The Man With the Golden Arm (26 page)

Yet, when the El passed overhead, it drew the curtain up in that same passionate fluttering that had touched her heart so strangely the first night he’d come by – then died, as she felt her heart had died; and dwindled like any dying heart away. He would not be by again.

She tried to rouse herself, saying it would never do, letting herself feel so useless again. She had never understood why she had lived with a man like Drunkie John, for whom she had cared nothing at all, and found the answer now: when a woman feels useless she doesn’t think anything of throwing herself away. One way of doing it, with one man or another, was as good a way as any other then. She ought to be hustling drinks across the street this minute instead of letting herself feel that, unless one certain clown knocked soon, she would be useless all her life.

It seemed to her now that all she had ever wanted, with one man or another, one street or another or under any old moon at all, was simply this: a man to care for, and a child of her own. To nurse in the silver evening light and tend in the gilded morning. That was all she had ever wanted.

Or ever could want again.

As the party down the street grew gayer and the revelry in all the bars increased, she sank into a pleasant sleep and dreamed she held somebody else’s baby to her naked breast while someone knocked and knocked at some far door and she could not answer without letting the baby go.

‘John is drunk and back at the door,’ she counseled herself in sleep, ‘come to take my baby away.’ She wakened in a dead-cold fright, the fire had gone out and yet the knocker rapped on through her dream.

‘It’s me, Molly-O,’ Frankie’s unemphatic voice. ‘I know
you’re there. I asked at the club and they said you hadn’t showed up. You sick, Molly? You mad at me?’

She watched the knob turning, he was trying to see whether it had been locked against him. Then rose at last and let him in.

‘He’s scared,’ she thought the second she saw his face. ‘I’m the girl he comes to when he’s scared.’

He stood with his back against the door and he was sweating across the hair line, there were flakes of snow on the hair.

‘Who’s chasin’ you, Frankie?’

‘The aces. They’re goin’ to pin the sluggin’ on me.’

‘Are you clean?’ she asked and before he had time to fashion the lie, ‘Don’t tell me you weren’t in on sluggin’ Louie. It’d spoil just everythin’ if you did. We been straight with each other so far – let’s keep it straight. The way it is with you ’n me, when it ain’t straight no more it’s over. There ain’t six barflies between Antek’s and the Safari who can’t take one good guess about who got Louie that night. It ain’t that hard to guess with your buddy spendin’ like crazy.’

‘The punk ain’t had two bucks all his own to spend in a month,’ Frankie reproved her. ‘What you tryin’ to hand me?’

‘Just what the people are sayin’. Buyin’ drinks by Antek like he owns the joint all yesterday afternoon.’

Frankie laughed uneasily. ‘You didn’t see no cash go over the bar, did you?’

‘I wasn’t there, Frankie, I just
heard
. They don’t like it at the Safari if I hang around Antek’s too much. Where I make my livin’ is where I should spend, they think.’

‘Then I’ll tell you this: either the punk is spendin’ Stash’s Christmas bonus money or he’s runnin’ up a tab on Antek. Stop worryin’.’

‘I ain’t worryin’ about the punk,’ Molly told him gravely, ‘it’s you I’m worryin’ about.’

He went to the window. Between the girders of the El the snow was freezing fast. ‘No, I ain’t clean,’ he answered with an ice-cold bitterness. ‘I ain’t got enough blood on my hands, I got to pull somethin’ like
that
.’

It wasn’t till he’d told her that she came to him, to link one arm into his own. ‘Don’t torture yourself. It’s a good thing he’s gone. I seen the way he hooked a couple of them Safari kids onto the needle.’

‘I don’t feel proud, like I done somethin’ so great,’ Frankie told her with a grin at once both grateful and heartsore.

Seeing the defeat in that smile, Molly thought, He’s going to have to run for it all right. ‘When you’re ready to take off I’ll take off with you,’ she told him matter-of-factly. ‘But let’s not start runnin’ till we’re chased, Frankie. We run now we give the game away. Let’s tough it out till it blows over a little. If we run we split it wide. Give it a chance to heal. Let them pick you up ’n haul you down to Record Head, there’s nobody around here who’ll testify up against you ’n nobody who can prove anythin’ if they did. Tough it out, Frankie. I’ll tough it with you. We’ll tough it together.’ And took his tough little mug in her hands, gave him one small tough kiss and held it for luck. When she released him he grinned in the way she remembered best, with something of the old hope in his eyes.

