Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

Frankie felt himself struggling to waken, for the monkey was tucking the covers about his feet, still wearing that same lascivious yet somehow tender look. Felt the unclean touch of its paw and saw its lips shyly seeking his own with Sparrow’s pointed face. To kiss and be kissed, and he wakened from the very pit of his stomach, with a bounding leap of his heart – the window was open, the dark shade was rustling, something was going wrong with him and someone was knocking softly and stealthily at his own hallway door.

The furtive knocking of one who wishes to waken but one sleeper in a room where a friend and a foe lie sleeping; and felt Sophie stir beside him.

He went to the door in his naked feet and asked, as softly as the hand that knocked, ‘Who’s knockin’ this time of the morning?’

Kvorka from Saloon Street, out of uniform, sweaty about the collar and whitish about the mouth, stood in the hall with the knuckles of his red-mittened right hand raised as if to conceal some evidence there of the new year’s earliest felony. Frankie shut the door noiselessly behind him.

‘The punk is cryin’ off, Dealer,’ Cousin had come to say. ‘Bednar come out of the room half an hour ago with the paper in his hand. The wagon men got the warrant, they’re havin’ coffee at the Coney ’n then they’re on their way.’ He started to give Frankie his hand, thought better of it and turned toward the stairs with his one last embarrassed plea: ‘Don’t feel too hard on the punk, Dealer. He bucked the old man in five different stations thirty dirty days before he bust. He been cryin’ downstairs there all night since he done it. Don’t feel too hard.’

‘Thanks, Cousin.’ Listening to Cousin’s hurried step down the leaning stairs, he called over the railing, ‘Look out for the loose board.’

Cousin was already safely past the open tread and safely out on the open street. Frankie turned, numb from cold or fear, back to the room, feeling for the knob as though he were still dreaming. Then came to with a sharp command to his own numb toes: ‘Move fast, feet. Jump off.’ And the cold hall draft nudged him anxiously, like a nudge from an anxious stranger: the downstairs door had swung open of itself and would bang back and forth there till the Jailer sent Poor Peter down to fasten it securely.

He had his left lace tied and his hands upon the bow of the right when the right hand started to tremble. It shook for a whole half minute while he watched it with a wan despair; then pressed his thumb down upon the knot and tied it with his left hand. When it was tied the trembling stopped as suddenly as it had begun; yet something continued to flutter there. Within his pulse’s fluttering.

‘Where the hell you casin’ off to?’

‘Just goin’ down for rolls, Zosh.’

‘Was somebody here?’

‘Just the paper kid.’

‘You got to wear a clean shirt to buy rolls these days?’

‘It’s Sunday, Zosh. What kind you want?’

‘The custard kind.’

‘They don’t have that kind on Sunday.’

But she had fallen asleep again, into a dream of fresh custard rolls every day of the week and chocolate éclairs on Sunday. He slipped his GI shaving kit into his combat jacket, fingers fumbling on the buttons, saw a couple bandages on the shelf and took those too, he didn’t know why. Then picked up an empty half gallon from under the sink, tapped his wallet to be sure there was still something in it and didn’t even look toward the bed to see whether she slept or watched as he left.

Standing on the open street with the empty in his hand, he hesitated to go to the left or to the right for the refund. It wasn’t that he needed the dime that badly – though he knew he was going to need every dime he could trap soon – but rather that it just didn’t seem right to be hunted by the police with a half-gallon empty in his hand. He couldn’t remember Burt Lancaster doing it that way at all. Burt never seemed to need a ten-cent refund.

For what Frankie sought, in that hesitating moment, was the place that would return him a refund on his very life, fleeing headlong, down back street and alley, so fast and so far he didn’t know whether he’d ever recapture it again.

The nearest open bar was the Widow Wieczorek’s and he moved into it with the hand that held the empty already bluish with cold. It wasn’t any kind of a morning to be on the lam – how the hell was a lamster supposed to stay warm in January anyhow?

Right at the front of the bar Umbrella Man stood as if he’d been leaning against it all Saturday night, waiting for Sunday morning’s earliest customer.

He certainly looked like he was battling the booze, Frankie saw. Umbrellas looked like he was dying for a beer. But he spoke no word as Frankie passed: only leaned forward and begged with his eyes, rolling them like a dying dog’s toward Frankie. Frankie shook his head. No.

Umbrellas leaned back once more against the bar to wait for someone who would say yes.

In the rear of the bar the Widow Wieczorek was stoking up the stove and Frankie sat studying the usual legends till she came to serve him. Feeling Umbrellas’ eyes upon him all the while.

Don’t say ‘charge it,’ one legend urged, this isn’t a battery station.

Don’t stare at the bartender, another requested, you may be goofy yourself someday.

Frankie hunched forward over the rail, pretending he was back in the Kentucky Tavern in Brussels, where he’d spent a riotous three-day pass just before his last convoy. When he opened his eyes the Widow was looking down at him and asking, ‘How’s by you?’

‘Is by me okay,’ Frankie assured her and shoved the empty toward her; but she shook her head, no soap. It was a Fox 400 and she had switched to Canadian Ace.

‘Take it anyhow,’ Frankie told her. ‘I just want to set a minute to get warm. You got a warm beer?’

The Widow brought him a warm beer and he let it stand while trying to guess which of his two pursuers he might dodge the longest. Bednar or McGantic. How long was he going to be able to stay out of sight when he started getting sick? He was good for forty-eight hours at the most – then he was going to have to score for M, and he’d have to do it in strange territory.

He knew, as every West Side junkie knows, of the one-arm restaurant at a Madison Street transfer point that carries junkie traffic all night long. There the sallow unkjays sit, over coffee growing cold, facing windows which allow them to spot anyone pushing the stuff in any of four directions.

A convenient arrangement for both sides in the ceaseless battle for possession of heroin, morphine and cocaine. Convenient to the junkies and convenient to the narcotic squad, which could pick up any particular junkie – the squad knew most of the old-timers – without pursuing him all over the city. After the squad had picked up the one they wanted, those left behind felt a sense of ease, knowing they would not be troubled again for a few hours and could go about their business in relative peace.

The junkies were Sergeant Dugan’s business and Sergeant Dugan was theirs. There was an understanding between them which made it possible for him to pick them up like a father taking a wayward child home. They liked to be regarded as children, and it was as sick children that Dugan regarded them. They went with resignation. Occasionally one sought him out to give himself up, asking to be sent to Lexington for the cure, and Dugan would arrange the pauper’s writ for such a surrenderer. If he felt such surrender sincere. He would wish the junkie luck in kicking the habit.

Six months later Dugan would be cruising about with one eye out for that same truce-bearer and a warrant in his pocket.