The Man With the Golden Arm (31 page)

‘No, sir. I’m a seaman.’

‘Then how’d the window get broken?’

‘Knocked my old man through it.’

‘You’re a seaman all right. On the Humboldt Park lagoon.’

The Humboldt Park salt snickered. ‘Very funny,’ he observed. ‘Captain, you’re killing me.’

The flat-nosed, square-faced, tousled blond with the dark lines under the eyes was next. With his left sleeve slit to the shoulder. As if his life, like his knife, had been turned upon himself at last.

‘Francis Majcinek,
Div
ision Arms
Hot
el,’ and added indulgently: ‘That’s on
Div
ision.’

‘Thank you. I always thought it was on Eighth and Wabash – where’s the punk?’

‘Wasn’t picked up with no punk.’

‘Talk into the mike, not at me. And get off that back rail. What were you up to with the shopping bag at Nieboldt’s, Dealer?’

‘Went to buy an eye-ron.’

‘With a shopping bag?’

‘Had to stop by the butcher’s on the first floor.’

‘You should of stayed on the first floor. Those weren’t lamb chops fell out of the bag.’

Frankie grinned. He could still see those damned irons bouncing.

‘Get that grin off your puss – what else did you boost over the holidays?’

Frankie managed a look of blandest innocence. ‘You got me wrong, Captain. I was lookin’ around for the cashier—’

‘When the bag broke,’ the captain finished for him. And eyed him broodingly. ‘I like liars,’ he decided at last, ‘but you suit me too well. What did you need six irons for? I don’t suppose you were planning on
selling
them?’

‘No, nothing like that, Captain,’ Frankie assured Bednar earnestly, ‘I needed one for the wife ’n the others were for when that one wore out. They make things so
cheap
these days.’

‘I don’t know who you think you’re kidding or whether you’re trying to be funny,’ Bednar told him, studying him to find out what was really the matter. There was something wrong all right, the dealer really wasn’t trying to be funny at all; his face had somehow altered in the past month. At the moment it looked both pious and weak. ‘Come down off that cross ’n give me a straight story,’ the captain pleaded – and as he asked it he got it – in one moment he knew beyond any doubt at all. ‘How long you been on the stuff, Frankie?’

Frankie heard the small, reluctant note of surprised sympathy under Record Head’s voice.

‘Not too long,’ he acknowledged easily, coming down off the cross in return for that small reluctant note. ‘I’ve kicked it.’

‘Where you’re going you’ll have to kick it. You think you can straighten up out there?’ ‘I’m straight now.’

‘And you won’t go right back on it when you make the street again?’

‘I’ve learned my lesson, Captain.’

‘I hope to God you have.’

The captain took off his glasses and covered his eyes, to rest them from the light a moment. When he replaced them he studied Frankie’s charge sheet a long minute, while Frankie shifted restlessly in the glare and wished they’d move the damned mike away from his chin. When he heard the captain’s voice again he turned his head attentively toward the shadow out of which the voice came at him.

‘Here’s a man with thirty-six months service and the Purple Heart,’ he heard Bednar telling the listeners, ‘he was a fast hustler with a deck when he went in the service and he’s probably faster now. Are you one of Kippel’s torpedoes now, Frankie?’

‘All I do is deal, Captain.’

‘How long you been out of the army?’

‘Over a year.’

‘And Louie Fomorowski been dead how long?’

‘I didn’t even know the fellow was sick, Captain.’

‘Then you did know the man?’

‘Heard of him.’

‘Seen him on your bedpost lately?’

‘I sleep pretty sound.’

‘You don’t look it. Frankie, you don’t look like you slept in a month.’ And never took his eyes off Frankie all the while the mike was being moved. While Frankie looked straight ahead.

‘Not a nerve in his body,’ the wondering listeners heard the captain murmur at last.

