Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

‘Get a lawyer, lad,’ he counseled the punk gently. ‘Get a good lawyer. I want to see you get every break you got comin’. You’re going to need every one of them.’

‘Can I have coffee now, Captain?’ Sparrow asked wistfully.

But the captain had put his head upon his hands as if he were the one in need of confession. Sparrow leaned forward and saw, with a strange uneasiness, that the captain was feigning sleep.

They didn’t call him Machine any more. The marks didn’t want a junkie dealing to them. He didn’t look regular to them any longer, they were not certain why. They sensed something had gone wrong, he looked so like a stranger at times. He saw this in their eyes and felt it in their voices; and somehow didn’t care at all. He had the feeling he wouldn’t be hanging around Schwiefka’s long enough for it to matter.

Bednar was working on the punk was the word at Schwiefka’s. There was no word that Bednar had broken him down. Frankie saw a small bet made, between Meter Reader and Schwiefka, that the punk wouldn’t break at all. But it was Meter Reader who believed in Sparrow – and who had ever heard of Meter Reader winning a bet on anything? ‘I’ll wait till I see Umbrellas backin’ the kid,’ Frankie thought wryly, ‘when I see that I’ll know it’s time to run.’

Meanwhile he wandered restlessly between the room, the Tug & Maul, and Schwiefka’s. He couldn’t stand the room and he couldn’t afford to drink all day with Antek and he no longer belonged at Schwiefka’s.

‘The dealer’s on the needle,’ was the whisper, and overnight he was an outcast of outcasts and a new dealer – that very Bird Dog to whom Frankie had misdealt – sat in the slot. If Frankie wanted to take a hand the boys made room for him. Just a bit too much room, he fancied; the way they’d make room for a syphilitic. For the man on the needle, though he be your brother, is a stranger to every human who lives without morphine.

He sensed pity mixed with fear in the voices of those who spoke to him now. Yet Schwiefka let him take care of the door that Sparrow had so long and so faithfully guarded. He drew five dollars a night and tips, the same wage Sparrow had drawn. And each night, when he paid Frankie off, Schwiefka averted his eyes and asked, ‘You tried Kippel’s, Frankie?’ Frankie would shrug, he understood well enough. Schwiefka wanted him to be working for somebody else if the punk should start pointing.

Frankie would try to look as though he didn’t know he were hot at all. He needed that fiver too badly. Each night now, after closing time, he spent half of it for a quarter-grain fix in Louie’s old room. He paid Blind Pig the two-fifty in quarters and halves and fixed himself with the help of one of Louie’s flashy ties and that same hypo he’d stolen overseas. ‘Just enough to put me to sleep,’ he would tell Blind Pig, ‘I ain’t doin’ no joy-poppin’ these days. All I want is enough to keep from gettin’ sick.’

‘Thought you was off the stuff, Dealer.’ Pig would feign surprise that anyone who wanted to be off it should go on feeding the habit all the same.

‘When you come to the end it’s the end, that’s all.’ Frankie acknowledged his defeat in the wan winter light.

Each night at Schwiefka’s felt like the last night of guarding any man’s door: as each day seemed now it must surely be the last of all with Sophie. Sometimes he wondered idly how long it could be before she caught on to what was wrong. Then it would come over him that she had known from the day he’d come back and every day since. ‘She don’t say nothin’ because it’s her one big kick. Like watchin’ me crawl around the floor pickin’ up the dishes that time.’ An hour later, recalling that he had entertained such a suspicion, would reproach himself. ‘I ought to be ashamed of myself, thinkin’ of Zosh like that – how could she know about me when all I’m ever doin’, when we’re in the room together, is layin’ on the bed?’ He would make up his mind, there and then, to run for it. If she knew it was time to run and if she didn’t know it was time to run before she found out.

Yet each night found him back at the door trying to overhear some mention of Solly Saltskin’s name. Though he listened every night for word of the punk all he could learn was that the punk was still being held in one station or another. And would try in his heart to believe that Sparrow wouldn’t finger him in any station at all.

The dread stirred with his every waking. ‘This is the day Bednar busts the kid.’ Then the need of the quarter-grain charge would start coming on so strong he would have to admit, even to himself, that the reason he hadn’t yet run, in the very teeth of arrest, was that he feared to go far from the room above the Safari. ‘That’s just what Bednar’s bankin’ on too,’ he felt.

One night when the table was filled and Schwiefka didn’t want the door opened for anyone for a while, Frankie stood on the fire escape and saw how the unseen lights of the Loop were reflected in the sky like light from some gigantic forge beating in the pit of the city’s enormous heart. A heart seeming now to beat in suppressed panic. A panic lying in wait, each midnight hour, at his own heart’s forge.

Night of the All Nite restaurants, the yellow-windowed machine-shop night where daylight was being prepared on lathes. Night of the thunderous anvils preparing the city’s iron heart for tomorrow’s iron traffic. Night of the city lovers, the Saturday Night till Sunday Morning lovers, making love on rented beds with the rent not due till Monday.

Night of iron and lovers’ laughter: night without mercy. Into a morning without tears.

From where the narrow alley ran a child’s cry, high-pitched, brief and cut off sharply, came up to him like the cry of a child run down in the dark by a drunken driver. A cry that held no hope of help at all, a cry that pitched the very darkness down. Tautly, as he himself had pitched his tent that winter on the Meuse, with the stakes driven through the cloth like the cloth of the heart, the way darkness pinned any child down between tavern and trolley and tenement.

The darkness through which all such children of the broken sky line moved, their small white faces guided only by a swinging arc lamp’s gleam and the swift-changing neon guide lights of the city’s thousand bars. Till the difference between daylight and darkness seemed to them only the difference between the light of the alleyways under the El and the light down any gin-mill basement.

That was why, Frankie guessed, everyone from the neighborhood he knew, from the punk to himself, tried to be something different than what he was. The minute some kid with an accordion began playing for pennies in the corner bars he fancied himself a musical-comedy star. If a neighborhood girl got a Loop switchboard job she considered herself a career woman. Nobody bred around Division Street ever turned out to be a cheap crook: they were all Dillingers or Yellow Kid Weils to hear them tell it. Just as though the dead wagon didn’t cart off the international embezzler as surely as it bore off the musical-comedy headliner and the crummiest stewbum who ever turned up his toes between Goose Island and the carbarns.

Sometimes, as Frankie walked to the Safari in the earliest morning light, after the night’s last deck had been boxed, Division Street was deserted from the Dziennik Chicagoski to the El. Then the changing traffic lights seemed to warn no one but himself: STOP.

And so waited prudently, though there was no traffic in sight and the wind so bitter, till the amber light counseled him to look both ways, for enemy and friend alike, before crossing carefully.

Until the green told him to pull up his collar and keep moving straight ahead, warning him it was just as dangerous to stand in one spot too long as it was to try to beat the lights. That it was more dangerous now, with every hour, to stand unmoving in a bitter wind; that it was his one chance to plunge blindly ahead looking neither this way nor that.