The Man with the Golden Arm

her call once and then yank the cord. Bong! ‘Mister!’ and the bong was lost in the oncoming thunder of the Loopbound El pulling up, pausing and pulling away.

Leaning flat against the door, he caught one brief flash of the car in the alley below and then the alley was gone in a rush of city sunlight. ‘Bednar’s gonna be awful mad at someone for this,’ he thought softly; and stopped hiding. He was on his way.

Sitting with one arm across the open window while the city rocked along below, he wiped sweat off his forehead with his cap and felt the sweat clear down to his socks. ‘I only hope they don’t go too tough on Molly-O,’ and felt the old pang of conscience: something happened to everyone, it seemed, who came too close to the man with the golden arm. ‘I’ll make it all up to her some day,’ he eased himself out of the vise.

But it was hard, with the breath hardly back in his lungs, to ease himself far. He counted three stations: they had just passed Franklin and Wells when the sweat in his socks began stinging and he looked down.

He was on his way all right. With a sockful of blood.

A sockful of blood and an hour and a half to the rush hour. Frankie coughed a bit into his hand, the little dry junkie’s cough that starts coming on when trouble starts coming. He looked down the car: there were only a couple women sitting, with their backs toward him, down at the other end. And felt the first cold surge of the sickness. ‘I’ll stop by the drugstore ’n get cough medicine,’ he decided, pinning all his hope now on codeine.

Knowing that, without Molly-O, neither codeine nor paregoric could do it. He undid the shoe’s lace with fingers that weakened momentarily. When the conductor passed he crossed his ankles to conceal the bloody shoe and looked out the window all the way to State and Dearborn. The car began filling.

If he could score for just half a grain he’d be good for two days; and fingered the fiver in his pocket. ‘I’ll double back on them.’ He walked, limping as lightly as he might, across the transfer bridge. ‘Old Doc D.’ ll remember me, he’ll patch the foot ’n Owner’ll let me have the dough to hide out with till it blows over ’n Zygmunt can fix it. I’ll make it up to everybody.’

With each step downward to the northbound platform he let his hopes go up an inch. If he could just make it back to the Division Street Station ahead of the rush-hour crowd, before he got just too damned sick. The Logan Square El rumbled up with the spring’s last snow rusted along its roof.

‘They’re runnin’ right on time today,’ he congratulated the CTA, reminding himself with mock seriousness: ‘I still owe ’em fifteen cents.’

The moment he felt the El picking up speed as it left the Loop he began fancying the aces waiting for him, harness bulls and soft-clothes dicks, on every West Side platform: twice he changed seats to get away from the station side. At every stop the car got more crowded; till there wasn’t one seat a restless rider might change for his own.

When the conductor called ‘Madison!’ he knew he wasn’t going to make it to Division, he’d be flat on the floor of the car by then. The ice was under his heart and the bones were beginning to twist. He got off just in time to keep from being pinched by the El door.

The air, after that of the closed car, brought the sickness down and when he got to the bottom of the Madison Street El stairs at Damen he saw a bundle of tabloids, bound, for return, by newspaper twine and picked them up on a hunch as fast as he’d ever had on a pair of dice or a last closed card. ‘Makes me look like the corner paper hustler,’ he decided. ‘Innocent-like.’ He felt himself growing more sly by the moment, limping east, block after block, toward the Cloudland, down a pavement thronging with overalled winoes, past curbs littered with bottles and butts. Once having to step a bit to one side to allow a white-aproned bartender, busily backing out of a bar door with his hands wrapped about the ankles of a drunk so limp he would have seemed only a bundle of ragged clothes except for the gleam of the sun on the naked white ankles: when he had the wreck in the middle of the walk the bartender simply left him there and went back to work. Leaving the ruined sleeper lying flat on his back with his fly open to the blue and mocking sky.