‘I took over the traps for the drummer tonight,’ he told her as proudly as a boy, ‘I didn’t miss a beat the whole time.’

‘Where’d you disappear to?’ Sophie was parked in the dance hall’s vestibule and the party was over for her too.

The party was over for everyone. The crap game was over, losers and winners alike had left, the orchestra was packing its instruments and a janitor was pushing a broom down one side of the floor. All that remained of the night’s many dancers were the shadows of two drunks on the walls, clinging to
each other in a freakish caricature of a dance like a couple drunken bears: Meter Reader hauling Umbrella Man around and around the hall for no reason anyone could see at all. Their shadows fell across the wheelchair’s arm like a derisive memory of all the boys she had danced with and now would dance with no more. He hadn’t thought she’d noticed him slip away.

‘I had to see a clocker. He give me a good thing for Tropical tomorrow.’

An anxious wind hurried past them like the old year’s last latecomer, Umbrella Man fell to his knees within as though to beg or pray and Meter Reader hauled him across the floor by the collar with the janitor nudging both playfully at the heels across the floor and out of sight while the wind went seeking someone in all the littered corners.

‘It wasn’t so good as the dances we used to go to, was it, Frankie?’ she asked, hoping for some reason it hadn’t been.

He tucked the blanket in about her feet without reply and wheeled her out onto the street, the chair making a tiny trail in the light new snow all the way down to Division. To be blown, as soon as they passed, into the footsteps of the night’s thousand revelers. And into their own dim hall. He shoved the chair into the alcove below the staircase and she leaned her full weight upon him for the climb. He had to hold to the railing, she had never leaned so heavily upon him. The steps rose, into a wan yellow light, more steeply for him than ever before.

‘Don’t lean so hard, Zosh. I can’t hardly make it.’

She lightened her weight a bit up to the second flight.

There, across the hallway window, the Division Street Station’s signal tower stood out clearly and abruptly, its red and green ornamentation glowing down the tracks like an iron caricature of the Christmas tree they had left behind in a half-lighted hall.

With his arm about her they paused to see the snow falling aslant the crosslights as far as the night would let them see.

To Frankie that quarter-moon sky looked darker and all the iron apparatus of the El taller than ever. The artificial tenement light seeping across the tracks made even the snow seem artificial, like snow off a dime-store counter. Only the rails seemed real and to move a bit with some terrible intent. ‘Your hands ’r so cold I can feel the ice t’rough my mittens,’ Sophie told him, thrusting her damp, mittened hand out of his in a child’s sudden displeasure.

So cold, so cold, hands, wrists and hearts: the old quarter-moon of the tenements shone no colder tonight than the blood crying for warmth in his wrists.

And though her eyes were still bloodshot from crying Sophie suddenly sang to him with a certain phony gaiety, ‘
You’re gonna miss your big fat mamma one of these days
– you know why I like that song?’ Cause it reminds me of one I
really
like.’

In the icy dark the street lamp’s frosty glow lay like hoar across dresser and wheelchair and bed. The clock was beating out its heart on the wall in a freezing pain and the luminous Christ gleamed all around with an icy, creaking mystery. Below the crucifix Rumdum whimpered, shaking in all his limbs and pounding the floor with his whiskbroom tail in hope of some ultimate warmth.

‘That sneak of a hound been curlin’ up on the chair again,’ she snitched on Rumdum, he had so often been warned against shedding hair anywhere in the room except on the floor. The floor was all right because there Violet would sweep it up sooner or later.

‘He was just tryin’ to get warm,’ Frankie told her in the darkness, fumbling about the gas plate in the corner.

‘Then why does he have to
sneak
about it, jumpin’ off ’n
pertendin’ he been under the dresser the whole time we was gone?’

‘’Cause he’s scared he’ll get rapped in the snout with the hair curler like the other time he tried it,’ he reminded her.

‘I’ll rap him wit’ somethin’ more than a hair curler,’ she warned them both, ‘if he got rapped wit’ a little rat poison in his dirty beer we’d see how much sneakin’ he’d do then.’

A little blue flame spurted upward in the dark beneath Frankie’s hand.

