‘I know,’ Molly laughed with that laugh so soft one hardly heard the small rasp in it. ‘I heard you two goin’ at it one night, it sounded like all the dishes in the place gettin’ bust. I had to hold my ears. What went on?’
‘“What went on?” Why, that’s just what went on: all the dishes in the joint gettin’ bust. She started it just to show me she didn’t care one way or another, for dishes ’r me ’r anythin’ no more. So I helped her out to show her I didn’t neither. I don’t.’
‘You just think you don’t,’ Molly decided. ‘So now you’re eatin’ out of paper plates?’
‘I ain’t eatin’ up there at all. Vi brings her soup in a bowl ’n I eat by Messinger’s on Milwaukee, it’s where you can lay your dirty head right down on the table ’n go to sleep ’n they don’t bother you if they seen you spent for coffee.’
‘I like Violet,’ Molly told him as if thinking of something else, then said what she was trying to say. ‘Don’t go by Messinger’s no more when you want to put your dirty head down somewheres. I got a table ’n you don’t have to buy coffee to put it there. I’m settin’ here three days now waitin’ for you, listenin’ to the Els go by, countin’ how many cars it sounds like. You don’t know how lonely it gets, waitin’ for El cars. Frankie, let’s both quit stonin’ ourselves.’
He didn’t know she was crying till her tears touched his lips.
‘I know how lonely it gets waitin’ for Els,’ Frankie Machine told dark-haired Molly.
* * *
Frankie sat in the dealer’s slot but he did not see the players. He saw only their shadows along the pale green baize and he dealt only to shadows.
For each sat in the same seat every night and he knew each shadow well. The heavily crouching one to his left was Schwiefka’s, the trembling, pinheaded one was Sparrow’s; the humble, headless and hunched-up one was Umbrellas’, bent as though still carrying his daytime burden. And the ever-shifting, wavering one, that seemed to change shape as its owner reached in a shadow pocket for the shadow of a single cigarette, was the tallest, leanest shadow of all.
‘Louie’s all dressed up tonight,’ Sparrow feigned admiration of Louie’s soft green fedora with the red feather in the brim and his polopony shirt. ‘You goin’ cabaretin’ for Christmas Eve, Louie?’
‘No, I just got tired of winnin’ in my old clothes,’ Louie explained confidently, and shifted the fedora onto the back of his head so that everyone might see he had just had two bits worth of Division Street sun tan and a Paradise Ballroom haircut. The man would never see fifty again, yet dandied about as if he were twenty-two, whistling at the girls and fingering his American Legion button – a habit derived after six months spent in Stateside army camps in 1918.
‘I could of got ten to one in 1924,’ he announced. But no one asked him ten to one on what. Everyone knew. They’d heard it all before.
‘Ten to one I wouldn’t live out the year ’n that was only May,’ he answered himself as though someone had asked, as if anyone cared. ‘Standin’ right there by the Four-Corner Tap I told Red Laflin he’d be dead before I was ’n he lived twenny years ’n his best rod man is buyin’ me a shot every time I stop by the Four-Corner just to say hello, just for old time’s sake. “You was Red’s best friend,” he tells me,’ n puts the bottle on the bar.’
‘’N you’re just the schleck to kill the bottle wit’out layin’ out a dime, too,’ Sparrow observed. ‘Red must be turnin’ over when he sees his best rod man settin’ that big free bottle down.’
‘I mix it wit’ lemon,’ Louie explained smugly, ‘it don’t burn up your insides that way.’
‘I always wondered who burned down Laflin’s joint,’ Sparrow wondered idly, and added hurriedly, ‘I know it wasn’t no guy from around here.’
‘Back off, Jewboy,’ Louie told him, sounding bored, ‘your job is by the door.’
‘Zero’ll tell the steerer when to get by the door,’ Frankie put in quietly.
And the cards went around and around.
‘He’s just afraid I’ll win his dollar-twenny before the suckers start comin’,’ Sparrow explained of Louie.
‘Quit waspin’ him,’ Frankie ordered.
But Louie opened his wallet and started counting just to show how many ‘dollar-twennies’ he was holding. There was a c-note right on top, then a couple fifties, then so many twenties and tens that Sparrow figured it, just offhand, at better than half a grand.