Two doors down Frankie felt himself going and turned, holding the papers he had forgotten in a sudden sly flicker of pain in his groin, into a hallway bearing a simple invitation:

HOTEL

Men Only

And now it was time to ride the whitewashed merry-go-round once more with laughter all the way. So she closed her eyes and made the secret finger signs that started the music and the wheels, spreading her fingers over her lips to let the laughter through. She was going farther than ever this time. Yet – feeling the roughness of the flannel nightgown – no one could go calling like this. Where were her garters and stockings and skirt?

They had taken her garters, they had taken her purse, they had taken her hand mirror and locked her door. They had taken her dark, loose-fitting dress and her white, tight-fitting pride. ‘How do you expect a person to look neat without even a little mirror to peek into?’ she asked the doctor. ‘How am I supposed to comb my hair?’ Coming so close to him that he held her hands to her sides, not seeming to trust her at all, though she liked the touch of the hands. Then before he had time to say a word, got one finger loose, pointed it at his little mustache and laughed right in his face: ‘Look at the cooky duster, girls!’

She would fix them all. If they didn’t let her have the things a decent person should have, she’d just let herself go, hair, face, figure and nails. Till they’d be so ashamed they’d come in with a little white dressing table and fingernail polish and she’d make herself proper again; for when proper people came to see her.

Sometimes at night she heard the proper people coming down the hall and not any of your West Division Street hides either. Real refined devils from Augusta Boulevard. But when they heard how badly she was dressed they kept right on going; to call on someone a bit more in the fashion.

So she’d have to go visiting justas she was and allin her own strange way. Rocking herself on the cot’s iron edge with a pillow behind her back as though fancying herself still in the wheel chair, her knees came up slowly toward her chin, her head went ever so slowly and sleepily forward into her cupped and waiting hands. Rocking herself gently and steadily so, she felt herself going into the dark on the one-way merry-go-round, rocking along to somewhere ever so pleasant she had been sometime, somewhere, before. A rocketing, darkening, winding trip, all the way to Sometime Street where there was always dancing down the whitewashed, lopsided walks.

But mustn’t speak to a single soul on the way or they’d come and take her back. She had to let everything go, keep both eyes closed and never peek, that was the whole trick of riding the whitewashed merry-go-round to the whitewashed lopsided streets. The merry-go-round that rolled in, rolled out, rolled right along through night and day, down the ceaseless carnival that kept all-day holiday now in her brain: nurses and card dealers, doctors and all, policemen and landlords and priests and blind peddlers – not a word to a single soul, she had to let everyone, all of them go and never look back at any.

For when they found out where she was trying to ride they would force her back on the iron cot. There was some sort of house rule that forbade her to leave by either the door to the room or on the merry-go-round: she would waken with her spine throbbing and her wrists still hurting from where they’d been twisted to force her back and she would know they had found her out again.

She mustn’t do that, they told her, ever again. She mustn’t go there, for some night she wouldn’t get back at all. She would find it was darker and colder there than she’d ever thought; so dark and so cold and so far that no one could help her find the way back. They stood around looking down at the stray-haired woman with such peace and light in her eyes; and when they were quite through telling her what she must and must not do she looked at them all and, very slowly, told them everything they had to do.

For she was on to all their tricks and knew a thing or two she wasn’t telling. She wasn’t telling one of them of the magic skate she wore which got her back, all the way, every time, because of a certain skater who showed her the way, far up ahead with a sort of light about him no matter how dark and cold it was behind.

Small wonder they didn’t want her to leave, they were getting paid well enough to keep her. What they were really afraid of was that she’d bring her business elsewhere.

That was why they wouldn’t return her clothes, why they kept on taking her temperature to pretend they thought she was sick. That was why they took to surprising her. The door would open without warning in the middle of the night and the light would go on – they’d catch her at it then, her head in her hands and her knees drawn up. It got to be something of a game: when she lost she got the needle.

They never knew of the times they never caught her at all.

At first she had fought against them, spat their thermometers out on the floor, bitten a nurse’s hand and