In the brief interval between the departure of one line and the arrival of the next the captain leaned forward on his elbows and spread his fingers gently across his temples;
the light kept hurting his eyes. And didn’t feel he had heart enough left to face one more man manacled by steel or circumstance until his own heart should stop hurting.

Yet they come on and come on, and where they come from no captain knows and where they go no captain goes: mush workers and lush workers, catamites and sodomites, bucket workers and bail jumpers, till tappers and assistant pickpockets, square johns and copper johns; lamisters and hallroom boys, ancient pious perverts and old blown parolees, rapoes and record-men; the damned and the undaunted, the jaunty and condemned.

Heartbroken bummies and the bitter rebels: afternoon prowlers and midnight creepers. Peeping Toms and firebox pullers. The old cold-deckers and the young torpedoes coming on faster than the law can pick them up.

The unlucky brothers with the hustlers’ hearts.

‘It says here you were annoying a ten-year-old girl.’

‘I beg your
pardon.
’

‘Beg my pardon for
what?
’

‘It was a ten-year-old boy.’

The captain crossed himself. ‘I beg
your
pardon,’ he apologized, adding under his breath, ‘through your jugular vein.’ The captain felt ready for almost anything tonight, in the weariest sort of way. For knowing the answers to every alibi and having a tailor-made quip ready for every answer only seemed to make him wearier than ever of late.

‘Snatched a purse where Sinatra was singing.’

‘Do you swoon too?’ The captain was weary tonight all right.

Worst of all were the witnesses who snickered after every questioning. If only, just once, one of them would laugh out from the heart.

And felt the finger of guilt again tap his forehead and the need of confession touch his heart like touching a stranger’s
heart. A voice like his own voice, confident and accusing: ‘That’s your man, Captain. That’s your man.’ A voice like his own voice. Yet a heart like a hustler’s heart.

‘I’m affiliated with two bolts of poster paper,’ the odd fish near the end of the line announced before he was asked.

‘Are you sure you’re not incorporated?’ the captain wanted to know.

‘Put a cigar in my pocket ’n set my coat on fire,’ the next youth offered cheerfully.

‘Why didn’t you pull the firebox?’

‘What do you think I’m here for?’

‘I picked up a drunk,’ a South State Street strongarmer explained.

‘I’ll say you did. By the pockets.’

‘I got a perforated eardrum,’ the next pointed out as though that condition justified all felonies under ten thousand dollars.

‘You must have got it crawling in ’n out of transoms,’ the captain diagnosed him, ‘you can still hear a squad car coming, can’t you?’

‘If I could I wouldn’t be here.’

‘How long were you in Leavenworth?’

‘Five years eight months twenny-eight days.’

‘How many minutes?’

‘Next time I’ll take a watch.’

‘Next time you won’t need one. You’re a habitual.’ Just as the captain said that his mind jumped to a conviction as automatic as it was without basis in the charge sheet: the dealer had had the punk with him.

Out of the file he kept in his head Bednar slipped a certain arrest slip. Then slipped it back feeling pleased with Mr Schnackenberg’s bill that made two felonies, of the same nature, add up to recidivism. The punk must have had a quicker eye for that ace in the draperies.

‘Not off one conviction I ain’t no habitual,’ the ex-con on the platform answered the captain’s accusation at last.

‘You’ll have your day in court,’ the captain assured him. ‘Tell the court that Belgian.22 was to pick your teeth with. Maybe they’ll believe you. I don’t.’

The man with the Southern Comfort accent and the true assassin’s mug complained sullenly, ‘I ain’t been in trouble in eleven years. They made a believer of me on Governor’s Island. When I got out I got a lunch pail.’

‘Next time get a transparent one so the officers can see what’s in it.’

The captain had an answer for everything tonight. He hadn’t been listening to their lies for twenty-odd years for nothing.

‘I cook on the Santa Fe.’

