The Man with the Golden Arm

PART TWO
Act of Contrition

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD In the real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

Frankie lived by day beside the ceaseless, dumping shuffle of the three-legged elephant which was the laundry’s sheet-rolling machine. When he piled onto his narrow pad in the long dim-lit dorm at night and turned his face to the whitewashed wall, the three-legged elephant of the mangle roller followed, galumphing, through dreams wherein he dealt Record Head Bednar hand after hand while Louie Fomorowski watched from behind the captain’s chair. Night after night.

When the lights were down all voices were subdued. Down the long and low-roofed hall the good boys slept: the laundry and the bakery workers, the printshop typesetters and the boys who sat in classrooms and accepted their sentences with the dry, hard-bitten humor of old contented soldiers. These were the ones who had convinced the chaplain that they were really going straight this time. Frankie too had convinced the chaplain.

It had been harder to convince a certain ex-army major. ‘That vein been injured,’ he’d told Frankie in the infirmary on Frankie’s very first morning. ‘How long you been punchin’ holes in it?’

‘I been on the sleeve since I got out of the army, Doc,’ Frankie told him.

‘How big a habit you got, son?’

‘Not too big. I go for a quarter grain a day.’

‘Big enough. But I’ve seen them come in here hooked worse than that ’n still kick it. In here you got to kick it. When you get sick I’ll taper you off and if you behave yourself you’ll be out for Thanksgiving and have it kicked for keeps. Still, there’s boys in here who’ll tell you they can get you anything from heroin to gage for a price – forget it. Capone couldn’t afford the price. But if you get out of line any time you’re in here – remember that you’re on the books as a user. I’ll get you shipped to Lexington ’n that won’t be for a week end the way it used to be. That’ll be six months added. I tell you now for your own good and I won’t tell you again.’

Frankie gave him the grin. ‘I’ll tough it out, Doc.’

After that Frankie slipped into a life like the life of the barracks he had known for three years. Orders were given matter-of-factly without threats; and were obeyed complacently. Most of the men kept themselves as clean as if preparing for retreat each evening and most, out of sheer boredom, attended services in the pink-and-white chapel on Sunday morning. And each good soldier counted his two days off a month, for good behavior, like money in the bank and well earned.

All but Applejack Katz, with a long-term lease on the cot next to Frankie’s own: a man who daily risked his good-conduct time for the sake of a certain jar fermenting under the ventilator. He’d bought cider from one of the kitchen workers and, at every meal where boiled potatoes were served, stole the skins and made Frankie steal them too. He added the potato skins to the cider after lights out and was only waiting for a chance to snatch a few white-bread crusts. ‘When we get them crusts it’ll only take a week after that,’ he promised Frankie. He leaned across the cot to add a low warning word:

‘I seen you come out of the infirmary your first morning, Dealer. My advice to you is look out for the major. He’s a psycho. What he’ll do to you is to get you so square you’ll never have another day’s pleasure in your life.’

Katz glanced about the dormitory with a look so swift and furtive Frankie was reminded, with a troubling pang, of Sparrow Saltskin.

‘Listen. They sent me to a psycho eight years ago. I was forty-five then ’n if I’d worked two full weeks in my life I don’t remember where. If anyone had told me, eight years ago, I’d go to work for eight hours a day six days a week and stick at it over two years I would of give him hundred to one against it.’ N I would of lost.’ Cause that’s just how square I got.

‘For two years I was off the booze, off the women, off the horses, off the dice. I even got engaged to get married in a church. All I done that whole time was run a freight elevator up ’n down, up ’n down. It scares me when I think of it now: I come near losin’ everything.’

Applejack lay back in the very real relief of one snatched from the eternal fires, at the last possible moment, straight up into Salvation Everlasting. He gave a low laugh, mocking and wise.

‘Now they’re after me to go back to that same psycho. “He done me so much good that other time,” they try to tell me, “he almost cured my new-rosis.” Sure the fool almost cured my “new-rosis.” If I went back he might cure it altogether – and what would I have left? All the good times I ever had in my life was what my little old new-rosis made me have. Them whole two years on the square I didn’t have one good time. I like my little old new-rosis. It’s all I got ’n I’m holdin’ onto it hard. My advice to you is hold onto yours: lay off them psychos. Look out for the major. When guys like you ’n me get square we’re dead.’

Katz had a record that read like a Southern Pacific Railroad schedule. He’d made every stop between Jeff City and Fort Worth and had fashioned applejack out of white-bread crusts and potato skins in every one. Of his fifty-odd years fifteen had been spent between walls and he recounted each one in terms of applejack. Sometimes it had been hard to make and had turned out badly, in other places it had been easy and had turned out fine: his life was the definitive work on the science of making applejack under the eyes of prison guards.

