Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

The room was bare from the ceiling to the cold stone floor except for a built-in cot covered by one clean and well-worn sheet and a familiar-looking khaki blanket across its foot.

She felt a sick dread of the walls, they were as white as the corridors, as white as the cot, as the sheet, as the ceiling and as the faces that urged her inside: she drew back, sensing she would not return from here, making a polite child’s excuse. ‘Somebody lives here, I mustn’t go inside – but I’ll come back tomorrow and we’ll all have a little talk.’

They turned on the light to show her there was no one waiting for her here. Though she knew whoever lived in here was only hiding – he would come when they had gone and the light was out and the door locked behind her.

A room with neither window nor door, a room within many other rooms unlighted at evening by either neon or moonlight, where neither the city’s sounds nor Frankie’s cherished voice would sound for her again. But, feeling herself urged on either side, went forward with the crushed docility of the utterly doomed.

Heard the door click behind her for keeps and something locked in her heart with that same automatic key. When she looked around from where she lay on the clean and well-worn sheet, she saw no way to tell where the door had been at all: the walls merged into the door in a single whitewashed surface. Her slow eyes followed for some corner that would rest them, but wall merged into wall in a single curve and there was no place for the eye to rest. Around and around and around, on a whitewashed merry-go-round, ceiling to floor and back again. Till the heart grew sick and the sick brain wheeled, around and around and around.

Till the whiteness was a dull pain on the eyeballs, then a weight on the lids, and the merry-go-round slowed down, slowed down; till it moved on only to the timeless tunes of sleep.

She wakened in a low, sad light, with rumors of evening all down the hall and hearing, from the other side of the wall, a low animal moaning. It was that Drunkie John beating that poor hide of a Molly Novotny again, he was beating her harder than ever before, he was beating her with a certain contentment.

‘If he loves her, what are a few blows?’ Sophie thought with sudden clarity. ‘If a man tells you you’re his – what are a few slaps to that? ’ Then, relapsing into an infantile smile as the nurse entered, asked, pretending to lisp a little, ‘Nursy, I want to brush my toothies, please.’

And after her teeth had all been nicely brushed began telling the nurse, still with the same babyish lisp, all the names she knew.

‘Sparrow. Vi. Stash. Rumdum. Zygmunt. Old Doc D. Piggy-O. Nifty Louie.’ Saying each one aloud lying on her stomach while the nurse sponged her back with something cool. Picturing their strange lost faces, faces never truly cherished at all and yet now seeming, suddenly, so dear, so dear.

Saying them like a child counting numbers. ‘Umbrella Man. Cousin Kvorka. Record Head. Schwiefka. Chester from Conveyor. Meter Reader from Endless Belt. Widow Wieczorek. Jailer Schwabatski and Poor Peter. Shudefski from Viaduct. Molly N. Drunkie John.’

And not till after the nurse had left, only then and more tenderly than any, softer than all, somehow more terribly, she whispered at last the last sad name of all-

‘Francis Majcinek. We got married in church.’

The sorrowful name of Frankie Machine.

And now they had been hunting him three weeks already. And where, in all Chicago, a junkie stud-poker dealer might be hiding, this season of thunderous winds and bitter skies, Zygmunt the Prospector might inquire, Antek the Owner might surmise, a certain ward super had to know; and Record Head Bednar could only try to find out. The captain had not reckoned on a woman whose heart could be trod upon by army brogans.

For none but God and Molly Novotny knew for sure.

They had searched the back-room stud sessions and listened in the gin mills for mention of a name. Beneath the hollow merriment of the backstreet cabarets they had watched the midnight creepers and the last-jag weepers; they had questioned forty lushes and pinched one hyped-up Purple-Heart blond. They had let the 26-girls cheat them without a rumble: the music and the traffic passed, great freighters forced the river ice, the murmurous bridges strained slowly upward, paused and as slowly fell. The clocks in all the railroad depots were synchronized to a second’s fraction; yet no one heard that name. The night’s last drunk left with the wind at his heels and the snow turning into a smoke-colored rain.

They followed drunks in a driving sleet and finished following a changeable rain. A rain that wandered aimlessly, like any hatless drunk, down sidestreet and alley and boulevard looking for any open door at all. In a Lake Street alley they found a five-foot-seven Pole wrapped in an army overcoat, with the marks of the needle like two knotted nipples tattooed into the breasts of a nude on his arm. So they beat him in a different station at exactly the same hour every evening for five nights running. Then kicked him out right on the sixth night’s hour.

Just as the smoke-colored rain began once more.

They picked up a six-foot-four North Clark Street drummer with a stick of marijuana in his wallet almost as long as himself and on South State they found an aging stripper who wept, ‘That’s the same guy walked out on me wit’ my watch after we run up a twenty-six-dollar tab at the Jungle Club – he said I could go to work doubling for Thelma Todd any time I wanted – Who the hell is Thelma Todd?’

They picked up weed hounds, shook down every peddler they spotted coming out of the Cloudland, badgered tavern hostesses and talked price with the hustling girls. And God help the weary hustler without a connection then.

Weed hounds, peddlers, hostesses and hustlers, all gave the law the names of half a hundred other hustlers and hostesses. Then names, alibis, threats, protests and counterthreats, all ran down and were drowned in the snow that, white as uncut morphine, melted in whitish surgical streams along the city’s walks and drains.

They had searched the Polish taverns, they had stood listening in the washroom at Guyman’s Paradise and had inspected the stag line at St Wenceslaus Kostka. They had picked up four blond dealers, three with broken noses and one with no nose at all, and Bednar himself still conducted the showups at Central Police with the unwavering knowledge that, sooner or later, the West Madison Street dragnet would seine up his fair-haired smash-nosed boy.

But his fair-haired boy wasn’t in the Polish bars and he wasn’t on West Madison. He slept on an army cot in a two-room first-floor cold-water flat where no one knocked but a Negro housekeeper called Dovie and the only other white who entered was Molly-O herself.

‘Everythin’s blowed over,’ Frankie assured Molly-O, ‘there ain’t been a line in the papers about it.’

‘If there ain’t nothin’ in the papers about it,’ Molly told him, ‘it just means they’re keepin’ it out so you’ll get careless ’n walk into the chair for them.’

Frankie sounded hurt. ‘There ain’t no chair about it, Molly-O. It’s manslaughter is all. Happens every day of the week.’

‘It must be nice not to have to worry about a little thing like doin’ one to twenty then,’ she feigned admiration of anyone so lucky.

He grinned wryly. ‘Don’t forget that good-conduct time. I may get out in sixteen.’

‘You couldn’t behave yourself that long if they handcuffed you to the warden.’

Of course Molly-O was right, she had that way of knowing what was wisest and best for Frankie; it was only for herself she couldn’t tell what was wisest.

‘One to twenty’d be worse than the chair for you,’ she told him. ‘The shape you’re in you wouldn’t live four.’ Then she was sorry for saying it like that and came to him, he looked so beat, where he sat at the bare little table where he always sat, dealing to men he’d never deal to again; and took the deck from his hand. ‘Nothin’ blows over Record Head’s head but smoke,’ she told him, and perched on his lap with her hands on his shoulders. ‘You never did tell me what happened that night.’ It was by now only her right to know.