The Man With the Golden Arm (18 page)

Rumdum’s paws waggled in sleep. He was a dream terrier running down a dream fox, leading all the other hounds to it. The fox changed into a great white merry-go-round steed, loping with infinite mechanical ease to some old merry-go-round tune and the dog scrambled, slipping and falling and barking, upon its terrible hooves; all down the weary merry-go-round of old-dog dreams.

‘Dogs dream too,’ Molly added, from some authentic source she did not care to reveal, ‘they dream they’re doin’ what they like to do best. Just like people.’

‘That one don’t,’ Frankie assured her, ‘or he’d be dreamin’ he was drownin’ in a beer barrel ’n wake up yipin’.’

‘I don’t sleep good myself – I guess I’m just not used to sleepin’ alone. I dream that John is back ’n wake up. Some nights I can’t sleep at all, like my vitality is runnin’ away with me. I’m too high-strung. You know what I am?’ And before he could ask what – ‘Polish, Bohemian ’n Magyar.’

‘No wonder you can’t sleep.’

‘All I do on rainy days here is play classical music,’ she informed him with a primness he thought she had long lost. ‘I try to stay out of the whisky taverns now that John’s gone. You like classical music?’

‘No.’

‘I do. Sometimes I hear a new word. Then I find a word to rhyme with it ’n make up classical music to go with it. You read books?’

‘No.’

‘I do. Sex books.
Intellectual
sex books like that
Strange
Woman
. She has this guy, that’s the sex. Then they get married, so that makes it intellectual.’

Since he had nothing to add to that, and still didn’t reach for her or move, she fell into one of her little singsong taunts:

Then, with a gesture Frankie never forgot, touched two fingertips lightly to her tongue, then touched the fingers to her breasts. ‘It’s how the girls do at the Safari,’ she apologized – and actually blushed. ‘But all I do is get the suckers to drink.’

‘If people dream what they
want
to dream’ – he came awake at last – ‘then I’ll dream I’m gettin’ a new girl on the first floor front – I think you’re a
nice
girl, Molly-O.’

‘I know,’ she acknowledged readily, ‘I’m a
real
nice girl. ’N the bathroom’s to the right.’

‘I mean it, Molly-O. You got the good kind of heart, the kind that melts a guy.’

She studied him to see just what made him tick. Something had gone wrong with him, she sensed without being able to put a finger on it while her eyes moved from the shaggy tousle of his hair to the battered army brogans. ‘You don’t keep yourself sharp like you used to,’ she decided. ‘When you gonna get that sleeve sewed up?’ It was the sleeve that had been ripped in the accident, Sophie hadn’t yet gotten around to patching it. Some days it was hooked together with
a safety pin and some days wasn’t hooked at all. ‘I remember you when your pants was so sharp they was jealous of your shoes,’ she teased him in a voice ready to break into laughter or tears without knowing which it wanted most to do. He came to her.

‘Yeh.’ N I remember you when you had that profile that went all the way down.’

‘I
do
get lonely,’ she had to confess then, and her voice broke on his name. ‘Frankie.’

A quarter of a mile away the Loopbound El sent the curtain stirring and as the cars clattered overhead it bloomed, passionately and white. Then slowly fell and went limp. With his face buried between her breasts he heard the city beyond the window stir like a sleeper with the first rumors of evening.

When evening came taxiing in under the arc lamps she rose, while he still slept, and sewed his sleeve with love. ‘I’m patchin’ his heart,’ she told herself quietly.

She didn’t sew well. By the time she was through, and pleased with her handiwork, it still looked as if it were hooked with a pin. She had been loved, before the world went wrong, and now was loved again.

All through that night, long after he had left for work, she remembered how he had been before and how he was now. And a tenderness mixed of pity and love shook her like the wind off the tracks at midnight.

Till tenderness turned into sleep; as night turned into morning.

Later on that Sunday forenoon Frankie lay again on his own bed up on the second floor front trying to believe that, if there had been no war at all, if he hadn’t volunteered, if there had been no accident, if there hadn’t been this and there hadn’t been that, then everything would certainly have turned out a lot better for Frankie.