He remembered certain jugs as if remembering certain people: the El Paso County Jug, recalled with joy and a certain tenderness, that he had kept filled, through a kitchen connection, night and day for six blissful months. The Grant’s Pass Jug, recalled with bitterness and doubt, that had been spirited out of his cell in the night and never seen again.

But applejack wasn’t Katz’s only interest. He had half a dozen minor projects going, involving the bartering of nutmeg for Bull Durham, of Bull Durham for nutmeg and of emory for the manufacture of something he called a ‘glin wheel,’ a sort of homemade cigarette lighter. It was also his daily concern, while working beside Frankie on the mangle roller, to steal the paraffin wax off the rollers for the making of candles, which he sold clandestinely to the harder cons upstairs.

The cons up there were either in bug cells or deadlock. They were the privates who went for stronger brew than applejack. These no longer cared: these were the truly unsaved. Over the hump for redemption and the hour for turning back lost forever: too late, forever too late. So they hurried forward all the faster into the darkness.

They talked in terms of police administrations and remembered in terms of police cars. ‘That was the year the aces had black Cadillacs with a bell on the side – or was that the year they had them speedy orange Fords?’

One night some pale castoff, a twenty-year-old so far gone in narcoticism that nothing but the one big bitter fix of death could cure him, was placed among the good soldiers either by error or just to see how long he could stand it there.

It didn’t take long for the panic to start. One look at the stolid faces about him, he knew he was in the wrong tier and the horrors shook him like an icy wind.

‘Bond me out! Don’t touch me!’

The junkie wants a bondsman though he doesn’t own a dime. His life is down to a tight pin point and the pupils of his eyes drawn even tighter: nothing is reflected in them except a capsule of light the size of a single quarter grain of morphine. He has mounted the walls of all his troubles with no other help than that offered by the snow-white caps in the brown drugstore bottle. A self-made man.

But all the drugstores are closed tonight.

‘Bond me out! Bond me out!’

And the flood of shameless tears. By the time the major shuffled in, yawning, with the hypo, the junkie was throwing a regular circus for the boys, tossing himself about on the floor. It took four men to hold him down to give him his charge at last.

‘I think he ate somethin’ didn’t agree with him,’ Applejack observed after the youth was carried out. Such exhibitions seemingly required this flat, cold sort of mirth. The only laughter that broke the monotony here was that same hard-bitten glee: ‘The service is gettin’ pretty bad when a man has to knock his skull on the floor to get a charge of M. I remember a time when all you had to do was hold your breath for half an hour.’

Yet such pale youths felt as devout about their addiction as others might of some crotchety religious conviction or other. ‘I’m just the type got to have it, that’s all. It’s how I’m built. Don’t ask me why - how do I know? It’s just something, cousin. It’s there.’

Frankie Machine understood too well. Standing at the sheet roller on his eleventh morning, it hit him so hard and so fast he went down beside the machine while the sheets, unguided, twisted and tore themselves to shreds at the very moment that his own entrails were tearing at his throat and his very bones were twisting. He heard his own voice crying as shrill as a wounded tomcat’s down the icy corridors of his anguish.

He lay eight hours in a 104 fever before the major pulled him out of it with dolaphine.

‘If you get sick on me like that again you won’t even get paregoric off me,’ were the first words he could distinguish, and blinked the sweat out of his eyes to see the major studying him. ‘Next time I’m lettin’ you sweat it out, soldier.’

Back at the sheet roller two mornings later, Frankie felt he’d already sweated it out. All that remained of his sickness was a couple days of the chuck horrors, of which Nifty Louie once had told. ‘It feels like I got a tape snake or somethin’,’ he complained to Applejack Katz, ‘every two hours the bottom falls out of my gut ’n I feel like I could eat myself through a cow on the hoof.’

Katz traded off his ‘glin wheel’ to a kitchen connection for a pound of lump sugar and gave it to Frankie. Frankie consumed it in a single day.

‘Wait till the applejack is ready,’ Applejack immediately promised him, ‘that’ll kill the chucks every time.’

‘Ain’t it ready yet?’ Frankie pleaded a little, he still felt so weak.

‘Give it just one more day,’ Applejack promised.

Katz could give anything he owned to anyone but the warden. Except that applejack. He was no more able to give that away than to give away his blood.

When the horrors had passed at last Frankie felt himself beginning to want Molly-O again. He hadn’t had one visitor, not so much as a letter or a card, in all those hard first two weeks.