‘Glad to know it. After this I’ll ride the Southern Pacific.’ He dismissed the cook for some gaunt wreck in a smudged clerical collar. ‘Are you a preacher?’ The captain sounded puzzled.

‘I’ve been defrocked.’

‘You still preach pretty good when it comes to cashing phony checks. What were you defrocked for?’

‘Because I believe we are all members of one another.’

That one stopped the captain cold. He studied the wreck as if suddenly so uncertain of himself that he was afraid to ask him what he had meant by that. ‘I don’t get it,’ he acknowledged at last, and passed on, with greater confidence, to a little heroin-head batting his eyes and coughing the little dry addict’s cough politely into his palm.

‘I ain’t used the stuff for fourteen years,’ he lied right into the mike the moment it was moved to his lips.

‘Then how come you were shooting that girl in the arm when the cops come in? You were putting her on it too, you Fagin.’

‘How
could
I? She been on it longer than I have.’

‘Tell that to a mule and he’ll kick your head off. The girl is nineteen and you’re forty-four and on top of that you had her so drunk she didn’t even know her own name.’

‘Well, she acts older.’ N I ain’t forty-four. I’m thirty-nine ’n that chick is twenty if she’s a month.’

The heroin head smiled virtuously at having established his innocence so irreproachably.

As the final line shuffled off the listeners rose in the rows as though to wish all such irreproachable innocents long life and good health on the way. Under the dimming lights the innocents filed through a green steel doorway into a deepening darkness.

But the listeners straightened their trousers and smoothed their dresses down and one by one, by twos and threes, by smiling threes and laughing fours, all left through a well-lighted door onto a clean well-lighted street.

With nothing, it seemed, to fear in the world at all.

Only the captain, trapped between the hunters and the hunted, looked mournfully through that green steel door as though yearning to follow his innocents there.

To follow each man to a cell all his own, there to confess the thousand sins he had committed in his heart.

For he seemed to see them still, each with the left hand manacled and the right thrown protectively across the eyes.

As his own left hand, in dreams, seemed cuffed, of late, to smooth cold steel. As he had one morning wakened to find his own right hand flung across his eyes. ‘I’ll get dark shades for the bedroom,’ Record Head decided restlessly, ‘the light is wakin’ me up too early.’

For there was no priest to wash clean the guilt of the captain’s darkening spirit nor any judge to hear his accusing heart. The court forbade him entrance to that narrow green steel door. Justice had been done; his case was closed. He
could not even tell the names of those who’d taken the rap for him.

To leave him, of all men most alone, of all men most guilty of all the lusts he had ever condemned in others.

What was it that the defrocked priest had said? ‘We are all members of one another.’ What had the holy-sounding fraud meant by
that?
Why had several snickered then and not one had laughed out from the heart? Bednar hadn’t understood then and could not let himself understand now. It had been too long since he himself had laughed from the heart.

Yet the words had left him with a secret and wishful envy of every man with a sentence hanging over his head like the very promise of salvation. Leaving him with no recourse save to swallow his own dark guilt, like a piece of spoiled meat in the throat, and turn out the charge-sheet lamp.

‘Come down off that cross yourself,’ he counseled himself sternly, like warning another.

But the captain couldn’t come down.

The captain was impaled.

Frankie lived by day beside the ceaseless, dumping shuffle of the three-legged elephant which was the laundry’s sheet-rolling machine. When he piled onto his narrow pad in the long dim-lit dorm at night and turned his face to the whitewashed wall, the three-legged elephant of the mangle roller followed, galumphing, through dreams wherein he dealt Record Head Bednar hand after hand while Louie Fomorowski watched from behind the captain’s chair. Night after night.

When the lights were down all voices were subdued. Down the long and low-roofed hall the good boys slept: the laundry and the bakery workers, the printshop typesetters and the boys who sat in classrooms and accepted their sentences with the dry, hard-bitten humor of old contented soldiers. These were the ones who had convinced the chaplain that they were really going straight this time. Frankie too had convinced the chaplain.

