Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

For now, in this season of caroling, when fir trees were sold in every corner lot, no morning brought tidings of comfort and joy.

Morning brought only church bells and dock bells, river bells and barge bells, freight bells and fire bells – and the ceaseless charging of the westbound, southbound, northbound, Loopbound Els.

The green light itself had turned informer.

It grew pretty lonely without Frankie. No fun like the other times at all. Only the lost cabbie, one cell down, by turn boasting of his Gracie and repenting of his own manifold weaknesses.

‘Ask fer me on Wabash ’n Harrison,’ he began inviting everyone late one night, his tongue still sounding burdened to Sparrow. ‘I’m the guy wit’ the right connections. Ask fer me on the hotel corner, I wheel the GI Joe cab there. Gracie brings me sandriches but I got no damned matches. Pokey’d gimme some but I don’t want to wake him up. He let me make a phone call fer free when I told him I was crashed but the morning guy is no good, he wants a buck or no phone. I showed that marked-down lushworker, I thrun his moldy baloney on the floor. “There’s yer breakfast,” I told him straight.’

Sparrow was too preoccupied with his own woes to listen to any cabbie’s. ‘The captain’s gonna see I get all the breaks I got comin’,’ he brooded now upon Bednar’s words. ‘How the hell did he mean that?’

Yet knew in his heart just how Record Head had meant that.

‘Tomorrow I’m gettin’ out,’ the cabbie decided aloud, as he decided around this time every night, ‘first thing I’m goin’ to the Rye-awlto. You guys remember Eddie Cicotte? I knew a guy once used to pinch-hit fer Rockferd in the T’ree-Eye League. My old man never hit a bar in his life but he kept a little bottle in the medicine cab’net, he said it was his healt’ tonic. The old lady was hitched to him twenny-eight years before she found out it was Old McCall. You guys know some good pinched-hitters? She did say she’d noticed he’d act a little strange on Saturday nights. Swap me a couple cigarettes, soldier?’

All Sparrow could see of the cabbie was one tattooed forearm wrapped about the bars. ‘I ain’t no soldier,’ he assured the cabbie, ‘I got rejected for moral warpitude.’ And a dull calamitous light like a madhouse light began filtering dimly down from somewhere far above, making an uphill queue of shadows aslant the whitewashed walls. Nudging each other upward inch by sullen inch, they gathered strength for some sudden and swift descent by midnight behind queues of shadowy escapees from a hundred other cells. Down to a shadowed street.

Between the bars and down the disinfected corridors, unseen by captain’s men and soft-clothesmen, undetected by the confidence detail the sullen shadows sidled, by-passing the pawnshop patrol and the cartage squad while the auto-theft hawks were giving tomorrow’s winners to two dog-tag detectives and a single plain-clothes bull. Past pressmen and citizen-dress men, evading fire dicks and gumboots, fingerprint experts and rookies in harness, the night’s last bondmaker and the morning’s earliest, most eager bailiff, down many a narrow long-worn wrought-iron way, to be delivered at last from the grand-jury squad and the Bail Bond Bureau into the dangers of the unfingered, unprinted, unbetrayed and unbefriended Chicago night.

‘You should see my Gracie,’ the cabbie invited everybody, waking or asleep, ‘she’s a hundred per cent ’n her petticoat hangs like crazy. But I got a good record too, I never hit a mailman in my life. Never hit a conductor. Who wants a couple lousy cigars for a couple tailor-made cigarettes?’ He laughed derisively.

Then added as apologetically as though suddenly confronted by a teetotaling judge: ‘I been in five rackets, sir, but I supported my sister’s kids two years, that’s in my favor. Once I lost a hunderd-eighty in a fixed crap game, worked overtime t’ree mont’s to make it back ’n then got rolled by my best friend for a hunderd-ten. Didn’t even get downhearted, just started on that overtime slave deal again, pinchin’ them little red pennies, gettin’ back on my feet wit’ the little woman helpin’ all the way ’n never askin’ nothin’ except once a while a piece of my little pink body. Never heard her squawk once. “My little red wagon is hitched to yours, DeWitt,” she tells me, “I take the bad wit’ the good, the bitter wit’ the sweet.” So I knocked her off the back porch to learn her some sense.

‘You know where a man goes wrong? It’s on them dirty gas bills every time. I didn’t owe a dime in the world yesterday afternoon – then she sent me out to square up wit’ People Gas Light ’n Coke ’n I stopped off for a quick one ’n all I got to do now is restitute the in surance company for a four-hundred-buck plate-glass window ’r do it on the knees. “Let’s settle this out of court,” I says. “Wit’ what? ” they want to know – can you beat that? They’d been to see Gracie awready ’n found out I don’t own a dime of my own ’n now Friendlier Loans knows where I’m at too. Them dirty gas bills is a man’s downfall every time.’

‘Go back to the beginning,’ Sparrow requested politely, ‘I lost tract in the middle.’ But DeWitt was too busy hauling that little red wagon of piled-up woes to heed anyone.

‘Can they get their money back if I do a stretch?’ he asked himself with a sort of angry perplexity. ‘They won’t get penny-one that way ’n that’s where I got ’em by the old jalino. I’m goin’ to work for them plate-glass people till the in surance people is all squared up – so now all I’ll have to do is drop one of them windows now ’n then ’n I got me a steady slave deal the rest of my dirty life.

‘All I hope is that bartender don’t clunk the bucket, the cop said he got cut pretty bad when he went t’rough the glass. If he clunks it, then it’s all over. Then it’s on the knees the rest of the way ’n no Gracie, no gas bills, nothin’.

‘Bills ’n humiliations, troubles ’n degradations,’ DeWitt told himself softly, ‘’n it’s on the knees the rest of the way all the same.’

‘I’m a lost-dog finder myself,’ Sparrow informed the cabbie brightly. ‘You want to buy a Polish airedale?’ but DeWitt remained too preoccupied. ‘I try to get the fool salty at me but the fool won’t salt. Brings me cigarettes ’n says she’s still wit’ me. If she’s still wit’ me how come she fergets the matches? Are they all like that? Once I shoved her out of the cab ’n all she done was sniffle a little ’n come up lame. I should of shoved her harder. But one thing they can’t pin on me, I never hit a mailman in my life. Say, who wants to swap me a couple cigarettes for a couple lousy stogies – where’d I get these things in the first place?’

‘The same thing happened to a fellow in Pittsburgh,’ Sparrow consoled DeWitt.

‘How many in there?’ the lockup wanted to know.

‘One,’ Sparrow told him and the lockup, peering closer, recognized the punk in the dimness. ‘Oh, it’s you – the captain says any time you want to get in touch with a lawyer, just say the word.’ And moved on to ask DeWitt, sitting hoarse and limp from his night-long efforts, ‘Are you the guy was hollerin’ all night?’

‘No, sir,’ the little cabbie lied meekly, ‘I just been settin’ here waitin’ for the brother-law.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘He’s a sergeant detective wit’ the attorney’s office.’

‘What attorney?’

‘State’s attorney.’

‘Don’t give me that cheap romance. You’re a loose bum with a streak of pimp ’n if you got a brother-law he’s pimpy too. Yer whole fam’ly’s pimpy.’