But he’d gotten to know some of the boys who were neither trying to be good soldiers, like himself, nor bad ones like those upstairs.

These were the ones who just wouldn’t work. Yardbirds who couldn’t quite be trusted in a bakery or a laundry. They never disobeyed an order directly nor made trouble nor talked back. But time off for good conduct means little to men with no place to go and nothing in particular to do when they get there. They were men and youths who had never picked up any sort of craft – though most of them could learn anything requiring a mechanical turn with ease. It wasn’t so much lack of aptitude as it was simply the feeling that no work had any point to it. They lived in prison much as they had lived out of it, vaguely contented most of the time, neither hoping nor despairing, wanting nothing but a place to sleep and a tin pie plate with some sort of slop or other on it a couple times a day. They neither worried about the future, regretted the past nor felt concern for the present.

They were the ones who had never learned to want. For they were secretly afraid of being alive and the less they desired the closer they came to death. They had never been given one good reason for applying their strength. So now they disavowed their strength by all sorts of self-deceptions.

They gave nothing because nothing had been given them. If they lost their privileges they shrugged it off, they had lost certain privileges before; one way or another they had had always to forfeit any small advantage gained by luck, chance or stealth.

Some slept at the race-track barns all summer and crashed County in the winter, year after year. Getting back to the barns a week sooner or later didn’t mean much, it would probably be raining that week anyhow. So why get all steamed up in a laundry all winter for nothing? Where was the payoff?

They didn’t even read comic books. They had been bored to death by all that the day before they were born. The whole business between birth and death was a sort of inverted comic strip, too dull to read even if set right. So what was the difference whether a man slept on wood or hay?

‘Rubber heels ’n fisheyes again’ was the word on the meatloaf and tapioca, ‘but wait till we get that mountain goat’ – warless soldiers as indifferent to Sunday mutton as the walls were indifferent to themselves; yet feigning to look forward to a Sunday dinner as tasteless in the mouth as life was in their hearts.

Sometimes something wakened and flared feebly in one of these: he talked back and got to think it over in deadlock.

Deadlock was any cell with a red metal tag locked onto the bars to indicate the man was either a junkie or just out of line. As long as the tag stayed there it meant no yard privileges, no cigarettes, no newspapers and no mail; no candy, no card playing and the next time maybe you’ll keep that big trap buttoned.

Deadlock meant a monotony more deadly even than the regular abnormal monotony of jailhouse days and nights. For no one can sleep all the time and deadlock brought hours when memory caught up with a man at last. Hours in which to sit and remember that willing long-ago lovely who’d married some square after all; or a family that cared less than ever. Or how suddenly the rain had come one blue-and-gold Easter Sunday a dozen blue-gold Easters ago.

Thinking of release only slowed the hours down to the deadliest crawl of all – yet of what else was there to think? And what could freedom mean except a chance to get out of the state with one clean shirt on your back and jump back on the con the day it got dirty? You had to get across the state line to promote some decent clothes and enough change in the poke to take a woman to a movie or a bar.

So the deadlockers walked up and down till they grew weak at the knees, slept and rose to walk again till night and day and the weariness in the knees and the weariness of the mind all rolled together into one big cell-sized, life-sized weariness.

‘The day after I come out of deadlock the first time,’ Applejack Katz told Frankie, ‘I seen how they got all the clocks stopped at twelve o’clock ’n I realized I was in deadlock whether I was in a cell with a red tag on it or not.’

Till night and day were one and the heart itself felt like a clock stopped cold on a dead-cold hour.

The very hour that life was to begin; and would not tick again.

Yet even a stopped clock can be right for a while. If time moves slowly enough. And Frankie lived in a deadlock only somewhat darker and narrower than that deadlock in which all his days had been spent.

Just one bit lighter than the deadlock of the cells with the red metal tag.

To the tune of some old frayed song, offered over and over again by Applejack Katz in his horrible fifty-four-year-old squawk.

‘I’m a ding-dong daddy from Duma

’N you oughta see me do my stuff.’

Till all the other cots would howl him down.

‘That stuff ought to be about ready,’ Frankie hinted.

Applejack felt it wasn’t yet sufficiently fermented.

Though Frankie would hear him rise in the night, fumble about under the ventilator, hear the secret gulping in the dark and the sound of the cork being carefully replaced; and once, long after lights out, that querulous, quavering squawk.

‘I’d feel bad if you’d kissed too many

But I’d feel worse if you hadn’t kissed any.’

All the next day, working beside Frankie at the mangle roller, Katz murmured songs as frayed as his voice. There was a certain sly merriment about old Applejack. One felt that, secretly, he was convinced he’d already beaten the state on so many charges that there was no chance at all of the state getting it back in terms of timeserving. He could be in the rest of his life, he knew, and still end up far ahead of the game.

