Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

Antek paused to go for a small one from the bottle himself, then set the bottle down with a certain decision; the drink had convinced him it was time to wise the dealer up all the way.

‘God knows it wasn’t him rolled Louie, Frankie.’ For a moment Antek looked like a man caught rolling a corpse himself.

‘I had a good hunch it wasn’t all along,’ Frankie decided, things coming clearer at last. ‘I get it now. Pig had to frame the punk that night with the package to save his own hide. Bednar guessed that the punk was the one guy who could give him the straight story on Louie and he guessed right.’

‘It was a dirty one awright,’ Owner agreed, ‘puttin’ Pig on the payroll to get the punk.’ Antek looked white about the mouth. ‘You can see the spot I was in, Frankie, just to keep my nose clean – but don’t think we’re blamin’ you . You done what you had to do, it wasn’t just one guy’s fault. We all got caught in it one way or another.’

Frankie got his shot down. ‘It’s hard to tell whose fault a thing like that is,’ he told Antek. ‘There’s so many things seem like they’re all my dirty fault, I don’t know just why.Even the punk got plenty to blame me for now, I wanted to jam him up – but I didn’t want to jam him so’s he couldn’t get out, ever. Seems like everyone I get close to ends in the vise – what’s the score on Zosh?’

If Antek had looked white before, he looked as red as the label on the bottle now; yet came up with the answer straight enough. Somebody had to say it. ‘Your Zosh is one sick chick, Frankie. She flipped her wig the Sunday you left, right up there in the hall. My Mrs went to see her once when she was at County ’n Vi goes to see her too. Only she ain’t at County no more. She’s at the end of the Irving Park line ’n it ain’t your fault there neither, like you’re thinkin’ it is awready.’

As though he had known it secretly, without acknowledging it to himself, Frankie just stood looking down at the bottle. ‘How’s Vi doin’?’ he asked at last. Just to ask something and be on his way.

Antek’s voice was relieved that Frankie had changed the subject. ‘You’d never recognize that woman, Frankie. All squared up. “Lips that touch liquor will never touch mine” is her motto these days,’ n she’s got the Jailer off the bottle too. It’s just about half my rent gone to hell there, between the two of them. You know she’s hooked up with the Jailer legal?’ N all they do is count their money? Schwabatski moved her into his own flat ’n his dimwit is goin’ to a school fer tardy children, somethin’ like that. Even that broken-wind hound is off the lush, Frankie.’ For a moment Antek looked torn between tears and laughter. ‘You should just see the four of ’em goin’ down Division Saturday nights, the dummy with a big new picture book all about flowers under his arm, leadin’ the hound with a new dog collar ’n all brushed ’n combed – you wouldn’t even recognize the hound. He goes for milk ’n dog biscuit now ’n brings home the newspaper instead of a bottle in his teeth.’

‘Where they goin’ down Division on Saturday nights if they don’t go by whisky taverns?’ Frankie asked suspiciously.

‘Oh, they’re handin’ out literature on Milwaukee ’n Ashland, all about guardin’ an old lighthouse, somethin’ like that, they’re in a tailspin on some religious kick. That loose board we used to razz the Jailer about ain’t never gonna get fixed now, looks like, unless the dummy gets smart enough in that school to fix it hisself. Looks like the loose board is in the Jailer’s head these days.’

‘He could do worse than Vi,’ Frankie felt, slapping his checkered cap on the back of his head.

Antek held him one moment.

‘Stay out of sight till after elections, Frankie. They’ll have to get the punk into a jacket by then, he can’t keep on gettin’ continuances ’n once he’s on his way you’ll be cooler. You won’t have to be afraid of no one-to-twenty rap if you can stick it out till November. You’ll beat the rap altogether if you can get a grand together. Zygmunt’s beat tougher raps than yours for less. I’d pitch in a c-note myself ’n the other boys’d come along. Even Schwiefka’d have to pitch in the way we’d put it to him. We’ll hold a raffle every night here to get the clout together for you. How much you need right now?’

‘Slip me five to keep me alive,’ Frankie singsonged. And as he took it heard Antek add in an embarrassed undertone, ‘Lay off that happy gas, Frankie. If you can beat that we’ll beat Bednar. Is it a deal?’

‘It’s a deal.’ Frankie gave him the grin and the grip. Such deals are so easily made.

With the fiver in his pocket he let Antek scout the street both ways for him before he took off. ‘If you can stick it till November-’ Antek was beginning all over again.

At the corner a whole billboard, taken up by the features of the man behind Record Head Bednar, begged shamelessly in five-foot letters:

VOTE FOR UNCLE MIKE

‘I’ll vote for you, Uncle dear,’ Frankie assured him and reminded himself, of both the weather and the place: ‘The patch is pretty warm for March.’

As he passed the iron-fenced yard of the Mc Andrew School he paused to watch a group of punks shooting craps in a shadowy corner: the identical corner in which he’d been caught shooting craps on his last day of school. He walked on with the children’s cries rising above the traffic’s clamor like voices heard undersea: then realized he wasn’t hearing the children who shouted and cried out on this day at all, he was hearing cries that had followed him out of the schoolyard twenty years past and he shuffled on, the checkered cap shading his eyes and the threads, from where his overseas stripes had been torn off, hanging loose from the jacket’s patched sleeve.

He turned down a familiar alley, crossed a familiar street, caught a familiar trolley and, where the Ashland Avenue car rolls down Paulina toward Madison, returned to the streets of his exile. Overhead ran the Lake Street El and underneath its checkered light the Negro missions crouched. Missions, taverns and bazaars in long unpainted rows. He cut down the home alley to Maypole Street.

As his hand touched the knob he sensed trouble. Molly sat on the couch, her back against the wall and her legs drawn up protectively under her. Drunkie John was leaning over her.

‘Don’t kick me,’ Frankie heard her begging. ‘Don’t kick me.’ A plea as simple as that. Of a man with a face that belonged on the bottle on the table. John wore some sort of leather headgear, a boy’s helmet with chin straps dangling; apparently his latest fancy was that he was some kind of aviator. The face it framed, as it turned toward Frankie, was seared to a purplish red on one side and sunken and pale on the other, giving it a paralytic look; a look borne out by his old trick of speaking, without any movement of the lips at all, from the unseared corner of the mouth. ‘All in a muddle, like a whore’s handbag,’ he was saying, holding Molly’s purse in his hand. ‘She thinks I drink too much,’ John told Frankie; but put the purse down. Frankie pushed him toward the door.

‘All in a muddle,’ John laughed quietly even while he went stumbling and came up against the wall with a sly and sheepish little smile. ‘The joke’s on you,’ he told Frankie, ‘I’m not as drunk as you think.’

‘You’ve done a damned good job of trying,’ Frankie told him.

‘I ain’t really drunk till I stagger around,’ John defended his condition with anxious pride. ‘One glass of beer all morning ’n I spit that one out, it tasted green.’

‘Some of it must of trickled down,’ Frankie suggested, and turned to Molly. ‘You all right, Molly-O?’