It had been harder to convince a certain ex-army major. ‘That vein been injured,’ he’d told Frankie in the infirmary on Frankie’s very first morning. ‘How long you been punchin’ holes in it?’

‘I been on the sleeve since I got out of the army, Doc,’ Frankie told him.

‘How big a habit you got, son?’

‘Not too big. I go for a quarter grain a day.’

‘Big enough. But I’ve seen them come in here hooked worse than that ’n still kick it. In here you got to kick it. When you get sick I’ll taper you off and if you behave yourself you’ll be out for Thanksgiving and have it kicked for keeps. Still, there’s boys in here who’ll tell you they can get you anything from heroin to gage for a price – forget it. Capone couldn’t afford the price. But if you get out of line any time you’re in here – remember that you’re on the books as a user. I’ll get you shipped to Lexington ’n that won’t be for a week end the way it used to be. That’ll be six months added. I tell you now for your own good and I won’t tell you again.’

Frankie gave him the grin. ‘I’ll tough it out, Doc.’

After that Frankie slipped into a life like the life of the barracks he had known for three years. Orders were given matter-of-factly without threats; and were obeyed complacently. Most of the men kept themselves as clean as if preparing for retreat each evening and most, out of sheer boredom, attended services in the pink-and-white chapel on Sunday morning. And each good soldier counted his two days off a month, for good behavior, like money in the bank and well earned.

All but Applejack Katz, with a long-term lease on the cot next to Frankie’s own: a man who daily risked his good-conduct time for the sake of a certain jar fermenting under the ventilator. He’d bought cider from one of the kitchen workers and, at every meal where boiled potatoes were served, stole the skins and made Frankie steal them too. He added the potato skins to the cider after lights out and was only waiting for a chance to snatch a few white-bread crusts. ‘When we get them crusts it’ll only take a week after that,’ he promised Frankie. He leaned across the cot to add a low warning word:

‘I seen you come out of the infirmary your first morning, Dealer. My advice to you is look out for the major. He’s a
psycho. What he’ll do to you is to get you so square you’ll never have another day’s pleasure in your life.’

Katz glanced about the dormitory with a look so swift and furtive Frankie was reminded, with a troubling pang, of Sparrow Saltskin.

‘Listen. They sent
me
to a psycho eight years ago. I was forty-five then ’n if I’d worked two full weeks in my life I don’t remember where. If anyone had told me, eight years ago, I’d go to work for eight hours a day six days a week and stick at it over two years I would of give him hundred to one against it.’ N I would of lost.’ Cause that’s just how square I got.

‘For two years I was off the booze, off the women, off the horses, off the dice. I even got engaged to get married in a church. All I done that whole time was run a freight elevator up ’n down, up ’n down. It scares me when I think of it now: I come near losin’ everything.’

Applejack lay back in the very real relief of one snatched from the eternal fires, at the last possible moment, straight up into Salvation Everlasting. He gave a low laugh, mocking and wise.

‘Now they’re after me to go back to that same psycho. “He done me so much good that other time,” they try to tell me, “he almost cured my new-rosis.” Sure the fool almost cured my “new-rosis.” If I went back he might cure it altogether – and what would I have left? All the good times I ever had in my life was what my little old new-rosis
made
me have. Them whole two years on the square I didn’t have one good time. I
like
my little old new-rosis. It’s all I got ’n I’m holdin’ onto it hard. My advice to you is hold onto yours: lay off them psychos. Look out for the major. When guys like you ’n me get square we’re dead.’

Katz had a record that read like a Southern Pacific Railroad schedule. He’d made every stop between Jeff City and Fort
Worth and had fashioned applejack out of white-bread crusts and potato skins in every one. Of his fifty-odd years fifteen had been spent between walls and he recounted each one in terms of applejack. Sometimes it had been hard to make and had turned out badly, in other places it had been easy and had turned out fine: his life was the definitive work on the science of making applejack under the eyes of prison guards.