Down in the G-H blocks the punks from eighteen to twenty lived in shifts more sullen than that which Frankie shared with Katz. G was for the black punks and H for the whites. The whites went to school in the mornings and blacks in the afternoons. The sign in the mess-hall library said:

THINK

Read a good book

Which didn’t at all mean that a black punk should be caught reading a good book at the same time as a white punk; and didn’t say just what book. Each went to think separately, for the thinking of separate thoughts. For the black con’s brain, it appeared, was darker than the white con’s and therefore required the afternoon sunlight to assist the thinking of certain scheduled thoughts.

Yet, strangely enough, the chair in the basement accepted any color at all. Indeed, it was painted black just to show how little race feeling there was down there in the basement where the afternoon sunlight didn’t shine at all.

Nor did the big black sheriff’s wagon that pulled up for the haul to Stateville, St Charles, Dixon and Menard draw any particular color line.

The punks piled in it, leaping over each other as if going on a picnic, filled with a sudden brainless, coltish joy to be out of the cells and riding in the open air for the hour that took them down Route 66. One hour. The years to follow were forgotten in the brightness of the immediate sun.

Screwy punks and tough punks, wise punks and dumb punks, dirty punks and clean punks, little punks and big punks, skinny punks and fat punks: here comes the wagon and we’ll all take a ride.

Here comes the sheriff’s wagon, punks, and you’ll be a long time gone.

While all clocks will remain forever, however long you serve, precisely at twelve o’clock.

‘A.M. or P.M.?’ Frankie Machine wondered idly, as if it really made some difference. If you wanted to know the time you asked the screw and were told, inevitably: ‘Forget it. You ain’t goin’ nowheres.’

The time the clockmakers had locked into the stopped clocks of these corridors was a different kind of time, Frankie felt, than that they had put into the clocks outside. Just as there was a different sort of time for cripples than for junkies, and a different kind of time than either for dealers, there was a special kind of time for convicts too.

On Sundays he went to Mass, in the pink-and-white chapel lined with portrayals of the Stations of the Cross, fashioned by some forgotten felon. He always knelt beneath one labeled Jesus Falls the First Time, he didn’t know why. Yet that one touched him most.

He would cross himself, genuflect and assure himself mystically, ‘Zosh’ll be so much better when I get out I’ll be able to tell her about me ’n Molly-O myself, I won’t have to let Vi do the dirty job for me.’ On some Sunday morning dream train with the incense in his nose.

When his next ten days had passed without any recurrence of the sickness he began drawing fresh courage with the passing of each new day. ‘The hell with Nifty Louie ’n Private McGantic, too,’ he told himself one night, refusing either to see Louie ‘on his bedpost’ as Bednar had put it or to worry about McGantic’s terrible monkey. ‘Louie was a long time livin’ and he’ll be a long time dead and there’s more people better off for his bein’ out of the way than not.’ And the memory of that hallway blow returned to him like the memory of a blow by which he had freed himself from McGantic’s monkey. He felt not the faintest flutter of remorse for his part in the passing of Louie F. Remorse touched his memory of the fixer only when he recalled that, by losing his head, he had lost the fixer’s big fat roll.

From the passage of the nights now he gained more strength than he had ever gained from a hypo. He felt himself getting over the roughest point of the hump without so much as a quarter grain to help him over. And knowing how proud Molly-O was going to be for him, felt proud of himself.

The pride he’d abandoned in the ward tent on the narrow Meuse. Through the open laundry window the first cold hint of spring touched him as had that other spring on that cold and alien river.

‘I got the second paw off,’ he confided to Katz; like a man who’d seen a festering wound in his flesh dry before his eyes and slowly start to heal.

For now all things healed strangely well within him, as though by grace of his punishment. He was paying off for smashing up Sophie, the irons had only been God’s means to let him, a priest told him; so that when he was released everything he’d done would be paid for and he’d be truly free at last.

‘I feel like, someday, I’m gonna shine again,’ he told old Applejack.

And heard, through walls as high as tenement walls, a long, slow, dull whirr-whirr.

As of a heavy sewing machine being pedaled by some lame and sweating con.

Ten o’clock in the morning. Above the visitors’ cage burned one small dull red bulb and right below it, peering through the glass with the prison pallor on his face but the shadows gone from under his eyes, Frankie Machine waited for his first visitor; though they hadn’t told him who it was. Certainly the punk wouldn’t have the nerve to come around after the way he’d pulled out of the deal with the irons, ducking without a warning word so that Frankie might have gotten rid of that damned bag.

