Yet, strangely enough, the chair in the basement accepted any color at all. Indeed, it was painted black just to show how little race feeling there was down there in the basement where the afternoon sunlight didn’t shine at all.
Nor did the big black sheriff’s wagon that pulled up for the haul to Stateville, St Charles, Dixon and Menard draw any particular color line.
The punks piled in it, leaping over each other as if going on a picnic, filled with a sudden brainless, coltish joy to be out of the cells and riding in the open air for the hour that took them down Route 66. One hour. The years to follow were forgotten in the brightness of the immediate sun.
Screwy punks and tough punks, wise punks and dumb punks, dirty punks and clean punks, little punks and big punks, skinny punks and fat punks: here comes the wagon and we’ll all take a ride.
Here comes the sheriff’s wagon, punks, and you’ll be a long time gone.
While all clocks will remain forever, however long you serve, precisely at twelve o’clock.
‘A.M. or P.M.?’ Frankie Machine wondered idly, as if it really made some difference. If you wanted to know the time you asked the screw and were told, inevitably: ‘Forget it. You ain’t goin’ nowheres.’
The time the clockmakers had locked into the stopped clocks of these corridors was a different kind of time, Frankie felt, than that they had put into the clocks outside. Just as there was a different sort of time for cripples than for junkies, and a different kind of time than either for dealers, there was a special kind of time for convicts too.
On Sundays he went to Mass, in the pink-and-white chapel lined with portrayals of the Stations of the Cross, fashioned by some forgotten felon. He always knelt beneath one labeled Jesus Falls the First Time, he didn’t know why. Yet that one touched him most.
He would cross himself, genuflect and assure himself mystically, ‘Zosh’ll be so much better when I get out I’ll be able to tell her about me ’n Molly-O myself, I won’t have to let Vi do the dirty job for me.’ On some Sunday morning dream train with the incense in his nose.
When his next ten days had passed without any recurrence of the sickness he began drawing fresh courage with the passing of each new day. ‘The hell with Nifty Louie ’n Private McGantic, too,’ he told himself one night, refusing either to see Louie ‘on his bedpost’ as Bednar had put it or to worry about McGantic’s terrible monkey. ‘Louie was a long time livin’ and he’ll be a long time dead and there’s more people better off for his bein’ out of the way than not.’ And the memory of that hallway blow returned to him like the memory of a blow by which he had freed himself from McGantic’s monkey. He felt not the faintest flutter of remorse for his part in the passing of Louie F. Remorse touched his memory of the fixer only when he recalled that, by losing his head, he had lost the fixer’s big fat roll.
From the passage of the nights now he gained more strength than he had ever gained from a hypo. He felt himself getting over the roughest point of the hump without so much as a quarter grain to help him over. And knowing how proud Molly-O was going to be for him, felt proud of himself.
The pride he’d abandoned in the ward tent on the narrow Meuse. Through the open laundry window the first cold hint of spring touched him as had that other spring on that cold and alien river.
‘I got the second paw off,’ he confided to Katz; like a man who’d seen a festering wound in his flesh dry before his eyes and slowly start to heal.
For now all things healed strangely well within him, as though by grace of his punishment. He was paying off for smashing up Sophie, the irons had only been God’s means to let him, a priest told him; so that when he was released everything he’d done would be paid for and he’d be truly free at last.
‘I feel like, someday, I’m gonna shine again,’ he told old Applejack.
And heard, through walls as high as tenement walls, a long, slow, dull whirr-whirr.
As of a heavy sewing machine being pedaled by some lame and sweating con.
Ten o’clock in the morning. Above the visitors’ cage burned one small dull red bulb and right below it, peering through the glass with the prison pallor on his face but the shadows gone from under his eyes, Frankie Machine waited for his first visitor; though they hadn’t told him who it was. Certainly the punk wouldn’t have the nerve to come around after the way he’d pulled out of the deal with the irons, ducking without a warning word so that Frankie might have gotten rid of that damned bag.
Then spotted Molly Novotny far down the line, trying to see over the heads of the other visitors like a child trying to see the animals in the zoo over the heads of the adults and saw him at last.
She took his breath away with her pertness: a neat dark suit and little silver-heeled slippers that tap-tapped right on up to him just as she’d tapped into his arms on the first floor front.
