the house earned thirty cents and the winner the crumbs.
Oddly, there weren’t many players for the next hand. Only forty-five cents lay in the kitty and Sparrow got two bits of that before Schwiefka had him by the neck. Before the punk could squawk so much as once he was sitting on the other side of the table right where he’d started. Only this time with nearly five dollars before him and there wouldn’t be any getting him out of the game till it was gone.
‘I’m supposed to be dead in 1921,’ Louie began confiding in Drunkie John. ‘Here it is almost ’47 ’n I’m still pumpin’ water.’
Louie could never quite get over his feat of having pumped water so long. ‘The guys who were lookin’ for me in the old days ’r gone: dead ’r drunk ’r dyin’. Them was the ones rubbed garlic on the shells – I’m suppose to have a garlic slug in my head twenny-six years ’n all I got was a toenail yanked off with a red-hot pintsers.’ Under the light, perspiration had dried the violet talc into the corners of his lips and the lips barely moved when he spoke. ‘Doin’ time ’r lushin’, dead ’r drunk ’r dyin’.’
‘I remember Frank the Enforcer,’ Drunkie John boasted, showing his blackened teeth, ‘he was the kind who’d blow half a hundred over the bar but wouldn’t spend for a pack cigarettes. He’d smoke yours.’ And drank. From the bottle without a name. ‘Them was the good old days, when a guy got thirteen years for a misdemeanor. When you done somethin’ then you paid for it,’ he mourned. ‘It ain’t like now. It’s too cheap now.’ The marks of debauchery were seamed across his face like a chronic disease.
The only one here who seemed to have no memories of torture, murder and grand larceny was Umbrella Man, who walked about the streets smiling gently, day after day, tinkling an old-fashioned school bell and bearing a battered umbrella strapped to his back. He could not look on violence without panic, so it was always told of him with surprise: ‘That fool with the umbrellas – you know who
Beside Umbrellas, the one called Meter Reader had once played sandlot baseball and now coached his employers’ team, the Endless Belt & Leather Invincibles, an aggregation that hadn’t won a game since Meter Reader had taken it over.
‘Next time you come up here after raidin’ the five-’n-ten I’m gonna turn you in to Record Head myself,’ Louie warned Sparrow just to start the evening rolling.
‘The day you turn him in I’ll have
‘You can’t do that to
Yet no one had to be a Pinkerton to tell that Sparrow had been raiding the five-and-ten again. He was wearing half a dozen red-white-and-blue mechanical pencils, each containing a tiny battery and having a tiny bulb at the point commonly occupied by an eraser. He had seen the one Sophie toyed with and had decided he needed a handful of them himself.
‘What the hell good is a pencil with a flashlight on it?’ Louie wanted to know. As Frankie’s grip on himself tightened Louie felt increasingly restless.
‘They’re good for writin’ in blackouts, brother,’ the punk explained.
‘You hit him from this side, I’ll hit him from this,’ Louie exclaimed in disgust at Sparrow’s argument. ‘The war’s over -’ n don’t call me “brother.”’
‘Still, they’re good on dark nights to save ’lectricity,’ Sparrow persisted. ‘You could write all night ’n it’s easier on the eyes too.’
Louie rolled a quarter toward the punk, received one of the pencils and warned him, ‘You got to replace the battery when it burns out, for free.’
‘For a
‘When the battery wears out you’ll replace it – or eat the pencil,’ he advised Sparrow matter-of-factly.
‘How can I refill it if the five-’n-dime puts somethin’ else on the batt’ry counter?’ Sparrow pleaded.
‘Don’t ask me how to run your business. This thing is guaranteed for life so far as I’m concerned.’
‘Here’s yer two bits back,’ Sparrow offered to return the coin.
‘Keep your money, Solly,’ Frankie suggested, ‘if that battery lasts three days it’ll prob’ly outlive Louie.’ As though secretly convinced of Frankie’s prophecy, Louie reached anxiously for the coin as if for his very own life being held, just out of reach, in a stranger’s hand. Sparrow thrust it deep into is watch pocket. ‘I just realized how right Dealer could be,’ he told Louie, and saw the pallor of Louie’s flesh under the violet talc. ‘You look like if the batt’ry lasts the night it’s a lifetime guarantee in yer case.’
‘I’ll die like Machine deals,’ Louie conceded, abandoning the argument in a surge of weariness – ‘fast.’
‘It’s how you’ve lived,’ Schwiefka told him.
‘It’s how we’ve all lived,’ Drunkie John reminded them all, speaking as if it were over and done with for everyone. Everyone’s chickens would be coming home to roost soon enough, John felt.
Sparrow, studying Louie’s ravaged face in the greenish light, suddenly relented. ‘I’ll refill it any time it goes dead, even if I have to sneak in the warehouse to do it.’
‘You keep hangin’ around that warehouse after dark you’ll end up on a slab before he will,’ Frankie put in nervously. But Sparrow shook off the warning.
‘I’m a businessman,’ the punk explained with dignity. ‘I fulfill my obligations even if I have to rob a warehouse to do it. You think I want my credit to lapse? That’s the difference between a businessman like me ’n a cheap hustler like you – you hustlers got no credit.’
Frankie shuffled the deck slowly, stalling in the hope that the suckers might start knocking to get the night over and done and forgotten. ‘That’s the trouble with the whole country, all you businessmen cheatin’ the peoples so fast ’n hard there’s nothin’ left for an honest hustler to steal.’
‘I’ll tell you what I think for true,’ Sparrow offered seriously, ‘I don’t think there’s any difference: a businessman is a hustler with the dough to hustle on the legit ’n a hustler is a businessman who’s either gone broke or never had it. Back me up with five grand tonight ’n tomorrow mornin’ I get a invitation to join the Chamber of Commerce ’n no questions asked.’
‘Record Head’ll get you first,’ Louie repeated his warning to Sparrow.
‘Yeh,’ everyone agreed at once, their spirits improved by the punk’s prospects for a long-term jacket, ‘by the time he gets out Kvorka’s kid’ll be wearin’ the old man’s badge.’
‘It’s too cheap now,’ John renewed his ancient complaint, ‘when you done somethin’ in the old days you paid for it.’
‘The hell with the old days,’ Sparrow protested, looking resentfully at John. ‘I hope your batt’ry goes dead too.’
‘His battery’s been dead for twenty years,’ Frankie had to put in.
‘That’s all right,’ John pointed out, ‘the batt’ry may be dead but the brain is still workin’. What good is hot batt’ries when the radiator’s leakin’? Look at this punk – his tubes is boilin’ over but his connections is spillin’ like a secondhand Essex.’
‘I’m still on the legit,’ Sparrow answered without glancing at Louie, ‘compared to some people anyhow. There ain’t no joy-poppers waitin’ for
It was the first time Frankie realized that the punk was on to Louie’s racket and he felt an unreasoning resentment of that knowledge. How much did the punk know? It must be just some word he’d overheard and was tossing around with no real knowledge of the accusation he was making, Frankie decided uneasily.
Sparrow had pressed the game too far. With the ace of clubs in his hand Louie asked, ‘You want to die in an alley?’ With all the jesting gone out of his voice.
Sparrow didn’t have the courage to defy Louie when Louie talked business – but he had an ace in the hole himself. He could throw out the knuckles of the index finger of his left hand, broken in some childhood antic, bending it into a series of unnatural ridges which he could point at an opponent silently, thus avenging himself without risking provocative language.
‘I’ll make the ju-ju sign on you,’ he threatened Louie softly, and Louie overheard. ‘You point that freakin’ finger
