The Man with the Golden Arm
‘Hey! Pokey!’ DeWitt had heard the girl’s anguished cry too and was back at the bars ready to do fresh battle with the lockup. ‘Hey! Pokey! They just fished a Clark Street whore out of the river – run up ’n see if it’s your wife!’
Really going. Going for good and it wasn’t a gag and no vaudeville stuff about being ready to come down and do thirty days any time would get him out of an hour of the whole long dirty unlivable years. ‘I don’t want to go,’ Sparrow whimpered in a terror that wrung his heart. For Bednar’s own great hand had reached within and found that heart at last.
When Pokey came past, to see what the cabbie had to say for himself this time, Sparrow reached one thin arm through the bars and touched the pokey’s shirt sleeve.
‘I’ll make that phone call now,’ Sparrow told Pokey.
This year there was no party. There was only a four-foot Christmas tree, bearing a single star from the five-and-dime, to stand beneath the luminous Christ against the hallway wall.
And like a child waking from a dream of a single star, Sophie spoke the words she had spoken all the Christmas seasons of her life: Gwizadka tam na niebie. A starlet there on the heavens. For one more year.
On New Year’s Eve there came a brief challenge of cardboard horns from the bar below; and a single silvery siren called to them both from far away. Then all was still: the long, long year was gone and the new year had begun, borne in upon a revelry of cardboard trumpets blown by strangers. Blowing like their very own lives to somewhere far away.
Frankie had not gone to work. He went to sleep just after 2 A.M.
Slept. And had bad dreams.
Dreams of iron footsteps upon a spiraling stair with just time enough left to reach a pane blurred by either last year’s rains or tomorrow’s tears – only time enough left to get his hand on the latch and feel it grate with rust as old as the rains and all the strength went out of his fingers: through the streaked and spotted glass a monkey with a jaunty green fedora on his head returned his gaze. A small red feather in the fedora’s band was wilting in the rain. Bent in a sort of crouching cunning there on the other side of the pane, it gave Frankie the look which womenish men employ in sharing an obscenity with their own kind.
Frankie felt himself struggling to waken, for the monkey was tucking the covers about his feet, still wearing that same lascivious yet somehow tender look. Felt the unclean touch of its paw and saw its lips shyly seeking his own with Sparrow’s pointed face. To kiss and be kissed, and he wakened from the very pit of his stomach, with a bounding leap of his heart – the window was open, the dark shade was rustling, something was going wrong with him and someone was knocking softly and stealthily at his own hallway door.
The furtive knocking of one who wishes to waken but one sleeper in a room where a friend and a foe lie sleeping; and felt Sophie stir beside him.
He went to the door in his naked feet and asked, as softly as the hand that knocked, ‘Who’s knockin’ this time of the morning?’
Kvorka from Saloon Street, out of uniform, sweaty about the collar and whitish about the mouth, stood in the hall with the knuckles of his red-mittened right hand raised as if to conceal some evidence there of the new year’s earliest felony. Frankie shut the door noiselessly behind him.
‘The punk is cryin’ off, Dealer,’ Cousin had come to say. ‘Bednar come out of the room half an hour ago with the paper in his hand. The wagon men got the warrant, they’re havin’ coffee at the Coney ’n then they’re on their way.’ He started to give Frankie his hand, thought better of it and turned toward the stairs with his one last embarrassed plea: ‘Don’t feel too hard on the punk, Dealer. He bucked the old man in five different stations thirty dirty days before he bust. He been cryin’ downstairs there all night since he done it. Don’t feel too hard.’
‘Thanks, Cousin.’ Listening to Cousin’s hurried step down the leaning stairs, he called over the railing, ‘Look out for the loose board.’
Cousin was already safely past the open tread and safely out on the open street. Frankie turned, numb from cold or fear, back to the room, feeling for the knob as though he were still dreaming. Then came to with a sharp command to his own numb toes: ‘Move fast, feet. Jump off.’ And the cold hall draft nudged him anxiously, like a nudge from an anxious stranger: the downstairs door had swung open of itself and would bang back and forth there till the Jailer sent Poor Peter down to fasten it securely.
