The Man with the Golden Arm

  ‘Besides, the cards ain’t even greasy,’ he decided, ‘I put your Saturday Night in a Whorehouse powder on ’em to make ’em slip good.’ He shifted the match between his teeth. That had been a pretty good one all right. ‘You don’t let me practice on the tubs, I got to do somethin’ to kill the pass-time.’

  ‘Where’s my pass-time then? A dawg’d be my pass-time oney I don’t count. I count fer nuts. It’s just you ’n that secondhand drum box that counts.’ She wheeled up to him, her tone turning to a plea as she came: ‘’N it’d give you somethin’ to do too, honey. You could take him out for air ’n bring back some beer.’

  She lay her fingers, so soft, so cold, upon his own hard hand.

  ‘Beer ain’t no good for you, Zosh,’ he reminded her, ‘the croaker said it wasn’t no good for you account you can’t exercise. It blows up your belly ’n the bubbles go to your head. Here’ – he proffered the deck – ‘pick a card.’

  The fingers upon his own turned to bloodless claws – he drew his hand back fast. ‘Ever’thin’s no good fer me,’ she wailed and slapped the cards out of his hand. ‘Little puppies ’n even havin’ a little beer, to have somethin’ to do. I’ll be twenny-six years for Christmas ’n just look how I am – a old lady awready!’

  Abruptly the loss of all her bright hours enraged her: ‘Never say “croaker” – I don’t like it when you say “croaker.”’

  ‘What do you like, Zosh?’ He just thought he’d ask.

  ‘What I like is when I mix that dark beer wit’ the light stuff!’ She had pinned him to the sink with the wheels of the chair touching his shoes. ‘It’s that kind I like, what I really go for. Oh godamnit, don’t you even know what I like yet?’

  When her voice rose in that rattling whine he remembered the distant beat of artillery and the sudden applause of M.G. fire.

  ‘Somebody was trying the latch last night,’ he told her, inching his toes back from the wheels.

  ‘It’s just the way the El shakes it,’ she explained. ‘It done that before you left ’n you wouldn’t fix it then ’n it’s gettin’ to look like you never will now.’ Her hand tried to recover his own. ‘Everybody got to have a little bit,’ she told him pleadingly.

  ‘A little bit of what, Zosh?’

  ‘A little bit of beer, a little bit of fun,’ she told him in her thin sing-song. ‘A little bit of anythin’, a little bit of love.’

  ‘What kind of beer you like best, Zosh?’ Trying to get her back on the rails.

  ‘“What kind? What kind?”’ she mocked him, her voice ringing as brainlessly as a ninety-eight-cent alarm clock in an unrented room running down to a whimper. ‘It’s been so long since I had a beer I just don’t know what kind I like no more.’

  With yesterday’s empties crouching behind her chair.

  ‘I don’t know, Frankie,’ she complained with a distress like a tired child’s. ‘How many kinds are there? I don’t even know what kinds there are any more.’

  ‘There’s Budweiser,’ he told her indulgently, as if enumerating distant relatives, ‘then there’s Schlitz, and Blatz, and Pabst and Chevalier—

  ‘Drink Chevalier

  The beer that’s clear—’

  he hummed a radio commercial that sometimes softened her. Yet himself remained tense with the sense of being cornered by more than a secondhand wheelchair.

  ‘Any kind wit’ foam on, that’s the kind I like’ – her voice was happy at last, running over with imagined foam, drooling over her tongue in her haste to tell all about it. ‘Any godamned kind wit’ lots of godamned foam – warm beer, cold beer, hot beer, winter beer – I like beer.’

  ‘I like beer too, Zosh,’ he assured her. She ignored his assent.

  ‘I like beer. I just like it. Warm beer, cold beer, old beer, winter beer, big beers, bock beers ’n them little old teensy Goebbels’ beers – I like beer, Frankie hon.’

  ‘I know, Zosh—’

  ‘I like the Great Lakes too – you know why?’ Cause the navy’s there. Godamnit, I like the navy, any navy, the Irish navy, the Mexican navy, I even like the Dago navy. I like beer, I like the navy, sunk navies ’n floatin’ navies – I like them movie actors too. Give me them movie actors – godamnit, you don’t know how I like anythin’.’ Her voice trailed off. ‘I like dancin’ too, Frankie hon.’