They had only fifteen minutes and he didn’t know what to ask first. There was so much he had to know and she had so much to tell.
‘That poor old man of Vi’s is gone,’ was the first thing she reported. ‘He leaned out the window too far.’
‘So long as he wasn’t pushed,’ Frankie told her.
‘No, Vi just forgot to lock the window.’
And they passed over Poor Old Husband as indifferently as life itself had passed Poor Husband by. ‘How’s Zosh?’ he wanted to know.
‘Gettin’ fatter than ever, Frankie,’ and heard the ancient malice in her voice.
‘How are things going at the Safari?’ As soon as he asked that he knew he shouldn’t have. For she didn’t lower her eyes, she simply curtained them from him and he’d never seen her look so hard.
‘I ain’t there no more, Frankie,’ she told him defensively. ‘I don’t live downstairs no more.’
‘Where you livin’, Molly?’ A leaden fear had him. He had to ask her twice before she could hear through the glass. Or just didn’t want to hear.
‘Just around, Frankie. I’m just livin’ around. You know.’
The red bulb winked, the whistle blew, Visitors’ Day was over.
And knew in his bones she wouldn’t return on any Visitors’ Day to come.
‘Little Lester,’ he called himself. ‘Little Lester the Money Waster and Woman Chaser’ and he lived up there in the bug cells with all appeals but the last one gone.
Down where Frankie lived below rumors came each night of Little Lester’s latest piece of arrogance in the very face of the big black chair. But Frankie never got to lay eye on the fellow till, on the Saturday afternoon of Frankie’s sixth week, he caught a detail with Katz.
‘You two get the Susie-Q wagon ’n get up there to the fourth floor,’ Screw told them, ‘there’s a ticket on both of you for talkin’ in line.’
There wasn’t much to the detail. The Susie-Q wagon was the little white cart on which mops and buckets were borne. The fourth-floor boys themselves couldn’t be trusted with buckets and mops. Half of them were in deadlock and those that weren’t never moved without a screw’s eyes following. They were the sullen jug-heavies and the loudmouthed torpedoes, the gaunt jungle buzzards and the true assassins.
‘Me ’n you ’r just punks up against some of these birds,’ Applejack reminded Frankie in secret admiration of all assassins and Frankie was glad, in that moment, to be on the books as only one more jerk who’d tried to cop a piece of tin out of a West Side department store. He felt a clandestine thrill at recalling the thinness of the hair which had kept him out of the bug cells. ‘I almost made it up here myself,’ he boasted to Applejack, ‘when I was on the junk I pulled lots of jobs.’ And hastened to add, ‘I got it kicked for keeps now.’
‘It’s what they all say,’ Applejack answered skeptically, and Frankie was too superstitious to boast further. ‘The smarter a guy is the harder he gets hooked,’ Katz observed, ‘I’ve seen ’em hittin’ C, I’ve seen ’em hittin’ M, I’ve seen ’em hittin’ the H ’n I’ve seen ’em shootin’ speedballs – half a cap of C ’n half a cap of H together. C i
s the fastest, it’s what they start on when they’re after a gentleman’s kick. M is slower ’n H is the slowest ’n cheapest of all, it’s what they wind up on when they’re just bummies tryin’ to knock theirselves out without no kick at all. But I’ll tell you one kick to lay off ’n that’s nembutal. If you miss the vein you get an abscess ’n the shade comes down. Lay off the nembie is my advice to you, Polak.’
Just as if he hadn’t heard Frankie tell him he’d kicked all that stuff.
‘Another thing works funny is gage,’ Applejack resumed his report while dragging the little white wagon behind him. ‘One day you’ll pay two bucks for a single stick ’n the next day some guy says, “Gimme twelve cents ’n a pack of butts for a stick,”’n you pass him up. It don’t make sense to me neither the way they always say a guy gets “high” on it. My cell buddy at Grant’s Pass worked twenty years in mines around Scranton before he threw his shovel away ’n started eatin’ a little higher up on the hog. The gage never lifted him up, it sent him down. When it was hittin’ real good he’d get to thinkin’ he was twelve miles underground. He never said he was “coastin’ in.” He always said, “I think I’m comin’ up.” Say, if you get detailed down to the kitchen sneak me a fistful of nutmeg, I know a fool who’ll give a pack of butts for a sack of that stuff. I wonder what he does with it.’