‘Thanks, Louie,’ he offered, ‘I was just wonderin’ what you were holdin’ – which alley you go home by? I’ll walk you down.’
‘I could buy a hundred Jewboys,’ Louie told no one in particular, and returned the bills to his poke.
‘We know where you get it, too,’ Frankie said boldly, seeing nobody’s shadow at all.
‘We give the public what it asks for,’ Louie smirked.
‘Be careful the public don’t give you what you’re askin’ for,’ Frankie told him. And thought to himself, ‘This joker thinks he still got me on the hook, he’ll find out nobody needs him.’
And the cards went around and around.
There came a scratching like a cat’s scratching at the metal door, but Sparrow did not rise.
‘It’s just that blind hyena again,’ he said, ‘let him wait.’
‘Let him in,’ Frankie asked, ‘I need coffee.’
Sparrow rose, and a moment later the greasy white cane and the gamy odor of the peddler moved across the table like a cloud off the canal.
‘Sit next to me, prosiak,’ Nifty Louie ordered, pulling the peddler around into the empty chair beside him. ‘You want a hand of no-peek? I heard you was pretty good at it.’
‘Can’t deal no blind guy,’ Frankie protested, ‘I’ll do everythin’ but that.’
‘Blind guys are the betht to deal,’ Pig himself pointed out politely, ‘they can’t tell what they’re holdin’.’
‘I’ll read his hand,’ Louie explained.
‘Blind, bummy ’r beggars,’ Frankie insisted, ‘no two guys holdin’ one hand.’
‘I’m goin’ to Stickney to play,’ Louie announced, ‘this is Clark Street poker – hobo gamblers, hobo steerer, hobo dealer.’
‘If he stands behind Pig it’s awright, Frankie,’ Schwiefka compromised anxiously, ‘it’ll be Louie’s hand, only Piggy-O holdin’ it. Be sociable.’
‘Why can’t he play it hisself?’
‘I believe in blind man’s luck is why,’ Louie told everyone, fingering the yellowed Legion button. And placed a silver dollar in front of Pig.
Frankie reached over, tested the dollar against the metal shade of the night light, then peered more closely at its stain.
‘I seen that dirty buck somewheres before,’ he decided, returning it to begin boxing the cards. ‘Somewheres before. That’s bloodstains on that dirty buck.’
‘The bank’ll cash it,’ Schwiefka put in, ‘deal us a round of blackjack, make everybody happy.’
‘It’s my good-luck piece,’ Louie told them all, ‘I’m always superstitious as a whorehouse rat toward Christmas.’
Umbrella Man rose uneasily and shuffled, still half crouching, into his coat, fearing the air of challenge going around the board. When Sparrow returned, after letting him out, the soiled dollar lay in front of Frankie: he had dealt himself a winner.
‘Gimme back the silver.’ Louie was laying down a crisp new single in exchange. ‘I wasn’t bettin’ the silver one, it was just to bring the old luck around.’
‘It’s my good-luck piece now,’ Frankie said, with a low, soft malice in his voice, ‘I get superstitious myself around New Year’s.’
‘Change it for him,’ Schwiefka ordered his dealer.
‘Keep your muscles in your pockets, bakebrain,’ Frankie answered, ‘I make the change around here.’
Louie rose. ‘If I once quit a joint I never come back in it ’n neither do my friends,’ he threatened Schwiefka’s purse.
‘Nobody sent for you in the first place,’ Frankie as
sured him.
‘I sent for him,’ Schwiefka decided, and reached for the blood-stained buck.
Sparrow’s narrow hand got it first and had it pocketed by the time Frankie had pushed back his chair. ‘If you sent for him you deal to him,’ and sent the deck flying across the board, aces and kings and deuces scattering across the floor. Schwiefka, bending heavily, went in pursuit of his sixty-cent deck while Frankie followed Sparrow down the steep stairwell to the street.
‘He’s gettin’ too big for his britches,’ Schwiefka complained peevishly to Louie when he’d gotten his deck together again. ‘In the old days for a dealer to walk out on me like that, he wouldn’t be dealin’ no place for life. He’d be spottin’ pins in a bowlin’ alley ’n lucky to get that, it’d be just ’cause I was sorry for him.’
Louie wasn’t hearing Schwiefka. He was hearing only the dealer’s footsteps walking away with Louie’s special luck. With the dealer’s every step Louie felt one step unluckier. He had never felt so unlucky so fast in all his life.