  ‘Should I go down ’n get a half gallon?’ Anything to get out of this corner.

  ‘You can run down ’n get me a godamned dawg like you promised, you promised, you promised’ – abruptly she realized that he’d deliberately sidetracked her desire for a dog.

  ‘I spent thirty-four months havin’ green-ass corporals chew me up,’ he told her with a bitter wisdom: ‘“Dress up that salute, Private, no pass for you, Private, get the dust off that carbine, Private – pick up that butt you just stepped over, Private’ – you think I come home to hear you quackin’? If I don’t talk you get mad ’n if I say somethin’ you tear my head off.’ He leaned his back against the sink, looking puffy-eyed, and heard his own voice pleading: ‘I don’t know if I’m comin’ ’r goin’ no more, Zosh.’

  ‘You look to me more like you’re goin’.’ She eyed him steadily, inching up till the wheels pushed the toes of his heavy army shoes back a fraction of an inch. ‘You know what the ruination of the world is?’ And answered herself: ‘Stubbornness. You know what’s wrong wit’ you? You’re a stubborn t’ing. It’s why you’re the ruination of me. It’s why it’s all your fault.’

  ‘You don’t know anythin’ about dogs,’ he defended himself.

  ‘I know about dawgs, you don’t know about dawgs.’

  ‘He’d run away,’ he told her, his eyes half closed against her.

  ‘I’d keep him tied. The dawg’d be tied all the time.’

  ‘What you want a dog to be tight all the time for? Don’t you think dogs like to sober up once in a while too?’

  It didn’t work. She thought it over one long moment and her mind ricocheted again: ‘Honey, you know about the girl wit’ the strorberry on her behind? Whenever she ate strorberries it got real red.’

  No, he had heard about the girl with the blossoming butt.

  ‘But that ain’t nuttin’,’ she assured him. ‘On Saloon Street was a little kiddie-kid, her old lady got scared by a rat so bad

  she slipped her wig ’n you know how that kid come out? She had a birt’mark shapen like a rat right across her teeny face wit’ the tail curlin’ up onto the cheek, hair’n all.’

  Then saw he was just sitting there listening to nothing but the ceaseless traffic’s murmur and nudged the cup off the wheelchair’s arm; he started as it shattered on the floor. She nudged the saucer after the cup.

  ‘What you breakin’ the dishes for?’

  ‘’Cause I feel like it.’

  ‘Okay,’ he agreed amiably, ‘I feel like it too,’ and shoved a soup bowl off the sink.

  She reversed the wheels swiftly, turned and raced to the cabinet in the corner as pale as the pillow behind her head. ‘You like to break t’ings?’ she asked so softly he scarcely heard – and yanked the soiled newspaper out from under the stacked plates, bringing the whole shelf of them down with an explosive clatter and in a very frenzy of vengefulness wheeled the chair back, then swiftly forward over the remains of her best china, crushing fragments into further fragments.

  Frankie grabbed his cap. He needed air. He needed sleep. He needed a good stiff drink. He needed anything, anything at all for just one short hour of peace.

  ‘You ’n your godamned dog,’ he paused to tell her in the doorway. ‘You ’n your godamned dishes. You and your godamned chair – what you need is a good Polish beatin’.’ The door slammed behind him, then banged ajar with the impact and stood swinging a little in the gray, indifferent air.

  ‘You’re mad ’cause I like beer too!’ she shouted after him.

  ‘Up your dirty skirt!’ he called back over his shoulder, almost tripping over the loose tread halfway down.

  Again it had bee
n all his fault, she realized: even the dog on the landing below began yapping up at him. And on top of everything else calling her dirty names – nothing could make up for a man calling his wife dirty names any more than broken china could be mended to look like new.

  It struck her abruptly that her dishes were broken. There at her feet her own dear sweet dead mother’s very best dishes broken just because that Frankie Majcinek had turned out so mean – blaming her now for being a cripple, breaking up the house to show how he felt just as if it hadn’t been him who’d put her in the chair in the first place.

  Yet her eyes took a sort of dry satisfaction at sight of the littered chards of crockery: she wouldn’t pick up a single piece. Let it be like this when that henna-headed Violet Koskozka, always saying Frankie was too easygoing, came in. Let her see for herself what he really was like when you had to live with him. Let them all see what she had to put up with, chair or no chair. Let them all get a good look at what a temper that Polak had.

