But caught no one reaching for a thing.
‘The courts are very severe on these cases of late,’ the ace went on regretfully, ‘it might be assault wit’ attemp’ to tap a gas main for immoral purposes for all I know. Seems to me you answer the description of Firebox Phil, the fiend who’s pullin’ boxes for the purpose of pickin’ the fire chief’s pocket when he hangs his coat on the hook-’n-ladder.’
The wind searched curiously all the way down to the end of the hall; yet no one reached for a fiver at all. It turned and jostled back between them, nudging each suggestively. Yet no one came up with a crying dime.
‘You better look out or he’ll try to buy you off,’ Sparrow warned the law.
‘Where you work? You look awful familiar to me,’ the ace turned irritably upon the punk. ‘Let’s see some eyedintification.’
Sparrow’s wallet was in apple-pie order. It wasn’t his, but it was all there: the photostated discharge stolen off a sleeping drunk on a Humboldt Park local and the Social Security card with the carelessly forged signature. He let the ace see there wasn’t so much as a single loose deuce in the package.
‘Now let’s see yours, Scarface,’ he turned back to Stash, sensing easier game. He didn’t want to fool with the one in glasses, he looked like some kind of crook.
‘Worrrk by izehowz,’ Stash insisted, feeling the net beginning to close.
‘He didn’t even register for the Spanish-Americun War, I bet,’ Violet scoffed, while Old Husband hauled out his icehouse badge and his Christmas bonus check.
‘’N you told me you were broke just last night!’ Violet whooped in indignation. ‘Gimme that! A fine pervider you turned out to be, holdin’ out on your own flesh ’n blood.
Bringin’ home stale pumpernickel with a uncashed check in your poke! I guess you figure you could take it with you ’r somethin’.’
‘If he can’t he won’t go,’ Sparrow put in, and apologized immediately. ‘I heard that on the radio.’
The ace craned his neck, inwardly cursing his slowness in failing to grab the check first – not a loose fin among the three of them. Maybe he ought to make them take off their shoes; if he could just think of one good reason for the pair still wearing them. Well, he could always get a fin for the gun from any Division Street hood.
‘Now I go by worrrk,’ Stash announced, hugging himself to keep warm while Violet, relenting at last, buttoned his fly. When the whisky ebbed she’d be half sorry for him.
‘Now you go by station howz ’n get good lawyer,’ the officer corrected Stash. ‘Maybe you’ll talk better English after you’ve slept a spell.’
At mention of sleep Stash looked homesick for bed. Anybody’s bed. Was there such a place left in the world where no one woke you up at a quarter to four, plastered you with mustard and ran you onto a fire escape in your underwear for neighbors to make bad scandals?
‘We got a nice dry cell for you – or don’t you think it’s time for your fam’ly to get a little rest? You ought to be ashamed, a man of your age,’ n holdin’ out on your kids on top of it.’ Apparently he’d concluded that Sparrow and Violet were brother and sister.
Old Husband hung his unhappy old head. He just hadn’t known you could be arrested for holding out a pay check on your wife. Down the stairwell and by the ace’s firm hand on the back of his belt, all the way down, he realized now it was a real bad thing he had done.
‘Could sleep by station howz?’ He wriggled a bit with hope.
‘Yeh.’ N coffee ’n a sausage sandrich for you too.’
Stash slid his dim eyes sidewise like a condemned rooster’s. ‘Please – no sandrich.’
Violet and Sparrow, standing with arms hooked about each other’s waists as the first light began carpeting the ironwork of the fire escape and started down the hall, watched from the alley window while the law helped Stash into a squad car. They saw the little red taillight wink up at them once. To warn them to be good children so they’d never have to go to jail.
‘That old man is certainly a lot of trouble to me,’ Violet sighed as the car pulled east out of the alley and wheeled south toward the station.
‘I hope they take him to Racine Street better’n by Saloon Street – by Racine they got mattresses,’ Sparrow hoped wanly in the wan city dawn. While the light of Chicago’s vast West Side, like the light of nowhere else in the world, crept softly, with its special Chicago softness, up a hundred thousand seamed city walls. ‘What makes that old man so mean in the first place?’ Sparrow wondered. ‘Don’t you treat him nice?’
