From under the heaped army blankets on the bed – blankets stolen from army camps all the way from Fort Bragg to Camp Maxey – Frankie peered out, with one limp eye, upon the new year’s calendar: January 1, 1947. Outside the pane the year’s first snow turned into the year’s first rain.
Time, Frankie saw by that calendar, was some old man with a scythe. Time was always an old man with a scythe, for some reason. Yet as he drifted toward sleep it seemed that Time was really Antek the Owner’s great gray deaf-and-dumb cat, that simply sat all day on the bar and studied the barflies with such unwavering tolerance.
Everyone said the cat was dumb, all insisted he had never even been heard to purr. Antek alone knew differently; he alone had heard the old cat purr. ‘’N when you hear that one purr you’re through,’ Antek was convinced. ‘That one keeps track of how many shots you put down every day. So long as you’re just a sociable drinker he don’t purr. But when you take the one that puts you on the lush for keeps, then he knows you’ll never get off the bottle all your life,’ n he purrs once at you. He purred at me ’n he’ll purr at you ’n with my own ears I heard him purr at Rumdum.’
The old cat knew, Frankie realized dreamily, only the old cat knew. Watching and waiting for the finishing shot that each hustler came to with the cat-gray stroke of the years.
Dreamed he heard Molly-O cry out only one flight down; in a voice made remote by many walls. And muffled by a slow slant rain.
By walls, by rain and by years to be when he would hear no voice at all; muffled by the slow slant rain of a night he would never know.
Some rain that beat, like forgotten tears, against some other room’s single pane: the rain of that far-off night when his name would be the name of nobody at all, as the name of one who had never lived. Save in the memory of Molly-O, grown too old to remember.
Caught between the dealer’s slot and the cat-gray stroke of the years, Frankie saw a line of endless girders wet with the rain of those years to be. Where all night long, in that far time, the same all-night salamanders burned. Burned just as they had so long ago. Before the world went wrong. And any gray cat had purred at all.
The cold rain ran with the red-lit rain. Like years beating by on the wheels of an empty Loopbound El. Till his heart, that cried for a greater rest even in sleep, felt tattooed by that long rain’s beating. Why was it that within the voice of any woman crying at night he always heard an infant’s gasping cry?
As the first light began enfolding the signal towers with tourniquets of fog, a sounder sleep finally folded a tourniquet about the fever in Frankie’s brain. The slow heart stanched itself at last; though the rain ran on forever. And Molly-O, so far below, had yet such a long hard way to go.
‘Sophie knows,’ he mumbled in sleep, ‘she knows about Molly-O, but she don’t know about everything.’ Cause the cat won’t purr, the cat won’t tell. Nobody can tell which way the old cat’ll jump.’
And a dream cat leaped, in a slow and stiff-legged tableau, down a steep dark stair where paper daisies bloomed in an unabating rain.
Two hours later he felt himself being shaken awake by Record Head Bednar’s hand on his shoulder. He opened his eyes to see only Sophie shaking him. ‘What’s the matter? What’s up?’ he wanted to know irritably; yet relieved that it had only been Zosh after all.
‘Nuttin’, dummy,’ she scolded him. ‘You just look too lonesome when you sleep. I don’t like it when you look so lonesome, it makes me feel lonesome too – I’m here, ain’t I? If you got to sleep lookin’ like that get up ’n get dressed, it means you need a drink.’ Then, curiously, almost gently: ‘Why you look like that when you sleep, Frankie?’
‘Some cats just sleep like that,’ he told her without hearing his own voice. He was already purring, back in dreams, among all manner of other strange lost strays.
Time may well redeem the forger while leaving the bad checks unredeemed was how Antek Witwicki looked at it. And just to show how little trust he had in Time had had a fresh challenge painted above his register for all Tug & Maul employees to heed:
I’ll cash the checks here – Owner
Then, reminding himself that the only other employee of the place was Mrs Witwicki, had softened the alarm with a gentler admonition:
He who drinks and drinks with grace
Is ever welcome to this place
But he who drinks and starts to swear
Is never welcome anywhere.