He remembered certain jugs as if remembering certain people: the El Paso County Jug, recalled with joy and a certain tenderness, that he had kept filled, through a kitchen connection, night and day for six blissful months. The Grant’s Pass Jug, recalled with bitterness and doubt, that had been spirited out of his cell in the night and never seen again.

But applejack wasn’t Katz’s only interest. He had half a dozen minor projects going, involving the bartering of nutmeg for Bull Durham, of Bull Durham for nutmeg and of emory for the manufacture of something he called a ‘glin wheel,’ a sort of homemade cigarette lighter. It was also his daily concern, while working beside Frankie on the mangle roller, to steal the paraffin wax off the rollers for the making of candles, which he sold clandestinely to the harder cons upstairs.

The cons up there were either in bug cells or deadlock. They were the privates who went for stronger brew than applejack. These no longer cared: these were the truly unsaved. Over the hump for redemption and the hour for turning back lost forever: too late, forever too late. So they hurried forward all the faster into the darkness.

They talked in terms of police administrations and remembered in terms of police cars. ‘That was the year the aces had black Cadillacs with a bell on the side – or was that the year they had them speedy orange Fords?’

One night some pale castoff, a twenty-year-old so far gone in narcoticism that nothing but the one big bitter fix of death could cure him, was placed among the good
soldiers either by error or just to see how long he could stand it there.

It didn’t take long for the panic to start. One look at the stolid faces about him, he knew he was in the wrong tier and the horrors shook him like an icy wind.

‘Bond me out! Don’t touch me!’

The junkie wants a bondsman though he doesn’t own a dime. His life is down to a tight pin point and the pupils of his eyes drawn even tighter: nothing is reflected in them except a capsule of light the size of a single quarter grain of morphine. He has mounted the walls of all his troubles with no other help than that offered by the snow-white caps in the brown drugstore bottle. A self-made man.

But all the drugstores are closed tonight.

‘Bond me out! Bond me out!’

And the flood of shameless tears. By the time the major shuffled in, yawning, with the hypo, the junkie was throwing a regular circus for the boys, tossing himself about on the floor. It took four men to hold him down to give him his charge at last.

‘I think he ate somethin’ didn’t agree with him,’ Applejack observed after the youth was carried out. Such exhibitions seemingly required this flat, cold sort of mirth. The only laughter that broke the monotony here was that same hard-bitten glee: ‘The service is gettin’ pretty bad when a man has to knock his skull on the floor to get a charge of M. I remember a time when all you had to do was hold your breath for half an hour.’

Yet such pale youths felt as devout about their addiction as others might of some crotchety religious conviction or other. ‘I’m just the type
got
to have it, that’s all. It’s how I’m built. Don’t ask me
why
– how do
I
know? It’s just
something
, cousin. It’s
there.
’

Frankie Machine understood too well. Standing at the sheet
roller on his eleventh morning, it hit him so hard and so fast he went down beside the machine while the sheets, unguided, twisted and tore themselves to shreds at the very moment that his own entrails were tearing at his throat and his very bones were twisting. He heard his own voice crying as shrill as a wounded tomcat’s down the icy corridors of his anguish.

He lay eight hours in a 104 fever before the major pulled him out of it with dolaphine.

‘If you get sick on me like that again you won’t even get paregoric off me,’ were the first words he could distinguish, and blinked the sweat out of his eyes to see the major studying him. ‘Next time I’m lettin’ you sweat it out, soldier.’

Back at the sheet roller two mornings later, Frankie felt he’d already sweated it out. All that remained of his sickness was a couple days of the chuck horrors, of which Nifty Louie once had told. ‘It feels like I got a tape snake or somethin’,’ he complained to Applejack Katz, ‘every two hours the bottom falls out of my gut ’n I feel like I could eat myself through a cow on the hoof.’

