‘I don’t know, Frankie.’
‘Tell me just one thing you do know then.’
Sparrow watched closely to see whether Frankie was putting on a bit of an act, to get at something he still wanted to find out. It was hard to tell. ‘I’ll tell you if I know, Frankie,’ he offered.
‘Then tell me just this – why do some cats swing like this?’
Solly didn’t know that either. He didn’t know what to make of the answer any more than he’d known what to make of the question. Yet Frankie was laughing, weakly on and on, just as if he’d said something funny. While that naked arm looked far too white to have any gold left in its veins.
‘You know the heartaches, Solly, I’ll say that for you,’ Frankie took breath long enough to say. ‘You always knew the heartaches. Why don’t you learn the good kicks too?’ Then the weak laughter began again, with something almost convulsive in it now, as though he lacked the strength to laugh but somehow felt he had to – till it ran into tears of such a barbed despair that Sparrow called to him like calling to someone far away, ‘Be yourself, Frankie!’ For a second he thought he was going to have to slap him to bring him back.
Frankie came back to himself, brushed the sweat off his forehead with the back of his arm and began flattering Sparrow. The punk heard the false note clearly now. ‘It ain’t just knowin’ the heartaches you’re good for, Solly. You know how to do a thing, too. I’ll say that much for a kid like you.’ Cause you’re the one kid knows how to fix the old junkie when Old Junkie needs a little fix.’ He shook his head like a drunk. ‘Whoof! Old Junkie’s spinnin’ like never before. Hit the main stem ’n make me right.’
Across the disheveled bed a new deck lay scattered. ‘He must of been shufflin’ a few hands to hisself just to keep in shape,’ Sparrow deduced and told Frankie, ‘I don’t know if I can find it, Frankie, it ain’t my line of work.’ But felt Frankie’s hand, cold as a surgeon’s glove, guiding his fingers. ‘There. Press. Slow. Now.’
Frankie clenched his fist tightly to bring out the vein. Above the elbow a little inflamed knot began to point right at the needle. ‘Operation McGantic,’ Sparrow heard him murmur.
Sparrow saw the blood spray faintly, tingeing the morphine pink – and pressed while his own eyes went blind. ‘It feels like I’m puttin’ it right into your poor heart,’ he thought. As the needle came out a slow trickle of blood followed halfway to the elbow.
Frankie lay sprawled loosely with his eyes shuttered; but with the first faint flush touching the pallor of his cheeks. As the pale morphine had been tinged by the suffering blood.
‘How’s my complexion?’ he asked teasingly, without opening his eyes at all.
‘Your complexion’s awright, Frankie. But you can’t deal on that stuff. Remember “Steady hand ’n steady eye. It’s all in the wrist ’n you got the touch”? Remember, Frankie?’
‘It’s all above the elbow now,’ Frankie answered, scratching his calf indolently. ‘I’m out of the slot,’ he assured Sparrow with a fresh confidence in his voice. The stuff was starting to hit, his eyes were dew-bright and the glow of health was on his cheeks. ‘Didn’t I tell you I got a chance to start beatin’ the tubs at a hundred-fifty a week? Krupa been askin’ around at the Musicians’ Club where can he get in touch with me, I guess some guys told him about that night at St Wenceslaus when I got everybody goin’ like fools the way I was in the groove. I may take it, I’ll have to see what he got.’ He went right into some little old tune or other, rapping his knees with his knuckles, tongue between his teeth and his neck waggling an imagined rhythm.
‘You got to gimme whatcha got,
You got to gimme whatcha got …’
‘That’s the best way to do, Frankie,’ Sparrow agreed earnestly. ‘Don’t let them get you cheap.’ After all it’s quite a trick to lose your strength and get a better job into the bargain. ‘Maybe you could get me somethin’ to do with one of them orchester leaders,’ Sparrow offered his services as innocently as he was able. ‘It sort of looks like I’m in that line now anyhow.’
Frankie yawned hugely. ‘Come here ’n scratch my back.’ And while Sparrow scratched his back he turned and twisted, with an animal’s ice-cold joy. ‘I’ve said it a hundred times,’ he told Sparrow after the punk had been permitted to leave off scratching at last, ‘this one time and I’ll kick it for keeps.’ He bent over to scratch his ankles and toes right to the nails.
