmary and the clean, well-lighted mess, between the sweating boiler room and the cool dry dorm – ‘the left knee kicked up, just once, after the switch was thrown.’ The voltage clamp behind the neck had fitted nicely on the very first try – only the one on the pale right ankle had seemed a trifle loose – but the laces, the laces – Frankie had to know – had he tied them up first or had he just let them loose? Did one of the screws tie them for him so that he wouldn’t trip and skin his knee? The laces, the laces-

But no one had noticed if the laces were tied at all.

The single shoulder button had been stripped off when the shirt had been ripped down to expose the flesh above the poor seared heart. Five doctors – which one had pulled the button off? No – it certainly had been six – had pronounced the heart as dead as any hustler’s heart can get: a charred lump of ashy flesh that sagged where the living heart had burned.

There had been one hundred and twenty men and two women on the witness benches, they said. It had all been spick and span behind the glass, everything had gone off in tiptop order, there had been not even the telltale flickering of the lights throughout the building.

Four buttons had been pushed by four unnamed men. They said. Yet only one of these had pushed the live one. None would ever have to think it was himself had sparked the living flame.

But the laces , the laces -

They had used an amperage of eight, everyone knew, because that was the usual amperage for a white man. Everyone said. Just as the usual amperage for a Negro was seven and a half.

Everyone knew.

Then they’d thrown him nine hundred extra volts just to make certain. Everyone knew about that too. Everyone told everyone else just how it had gone off. Everyone but Frankie had been there it seemed.

But the laces-

What laces? You think they let him walk in there with shoes on? Those tights cover your feet like an acrobat’s tights, there aren’t any shoes to it. Just a strip of black cloth sheared neatly halfway around the right ankle.