It was the sort of night he went to a dance or stuck close to the bars and wouldn’t let himself glance at a deck or a pair of dice or a cue. Just like that, only worse. All his luck stepping down a staircase inside of the luckiest buck in the world. ‘I got careless, teasin’ him wit’ that dirty buck,’ he realized with a strange despair. Then slapped his fedora forward onto his skull and hurried after his dollar.
At the top of the stairs Schwiefka heard him call down; they all heard him call down.
‘Dealer! I want to talk to you!’
Everyone there heard Louie ask that. But not one heard the dealer reply. Then the upstairs door closed behind Louie; and none had heard the door downstairs open at all.
All heard a long, steep, waiting silence there, where the dealer and the steerer waited within the stairwell’s high-walled pit, for someone coming down to them from above.
The dealer and the steerer heard the upstairs door open and close; like a door shutting upon some long-lost argument. Both watched Louie’s lean dark figure coming down, the sparkler in his tie glinting like a one-eyed cat, one step down and one step down. He was a long dark time coming down.
Laughing nervously to himself as he came. ‘I’m givin’ you a buck fer a buck,’ he repeated his offer, sticking a folded single into Frankie’s jacket pocket. ‘No more ’n no less.’
‘Don’t buckle, Frankie,’ Sparrow encouraged him. If Frankie buckled now he’d buckle for keeps, he’d buckle in everything, the punk sensed.
‘I don’t want trouble, I got enough,’ Frankie mumbled his apologies with all his defiance swept under. ‘Give him his dirty buck back, Solly. He worked for it.’
Sparrow stalled, fishing for it in all the wrong pockets at once. Frankie unfolded the single just to be sure it wasn’t a phony.
‘It’s good awright,’ Louie laughed, ‘it come from the same place as the silver buck. You give it to me yerself last week – remember?’
‘I remember -’ cause it was the last one you’re gettin’ that way off me.’
‘Wrong again, Dealer. You’ll look me up ten thousand times to come.’ N on yer knees to beg me to take your money too.’
‘What way, Frankie?’ Sparrow put in innocently, pretending to forget all about the silver in his watch pocket.
‘None of yer sheenie business,’ Louie told him. ‘Come up, Jewboy – the buck, the lucky buck.’
Sparrow offered it to Louie’s reaching hand, then let it slip through his fingers deliberately and stepped back just in time to let the back of Louie’s hand whizz past his lips.
‘A Jew trick,’ Louie laughed derisively, and the odor of violet talc touched the air. Sparrow opened the door to the alley so that he could kick the coin out into the alley’s darkness if he spotted it first; and retrieve it in the morning. Through the open door the arc lamp’s light fell across Louie’s face.
Frankie felt his own back pressed hard against the hallway wall knowing neither God nor Molly-O could save him from going to Louie on his knees with ten dirty thousand more. ‘There’s people ought to be knocked on the head,’ he told Louie without hearing his own voice at all. ‘I want people like you knocked on the head.’
‘You couldn’t knock nobody’s head,’ Louie laughed at him, ‘all you can knock around is that beat-out hustler John brushed off, the piece of trade with the pinned-up skirt.’ Then spotted the buck, trapped upright under the door’s lower hinge, and bent swiftly for it.
Frankie locked his fingers to stop their shaking. If the shaking didn’t stop he was going to cry in front of the punk and a flame of cold shame for having lain in a cold and secret sweat begging for morphine charged the fingers with a pride of their own. He rose on the balls of his toes and came down with all his weight full upon that white defenseless nape.
The throat made a single startled gurgle.
Then the neck flopped forward like a hen’s with the ax half through it.
An irregular thunder beat in his ears and a whitish lightning hurt his eyes till he felt Sparrow’s hand on his arm and Sparrow’s inside-info voice near at hand. ‘Take it easy, Frankie, we’re in the clear.’ The irregular thunder became a bowling alley’s harmless roar and the lightning steadied to the alley’s unquestioning glare. ‘I didn’t even hear him fall,’ he heard his own voice returning.
‘You keep sayin’ that, Frankie. Quit sayin’ that. We got to be upstairs before the aces pick him up.’
‘Did you run too?’ Frankie asked, feeling the first recession of the shock that had blacked him out.