He had his left lace tied and his hands upon the bow of the right when the right hand started to tremble. It shook for a whole half minute while he watched it with a wan despair; then pressed his thumb down upon the knot and tied it with his left hand. When it was tied the trembling stopped as suddenly as it had begun; yet something continued to flutter there. Within his pulse’s fluttering.
‘Where the hell you casin’ off to?’
‘Just goin’ down for rolls, Zosh.’
‘Was somebody here?’
‘Just the paper kid.’
‘You got to wear a clean shirt to buy rolls these days?’
‘It’s Sunday, Zosh. What kind you want?’
‘The custard kind.’
‘They don’t have that kind on Sunday.’
But she had fallen asleep again, into a dream of fresh custard rolls every day of the week and chocolate éclairs on Sunday. He slipped his GI shaving kit into his combat jacket, fingers fumbling on the buttons, saw a couple bandages on the shelf and took those too, he didn’t know why. Then picked up an empty half gallon from under the sink, tapped his wallet to be sure there was still something in it and didn’t even look toward the bed to see whether she slept or watched as he left.
Standing on the open street with the empty in his hand, he hesitated to go to the left or to the right for the refund. It wasn’t that he needed the dime that badly – though he knew he was going to need every dime he could trap soon – but rather that it just didn’t seem right to be hunted by the police with a half-gallon empty in his hand. He couldn’t remember Burt Lancaster doing it that way at all. Burt never seemed to need a ten-cent refund.
For what Frankie sought, in that hesitating moment, was the place that would return him a refund on his very life, fleeing headlong, down back street and alley, so fast and so far he didn’t know whether he’d ever recapture it again.
The nearest open bar was the Widow Wieczorek’s and he moved into it with the hand that held the empty already bluish with cold. It wasn’t any kind of a morning to be on the lam – how the hell was a lamster supposed to stay warm in January anyhow?
Right at the front of the bar Umbrella Man stood as if he’d been leaning against it all Saturday night, waiting for Sunday morning’s earliest customer.
He certainly looked like he was battling the booze, Frankie saw. Umbrellas looked like he was dying for a beer. But he spoke no word as Frankie passed: only leaned forward and begged with his eyes, rolling them like a dying dog’s toward Frankie. Frankie shook his head. No.
Umbrellas leaned back once more against the bar to wait for someone who would say yes.
In the rear of the bar the Widow Wieczorek was stoking up the stove and Frankie sat studying the usual legends till she came to serve him. Feeling Umbrellas’ eyes upon him all the while.
Don’t say ‘charge it,’ one legend urged, this isn’t a battery station.
Don’t stare at the bartender, another requested, you may be goofy yourself someday.
Frankie hunched forward over the rail, pretending he was back in the Kentucky Tavern in Brussels, where he’d spent a riotous three-day pass just before his last convoy. When he opened his eyes the Widow was looking down at him and asking, ‘How’s by you?’
‘Is by me okay,’ Frankie assured her and shoved the empty toward her; but she shook her head, no soap. It was a Fox 400 and she had switched to Canadian Ace.
‘Take it anyhow,’ Frankie told her. ‘I just want to set a minute to get warm. You got a warm beer?’
The Widow brought him a warm beer
and he let it stand while trying to guess which of his two pursuers he might dodge the longest. Bednar or McGantic. How long was he going to be able to stay out of sight when he started getting sick? He was good for forty-eight hours at the most – then he was going to have to score for M, and he’d have to do it in strange territory.
He knew, as every West Side junkie knows, of the one-arm restaurant at a Madison Street transfer point that carries junkie traffic all night long. There the sallow unkjays sit, over coffee growing cold, facing windows which allow them to spot anyone pushing the stuff in any of four directions.
A convenient arrangement for both sides in the ceaseless battle for possession of heroin, morphine and cocaine. Convenient to the junkies and convenient to the narcotic squad, which could pick up any particular junkie – the squad knew most of the old-timers – without pursuing him all over the city. After the squad had picked up the one they wanted, those left behind felt a sense of ease, knowing they would not be troubled again for a few hours and could go about their business in relative peace.