Then spotted Molly Novotny far down the line, trying to see over the heads of the other visitors like a child trying to see the animals in the zoo over the heads of the adults and saw him at last.

She took his breath away with her pertness: a neat dark suit and little silver-heeled slippers that tap-tapped right on up to him just as she’d tapped into his arms on the first floor front.

They had only fifteen minutes and he didn’t know what to ask first. There was so much he had to know and she had so much to tell.

‘That poor old man of Vi’s is gone,’ was the first thing she reported. ‘He leaned out the window too far.’

‘So long as he wasn’t pushed,’ Frankie told her.

‘No, Vi just forgot to lock the window.’

And they passed over Poor Old Husband as indifferently as life itself had passed Poor Husband by. ‘How’s Zosh?’ he wanted to know.

‘Gettin’ fatter than ever, Frankie,’ and heard the ancient malice in her voice.

‘How are things going at the Safari?’ As soon as he asked that he knew he shouldn’t have. For she didn’t lower her eyes, she simply curtained them from him and he’d never seen her look so hard.

‘I ain’t there no more, Frankie,’ she told him defensively. ‘I don’t live downstairs no more.’

‘Where you livin’, Molly?’ A leaden fear had him. He had to ask her twice before she could hear through the glass. Or just didn’t want to hear.

‘Just around, Frankie. I’m just livin’ around. You know.’

The red bulb winked, the whistle blew, Visitors’ Day was over.

And knew in his bones she wouldn’t return on any Visitors’ Day to come.

‘Little Lester,’ he called himself. ‘Little Lester the Money Waster and Woman Chaser’ and he lived up there in the bug cells with all appeals but the last one gone.

Down where Frankie lived below rumors came each night of Little Lester’s latest piece of arrogance in the very face of the big black chair. But Frankie never got to lay eye on the fellow till, on the Saturday afternoon of Frankie’s sixth week, he caught a detail with Katz.

‘You two get the Susie-Q wagon ’n get up there to the fourth floor,’ Screw told them, ‘there’s a ticket on both of you for talkin’ in line.’

There wasn’t much to the detail. The Susie-Q wagon was the little white cart on which mops and buckets were borne. The fourth-floor boys themselves couldn’t be trusted with buckets and mops. Half of them were in deadlock and those that weren’t never moved without a screw’s eyes following. They were the sullen jug-heavies and the loudmouthed torpedoes, the gaunt jungle buzzards and the true assassins.

‘Me ’n you ’r just punks up against some of these birds,’ Applejack reminded Frankie in secret admiration of all assassins and Frankie was glad, in that moment, to be on the books as only one more jerk who’d tried to cop a piece of tin out of a West Side department store. He felt a clandestine thrill at recalling the thinness of the hair which had kept him out of the bug cells. ‘I almost made it up here myself,’ he boasted to Applejack, ‘when I was on the junk I pulled lots of jobs.’ And hastened to add, ‘I got it kicked for keeps now.’

‘It’s what they all say,’ Applejack answered skeptically, and Frankie was too superstitious to boast further. ‘The smarter a guy is the harder he gets hooked,’ Katz observed, ‘I’ve seen ’em hittin’ C, I’ve seen ’em hittin’ M, I’ve seen ’em hittin’ the H ’n I’ve seen ’em shootin’ speedballs – half a cap of C ’n half a cap of H together. C is the fastest, it’s what they start on when they’re after a gentleman’s kick. M is slower ’n H is the slowest ’n cheapest of all, it’s what they wind up on when they’re just bummies tryin’ to knock theirselves out without no kick at all. But I’ll tell you one kick to lay off ’n that’s nembutal. If you miss the vein you get an abscess ’n the shade comes down. Lay off the nembie is my advice to you, Polak.’

Just as if he hadn’t heard Frankie tell him he’d kicked all that stuff.

‘Another thing works funny is gage,’ Applejack resumed his report while dragging the little white wagon behind him. ‘One day you’ll pay two bucks for a single stick ’n the next day some guy says, “Gimme twelve cents ’n a pack of butts for a stick,”’n you pass him up. It don’t make sense to me neither the way they always say a guy gets “high” on it. My cell buddy at Grant’s Pass worked twenty years in mines around Scranton before he threw his shovel away ’n started eatin’ a little higher up on the hog. The gage never lifted him up, it sent him down. When it was hittin’ real good he’d get to thinkin’ he was twelve miles underground. He never said he was “coastin’ in.” He always said, “I think I’m comin’ up.” Say, if you get detailed down to the kitchen sneak me a fistful of nutmeg, I know a fool who’ll give a pack of butts for a sack of that stuff. I wonder what he does with it.’