The light filtered down from a hundred thousand roofs and across the floor just as it had filtered across the Humboldt Park lagoon on their first mornings together, when the lagoon was the thrill of a clandestine honeymoon month, before the whole world started acting clandestinely.
Violet shrugged. ‘They all get that way when they get old,’ she advised him like a grandmother.
‘I’m not so hungry no more,’ Sparrow decided, ‘one more sandrich is all I could eat.’
‘Just the same, it was mighty sweet of you to pick up the sandrich when he slugged me wit’ it – did you see him hit me?’ For one moment he felt she was going to get mad all over again. Then she added: ‘The poor old man,’ and Sparrow knew she was almost sober.
‘Don’t worry about your perm’nent,’ he flattered her, ‘spendin’ on hair like yours is just tarnishin’ the lily. With hair like yours you could be a model ’n pose.’
‘Yeh,’ she laughed off his praise, ‘under the arms maybe.’ She raised her arms elegantly, like a real lady in a deodorant ad, high over her head. ‘Anyhow it ain’t red, it’s just awe-burn. Would you like me wit’ red hair all over?’
‘I like redheads of any color – oney first fix the sandrich ’n get some clean sheets on the bed. Old men ’r kind of moldy, you know.’ N leave the dirty mustard off. Off the sandrich, I mean. It got on the sheet awready, somehow. You know what I mean?’
‘I know what you mean,’ she replied, and went to the bedroom to change the sheets and stash Stash’s upper plate in the drawer on top of the.38, wondering casually how in the world that poor old man was ever going to eat without his plate. There was a daub of blood on her slip and she was examining it when the punk shambled in and said, ‘Let’s see.’
‘No,’ she told him firmly, ‘there’s blood on it. I don’t think a man should look at blood on a woman. I don’t like the sort of man that would.’
So Sparrow ignored the slip, he was accustomed to her superstitions. ‘I hope Old Man gets a good lawyer,’ he hoped.
‘Yeh,’ Violet repented, ‘I’d hate to see him lose that job. But maybe this’ll teach him to quit dictatin’ everybody. Honey, that string is ticklin’ me.’
Sparrow generously switched the string to the other corner.
It was better than no love at all.
He hadn’t stopped by Molly Novotny’s door for three nights and three days. But for the second time in the week he had had his last, final and never-again fix. This time he was through and meant it. So he wanted to tell Molly how she had helped him to beat the stuff just in time.
He came down the stairs with Rumdum plowing on a leash before him and his mind went down the stairs one bound ahead of the hound. Frankie had dark-haired Molly on his mind as well as the needle and he couldn’t get either off. His eyes had a curtained look; to hide the need of both from himself. But Rumdum’s were hotly eager for everything.
For Rumdum had good beer and Girlie on his mind and he and Frankie were going calling together.
Within Frankie heard the phonograph’s sleepy murmur, but he did not knock. Some aversion to knocking at this door still held him, it must always be somehow accidental and nobody’s responsibility; he kicked Rumdum in an oblique hope that the dog might protest loudly enough to get Molly’s attention. But the hound only slid one cold eye sidewise. When the murmuring paused Frankie stepped, gently but firmly, on the dog’s tail. Rumdum put it between his legs and sat down he
avily upon it, looking as wronged as a hound could look: he didn’t want to take responsibility either.
Frankie stood looking down at the ravenous-looking freak at his feet and saw a shiver, as of returning life, run through that mangy and bloated form: the beer-clogged nostrils had picked up, faintly, Girlie’s special scent. A scent, for Rumdum, like that of no other bitch the whole endless length of Division Street. He bristled and forgot himself long enough to give forth with a low, menacing, masculine growl, reserved strictly for occasions when no opponent was in sight. Molly heard that boastful rumble and opened the door just a crack.
‘He stopped dead here ’n I couldn’t get him a step farther,’ Frankie explained casually. ‘I think he got a crush on Girlie.’
‘He sounds mad at somebody.’