  Not one of them must so much as pick up a single piece. Let it all lay and every time he came home he’d have to look at what he’d done until he’d finally understand that this was just what he’d done to one poor girl’s heart: ten thousand fragments never to be repaired. Till at last, on some sad day he’d always remember, he’d have to pick up every last fragment on his knees and every one like a jagged edge in his heart. He’d come begging her forgiveness in that sweet hour. ‘It’s too late, Frankie,’ she’d tell him. ‘You come to your senses too late.

  ‘After all,’ she reasoned primly, ‘if he’d wheeled me a little like he should I wouldn’t of shoved the cup in the first place. If it wasn’t for him I’d be out dancin’ by St Wenceslaus tonight.’

  The dog accusing him on the landing below knew too how Frankie was forever breaking everything he touched: crockery, women’s hearts or suckers’ pocketbooks – then squealed in puppyish surprise and Sophie knew Frankie had kicked it in spite against all such dogs.

  ‘He thinks he’s gettin’ even on me, kickin’ somebody’s little helpless pup – I ought to say I want a horse, maybe he’ll break his dirty foot.’ A thin pang of pleasure went through her so deeply that she felt it between her withering thighs.

  ‘I’m gonna lock my heart

  ’N throw away the key,’

  she sang among the ruins.

  ‘I’m wise to all those tricks

  You played on me …’

  and paused at the echo of a woman’s voice or of some scolding girl’s: that no-good little Molly N. giving her Frankie unmixed hell for kicking the dog. That one had something coming to her too. Ever since Frankie had taken her dancing that night. With a swift and babyish glee Sophie wheeled to the door, it wasn’t every night there was this much excitement for her pale eyes to see or her ears to hear.

  Yet the tingle of anticipation faded to an uneasy qualm as she listened and wondered dimly why her joy must always turn sick within her without her ever really knowing why.

  ‘Next time you come downstairs feelin’ mean go kick your own dog,’ Molly N. was telling him off down there. While doors all over the vast and drafty old house opened a crack to hear the battle on the first floor front.

  To Sophie it sounded as though Frankie were buckling under down there. Not a peep out of him. Not a single dirty name of all the names he knew to call his wife. He mustn’t say a one of them to a little tramp like that one. It sounded as if he were standing down there with his cap in his hand taking it big.

  Frankie had his cap in his hand all right; but wasn’t hearing a thing. Dark-eyed Molly stood before him holding her pup in her hands and so angry she’d forgotten she wasn’t wearing a slip and wasn’t dressed to be standing in a doorway with the light behind her. Her anger subsided slowly before Frankie’s downcast eyes till she realized they weren’t downcast from humility – and slammed the door in his face.

  Frankie didn’t move a step. Just stood there grinning like a tow-headed clown. ‘Wow,’ he decided at last, ‘a shaft like that wasted on a clown like Drunkie John. I got no dog of my own to kick, Molly-O,’ he called through the door.

  Molly-O answered swiftly, urging him to go. ‘Sorry I hollered at you, Frankie. Maybe the hound was makin’ too big a racket, she deserved a little kick.’ After all, what was the use of inviting trouble with the rent overdue?

  He heard the scraping of the wheelchair’s arm against the railing overhead. Sophie had been listening up there the whole time. ‘Zosh is gettin’ sneaky, she never used to be like that,’ he realized uneasily.

  The sign above the cash register of the Tug & Maul Bar indicated Antek the Owner’s general attitude toward West Division Street:

  I’VE BEEN PUNCHED, KICKED, SCREWED, DEFRAUDED, KNOCKED DOWN, HELD UP, HELD DOWN, LIED ABOUT, CHEATED, DECEIVED, CONNED, LAUGHED AT, INSULTED, HIT ON THE HEAD AND MARRIED. SO GO AHEAD AND ASK FOR CREDIT I DON’T MIND SAYING NO.

  Antek’s customers, from Meter Reader the Baseball Coach to Schwabatski and Drunkie John, held the bar directly across the street in lively contempt. For the joint across the way didn’t even have the simple honesty to confess itself a tavern: it was a club, mind you. Club Safari, Mixed Drinks Our Specialty.

  Nobody mixed anything but whisky and beer at the Tug & Maul. To ask Antek for a martini would have been the equivalent of asking him for a kiss. It wasn’t done. Antek kissed no one but his wife and served no man anything but whisky and beer.