Violet had wheeled Sophie to Mass – if he could only believe that going to Mass might help undo what he had done he might even go himself. If only it might make a little bit of the might-have-been still come true perhaps it would be worth while to go sometime again. Maybe if he went along some Sunday, suddenly right there by the altar rail Sophie would get up on her feet and tell him, ‘Nobody’ll have to wheel me here no more, Frankie. Let’s go dancin’ by Guyman’s Paradise t’night.’

But Sunday morning was always pretty rugged for anything but sleep. All the miracles were performed on Saturday night, it seemed. Down on the first floor front.

‘I’ll say one Hail Mary, one Our Father,’ n one Act of Contrition,’ he compromised with himself, ‘just as soon as Vi ’n Zosh get back.’

So the first thing he did when they returned was to reach for the bottle on the shelf above the bed.

And the second thing he did was to go back to sleep.

Yet there was a difference now to the dealer’s nights. He had found that, with Molly Novotny’s arms around him, he could resist the sickness and the loneliness that drove him to the room above the Safari. He had confessed the whole business to her, she had half guessed the truth before he had told it.

‘I could tell somethin’ was wrong the minute you put your head in that door the other evening, Frankie. I said to myself, “This guy got somethin’ eatin’ on him, he got that beat look them Safari junkies got.” Frankie – the next time you start gettin’ sick you come to me instead of to Louie. I’m better for you. And I’ll lock you in here if I have to but I’ll get you off that dirty stuff.

‘If I just knew you a couple days I wouldn’t care, it wouldn’t be none of my business. But I knew you when
you were the best guy I ever knew ’n I want you to be the best guy again.’

He had fought off the sickness four nights running and on the fifth it was no worse than being hungry all night. ‘I got one of that monkey’s paws off my back,’ he bragged to Molly.

In the dealer’s slot his old confidence ebbed back a bit, until he could again assure himself, ‘It’s all in the wrist ’n I got the touch.’

Only the blurred image of a woman in a wheelchair remained to darken his moods: that was the monkey’s other paw.

Each night he slipped singles and fives and deuces into the green silk bag. Frankie dealt the fastest game in the Near Northwest Side when he was right, and he was more right now with every night; at moments it seemed to him he was faster and steadier than he had ever been. At any second, through all the hours, he knew to a nickel how the pot stood and controlled the players like the deck. They too were aces and deuces, they too were at his fingertips once more.

For like the deuces and aces they all came home to him toward closing time. Turned face up at last, their night-long secret bluffing was exposed at last: the fat florid kings, the lean and menacing black jacks and those sneaky little gray deuces, all betrayed the sucker by morning.

In the early light Schwiefka, with his fry-cook’s complexion, called ‘Change it up!’ to the steerer for the last time. And went south with the bundle.

There had been only one serious argument at Schwiefka’s while Frankie was in the slot, for Frankie had the knack of anticipating funny business. He sensed the sort of desperation which would tempt a man to slip a single exposed ace around the hole card, flashing it so fast it gave the impression of a pair. It had been that one pulled, for the sake of caution, on
the slow-witted umbrella man, in which Frankie had trapped Louie cold.

Everyone knew immediately what had happened – everyone but Umbrellas. All Umbrellas knew was that Louie had said ‘bullets’ and reached for the pot. Frankie had flipped Louie’s cards open before the fixer had had time to get them back into the deck.

‘I
swear
I seen bullets,’ Louie had pretended casually, and nobody told him he lied. But Umbrellas had gotten the pot and Louie had never quite forgiven the dealer for exposing him. ‘You’d think it was comin’ out of his own pocket,’ he complained later of Frankie.

Since that time there came a moment every night, before the first suckers started knocking, when Frankie would look uneasily at Louie and say, ‘I call the hands. What I say goes. That’s how it’s always been ’n that’s how it’s gonna stay ’n nobody’s gonna change it.’ He told Louie that exactly as some sergeant had once told it to him when he’d questioned an order. It had worked on Private Majcinek. So ex-Private Majcinek assumed it had an effect on the fixer’s narrow head.

