But in a white fear she clung to him, her hand pressing him hard against the wall. He wheeled her about by her shoulders and shoved her hard. ‘Stall them.’
The little silver heels went tap-tap-tapping like a silver hammer on stone down the concrete and up the little flight of stairs, like tapping up the little flight of stairs into her dressing room, and the door slammed behind her. Good girl. She’d do as he’d told her.
Just like he’d told her, plus a year and a day, and what tapping the little silver heels would do after that wouldn’t amount to much. A bit on the backstreet pavements after dark perhaps and not much more. Then his own position broke upon him.
One squad in front and one in the back and the aces in the alley sitting there playing it safe.
‘That John must have said I was packin’ a rod to make hisself look good,’ Frankie guessed. Well, the boy with the golden arm had been lucky once, a long time ago, this must be the spot where the old luck started coming back – just when it couldn’t get worse. He got back down the gangway and down the half flight to the basement. To listen one moment at the basement door for the housekeeper’s heavy step, heard nothing but a rat’s light scuttling and ducked into the gaseous darkness, bending under the low-hung piping to the single ground-level window.
Overhead he heard the military clumping, from small room to small room all down the hall, the banging at doors and the calling up the stairs, the shoes and shouts and threats of the Lake Street aces. He swung the window open from the inside, latched it carefully onto a little rusty hook in the basement ceiling and got out onto the stone walk between the walls.
He had gained the distance of the building’s breadth, nothing more. He would be that much farther away from the aces when he hit the alley, their eyes would be just a second slower to spot him when he walked into view, if he hit the alley in the spot a next-door neighbor would hit it. He pulled his cap down low and shoved his hands in his pockets to give him that fraction of a second it would take for them to make certain he was their man.
‘If she can hold them two more minutes,’ he prayed, feeling the brick against his back.
A lanky Negro in a baseball cap paused, on the walk that fronted the house, to rest a bat on the toe of his left shoe and study Frankie as gravely as a scout out looking for pitching talent. ‘They get out for spring practice early around here,’ Frankie thought hurriedly, crossing himself for the first time since he’d left County. He was going to need somebody’s help, that was for sure. And came out into the alley standing up thirty feet behind the squadrol.
Shambling along like any early afternoon bottle boy, he counted four El girders before he heard the aces rumble. ‘Man out the basement!’ someone called and ten yards ahead, with two girders still to pass, the iron steps of the El waited in the checkered sunlight.
‘You down there!’
Now he was for it and yet shambled listlessly on – a deaf, dumb, half-blind drunk of almost any color at all going nowhere in no particular hurry – he’d be good for one warning shot and the ace gave it to him: it whined high overhead into the ties, the next shot would be for promotion and he went low, assault-course fashion, zigzagging with the girders sheltering his back, thinking, ‘I done this three times awready – it’s all in the Service Record,’ and up the iron steps three at a time, the promotion shot whammed into the iron inches below and a brief, cold, painless flame, like the needle’s familiar touch, brushed his heel. He went past the ticket taker head down, heard 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 mu
sic 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 refused their food, their voices, their hands and their terrible eyes.
Then, too abruptly, had turned strangely docile. ‘That’s a real good girl,’ she heard the nurse tell the doctor. ‘She’s just as good as she can be now, Doctor, we’re ever so proud of her.’ Without looking at their eyes Sophie was pleased. She had caught the falseness of the nurse’s tone and sensed her sudden docility had them more worried now than had her hostility. They didn’t know how to bring her out of it. They knew that her docility was feigned; but couldn’t reach her through it. For it wasn’t docility. It was a wall.
Behind it she began evading them. So what they wanted of her now was exactly what they had first punished her for: to weep against them, to curse them, to beg them to let her go and to throw the food on the floor in a biting spite.
Now she ate only so long as they guided her hand to her mouth and not one spoonful more.
‘Just try eating this yourself. You can eat and walk too. If you just wanted to.’ Underneath the warmth of the nurse’s tone was a concealed rage at this one who wouldn’t come out of the shell and was wiser in her spite, somehow, than any of them.
Right along with breakfast, the next morning, the nurse brought a deck of cards to test this one’s wisdom, and Sophie understood right away. When she had all the cards in the world counted she could go home. That would show them she was as smart as could be, so they would have to let her go.
So it was that, knowing they watched her secretly, yet feeling wonderfully at peace with herself, she sorted the cards most carefully and counted them one at a time to be sure not to make a single mistake and spoil all her chances. She could tell by the way they stood, a bit to the side, so white and stiff and proper, the way good doctors and nurses must always stand until they are told to go away.
Sorted and counted so carefully, according to some strange, wanton pattern drifting like a rainbow-colored fog bank through her mind, counting by color and whim and a wayward cunning the way she’d counted falling snow from a window that faced the El.
And when they were all properly counted began throwing them one by one, selecting this one and rejecting that, because this one was a good little card and that one had been naughty – and always somehow picking the one they hadn’t expected at all – the very one she knew they hadn’t seen, since it had been hiding from everyone but herself. Tossing them according to the slow suspended motion of the snow that had fallen so slowly all night long and he hadn’t come home at all.
Tossed them toward the cot’s iron corners, making each one come down face up or face however she wished, just by telling each, in her mind, which way to land as it fell; so each did his trick just as he was told.
When it was all done at last and time to go home she looked up and told the doctor pleasantly, ‘Now you must tell the precinct captain to bring my new-look dress and the green babushka so I can go home looking nice,’ and added, just because it always pleased her to say it, ‘you with the cooky duster.’
‘I’ll tell the precinct captain,’ Cooky Duster assured her, his grave gray eyes never leaving her face for a moment. ‘I’ll tell him you’re moving to another precinct.’
She looked at them both then, with such seeming trust, that something of pity stirred beneath the white-starched hospital jackets. For they saw a child’s face, puffed by some muted suffering she could never tell. The face she had rouged, from the nurse’s compact, so it was that of a child painted to look like a clown’s.
And the eyes so dark and buttoned so tightly. So pinched by that private, mid
night-colored grief.
The doctor nodded to the nurse, saying something Sophie wasn’t supposed to hear at all. So she spoke right up and told them to their faces, ‘You can just tell them the whole business is a dirty lie and everyone has to stop pretending it isn’t right this minute.’ She saw their look of genuine amazement and paused in a quick fear that somehow she had given herself away and would not be going home after all. For both at once urged her to say more, say something more, anything more. She made a slow, weaving motion then with her hand and sang teasingly, just for Cooky Duster to hear: ‘Oh, Doctor – you do me so much good.’ Then hid herself behind her eyes and grew so rigid, under the nurse’s stroking, that the doctor had to tell the woman to stop.
‘There’s real spite for you,’ Sophie heard the nurse decide.
That night, just to show what she thought of them both, Sophie went down the street lined with the picture-postcard trees, pushing herself on the single skate; trying to keep the skater ahead in view all the way to the porch with the leaves strewn along the arc lamp’s broken light.
But there, for the first time, she was left all alone in the dark. It was later than ever before and he had not waited to show her the way back. So dark, so cold, so far to go with leaves rustling so darkly all around. Till the chimes of old St Stephen’s rang once and the wind began blowing the flies away. The lights went on and a voice said right in her ear: ‘What are you thinking of right now, Sophie?’
She drew her knees to her chin and showed the voice what it was like to be dead.
Whenever they peered into the whitewashed room after that they saw only a gently rocking shadow in a long gray nightgown on the built-in cot, her head in her hands and her knees to her chin with the playing cards scattered and forgotten. Like everything else she had scattered and forgotten, across the cold gray concrete at her feet.