‘Maybe he puts it in applejack,’ Frankie hazarded a guess.
‘You guys laugh at my applejack,’ Katz told him, ‘but a guy got to do somethin’ to keep his mind occupied. Otherwise I’d be thinkin’ how it used to be outside.’
‘When will you make the street again?’ Frankie asked him.
‘Never, soldier,’ Katz told him without regret, almost with contentment. ‘When I finish here the feds pick me ’n I start a twenty-year rap – when I finish that one they can come ’n cremate me: I been caged up all my life, I don’t want even my bones to be cooped up in some hole in the ground,’ he confided cheerfully to Frankie. ‘What can a guy like me do on the outside anyhow? I’m so used to holdin’ up my hand when I want another piece of bread ’n dumpin’ the silver in the wire basket on the way out from chow I wouldn’t know how to do for myself on the outside no more.’
A guard, eating off one of the same tin pie plates that the deadlockers used, in an empty cell with the door ajar, looked up at the pair as they passed and motioned them silently down the half-lit corridor toward the cell where Little Lester leered lewdly through the bars.
All day Little Lester stood waiting for someone to pass whom he could bait for a moment. He liked to be looked upon pityingly in order that he might catch the pity coming at him on the fly and hurl it back between the eyes – to see pity replaced there first by shock, then by real hatred. Little Lester had long suspected that everyone in the world hated him, on sight and from the heart; that all, without exception, had wished him to be dead since the morning he’d been born. So it pleased him to prove to himself that he’d been right in this suspicion all along, that everything the priests had told him since he’d been so high had been wrong.
Pity was the thing people used to conceal their hatred, Lester had decided, for the chaplain himself came now only out of a sense of duty. Lester had had trouble turning the chaplain against him but he had done it at last and now the chaplain hated him as cordially as did the screws, the warden, the sheriff, his attorney, his mother and sisters, his father and his old girl friend.
‘You guys want a pack of Bull Durham wit’ two papers for thirty-five cents?’ he began on them hurriedly, the moment he heard the cart roll up. Though he knew every con was forbidden to talk to him while he was in the cell. ‘You guys want to change jobs? Look, you two first-floor marks, all I do is play solitary ’n chew the fat with the screws all day. How’d you like that awhile, marks?’
The marks didn’t care to switch jobs at the moment, they had to keep the mops moving down the tier.
‘Hey!’ he called after them. ‘You the guys gonna split my pants ’n shave my little pointy head?’
‘He’s just tryin’ to get a rise out of us,’ Katz cautioned Frankie, ‘he wants to see if he can get us in a little trouble, arguin’ with him about somethin’. One of the screws asked his lawyer to make the guy lay off him, he kept askin’ things like is them fuses all screwed in good ’n tight, he don’t want no slip-ups ’cause he’s invited his folks as witnesses – it’s how he gets people’s nerves jumpin’. If you ask me the guy is suck-silly.’
‘If you ask me it’s his nerves is jumpin’ the highest,’ Frankie surmised.
Applejack and Frankie stalled around at the far end of the block, for two soft-clothes men were coming up on either side of a little man with a bandaged eye and all three tagged by some joker in a spring topcoat, wearing the coat with the sleeves hanging emptily, like a woman’s cape.
‘That’s a newspaper joker,’ Applejack assured Frankie, ‘I don’t know who the bandage is but only newspaper guys drape a coat on them like that. You know why?’
Frankie didn’t have the faintest idea.
‘He ain’t got time to button it ’cause he gotta keep his hands free of his sleeves to take notes, in case somethin’ big happens real fast. If he takes time to get his hands out of his sleeves some other guy’ll beat him to the phone ’n get a scoop on him. I saw all about it in a movie at Jeff City.’ Old Katz was proud of his knowledge.
Frankie understood. ‘You’re right. I seen one come into the Victory on North Clark one night ’n set down with one bottle of beer ’n wrote in a little book-like, everythin’ that was goin’ on, what the people said. Then he picked up ’n didn’t even touch his beer. He didn’t touch his beer was how I knew there was somethin’ wrong with him.’
‘It’s sort of a club,’ Applejack explained, ‘they all get together ’n write a book.’ Though neither he nor Frankie could hear what either the bandage or the draped topcoat said to Little Lester, there was no difficulty at all in hearing the punk’s jeering reply.