And studied each fresh sucker with a practiced eye. Schwiefka sent occasional stooges into the game to keep his dealer straight – usually one wearing a loudly flowered tie and sideburns; with a habit of finding the dealer’s toe under the table to indicate that a bit of co-operation with that deck wouldn’t go unappreciated. Good-time Charlies with the usual whisky glass in the middle of the forehead and that certain faraway look which never troubled to count a winning pot to see whether it was right. ‘
We
trust each other, Dealer,’ was the implication of that look.

The dealer trusted no man on the other side of the slot. He had outlasted forty such touts. They didn’t call him Machine
just because he was fast. They called him Machine because he was regular.

He couldn’t risk being anything else; dealing was the sole skill he owned. ‘The day I get my musician’s union card is the day I’ll steal Schwiefka blind,’ he planned in his tough-skinned larcenous little heart. Until that day he would be as straight as one of Widow Wieczorek’s ivory-tipped cues.

One by one Schwiefka’s shills would give place; as the winter night wore on, the stakes would grow higher as the air grew heavier and the marks grew lighter; to be replaced, one by one, like so many sausages into the same sure grinder.

While at the door Sparrow urged losers and winners alike: ‘Tell ’em where you got it ’n how easy it was.’

Till Frankie would sit back wearily, sick of seeing them come on begging to be hustled, wondering where in the world they all came from and how in the world they all earned it and what in the world they told their wives and what, especially, they told themselves and why in the world they always, always, always, always came back for more.

Some tattered walkathon tune of the early thirties went banging like a one-wheeled Good Humor cart of those same years through his head as the cards slipped mechanically about the board and his fingers went lightly dividing change in the middle, taking the house’s percentage without making the winner too sharply aware of the cut. It was one thing for a player to understand he was bucking a percentage and quite another to see it taken before his eyes. To the mark it always seemed, vaguely, that the dealer might have overlooked the cut, just this once, out of sportsmanship. For when the sucker held a hot hand five per cent didn’t trouble him – he’d be feeling too smug about having the case ace concealed while
that chump across the board was pitching in his last desperate dollar in the hope of hooking that same ace. And when he wasn’t involved in the pot the sucker didn’t care if the dealer took ninety per cent. It wasn’t any skin off his hide then, the sucker figured.

‘I hope I break even tonight,’ was the sucker’s philosophy, ‘I need the money so bad.’

And always the same tune clanging like a driverless trolley down some darkened backstreet, past familiar yet nameless stops, through the besieged city of the dealer’s brain.

A tune he’d heard some afternoon when he and Sophie were first engaged and he’d liked taking her down Division because she dressed so sharp and had that haughty, hard-to-get stride that had had everyone fooled but himself: he’d solved it before she’d had a chance to develop adult defenses.

A stride somewhere between a henwalk shuffle and a Cuban grind, one of the boys had once described it. A walk as provocative as a strip teaser zipping down one black glove on the runway just to give the boys an idea of how much there was to zip before taking it all away again. And those silk-sheathed legs as proud-looking as a fawn’s.

Once, when both were still in their teens, he’d ignored Sophie for a month just to show her he didn’t care one way or another. Until she’d asked him straight out if they were still sleeping together on Saturday nights or not.

He’d fished a nickel out of his pocket and slipped it into her palm. ‘Here’s a nickel, kid. Call me up when you’re eighteen. Right now I got to do some shoppin’ around.’

She’d gone off in such a high-wheeled huff he’d thought that that was surely the end of
that.
But two days later she’d
slipped him a note in front of the corner
apteka
.
‘I have to talk to you.’

But in her own living room there really hadn’t been anything to talk about after all. She’d come down off that high horse onto her knees. He’d brought her down till she’d never have her full height again. He’d broken her pride for keeps that afternoon.

Now for ten years she had held him in the hope of recovering that lost pride; till it had grown too late to loosen her grip upon him. If she let go of him now she let go of everything.

The old days, the old days, Frankie thought nostalgically. When every other door was a tavern and you had as much on the next guy as he had on you. When the worst thing the neighborhood bucks got pinched for was strongarming and no one fooled with anything deadlier than whisky. When there weren’t any fixers strolling through the Safari with more dough tied up in a single brown drugstore bottle than in a case of the best bonded scotch behind the bar.