‘You wanted a dog,’ he told her, ‘you got one.’ He sat on the bed’s edge and smoked a cigarette while Rumdum nuzzled between his knees. Once the latch rattled suddenly and he wondered why he could never get used to the way the El rattled it.

‘Wheel me a little, Frankie.’

That meant she would sleep in the chair tonight, and he wheeled her till her head slipped onto her shoulder in a light doze. Beside the gas plate’s feeble warmth she napped lightly, with the little blue flames playing on her nodding head; beneath the chair Rumdum shivered. The overhanging blankets kept the cold off his hide a bit down there.

From under the heaped army blankets on the bed – blankets stolen from army camps all the way from Fort Bragg to Camp Maxey – Frankie peered out, with one limp eye, upon the new year’s calendar: January 1, 1947. Outside the pane the year’s first snow turned into the year’s first rain.

Time, Frankie saw by that calendar, was some old man with a scythe. Time was always an old man with a scythe, for some reason. Yet as he drifted toward sleep it seemed that Time was really Antek the Owner’s great gray deaf-and-dumb cat, that simply sat all day on the bar and studied the barflies with such unwavering tolerance.

Everyone said the cat was dumb, all insisted he had never even been heard to purr. Antek alone knew differently; he
alone had heard the old cat purr. ‘’N when you hear
that
one purr you’re through,’ Antek was convinced. ‘That one keeps track of how many shots you put down every day. So long as you’re just a sociable drinker he don’t purr. But when you take the one that puts you on the lush for keeps, then he knows you’ll never get off the bottle all your life,’ n he purrs once at you. He purred at me ’n he’ll purr at you ’n with my own ears I heard him purr at Rumdum.’

The old cat knew, Frankie realized dreamily, only the old cat knew. Watching and waiting for the finishing shot that each hustler came to with the cat-gray stroke of the years.

Dreamed he heard Molly-O cry out only one flight down; in a voice made remote by many walls. And muffled by a slow slant rain.

By walls, by rain and by years to be when he would hear no voice at all; muffled by the slow slant rain of a night he would never know.

Some rain that beat, like forgotten tears, against some other room’s single pane: the rain of that far-off night when his name would be the name of nobody at all, as the name of one who had never lived. Save in the memory of Molly-O, grown too old to remember.

Caught between the dealer’s slot and the cat-gray stroke of the years, Frankie saw a line of endless girders wet with the rain of those years to be. Where all night long, in that far time, the same all-night salamanders burned. Burned just as they had so long ago. Before the world went wrong. And any gray cat had purred at all.

The cold rain ran with the red-lit rain. Like years beating by on the wheels of an empty Loopbound El. Till his heart, that cried for a greater rest even in sleep, felt tattooed by that long rain’s beating. Why was it that within the voice of any woman crying at night he always heard an infant’s gasping cry?

As the first light began enfolding the signal towers with tourniquets of fog, a sounder sleep finally folded a tourniquet about the fever in Frankie’s brain. The slow heart stanched itself at last; though the rain ran on forever. And Molly-O, so far below, had yet such a long hard way to go.

‘Sophie knows,’ he mumbled in sleep, ‘she knows about Molly-O, but she don’t know about everything.’ Cause the cat won’t purr, the cat won’t tell. Nobody can tell which way the old cat’ll jump.’

And a dream cat leaped, in a slow and stiff-legged tableau, down a steep dark stair where paper daisies bloomed in an unabating rain.

Two hours later he felt himself being shaken awake by Record Head Bednar’s hand on his shoulder. He opened his eyes to see only Sophie shaking him. ‘What’s the matter? What’s up?’ he wanted to know irritably; yet relieved that it had only been Zosh after all.

‘Nuttin’, dummy,’ she scolded him. ‘You just look too lonesome when you sleep. I don’t like it when you look so lonesome, it makes me feel lonesome too –
I’m
here, ain’t I? If you got to sleep lookin’ like that get up ’n get dressed, it means you need a drink.’ Then, curiously, almost gently: ‘Why you look like that when you sleep, Frankie?’

‘Some cats just sleep like that,’ he told her without hearing his own voice. He was already purring, back in dreams, among all manner of other strange lost strays.

Time may well redeem the forger while leaving the bad checks unredeemed was how Antek Witwicki looked at it. And just to show how little trust he had in Time had had a fresh challenge painted above his register for all Tug & Maul employees to heed: