The Man with the Golden Arm

battled, like respectable people should, behind closed doors. Schwabatski’s ears had long ago turned out the sort of roarer that the dealer and his Sophie sometimes put on. To a stranger it would have sounded like one word short of murder; but the Jailer would shuffle past, explaining it to himself: ‘They want to love each other – but they don’t know how.’ And shrug upon his way.

It was the rooms from which no sound came at all, while man and wife were together in there, that caught Schwabatski’s ear. It was from such rooms that real trouble came, the sudden glass-splintering crash, the moment of panting stillness and then the unspeakable flat-level scream of straight terror as the woman stumbled out of the room with the blood down the side of her face and her particular prize behind her with the broken bottle in his hand.

Schwabatski never worried about the dealer’s yellow door. There Sophie sat, her ash-blond hair in pin curls, one hand on the wheelchair’s arm and her army blanket across her knees, toying aimlessly with a combination flashlight-pencil, pressing the tiny light off and on, on and off. A dog howling down Schwabatski’s shadowed stairs recalled a casual promise made down her memory’s spiraled stairwell.

‘When you gonna get me the dawg you promised?’ she asked as Frankie closed the door carefully behind him. ‘You promised me you was sure gonna bring me a sweet lit-tul dawg. Well, I’m still settin’ ’n waitin’ but I don’t see no damned kind of dawg except a jailhouse dawg ’n that’s you. Why you always promisin’: “I’m gonna bring you the cutest puppy-pup” -’ n then a beat- out deck ’n a dirty shirt is what you really bring – I suppose you think I don’t even know where you was again?’

‘It wasn’t no pet shop, Zosh.’

‘Who told me?’

‘Who always travels the news around here? Piggy-O, the Information Bureau.’

‘He asks me how am I feelin’, he don’t just shove in here without even sayin’ how’s anyone feelin’.’

‘How you feelin’, Zosh?’

‘Don’t call me “Zosh,” I ain’t no greenhorn, I wasn’t born in Slutsk, I was born on eart’ on Awgoosty Boulevard ’n my name is Soph-ee-a – say it.’

‘How you feelin’, Soph-ee-a?’

‘No damned good at all. I got gas on the stomach. You got gas on the stomach?’

Something more subtle than gas weighed on her stomach. Behind the curtain of loneliness which had sheltered her childhood a sick dread had grown. Of being left, some final evening, alone in a room like this small room with no one of her own near at all.

A dread she sometimes evaded by reaching for an outsized album labeled, in her own childish and belabored hand, My Scrapbook of Fatal Accidence. When she had finished scissoring these letters out of red and green Christmas wrapping paper they had looked so large and cheerful she had gone on to embroider the title with comic-strip cutouts: Superman and Bugs Bunny, Tarzan and Little Abner cavorted in a wanton carnival among lady spies in sheerest negligee and announcements of double-horror features and double-feature horrors from the tabloid movie directories.

She had begun the book with the Times photo of her own ‘fatal accident’ and had gone on to add to it all manner of lurid cries from the depths: of unwed mothers who plunged newborn infants down dumbwaiters in an oatmeal box or tossed them into a furnace in a cornflake carton because ‘God told me to.’ To announce, when a visitor remarked that the house seemed rather warm: ‘I know. I just put the baby in the stove.’

She loved to pull out the one captioned Death Was Driving, to which she’d added, in her own crude art, a skull and crossbones; because she had learned that that gave Frankie what he called ‘chicken flesh.’

In fact she had been so altogether tickled with the crinkling effect it had had on his skin, reminding him as it did of the night when he’d supported her onto a cold white hospital bed with her eyes still dilated with shock, that she had gone on to wider fields: a whole family wiped out in a secondhand Chevvie one bright May morning at an Indiana Harbor crossing.

The movie directory captions she had clipped and hoarded like an aging coquette treasuring old dance programs.

EVERY KISS

EVERY EMBRACE

Brought a nameless terror…

A sinister jealousy!

ADULTS ONLY!

What do gorilla kidnappers do

with their women prey?

Do native women live with gorillas?

See: A Beautiful Maiden in the hands

of the horrible Urubu Tribe.

VOODOO SECRETS!

Best of all was the yellowing photo from the Times that proved to him, each day anew, that it had all been his fault. So much his fault that he could never leave her alone again.

‘Wheel me a little, Frankie,’ she begged. There were moments when not even the scrapbook sustained her. She would feel she was falling and only being wheeled back and forth could arrest that endless plunge into nowhere.

Some nights she wheeled herself while he slept. When he wakened he would see her in the corner where the light and darkness met, half her face in the fading shadows of Saturday night and half in Sunday morning’s rain- washed light. With her hair in papers, in crimpers or pins, she would be ready for the day and all day long would move, little by little, following the light, till the night’s neon carnival began once more below.

All day long, alternately picking at the army blanket about her knees with her tinted fingernails and then at her chin. ‘Whiteheads, blackheads,’ she had a little song for the very loneliest hours, picking at the chin’s flesh till it was raw: ‘I like to tweeze ’em ’n squeeze ’em, it’s when I get in the mood.’

Till the same old shadows took her anew.

Sometimes it seemed to Frankie there was no end to the wheeling at all. So now for reply he pulled a homemade drummer’s practice board out from under the sink, seated himself before it, sticks in hand, on a little backless chair. He used the sticks lightly a moment, just enough to shut out the pleading punctuated by the flashlight’s irregular clicking. Till he could get the feel of the drums again.

‘That’s right, just duck your puss over that dirty board ’n make off like I ain’t even alive. I ask you to wheel me so you make like I’m dead – it’s what you’re hopin’ all the time anyhow.’

For one moment there was no sound in the room save that of the battered clock below the phosphorescent crucifix on the wall, its sturdy old pulse beating quietly, without a single flutter. He rapped out a long, sure, steady workmanlike beat.

Frankie liked the drums. That was in the wrist too. He beat through his own version of ‘Song of the Islands’ twice.

‘Cute,’ Sophie announced the moment he’d finished.

A single meaningless word like that: cute. But what and who and why everything had to be so damned cute there would be no telling.

‘I knew that Gertie Michalek, the one wit’ the birt’ mark like a p’tato on her wrist,’ Sophie went on, ‘when she got preg’ant she could always tell if it was going to be a girl ’cause she’d get that cravin’ for cold p’tatoes.’ N you know what, Frankie? To this day when Michalek’s little girl eats a p’tato, the p’tato eyes come out on Michalek’s birt’mark. What you think of that?’

No answer. He would be trying not to feel unnerved at her meaningless discontent. Around and around she would go now upon the breathless merry-go-round of her ceaseless mysteries; till his mind would be dulled by its whirling and he would try talking her back to reality.

‘I’m lookin’ for a job beatin’ the tubs, Zosh,’ he told her, leaning forward to begin again just as she signaled to him with the flashlight – dot-dot-dash-dot-dot-dot – in a code she had just invented. ‘What am I signalin’ now?’ she