Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

Sparrow didn’t linger: the incident had proven to him that the heyday of dog stealing was gone with the miniature golf courses and Star and Garter burlesque. There was no sort of living left in the alleys, it seemed. It was all on the streets nowadays.

He had been dependent upon Frankie and Violet too long. Where would he go when the sawbuck out of Vi’s apron was gone? he wondered uneasily. It looked like a long cold winter for Solly Saltskin.

He caught up on his sleep curled up on the Widow Wieczorek’s pool table, curtained off from her bar, using a rack wrapped in his baseball cap for a pillow. The Widow had been widowed so long she’d cut her hair short and grown a mustache. She didn’t mind one of the boys sleeping on the table if he lifted a couple with her first. She shook him awake toward two o’clock and he idled the rest of that bright afternoon away watching Gringo Guns in the roaring darkness of the Pulaski.

When he came out the evening light lay like a dreamer with sunburned flanks across the dreaming city: water towers, steeples and rooftops, all lay adrift in an amber sea; till the wind below began to search, in hallway and alley and yard, for the place where pale night was hiding.

A wind that stirred nothing else than a kite caught on a telephone wire. A kite of such a darkling red, with that lowering orange sun behind it flooding the heart-shaped wound where the wires ran it through, that it looked to be bleeding. The merciless city wires, upon which it tried to turn a bit, first this way and then that so helplessly, were tinted red from that enormous wound. Sparrow watched it flutter up there with the first rumors of evening, and his own heart pinked with the wind. The frail cross of the kite’s frame hung as piteously as his own heart had hung, since Frankie had gone to jail, to the taut and insulated steel. Goggling upward at it, shivering a bit in the shabby coat, he felt for a moment as if he too were something impaled on city wires for only tenement winds to touch.

He had nine dollars left in his pocket and knew just the place to build it up to forty. All you needed to sit in on a stud session at Kippel’s was a five-dollar bill on the board before you. ‘I could lick them rag sheenies every day ’n twice on Yom Kippur,’ he decided, taking the alleys toward Damen and Division.

He took a seat at the corner table, folding his nine singles to look like eighteen and declared himself casually – ‘from the pocket’ – to indicate he reserved the privilege of reaching for his empty wallet. It was seven-card, two down, four open and the last one closed and he didn’t glance at the closed pair till the first open card hit him: two blood-red jacks hiding just as the third jack slid in face up to meet its relations. Three J-boys wired, this was Solly Saltskin’s night. He glanced one suspicious second at the dealer, saw he was just some run-of-the-mill houseman and that three jacks were just luck for one punk whose luck, God knew, was long overdue for a change. All he had to do was to suck the mockies in softly.

The mockies were wary of the new hand: he looked too simple to be quite true. Each felt he had seen the punk around before; but none could give him a name or place him. Kippel’s players were Jews and this was a Jew – yet one who didn’t somehow belong. They sensed a renegade.

They sensed it in the first-generation Polish inflection which association with Frankie Machine had lent him. They sensed it in the baseball cap, tilted at the jaunty Polish angle, instead of a conservative felt pulled down a bit over the ears. Kippel’s customers wore white shirts and dark jazzbows and not one tie in that whole circle gave promise of lighting up even for a moment. ‘What’s the matter – no gamblers in the house?’ Sparrow asked with real resentment as, one by one, they dropped off from the challenge of the hidden jacks.

For, like the Jewish fighters, the Jewish gamblers were counterpunchers. They could wait on the defensive forever, hoarding their strength, their cunning and their cards for the single opening as though one opening were all that were granted a man in one lifetime.

They had learned that the one blow, the one ace, the single chance had to be the decisive one. They knew that for them there would be no consolation honors and no second chance. There was the knowledge of the long-hunted: to turn swiftly, with open claws at the very moment of disaster, upon the undefeated hunter.

For the hunter there was always another day. When the hunted lost they lost for keeps.

Therefore they had to win every day, they had to win tonight, tomorrow and forever. The long chance was the pursuer’s luxury, the short one the necessity of the pursued. The pursued had to be certain beforehand, make no mistake in timing and do it all within rules laid down long ago by the hunter.

‘If this was a Polak game nobody’d drop,’ Sparrow decided.

For the Poles shoved the law of averages off the table and chased the longest possible chance down fantastic myriad ways. With three kings face up about the board and not enough in the pot to warrant a 5-1 risk, they took the 52-1 chance without hesitation and went for the case king as if it were a hope of heaven. If they did hit it the very idea of having had the brassbound nerve to play a chance that long was as exciting a reward to them as the money it had won.

So long as they could still borrow from the bartender they played like men who never lost a round; though they might have been losing steadily for a month. The Jews recalled last year’s losses and forgot this hand’s winnings. The Poles played the game for its own sake, to kill the monotony of their lives. The Jews played to make the hours return to them of what other hours, in other cities, had robbed their fathers; their lives were less boring away from the board than at it. The Pole, even when playing on borrowed money and the rent overdue, still felt, somehow, that he could afford to lose all night because he was so sure to win everything in the end. The Jew knew that the moment he felt he could afford to lose he would begin losing till the bottom of the world fell through and he himself went through the hole. It was more fun being a Polish gambler; it was safer to be a Jewish one.

Now, after he had raised the bet to a dollar on his three jacks, only two players came along with Sparrow. He hadn’t yet filled but had an open six and an open deuce to draw to and on the sixth card the player to his left suddenly bet into him. Sparrow raised it a dollar without faltering and the third hand dropped. The final card was down and the man who’d taken over the driver’s seat checked. Sparrow sensed him to be hiding. With only a single left in front of him he said, ‘Two in the dark – one buck light.’ He was that certain his card was there. It had to be there.

‘Owes the pot a buck,’ the dealer announced and Sparrow caught High Man’s eyes measuring him as if he were a badly marinated herring and shoved two singles and a silver trail of quarters into the pot. ‘Two and two better.’ The dealer counted swiftly – ‘but not so fast as Frankie’ – Sparrow thought loyally. Then lost courage and said, ‘I see.’

‘Three bucks light,’ the dealer warned him, and the punk’s greedy little heart fluttered weakly.

‘Turn ’em over.’

High Man flipped his hand: two little deucies and three little treys. He’d caught. Sparrow revealed his three jacks wired. Beside a six, a deuce and a queen. All the closed card had to be was a deuce – but the deuces were dead – a trey – but the treys were dead – a queen then or the case jack – the dealer flipped the card for him.

Nine of clubs.

‘That nine of clubs is the devil card every time,’ somebody sympathized.