‘Maybe he puts it in applejack,’ Frankie hazarded a guess.

‘You guys laugh at my applejack,’ Katz told him, ‘but a guy got to do somethin’ to keep his mind occupied. Otherwise I’d be thinkin’ how it used to be outside.’

‘When will you make the street again?’ Frankie asked him.

‘Never, soldier,’ Katz told him without regret, almost with contentment. ‘When I finish here the feds pick me ’n I start a twenty-year rap – when I finish that one they can come ’n cremate me: I been caged up all my life, I don’t want even my bones to be cooped up in some hole in the ground,’ he confided cheerfully to Frankie. ‘What can a guy like me do on the outside anyhow? I’m so used to holdin’ up my hand when I want another piece of bread ’n dumpin’ the silver in the wire basket on the way out from chow I wouldn’t know how to do for myself on the outside no more.’

A guard, eating off one of the same tin pie plates that the deadlockers used, in an empty cell with the door ajar, looked up at the pair as they passed and motioned them silently down the half-lit corridor toward the cell where Little Lester leered lewdly through the bars.

All day Little Lester stood waiting for someone to pass whom he could bait for a moment. He liked to be looked upon pityingly in order that he might catch the pity coming at him on the fly and hurl it back between the eyes – to see pity replaced there first by shock, then by real hatred. Little Lester had long suspected that everyone in the world hated him, on sight and from the heart; that all, without exception, had wished him to be dead since the morning he’d been born. So it pleased him to prove to himself that he’d been right in this suspicion all along, that everything the priests had told him since he’d been so high had been wrong.

Pity was the thing people used to conceal their hatred, Lester had decided, for the chaplain himself came now only out of a sense of duty. Lester had had trouble turning the chaplain against him but he had done it at last and now the chaplain hated him as cordially as did the screws, the warden, the sheriff, his attorney, his mother and sisters, his father and his old girl friend.

‘You guys want a pack of Bull Durham wit’ two papers for thirty-five cents?’ he began on them hurriedly, the moment he heard the cart roll up. Though he knew every con was forbidden to talk to him while he was in the cell. ‘You guys want to change jobs? Look, you two first-floor marks, all I do is play solitary ’n chew the fat with the screws all day. How’d you like that awhile, marks?’

The marks didn’t care to switch jobs at the moment, they had to keep the mops moving down the tier.

‘Hey!’ he called after them. ‘You the guys gonna split my pants ’n shave my little pointy head?’

‘He’s just tryin’ to get a rise out of us,’ Katz cautioned Frankie, ‘he wants to see if he can get us in a little trouble, arguin’ with him about somethin’. One of the screws asked his lawyer to make the guy lay off him, he kept askin’ things like is them fuses all screwed in good ’n tight, he don’t want no slip-ups ’cause he’s invited his folks as witnesses – it’s how he gets people’s nerves jumpin’. If you ask me the guy is suck-silly.’

‘If you ask me it’s his nerves is jumpin’ the highest,’ Frankie surmised.

Applejack and Frankie stalled around at the far end of the block, for two soft-clothes men were coming up on either side of a little man with a bandaged eye and all three tagged by some joker in a spring topcoat, wearing the coat with the sleeves hanging emptily, like a woman’s cape.

‘That’s a newspaper joker,’ Applejack assured Frankie, ‘I don’t know who the bandage is but only newspaper guys drape a coat on them like that. You know why?’

Frankie didn’t have the faintest idea.

‘He ain’t got time to button it ’cause he gotta keep his hands free of his sleeves to take notes, in case somethin’ big happens real fast. If he takes time to get his hands out of his sleeves some other guy’ll beat him to the phone ’n get a scoop on him. I saw all about it in a movie at Jeff City.’ Old Katz was proud of his knowledge.

Frankie understood. ‘You’re right. I seen one come into the Victory on North Clark one night ’n set down with one bottle of beer ’n wrote in a little book-like, everythin’ that was goin’ on, what the people said. Then he picked up ’n didn’t even touch his beer. He didn’t touch his beer was how I knew there was somethin’ wrong with him.’

‘It’s sort of a club,’ Applejack explained, ‘they all get together ’n write a book.’ Though neither he nor Frankie could hear what either the bandage or the draped topcoat said to Little Lester, there was no difficulty at all in hearing the punk’s jeering reply.

‘Sure, ya stinkin’ squeala, I’m the guy shot out ya eye. It was easy as eatin’ a ice-cream comb. So what? Prove I’m nuts I go to the buggy bin – they feed you there, don’t they?’ N if I ain’t nuts I get the seat – so what? Then I don’t have to bother with stinkin’ squealas no more. It don’t make me no difference.

