The Man With the Golden Arm (35 page)

‘One I had said no hammering on Sunday too,’ the Jailer reproved Violet, ‘she said I hammered enough all week!’

‘You’ve hammered enough around here too – and you ain’t hit a nail yet,’ she chided him. ‘Two years fixing one board!’

‘You want to come down and try my board for size now?’ he invited her. ‘You won’t mind my hammering after
that!
’ He sounded a trifle tight all right.

‘Shame, Schwabatski,’ Vi teased him softly, ‘drinkin’ up that boy’s milk at the bars.’

‘Leave the helpless children out of this!’ He waved the hammer, pretending to be ready to come up after her.

Frankie leaned heavily on the rail, waiting for he didn’t know what. For some reason the twenty-watt bulb of the hallway had been painted a dull red, the same as that over the visitors’ cage. As he passed the Jailer the old man’s hammer caught him by the claw and hauled him back.

‘It served that one right, Dealer – he went into that business
in the wrong neighborhood – Polaks don’t need what he was selling. You see: it didn’t help him after all to have the devil for a father.’

Frankie freed himself and went on up the stairs, but the old man shambled right on up behind him, babbling away till Frankie had to turn on him to get him back to his stairs, his son and his whisky.

‘You’ll never finish that step runnin’ off at the mouth all day, Jailer,’ he urged without anger.

The old man took him by the jacket’s sleeve and Frankie looked down into the grizzled, grayish, boozed and wrinkled mug, always so intent on giving fresh heart to all those who seemed to be in need of it.

‘People like that
ought
to be knocked on the head!’ he whispered as though he’d overheard Frankie’s threat to Louie one night. ‘Don’t torture yourself! Myself would of give you this hammer! Myself would have done it! Don’t torture! Don’t suffer!’ The old man was pleading so, two steps there below, he seemed to be pleading on his knees. Frankie took the big veined hand and felt his own fingers’ weakness in the old man’s grip.

‘All I done was a little stealin’, Jailer,’ he told the old man softly. ‘Now I done my time for that, so let’s forget what can’t be helped no more. All sorts of things happen and then it’s done and the less we talk about it now the better for me ’n everybody.’

It was the assurance the old man needed, he sensed Frankie had found some degree of peace and let him go at last. Frankie saw him return, with a pencil behind his ear and a ruler sticking out of the back overall pocket, to his work among the paper daisies.

Overhead he heard Violet return back down the hall without a greeting. That wasn’t like Vi at all. ‘She’s gone to tell the punk I’m back,’ he guessed.

‘You heard what I said all the same,’ the old man mumbled, through two nails clenched in his teeth as he squatted on the step. ‘Knocked on the head! With this same hammer!’ Then the hammer’s rapid tapping, light and sane and calm, a good carpenter’s hammering, like the beat of a lightened heart. The Jailer felt better for having unburdened himself. Frankie could tell. But how long it had been since the old man had first wished to speak out Frankie could only surmise.

‘The old man got good heart,’ Frankie told himself. Everyone, even those who left doors ajar just to bait him a bit, knew the old man had the truest sort of heart.

It was only that there was so little demand for the truer sort of heart of late.

Hearts shaped like valentines aren’t at all the fashion. What is more in demand are hearts with a bit of iron – and a twist to the iron at that. A streamlined heart, say, with a claw like a hammer’s claw, better used for ripping than for tapping at old repairs – that’s what’s needed to get by these days. It’s the new style in hearts. The non-corrugated kind don’t wear well any longer.

Hearts with a twist to the iron – that’s what makes a good hustler’s heart.

Behind the narrow yellow door bearing the red tin 29 he himself had nailed there, Frankie heard the old clock below the crucifix tick once – warningly – and pushed in without knocking.

Sophie sat with her head thrown back and eyes closed, looking debauched in the dim tenement light. Apparently assuming it was only that nosy Violet again, she said tonelessly, ‘You come in yourself this morning, did you? You only sent things yesterday.’

The room certainly looked as though Violet only sent things these days. It didn’t look as if it had been swept in a
month; cigarette butts, Kleenex, bottles and hairpins littered the floor. The walls had grown darker.

Her scrapbook lay on her lap. ‘You pastin’ pictures, Zosh?’ he asked.

She opened her eyes, smiled wanly and lifted her hands listlessly toward him.

