Indeed the Irony of It All had inspired another amateur to scratch a second portrait: a beat-out, tattered, crooked-limbed wreck, groping in two directions at once and captioned Chicago Justice Deaf Dumb Blind and Falling Apart.
In for a bum rap, one hand explained, I never rolled a drunk in my life.
While another commented knowingly: In for a bum rap too I never rolled a sober one.
That’s how it is, another had confided, when you hit some lousy bum the dough falls out of his pocket and you get the blame.
By the yellow night light’s glow Frankie saw how the four walls, as well as the floor – and by some frenzied acrobatics the very ceiling – recorded with equal fame the damned and the saved: those who would surely ascend the golden escalator reserved for good guys and their true-blue pals, the real sports and square johns capable of breaking any Kolkowski’s back; while upon the rusty freight elevator clanking miserably downward forever would go all copper johns, double clockers, lush workers and mush workers, deadpickers and turncoats, rats, pigeons, stooges, short faders and crap catchers, deadheads and deadbeats who had ever stood drinks for Kolkowski, loaned him a dollar or applauded that big flannel mouth.
Frankie could smell the walls. They were closer now than they had ever been; they bent together above him till the door seemed a part of the walls.
Walls which revealed that, by and large, the young men preferred the simple, straight-from-the-shoulder take-it-or-leave-it sort of warning:
All cops are stooges
Never rat on a pal
Get a steady job and stay home nights and keep off
N. Clark.
While at the very bottom of the cell some latter-day Moses had written off all preceding commandments: Everybody shut up. If you were any good you wouldn’t be in here.
In the growing light the wall legends continued like the continuation of a dream begun in another place: the legends that follow upon each other in all the tongues of man, from cell to cell and jail to jail, linking seas to cities and cities to plains, down the streets of all the world wherever a thief stands waiting behind steel bars and a turnkey waits by the wall.
In one corner some repentant bravo had inscribed a prayer for the salvation of all such sinners as himself, recommending them to John 3:7, and adding piously that he’d leave his body to the Board of Health and his ivory-tipped cue, locked in the middle rack at Spongy Kaplan’s Snooker Palace and Pool Parlor, to Hines Memorial Hospital, providing such sacrifice would bring just a bit more sunshine into the lives of his fellow men.
Have Doc Bunson call for my body personlly, this soldier of the Lord had directed in a testament above the water bucket, He is a personl friend of mine and no autotopsy is necessry.
While dated in the same week some revived will to live and still to do great deeds had come into the same wavering hand. Couched there in formidable obscenities the repentant bravo promised that same Lord he’d burn his old man’s house to the ground within the hour he made the street and found the matches; adding an invitation to all rogue males within the city limits to enjoy his wife’s favors on their first night out of the clink.
My wife only sleeps with her friends and she don’t have a enmy in the world. Call her at Madison 1–6971 and have yourselfs one hell of a time. The tramp married me for my alotment and my old man and her played the horses on my cash 19 months while I got scabies for my country overseas. Now I’m headed for almoney row my old man & that tramp still playing them on my dough I cant even get a winner off her she just gives them to the old man I can go scratch my dirty scabies and she says thats my todays hot tip for you soldier – How you like them onions?
Whether anyone like them onions or not, there they were, all ready for peeling.
Frankie rolled over onto his side to examine the opposite wall in a sluggish hope that there might be some drawings of women there.
But any one side of any jailhouse wall is never much different than any other side. There are only the same old threadbare variations on the same age-old warnings against all the well-tried ancestral foes: whisky and women, sin and cigarettes, marijuana and morphine, marked cards and capped cocaine, dirty laughter and easy tears, engineered dice and casual disease, bad luck and adultery, old age and shyster lawyers, quack doctors and ambitious cops, crooked priests and honest burglars, lack of money and hard work.
