Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

That was a hard thing for Peter to understand. It seemed to him it rained all day indoors. All day it rained in Poor Peter’s mind upon the paper daisies of his brain: a paper garden in a paper rain. It was the reason he always wore a raincoat, sun or rain; dust storm, blizzard or summer hail.

It was of this same Poor Peter Frankie had heard the Jailer speak mournfully once, after the Jailer had been openly boasting to Violet, ‘I know how to hit them ovalries: the right one makes a boy, the left one a girl, right square in the middle is what we call a murphydyke.’

‘Where’d you hit it?’ Violet had asked.

‘I missed altogether, I guess,’ Jailer had acknowledged then with a smile so wan Frankie had wished Vi hadn’t asked that that time.

For the boy had been sitting then where he sat now, moving humbly aside as always for traffic, too absorbed in his dusty flowers to lift his half-bald head. He was not more than twenty but had been losing his hair since he’d been twelve.

As he stepped past Peter, Frankie heard Violet and the Jailer really going at it.

‘No hammering on Sunday!’ Violet was demanding. ‘Go to sleep, drunk! Get a wife and hammer in bed!’

‘One I had said no hammering on Sunday too,’ the Jailer reproved Violet, ‘she said I hammered enough all week!’

‘You’ve hammered enough around here too – and you ain’t hit a nail yet,’ she chided him. ‘Two years fixing one board!’

‘You want to come down and try my board for size now?’ he invited her. ‘You won’t mind my hammering after that! ’ He sounded a trifle tight all right.

‘Shame, Schwabatski,’ Vi teased him softly, ‘drinkin’ up that boy’s milk at the bars.’

‘Leave the helpless children out of this!’ He waved the hammer, pretending to be ready to come up after her.

Frankie leaned heavily on the rail, waiting for he didn’t know what. For some reason the twenty-watt bulb of the hallway had been painted a dull red, the same as that over the visitors’ cage. As he passed the Jailer the old man’s hammer caught him by the claw and hauled him back.

‘It served that one right, Dealer – he went into that business in the wrong neighborhood – Polaks don’t need what he was selling. You see: it didn’t help him after all to have the devil for a father.’

Frankie freed himself and went on up the stairs, but the old man shambled right on up behind him, babbling away till Frankie had to turn on him to get him back to his stairs, his son and his whisky.

‘You’ll never finish that step runnin’ off at the mouth all day, Jailer,’ he urged without anger.

The old man took him by the jacket’s sleeve and Frankie looked down into the grizzled, grayish, boozed and wrinkled mug, always so intent on giving fresh heart to all those who seemed to be in need of it.

‘People like that ought to be knocked on the head!’ he whispered as though he’d overheard Frankie’s threat to Louie one night. ‘Don’t torture yourself! Myself would of give you this hammer! Myself would have done it! Don’t torture! Don’t suffer!’ The old man was pleading so, two steps there below, he seemed to be pleading on his knees. Frankie took the big veined hand and felt his own fingers’ weakness in the old man’s grip.

‘All I done was a little stealin’, Jailer,’ he told the old man softly. ‘Now I done my time for that, so let’s forget what can’t be helped no more. All sorts of things happen and then it’s done and the less we talk about it now the better for me ’n everybody.’

It was the assurance the old man needed, he sensed Frankie had found some degree of peace and let him go at last. Frankie saw him return, with a pencil behind his ear and a ruler sticking out of the back overall pocket, to his work among the paper daisies.

Overhead he heard Violet return back down the hall without a greeting. That wasn’t like Vi at all. ‘She’s gone to tell the punk I’m back,’ he guessed.

‘You heard what I said all the same,’ the old man mumbled, through two nails clenched in his teeth as he squatted on the step. ‘Knocked on the head! With this same hammer!’ Then the hammer’s rapid tapping, light and sane and calm, a good carpenter’s hammering, like the beat of a lightened heart. The Jailer felt better for having unburdened himself. Frankie could tell. But how long it had been since the old man had first wished to speak out Frankie could only surmise.

‘The old man got good heart,’ Frankie told himself. Everyone, even those who left doors ajar just to bait him a bit, knew the old man had the truest sort of heart.

It was only that there was so little demand for the truer sort of heart of late.

Hearts shaped like valentines aren’t at all the fashion. What is more in demand are hearts with a bit of iron – and a twist to the iron at that. A streamlined heart, say, with a claw like a hammer’s claw, better used for ripping than for tapping at old repairs – that’s what’s needed to get by these days. It’s the new style in hearts. The non-corrugated kind don’t wear well any longer.

Hearts with a twist to the iron – that’s what makes a good hustler’s heart.

Behind the narrow yellow door bearing the red tin 29 he himself had nailed there, Frankie heard the old clock below the crucifix tick once – warningly – and pushed in without knocking.

Sophie sat with her head thrown back and eyes closed, looking debauched in the dim tenement light. Apparently assuming it was only that nosy Violet again, she said tonelessly, ‘You come in yourself this morning, did you? You only sent things yesterday.’

The room certainly looked as though Violet only sent things these days. It didn’t look as if it had been swept in a month; cigarette butts, Kleenex, bottles and hairpins littered the floor. The walls had grown darker.

Her scrapbook lay on her lap. ‘You pastin’ pictures, Zosh?’ he asked.

She opened her eyes, smiled wanly and lifted her hands listlessly toward him.

The gesture told him she had known it was himself in the doorway all the time, that she had been playing some strange game with herself after hearing his voice on the stairs, pretending she had not heard anyone at all. Yet he held both her hands in his. He had seen so many weary homecomings at the Pulaski. Till her fingers began to work like small claws upon his palms.

‘You’re stronger than you were,’ he told her. For her hands seemed to have gained a chilly ferocity all their own. They felt so cold, so cold. He dropped them gently and went behind her chair to rock her shoulders awhile.

‘That’s nice , Frankie,’ she told him thinly, ‘you learned your lesson. God punished you. Always be nice after this fer what you done.’

Violet’s voice at the open door: ‘When did that sonofabitch break out?’

Frankie saluted her from where he stood. ‘Hi, Sergeant – come on in – but don’t bring your army.’

For the punk’s shadow fell behind her.

‘He didn’t mean no harm, Frankie,’ Violet pleaded for him like a mother for a wayward child, ‘he just got scared ’n run.’

‘Then he can keep on running – right back up them steps. He’s got somebody’s nice fat bankroll up there to count and he’s gonna get plenty of time to count it. I’m goin’ back to work by Schwiefka tonight ’n that mocky ain’t workin’ no door where I’m dealin’. I’m the guy who got him the job ’n I’m the guy who’s visin’ him off it. That’s the first thing I’m doin’ t’night, it’ll be my first good deed for society.’

He heard Sparrow retreat as softly as he had come. As though knowing for months that that would be Frankie’s answer. He’d run like a scalded dog all right, no two ways about it.