‘He’s just puttin’ that on. All he is is thirsty again ’n he knows the place he gets took care of. Say, I’m sort of dry myself. How about a little Christmas cheer? You dry?’ And fetched Rumdum a sharp kick to make him leave off growling long enough so a person could make himself heard. ‘I guess he’s likely to go on like that till he gets some beer in him.’
She opened the door just wide enough so that he could brush past, if he pleased to, or stay where he was. Yet gave him the benefit of both breasts against his arm as he passed.
He sat down in the big red upholstered chair in the corner, looking shabbier than ever in his stained field jacket. While Rumdum swished about his legs, suddenly coy after all his growling threats about what was going to happen to her if he ever got within paws’ reach of her lovely flanks.
Girlie, snarling defensively down at the oversized mongrel from her sanctuary in Molly’s arms, seemed to share some of those reservations about Rumdum which Molly held for Frankie. Whose big dog had he been lately?
‘I’ll tie her up,’ Molly announced, and when she returned to her guests: ‘I left her a saucer of milk. She isn’t old enough for beer.’
‘If she hangs around this one she won’t drink nothin’ else,’ Frankie bragged when Molly came to sit beside him on the chair’s broad arm. To study him with her direct child’s gaze.
‘You didn’t come back,’ she reminded him. ‘You went ’n got fixed again ’n was too ashamed to come back.’
Her directness shook him, he hadn’t had time to lie.
‘It was the last one, Molly-O.’
She’d been planning for three days to give him the sharpest dressing down she’d ever given anyone. Yet now that he was here, with the tired look under his eyes, all she could think of was, ‘I threw myself away on a man worth nothing at all. I can’t lose now by going along with one that’s worth something.’ And took his head to her breast.
‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ he told her without raising his head from the clean milk-and-fur odor of her. ‘All I hear up there is how I smashed her up a-purpose. If just she didn’t think that.’
‘She’s got you thinkin’ you done it a-purpose, is that it?’
‘All I know is she got me stonin’ myself. How does a guy know what he was really thinkin’ when he was stewed?’
‘You can’t take what she says now like it’s somethin’ real, Frankie – Sophie ain’t been right in the head since the accident, everybody knows that.’
‘But it was me made her wrong in the head then,’ n everythin’ I do since makes it worse for her, I don’t know why. What if one of them pin-curl biddies upstairs seen me come in here?’
Molly lifted his chin until his eyes were forced to meet her own. He read an ancient anger there. ‘I ain’t forgot the time I was just a kid ’n she cracked me in front of everybody -’ n you backed off ’n let me go bawlin’ home by myself. You was that scared of her even then.’ Cause you didn’t want to go home with her that night. You wanted to go home with me. It was how I wanted it too – things would have been better for me since then if you’d done like you felt instead of like other people told you you got to.’
He pressed her hands to his shoulders and turned his eyes away; but she brought him back.
‘You know why Zosh slapped me that night?’ Cause she was wrong in the head awready, that was why. She was evenin’ up on you way back then. You wouldn’t fall in love with her the way she wanted you to, the way she was in love, she had to get even with you for that. She never got another chance till the accident. That was her one big chance ’n she took it without even carin’ what she was doin’ to herself. It’s all she ever tried to do for you was to get even.’ N you’re lettin’ her do it every time you knock on that Fomorowski’s door or sneak up to see Blind Pig. You know it in your heart ’n you’re backin’ down from admittin’ it to yourself just like you backed down that other night.’
Rumdum, jealous of Molly’s arms about Frankie, padded up and put his head on Frankie’s knee and Frankie caressed the big ugly muzzle absent-mindedly.
Molly wouldn’t let him go.
‘If you want that girl to get well you ain’t going to do it by gettin’ as sick in the head as she is. It’s what you’re doin’ every single time you pay off Louie to use that dirty hypo on you-’
‘It ain’t just that, Molly, it’s that lead I got in my gut, it still hurts sometimes.’
