Tonight the moon held to the leaning ladders of the rain as it rose. She moved her chair with it till she could see where the flickering warning lamps burned, along the El’s long boundaries, like vigil lamps guarding the constant boundaries of night. Could even see the passengers in the cars as the locals slowed toward the station.
All night, each night, waiting for Frankie in dry weather or wet, whether the moon held to the farther crosslights or to the near-at-hand signal tower, the vigil lights burned faithfully to guard a night gone false. They seemed so right, so dependable and true, in a world gone wrong, all wrong. It made her want to cry out for everyone locked in some tenement’s pit on any long and littered street.
Till darkness brought her sleep on a weary handcar, switching her onto a nowhere train that curved and descended, softly and endlessly, out upon the vast roundhouse of old El dreams.
She was a girl again sitting on Frankie’s doorstep watching the sluggish late-summer flies settling heavily against the screens. The last leaves of some sultry September hung stiffly, like leaves pressed between the pages of an old catechism. Along the arc-lit parks and playgrounds the trees were still as shadows of trees down some picture-postcard street.
She had come to borrow his roller skates and he was telling her, ‘You can only have one and you have to do what I do.’ Then rolling away on his single skate down the darkening boulevard the old terror that he was going away forever shook her and she had to follow – he was so far ahead, the night was so dark, the trees stood so stiffly and so tall while the arc lamps watched too steadily – yet somehow with light about him so that she could see every turn he made and did each one exactly as he’d said she must all the way up to that old leaf-covered porch of which he’d taught her to be afraid because no one lived there any more. She was careful to go through the broken latticework left leg first as he had done and down into the dangerous hide-out lit only by a single broken ray from the arc lamp’s eye across a leaf-strewn darkness where other lovers had lain. Here, where the earth held like a pang the odor of dry leaves, night dew, and faintly the scent of sometime lovers’ sweat, he had said, ‘Lie down, Zosh.’
The yellow arc lamp’s single eye found them out. To watch unwinking while the bells of Old St Stephen’s rang out a warning right overhead, shaking the picture-postcard trees till the brittle leaves fell stiffly down and flies fell off lattice, window and screen.
She wakened in the chair to hear the last echo of St Stephen’s fading across this present midnight’s dreaming roofs. And her whole life, from her careless girlhood until this crippled night, seemed caught within that fading chime. For now, as though no time had passed but the time it had taken to dream it, the leaves were stiff with age again, sultry September had come and gone and the wind was blowing the flies away.
‘God has forgotten us all,’ Sophie told herself quietly.
For the rain would come straight down forever and nothing would ever change at all. Save the picture on the calendar. And a long nerve in each thigh.
The mousetrap in the closet clicked. She felt it close as if it had shut within herself, hard and fast forever. Heard the tiny caught thing struggling, slowly tiring, and at last become still.
The wind was blowing the flies away. God was forgetting His own.
A single wire was strung tautly across the room, bearing a wooden marker for remembrance of a time when the place had been a poolroom. Beneath it a circle of red leather and chrome chairs, a splash of yellow ties and sallow faces wavered about a horseshoe-shaped table.
The evening’s first cigar smoke moved below the single light like the opening shot of battle upon a long green meadowland. All the day’s horses had made money or run out hours ago; there was nothing left on the wall, where they had drummed up the dust of Bowie and Tanforan, but tomorrow’s possibilities:
TRACK:
The dealer placed a new deck in front of Schwiefka for cutting and, while Schwiefka cut, took time to wind his PX wrist watch carefully; as if setting it to keep time, this whole long night to come, to the players’ troubled hearts.
a red legend warned everyone above the dealer’s head. Strung from that same taut wire that held the poolroom marker, it would waver a bit and darken as the smoke grew heavier. On the other side of the marker hung a meaningless little green invitation as dated as last year’s calendar:
SHORT CARDS
60c per hour
No one had played short cards here since Pearl Harbor. Schwiefka, and Schwiefka’s shills, killed the hours before the suckers’ hours with call-rummy and no-peek between themselves while listening to each other’s boasts and complaints.
‘I went to five taverns ’n a guy bought me a drink in every one,’ Sparrow reported with real pride.
‘The same guy?’ Frankie asked, riffling the deck.
‘Differ’nt guys,’ Sparrow explained indulgently. ‘Now I ain’t even got for a bottle wine -’ n you sayin’ I ain’t really broke.’
‘You’re always broke,’ Nifty Louie observed, ‘I think when you were born your old man was out of work.’
‘If yours’d ever had a steady job you never would of been borned at all,’ Sparrow retorted.
‘Trouble with both you guys is you spend your dough on foolish things,’ Frankie counseled them both in all seriousness and Louie, who had followed Frankie in tonight, asked too casually, ‘What you spend yours on, Dealer?’
Frankie dealt around for reply, skipping Sparrow, who professed to be too broke to play. When Drunkie John came up with an unlabeled half pint off the hip and offered it to the punk for consolation, Sparrow eyed it sadly and mourned, ‘Boy oh boy, the bottle wit’out a name.’ In a tone so melancholy it sounded like, ‘Boy oh boy, the Christ wit’out a cross.’ Drank without pleasure, handed it back to Drunkie John and sat back unhappily. ‘Borrow me a dirty sawbuck, I wanna play too,’ he asked the players on either side of him, twice each.
Each time each answered, looking straight ahead at the dealer’s eyeshade, ‘Never play against my own money.’
‘Then borrow me a dirty deuce.’
Sparrow was always careful to identify any money he was able to borrow as dirty, suspecting that he thus reduced the obligation slightly. It troubled him to see the cards going around, skipping only himself. Yet he didn’t like to ask money of Frankie, it seemed like Frankie never had a dime any more. And looked so pale, so pale.
‘Let me deal,’ he begged Frankie, ‘let me relieve you two bucks wort’ – go pertend you got a date wit’ a movie actress ’n don’t come back till the marks start knockin’.’
The dealer made no reply and didn’t look as though he cared one way or another. If Schwiefka wanted to let the punk fool around for half an hour it was all right with Frankie.
But Schwiefka paid no heed and Sparrow waited miserably.
‘Well, should I start washin’ my hands to get ready?’ he wanted to know after a minute.
‘Yeh,’ Schweifka deigned to answer at last. ‘’N wash yer face too.’
‘Let him deal,’ Nifty Louie urged, ‘he can’t steal no more than Machine.’
Nifty Louie’s roll carried weight with Schwiefka. He shrugged uncertainly. Sparrow nudged Frankie out of the slot and the players tossed in a nickel ante each.
‘Look at the Jewish deal,’ Louie marveled, for the punk dealt lefthanded.
Sparrow dealt swiftly, sometimes with the right hand and sometimes with the left, sometimes beginning with the player to his right and the next time to his left, it was all one to Sparrow. But all the while watching that pot like a mangy chicken hawk. There was four dollars and twenty cents in it for the winner – the player he’d just asked for the loan of a two-spot. The punk knew when he had a good thing. He shoved seventy-five cents of the four-twenty to the winner, put a single lonely dime in the big green bag and got the rest in his own shirt pocket all in a single scoop of those ragged little claws.
The winner looked down in cold horror: he’d spent over two dollars to win a four-dollar pot and had six bits of it in front of him. ‘Back off if you don’t like how we deal here,’ Sparrow anticipated his protest. ‘Should I deal you out?’
The others cheered wildly, they hadn’t lost a dime on the deal. ‘Ataboy, Sparrow, you’re in the driver’s seat now.’
They didn’t cheer for long. The next pot held three dollars, of which the dealer got a dollar-forty for his trouble,
