Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

Dugan was an earthy man and wished other men to stay on the ground. When he saw one propelling himself through Cloudland simply by twitching his nose like a rabbit, Dugan felt obliged, by decency as well as by duty, to bring him back down. Though the junkie might howl his protest all night long.

The junkies had nicknamed the restaurant the Cloudland. For it was precisely at this transfer point that those for whom there was nothing to do and nowhere to go on the ground got their transfers to the stratosphere. ‘It’s better up there than down here,’ they agreed, yawning a bit, having themselves a bit of a scratch together. But you had to know somebody who’d sell you a transfer before you could go visiting up there. The peddlers didn’t chance it, selling to some panic man and then having him pull his badge and say, ‘That did it, Fixer, now come along nice or come along dead.’

‘I’ll have to chance it there, it’s the only place I know around Madison,’ Frankie knew with the first faint sinking touch of dread. That McGantic was working for Bednar now, blocking him off into just those very places where the captain would look for him first.

The man with the thirty-five-pound monkey on his back was running him down and between that one and Bednar he had most to fear from McGantic. That was the wiser pursuer. For he knew Frankie’s next move before Frankie himself. Indeed, he told Frankie where to go and could wave to Bednar: ‘Here he comes.’ He would never shake off Bednar unless he shook off the sergeant first.

Yet for the moment Frankie felt that neither the captain nor the sergeant had really begun the hunt in earnest. Bednar would have to wait at least till Frankie’s innards began to tighten with the need of a charge.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Umbrella Man scoop a roach off the bar in a movement surprisingly swift for one so sluggish – and in the same movement jam it between his teeth. Frankie’s hand stopped on the glass: here came Umbrella Man, the bug’s blood streaking down teeth and chin and the bug itself crushed – feelers still waving between the teeth – ‘Man! Wash! Gimme wash!’ – pleading between the clenched teeth and his smeared face right up to Frankie’s.

Frankie turned his head away, shoved the beer toward Umbrellas and didn’t turn his head back till he heard Umbrellas drain the glass to the last drop.

‘He never done anythin’ like that before,’ Frankie complained to the Widow Wieczorek. ‘What’s gettin’ into him?’

‘He does it all the time now,’ Widow explained with a certain pride; as if she had taught him such a trick.

When Frankie left the empty behind him on the Widow’s bar, and Umbrella Man leaning in the exact spot he’d leaned when Frankie had entered, Frankie felt as if he were leaving a burden of some kind behind. Though he saw no certain possibility of ultimate escape, yet a reasonless confidence had him feeling that somehow he could find a way. He had not felt so light and free since the day of his discharge; when everything was going to be as it had always been because he had a paper in his hand that guaranteed it to be so.

‘They’ll never catch up with the boy with the golden arm,’ he boasted to himself while warning his feet: ‘Feet, just be careful where you take me.’

For he still felt he had one clandestine door in which to duck both Bednar and McGantic.

Molly Novotny’s door. Wherever that might be this night.

What was the name of the place Meter Reader had said he’d seen her? The Kit-Kat Klub, something like that, one of the jungle clubs between Madison and Lake. ‘Wherever it is, it’ll be safer than the Cloudland,’ he decided. He wouldn’t try the Cloudland till he’d tried to find Molly first.

He went south down Paulina to Huron and the day was so overcast that, though it was still morning, Christmas-tree lights and red-bulbed holly burned, here and there, as if it were already evening. ‘They ought to throw those things away now,’ Frankie thought irritably, ‘Christmas is over.’

He paused in a doorway, took a drugstore bandage out of one pocket and a five-dollar bill from his wallet. Folding the bill carefully, he plastered it onto the inside of his right arm right below the elbow. An old precaution. Strongarmers hesitated to pull a bandage off a man if he were wearing it near a vein. The police, however, with their greater courage, would yank a bandage off a man’s jugular for the sake of a two-dollar bill.

When Frankie reached Ontario he cut over to Ashland and caught a trolley south. One block south of Lake he got off under a black-and-yellow sign: Maypole Street.

Maypole Street is a long, cold street, and it runs both ways to the end of the line. Frankie blew on his hands and fished, with numbed fingers, all his identification out of his wallet and tossed the papers – voter’s registration card, photostated discharge and a season pass to the club-house at Sportsman’s Park for 1947 – into an alley bonfire. ‘My name is Private Nowhere now,’ he told himself with his wry half grin. ‘Private Nowhere from every place but home. And I won’t be here long.’

As he stood by the fire that burned out of an ashcan, warming his hands and liking the way the smoke curled so tenderly about the buttons of his jacket, a half-pint Negro girl came skipping down the alley hauling a quarter-pint one by the hand, the little one trying to skip just as high and fast as Half Pint. Both of them were wrapped tightly in some old red-sweatered rags and right in front of the fire Half Pint whirled Quarter Pint with one deft motion of her hand on the crown of the little one’s pigtail, crying, ‘Now you’re a human merry-go-round!’ Then both whirled on without so much as having seen Mr Nowhere from No Street at All.

Once he fancied he was being watched from somewhere above, but when he glanced up all he saw was an open window with a white curtain fluttering like a pennant there. Something about that fluttering made him feel homesick for someplace where he’d been nearly happy. The only place he’d ever had that had felt like his own. The one place to which he’d belonged at last. Had belonged so well he’d almost gotten straight in it.

A room with two lamps, one red and one blue. A heart-shaped face, so dear, so dear, that came to him out of the gloom. Near a candle red as wine.

He came to the open street and from somewhere near at hand, as if borne by the wires overhead, heard the familiar revelry of some old juke-box tune.

Directly across the street, above a tavern built below street level, an unlit neon legend announced:

PINK KITTEN KLUB

All cats welcome

That must be the joint, he hoped vaguely, and just as he went down the steps, as if they’d been waiting all morning only for his arrival, the neon legend lit up in green and red and the juke-box tune came clearer.

‘I wonder who’s boogin’ my woogie now?’

Frankie touched the bandage below his elbow where his fix money was wadded; his drinking money was in the half-dozen halves and quarters in his pockets. He pushed at the big red door.

‘Looks like some cats swing right here,’ Frankie observed, looking all about.

The captain felt impaled. It had been a bit too long since he had laughed. Felt joy or sorrow or simple wonder. When a light ripple, half protest and half mockery, moved down the other side of the wall he felt somehow appalled that caged men should laugh at anything. The ragged edge of that careless laughter hung like a ripped scarf upon an iron corner of his heart.

An iron heart, an iron life. Laughter and tears had corroded in his breast. In the whitish light of the query room a tic took a corner of his mouth and his lips worked trying to stop it, like a drunk trying to work off a fly.