The Man with the Golden Arm

and shoving with eagerness – all those for whom nothing had yet happened in the world shouting that it had happened at last, they’d always known it would happen sooner or later, that corner had always looked so unlucky.

Something had finally happened outside of the movies. Death in a blazing Chrysler or a blood-covered madman pinned to the pavement by a pair of poolroom bullies: madman, Chrysler, flash fire or a scoutmaster helping an old lady across the street, it was all one. Something had been made to happen in their lives at last.

Everything arrived in nothing flat. A fire-insurance patrol, the pulmotor squad, the hook-and-ladder boys – everything but an ambulance. Frankie and a nineteen-year-old in a staff sergeant’s uniform took over, hauling Sophie between them up and down the curb to nowhere, neither being certain who was giving the orders, while the crowd looked on admiringly at the military in action.

‘Artificial inspiration,’ Frankie explained to his audience and wouldn’t let anyone but the sergeant help him haul her about; till a stray cop, wandering out of the Safari to clear his head, nabbed the sergeant on sheer blind impulse.

‘Let’s see your papers, Sergeant.’

The soldier just didn’t have any papers. He didn’t even have a draft card.

‘I tawt you looked like some kind of spy awright,’ the cop announced, ignoring the leaning light pole, the bleeding woman and the fire department. ‘I’m gonna put you under the authority of the F.B.I.’

‘I got a draft card at home,’ the sergeant offered meekly, chastened at finding himself so heavily outranked.

‘Yeh – but where’s your license to drag this woman around at t’ree A.M.?’ He had spotted Sophie at last and could tell at a glance she was a woman. ‘You pushed her.’ The law had reached its verdict. The sergeant shook his head, No, No, he hadn’t pushed a soul. But the law wasn’t taking any such guff. ‘Who give you the right to shove a woman in front of a car anyhow – you married to her? Let’s see your license for that.’

‘This is just her boy friend,’ a helpful bystander offered, ‘that’s her husband settin’ on the curb holdin’ his dirty head. He tried to run the soldier down for datin’ his wife. Looks like an internal triangle to me. If you ask me they’re all three of them no good.’

‘Nobody asked you.’

Yet the law could see there was something to the story all right. Frankie sat on the curb with his army shoes in the gutter and his combat jacket ripped below the shoulder halfway to the overseas stripes below the elbow. Dabbing at his forehead with a handkerchief and wondering how to get the booze off his breath in a hurry.

‘You kids got a stick of gum?’ he whispered to two ten-year-old girls studying him placidly, both of them chewing like twin calves side by side. One came up with a single dirty stick, its wrapper long unpeeled, and offered it just out of Frankie’s reach.

‘Joosy Froot. Only cost you a nickel.’ Her accomplice nodded approvingly. ‘That stuff is pretty hard to get these days, mister.’

Frankie found a lone dime and when the girl had it safely in her hand she advised him further, in lieu of a nickel change, ‘You don’t have to worry about that stupid bull, mister. He’s as stiff as you are.’

‘He can fwisk you but he can’t search you,’ the other told him softly, with the softest lisp possible. ‘Don’t let him search you without a wawwant.’

The corner pharmacist brought Sophie around and slapped a bandage above Frankie’s right eye. When the wagon arrived to take the sergeant away for lack of papers Frankie was sober enough to get by by identifying himself and pleading the old tune: ‘Only two small beers, Officer, all I had. I’m a combat vet. Purple Heart. Good Conduct. Buddy of Captain Bednar by Saloon Street.’

While they waited for the ambulance the cop walked about, a wadded Tribune jutting out of his hip pocket, with the deliberate gait of any stewed flatfoot, around and around the battered car, slapping his big feet righteously up and down while the crowd grew and some newspaper joker took a flash-bulb photo of Sophie, stretched out on the wrinkled running board with somebody’s corduroy cap under her head, resting against the fender’s slope. The bulb burst, splattering glass for a dozen feet around, so that the pharmacist had to run back for more bandage and the cop had to run the photographer off, press card or no press card.