The junkies were Sergeant Dugan’s business and Sergeant Dugan was theirs. There was an understanding between them which made it possible for him to pick them up like a father taking a wayward child home. They liked to be regarded as children, and it was as sick children that Dugan regarded them. They went with resignation. Occasionally one sought him out to give himself up, asking to be sent to Lexington for the cure, and Dugan would arrange the pauper’s writ for such a surrenderer. If he felt such surrender sincere. He would wish the junkie luck in kicking the habit.
Six months later Dugan would be cruising about with one eye out for that same truce-bearer and a warrant in his pocket.
Dugan was an earthy man and wished other men to stay on the ground. When he saw one propelling himself through Cloudland simply by twitching his nose like a rabbit, Dugan felt obliged, by decency as well as by duty, to bring him back down. Though the junkie might howl his protest all night long.
The junkies had nicknamed the restaurant the Cloudland. For it was precisely at this transfer point that those for whom there was nothing to do and nowhere to go on the ground got their transfers to the stratosphere. ‘It’s better up there than down here,’ they agreed, yawning a bit, having themselves a bit of a scratch together. But you had to know somebody who’d sell you a transfer before you could go visiting up there. The peddlers didn’t chance it, selling to some panic man and then having him pull his badge and say, ‘That did it, Fixer, now come along nice or come along dead.’
‘I’ll have to chance it there, it’s the only place I know around Madison,’ Frankie knew with the first faint sinking touch of dread. That McGantic was working for Bednar now, blocking him off into just those very places where the captain would look for him first.
The man with the thirty-five-pound monkey on his back was running him down and between that one and Bednar he had most to fear from McGantic. That was the wiser pursuer. For he knew Frankie’s next move before Frankie himself. Indeed, he told Frankie where to go and could wave to Bednar: ‘Here he comes.’ He would never shake off Bednar unless he shook off the sergeant first.
Yet for the moment Frankie felt that neither the captain nor the sergeant had really begun the hunt in earnest. Bednar would have to wait at least till Frankie’s innards began to tighten with the need of a charge.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Umbrella Man scoop a roach off the bar in a movement surprisingly swift for one so sluggish – and in the same movement jam it between his teeth. Frankie’s hand stopped on the glass: here came Umbrella Man, the bug’s blood streaking down teeth and chin and the bug itself crushed – feelers still waving between the teeth – ‘Man! Wash! Gimme wash!’ – pleading between the clenched teeth and his smeared face right up to Frankie’s.
Frankie turned his head away, shoved the beer toward Umbrellas and didn’t turn his head back till he heard Umbrellas drain the glass to the last drop.
‘He never done anythin’ like that before,’ Frankie complained to the Widow Wieczorek. ‘What’s gettin’ into him?’
‘He does it all the time now,’ Widow explained with a certain pride; as if she had taught him such a trick.
When Frankie left the empty behind him on the Widow’s bar, and Umbrella Man leaning in the exact spot he’d leaned when Frankie had entered, Frankie felt as if he were leaving a burden of some kind behind. Though he saw no certain possibility of ultimate escape, yet a reasonless confidence had him feeling that somehow he could find a way. He had not felt so light and free since the day of his discharge; when everything was going to be as it had always been because he had a paper in his hand that guaranteed it to be so.
‘They’ll never catch up with the boy with the golden arm,’ he boasted to himself while warning his feet: ‘Feet, just be careful where you take me.’
For he still felt he had one clandestine door in which to duck both Bednar and McGantic.
Molly Novotny’s door. Wherever that might be this night.
What was the name of the place Meter Reader had said he’d seen her? The Kit-Kat Klub, something like that, one of the jungle clubs between Madison and Lake. ‘Wherever it is, it’ll be safer than the Cloudland,’ he decided. He wouldn’t try the Cloudland till he’d tried to find Molly first.
He went south down Paulina to Huron and the day was so overcast that, though it was still morning, Christmas-tree lights and red-bulbed holly burned, here and there, as if it were already evening. ‘They ought to throw those things away now,’ Frankie thought irritably, ‘Christmas is over.’
