With Blind Pig looking up at the great load of silver icicles and artificial snow borne by the tree just as if he could see it all; and his eyes still red from weeping.
For everyone who really mattered had come by now. Chester from Conveyor, Chester from Viaduct, Oseltski from Post Office, Shudefski from Poolroom, Shudefski from Marines, Szalapski from Dairy, Widow Wieczorek and Umbrella Man’s brother, Kvorka from Saloon Street. And Sophie’s own bright little grandmother with a bottle all her very own. Everybody who counted, a few who just imagined they counted, and a couple dozen more who knew well they never had, never would, never could and had never been intended to count at all.
Now began the midnight uproar to welcome the new year in. In the middle of the Swiateczyna Polka the younger couples began jitter-bugging, and Sophie’s grandmother shook her wise old head to see. She liked all things young people did, so long as it wasn’t something old people did better, like counting their money. She liked it so well that she shook Umbrella Man awake, where he slept a drunken sleep in the chair beside her own, till he sat up and asked, ‘How far are we?’ And promptly returned to sleep.
Violet, pickled to the point of elegance, strolled like a lady in her fancy, fancy gown, dragging cigarette butts in her train, gesturing artistically and asking everyone, ‘I do carry myself nice – don’t you really think?’ Right up to Sparrow to take him dancing around, singing hoarsely into his ear at every turn.
‘Let me tell you, laddy,
Though I think you’re perfectly swell
My heart belongs to Daddy,
Da-a-dee, Da-a-dee, Da-a-dee-’
At the bar there was such a crush that the liquor ran out three times and emergency rations had to be rushed in by a squad of four flying lushes. It was one of those nights when everyone felt, for some reason, he really never had to go to work again at all.
In one moment everyone had to have a drink on everyone else. Men who wouldn’t loan their mothers three dollars without an I.O.U. heard themselves telling ancestral foes, ‘Keep your money, Emil. Spend mine. I got too much.’ The orchestra got tight to a man so that the drummer stood up on his traps, alleged he was Gene Krupa and wanted to buy some cigarettes, then toppled into the sax man’s lap. Immediately the sax man began taking a collection for the drummer and turned it over to the pianist. Who promptly rose to spend every dime of it back on the dancers.
Frankie took over the drums. For half an hour, while everyone was helping to bring the drummer around, the dealer was a man in a dream: he was Dave Tough, he was Krupa, then he was Dave Tough again without missing a beat. ‘The kid can do it when he feels like it,’ somebody said, and everyone shook his hand to tell him he was as much in the slot with the traps as he was with a deck.
Cousin Kvorka held his hand last and longer than anyone. ‘You can do it when you want to, Dealer,’ Cousin told him.
‘Don’t call me “Dealer,” call me “Drummer,”’ Frankie asked: he never had it in him to answer Cousin in a really friendly way at all. He turned toward the bar. Cousin turned him back.
‘Before you start hittin’ the bottle over there I want to do you a small favor, if you’ll let me,’ the leathery little man asked Frankie with real humility, ‘for the way you’ve kept the wolves off Umbrellas at Schwiefka’s,’ he explained with the embarrassment of a man more accustomed to denying a favor than to be asking the privilege of doing one.
‘You don’t owe me no favors, Cousin,’ Frankie told him with a sullenness he could not keep out of his voice, ‘it’s my job to keep the game straight, it’s what Zero pays me to do. Umbrellas gets the same deal as everyone else.’
Cousin had maneuvered him into the corner of the men’s wardrobe within a few steps of a couple bucks trying to start a crap game. ‘I wouldn’t sleep tonight if I didn’t tip you, Frankie.’
Frankie had the feeling, cold and swift, that the party was over and the new year well begun. Through the hubbub and the laughter, the smoke, the music and the stomp of dancing feet, he sensed, for one moment, that 1947 was going to be a long, long year for Frankie Majcinek.
‘Spill it,’ he told Cousin Kvorka.
‘When we picked up Fomorowski he been layin’ there two days ’n if some potato peddler hadn’t stopped by the shed to pee he might be layin’ there yet. The guy was covered up.’
‘You should of buried him deeper then,’ Frankie suggested without troubling to feign surprise. ‘Why you tellin’ me?’
Kvorka bridled a bit. ‘He didn’t freeze to death, Dealer.’
Frankie waited.
‘I ain’t tryin’ to make no pinch, Frankie,’ Cousin assured him earnestly. ‘I ain’t even tryin’ to give you advice. But it would do you some good to know what the score is on Louie now.’
‘Sounds like the game’s over for Louie,’ was all Frankie had to say.
‘He’s at the morgue ’n there’ll be a coroner’s inquest. I can tell you the verdict now ’cause I tossed him in the wagon myself.’
It was Kvorka’s turn to wait. Either the dealer needed to know or he didn’t.
‘What’s the story, Cousin?’
‘“Death due to assault, assailant unknown.” His neck was broke, Frankie.’
‘If you ask me that’s a damned good thing ’n I’m happy to hear it,’ Frankie told him steadily.
The crap game was getting well started. ‘Only tryin’ to square a favor,’ Kvorka told him.
‘What do I need favors for?’ Frankie turned on his heel. What did the guy take him for? Some high school stub who’d break down ’n say, ‘Please don’t arrest me, Mister, I won’t do it again’? It would be a cold day in hell before Bednar would pin a rap like that on Frankie Machine. He stood watching the crapshooters until he saw Kvorka get his hat and overcoat out of the wardrobe and leave. ‘He could save his favors,’ Frankie repeated. Machine didn’t scare as easy as some aces might think, he told himself.
But when somebody offered him the dice he shook his head, No, and wandered off looking for Sparrow. He went around the hall twice and couldn’t spot him.
Wandered without noticing that everything everyone was doing around him was the funniest sort of thing anyone had ever yet done. The hall was jumping with comical fellows wearing their girls’ best hats and every man of them doing it like he was born for the stage.
Best of all, no one seemed to mind being outdone in anything. Though each tried to outsing, outdrink and outdance the next fellow, yet between the singing and the dancing and the drinking each conceded readily he didn’t do nearly as well as anyone else in the place might have. Each exhibited his humility and trust by offering his whisky, his counsel and his girl to whoever stood nearest.
‘Just everybody is feelin’ good tonight,’ Sophie laughed, and felt just as good as anybody. Following Frankie’s circuit of the floor, she wondered who he was looking for. If it was for whom she suspected, she determined, someone would learn that it was as easy to slap a face from a wheelchair as from a standing position. Her suspicion trailed along behind Frankie as she watched him, hatless, leave the hall.
For he knew where dark-haired Molly sat by herself, in the nest on the first floor front, and it wasn’t Sparrow he had to see most of all. Remembered where she sat counting the Els that passed in the night.
It was New Year’s Eve on the El, it was New Year’s Eve down Division Street, it was Happy New Year’s Eve for the boys from the Tug & Maul and the girls hustling drinks at the Safari. It was Happy New Year in Junkie Row at Twenty-sixth and California and Happy New Year for the Endless Belt & Leather Invincibles.
It was Happy New Year everywhere except in Molly Novotny’s heart; neither her heart nor her nest gave sign of the season. The stove was smoking again and she thought carelessly, ‘We get the ones the landlords buy up for old iron,’ of both the stove and her heart. The day comes when both feel past throwing heat.
It’s like that for all hustlers’ hearts: to pay the most and get the worst. The only thing a hustling girl has
that doesn’t get stopped up is her purse. And that’s as full of holes as a married man’s promises.
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 bloodsho
t 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.
The Man with the Golden Arm Page 22
