Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

Alone below the glare lamp in the abandoned query room, stifled by a ravaging guilt, he knew now those whom he had denied, those beyond the wall, had all along been members of himself. Theirs had been the common humanity, the common weakness and the common failure which was all that now could offer fresh hope to his heart.

Yet he had betrayed them for so long he could not go to them for redemption. He was unworthy of the lowliest – and there was no court to try any captain for doing his simple duty. No place was provided, by church or state, where such a captain might atone for everything he had committed in his heart. No judge had been appointed to pass sentence upon such a captain. He had been left to judge himself.

All debts had to be paid. Yet for his own there was no currency. All errors must ultimately be punished. Yet for his own, that of saving himself at the cost of others less cunning than himself, the punishment must be simply this: more lost, more fallen and more alone than any man at all.

Thieves, embezzlers and coneroos, all might redeem themselves in time. But himself, who had played the spiritual con game, there was no such redemption. There was no salvation for such self-saviors.

Only his own heart might redeem him: through tears or laughter. His heart that felt stopped by dust.

It had been too long since the captain had laughed. Even longer since he had wept.

Someone – could it still be that steerer? – cried out in sleep on the other side of the wall – bringing him, out of the wisdom of some ancestral dream, news of salvation to policemen and prisoners, dealers and steerers and captains, blind men and hustling girls, cripples and priestlike coneroos alike.

To the hunter as well as the hunted.

Record Head wept.

Crocodile tears: he belonged to no man at all.

Long after Bednar’s men had come and gone and the whole great gray tenement had murmured once and grown still, Sophie sat on by the window and saw the snow, in a slow, suspended motion, begin to measure her hours. Heard the clock above the dresser begin keeping count with the snow; like a clock with a broken heart.

Counting out the weather in all the streets of evening with no true hope for the bright alarm of morning any more. Each tick suggested, to her stunned and brooding mind, a slow dying down of wheels, till everything would be the same as though she and Frankie Majcinek had never been born to listen to clocks. Nor see the slow snow trailing the evening trolleys.

Tavern and tenement, all was still, under the new year’s first still snow. Bakery and brothel, carbarn and bar, all lay under the dreaming snow. The night’s first drunks came padding through it: out of the Safari, out of the Widow Wieczorek’s, out of the Tug & Maul. Sometimes one cried a name up to her with the glow of the neon like drifting fog on his face and passed on in a neon-colored mist. Once a whole group of them stopped to look up together, laughed a single knowing laugh right in her face and went off laughing together about what they had just done.

The smell of despair, the odor of whisky and the scent of the night’s ten thousand dancers, the perfume and the powder sprinkled across the deep purple roar of barrelhouse laughter, the armpit sweat cutting the blue cigar smoke and the hoarse cries of those soon to grow hoarser with love, scents and sounds of all things soon to be spread up through a thousand rooms into her own room. Till the drinkers and the dancers, the gamblers and the hustlers and the yearning lovers came dancing and loving, came gambling and hustling in a wavering neon-colored cloud down her walls.

And died away forever in the room’s coldest corner as the neon beer signs died one by one along the street below.

Leaving her nothing but the dull gray clamor of those same night-weary locals she had heard when she had first yearned toward Frankie, in this same room, between the night’s last local and the morning’s first express, out of the very pit of sleep.

Now, between the wavering warning flares, the all-night locals paused, as always, and passed across the thousand-girdered El down the tunnel of old El dreams and were gone.

All night she saw the January watchfires flicking the swirling snow. And could not sleep for saying his name to the swirling snow. The snow that changed to rain, from time to time, while the radiator’s suggestive whisper was drowned, each time it changed, by the oncoming thunder of the cars: as their thunder receded the same secret gossiping would begin again.

Gossiping of whisperers who paused, fingers to lips, as the rattling clatter of the empties shook the old house and bent the vigil flares, like a single flare, all one way; and not another whisper then till the flares had come upright once more all down the line. To guard the constant boundaries of night.

Then heard them go right back at it again and it was lies, all lies. They told each other Frankie’s name, and named things he’d been doing she knew he hadn’t done at all no matter how tired he might have gotten. The nastiest sort of gossip and not a word of it true, they’d never get her to believe a single word. Then pretending they hadn’t said any such a thing, she had just imagined someone had said it – it must have been somebody else they’d tell her. Who ever would dream of saying such a thing about Frankie?

And the whispering would die away like a whisper dying within a dream.

Till all her nights seemed suddenly to have passed like local stops seen hurriedly from some long Loopbound express through windows streaming with an unabating rain. A violent city, in an unabating rain. So swiftly they all had gone, and could not come again: the handsome blond boys with the laughing mouths dancing her around and around: that would not dance her again. The brief and magic nights in Frankie’s arms, so sinewy, tight and warm: never ever so briefly to hold her so again.

Her fingers plucked phantom specks, like phantom memories, from the blanket across her knees. Old Pin Curls turned on the radio down the fourth-floor hall and its beat, without words or music or even a tone – only that muffled beat-beat-beat to which one’s fingers must keep plucking time like threads forever – it stopped and she lay back as slowly as though the back of the chair was sinking beneath her weight and passed her hands once over her eyes.

Voices, deliberately muffled – right next door. Schwiefka was running his game in there, she heard Sparrow and Blind Pig and Meter Reader and once, just once, Nifty Louie’s voice, all making one soundless laugh together at the way she had slept in this same chair while Frankie had slept with that piece of trade one flight down. All night. And how, when he’d come crawling back upstairs, everyone in the house but herself had known.

A lie. Just one more of Nifty Louie’s lies. Making up things about Frankie like that because he wanted to get Frankie’s job in the slot and then – because of a sudden they knew she was listening they all stopped their gossiping at once, gesturing to each other that she was there at the wall again listening for all she was worth: they winked quietly at each other then. She knew. For she heard the cards going around.

Heard cards slapping softly or sharply down and drew a circle about her temple to show them what she thought of them all and then as plain as day one said, ‘That one ain’t worth a nickel,’ and the latch shook with the long El’s passing.

Under its roar they all took their chance to laugh, so strange and noiselessly, till it had passed.

To pretend then no one had laughed at all.

When she looked up it was a night without a moon and the luminous crucifix on the wall had begun to glow dimly. She wheeled toward its small sorrowing face, wondering that it could seem so filled with some inner motion while the whole great house could seem so still. With no light down Division Street nor either way down the El.