‘And?’ Sparrow wanted to know.
Frankie looked up at him from where he bent his head over his shoeless feet. ‘I’m hooked, ain’t I?’
He sat up then, making a deck of the scattered cards in complete absent-mindedness, his hands straying blindly for the cards while his eyes searched, on the other side of the pane, for something far out upon the shoreless waters of the night.
‘I can’t do much for you in that line, Solly,’ he decided, still riffling the deck idly. ‘About the only thing I have open is a watcher’s job.’
‘A lookout, you mean, Frankie?’ It was time to start taking Frankie seriously again, he was coming down out of the clouds. ‘I’d sure like steerin’ better’n what I’m doin’ tonight. I’d rather have a square job than what I’m doin’ tonight.’
‘It’s not steerin’ exactly. It’s watchin’. Indian-watchin’, I think they call it. A little different but you’ll pick it up. It’s a new angle that’s just comin’ on.’
‘I’ll take anythin’, Frankie. Me ’n Vi ’r quits. Who’ll tell me what to do?’
‘Nothin’ to it, Solly. All you do is, first thing you get up tomorrow morning you climb that big hill they have out there ’n when you see the Indians comin’ you run right back down ’n tell the settlers. Nothin’ to it so long as you don’t fall asleep on the job.’
The light broke over Sparrow as the cheap gag was driven home. ‘I know,’ he admitted forlornly, ‘I listen to the radio sometimes myself.’ His face was peaked with disappointment as he waited now only for Frankie to pay him off for the delivery.
‘It’s your chance to tell him who rolled Louie that night,’ he told himself – and let the chance pass. What was the difference what Frankie thought any more? He rose to go.
‘Don’t go,’ Frankie begged him.
‘I got to,’ Sparrow realized, ‘I’m gettin’ that guilty feelin’ again, like the aces ’r gonna bust down the door.’
Without a warning Frankie leaned forward and slapped the punk squarely across the nose with the flat of the deck. The punk sat down. ‘What the hell is gettin’ into you, Frankie? I don’t have to take that off you.’
‘You got that comin’ for a long time, Solly.’
‘I tried to tell you once you got me wrong about Louie, Frankie. You wouldn’t listen. I wasn’t the guy got his roll. If I had we would of split like always. You can believe me ’r not.’
‘I know who got the roll now awright. But you still had it comin’.’
‘Awright – I ran ’n you got busted. I know I done bad then – but can’t you figure I got scared just like you done the night by Schwiefka’s hall? Can’t you figure what another department-store rap’d do to me, Frankie? I couldn’t even get paroled. Don’t that give me the right to get scared too?’
Frankie listened with his head moving a bit from side to side, unable to decide whether to listen a while longer or just to use the deck again. It had felt pretty good for a minute there. ‘It ain’t for that neither,’ he cut Sparrow short.
Sparrow watched the hand on the deck. ‘I won’t take another crack off you,’ he told Frankie quietly.
The hand drummed the deck a moment, thinking that over, then moved off the cards. ‘You want to know what for?’ Frankie demanded. And answered himself, ‘I’ll tell you what for.’
Sparrow waited. He wanted to know all right. ‘I don’t know why you done that to me, Frankie.’
‘’Cause you double-crossed me on the streetcar the time Cousin Kvork picked us up on Damen ’n Division for nothin’ ’n Schwiefka sprung u
s the next day. You didn’t have no two pair on that transfer. So I owe you nineteen more.’
Sparrow goggled, he was really stunned. He couldn’t remember the game played in the cell nor how he’d evened the score on the trolley.
‘Don’t give me the goof act,’ Frankie threatened him, ‘hearts for noses –’ n you losed both games.’
Sparrow got it then all right. ‘I don’t remember what I had ’r what you had, Frankie,’ he answered honestly. ‘But if you think I’m settin’ here while you try knockin’ my nose off you’re gonna get your own bust in a brand-new place.’ His hand touched the glass ash tray on the arm of his chair.
And felt hardly afraid at all. For the first time in his life he looked at Frankie with the knowledge that it wasn’t himself who would have to back down. ‘It’s the new way of doin’ things, you might call it,’ he explained.