‘Naw, I don’t feel nuttin’ good ’r bad. Good ’n bad is strictly for stinkin’ squealas. You know what? I chew t’ree packs of gum a day but I don’t smoke. I don’t even eat much. I don’t even play ball. Movies I like better’n anythin’.

‘But what I really like is mechanics. I don’t like readin’ about crime stuff, they don’t put it down how it really is. What I really like is readin’ about takin’ t’ings apart ’n puttin’ ’em togedder so they stay, like in airplanes. I used to go out to the airport just to watch, I seen them fancy squares all come down the gangplank like in them square movie pictures.

‘But what I really like is gym-a-nastics. That’s for me, it’s what I took up in the neighborhood. I crooked four days a week from school – you know what I was doin’? I was workin’ on the parallela bars.’

Abruptly his mind returned to the point of the interview. ‘You know what made me sore?’ Nodding toward the bandaged eye. ‘It wasn’t when that pig of his scratched me, what really got me was when I shoot his dirty eye out ’n he says, “Don’t shoot me.” After I done it he comes on wit’ a pitch like that.’ He imitated a high-pitched squeal: ‘“Don’t shoot me, please don’t shoot me” – boy, I would of let the stinkin’ squeala have it for real then only the dirty gun jammed on me, I should of cleaned it wit’ somethin’ good first.

‘Naw, I never went for playin’ wit’ other kids, all they do is jump up ’n down. Girls ’r poison. Once though I had one of ’em “I-got-to-get-in-tonight” romantic deals, we went down to Hubbard Street ’n got a free blood test. She was on one side of the screen ’n I was on the other ’n we hollered over to each other. A real romantic deal.

‘My old man? His one big trouble is he’s always a pallbearer ’n never a corpse. He’d look better to me wit’ his dirty head off five inches beneat’ the shoulders. You know what I told him that time he called the aces on me for sellin’ the icebox while he was out stiffin’ some piece of trade? I told him, “Daddy darlin’, you been workin’ for me for twenny-two years. Now go out ’n get a job fer yourself.” It’s what I told him, he’s a stinkin’ squeala too.’

Applejack Katz looked at Frankie Machine and Frankie Machine looked at Applejack Katz. ‘Let’s get the detail done,’ Applejack urged, ‘I got a deal on with a guy who got his hands on six bennies.’

‘What a loudmouth,’ Frankie whispered of Little Lester.

That was the name by which the screws knew Lester too.

Yet, when on the last Saturday afternoon in April Frankie sat for an hour at the same dayroom table where Little Lester sat, the punk spoke softly all the while. This was an assigned group permitted to write letters or play cards under the eyes of two screws, between four and five o’clock. If you didn’t have a letter to write and didn’t care for cards you went all the same. Neither Frankie nor Lester wrote letters. They sat across from each other with a soiled deck between them while Frankie showed him some of the tricks which had once seemingly confounded Sparrow.

‘It took me ten years to learn this one,’ Frankie explained, ‘pick a card.’

‘Show me one that don’t take so long,’ Lester reminded him humbly. Once away from his cell bars, he abandoned his tough-guy act; exactly as if he needed it only when locked behind steel for others to stare at and question.

He was only days from the chair if his last appeal were denied, yet slept and ate much as Frankie slept and ate. Therein lay a horror and a marvel for Frankie. Each saw the same gray corridors all night, each night, with the same yellowish fog wadded about the night lights. Each wakened from dreams of lifelong deadlock to the same muffled sounds: down the tier the long day was beginning.

Something of this awe was in Frankie’s eyes when he noticed how neatly combed and oiled Lester’s dark hair looked, and Lester caught Frankie’s glance. ‘I’ll have to wash the oil out the night before,’ he explained earnestly, not even in the same voice he had used for the reporters at all. ‘Oil leaves a burn ’n they don’t like to leave a man burned even from sweat.’

He spoke without any challenge to the world beyond the bars. ‘Here,’ Frankie insisted, wanting to do something for Lester, ‘here’s one it only takes two weeks to learn. Pick a card.’

But Little Lester had lost interest in cards and without a word picked up a book in which he sat immersed, not once raising his eyes till their hour was done. A book called How to Write Better Business Letters.

Frankie didn’t see Lester again for several weeks, though he once or twice saw the boy’s lawyer swinging down the corridor on that business of the last appeal.

Then, on a morning early in April, Frankie came out of the laundry with Applejack Katz to see two guards bringing Lester, uncuffed, to some unknown destination. He turned cheerfully toward Frankie as he passed.

