The Man with the Golden Arm

‘I could of got ten to one in 1924,’ he announced. But no one asked him ten to one on what. Everyone knew. They’d heard it all before.

‘Ten to one I wouldn’t live out the year ’n that was only May,’ he answered himself as though someone had asked, as if anyone cared. ‘Standin’ right there by the Four-Corner Tap I told Red Laflin he’d be dead before I was ’n he lived twenny years ’n his best rod man is buyin’ me a shot every time I stop by the Four-Corner just to say hello, just for old time’s sake. “You was Red’s best friend,” he tells me,’ n puts the bottle on the bar.’

‘’N you’re just the schleck to kill the bottle wit’out layin’ out a dime, too,’ Sparrow observed. ‘Red must be turnin’ over when he sees his best rod man settin’ that big free bottle down.’

‘I mix it wit’ lemon,’ Louie explained smugly, ‘it don’t burn up your insides that way.’

‘I always wondered who burned down Laflin’s joint,’ Sparrow wondered idly, and added hurriedly, ‘I know it wasn’t no guy from around here.’

‘Back off, Jewboy,’ Louie told him, sounding bored, ‘your job is by the door.’

‘Zero’ll tell the steerer when to get by the door,’ Frankie put in quietly.

And the cards went around and around.

‘He’s just afraid I’ll win his dollar-twenny before the suckers start comin’,’ Sparrow explained of Louie.

‘Quit waspin’ him,’ Frankie ordered.

But Louie opened his wallet and started counting just to show how many ‘dollar-twennies’ he was holding. There was a c-note right on top, then a couple fifties, then so many twenties and tens that Sparrow figured it, just offhand, at better than half a grand.

‘Thanks, Louie,’ he offered, ‘I was just wonderin’ what you were holdin’ – which alley you go home by? I’ll walk you down.’

‘I could buy a hundred Jewboys,’ Louie told no one in particular, and returned the bills to his poke.

‘We know where you get it, too,’ Frankie said boldly, seeing nobody’s shadow at all.

‘We give the public what it asks for,’ Louie smirked.

‘Be careful the public don’t give you what you’re askin’ for,’ Frankie told him. And thought to himself, ‘This joker thinks he still got me on the hook, he’ll find out nobody needs him.’

And the cards went around and around.

There came a scratching like a cat’s scratching at the metal door, but Sparrow did not rise.

‘It’s just that blind hyena again,’ he said, ‘let him wait.’

‘Let him in,’ Frankie asked, ‘I need coffee.’

Sparrow rose, and a moment later the greasy white cane and the gamy odor of the peddler moved across the table like a cloud off the canal.

‘Sit next to me, prosiak,’ Nifty Louie ordered, pulling the peddler around into the empty chair beside him. ‘You want a hand of no-peek? I heard you was pretty good at it.’

‘Can’t deal no blind guy,’ Frankie protested, ‘I’ll do everythin’ but that.’

‘Blind guys are the betht to deal,’ Pig himself pointed out politely, ‘they can’t tell what they’re holdin’.’

‘I’ll read his hand,’ Louie explained.

‘Blind, bummy ’r beggars,’ Frankie insisted, ‘no two guys holdin’ one hand.’

‘I’m goin’ to Stickney to play,’ Louie announced, ‘this is Clark Street poker – hobo gamblers, hobo steerer, hobo dealer.’

‘If he stands behind Pig it’s awright, Frankie,’ Schwiefka compromised anxiously, ‘it’ll be Louie’s hand, only Piggy-O holdin’ it. Be sociable.’

‘Why can’t he play it hisself?’

‘I believe in blind man’s luck is why,’ Louie told everyone, fingering the yellowed Legion button. And placed a silver dollar in front of Pig.

Frankie reached over, tested the dollar against the metal shade of the night light, then peered more closely at its stain.

‘I seen that dirty buck somewheres before,’ he decided, returning it to begin boxing the cards. ‘Somewheres before. That’s bloodstains on that dirty buck.’

