Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

He squinted out across the littered Negro yard next door, where February’s first touch of thaw was glinting along the rubbled earth. A wheelless, one-fendered chassis of something that might once have been a Chalmers or an Overland stood there with little puddles along its single fender. How many wheelless, one-fendered years it had rusted there no neighbor could have told.

‘I come in contack with that certain guy.’

He’d lost so much weight off his shoulders, face and forearms since that night, albeit his bit of a beer paunch had clung nicely to him through it all, that she really couldn’t imagine him knocking a fullgrown man down unless he were armed with a couple house bricks.

‘I slugged him.’ The toughness was still in the grin if not in the biceps, the arms making a loose, outswinging gesture which she took to mean he’d first tried shoving that certain guy off. ‘Then his neck made a sort of dead sound ’n I knew that was it.’

‘His mouth, you mean.’

‘No. His neck.’ Now the grin came one-sided, both tough and weak, like that of a fighter who knows he’s beat trying to convince everyone he can take still more. He lifted the thin wrists toward her as naïvely as a child. ‘Wit’ these.’ He locked the fingers till the knuckles cracked and the fingers reddened faintly at the tips. ‘It’s all in the wrists,’ he told her thinly, ‘I used to have the touch.’

She ran her hands over the locked fingers curiously, trying to feel what power had been in them that was there no more, then parting the fingers slowly; as though they had been manacled too long to open of themselves. They dropped onto his lap of their own weight and the very hopelessness of the way he’d let them fall reached at her heart. To put strength back into those fingers and the light back into those eyes was what Molly Novotny wanted and there was a gladness in her just at having such a chance.

‘When you feel useless you don’t think nothin’ of throwin’ yourself away,’ she’d once told him. ‘One way is as good as another.’ She didn’t feel like throwing herself away any more, for she couldn’t do that and still be of use to Frankie Machine. ‘I never did somethin’ real good like this for anybody,’ she realized quietly, standing behind his chair with her hands on his shoulders, as he had too often stood behind Sophie. ‘Nobody give me the chance.’

He shut his eyes and put his head back and she held his face cupped in her palms a long time. At night he ground his teeth and jumped wide awake, jerking with fear, if she touched him.

One night he’d shaken her roughly. ‘Where’s the punk?’ he’d demanded.

‘In jail,’ she’d told him quickly.

‘Poor punk,’ he’d told her and lay back with his lips still moving in sleep.

Had they let the punk out on bond or had they put the hammers to him? Sleeping or waking, he was troubled not to know. ‘How can I know where I’m at when I don’t know where he’s at?’ he wanted to know of Molly-O.

‘You’ll never know where you’re at till you kick that habit – Jack the Rabbit,’ she teased him: it was a kinder nickname than his own of ‘Frantic McGantic.’

They could afford a thin little jest or two about the habit. It had been three full weeks since he’d been sick – she’d never want to see anyone that sick again all her life. She’d pulled him out of his last tailspin with nothing more than codeine.

He wouldn’t let her think for a minute that he’d kicked a thing. ‘I kicked it once,’ he told her, ‘’n nobody kicks it twice. You get off that hook once you’re the luckiest junkie in Junkietown – but nobody gets that lucky twice. You get hung up again you’re on the hook to stay. Jesus Christ hisself couldn’t come down off that cross.’

‘Why’d you get back on the stuff, Frankie?’ He irritated her at the way he still drove the nails into his palms.

‘The troubles started pilin’ up on me the day I got back in that room with Zosh,’ he remembered. ‘I didn’t know how to get out from under ’n the more they piled up the more it felt like it was all my fault, right from the beginning, when me ’n Zosh was little stubs together ’n I made her do the things she wouldn’t of done with nobody else. Whatever happened to me, it seemed like, was just somethin’ I had comin’ for a long time, I don’t know why. It’s why I rolled up all the little troubles into one big trouble.’

‘If you kicked it once you can kick it again,’ Molly decided firmly; it was in her nature to hope for others against all reason and against all odds. ‘God has more than He has spent,’ she liked to quote an old proverb; out of a ragbag of many old proverbs.

So all she’d do for him, when the cold sweats came, was to get him the codeine that kept the sickness down for an hour or two. It eased him a bit toward sleep if she sat beside him and eased him too.

But codeine had no drive, no tingle. ‘The stuff don’t hit ,’ he complained like a child.

‘It ain’t supposed to, fool,’ she reminded him. ‘That’s the point. We can’t afford no more tingles ’n drives.’

There were days when he needed and wanted to bathe, yet couldn’t stand the idea of water touching his skin. It was one of those mysteries of the ever-changeful blood. He would sit saying wanly, ‘I’d like to take a bath, Molly-O – but I couldn’t stand the touch.’ Then he would get up to straighten a skirt or a jacket hanging crookedly on the back of a chair: ‘I can’t stand things to hang crooked.’ A drawer left open a minute troubled him till it was shut. A light bulb left swinging touched panic in him till it was stopped.

At night she walked him around the block as if she were walking a dog, staying close to him for fear he’d try to duck her and score somewhere for morphine. For she knew he wasn’t telling her how really badly he was needing it; it troubled her that, after all this time, she had not yet gained his trust. She had to lock him in, when she left for the club, with his codeine, his deck and a couple dated copies of Downbeat .

She hadn’t let him come near the club since that first night, for the police knew the place too well. The law was always seeking someone beneath the sign of the neon cat.

One night she brought him home a practice board she’d bought off one of the drummers, more battered even than his old one had been. The next morning he wakened her early, tapping lightly on it. All that day he kept hard at it with the radio murmuring the beat beside him; and no lush at all, not even a glass of beer. He didn’t even go for the codeine.

When she returned that midnight he looked happier than she’d seen him since the long-ago time when he’d taken her to the dance at St Wenceslaus. ‘You look like it’s going good, Dealer.’

‘Call me “Drummer,”’ he asked her, ‘’cause I’ll never deal another hand. I’m really gettin’ the swing of these sticks now.’ He turned the radio on to a program of dance recordings and followed the record all the way without missing a beat. Just to show her.

Yet hadn’t told her the best thing about it: that he had used both hands all day and the right had been as steady as the left. All day.

‘Once you got the touch it never leaves you,’ he boasted to her like a boy.

He passed the first week of March between the practice board and the bed. He would simply go at the board till he was too tired to work longer and would fall into the sack and sleep, only to return to the board on waking. On the first sunny day of that month he made up his mind. ‘I got to get out ’n get a drummin’ job,’ he declared, ‘this practicin’ thing is goin’ on long enough. If things ain’t blowed over now they never will.’