In the city’s cornerless heart.
Little dull red lights burning all in a row and the terrible odor of insanity, yellow and cloying, forever just one door down, almost underfoot and just overhead and following softly forever like a moving pall in the disinfected, bought-and-measured air. Seeping out from behind some whitewashed door where, so remote, so lost to all, some lost one sang in a young girl’s voice, like a voice circling endlessly on a lopsided merry-go-round.
‘I feel so gay
In a melancholy way
That it might as well be spring …’
While Somebody nearer at hand kept asking faraway questions of Someone who’d rather laugh than answer a sensible word.
Someone who kept turning her head so daintily instead of answering like she should. Till Somebody took her arm and everyone pretended to be a little sad, going down the hall all together without touching the floor at all till they came to a certain numbered door where nobody had a key.
‘We’re all locked out,’ Sophie told them solemnly, and they laughed, though why that was so funny nobody knew.
The room was bare from the ceiling to the cold stone floor except for a built-in cot covered by one clean and well-worn sheet and a familiar-looking khaki blanket across its foot.
She felt a sick dread of the walls, they were as white as the corridors, as white as the cot, as the sheet, as the ceiling and as the faces that urged her inside: she drew back, sensing she would not return from here, making a polite child’s excuse. ‘Somebody lives here, I mustn’t go inside – but I’ll come back tomorrow and we’ll all have a little talk.’
They turned on the light to show her there was no one waiting for her here. Though she knew whoever lived in here was only hiding – he would come when they had gone and the light was out and the door locked behind her.
A room with neither window nor door, a room within many other rooms unlighted at evening by either neon or moonlight, where neither the city’s sounds nor Frankie’s cherished voice would sound for her again. But, feeling herself urged on either side, went forward with the crushed docility of the utterly doomed.
Heard the door click behind her for keeps and something locked in her heart with that same automatic key. When she looked around from where she lay on the clean and well-worn sheet, she saw no way to tell where the door had been at all: the walls merged into the door in a single whitewashed surface. Her slow eyes followed for some corner that would rest them, but wall merged into wall in a single curve and there was no place for the eye to rest. Around and around and around, on a whitewashed merry-go-round, ceiling to floor and back again. Till the heart grew sick and the sick brain wheeled, around and around and around.
Till the whiteness was a dull pain on the eyeballs, then a weight on the lids, and the merry-go-round slowed down, slowed down; till it moved on only to the timeless tunes of sleep.
She wakened in a low, sad light, with rumors of evening all down the hall and hearing, from the other side of the wall, a low animal moaning. It was that Drunkie John beating that poor hide of a Molly Novotny again, he was beating her harder than ever before, he was beating her with a certain contentment.
‘If he loves her, what are a few blows?’ Sophie thought with sudden clarity. ‘If a man tells you you’re his – what are a few slaps to that?’ Then, relapsing into an infantile smile as the nurse entered, asked, pretending to lisp a little, ‘Nursy, I want to brush my toothies, please.’
And after her teeth had all been nicely brushed began telling the nurse, still with the same babyish lisp, all the names she knew.
‘Sparrow. Vi. Stash. Rumdum. Zygmunt. Old Doc D. Piggy-O. Nifty Louie.’ Saying each one aloud lying on her stomach while the nurse sponged her back with something cool. Picturing their strange lost faces, faces never truly cherished at all and yet now seeming, suddenly, so dear, so dear.
Saying them like a child counting numbers. ‘Umbrella Man. Cousin Kvorka. Record Head. Schwiefka. Chester from Conveyor. Meter Reader from Endless Belt. Widow Wieczorek. Jailer Schwabatski and Poor Peter. Shudefski from Viaduct. Molly N. Drunkie John.’
And not till after the nurse had left, only then and more tenderly than any, softer than all, somehow more terribly, she whispered at last the last sad name of all––
‘Francis Majcinek. We got married in church.’
The sorrowful name of Frankie Machine.
