Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

Sparrow spat in turn. Right into the water bucket where the roach now floated passively. ‘We ain’t eat since last night,’ he accused Schwiefka. ‘How many suppers you eat tonight, Mr Barrymore?’

‘Do they have a charge?’ Frankie interrupted politely.

‘I made ’em put it down a misdemeanor. It’ll be dismissed in the morning. They been holding it open.’

‘I’ll still be open after they let me out,’ Sparrow pointed out, ‘open for anythin’. You got somebody’s legs you want bust, spigothead? T’ree-fifty fer one ’n two fer five – you save a deuce gettin’ ’em both done at once ’n it’s easier on the mark, too. He oney got to go to the hospital once, my way.’

‘When I want to hear from you I’ll holler,’ Schwiefka advised the punk sternly, ‘and when I holler you come in on a shovel.’

Nobody took Solly Saltskin seriously any more.

‘You think I’m gonna sleep in this crum dump tonight again?’ Frankie wanted to know. ‘Get us out tonight if you have to get Zygmunt to do it.’

‘Where you sleep is your own business,’ Schwiefka reproached him mildly. ‘What I said was you’re gettin’ out in half a hour ’n the super hisself couldn’t put the fix in faster. The case’ll be dismissed by noon whether you’re in court or not. Depend on Big Zero.’

‘The oney place you’re big is in the belly, bakebrain,’ Sparrow told him from behind Frankie, ‘you’re the guy put his mother on a meathook for a quarter one time, I heard all about it from your old man, he was sore you wouldn’t split wit’ him.’

‘If your old man hadn’t been out of work you’d never been born,’ Schwiefka told him, and lit a cigarette for Frankie, through the bars, with a silver lighter.

‘Don’t worry, Sparrow,’ Frankie spoke assuringly, ‘we can depend on Zero – he’ll get us out if it takes ten years.’

‘I don’t even ask how come you’re in,’ Schwiefka complained, ‘I just come to spring you – what’s the big squawk?’

‘You know all right why we’re in, that’s the big squawk,’ Frankie let Schwiefka know. ‘Every time you duck Kvorka for his double sawzie he cruises down Division till he spots me or the punk ’n pulls us in on general principles. This time he caught us together. The next time it happens you’re payin’ me off ’n the punk too.’

‘Next time they’ll hang me,’ Sparrow put in moodily.

‘We’re layin’ low a couple days,’ Schwiefka evaded the accusation, ‘till I get the tables moved back to the alley joint. We ought to get a loose crowd up there Saturday night. What time you be around?’

‘Not early enough to move no tables, that’s a lead-pipe cinch,’ and turned away.

Schwiefka was long used to the turned back. He had brought news of salvation to men before. Frankie listened to the retreating shuffle of those big flat feet in the oncoming gloom, testing each iron step of the stairwell as if each might be the last iron step of all.

‘We won’t have to see the old toad for a couple days, anyhow,’ Frankie sighed.

‘You told him off just right, Dealer,’ Sparrow assured him. ‘He took off like a scalded dog. I guess you scared him, Frankie.’

‘Ain’t nobody scared of me my whole life,’ Frankie conceded regretfully.

‘Them Krauts was scared of you, Frankie,’ Sparrow reminded him in his rasping whisper, ‘you were a big man in the army.’

‘I was a big man awright – I was the guy had to pick the fly crap out of the pepper with boxin’ gloves,’ Frankie mocked himself.

‘’N that Nifty Louie been scared of you, too, ever since you caught him that time, tryin’ to sell Soph them funny kind of cigarettes.’

‘Funny cigarettes ain’t all that one pushes, it ain’t no big secret,’ Frankie observed and thought bitterly: ‘If I didn’t need a fix now ’n then I wouldn’t even let that creeper take a hand at the table I’m dealin’.’

‘How’d you catch him that time, Frankie?’ Like a child asking for some familiar bedtime tale.

‘It wasn’t him. It was Piggy-O. He wasn’t sellin’ ’n I didn’t catch him.’ There was an old defeat in Frankie’s voice now. ‘I just smelled ’em ’n asked her ’n she told me, “Piggy give me four sticks,” that’s all. So I told him to lay off her.’ Adding to himself: ‘One customer in the family is all we can afford.’

‘Tell you what’s funny, Frankie,’ Sparrow promised, ‘Louie bein’ scared of you, Zero bein’ so scared of Louie, ’n you bein’ scared of me – how come a little guy like me runs all you cheap hoods around, Frankie? How come a little guy like me bein’ such a little vterrer?’

‘Just because you’re so strong, I guess,’ Frankie conceded absently, his mind still occupied with Louie and Louie’s many moods.

He’d been in short pants in the days when Louie Fomorowski was beating two murder raps. They’d gotten a one-to-life jacket on him for the second one, of which he’d served nine months in privileged circumstances.

Yet now Nifty Louie was pushing a heavily cut grade of morphine and having his own troubles pushing it. Where he got it only the blind bummy called Pig, who peddled it for him, might have guessed. Pig never cared to guess. ‘How could I tell where the stuff comes from when I can’t even see where it goes?’ he’d put it to Frankie. ‘It’s why I’m the peddler,’ cause I can’t see what the people ’r doin’.’

‘I never asked you where the stuff comes from,’ Frankie reminded him, ‘but I’ll tell you one place where it ain’t goin’, ’n that’s upstairs where I live. I’m kickin’ the stuff altogether this week end, I don’t want you hustlin’ Soph onto no kick like that. I can’t afford.’

Blind Pig always agreed. ‘I never come around with the stuff till you send to Louie for me to come, Dealer,’ he pointed out. ‘If you’re kickin’ it I wish you luck. I hope you go from monkey to zero ’n never get hooked again.’

Both Blind Pig and Louie knew there was no harm in wishing any man luck. They called those using the stuff only occasionally ‘joy-poppers’ and wished them all great joy. For the joy-poppers had no intention of becoming addicts in the true sense. They had the will power, they felt, to use God’s medicine once or twice a month and forget it the rest of the time.

Nor did Louie acknowledge that a student had ceased to be a joy-popper because he had reached a once-a-week compromise with his need. Once a week wasn’t being hooked in Fomorowski’s book. On a quarter grain a week a man was still just a student. It wasn’t till a man needed a quarter of a grain a day that Louie felt the fellow was safely in the vise. ‘You’re not a student any more,’ he would offer his felicitations. ‘You just graduated. Junkie – you’re hooked. ’

‘C’mon’ – Frankie roused Sparrow – ‘hearts for noses,’ and they squatted together over the battered deck. Sparrow always played with some trepidation. For the winner was privileged to slap the loser across the nose with five of the cards ten times and Sparrow always lost. He would take his punishment then almost – but never quite – without flinching, trying very hard not to let the tears come into his eyes at the swift sting of the cards. For it always seemed a punishment, the way Frankie would slap him then, for something unspoken which Frankie held against him secretly.

So he stalled, knowing the turnkey was due with the keys, yet owed Frankie two games – twenty slaps – before the pokey appeared at last.

‘Up in there!’

‘I’ll collect sometime when you got it comin’ ’n I got more time,’ Frankie assured the punk as they reached for their caps. And Sparrow knew that, for no real reason he could name, Frankie had the right to collect, game or no game: that the game was really only an excuse to exact some ancestral tribute he owed the dealer.