Antek also expressed his faith in the high art of graceful drinking by sternly forbidding all strong-arming upon the immediate premises. ‘Take him out on the street,’ Owner would insist, ‘and I don’t mean in front of my doorway neither. The city put up a billboard for that purpose around the corner.’
His sense of justice was as decided as his love of graceful living. He backed up law and order with a wooden-handled plunger originally designed for the flushing of basement sewers. By reaching over the bar with the business end, to conk guilty and innocent alike, whichever happened to be nearest, he accounted for all sorts of unpaid sins. Although not so damaging as a blackjack or a rubber-handled gearshift, it was certainly more humiliating to be conked out of a tavern with a plumber’s plunger: there is scarcely more dignity to that than to being swept out, like a gum wrapper or a cigar band, in front of a janitor’s broom.
For the more serious brawls he went for a half-filled water bucket kept below the bar with a bottle of ammonia waiting beside it. A dash of ammonia in the water and a heave of the bucket over the bar would break up anything from bulldogs to men. He had used it with savage success on cats, bulldogs, torpedoes, ex-pugs, drunken paratroopers and cuckolds demanding satisfaction from their wives’ consorts. It had worked every time.
‘The only thing it ain’t worth a damn on is a woman under sixty or a girl over twelve,’ he conceded with some bewilderment. ‘We had a pair of biddies go after each other here one Easter morning – the one on top had her slipper off and was trying to get the other one’s eyes out with the heel – but that one got her teeth through the cheek ’n both ’em with their Easter dresses half ripped off. The toot’-holt one kept the shoe-holt one from gougin’ her but the shoe’s boy friend hollered somethin’ so she started rammin’ the slipper up between the toot’-holt’s legs – you ought to have heard the bloody screamin’ then – I figured it had gone far enough ’n went for the bucket ’n ammonia but it didn’t help a thing. I had to cold-caulk that one wit’ the slipper. What would you have done, you was me?’
The Tug & Maul, this winter noon, looked much as it had that Easter dawn. Frost had gathered on the windows and by night there would be neon rainbows in the snow. But, behind the piled beer cases, the same old mural took up the wall to the roof: a great spread-winged hawk painted there in descent upon one stuffed and helpless Christmas duck. The stuffing had been packed into the poor bird to the bursting point, it hung upon invisible wires. How it had ever gotten off the ground in that shape the artist had not so much as by a footnote indicated. While over the unhappy fowl’s head hung, forever, the great obscene claws of the descending killer. It too seemed suspended upon invisible wires.
Frankie Machine sat on a beer case listening to Meter Reader trying to establish credit with Antek without first settling his Christmas-week tab. ‘I never let the same guy hook me twice,’ Antek explained. ‘I’ll take it once. That’s all.’
‘You’re a better man then than Jesus Christ, to hear you talk,’ Meter Reader reproved Antek irritably. ‘He turned the other cheek, but that ain’t good enough for you.’
‘He didn’t turn it, that’s where you’re wrong,’ Antek informed Meter Reader. ‘He run the bankers out of the temple with a whip – you call that turnin’ the other cheek?’
‘That was different, they was Jews.’ Meter Reader was growing excited with his need of a double shot. ‘’N I’m the guy who can tell you about the Jews. You know what one told me once? He told me, “Your best friend is the dollar.” What do you think of that?’
> ‘It was a Polak told me that,’ Antek differed calmly. ‘My old lady, in fact.’ N she didn’t turn the other cheek neither.’
Frankie Machine witnessed Meter Reader’s defeat without interest: he was feeling like the duck on the wall overhead. A half gallon of Schlitz stood between his knees, it was nearly noon and he’d been waiting for the punk almost an hour and no sign of him yet. The punk was getting too independent, for some reason.
Antek ambled over to where a girl, with a bottle of cream soda on the table before her and a shopping bag in her hand, sat waiting for some drunk with his head on the table. Husband, brother, father or friend, she was waiting for him to come to his senses and it looked like a long, long wait. Antek shook the fellow but all he got was a cockeyed leer and a sickly grin for reply; the fellow seemed hopelessly drunk.
‘Get him out of here,’ Owner ordered the girl.
‘Why pick on us all the time?’ she wanted to know. For there were equally hopeless drunks sleeping it off on either side of her.