And now they had been hunting him three weeks already. And where, in all Chicago, a junkie stud-poker dealer might be hiding, this season of thunderous winds and bitter skies, Zygmunt the Prospector might inquire, Antek the Owner might surmise, a certain ward super had to know; and Record Head Bednar could only try to find out. The captain had not reckoned on a woman whose heart could be trod upon by army brogans.
For none but God and Molly Novotny knew for sure.
They had searched the back-room stud sessions and listened in the gin mills for mention of a name. Beneath the hollow merriment of the backstreet cabarets they had watched the midnight creepers and the last-jag weepers; they had questioned forty lushes and pinched one hyped-up Purple-Heart blond. They had let the 26-girls cheat them without a rumble: the music and the traffic passed, great freighters forced the river ice, the murmurous bridges strained slowly upward, paused and as slowly fell. The clocks in all the railroad depots were synchronized to a second’s fraction; yet no one heard that name. The night’s last drunk left with the wind at his heels and the snow turning into a smoke-colored rain.
They followed drunks in a driving sleet and finished following a changeable rain. A rain that wandered aimlessly, like any hatless drunk, down sidestreet and alley and boulevard looking for any open door at all. In a Lake Street alley they found a five-foot-seven Pole wrapped in an army overcoat, with the marks of the needle like two knotted nipples tattooed into the breasts of a nude on his arm. So they beat him in a different station at exactly the same hour every evening for five nights running. Then kicked him out right on the sixth night’s hour.
Just as the smoke-colored rain began once more.
They picked up a six-foot-four North Clark Street drummer with a stick of marijuana in his wallet almost as long as himself and on South State they found an aging stripper who wept, ‘That’s the same guy walked out on me wit’ my watch after we run up a twenty-six-dollar tab at the Jungle Club – he said I could go to work doubling for Thelma Todd any time I wanted – Who the hell is Thelma Todd?’
They picked up weed hounds, shook down every peddler they spotted coming out of the Cloudland, badgered tavern hostesses and talked price with the hustling girls. And God help the weary hustler without a connection then.
Weed hounds, peddlers, hostesses and hustlers, all gave the law the names of half a hundred other hustlers and hostesses. Then names, alibis, threats, protests and counterthreats, all ran down and were drowned in the snow that, white as uncut morphine, melted in whitish surgical streams along the city’s walks and drains.
They had searched the Polish taverns, they had stood listening in the washroom at Guyman’s Paradise and had inspected the stag line at St Wenceslaus Kostka. They had picked up four blond dealers, three with broken noses and one with no nose at all, and Bednar himself still conducted the showups at Central Police with the unwavering knowledge that, sooner or later, the West Madison Street dragnet would seine up his fair-haired smash-nosed boy.
But his fair-haired boy wasn’t in the Polish bars and he wasn’t on West Madison. He slept on an army cot in a two-room first-floor cold-water flat where no one knocked but a Negro housekeeper called Dovie and the only other white who entered was Molly-O herself.
‘Everythin’s blowed over,’ Frankie assured Molly-O, ‘there ain’t been a line in the papers about it.’
‘If there ain’t nothin’ in the papers about it,’ Molly told him, ‘it just means they’re keepin’ it out so you’ll get careless ’n walk into the chair for them.’
Frankie sounded hurt. ‘There ain’t no chair about it
, Molly-O. It’s manslaughter is all. Happens every day of the week.’
‘It must be nice not to have to worry about a little thing like doin’ one to twenty then,’ she feigned admiration of anyone so lucky.
He grinned wryly. ‘Don’t forget that good-conduct time. I may get out in sixteen.’
‘You couldn’t behave yourself that long if they handcuffed you to the warden.’
Of course Molly-O was right, she had that way of knowing what was wisest and best for Frankie; it was only for herself she couldn’t tell what was wisest.
‘One to twenty’d be worse than the chair for you,’ she told him. ‘The shape you’re in you wouldn’t live four.’ Then she was sorry for saying it like that and came to him, he looked so beat, where he sat at the bare little table where he always sat, dealing to men he’d never deal to again; and took the deck from his hand. ‘Nothin’ blows over Record Head’s head but smoke,’ she told him, and perched on his lap with her hands on his shoulders. ‘You never did tell me what happened that night.’ It was by now only her right to know.