Girls who would and girls who wouldn’t. If they did they were no good and if they didn’t what good were they? One biographer wanted to know and another replied smugly:
All women are deseased
Yet went on to offer consolation for this blow:
We’re all victims of circumstance
And for further consolation to all of Circumstances’ victims:
Drink Dr Jesse Blue’s bay rum and get six months
While another hand countermanded all preceding instructions by commanding everyone, simply and to the point:
DRINK DERAIL
I’m just a jailbird, one bird of passage mourned, Give me wings ’n I’ll fly out.
The only bird that flies out of here is a pigeon, another pointed out.
Held Fri. 9 pm to Tuesday showup 96 hours, some green youth protested.
This place gives me the baloney blues, yet another complained.
America the Anti-Christ Nation, one announced obscurely.
Never again, one promised forever.
Frankie examined the myriad dates, initials, and hearts pierced by a hundred unkept vows. Melancholy memories of men who had since gone down the city’s thousand ways like sparks off a State Street trolley, leaving only these few poor scribblings to prove it had not been, after all, but a nightmare within a nightmare.
Frankie searched carefully, hoping to find the name or initials of someone he knew or fancied he once had known. But the single arresting detail he discovered was a woman’s scratching, accomplished with a hairpin or barrette and almost obliterated with time, from years when the tier had been used for women.
A whore’s life is always hell
She’s always living in a cell
Signed, one could see through the grime, painstakingly; certain that this inscription was all she would ever have to bequeath to all good hustlers who were to follow:
Lucille just a hard-luck bitch
What had become of sweet Lucille? Frankie wondered wistfully. And what was to become of Frankie Machine? Had unbearable bad luck taken her, as it seemed by way of taking him, for a long slow walk down a short and downhill pier? Or had it changed strangely, as his own was bound soon to change, just in the nick of time, on the night she’d met the Salvation Army drummer whose old man owned a Florida dog track? Had they truly reformed each other then? Had they, too, found, like Mr and Mrs Francis Majcinek would someday find, that everything turns out right after all? As everything always does? Had the dream man found his dream woman hadn’t, somehow, been soiled by a thousand and one nights on North Clark Street after all? Did they find that a million dollars really made a difference in the end? Had it really ended like all good double features ought?
Good luck or bad, faithless or true, Lucille was gone with the Pulaski’s tenderest close-ups, accompanied only by last night’s slenderest shadows. And the dead-cold fog of North Clark Street through which she tapped on through the mists of nights no man remembered.
Along the tier a hundred thieves argued in sleep with unseen turnkeys: the unseen pokies of all thieves’ dreams who stride, jangling the special keys to each thief’s private nightmare, down all the lonely corridors of despair. There was no delivery from the dead end of lost chance. No escape from the blue steel bars of guilt.
Somewhere far above a steel moon shone, with equal grandeur, upon boulevard, alley and park; flophouse and penthouse, apartment hotel and tenement. Shone with that sort of wintry light that makes every city chimney, standing out against it in the cold, seem a sort of altar against a driving sky.
Beyond the bars light and shadow played ceaselessly, as it ha
d played beneath so many long-set moons, for so many that had lain here before Frankie: the carefree and the careful ones, the crippled and the maimed, the foolhardy phonies and the bitter rebels; each to go his separate way, under his own private moon. Against a driving sky.
Upon the walls, as morning moved from the women’s tiers down to where he lay, Frankie fancied many shadows: of Blind Pig with his cane stuck under his armpit; of Sparrow shuffling along with a shopping bag in his hand; of Sophie wheeling toward him and Nifty Louie, head hanging loosely, walking in sorrow away from everyone. Antek the Owner bent over his bar as if in prayer; Zygmunt the Prospector counting all his money; and Record Head Bednar studying two strays across his desk as if to say: ‘I figured you two’d be back.’
Saw again the green baize table as it had been the night of the argument over the soiled silver dollar: Schwiefka looking down at him with the green silk bag in one hand and the other extended toward Frankie for his take. Yes, and behind Schwiefka, Bednar’s shadow waiting forever for his take of Schwiefka’s take.