‘Because he didn’t get it in here is why,’ Antek explained. ‘I take care of my own customers. They could sleep here all day ’n half the night if they want. But I ain’t in the samarathon business, takin’ care of stiffs who get it somewheres else. Leave him sleep it off where he bought it.’
Recognizing the essential morality of this point of view, she bent forward and with a single finger tapped her companion below the elbow. Though he had hardly sensed Owner’s heavy-handed treatment at all, he rose automatically at that light touch, wiped his nose on his sleeve and told himself thoughtfully aloud: ‘The question got to be settled this Sunday. Father Bzozowy keeps Belgian hares. Somebody stole all four valve caps on me again. Why do they keep playing the same record all the time?’ And went for the door like a sleepwalker without even pausing to see whether the girl, whatever she was to him, was still with him or not.
How any man could find any door in such a stupor there was no way of telling – but he made it with the girl on his heels and right there she turned, stuck out her tongue at Antek and told him obscurely: ‘That’s for short measurement,’ and was gone, shopping bag, cream soda, zombie and all, to the very first bar that would let the pair of them sit around out of the cold and the wind and the wet for a little half hour or two.
Frankie watched Antek’s second triumph in as many minutes with an eye turned inward upon a sea of faces, like faces borne on a shoreward tide. Cousin Kvorka’s moonlike mug, full of a clumsy yet gentle anxiety, for he had something of Umbrella Man’s native gentleness; Record Head Bednar’s harassed face, brooding under its shaggy brows, looking like that of a man who has acted so heroically all the days of his life that he no longer has enough courage left to get him through the nights; Sophie’s eyes, full of a pale suspicion; Sparrow’s intense, peaked and eager look wanting to tell him something and being somehow afraid to say it and then smiling with Nifty Louie’s thin, disdainful smile as though to say, ‘You don’t have the whole story yet, Dealer.’
Molly Novotny’s face, full of a dark and steady appeal, upthrust trustingly to his own.
There was something had to be straightened out with the punk before he could take off with Molly. That punk wasn’t helping matters much, if what Molly said was true, buying people drinks and everyone knowing the kind of wad Louie had carried. How many people had Louie counted out his money for before he’d counted it out for the punk? There wouldn’t be one who remembered seeing another man’s money that night.
‘How come I’m never around when he’s doin’ the buyin’?’ Frankie asked himself broodingly. The punk was going to have to be straightened out all right, this business about Louie looked like it might not blow over for three weeks yet.
So first of all he’d have to get straight himself. He motioned to Antek for a double shot to start getting straight on right away.
For way down there, in a shot glass’s false bottom, everything was bound to turn out fine after all. Bednar was certain to find that death at the hands of person or persons unknown actually meant death due to causes unknown; so that it didn’t really matter after all. Any more than it would matter after he and Molly Novotny had gone away together. Vi would take good care of Zosh then, till Zosh was back on her feet again and married to some fellow, some sort of doctor, who’d take better care of her than Frankie ever had. So that after a while there’d be hardly any hard feelings left at all and he and Molly would go to visit Soph and this real good guy she’d married and they’d all wish each other good luck and really mean it.
He finished the shot and tried to remember: What was it he had had to worry about? He had the situation beat and it hadn’t been as tough as he’d thought it was going to be. He motioned to Antek with the shot glass and Antek brought over the bottle to save shoe leather.
Sparrow shuffled in and stood in the doorway trying to locate someone in the dimness. Frankie could see him clearly against the light from the street but did not call out. He sat and studied, one minute, this alley nomad with the forehead so high it looked capable of holding everything while all that ever actually sank into it were blows. It was time to check up on the punk.
As he came toward the back Sparrow’s eyes searched furtively along the bar rail as though he’d lost something there.
‘I think you’re still in the junkin’ stage,’ Frankie greeted him with a calculated scorn, ‘spyin’ for dimes along the bar rail, you must be down to your last nickel.’
‘Who wants to be rich?’ the punk evaded him. ‘You think I want to be the richest guy in the cemetery?’
‘How come when you’re with me you’re always broke ’n the other times you’re buyin’ the drinks?’ Frankie put it bluntly.
