The Man with the Golden Arm

‘I remember -’ cause it was the last one you’re gettin’ that way off me.’

‘Wrong again, Dealer. You’ll look me up ten thousand times to come.’ N on yer knees to beg me to take your money too.’

‘What way, Frankie?’ Sparrow put in innocently, pretending to forget all about the silver in his watch pocket.

‘None of yer sheenie business,’ Louie told him. ‘Come up, Jewboy – the buck, the lucky buck.’

Sparrow offered it to Louie’s reaching hand, then let it slip through his fingers deliberately and stepped back just in time to let the back of Louie’s hand whizz past his lips.

‘A Jew trick,’ Louie laughed derisively, and the odor of violet talc touched the air. Sparrow opened the door to the alley so that he could kick the coin out into the alley’s darkness if he spotted it first; and retrieve it in the morning. Through the open door the arc lamp’s light fell across Louie’s face.

Frankie felt his own back pressed hard against the hallway wall knowing neither God nor Molly-O could save him from going to Louie on his knees with ten dirty thousand more. ‘There’s people ought to be knocked on the head,’ he told Louie without hearing his own voice at all. ‘I want people like you knocked on the head.’

‘You couldn’t knock nobody’s head,’ Louie laughed at him, ‘all you can knock around is that beat-out hustler John brushed off, the piece of trade with the pinned-up skirt.’ Then spotted the buck, trapped upright under the door’s lower hinge, and bent swiftly for it.

Frankie locked his fingers to stop their shaking. If the shaking didn’t stop he was going to cry in front of the punk and a flame of cold shame for having lain in a cold and secret sweat begging for morphine charged the fingers with a pride of their own. He rose on the balls of his toes and came down with all his weight full upon that white defenseless nape.

The throat made a single startled gurgle.

Then the neck flopped forward like a hen’s with the ax half through it.

An irregular thunder beat in his ears and a whitish lightning hurt his eyes till he felt Sparrow’s hand on his arm and Sparrow’s inside-info voice near at hand. ‘Take it easy, Frankie, we’re in the clear.’ The irregular thunder became a bowling alley’s harmless roar and the lightning steadied to the alley’s unquestioning glare. ‘I didn’t even hear him fall,’ he heard his own voice returning.

‘You keep sayin’ that, Frankie. Quit sayin’ that. We got to be upstairs before the aces pick him up.’

‘Did you run too?’ Frankie asked, feeling the first recession of the shock that had blacked him out.

‘Sure I run,’ Sparrow reported with pride, ‘after I hauled him out of the hall. He’s behind Schwiefka’s woodshed, it’ll be morning before anybody spots him – can you handle the deck?’

‘I can do anythin’,’ Frankie decided firmly. ‘All I need is one quick one. You think maybe it was just his ticker give out?’

‘His ticker give out awright’ – Sparrow gave a little chortle of hoarse glee – ‘whose ticker wouldn’t give out when a boxcar lands on the back of his neck?’

At the bowling-alley bar Sparrow surveyed the dealer from behind his great glasses, trying to hurry him without rushing him back into panic. ‘He hit the floor like Levinsky,’ Sparrow told him, covering Frankie’s glass with his palm. ‘You got to get back to the slot, Dealer.’

At the prospect of returning Frankie felt something that had been holding him together open and let his stomach slip through. Sparrow saw him pale, yet kept the glass covered.

‘You got to make it, Frankie.’

‘I can make it. One more and I make it.’

‘One more and you’ll never make it.’ Sparrow was firm. He saw Frankie’s hand tremble as he lifted the empty glass to his lips in the hope of finding one last small drop. ‘Steady hand ’n steady eye,’ Sparrow told him.

But what was it Louie had told Frankie? ‘You’ll come beggin’ on your knees.’

That was it then. The fast shuffle-off on Damen and Division and the sudden turn of mood in the back booth at Antek’s. A guy as right as Frankie letting himself get hooked on a kick as wrong as that. It was Sparrow’s turn to feel a little sick.

‘Stick by me, Solly,’ Frankie pleaded exactly as if Sparrow had spoken aloud.