‘Sure, ya stinkin’ squeala, I’m the guy shot out ya eye. It was easy as eatin’ a ice-cream comb. So what? Prove I’m nuts I go to the buggy bin – they feed you there, don’t they?’ N if I ain’t nuts I get the seat – so what? Then I don’t have to bother with stinkin’ squealas no more. It don’t make me no difference.
‘Naw, I don’t feel nuttin’ good ’r bad. Good ’n bad is strictly for stinkin’ squealas. You know what? I chew t’ree packs of gum a day but I don’t smoke. I don’t even eat much. I don’t even play ball. Movies I like better’n anythin’.
‘But what I really like is mechanics. I don’t like readin’ about crime stuff, they don’t put it down how it really is. What I really like is readin’ about takin’ t’ings apart ’n puttin’ ’em togedder so they stay, like in airplanes. I used to go out to the airport just to watch, I seen them fancy squares all come down the gangplank like in them square movie pictures.
‘But what I really like is gym-a-nastics. That’s for me, it’s what I took up in the neighborhood. I crooked four days a week from school – you know what I was doin’? I was workin’ on the parallela bars.’
Abruptly his mind returned to the point of the interview. ‘You know what made me sore?’ Nodding toward the bandaged eye. ‘It wasn’t when that pig of his scratched me, what really got me was when I shoot his dirty eye out ’n he says, “Don’t shoot me.” After I done it he comes on wit’ a pitch like that.’ He imitated a high-pitched squeal: ‘“Don’t shoot me, please don’t shoot me” – boy, I would of let the stinkin’ squeala have it for real then only the dirty gun jammed on me, I should of cleaned it wit’ somethin’ good first.
‘Naw, I never went for playin’ wit’ other kids, all they do is jump up ’n down. Girls ’r poison. Once though I had one of ’em “I-got-to-get-in-tonight” romantic deals, we went down to Hubbard Street ’n got a free blood test. She was on one side of the screen ’n I was on the other ’n we hollered over to each other. A real romantic deal.
‘My old man? His on
e big trouble is he’s always a pallbearer ’n never a corpse. He’d look better to me wit’ his dirty head off five inches beneat’ the shoulders. You know what I told him that time he called the aces on me for sellin’ the icebox while he was out stiffin’ some piece of trade? I told him, “Daddy darlin’, you been workin’ for me for twenny-two years. Now go out ’n get a job fer yourself.” It’s what I told him, he’s a stinkin’ squeala too.’
Applejack Katz looked at Frankie Machine and Frankie Machine looked at Applejack Katz. ‘Let’s get the detail done,’ Applejack urged, ‘I got a deal on with a guy who got his hands on six bennies.’
‘What a loudmouth,’ Frankie whispered of Little Lester.
That was the name by which the screws knew Lester too.
Yet, when on the last Saturday afternoon in April Frankie sat for an hour at the same dayroom table where Little Lester sat, the punk spoke softly all the while. This was an assigned group permitted to write letters or play cards under the eyes of two screws, between four and five o’clock. If you didn’t have a letter to write and didn’t care for cards you went all the same. Neither Frankie nor Lester wrote letters. They sat across from each other with a soiled deck between them while Frankie showed him some of the tricks which had once seemingly confounded Sparrow.
‘It took me ten years to learn this one,’ Frankie explained, ‘pick a card.’
‘Show me one that don’t take so long,’ Lester reminded him humbly. Once away from his cell bars, he abandoned his tough-guy act; exactly as if he needed it only when locked behind steel for others to stare at and question.
He was only days from the chair if his last appeal were denied, yet slept and ate much as Frankie slept and ate. Therein lay a horror and a marvel for Frankie. Each saw the same gray corridors all night, each night, with the same yellowish fog wadded about the night lights. Each wakened from dreams of lifelong deadlock to the same muffled sounds: down the tier the long day was beginning.
Something of this awe was in Frankie’s eyes when he noticed how neatly combed and oiled Lester’s dark hair looked, and Lester caught Frankie’s glance. ‘I’ll have to wash the oil out the night before,’ he explained earnestly, not even in the same voice he had used for the reporters at all. ‘Oil leaves a burn ’n they don’t like to leave a man burned even from sweat.’
The Man with the Golden Arm Page 28