‘Sure I run,’ Sparrow reported with pride, ‘after I hauled him out of the hall. He’s behind Schwiefka’s woodshed, it’ll be morning before anybody spots him – can you handle the deck?’
‘I can do anythin’,’ Frankie decided firmly. ‘All I need is one quick one. You think maybe it was just his ticker give out?’
‘His ticker give out awright’ – Sparrow gave a little chortle of hoarse glee – ‘whose ticker wouldn’t give out when a boxcar lands on the back of his neck?’
At the bowling-alley bar Sparrow surveyed the dealer from behind his great glasses, trying to hurry him without rushing him back into panic. ‘He hit the floor like Levinsky,’ Sparrow told him, covering Frankie’s glass with his palm. ‘You got to get back to the slot, Dealer.’
At the prospect of returning Frankie felt something that had been holding him together open and let his stomach slip through. Sparrow saw him pale, yet kept the glass covered.
‘You got to make it, Frankie.’
‘I can make it. One more and I make it.’
‘One more and you’ll never make it.’ Sparrow was firm. He saw Frankie’s hand tremble as he lifted the empty glass to his lips in the hope of finding one last small drop. ‘Steady hand ’n steady eye,’ Sparrow told him.
But what was it Louie had told Frankie? ‘You’ll come beggin’ on your knees.’
That was it then. The fast shuffle-off on Damen and Division and the sudden turn of mood in the back booth at Antek’s. A guy as right as Frankie letting himself get hooked on a kick as wrong as that. It was Sparrow’s turn to feel a little sick.
‘Stick by me, Solly,’ Frankie pleaded exactly as if Sparrow had spoken aloud.
‘I’m stickin’, Frankie.’
Neither looked toward the woodshed shadowed by the wall of the Endless Belt & Leather Works as they returned down the alley through which they’d fled. A couple of Schwiefka’s dated racing forms scurried down the alley before them, pursued by a bitter wind; whipped past the woodshed’s corner and banked against the wood as though sent by the wind to cover something there. Neither spoke till they came to the darkened alley hall.
‘I hope you had sense enough to get our lucky buck back,’ Frankie remembered suddenly with a real sense of loss.
‘There wasn’t time for that, Frankie – it was pitch him by his ankles ’n run, you ought to be glad I didn’t just let him lay. You weren’t easy to catch. I still don’t kn
ow where you were headin’.’
‘I had a place all right, don’t worry,’ Frankie lied firmly. ‘Where the hell was I goin’?’ he had to ask himself. Then, begrudgingly: ‘You done awright for once.’
Outside the alley door Sparrow whispered pointedly. ‘I’m glad we were havin’ coffee when that guy Fomorowski Whatever His Name Is got slugged next door.’ He stooped, picked up a handful of Christmas Eve snow. When they walked in on the shills he shambled to the table, goggling dizzily, extending the snow and asking, ‘Who wants ice cream? Awready it’s t’ree inches deep!’
‘If Louie don’t come back it’s you guys’ fault,’ Schwiefka grumbled while Frankie, pale but steady, slid into the dealer’s slot. ‘You two guys gonna find yourselfs out of a good job one of these nights, treatin’ the customers like they was underground dogs.’
‘We’d be cheaper off wit’out this one,’ Sparrow told him.
‘Yeh,’ Frankie backed up the punk, ‘this is gettin’ to be a good place to hang away from, there’s too many arguments goin’ on.’
He looked around for Blind Pig as he riffled the deck.
But the peddler had left in the wind and the snow.
As the cards went around and around.
Stash was out of the bucket and all was forgiven. There would be a dance in the hall that stood in the shadow of Endless Belt & Leather and everyone would be there.
But right from his first hour back home he began giving Violet trouble again. Something had happened to the old man in his five days at Twenty-eighth and California, he’d gone a bit stir-crazy it began to appear.
First thing he shakes his head, No, to washing dishes after Violet had finished eating. So she cleaned them up herself and sent him down for a half gallon of beer – and here he comes back upstairs with nothing in his hand but five two-bit cigars and a dollar-fifty lighter. ‘Where’s my beer, Old Man?’ she wanted to know. But all Stash does is look about dreamily, like he thinks maybe he heard somebody ask him something, and lights up a fresh cigar.
The Man with the Golden Arm Page 20