‘I’m stickin’, Frankie.’

Neither looked toward the woodshed shadowed by the wall of the Endless Belt & Leather Works as they returned down the alley through which they’d fled. A couple of Schwiefka’s dated racing forms scurried down the alley before them, pursued by a bitter wind; whipped past the woodshed’s corner and banked against the wood as though sent by the wind to cover something there. Neither spoke till they came to the darkened alley hall.

‘I hope you had sense enough to get our lucky buck back,’ Frankie remembered suddenly with a real sense of loss.

‘There wasn’t time for that, Frankie – it was pitch him by his ankles ’n run, you ought to be glad I didn’t just let him lay. You weren’t easy to catch. I still don’t know where you were headin’.’

‘I had a place all right, don’t worry,’ Frankie lied firmly. ‘Where the hell was I goin’?’ he had to ask himself. Then, begrudgingly: ‘You done awright for once.’

Outside the alley door Sparrow whispered pointedly. ‘I’m glad we were havin’ coffee when that guy Fomorowski Whatever His Name Is got slugged next door.’ He stooped, picked up a handful of Christmas Eve snow. When they walked in on the shills he shambled to the table, goggling dizzily, extending the snow and asking, ‘Who wants ice cream? Awready it’s t’ree inches deep!’

‘If Louie don’t come back it’s you guys’ fault,’ Schwiefka grumbled while Frankie, pale but steady, slid into the dealer’s slot. ‘You two guys gonna find yourselfs out of a good job one of these nights, treatin’ the customers like they was underground dogs.’

‘We’d be cheaper off wit’out this one,’ Sparrow told him.

‘Yeh,’ Frankie backed up the punk, ‘this is gettin’ to be a good place to hang away from, there’s too many arguments goin’ on.’

He looked around for Blind Pig as he riffled the deck.

But the peddler had left in the wind and the snow.

As the cards went around and around.

Stash was out of the bucket and all was forgiven. There would be a dance in the hall that stood in the shadow of Endless Belt & Leather and everyone would be there.

But right from his first hour back home he began giving Violet trouble again. Something had happened to the old man in his five days at Twenty-eighth and California, he’d gone a bit stir-crazy it began to appear.

First thing he shakes his head, No, to washing dishes after Violet had finished eating. So she cleaned them up herself and sent him down for a half gallon of beer – and here he comes back upstairs with nothing in his hand but five two-bit cigars and a dollar-fifty lighter. ‘Where’s my beer, Old Man?’ she wanted to know. But all Stash does is look about dreamily, like he thinks maybe he heard somebody ask him something, and lights up a fresh cigar.

‘No more day-old pompernickel,’ he gave her a reply at last and before she could realize just what he meant by that there was a taptapping at the door and there was Sparrow with a blue-and-white pencil-striped mattress on his back.

‘Got it in the section next to the ’lectric eye-rons,’ Sparrow boasted, dumping the mattress right in the middle of the floor, ‘just picked out the prettiest one, hauled it off the pile, told the girl I was from the basement, they got to have six down there right away to ship to the South Side store, special order, they got up here by mistake. She’s still waitin’ for me to come back ’n get the other five.’

‘Don’t tell Zosh how you got it,’ was Violet’s thought, ‘she’d be so ashamed.’

‘Yeh. But think how proud Frankie’s gonna be,’ Sparrow pointed out and turned to Old Husband. ‘I bought it for you, Old Man, it’s your comin’-home present to sleep on when I got to sleep in the bedroom. I don’t want you bein’ uncomfortable on the front-room couch.’

‘Don’t want.’ Stash kicked at the mattress petulantly.

‘What don’t you want, Old Man?’ Sparrow demanded to know. ‘You’d rather sleep on the couch wit’out no mattress, you mean?’

‘You pay board, what I want.’

So that was it. Just like somebody owed him something. For a moment Sparrow was so hurt he thought of walking right out and leaving Stash to try to handle Violet himself awhile. It took more than a new mattress for that. He himself was being extended beyond his own powers, he knew. ‘You talk like a bolt from the blue, Stash,’ he