The gesture told him she had known it was himself in the doorway all the time, that she had been playing some strange game with herself after hearing his voice on the stairs, pretending she had not heard anyone at all. Yet he held both her hands in his. He had seen so many weary homecomings at the Pulaski. Till her fingers began to work like small claws upon his palms.

‘You’re stronger than you were,’ he told her. For her hands seemed to have gained a chilly ferocity all their own. They felt so cold, so cold. He dropped them gently and went behind her chair to rock her shoulders awhile.

‘That’s
nice
, Frankie,’ she told him thinly, ‘you learned your lesson. God punished you. Always be nice after this fer what you done.’

Violet’s voice at the open door: ‘When did
that
sonofabitch break out?’

Frankie saluted her from where he stood. ‘Hi, Sergeant – come on in – but don’t bring your army.’

For the punk’s shadow fell behind her.

‘He didn’t mean no harm, Frankie,’ Violet pleaded for him like a mother for a wayward child, ‘he just got scared ’n run.’

‘Then he can keep on running – right back up them steps. He’s got somebody’s nice fat bankroll up there to count and he’s gonna get plenty of time to count it. I’m goin’ back to work by Schwiefka tonight ’n that mocky ain’t workin’ no door where I’m dealin’. I’m the guy who got him the job ’n I’m the guy who’s visin’ him off it. That’s the
first thing I’m doin’ t’night, it’ll be my first good deed for society.’

He heard Sparrow retreat as softly as he had come. As though knowing for months that that would be Frankie’s answer. He’d run like a scalded dog all right, no two ways about it.

‘What makes him so brave?’ Frankie asked Vi with heavy irony. ‘He ain’t got a bad conscience about anythin’, has he?’

But Violet was gone, to console or upbraid her Sparrow, and Zosh was waiting for him to turn toward her so that everything could begin again, just like it used to be.

‘Your bonus dough is gone, Frankie,’ was her opening shot. ‘I tried to make it last. The last two mont’s I been livin’ off yer disability dough –’ n even then I had to borrow a double sawbuck off Vi I ain’t been able to pay back.’

‘You don’t have to pay it back,’ Frankie assured her, ‘if it come from where I think it come from.’

‘She said it was Old Man’s insurance dough,’ Zosh told him, ‘but the way she’s actin’ I don’t care if I pay her back either. You really goin’ back to work so soon, Frankie?’

‘Just till I get back on my feet,’ he assured her. ‘I’m out for a real job, Zosh. Beatin’ them tubs. I’m gonna be a drummer just like I always said.’ Then he noticed that no Rumdum crouched beneath the dresser. ‘Where’s the hound?’ he wanted to know.

‘Vi took him, she got more room. How could I take care of him all day here by myself? He didn’t like me anyhow. Why don’t you get me a nice little puppy-pup, Frankie? You said you would. You
promised
.’

So nothing had really changed after all. She would own a dog and he would be a big-name drummer. He would practice every night.

But she’d seen spurts of golden hope in him before. It
would wear off now as it always had. He’d be back dealing where he ought to be and she’d be sitting where she ought to be and everything would be just the way it had been, just as it ought always to be.

He was pulling the practice board out from under the sink and brushing the months of dust off its scars and dents and picking up the sticks to get the feel of them again. Then put them down gently, for he saw she was nodding where she sat, the brief half sleep of invalidism.

‘Let’s do like regular people now,’ she murmured, as though in sleep. ‘Like regular people ’n go by the Aragon.’

He stood behind her chair with his hands on the wood, ready to wheel her if she wakened. Then, as her head nodded, told her softly: ‘Have a good dream, Zoschka. Have a good dream you’re dancin’ again.’

He could not see the trace of a smile that strayed so knowingly across her lips.

Neither the Tug & Maul nor the Safari saw Molly Novotny any more. She had drifted into the vast web of backstreet and alleyway, crosslight and traffic warning, of the overnight hotels and those little nameless restaurants that burn all night under the single sign:
DOOD EATS
.

‘She’s workin’ in some boog honky-tonk,’ Antek told Frankie. ‘Ask Meter Reader, he’s the guy who goes out scoutin’.’

Frankie waited half a day for Meter Reader to show up, and got only the vaguest sort of information for his patience. ‘All I remember is a cat settin’ on a piano. I was so boiled I don’t know
where
I was. But I remember talkin’ to Drunk John’s girl. She was a little boiled herself.’

