Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

‘Them flowers been beat out for some time,’ she apologized for the daisies.

‘You been a beat-out flower yourself awhile, looks like, Molly-O,’ he told her gently so that by his tone she would understand it made no real difference: she would always be a flower to him.

‘We only bloom once,’ she told him in a voice that sorrowed because it wished for nothing any more except that she might bloom just once for him again.

Then tapped his fingers too familiarly. ‘Buy me one short beer, sport, I’m on my final uppers.’ And lifted the sole of her shoe to show him she wore only a pair of bowling shoes, still marked, in chalk, with the price it had once cost to rent them for a single hour: 10¢. With both bows so neatly tied, though the soles were worn to the ball of the foot and a line of dirt encircled the naked ankle like a chain.

‘I think you turned out to be one of them kind after all,’ he reproved her.

‘I always was one of them kind except with you,’ she admitted cheerfully and from somewhere the other side of the wall a low, agonized laugh, hoarse and significant, made him feel that some young girl was being either transported with rapture or murderously beaten in there.

‘That’s the other side of the wall, poor thing,’ he heard Molly telling him, ‘he does that to her every night, some nights it’s worse’n others. Some nights, though, there ain’t a sound – that’s when it’s worst of all.’

‘Does what to her?’ Frankie asked with a certain fear.

Molly looked up at him with a dumb appeal, like a beaten animal’s. ‘There ain’t words for some things any more, Frankie,’ she told him with an effort. ‘There ain’t no key to that room and all sorts hear about it. They come in at any hour at all ’n do whatever they want with her – she don’t seem to care for nothin’ since you went away like that.’ The fingers upon his own were chilled. It must take a whole lifetime for a woman’s fingers to grow that cold, he thought as they listened together to the silence from the other side of the wall.

There that tortured laugh had rung. And Frankie understood slowly. ‘It’s true. It’s worse now when it’s still.’

So wakened to the silence on his own dark walls and Sophie’s chill fat hand flat upon his own.

His own dark walls where a battered clock still beat the listening hours out. And an empty wheelchair stood beside a dark and battered shade. ‘It’s worse when it’s still,’ he repeated, wading heavily toward shore through the ebbing shallows of sleep.

The radiator began squealing as the heat strove to drive the night air out of the coils, like an uncovered child crying with sudden cold.

Coming out of the coils of his dream, with only a faint trace of morphine lingering along the edges of the brain, Frankie dismissed his nightmare for the more imminent one being woven, by hands as hard to grasp as those of any dream, about his waking hours.

He wrapped his shoulders in a blanket and sat by the window overlooking the abandoned tracks. ‘It’s Louie that Record Head got on his mind awright,’ he decided with an odd lack of dread at the realization.

Somewhere a single warning bell, by dock or crosslight or bridge, yapped like a farm dog far away and went yammering into nothingness till the velvet dark surged back.

No, it hadn’t been any accident that it had been the punk to whom Pig had passed the bottle. No accident, either, that Bednar had let him walk out of the station so easily while holding the punk so hard.

‘It ain’t the punk he wants, that’s plain enough.’ Nobody needed any punk that badly. ‘All Record Head needs him for is to testify up on who slugged Louie. Clearin’ that one up’ll get Super off Record Head’s neck.’ But how much pressure could the punk stand? How long would he be able to stand being wakened in the middle of the night and wheeled to a different station two nights a week without being booked in any?

‘He either got to take a rap for peddlin’ or finger me. He got to see it’s his turn to take a rap for me like I took one for him. Or he got to cry off.

‘Solly said he run from those irons before he had a chance to think,’ Frankie brooded. Well, now the kid was going to get all the time in the world to get things clear in his head. He would have to see it, Bednar wouldn’t be able to move until Solly saw it as clearly as the captain. As clearly as Frankie himself saw it now.

‘I got to sweat it out till I hear what the punk does,’ Frankie cautioned himself. ‘Settin’ my bond at a hundred bucks – it’s almost like the man wants me to jump bond.’

There’d always be time to jump it. If he ran now, leaving Zygmunt to forfeit the hundred, he’d have to stay on the run. It would be the super’s c-note Zygmunt had put up, he wouldn’t be able to go back to work on Division Street till he’d squared that hundred.

While Bednar would have captain’s men looking in every back-room slot on the Near Northwest Side for a dealer with needle marks on his arm and a slight squint in his eye.

He caught a picture of himself, wearing a little blond mustache and evening clothes, beating the drums with a big-name band on one of the revolving stages he’d seen in short features at the Pulaski – taking the bobby soxers’ applause with Carmen Bolero. ‘I’ll call myself Jack Duval ’r somethin” – the fantasy collapsed of its own weight and he straightened himself out with bitter counsel. ‘A better name’d be Jack McGantic.’

Someone turned on the water down the hall and all the second-floor faucets chirped at once, like so many crickets in a row.

It was too soon to run. For if the punk could take the punch there would be no need of running at all. He’d be clean of everything but possession of a hypo and it would be up to Zygmunt to put in the fix for that. If he ran too soon the game was lost before that last card had been dealt. ‘It’s that last card that counts,’ he recalled.

Yet his heart was running already.

Down some rickety backstreet fire escape, his feet in heavy army brogans feeling, step by step, for the iron leading downward into some basement doorway, down any old dead-end alley at all. Headlong and heartsick down into any dark-curtained sanctuary where no one could find him at all.

No one but Sergeant McGantic.

It was always December in the query room. A light like a mustiness left over from another century filtered through the single window, far above, too high for anyone but a fireman to wash. It had been so long since it had been cleaned that, even on summer noons with the sun like a brass bell across pavement and rooftop and wall, the light sifted down here with a chill autumnal hue. It was always December in the query room.

When someone yanked the cord of the unshaded night bulb suspended from the ceiling like an inverted question mark – it had once held a gas flare instead of a Mazda – shadows would leap from the corners in a single do-or-die try for the window; only to subside and swing awhile with the bulb’s slow swinging.

Then the wooden benches along the walls, where so many outcasts had slept, would be lit by a sort of slow, clocked lightning till the bulb steadied and fastened its tiny feral fury upon the center of the room like a single sullen and manic eye. To burn on there with a steady hate. Till morning wearied and dimmed it away to nothing more than some sort of little old lost gray child of a district-station moon, all its hatred spent.

It was not so much a room as a passage wherein were conveyed the pursued, by squadrol, panel wagon and Black Maria, out of the taverns, into the cells and thence swiftly down all the narrowing corridors of tomorrow.

Belonging, as it did, to no one and everyone, a place through which all passed and not one stayed, no one knew what it really looked like. Not even Record Head could have told its color, not even men who had confessed premeditated murder in it could have said whether its ceiling was low or high. Yet exactly as in the cells below, idlers wrote upon its walls: This is my first affair. So please be kind. Never once seeing how the walls upon which they wrote had been hallowed by pain. Only that bleak autumnal light, that had drifted down on so much anguish, told how these walls had been thus made holy.