He paused in a doorway, took a drugstore bandage out of one pocket and a five-dollar bill from his wallet. Folding the bill carefully, he plastered it onto the inside of his right arm right below the elbow. An old precaution. Strongarmers hesitated to pull a bandage off a man if he were wearing it near a vein. The police, however, with their greater courage, would yank a bandage off a man’s jugular for the sake of a two-dollar bill.
When Frankie reached Ontario he cut over to Ashland and caught a trolley south. One block south of Lake he got off under a black-and-yellow sign: Maypole Street.
Maypole Street is a long, cold street, and it runs both ways to the end of the line. Frankie blew on his hands and fished, with numbed fingers, all his identification out of his wallet and tossed the papers – voter’s registration card, photostated discharge and a season pass to the club-house at Sportsman’s Park for 1947 – into an alley bonfire. ‘My name is Private Nowhere now,’ he told himself with his wry half grin. ‘Private Nowhere from every place but home. And I won’t be here long.’
As he stood by the fire that burned out of an ashcan, warming his hands and liking the way the smoke curled so tenderly about the buttons of his jacket, a half-pint Negro girl came skipping down the alley hauling a quarter-pint one by the hand, the little one trying to skip just as high and fast as Half Pint. Both of them were wrapped tightly in some old red-sweatered rags and right in front of the fire Half Pint whirled Quarter Pint with one deft motion of her hand on the crown of the little one’s pigtail, crying, ‘Now you’re a human merry-go-round!’ Then both whirled on without so much as having seen Mr Nowhere from No Street at All.
Once he fancied he was being watched from somewhere above, but when he glanced up all he saw was an open window with a white curtain fluttering like a pennant there. Something about that fluttering made him feel homesick for someplace where he’d been nearly happy. The only place he’d ever had that had felt like his own. The one place to which he’d belonged at last. Had belonged so well he’d almost gotten straight in it.
A room with two lamps, one red and one blue. A heart-shaped face, so dear, so dear, that came to him out of the gloom. Near a candle red as wine.
He came to the open street and from somewhere near at hand, as if borne by the wires overhead, heard the familiar revelry of some old juke-box tune.
Directly across the street, above a tavern built below street level, an unlit ne
on legend announced:
PINK KITTEN KLUB
All cats welcome
That must be the joint, he hoped vaguely, and just as he went down the steps, as if they’d been waiting all morning only for his arrival, the neon legend lit up in green and red and the juke-box tune came clearer.
‘I wonder who’s boogin’ my woogie now?’
Frankie touched the bandage below his elbow where his fix money was wadded; his drinking money was in the half-dozen halves and quarters in his pockets. He pushed at the big red door.
‘Looks like some cats swing right here,’ Frankie observed, looking all about.
The captain felt impaled. It had been a bit too long since he had laughed. Felt joy or sorrow or simple wonder. When a light ripple, half protest and half mockery, moved down the other side of the wall he felt somehow appalled that caged men should laugh at anything. The ragged edge of that careless laughter hung like a ripped scarf upon an iron corner of his heart.
An iron heart, an iron life. Laughter and tears had corroded in his breast. In the whitish light of the query room a tic took a corner of his mouth and his lips worked trying to stop it, like a drunk trying to work off a fly.
For something had happened to the captain’s lips as well as to his heart. All his honest policeman’s life he had guarded both so well, knowing how little time there was, in the roistering world, for pity and loose talk and always too much traffic in the sort of thing anyhow. Too many women holding out pity like a day-old sweet roll out of a greasy bag – ‘We are all members of one another’ – what had that half-crazed priest of the line-up meant by that?
Something that even the punk had seemed to know when he’d said, ‘Everybody’s a habitual in his heart’? What did it mean that all the guilty felt so certain of their own innocence while he felt so uncertain of his own? It was patently wrong that men locked up by the law should laugh while the man who locked them there no longer felt able even to cry. As if those caged there had learned secretly that all men are innocent in a way no captain might ever understand.