He squinted out across the littered Negro yard next door, where February’s first touch of thaw was glinting along the rubbled earth. A wheelless, one-fendered chassis of something that might once have been a Chalmers or an Overland stood there with little puddles along its single fender. How many wheelless, one-fendered years it had rusted there no neighbor could have told.
‘I come in contack with that certain guy.’
He’d lost so much weight off his shoulders, face and forearms since that night, albeit his bit of a beer paunch had clung nicely to him through it all, that she really couldn’t imagine him knocking a fullgrown man down unless he were armed with a couple house bricks.
‘I slugged him.’ The toughness was still in the grin if not in the biceps, the arms making a loose, outswinging gesture which she took to mean he’d first tried shoving that certain guy off. ‘Then his neck made a sort of dead sound ’n I knew that was it.’
‘His mouth, you mean.’
‘No. His neck.’ Now the grin came one-sided, both tough and weak, like that of a fighter who knows he’s beat trying to convince everyone he can take still more. He lifted the thin wrists toward her as naïvely as a child. ‘Wit’ these.’ He locked the fingers till the knuckles cracked and the fingers reddened faintly at the tips. ‘It’s all in the wrists,’ he told her thinly, ‘I used to have the touch.’
She ran her hands over the locked fingers curiously, trying to feel what power had been in them that was there no more, then parting the fingers slowly; as though they had been manacled too long to open of themselves. They dropped onto his lap of their own weight and the very hopelessness of the way he’d let them fall reached at her heart. To put strength back into those fingers and the light back into those eyes was what Molly Novotny wanted and there was a gladness in her just at having such a chance.
‘When you feel useless you don’t think nothin’ of throwin’ yourself away,’ she’d once told him. ‘One way is as good as another.’ She didn’t feel like throwing herself away any more, for she couldn’t do that and still be of use to Frankie Machine. ‘I never did somethin’ real good like this for anybody,’ she realized quietly, standing behind his chair with her hands on his shoulders, as he had too often stood behind Sophie. ‘Nobody give me the chance.’
He shut his eyes and put his head back and she held his face cupped in her palms a long time. At night he ground his teeth and jumped wide awake, jerking with fear, if she touched him.
One night he’d shaken her roughly. ‘Where’s the punk?’ he’d demanded.
‘In jail,’ she’d told him quickly.
‘Poor punk,’ he’d told her and lay back with his lips still moving in sleep.
Had they let the punk out on bond or had they put the hammers to him? Sleeping or waking, he was troubled not to know. ‘How can I know where I’m at when I don’t know where he’s at?’ he wanted to know of Molly-O.
‘You’ll never know where you’re at till you kick that habit – Jack the Rabbit,’ she teased him: it was a kinder nickname than his own of ‘Frantic McGantic.’
They could afford a thin little jest or two about the habit. It had been three full weeks since he’d been sick – she’d never want to see anyone that sick again all her life. She’d pulled him out of his last tailspin with nothing more than codeine.
He wouldn’t let her think for a minute that he’d kicked a thing. ‘I kicked it once,’ he told her, ‘’n nobody kicks it twice. You get off that hook once you’re the luckiest junkie in Junkietown – but nobody gets that lucky twice. You get hung up again you’re on the hook to stay. Jesus Christ hisself couldn’t come down off that cross.’
‘Why’d you get back on the stuff, Frankie?’ He irritated her at the way he still drove the nails into his palms.
‘The troubles started pilin’ up on me the day I got back in that room with Zosh,’ he remembered. ‘I didn’t know how to get out from under ’n the more they piled up the more it felt like it was all my fault, right from the beginning, when me ’n Zosh was little stubs together ’n I made her do the things she wouldn’t of done with nobody else. Whatever happened to me, it seemed like, was just somethin’ I had comin’ for a long time, I don’t know why. It’s why I rolled up all the little troubles into one big trouble.’