Frankie tried to grin but the grin was weak. He scattered the deck across the bed in a gesture of surrender. ‘Maybe you won anyhow, I don’t know,’ he confessed. ‘I don’t even know what put it in my head. All kinds of things go through my head these days, how they get in there there’s no tellin’ any more. It’s just the way everythin’ is, I guess – you know how everythin’ is, Solly? Let me tell you how everythin’ is.’ He sounded like a man talking on and on for dread of something that will move through his brain the moment the tongue ceases its babble.
‘I can see how everythin’ is awright,’ Sparrow assured him.
‘No, you can’t see. Nobody can. Nobody knows, just junkies. Just junkies know how everythin’ is. Sit down, Solly – please.’
The light was fading in his eyes now, they were sinking into his head and the freshness the drug had brought to his cheeks had turned into a dull putty-gray. He said ‘please’ like a man begging for a dime and just the way he said it left Sparrow feeling that he himself had just swallowed a mouthful of dust. ‘If it’ll do you good to talk,’ he thought with the taste of dust on his tongue, ‘I’ll listen this one time. Because I knew you when you were the best sport I knew my whole life. What’s your story, cousin?’ he offered aloud.
Frankie coughed into his palm. ‘It’s like this, Solly. You put it down for months ’n months, you work yourself down from monkey to zero. You beat it. You got it beat at last.’ He was talking low and breathlessly, like one who fears that, if he doesn’t get his story told quickly it will never be told at all; like one who believes he is the only one who knows. Really knows. ‘You know you got it beat. You got it beat so stiff when the fixer says, “It ain’t gonna cost you a dime this time, I got some new stuff I just want to try,” you tell him, “Try it yourself,” ’n give him the laugh. When he tells you, innocent-like, “The hypo is in the top drawer over there, help yourself any time,” just to put it in your head how easy it’d be, you turn him down flat. Because gettin’ fixed is the one thing you’ll never need again all your life.
‘Three weeks later you wake up, it’s dark out but not like night ’n it ain’t morning neither – it’s just Fix Time. It’s comin’ on like a wave way out there, bigger ’n bigger ’n comin’ right at you till it’s big as this hotel, it hits you ’n you’re gone. You’re so sick you’re just turnin’ around down there under that wave not carin’ who knows, your mother ’r your sister ’r your buddy ’r your wife – anythin’ just so’s you can stop drownin’ for a minute.
‘Nobody can stand gettin’ that sick ’n live, Solly. You have to puke ’n you can’t. You just heave ’n heave ’n sweat ’n heave ’n still nothin’ happens – then somebody turns on the faucet in the sink or the bathtub down the hall ’n just the sound of water runnin’ rolls your whole stomach over on top of itself ’n you got to puke ’r die.
‘Then you don’t even know no more where you’re sick – if you think just for one second, “It’s my poor gut” – it starts bustin’ your brains out the back of your head just to show you. So you think it’s your head ’n it slams you a dirty one in the stones – it’s here ’n it’s there ’n you’re shaggin’ it in a dream, tryin’ to pin it down to some place you can feel it so you can fight it.
‘But it won’t stay still ’n you can’t get hold ’n if you don’t pin it in a minute you’re dead’ – he brushed the buffalo-colored shag of hair out of his eyes – ‘that’s all. There ain’t no “will power” to it like squares like to say. There ain’t that much will power on God’s green earth. If you had that much will power you wouldn’t be a man, you’d be Jesus Christ.’ He began drying the sweat out of his armpits with the pillow-case. ‘You know what you brought me in that little bottle, Solly?’
Sparrow didn’t know. Frankie knew he didn’t know. He wanted to tell Sparrow so that the punk would never forget. So that everyone in the world who didn’t know would know forever and always what Solly had brought him in the little brown bottle.
‘I knew, Frankie,’ Solly admitted. ‘I knew what was in the dirty bottle awright. I guessed when Pig asked me––’
‘You didn’t know a thing. You didn’t have no idea at all. You still don’t know. You just think you know. You think you know everything.’