‘It ain’t just when I’m wit’ you I’m broke,’ the punk assured him lightly, squatting down across the table from the dealer, ‘it’s all the time.’
‘That ain’t the way I heard it. They tell me you’re spendin’ awful easy these last couple days. Did one of them easy bucks have a little blood on it, Solly?’
For one moment Sparrow didn’t really seem to get it: his jaw hung slack. Then his eyes sought something along the floor and he answered in a mumble without meeting Frankie’s eyes at all. ‘I had a couple bills Wednesday night but you wasn’t around. It was Stash’s Christmas bonus check ’n me ’n Vi was lookin’ for you to help us tear a hole in it. We come in here lookin’ for you ’n we drank half of it up waitin’ for you. You think I’d be drinkin’ Louie’s bloody bucks up in here?’ His eyes met Frankie’s at last. And demanded an answer in turn.
‘I’m just askin’ whose dough you’re spendin’,’ Frankie heard himself apologizing and felt dismayed: he’d backtracked to everybody for years but never before to the punk.
‘Whose dough you think I was spendin’?’ Sparrow had the offensive at last. Everyone else made Frankie buckle – why shouldn’t he? Sparrow thought excitedly.
‘I thought maybe Antek was givin’ you credit again,’ Frankie said weakly.
‘You’re the only guy can run a tab on Owner these days,’ Sparrow pursued his victory. ‘You want to start a new one wit’ him now? I’ll call him over.’
It looked like Frankie had not only been outmaneuvered but was going to buy the drinks to boot. He pushed the bottle toward Sparrow and while the punk drank alone the dull drums of suspicion began beating another tune. Between the fumes of whisky there he began probing into darkened corners, like a man looking for a lost coin in an unlit steam room with the heat on full. Yet couldn’t quite touch anything that felt real for all his probing.
‘I’ll tell you somethin’ now,’ Sparrow decided after finishing a second shot, apparently not even noticing that he was drinking alone. ‘Pig is settin’ by the Safari in a new suit ’n really buyin’ – how come he couldn’t even get in there by the front door before ’n now it’s like he owns the joint?’
‘What good would it do Pig to strongarm Louie?’ Frankie asked foggily. ‘Who’d give him a square count? He
wouldn’t know if he had forty bucks ’r four hundred.’
‘Owner’d give him some kind of count, Frankie,’ Sparrow decided. ‘You want to ask Owner if he give Pig a square count?’
‘Don’t pertend to be that dizzy,’ Frankie scolded him hotly. ‘Don’t think that dizzy act can get you out of everythin’. I know you better than you know yourself.’
‘All I want to know is this,’ Sparrow asked quietly, with no further dizziness at all. ‘Who’s wearin’ the new suit – me or Piggy-O?’
‘That doesn’t prove much,’ Frankie grumbled; but this time he filled both glasses. Then shifted his cigarette to the corner of his mouth till it dangled and Sparrow realized swiftly, ‘Now he’s gettin’ set to pull one of his corny movie acts on me.’
Frankie passed his hand ruminatively across his cheek just the way that Bogart did it when they were hunting him down and he needed a shave. Somebody had squealed, that was it, it was between himself and Edward G. Robinson now.
‘We could go look for Pig in the Coney Island Diner,’ Sparrow suggested, for he dearly loved this movie game. Like the reading of serial numbers on streetcar transfers, it was one game he played faster than Frankie.
‘What’s the use of goin’ to the Coney? You said he was at the Safari.’
‘That’s just why we should go to the Coney,’ cause he won’t be there. We just come in ’n look around at the menu ’n when the counter guy asks what do we want we tell him somethin’ that’s crossed out.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘You just don’t see the right movies then. We ask the counter guy what people do in this town ’n then you say, “They come in here to order the crossed-out dinner – ain’t that right, smart boy?”’
‘Does Pig eat there now?’ Frankie was at sea and not even drifting.
‘Forget it,’ Sparrow told him, ‘I’m just too educated for you. We can pick up Pig at the Safari if there’s somethin’ you want to see him about. You sure you want me along?’
The Man with the Golden Arm Page 23
