railroad – the seven ’n the ten pins. A guy offers you twenty to one you can’t pick it up. “I never seen it done my whole life,” he’ll tell you, “Wilman couldn’t pick it up.” He’ll even show you a record book where it says it ain’t been done in years. You tell him, “Put up ’r shut up.” So he puts up a double saw ’n you just stroll down the alley ’n pick ’em up with the lunch hooks. That’s all. Strictly on the legit.’
‘Is that in a Hebe bowlin’ alley ’r a Polak one?’
‘I done it on a guy on Milwaukee so I guess it’s a Polak one.’
Sparrow could see through that one right there. ‘That’s out. I’d get my little head cracked for sure. Then I’d be offbalanced on
‘That’d even you up then. You’d be just right.’ For no seeming reason Sparrow suddenly pointed an accusing finger at Frankie. ‘Who’s the ugliest man in this jail?’ he demanded to know and answered himself just as suddenly. ‘Me.’
Then sat down to brood upon that reply as though it had been offered by another. ‘What do I care how I look anyhow?’ he assuaged the insult he had so abruptly dealt himself. ‘What counts is I know how to get along with people.’
‘If you could get along with
‘I’m
‘I don’t know,’ Frankie sympathized, ‘it’s just that some cats swing like that, I guess.’
Whatever Frankie meant by that, Sparrow skipped it to supply his own explanation. ‘It’s ’cause I really
Yet he poked more fun at his own peaked and eager image, the double-lensed glasses and the pipestem neck, the anxious, chinless face, than did all others together. He was too quick to take the sting out of others’ jibes by putting them on his own tongue first – his anticipation of insult was usually unfounded, the others had not been thinking of Sparrow’s ugliness at all. Others were long used to him, he alone could not get used to himself. All he could do was to smile his shrewd, demented little grin and just be glad he was Solly Saltskin instead of Blind Pig or Drunkie John.
Sitting tailor-fashion on the cement floor, he blinked up at the white-washed walls as they were lit by the first half glow of the nightlights along the tier; blew the jailhouse dust off his glasses and brought his cap around till the peak was low over his eyes to express his feeling that he wouldn’t be going anywhere before morning.
‘I’ll bet you don’t have a cap on.’ Frankie was off again on his endless challenging of the punk; Sparrow fumbled a moment to be certain that he had, yet declined the challenge. ‘I’ll bet you don’t have shoes on, I’ll bet you aren’t smoking a cigarette. I’ll bet I can get on a streetcar without a transfer, say nothin’ to the conductor, pay him nothin’ ’n walk right on in. I can’t tell you the answer to all those, I don’t want to expose myself.’
‘I won’t expose you ’n don’t you expose me,’ Sparrow offered, standing up to shake hands on that equivocal pact. And having shaken, began diverting himself by swinging, hand over hand, from the great beam directly overhead. ‘Look at me!’ he demanded. ‘The Tarzan of the City!’
Frankie hauled him down by his spindling shanks.
‘It’s just the new way of walkin’,’ Sparrow explained, ‘we got all kinds of new ways to do things since you come back, Frankie.’
‘They’ll get you in trouble the same as the old ways,’ Frankie assured the punk glumly.
That night, while the little twenty-watt bulbs burned on in a single unwinking fury down the whitewashed tier, Frankie Machine was touched by an old wound fever and dreamed, for the second time in his life, of the man with the thirty-five-pound monkey on his back. His name was Private McGantic, no one knew why; yet he stood, stoop- shouldered by his terrible burden, in a far and sunlit entrance to a ward tent where Frankie lay once more on his old army cot.
No other soldier lay along that double row of neatly made-up cots, but Frankie could tell that the private squinting into the tent had been sent by the dispensary. The winter’s sun on his face revealed a hospital pallor; and the eyes looked so bleak below the dim and huddled mass on the shoulders.
‘I can’t get him off,’ he complained to no one in particular, with a certain innocence where one expected shame: a voice like that of a child confessing an unclean disease without sensing any uncleanliness. ‘Something has happened to him,’ Frankie felt. The private was pointing to where, on the ward sterilizer, a GI syrette, out of some 0 first-aid kit, lay with the GI quarter-grain ration of morphine beside it, melting whitely even as he watched.
‘A shrewd one all the same, coming between shifts. He knows I’m the guy who knows how to get the monkey off, he waited till the corporal went to chow,’ Frankie decided, ‘I’m not getting into trouble on some private’s account.’
But the fellow kept looking at him in such dumb misery, afraid to come inside and too sick to leave while he had any hope of relief, that Frankie finally heard himself say, ‘You can use my tie.’ He looked up and the private was gone, so he got off the cot, the long dull pain in his liver began kneading the gut, the needle was full and ready and the tie was hanging neatly over the suntans and there was time, just time. He had the tie about his arm, trying to bind it with one hand an inch above the elbow but his fingers fumbled with a nervous weakness, he felt fevered and had to hurry and right outside the corporal’s voice said, ‘I’m going to catch him at it today’ – the needle curved softly into some soft sort of useless rubbery fever thermometer, someone put a flashlight right in his eyes and he wakened on his back in the cell to its accusing stare. With the old pain beating behind his navel.
The pain left off slowly. Some patriot down the tier was using a reflecting mirror to waken anyone it happened to hit. The cell was full of a drifting flesh-colored light and the murmuring rumdums were being let out of the cells to wash, break wind, hawk, stretch, spit and scratch their hairy bottoms.
Frankie got up and went to the bars, without waking Sparrow, to watch the Republic’s crummiest lushes lining up to dip their hands gingerly and touch their foreheads, each with a single drop, as if it were holy water and each were on his way to confession instead of to twenty dollars or twenty days on the Bridewell floor.
Frankie Machine had seen some bad ones in his twenty-nine years. But any one of these looked as though all the others had beaten him all night with barrel staves. Faces bloody as raw pork ground slowly in the great city’s grinder; faces like burst white bags, one with eyes like some dying hen’s and one as bold as a cornered bulldog’s; eyes with the small bright gleam of hysteria and eyes curtained by the dull half glaze of grief. These glanced, and spoke, and vaguely heard and vaguely made reply; yet looked all day within upon some ceaseless horror there: the twisted ruins of their own tortured, useless, lightless and loveless lives.
Though he had seen not one man of them in his life before, Frankie knew each man. For each was seared by that same torch whose flame had already touched himself. A torch which burned with a dark and smoldering flame from within till it dried a man of everything save a dark-charred guilt.
The great, secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one. Guilt that lay crouched behind every billboard which gave each man his commandments; for each man here had failed the billboards all down the line. No Ford in this one’s future nor ever any place all his own. Had failed before the radio commercials, by the streetcar plugs and by the standards of every self-respecting magazine. With his own eyes he had seen the truer Americans mount the broad stone stairways to success surely and swiftly and unaided by others; he was always the one left alone, it seemed at last, without enough sense of honor to climb off a West Madison Street Keep-Our-City-Clean box and not enough ambition to raise his eyes back to the billboards.
He had not even been a success in the taverns. Even there he could not afford the liquor that lends distinction nor the beer that gives that special glow of health, leading, often quite suddenly, to startling social success. He had snatched snipes, on the fly, of the cigarette that clears the mind for the making of swift decisions in sudden crises with the fire still alive in the tobacco. Yet always, somehow, by the time the paper had touched his lips the tobacco had long gone stale. There must be something wrong with his lips.
All had gone stale for these disinherited. Their very lives gave off a certain jailhouse odor: it trailed down the streets of Skid Row behind them till the city itself seemed some sort of open-roofed jail with walls for all men and