‘If you kicked it once you can kick it again,’ Molly decided firmly; it was in her nature to hope for others against all reason and against all odds. ‘God has more than He has spent,’ she liked to quote an old proverb; out of a ragbag of many old proverbs.
So all she’d do for him, when the cold sweats came, was to get him the codeine that kept the sickness down for an hour or two. It eased him a bit toward sleep if she sat beside him and eased him too.
But codeine had no drive, no tingle. ‘The stuff don’t hit,’ he complained like a child.
‘It ain’t supposed to, fool,’ she reminded him. ‘That’s the point. We can’t afford no more tingles ’n drives.’
There were days when he needed and wanted to bathe, yet couldn’t stand the idea of water touching his skin. It was one of those mysteries of the ever-changeful blood. He would sit saying wanly, ‘I’d like to take a bath, Molly-O – but I couldn’t stand the touch.’ Then he would get up to straighten a skirt or a jacket hanging crookedly on the back of a chair: ‘I can’t stand things to hang crooked.’ A drawer left open a minute troubled him till it was shut. A light bulb left swinging touched panic in him till it was stopped.
At night she walked him around the block as if she were walking a dog, staying close to him for fear he’d try to duck her and score somewhere for morphine. For she knew he wasn’t telling her how really badly he was needing it; it troubled her that, after all this time, she had not yet gained his trust. She had to lock him in, when she left for the club, with his codeine, his deck and a couple dated copies of Downbeat.
She hadn’t let him come near the club since that first night, for the police knew the place too well. The law was always seeking someone beneath the sign of the neon cat.
One night she brought him home a practice board she’d bought off one of the drummers, more battered even than his old one had been. The next morning he wakened her early, tapping lightly on it. All that day he kept hard at it with the radio murmuring the beat beside him; and no lush at all, not even a glass of beer. He didn’t even go for the codeine.
When she returned that midnight he looked happier than she’d seen him since the long-ago time when he’d taken her to the dance at St Wenceslaus. ‘You look like it’s going good, Dealer.’
‘Call me “Drummer,”’ he asked her, ‘’cause I’ll never deal another hand. I’m really gettin’ the swing of these sticks now.’ He turned the radio on to a program of dance recordings and followed the record all the way without missing a beat. Just to show her.
Yet hadn’t told her the best thing about it: that he had used both hands all day and the right had been as ste
ady as the left. All day.
‘Once you got the touch it never leaves you,’ he boasted to her like a boy.
He passed the first week of March between the practice board and the bed. He would simply go at the board till he was too tired to work longer and would fall into the sack and sleep, only to return to the board on waking. On the first sunny day of that month he made up his mind. ‘I got to get out ’n get a drummin’ job,’ he declared, ‘this practicin’ thing is goin’ on long enough. If things ain’t blowed over now they never will.’
‘There ain’t a safe job for you in this town, Drummer.’
‘I’ll drive a cab then. Hack all day ’n get a drum job nights.’
‘They’ll print you the first day ’n fire you the second ’n here comes the man on the third.’ She crossed her wrists to indicate the man from the law.
‘I’ll hustle freight by Kinzie Street.’
‘They’ll print you.’
‘I’ll drive a truck. I’ll go to work in a factory. I’ll get a mill job in Gary.’
‘They’ll print you.’
‘We’ll case out of town then.’
‘We can’t blow town on nothin’, Frankie.’
She never mentioned Drunkie John.
Yet, when she tried telling him she’d lost ten dollars of her pay playing twenty-six, he asked her simply: ‘You mean John is cuttin’ in again?’
‘He wants me to come back to him.’
‘Why lie?’ Frankie wanted to know. ‘You know as well as I do John don’t want you or any woman. You’re payin’ him ’cause he’s found out I’m sleepin’ here ’n he’s promised to button up. Why not just say it straight, Molly-O?’
‘I didn’t see what good makin’ things worse for you’d do,’ she confessed miserably. ‘Just when you’re startin’ to get back on your feet, lookin’ like you used to look the night we went dancin’.’ Suddenly she dropped the past and all its broken promises. ‘I’m afraid not to give him the money, Frankie.’