So all nights ended for Frankie now with a firm resolution, renewed each morning, to scout around Lake and Paulina before the day was over. But 10
P.M
. found him in the
dealer’s slot and he couldn’t afford to miss a single night: he had to get a small stake together. He couldn’t come to Molly broke and begging.

Yet the week ran out on Saturday night and he was no richer than he’d been on Monday morning. The old merry-go-round was rolling again and he had to ride as hard as any.

Once more the yellow arc lamps bloomed in the shadow of the El. Pumpkin-colored posters appeared in the bakers’ windows among the round brown loaves of morning, announcing that Mickey Michaels’ Melody Masters would play at St Wenceslaus Kostka Saturday evening for the Endless Belt Invincibles S.A.C.

In front of Piechota’s Poultry & Fresh Eggs Market a single gander stood gawking between its legs at a cord that forever held it fast.

Umbrella Man came in to Schwiefka’s every noon with the
Times
morning line crumpled in his pocket, the daily double checked off and fifty cents in his hand. He never won and never complained. He came in with a bottle on his hip, made his bets like a man paying a bill, and left with the relieved air of one who has settled a long-overdue debt. The only return he seemed to expect was the privilege of climbing the same stairs and trying again another day.

He wasn’t permitted to climb those stairs after the last race had been run. Since Frankie had been gone Cousin Kvorka had forbade him to sit in any poker game. So that, after his fifty-cent bet was made, Umbrella Man spent the evening drinking instead of playing poker. By the next noon, as often as not, he would still be weaving a bit.

It was said that he had taken to begging secretly for drinks at Widow Wieczorek’s. That though he never begged anywhere with his lips, for fear of Cousin Kvorka, he managed to pick
up a beer or two at the Widow’s simply by using his eyes to express his need.

‘The gray cat’s purred for Umbrellas,’ Frankie heard Antek say.

All things remained the same; yet all things had changed. No one sat under the short-card sign waiting to bring up coffee and cigarettes for the players. Blind Pig spent his nights in the Safari now and lived in the room where Louie had lived, among Louie’s abandoned possessions. ‘I’m takin’ all I can get,’ Pig reassured the troubled ghost of Louie Fomorowski.

For Louie’s old customers still found their way: they came now with cold, hard silver. Pig wouldn’t touch folding money. ‘I can’t get nobody to give me a square count,’ he complained of everybody.

The Prager legend above the Tug & Maul still came on at the same moment every night. Above the bar mirror, and all down Owner’s wall, hung fresh ads for Budweiser, Chevalier, Nectar and Schlitz. As if in honor of Frankie’s return.

And why was it, Frankie wondered, getting his own little beer paunch back, that the faces in Owner’s ads were always so clean and healthy and wholesome and glad? There was the freshly scrubbed young housewife winking broadly at her own cleverness in having kept two bottles of some green offgrade brew in the icebox in event of company: evidently she was one of the few women in Cook County who had heard of beer. For her husband’s enthusiasm over such foresight scarcely knew bounds.

Beside her was some usurer togged out in woodsman’s gear, preparing an enormous t-bone – where had
that
come from? – over a smokeless fire in a clean green land of night-blue lakes and birch trees so straight and tall they looked like ivory-tipped cues. ‘He must of gone up there ’n shot it hisself,’ Frankie decided, missing the entire point
of the ad, which was simply to take note of the cold beer mug waiting in the blanket-roll by that smokeless fire.

Down the line a pink-cheeked, overstuffed illiterate with a shot glass at his side looked benignly down, over volumes heaped by a cynical photographer, upon the barflies of the Tug & Maul who actually drank the stuff.

The barflies returned his gaze, from time to time. But a slight glaze so commonly clouded their sight that they thought, as often as not, that the man in the private library was Errol Flynn.

This freshly blooded race bred by the better advertising agencies looked down upon the barflies of the Tug & Maul, trying to understand how it was that these battered wrecks could look as though not one of them had ever seen a land of night-blue lakes with poolroom cues for trees. Nor any man’s private library at all. They appeared not even to have discovered the public ones.

There were only boys with bad teeth, wives with faces still dented from last night’s blows and girls whose hair was set so stiffly it looked metallic. There were only old drooling lushbums with faces like emptied goboons. There was only a long line of faces that had passed straight from the noseless embryo into the running nose of senility. And had seen no birch tree at all.