Sparrow wanted to go now, he could scarcely sit still for restlessness. And yet it was so hard, it was just too damned hard, to leave Frankie talking to himself all alone up here like this. ‘What was in it, Frankie?’ he humored the man on the bed while watching him hopefully for signs of sleepiness. He could get Frankie’s shoes off if he’d just drowse a bit, then turn off the light and by morning they’d both feel better.
But Frankie didn’t look sleepy at all. A smile both benign and wan wandered across his lips and a look of childlike wisdom entered his eyes. ‘I’ll tell you what was in the bottle, Solly.’ He looked demure, he looked so sly, his eyes sought the floor in a womanish sort of coyness completely strange to Sparrow.
‘A itty-bittsy little old monkey, Solly, that’s what you brought me in the bottle. Such a little feller he can hide hisself right inside there. You know where my itsy-monkey is now, Solly?’
These changes in mood, so swift and strange in one always so slow in all moods, brought a cold tug of fear to Sparrow’s heart.
‘I guess he was just too little for me to see then,’ he humored Frankie again.
‘It’s just what I thought you’d say’ – Frankie looked triumphant – ‘’cause he ain’t little at all no more. He’s growed up into a real great big feller just since you been settin’ there, Solly. He weighs thirty-five pounds ’n he’s settin’ right here on my back usin’ all his weight ’cause he knows I got to carry him around wherever I go so’s I don’t get lonesome for nobody no more. Can you see him, Solly?’
‘Why don’t you try to sleep awhile, Frankie?’
But Frankie was wound up like a clock and there was nothing to do but listen to him till he ran down.
‘Some weeks he only weighs twenty-six pounds, that’s when I cut him down a little. Once I cut him down to zero, I starved the poor little feller to death. They buried him out at Twenty-sixth ’n Cal.’ N that’s a funny thing right there.’
‘It don’t seem so funny to me, Frankie.’
‘What I mean is so funny is when he come back to me last week he weighed forty-four pounds – where’d he put on all that weight, Solly?’
‘It must of been another monkey, Frankie.’
‘Can you see him yet, Solly?’
‘I think I can see him a little now, Frankie.’
Frankie grew cunning. ‘Want to take him a little walk yourself, Solly? There’s still two quarter grains in the bottle – you fixed me so I’ll fix you ’n then we’ll be buddies again like we used, helpin’ each other out ’n hustlin’ some mark so fast he can’t figure which one of us hustled him ’n then we get together afters in the back booth by Antek ’n nobody knows what we’re laughin’ about, just you ’n me, the good old buddies again ’cause bygones is bygones. What you say, Solly? A free pop on me? Just to see what it really feels like? Then you’ll know, you’ll be more broadminde
d like.’
‘I got enough worries without that, Frankie.’
‘That’s just the point, buddy.’ His voice began drifting somewhere the other side of the room, the other side of the curtained window, the other side of the street and the other side of the world. ‘There’s so many little worries floatin’ around ’n floatin’ around, why not roll ’em all up into one big worry? Just like goin’ by the loan shark ’n gettin’ enough to pay off all the little debts with one big one? That’s where I’m bein’ smarter than you, it shows I’m gettin’ out of the hole, it’s what you ought to do too so’s we can be buddies again: roll ’em all up into one big one like me, Solly.’
‘I don’t have that many, Frankie.’
Frankie laughed derisively, with a sort of loose contempt for himself and Sparrow and everyone. The only man Sparrow had ever heard laugh like that had been Louie Fomorowski. ‘You got more worries than you think, punk,’ Frankie told him. ‘You got more worries than Dick Tracy. Compared to you I’m little Orphan Annie.’ Cause my little worries ’r almost over but yours ’r just beginnin’.’
His voice returned from the other side of the world to stir the curtain a moment and came right up to Sparrow. ‘Why you think Pig sent you?’ Frankie pressed both hands to his temples as if trying to hold his mind onto a single big idea. ‘Get out of here, punk. I had it figured the minute you walked in that door, I just been tryin’ to hold you to see if I was right. Now I don’t care if I’m wrong ’r right no more––’
Sparrow didn’t figure it – he only felt it. He was at the door and the knob was in his hand – it was turned for him from the other side and he had to step back to keep from getting banged by the door, they came in that fast, and he hadn’t even heard a house key in the lock.