She shoved him away from her. ‘Don’t give me that Purple Heart romance. It’s nothin’ of the kind ’n you know it. If things were right with you you wouldn’t be runnin’ to Louie because you got a pain in the belly. You’re runnin’ over there because you get to thinkin’ the whole thing is all your fault, that you smashed her up on purpose. She’s got you lyin’ to yourself, Frankie. You got to believe that that girl was wrong before the accident and the accident was just somethin’ that could have happened to anybody who’d had one too many.
‘It happens every day, there wasn’t anythin’ special about yours – you think your accident was like made in heaven? Can that bull. It was made right down at the Tug & Maul at the bottom of a whisky glass ’n you better start pickin’ up the pieces ’n start livin’ again with what’s left over. If she don’t want to put the pieces together for herself you got to do it for yourself.’
Her hand, with its wrist as thin as a child’s, lay firmly upon his own.
‘Things have sure went to hell on a handcar since the accident,’ he acknowledged.
‘Were they ever the way they should be between you ’n Zosh? Before the accident, Frankie. That’s somethin’ I got to know.’
He shook his head. No. It never had been. It hadn’t ever been right. ‘She never trusted me.’ He’d brought it out at last, avoiding Molly’s eyes.
‘Look at me. You think I can?’
It had been a long time since Frankie had looked at anyone steadily. How could he expect anyone to trust him who could not trust himself?
‘I always trusted you, Frankie, from way back. I trust you now.’
‘I trust you too, Molly-O,’ he said mechanically, and she let his eyes go at last. She unbuttoned his field jacket, he looked so warm, and tripped the knot of the little blue jazzbow about his throat like tripping the knot which held his innards so tightly of late. He felt the knot within loosen with the realization that he could talk straight to somebody at last.
For how does any man keep straight with himself if he has no one with whom to be straight? He had never fully trusted Sparrow, the punk thought too fast for him. In their world of petty cheats, phony braggarts, double clockers, elbow sneaks, small-time chiselers, touts and stooges and gladhand-shakers, one had always to be on guard. He had been on his guard since the day he’d been chiseled out of two steel aggies back of the Mc Andrew School, when he was nine. He had been on guard with everyone since and with Sophie most of all. He had a blurred, reasonless conviction now that, somehow, it had been she who had stolen his two steel aggies, never to be replaced.
She’d never given his aggies back. He lost them anew to her every day. Well, let her keep them then, let her keep everything. Let it be as she said, all his fault, and let him go at last. He felt an almost anima
l-like yearning to let his guard down and take all the blows there were in the world till there were no blows left: to sink under them in utter weariness into sleep and wake up being the real Frankie Majcinek. The Frankie who was straight with himself as he was with the world. The Frankie he had never been.
To sleep a bit in this small room and waken to see the curtain flutter and feel a trust of all things near. To sleep so long, on this small woman’s olive breast, feeling her trust of him binding him like her arms, that he would waken to become what Molly once had glimpsed in him. What she knew he yet might be.
He had never been trusted. He had never trusted himself. The thought of being trusted hit him like a double shot on an empty stomach. He wasn’t ready for anyone’s trust. He had been too long trained in wariness to drop his guard that low. That low, and that fast.
Wary of all straight answers. On all the backstreets of home he had learned how a straight answer could land a man in the lockup while the boy with the quickest lie stayed on the street. Yet – if there were just one person to whom one’s answers were always straight, just that might make the whole twisted world come straight – he looked up to see Molly reading him like reading yesterday’s race results.
‘All we done, from the first time we went roller skatin’ together, was fight,’ he told her. ‘We battled all the time we went steady, we battled the weddin’ night till 4 A.M., we started in again when we woke up ’n kept it up till I went in the army ’n started all over the day I got discharged. We kept it up till the night of the accident ’n we ain’t quit yet.’
The naked bulb that burned overhead, by night, by noon, by twilit hours, hung like a little bald yellow skull on a chain like a twisted rope. Below it she had a candle burning, a candle red as wine. Its tiny flame pointed, upon the yellow wall, to the skull burning overhead: it glinted a bit on the bottle of cheap cologne and in the depths of dark-haired Molly’s eyes. On the other side of the window a prairie snow fell across backstreet and tenement, looking for dry leaves upon which to rest and finding only concrete and steel.
The Man with the Golden Arm Page 19