Yet the photographer remained, a small man in a raincoat almost dragging the ground, shivering with either humiliation or the cold early morning air. Pretending, on the border of the crowd, that he’d abandoned the idea of getting a close-up shot while furtively preparing another bulb. When the cop regarded him suspiciously once more he spoke up humbly, ‘I just like to watch.’ And inched up ever so little. ‘I’m neurotic, I like to get up close to accidents.’

A weak excuse.

It was half an hour before the ambulance arrived, the early morning trolleys were blocked halfway to North Avenue and everyone but Frankie and Sophie and the sergeant felt it had been well worth the trouble. The pharmacist and photographer, the cop, the audience, trolley conductors and motormen, all agreed tacitly that this had been a better summer night than most.

‘Not a bone broken,’ an intern had assured Frankie of Sophie’s condition. ‘Just shock.’ She was lying on the receiving-room table, eyes wide and pupils dilated. ‘Open the door,’ she asked in an oddly altered voice; the door to the long white corridor stood wide.

‘It is open, Zosh,’ Frankie told her, stepping close to her.

‘Open the door,’ she asked again, as though she had not heard and did not know who he was.

There was only one door to open. A closet door, and he opened it just to please her. Inside it, leaning against a wheelchair, stood a crutch with a cracked handle. He closed the door again softly. When the intern came in to look at her again she slept like one who hadn’t slept in weeks, without help of any drug at all.

Four mornings later she was back home and no worse for wear, apparently, except for a bluish wound on her lip, where she had bitten herself through the force of the smashup into the light pole and a tiny cut over her ear where the flash bulb had burst above her. Yet she did not seem to share Frankie’s elation at all. He’d gotten the super’s man, Zygmunt the Prospector, on the job and felt confident of beating any drunken-driving charge with which the Traffic Bureau might confront him.

‘You sore ’cause you didn’t get your back broke?’ he asked her. ‘You ought to be singin’ ’n you’re moonin’.’

‘I just don’t feel like it’s over, Frankie,’ she told him. ‘Last night I had a sleep warnin’ – my leg jerked ’n woke me up, it was a pre-motion, what they call it.’

‘So long as you’re feelin’ awright, what you got to holler?’ he wanted to know, and had hauled out the practice board against the time when he could afford a set of real traps of his own, quit Zero Schwiefka cold and go on the legit with a big-name band.

Listening to the light mechanical beat, it began to sound for the first time, to Sophie, like a hammer’s rapid tapping. When she’d closed her eyes his hammer went tap-tap-tapping down a thousand little bent rusty nails. She had had to clench her palms tightly to fight off the panic rising within her and when he’d looked up at her her eyes had had the same immovable stare they’d had on the receiving-room table.

It wasn’t till he’d stopped beating the board that that look had faded out and she had shuttered her eyes.

But he had known right then, however inadmissibly, that something had gone wrong with his Zosh.

Zygmunt, a man continually clutching, for one reason or another, at other men’s sleeves, had attended so many night schools in his early manhood that now, in his bustling middle age, he retained the pallor of his Kent College nights: the look of the downtown pavements after the rush-hour window-shoppers are doing all their window- shopping through the bright interiors of dreams. The light on his glasses seemed a reflection of the light of law- school chandeliers in those desperate days when he felt that if he didn’t pass the bar he’d be tending one the rest of his life. He looked like a man who had never seen a cloud.

He’d passed the bar, put out his shingle, won his first case in a blaze of patriotic oratory – and had been disbarred for representing conflicting interests three months later. Now he called himself a claim adjuster and had been known to reach a hospital ahead of the ambulance. Railroad brakemen, switchmen, ambulance drivers, nurses and interns beheld him with cries of sheerest joy. Only insurance men felt pain. Each year he gave precisely one thousand dollars worth of Christmas presents to railroad men and hospital attendants while the sour-looking insurance adjusters sent greeting cards in unsealed envelopes bearing half-rate postage.

‘Zygmunt does us poor people a big favor,’ one old contented cripple informed Frankie, ‘if it wasn’t for him I would of settled for fifty dollars ’n I would of been screwed cold. Zygmunt got fifteen hundred out of court