‘The bank’ll cash it,’ Schwiefka put in, ‘deal us a round of blackjack, make everybody happy.’

‘It’s my good-luck piece,’ Louie told them all, ‘I’m always superstitious as a whorehouse rat toward Christmas.’

Umbrella Man rose uneasily and shuffled, still half crouching, into his coat, fearing the air of challenge going around the board. When Sparrow returned, after letting him out, the soiled dollar lay in front of Frankie: he had dealt himself a winner.

‘Gimme back the silver.’ Louie was laying down a crisp new single in exchange. ‘I wasn’t bettin’ the silver one, it was just to bring the old luck around.’

‘It’s my good-luck piece now,’ Frankie said, with a low, soft malice in his voice, ‘I get superstitious myself around New Year’s.’

‘Change it for him,’ Schwiefka ordered his dealer.

‘Keep your muscles in your pockets, bakebrain,’ Frankie answered, ‘I make the change around here.’

Louie rose. ‘If I once quit a joint I never come back in it ’n neither do my friends,’ he threatened Schwiefka’s purse.

‘Nobody sent for you in the first place,’ Frankie assured him.

‘I sent for him,’ Schwiefka decided, and reached for the blood-stained buck.

Sparrow’s narrow hand got it first and had it pocketed by the time Frankie had pushed back his chair. ‘If you sent for him you deal to him,’ and sent the deck flying across the board, aces and kings and deuces scattering across the floor. Schwiefka, bending heavily, went in pursuit of his sixty-cent deck while Frankie followed Sparrow down the steep stairwell to the street.

‘He’s gettin’ too big for his britches,’ Schwiefka complained peevishly to Louie when he’d gotten his deck together again. ‘In the old days for a dealer to walk out on me like that, he wouldn’t be dealin’ no place for life. He’d be spottin’ pins in a bowlin’ alley ’n lucky to get that, it’d be just ’cause I was sorry for him.’

Louie wasn’t hearing Schwiefka. He was hearing only the dealer’s footsteps walking away with Louie’s special luck. With the dealer’s every step Louie felt one step unluckier. He had never felt so unlucky so fast in all his life.

It was the sort of night he went to a dance or stuck close to the bars and wouldn’t let himself glance at a deck or a pair of dice or a cue. Just like that, only worse. All his luck stepping down a staircase inside of the luckiest buck in the world. ‘I got careless, teasin’ him wit’ that dirty buck,’ he realized with a strange despair. Then slapped his fedora forward onto his skull and hurried after his dollar.

At the top of the stairs Schwiefka heard him call down; they all heard him call down.

‘Dealer! I want to talk to you!’

Everyone there heard Louie ask that. But not one heard the dealer reply. Then the upstairs door closed behind Louie; and none had heard the door downstairs open at all.

All heard a long, steep, waiting silence there, where the dealer and the steerer waited within the stairwell’s high-walled pit, for someone coming down to them from above.

The dealer and the steerer heard the upstairs door open and close; like a door shutting upon some long-lost argument. Both watched Louie’s lean dark figure coming down, the sparkler in his tie glinting like a one-eyed cat, one step down and one step down. He was a long dark time coming down.

Laughing nervously to himself as he came. ‘I’m givin’ you a buck fer a buck,’ he repeated his offer, sticking a folded single into Frankie’s jacket pocket. ‘No more ’n no less.’

‘Don’t buckle, Frankie,’ Sparrow encouraged him. If Frankie buckled now he’d buckle for keeps, he’d buckle in everything, the punk sensed.

‘I don’t want trouble, I got enough,’ Frankie mumbled his apologies with all his defiance swept under. ‘Give him his dirty buck back, Solly. He worked for it.’

Sparrow stalled, fishing for it in all the wrong pockets at once. Frankie unfolded the single just to be sure it wasn’t a phony.

‘It’s good awright,’ Louie laughed, ‘it come from the same place as the silver buck. You give it to me yerself last week – remember?’