Frankie Machine wasn’t happy; yet Frankie wasn’t too sad. He felt oddly relieved now that, for a while at least, all things would be solved for him. There was nothing he could do now about Sophie, nothing he could do about Molly, nothing he could do about boozing. Not a thing he could do about hitching up the reindeers for a sleigh ride through drifting snow.
‘It’ll be my chance to kick the habit for keeps,’ he realized. Caught between the wheelchair and the first floor front, between Old Crow and a little brown drugstore bottle, between his need for Molly Novotny and his need for the man with the thirty-five-pound monkey on his back, the dealer had found an iron sanctuary.
‘When I get out I’ll be straight as a cue,’ n Molly-O’ll be so proud we’ll stick together the rest of our lives ’n everythin’ on the legit,’ Frankie assured himself.
And meant every word of it, too.
It was during that loneliest of all jailhouse hours, the hour between chow time and Lights-On, when empty pie plates stand in a double row, one or two before each cell waiting for a trusty to return them to the kitchen. Those within the cells slept the uneasy evening sleep till a buzzer sounded a measured warning and the sleepers wakened. Then all said at once that there, out there, just the other side of the green steel door, the snickerers were coming in. To accuse someone of everything and almost everyone of something and snicker at everyone in between.
A holiday air seemed suddenly to festoon the tier, as if a play for which all had rehearsed many times was to have an audience on the other side of the footlights at last. No one seemed worried about catching a finger out there. Everybody was in on a bad rap so how could anyone get fingered?
Already the snickerers were waiting restlessly, in darkened rows, to identify the man who’d slugged the night watchman and the one who’d snatched the purse through the window of the moving El; for he who’d chased somebody’s virgin daughter down a blind alley or forged her daddy’s signature; tapped a gas main or pulled a firebox; slit the janitor’s throat in the coalbin or performed a casual abortion on the landlord’s wife in lieu of paying the rent. All the things that had to be done to help someone else out of a jam. The little things done in simple fun and the big things done for love.
The snickerers were really too serious-minded. They suspected everybody and helped no one; they were afraid of one another and had almost no fun at all.
Frankie, offstage among other bit players, heard the voice of the evening’s star and caught glimpses of that noble brow whenever the door opened and shut: Record Head Bednar lowering the mike to question a cap the color of any district-station corridor above a shirt broken out with blood spots.
‘What you cuffed for?’ Record Head longed to know.
‘Took a cab home was all,’ Frankie heard Blood-Spots explain.
‘That’s no crime. Did you pay the driver?’
‘I couldn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘He wasn’t in the cab.’
‘That’s the chances you take. Next man.’
The mike was moved before an old hallroom boy who stepped forward as proudly as a newly appointed ward committeeman at a politician’s banquet, quavering importantly.
‘Now I realize the true wort’ of friendship – if a man has friends that’s all he needs.’
‘You weren’t looking for friends with a nine-inch file in a dentist’s office. You were prospecting.’
‘I’m a maintenance engineer at Thompson’s.’ As if that explained the file.
‘You mean you have charge of the doughnuts?’
‘I got a good record there.’
‘You got a good one here too.’ The captain waved the charge sheet before the mike and passed on to the next funny fellow.
‘Back so soon, Julius?’
‘Back? I ain’t even been gone.’
‘Silly Willie here hustles schoolboys out of their lunch money with phony dice,’ Record Head explained and returned his attention to Julius. ‘What were you carrying a pistol for?’
‘For pertection.’
‘Protection from who? Those seventh-graders?’
‘I brought it back from the service.’
‘How long were you in?’
‘Thirty-eight days.’
‘How many times were you wounded?’
Julius permitted himself a derisive little one-sided smile, faintly contemptuous of all non-combatants, and let the listeners wait.
‘Okay,’ Record Head forgave him impulsively, ‘we’ll lock up the officer who pinched you. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘Then we’ll give you back the gun and an extra box of shells if you promise not to sue the city. Promise?’
‘Suits me fine.’