  Tug & Maul

  Shove & Haul

  Old Fitz, Old Crow or Old McCall—

  When you’re broke go home—

  That’s all.

  That was not only Antek’s own poetry: it was also his coat of arms. It was inscribed on the back of an oblong strip of tin originally intended to advertise Coca-Cola and leaned, against the pretzel bowl, to warn the barflies who buzzed all day long between the curb and the bar.

  And all day long brought Antek news of the carryings-on in the Safari, who had just gone in and who had just come out. They could see right into the window of the Safari and thus could undo any man’s reputation without so much as taking a foot off the rail. ‘I seen Nifty Louie steerin’ some old swish in there again yesterday, what they was drinkin’ was somethin’ wit’ leaves on top.’ That pretty well placed Louie on the Tug & Maul’s social register.

  For Antek held to the old days and the old ways, familiar whisky and well-tried friends. Neither bright neon nor a soft fluorescence lighted either his ceiling or his walls; but there was plenty of butchershop sawdust along the floor and an old-fashioned golden goboon for every four bar stools. He’d roll you for the drinks and give you a square shake, friend or passing stranger, every time; while penny-ante sessions went on, in one or another of the booths, from noon till 4 A.M. If you came in already stewed you right-about-faced right back to the place you’d come from; but if you had had too much out of his own bottles he’d see you didn’t get strongarmed on his side of the street.

  He drew the line at television. ‘I give it a honest chance,’ he often told Frankie, ‘it don’t work.’

  ‘Television don’t work, Owner?’

  ‘Well, it works in a way – but it don’t work out at all. A customer orders a beer, looks at the screen ’n asks me, “What’s the score, Owner?” I dunno, I been too busy to follow. All I can do is ask some guy who been watchin’: “What’s the score?” He dunno. He thinks it’s 8–3 but he ain’t sure. “What innin’ is it?” the new customer wants to know then. I dunno that neither, so I ask the guy who’s been watchin’: “What innin’?” He dunno neither. He thinks it’s the last of the sixth or the first of the sevent’, he ain’t too sure.

  ‘“Who’s playin’?” the new guy wants to know. I still dunno. So I ask the old customer. He dunno neither. He thinks it’s the Red Sox but he ain’t too sure.’ N all afternoon it goes that way till I’m hittin’ the bottle myself instead of pourin’.

  ‘’N when I do get a chance to listen ’n look a little all I hear is: “Here comes Luke App
lin’, he’s breakin’ the record for most games played at short, at third, I dunno. Last year he played so many games, this year he played so many awready, the record is two thousand – will he make it? I dunno.

  ‘“Luke would have broke the record sooner but he had to play third awhile, awready he got a better run-batted-in average than Everett Somebody. Yeh, but Everett Somebody was back in the days of the dead ball, you got to take all that into consideration” – why the hell do I have to take all that into consideration? Just because I work behind a bar?’ N the next time Luke comes up all I’m takin’ into consideration is do I wait for somebody to holler for the Old Fitz ’r do I open it up just for myself.’

  Frankie would nod understandingly and call for the Old Fitz himself, television or no television.

  ‘Why put up with a thing like that?’ Antek with the bottle in his hand would want to know, making Frankie wish he hadn’t said anything in the first place. ‘When I come up to serve a customer I don’t hear nobody yellin’: “Here comes Antek the Owner! Last year he served 5444 beers, 11,220 shots of bar whisky and refilled the pretzel bowl twice a week fer fifty-two weeks! Up to ’n includin’ last Sunday’s double-header he got 3317 shots of Old Grand-dad to his credit, 2343 shots of Schenley’s ’n God knows how many fifths of Old Fitz he has drunk by hisself!” What the hell, I got a record too –’ n when they put me on that screen I’ll buy it. Not before.’

  ‘They got wrestlin’ at the Safari,’ Frankie informed his old friend. ‘The swishes come to drink the joolips ’n see the wrasslers.’

  No sawdust carpeted the Safari’s floor and no penny-ante players were tolerated there. If you wanted to gamble you went to the 26-table or the bingo board. You received a receipt for every drink and a floor show was offered five nights a week. The tables had tablecloths, the lights were dim, music murmured from the walls and there were no drinks on the house.