Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

‘I’m a ding-dong daddy from Duma

’N you oughta see me do my stuff-’

till he sensed just by the way Sparrow sat so stiffly across from him that the punk was freezing with fear.

‘Looks like you’re goin’ to move out of this crummy neighborhood just like you always said you was goin’ to,’ Frankie mocked him.

‘I always try to keep my word, Frankie,’ Sparrow told him miserably.

Zygmunt the Prospector’s full-moon face and Zygmunt the Prospector’s full-moon smile lit up the query room for Frankie Machine without letting its mellow glow waste itself on Sparrow Saltskin. He took Frankie firmly right below the elbow; for a second Frankie fancied the other hand was trying for the pocket.

‘Could you set bond for our friend here tonight, Captain?’ Zygmunt had his hand around Frankie’s shoulder now and Frankie felt himself coasting in at last.

‘I’ll set his bond at a hundred bucks right now,’ Bednar replied before Zygmunt had finished asking. ‘I’ll let the court set bond for the guy who peddled it to him.’

‘Sounds like it was the punk Bednar was really layin’ for,’ Frankie figured foggily. Something was awfully wrong, Bednar sticking it to Solly that hard. Bond in court would be a grand and a half if it were a dime.

‘We’re not interested in anyone but Mr Majcinek,’ Zygmunt informed the captain blandly, clutching furtively at Frankie’s sleeve. Frankie shook his head to clear it. Whoof . And just that fast felt someone had winked.

‘Don’t worry about a thing,’ Zygmunt confided in Frankie on their way back to West Division. ‘I signed for you on the super’s orders. He takes care of his kids in the clutch.’

‘I didn’t know I was one of the kids any more,’ Frankie confessed in real bewilderment. ‘How can I be when I ain’t even workin’ nowheres?’ He was filled with an aching drowsiness, but he was back on the ground.

‘You ain’t said nothin’ about wantin’ a job,’ Zygmunt decided, ‘Schwiefka says you walked out on him. But if you want to go back dealin’ Super’ll find you a loose slot to fill in.’

‘How can I be settin’ in a slot ’n settin’ in the bucket too?’ Frankie wanted to know.

‘You ain’t gonna be settin’ in the bucket,’ Zygmunt told him firmly, ‘you’re gonna cop out for this deal tonight. You’re gonna tell the judge you’re a user but it’s the first time. It’s no felony, Frankie. Not the first time. It’s a misdemeanor is all. Super’ll take care of that.’

‘Will Super take care of Solly too?’ Frankie asked with a long sense of regret. He’d given the punk a bad time all right.

‘The punk is a different case,’ Zygmunt advised his client sternly.

‘Maybe it’s none of my business,’ Frankie told Zygmunt when they paused on Ashland for the lights to change, ‘but I can tell Bednar if it’s the guy who pushes the junk around a certain corner he’s lookin’ for, he ain’t got him. All the punk ever done, since he took that bad fall by Gold’s, is steer guys into Schwiefka’s.’

There was a queer little silence. Zygmunt seemed to be trying to swallow something that wouldn’t quite go down.

Whatever it was, he got it down. Zygmunt could put anything down. ‘He delivered the stuff, that’s all the captain needs. He been waitin’ to get it on the punk a long time now.’

‘He certainly picked a funny night for it,’ Frankie brooded, dissatisfied with Zygmunt without knowing why. ‘Seems like he didn’t want to pinch the true peddler at all.’ He was groping through an uphill darkness toward some door that must be there; yet with an increasing feeling, the closer he came to it, of being hopelessly trapped. ‘Seems like what he wanted was the punk – with somethin’ that can’t be cut down to a misdemeanor.’ Cause if it was Pig he wanted all he had to do was pick him up, Bednar knows who the peddler is as well as you ’r me.’

‘You’re cuttin’ in too close, Dealer,’ Zygmunt warned him softly. ‘Why don’t you try to get some sleep? We’ll talk it all out in the morning. You ain’t yourself tonight.’ Frankie felt a touch at his sleeve so light he wasn’t sure whether it was the Prospector or the wind.

In front of the yellow door with the red tin 29 nailed to the wood, Zygmunt shook Frankie’s hand and counseled him warmly, ‘Don’t worry, Dealer. You still got friends.’

He had said something true at last. In his heart Frankie knew he still had friends. Two of them.

One who was lost somewhere beneath the web of the Lake Street El; and another lost behind bars.

Sophie was sleeping in the chair beside the window. The clock’s hands lay like a single horizontal cue across its face: a quarter to three. He fell across the bed without waking her.

He had been sleeping scarcely an hour when he sensed someone had just called up to him from the hall. But all the familiar sounds of night were missing below. He lay listening for the beating of the clock beside the cross.

The clock had stopped, he read its hands in the phosphorescent crucifix’s glow, right-angled now precisely upon the hour: three o’clock in the morning.

With no child’s voice down the steep dark stair nor one lonesome drunk singing out from the one long bar below.

By the glare of the great double-globed arc lamp filtering through the dark and battered shade he saw that Sophie had left the chair at last and in its place had left a doll, some sort of mangy-looking straw-stuffed monkey of the kind that is won at street carnivals. Over its eyes and below them some mimic had painted in shadows of a purple harlotry with lipstick or rouge: the eyes surveyed the room gravely through its livid yet somehow dignified little mask. Like those of a child whose face, seared by disease, accepts the horror it reads in the eyes of others as its rightful heritage.

Pretending unconcern for its unwavering regard, he pulled the combat jacket’s collar up about his neck – and saw of what it was so terribly ashamed: the rip in his sleeve was still torn. Molly had broken her promise to sew it after all. Even the stripes on the sleeve seemed tattered. For he himself felt so frayed. Small wonder the thing in the chair felt ashamed of him. It wished him to be better dressed hereafter, always to be on time everywhere and not to be seen talking on corners at all hours of the night to people others didn’t even recognize at high noon.

‘I’m going to Stash’s New Year’s party,’ he apologized.

Of course everyone had already left the hall. Except a woman sleeping, head heavily upon her hands, below the sign that read NO REFUNDS. When she raised her head he saw it was Molly, drunk as always. Drinking all day and drunk once more.

She must be back with John, he heard the wind pick up in the street. Heard himself call some name in sleep and across his brain the dream flowed back like the flow of a wide wave over sand.

A faded trinket of a hat, topped by two paper daisies and soiled by a decade of free beers and dollar-a-minute love, lay beneath Molly’s soiled hand: the hand of an aging woman. Someone had scattered a handful of change, halves and quarters and dimes and one silver dollar, beside the hat. Louie had forgotten his change – the hat, the hand, the daisies and the dollar were all so darkly soiled.

He knew she had been waiting for him here for ever so long. For news of some new hope. And he had come to her, as always, broke and hunted. Broke, beat and hunted, needing her help. So touched the paper daisies just to please her.

When she raised her eyes he hardly knew her, so careworn had she become, and a nameless regret touched him because she followed his fingers with her own with such ineffable tenderness, not blaming him, even now, for the way he’d made everything turn out for her after all.