Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

The outraged cabbie rose, tore the top button off his shirt to give his throat room, squeezed his forehead forward between the bars till the temples were pinched by the steel.

‘You insultin’ my fam’ly? Awright, let’s have your number, fellow, you’re gonna be on the job as long as John was in the army ’n John wasn’t in there long. Don’t try givin’ me the business, when Big Eye Lipschultz gets here we’re puttin’ in a little beef on you to the state’s attorney ’n there goes your number. No use tryin’ to shove me around from one station to another neither – I’m the guy got friends in all of ’em, Big Eye ’n me don’t care what bond you set, Big Eye’s takin’ over this case person’lly now. Ever hear of Defamation of Character, sucker? That’s what you just done. Ever been sued for false arrest? Ever heard of the U.S.A. Constitution?’

‘I didn’t even know the fellow was sick,’ the turnkey advised DeWitt solicitously at last. ‘Could you let me know when he gets back to town?’ He turned softly away, thinking soft and killing thoughts. ‘I tawt that was the guy was hollerin’,’ he explained further up the tier, ‘I just wanted to make sure. For when he starts askin’ favors.’

‘I’ll need favors from you like I need a chop in the head with a dull ax!’ DeWitt had found his voice again all right. ‘You lead wit’ yer nose!’ Then bent his troubled forehead against his fist and his fist about the cold blue bars, brooding desperately upon the duplicity of policemen in general and Chicago cops in particular.

‘You got to know a desk man or a bailiff if you want to get out before Monday,’ Sparrow consoled him, ‘but you’re a man all the same, cabbie. You’re a victim of circumstance but you’re a man all the same.’ Sparrow laid it on heavy in the hope of getting DeWitt started on the turnkey again.

‘I’m just a nobody,’ DeWitt decided gloomily, confessing himself aloud. ‘Just a down-’n-out, hard-luck, no-good, slow-dwindling drip.’ Adding wistfully, ‘But Gracie’s a hundred per cent.’

‘That lockup wouldn’t of talked that way if there hadn’t been bars between you, champ,’ Sparrow flattered the little man as if picturing him as some oversized strongarmer not likely to be subdued by less than four patrol-loads of the city’s finest.

‘I couldn’t whip nobody , pal,’ the moody DeWitt resumed his self-denunciation like a man with a fixed idea. ‘I couldn’t battle my way out of a wet paper bag. I’m just a know-itall, know-nuttin’ jerk. A drag-ass ignoramus. A stooge. A bottom-of-the-heaper. I guess I’m the biggest bust out of the museum. Small potatoes ’n few in the hill, that’s me.’

‘Yeh,’ Sparrow agreed, ‘but he didn’t have to call you no bum. You want to buy a dog?’ Implying that a dog, any dog, was the one certain solution, in an uncertain world, to any cabbie’s troubles.

‘I couldn’t buy the lice off a sick cat,’ the cabbie answered from the very depths of self-deprecation.

‘I wouldn’t sell you one with lices,’ Sparrow assured him lightly. ‘I take the lices off ’n sell them sep’rate.’

‘I wouldn’t buy one wit’out no licenses.’ De Witt’s confusion grew.

Then down the dusty jailhouse hours Sparrow stood watching the long light rise and spread, shift slowly when the noon chow cart tinkled and ebb drowsily down, like feathered hours, upon the sleeping strays. All through that brief December day the castoffs and the outlaws slept, rebels and wrecks and heartbroken bummies, cell after cell and tier upon tier, wakened only by the weary chow cart’s call or the sudden clanging of a cell door upon some forenoon coneroo, afternoon penny matcher or early evening lush arguing fiercely while being locked up for cooling off.

Watched and remembered Frankie Machine and the arm that always held up. Remembered in the evening light, when cards are boxed and cues are racked, straight up and down like the all-night hours with the hot rush hours past. Remembered that golden arm.

Till he saw how Bednar would beat it at last.

Pokey came past dragging a drunk by the scruff of the neck and the toes turned toward the ceiling: he bounced by wearing a smile of serenest peace, as if fancying he were riding in a cab while his heels scuffed stone and his arms dangled like a puppet’s on broken strings. Pokey held him with one ham of a hand while opening the next cell with the other.

Sparrow heard the body land like a sack, Pokey’s twin cats tiptoed up to see whether they’d surveyed this particular abomination before and nodded to each other judicially: ‘It’s him again all right’ – and tiptoed tastefully out of sight.

‘Cats are all stooges anyhow,’ Sparrow felt an old preference, ‘a dog’ll never squeal on a pal’ – as his own predicament began breaking in on him at last.

Going. This time he was really going.

He heard a girl’s voice crying out a single question, she was being brought in off the street a full floor above him; but in a voice so agonized it seemed she spoke directly to himself:

‘Ain’t anybody on my side?’

She was really asking him.

‘Nobody, sister. Not a soul,’ Sparrow answered, she suited his own mood so well. ‘You’re all on your own from here on out. Ain’t nobody on anybody’s side no more. You’re the oney one on your side ’n I’m the oney one on mine.’

But no one, on the long streets above, off which both had been taken, cared one way or another. For up there each was the only one on his own side. Under one moon or another, he knew not one man on the side of men.

‘Hey! Pokey!’ DeWitt had heard the girl’s anguished cry too and was back at the bars ready to do fresh battle with the lockup. ‘Hey! Pokey! They just fished a Clark Street whore out of the river – run up ’n see if it’s your wife!’

Really going. Going for good and it wasn’t a gag and no vaudeville stuff about being ready to come down and do thirty days any time would get him out of an hour of the whole long dirty unlivable years. ‘I don’t want to go,’ Sparrow whimpered in a terror that wrung his heart. For Bednar’s own great hand had reached within and found that heart at last.

When Pokey came past, to see what the cabbie had to say for himself this time, Sparrow reached one thin arm through the bars and touched the pokey’s shirt sleeve.

‘I’ll make that phone call now,’ Sparrow told Pokey.

This year there was no party. There was only a four-foot Christmas tree, bearing a single star from the five-and-dime, to stand beneath the luminous Christ against the hallway wall.

And like a child waking from a dream of a single star, Sophie spoke the words she had spoken all the Christmas seasons of her life: Gwizadka tam na niebie. A starlet there on the heavens. For one more year.

On New Year’s Eve there came a brief challenge of cardboard horns from the bar below; and a single silvery siren called to them both from far away. Then all was still: the long, long year was gone and the new year had begun, borne in upon a revelry of cardboard trumpets blown by strangers. Blowing like their very own lives to somewhere far away.

Frankie had not gone to work. He went to sleep just after 2 A.M.

Slept. And had bad dreams.

Dreams of iron footsteps upon a spiraling stair with just time enough left to reach a pane blurred by either last year’s rains or tomorrow’s tears – only time enough left to get his hand on the latch and feel it grate with rust as old as the rains and all the strength went out of his fingers: through the streaked and spotted glass a monkey with a jaunty green fedora on his head returned his gaze. A small red feather in the fedora’s band was wilting in the rain. Bent in a sort of crouching cunning there on the other side of the pane, it gave Frankie the look which womenish men employ in sharing an obscenity with their own kind.