Katz traded off his ‘glin wheel’ to a kitchen connection for a pound of lump sugar and gave it to Frankie. Frankie consumed it in a single day.

‘Wait till the applejack is ready,’ Applejack immediately promised him, ‘that’ll kill the chucks every time.’

‘Ain’t it ready yet?’ Frankie pleaded a little, he still felt so weak.

‘Give it just one more day,’ Applejack promised.

Katz could give anything he owned to anyone but the warden. Except that applejack. He was no more able to give that away than to give away his blood.

When the horrors had passed at last Frankie felt himself beginning to want Molly-O again. He hadn’t had one visitor, not so much as a letter or a card, in all those hard first two weeks.

But he’d gotten to know some of the boys who were neither trying to be good soldiers, like himself, nor bad ones like those upstairs.

These were the ones who just wouldn’t work. Yardbirds who couldn’t quite be trusted in a bakery or a laundry. They never disobeyed an order directly nor made trouble nor talked back. But time off for good conduct means little to men with no place to go and nothing in particular to do when they get there. They were men and youths who had never picked up any sort of craft – though most of them could learn anything requiring a mechanical turn with ease. It wasn’t so much lack of aptitude as it was simply the feeling that no work had any point to it. They lived in prison much as they had lived out of it, vaguely contented most of the time, neither hoping nor despairing, wanting nothing but a place to sleep and a tin pie plate with some sort of slop or other on it a couple times a day. They neither worried about the future, regretted the past nor felt concern for the present.

They were the ones who had never learned to want. For they were secretly afraid of being alive and the less they desired the closer they came to death. They had never been given one good reason for applying their strength. So now they disavowed their strength by all sorts of self-deceptions.

They gave nothing because nothing had been given them. If they lost their privileges they shrugged it off, they had lost certain privileges before; one way or another they had had always to forfeit any small advantage gained by luck, chance or stealth.

Some slept at the race-track barns all summer and crashed County in the winter, year after year. Getting back to the barns a week sooner or later didn’t mean much, it would probably be raining that week anyhow. So why get all steamed up in a laundry all winter for nothing? Where was the payoff?

They didn’t even read comic books. They had been bored to death by all that the day before they were born. The whole business between birth and death was a sort of inverted comic strip, too dull to read even if set right. So what was the difference whether a man slept on wood or hay?

‘Rubber heels ’n fisheyes again’ was the word on the meatloaf and tapioca, ‘but wait till we get that mountain goat’ – warless soldiers as indifferent to Sunday mutton as the walls were indifferent to themselves; yet feigning to look forward to a Sunday dinner as tasteless in the mouth as life was in their hearts.

Sometimes something wakened and flared feebly in one of these: he talked back and got to think it over in deadlock.

Deadlock was any cell with a red metal tag locked onto the bars to indicate the man was either a junkie or just out of line. As long as the tag stayed there it meant no yard privileges, no cigarettes, no newspapers and no mail; no candy, no card playing and the next time maybe you’ll keep that big trap buttoned.

Deadlock meant a monotony more deadly even than the regular abnormal monotony of jailhouse days and nights. For no one can sleep all the time and deadlock brought hours when memory caught up with a man at last. Hours in which to sit and remember that willing long-ago lovely who’d married some square after all; or a family that cared less than ever. Or how suddenly the rain had come one blue-and-gold Easter Sunday a dozen blue-gold Easters ago.

Thinking of release only slowed the hours down to the deadliest crawl of all – yet of what else was there to think? And what could freedom mean except a chance to get out of the state with one clean shirt on your back and jump back on the con the day it got dirty? You had to get across the state line to promote some decent clothes and enough
change in the poke to take a woman to a movie or a bar.

So the deadlockers walked up and down till they grew weak at the knees, slept and rose to walk again till night and day and the weariness in the knees and the weariness of the mind all rolled together into one big cell-sized, life-sized weariness.