It suited Julius fine.
As the first line was led off the line behind the green steel door inched up a few feet and Frankie stood with a backstage view of the rows where, here and there among the listeners, a police badge glistened and all faces were dark and featureless. While upon the stage all faces were lined up under a glare that brought out every wrinkle, pimple and scar. A girl in plaid slacks was being urged forward by a police matron. Casting her eyes downward, the black arrows of the girl’s lashes became dipped in two great tears.
‘Save it for the jury, Betty Lou,’ the captain counseled her and turned to the listeners. ‘This is the slickest little knockout broad in seventeen states. How come you always pick on married men, Betty Lou?’
Betty Lou lifted the long damp lashes: the eyes held a wry and mocking light.
‘They’re the ones who don’t sign complaints,’ she explained softly. And gave the audience a hard profile.
So the men came on again: the ragged, crouching, slouching, buoyant, blinking, belligerent, nameless, useless supermen from nowhere. ‘For climbin’ a telephone pole at t’ree A.M. wit’ a peanuts machine on my back.’ ‘For makin’ anon’mous phone calls to call my wife dirty names.’ ‘Twice as big a crowd as here ’n a woman picked on me.’ ‘Went upstairs with a girl ’n came down with a cop.’
A shock-haired razorback with a bright Bull Durham string hanging over his shirt pocket’s edge: ‘Just throwed a rock at a wall ’n it happened to go through a window instead. So I followed through. But I didn’t have no intent of stealing.’
‘You never have. But you’re in and out like a fiddler’s elbow all the same. What was the stretch in the Brushy Mountain pen for?’
‘I got the wrong number was all.’
‘I think you did. The wrong house number.’
‘That’s right. The people were home. I was drinking pretty heavy.’
‘What do you do when you’re drinking light?’
‘Mind my own business.’
‘You haven’t got any business. For a quarter you’d steal the straw out of your mother’s kennel.’
The razorback tossed his tawny shock and his face in that light looked tawny too. ‘What I’d do for a quarter you’d
do for a dime.’ And held the captain’s gaze to prove it.
Record Head’s heart felt suddenly as if it were beating without love for any man at all. The finger of accusation leveled at him so steadily by a shock-haired boy revived in him the dream in which he was the pursued.
‘How’d you like it in the pen?’ he asked in old routine.
‘I didn’t.’
‘Why not? Wouldn’t the warden give you his job?’ That was always the answer to that one. They always stepped into it the same way.
Yet the light titter of lip laughter that followed, as it was always so sure to follow, didn’t fill the emptiness down the dry well of the captain’s heart. He listened to the next youth, an epileptic in a dark green wool sweater and a stocking cap, without really hearing the boy’s words at all.
‘Just havin’ fun with a little girl – I was in Dixon but my old man got me out, I was gettin’ worse. When I fool around a little I get better.’
‘Well,’ the captain thought absently, ‘we all feel better if we fool around a little’ – and caught himself up sharply. ‘I need a rest is all,’ he decided, and forgave himself uneasily.
As he could not forgive one of those up there under the lights.
‘A friend of mine went to sleep and I took his money before somebody else did.’ ‘For unbecoming words to a lady, I think it’s called.’ ‘For tryin’ to talk a friend out of trouble – he was settin’ in a patrol wagon, I told him to come out of there, so they put me in with him.’ ‘Went down to the West Side to round up bums for a labor gang ’n got picked up for one myself.’ ‘Picked up at an unreasonable hour.’
Of late all hours to the captain seemed unreasonable. ‘I know you,’ he thought cunningly of all outlaws. ‘I know you. I know you all.’
Till the next line’s shadows came on, and the outlaws followed their shadows.
Followed their shadows into the glare; and left the glare once more to shadows.
It made the captain want to shield his own eyes; for a moment he looked ready to cup his head in his hands. ‘The old boy is drivin’ himself as hard as he’s drivin’ the bums,’ Frankie thought with a certain malice. Then the glare hit his own eyes.