The Man with the Golden Arm

’n five hundred of it was all my own! It’s what I call a deed for Justice, what Prospector done for me that time. If he ever runs for coroner he got my whole family’s vote.’

The bruised, the cut, the fractured, the shocked, the maimed and the slightly frayed, all loved the Prospector with a deep, calm love. He was their Division Street Jesse James boldly defying the impersonal giants of the insurance trusts.

Zygmunt, in turn, loved the bruised, the cut and the frayed. He loved each sweet sufferer of them for all they were worth. What was more, he loved his country and, yet more ardently, the city that had given him his chance to serve mankind. ‘I’ll tell you what my ideal is,’ he told Frankie, ‘it’s to make Chicago the personal injury capital of the United States of America.’

He was well on his way toward achieving just that. Hustling down hospital corridors with a fountain pen at the ready and a legal retainer blank flying like the Stars and Bars at Bull Run, he brought news of new hope to those still under shock. It was those under shock, he had learned, in whom the true faith abided.

His tipsters gave him head starts to hospitals where doctors competed with nurses for the chance of making a ten-spot on the side. For it wasn’t always the easiest thing in the world to visit a victim still too woozy to know what had hit him. Yet as often as not Zygmunt got past the reception desk and out again without any hospital official knowing, officially, that he’d been prospecting the wards at all.

For the reception desks regarded ambulance chasing as some sort of felony or other and Zygmunt himself, at certain moments, wasn’t altogether too sure it might not turn out to be denounced as such on Judgment Day. Therefore he played it safe by hustling both sides of the street, the churches as well as the hospitals, and had more novenas to his credit than defrauded cripples. He kept the ledger balanced slightly in Heaven’s favor.

In the instance of Francis Majcinek vs. a city light standard his earliest concern was, ‘How much disability you get, Dealer?’

‘Twenty-five a month.’ Frankie had had the presence of mind to cut it down a bit.

‘In six months you’ll have me paid off. Sign here.’

Six months was exactly what it had taken. It would have taken longer had Frankie admitted to his forty-a- month disability. But fifteen of that was already going to Louie Fomorowski and a man had to keep his nose above water one way or another.

‘Just a couple lucky Polaks,’ Zygmunt congratulated Frankie and Sophie whenever he dropped in to collect his twenty-five and remind them that the drunken-driving charge had been dismissed and the light standard billed to the taxpayers at large. And clutched at Frankie’s sleeve when Sophie wasn’t looking.

‘I’ll say,’ Sophie would agree without heart. ‘If I get any luckier I’ll be the luckiest woman in the cemetery.’

For the second time Zygmunt collected she was in the chair.

On the night of V-J Day she had sat up in bed and shaken Frankie. ‘Wake up, honey. Somethin’s goin’ to happen.’ In the first faint light he had seen that her face was buttoned up like a locked purse – then something behind her eyes had shifted with fear as in those of a cornered cat’s.

‘It feels like air bubbles in my neck – honey, I feel so queer.’ She was trying to smile at him: an embarrassed, apologetic smile, not like her own smile at all. ‘I was dreamin’ about the accident, like in the car when we started tippin’-’

‘You must of been readin’ about that couple in the paper, their car caught fire.’

‘What happened to them?’ Her breath felt cut off. Her hands were crossed upon her throat and on the wall the luminous Christ glowed faintly above the clock. ‘I’m sweatin’ on my palms.’ She put one fat damp hand upon his own.

‘They were trapped, that’s all.’

‘Oh.’ With relief. Things that happened out of town never seemed to have happened to real people somehow. ‘But we didn’t,’ Frankie assured her hurriedly, turning toward her onto his side. That was the first time he had seen her breasts, full to the pink and rigid nipples, without feeling any attraction at all. ‘You got a headache?’ he asked.

‘I just feel sort of choky-like. Like I’m drinkin’ ginger ale I can’t taste.’

‘You want a real drink?’

‘No. It’s somethin’. Frankie’ – she paused as if it were too foolish to say – ‘I can’t get up.’

She tried to smile but the lips froze with a rising fright. He touched her knee. ‘A little charley horse is all you got.’ And massaged her legs gently while she braced herself by her elbows against the pillow.

‘I – I can’t feel you rubbin’ so good.’

‘Lay back ’n take it easy,’ he ordered her professionally, ‘your nerves is exhausted. I think that croaker missed a joint lookin’ you over.’

‘Don’t say “croaker,” honey. Say “Doctor.”’ She lay wide-eyed, looking up at the shadowed ceiling for some friendlier shadow there. ‘Frankie, if it was just somethin’ bust, wouldn’t it hurt like everythin’?’

‘Somethin’s bust awright,’ he decided. Not knowing quite what he meant by that himself.

* * *

The analyst at the people’s clinic was young, pure in heart, and dressed in theories as spotless as his own chaste white jacket.

‘The name is Pasterzy,’ he introduced himself, gripping Frankie’s hand in a med-school grip. ‘A good name for a doctor,’ Frankie told him, ‘this is my wife.’

He had brought her in a borrowed wheelchair and she’d raised one hand listlessly to take the doctor’s hand. Then had simply sat regarding them both with a sort of puffed-up hostility.

Young Dr P. had immediately taken her by surprise with a needle jabbed into the tender back of her calf. Her eyelids had fluttered but she had not cried out.

‘You felt that,’ he’d accused her gently.

‘Of course I felt it, goldarn t’ing.’ She had turned to Frankie indignantly. ‘This dummy pinched me, Frankie – what’s the big idea?’ But all Frankie had done was to stand there like a goof watching another man stroking his wife’s leg clear to the knee.

‘You’re lying to yourself, Mrs Majcinek,’ Dr P. had told her tactlessly and she’d turned in a flood of tears to Frankie. ‘Don’t just stand there when he’s talkin’ like that – gawpin’ while he calls your wife aliar ’ncopsfree feels – get me to a doc who respects people.’ She turned with condescension upon the doctor kneeling at her feet. ‘Do you mind?’

Dr P. stood up and the two men had exchanged understanding glances. ‘Bring her back after she’s better rested,’ he’d told Frankie.

Halfway through the door Sophie had grabbed the chair’s wheels to keep from being pushed all the way through before taking one over-the-shoulder parting shot: ‘If you’re so damned smart why ain’t you a millionaire?’

That night she had dreamed that she was about to be jabbed by a flaming needle in Frankie’s hand: she’d gotten out of bed, turned on the light and wakened screaming. Frankie had carried her back to the bed and she hadn’t gotten out of bed unaided since. Living between the bed and the wheelchair, her arms had grown flabby while her legs had lost flesh from disuse. The skin had crowded pendulously upon itself beneath her chin to make her eyes mere pale gray slits reflecting her sick despair.

That Pasterzy had taken as much as any doctor could. Frankie would have to wait outside and when Sophie was returned to him she would look so careworn that Frankie would hardly have the heart to question her. Yet couldn’t help wondering humbly.

‘What he do, Zosh?’

‘He took a sample of blood. He says I got real good blood. Wait till he takes a smear, see what he says then.’

‘He don’t hurt you, does he?’

‘It ain’t hurtin’ like that, Frankie, it’s just he’s such a squirrel. His roof is leakin’ – he