Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

‘A guy workin’ for me gets his dough in advance – he can’t get cheated that way, can he?’

Sparrow’s heart took a small, tight stitch. ‘Couldn’t you just borrow me a sawbuck? It ain’t my line of work, what you got in mind.’

‘It’s up to you, Steerer,’ Pig told him coldly and turned to go. Sparrow caught the cane with real despair.

‘I got no place to sleep tonight, Piggy.’ And sensed, even as he held the cane and would not let it go, that Pig had come into the Tug & Maul looking for him. That he’d simply let the talk run on until it had been Sparrow doing the seeking. He should never have talked that hard about Frankie.

‘It’s two bucks a delivery, Steerer. All I can afford.’ Then hearing no reply other than that despairing grasp on his cane, brought out a tiny package, wrapped by cleaner hands, out of an unclean vest. ‘I got friends who get sick. It’s a good deed, deliverin’ medicine to sick people.’

‘Bringing tidings of comfort and joy,’

the big brass juke agreed.

Sparrow needed a shot and a beer. But Pig let him sit feeling that his tongue was drying onto the roof of his mouth.

‘This one needs it real bad, and a hot little piece, I heard – if she wants to show you she’s grateful it’s awright – but get the sawbuck first – bring it back ’n you get the deuce for delivery – Antek’ll break the ten for me awright, he gives a guy a square count ’n don’t ask questions neither. Yeh,’ n I’ll buy you a double shot too. You stick with me you’ll have your own sawbuck by twelve o’clock.’

‘Is it real far, Piggy-O?’ It felt very far indeed.

And yet – how unlucky could one punk get in just one night? He’d had all the bad luck there was already and enough left over for a month to come. The image of the kite caught on the wires returned.

‘It’s a couple dirty miles for me but it’s only around the corner for a guy with eyes. Kosciusko Hotel. I’ll wait in the back boot’.’

And the little drugstore package lay on the scarred bar between them. Pig moved it with the cane’s curved handle toward Sparrow. If that Frankie wasn’t so stubborn, it was all that Frankie’s fault. As it moved toward him Sparrow saw, irrelevantly, that for some reason Pig had wrapped the cane’s handle in tinfoil. When Frankie found out how mean he’d been he’d be real sorry.

The cane’s bright silver luster had been stained, by those same hot blind hands, into a gutter-colored gray. ‘The dealer was laughin’ in here today,’ Pig reminisced, ‘he was tellin’ Owner how you couldn’t pick up a dime no more ’cause you lost his backin’. He said it was gonna get pretty rough for you when the Jailer moved in by Violet. He said-’

‘Don’t tell me what nobody said,’ Sparrow interrupted him, ‘let’s have the dirty bottle.’

‘T’ree-fifteen B,’ Blind Pig directed. ‘Go around the side door ’n use the elevator.’

Sparrow yanked the baseball cap down over his eyes – it would be just his hundred-to-one luck to have Cousin Kvorka pick him up on general principles at the corner.

But at the corner there was only the amputee who sold papers there, his cap wrapped in the Daily News and folded into his crutch’s handle to rest his armpit while he whooped, ‘Graziano suspended!’

Somebody was always suspending somebody, the punk reflected moodily. And the way the arc lamp swung one moment over newsstand and car line and curb gave a lilt of fear to his heart.

The lights were against him crossing Ashland but he wove in and out till he gained the opposite curb, keeping close to the store windows down to Cortez, and turned down a gangway where half-soled poverty has so long sought hotel side doors that Sparrow could feel, beneath his own thin uppers, the worn places in the walk’s cold stone. He remembered it was the hotel at which he had first registered with Violet as man and wife and no more luggage between them than that carried by the pigeons drowsing in the eaves.

Now the first full moon of December burned with a steady yellow fury, the way a night light once had burned above the dealer’s head. A pang of regret caught the punk unaware: that such nights could not come again.

Pausing to light a cigarette, the pang clung to his heart like the mist about the bulb at the gangway’s end. ‘I must be cheatin’ on somebody,’ he told himself uneasily, ‘I got that guilty-culprit feelin’, like somethin’s goin’ to happen.’

As he stepped inside the side door of the bright little lobby the elevator starter beckoned to him.

Sparrow didn’t name the floor: he simply stood eying that starter until the cage paused on the third level and the fellow slammed the door open with confidence that it was the third floor the shabby little man in the baseball cap wanted. It came on Sparrow like a voice. ‘Go back, Solly. Go back or you’ll never get back.’ But there was no place to go but out of the cage and into the long red-carpeted lobby.

He walked slowly, pretending to look for a certain door but only listening for the shutting of the cage behind him so that he could get rid of the bottle in his pocket anywhere at all. When he turned to see what was keeping the cage on the third-floor level that fishy-eyed starter pointed to 315B and called out in a soft-clothes man’s command: ‘ Knock! ’

In a kind of paralysis, afraid to knock and afraid not to, fearing the ones who’d open the door when he did and fearing fast footsteps down the carpet behind him and the flash of a badge, he raised his ragged little claws to the indifferent wood.

And never knocked at all. The door opened to him.

Frankie.

With a line of sweat under his hair line and looking so sick Sparrow could only stammer, ‘I didn’t know who I was comin’ to.’ Frankie yanked him inside, slammed the door, took the bottle out of the punk’s pocket and unwrapped it with fumbling fingers while Sparrow protested his innocence. ‘Honest to Jesus, Frankie, I didn’t know it was fer you ’n it begun to feel like a dirty frame ’n I got scared.’

‘You always get scared too soon. You got the bull horrors. Hand me the hypo, I’m hitchin’ up the reindeers.’

The needle lay in a cigar box above the radiator and Sparrow brought it over box and all as if fearing to touch the needle itself. Frankie was swinging his arm to get the blood moving, but his legs went weak and he had to sit on the bed’s very edge. His fingers faltered on his sleeve and then pointed. ‘Roll it up, Solly. I’m in a deadly spin.’

Sparrow rolled the sleeve neatly and backed off. He wanted to go now. There was an odor near Frankie he couldn’t name. Frankie smelled green. And he didn’t want to see Frankie using that dirty stuff.

‘I don’t know if I can make it by myself,’ Frankie pleaded. ‘Don’t chill on me. Stick with me just this one time.’

But somehow had still enough toughness left to grin weakly at the fright in Sparrow’s eyes. ‘You look as sick as I feel,’ he teased Sparrow. ‘Maybe you need a charge yourself. There’s enough for us both – we’ll jump together.’

‘I ain’t jumpin’ nowheres but home, Frankie,’ Sparrow told him just as if he had one.

Frankie sucked the air out of the medicine dropper, then held a match to the morphine in the tiny glass tube. But his hand shook so that he couldn’t steady the flame. ‘Melt it,’ he pleaded with the punk, ‘melt me God’s medicine,’ and lay back with the one bared arm upflung and the light overhead making hollows of anguish under his eyes. His whole broad forehead glistened whitely with sweat and the throat so stretched with suffering that it shone bloodlessly.