‘Hi, Dealer!’ he greeted Frankie. ‘Take a look at a man on his way to the chair!’ and sounded really deeply relieved.

A face like any stranger’s face, slightly slant-eyed in the Slavic way. A face at once as old as the moons of Genghis Khan and as youthful as a child’s playground in May. He seemed smaller than Frankie had remembered him. It had seemed, in the weeks since, that he was a big man. Small but rugged and built all in one piece, with a heavy-legged stride, a little bowlegged as if he had learned to walk too early about the West Side’s broken walks.

Frankie noticed that he was wearing bowling shoes with both laces neatly tied.

‘They ain’t takin’ him no place but the dentist’s chair,’ Applejack grumbled irritably at Frankie’s side.

Yet Frankie was to recall with awe, months later, those neatly tied bowling-league shoes still faintly touched with chalk.

‘A guy got somethin’ like that on his mind ’n he jokes about goin’ to the chair ’n ties his laces like he had a big-league bowlin’ match comin’ up,’ Frankie complained to Katz.

‘He has,’ Applejack decided dryly, ‘he got to bowl over six thousand volts from a settin’ position. They’re puttin’ him down in the deadhouse Monday week.’

Little Lester’s last appeal had been denied.

When, two days later, Lester was taken into the prison yard for a workout Frankie and Applejack watched, from the ground-level laundry window. Lester and three others were being marched out there like stock. It was strange that the other three, though only small-time thieves, would draw a certain prestige about the prison for having been exercised beside the condemned youth.

It was three o’clock of a May afternoon, the hour when school doors open and the city’s children ramble home down a thousand walks with books and crayons under their arms and their shoelaces tied into small, neat bows. A few more days till summer vacation and out in the prison yard a great crane, straining skyward to see the first sign of summer, caught only a glint of rusted iron sunlight instead. These were days of clouds swollen gray with promise of rain – only to burst emptily and reveal the deepest sort of blue drifting there all the time. Against the concrete wall Frankie saw a single con sitting on an upturned orange crate looking, under his winter pallor, like someone who’d seen all there was to see of grief, in prison or out.

That yard is laid out like somebody’s country garden; there’s a duck pond and a chicken house and a pale blue birdhouse. Beyond the wall rises a two-story-high legend:

BUDINTZ COAL

One Price to All

While directly across the way from Budintz that company’s chief competitor offers its own appeal:

RUSHMOORE COAL

Fastest Delivery

Cheapest in Years

Along rows where, in summer, vegetables would grow, the four cons stood under the eyes of four guards. Behind them a machine gun’s eyes peered from the sentry’s tower.

Without uniformity the cons touched their toes with their fingertips, bending awkwardly from the waist. Three of them had to stand spread-legged to do so. Lester, Frankie saw with an odd pride, touched the toes without either bending the knees or spread-legging. Touched the tips of the shoes’ neat bows with the condemned tips of condemned wrists.

A man no taller, not so old, neither uglier nor handsomer than himself. A man like any man, with a bit less luck than most. A punk like any punk. Clean-shaven, vain of his heavy head of hair. A youth much like any youth who has seen night games at Comiskey Park, shot six-no-count pool, applauded a strip tease on South State, played nickel-and-dime poker in the back of a neighborhood bar, crapped out on an eight-dollar pass or carried a girl’s photograph in his wallet one whole spring. Who perhaps had had a drink on the house from time to time and worn bright new swimming trunks to the Oak Street Beach some summer afternoon when he’d owned lake, water, sky, beach, sand, sun, the bright blue weather and every girl of all the girls that had passed so yearningly by.

‘He just does caliskonectics is all,’ Applejack informed Frankie. ‘Don’t worry, they ain’t gonna let him climb the horizontal bars. He might get too good at it.’

‘If it was me I’d tell ’em to let me skip the rope,’ Frankie said, because he wanted to say something funny too. Only Applejack didn’t see anything funny. ‘What good would that do?’ he demanded to know. ‘You’d still have to beat the chair. Nobody gets the rope in Illinois any more.’

Yet Frankie wasn’t quite as wrong as Applejack Katz thought. There was still one fugitive on Illinois’s books that would die by the rope when he was caught. Down in the sheriff’s basement, among slot machines confiscated from half a hundred roadhouses and roulette wheels that once had whirled for Guzik, Nitti and Three-Fingered White, stood the gallows that waited, year in and year out, for Terrible Tommy O’Connor’s return.

Not many knew that still, behind the Board of Health Building, where once the County Jail had stood, the death house from which Terrible Tommy had escaped remained. Though the building about it had long been demolished, the little brick room waited, in the middle of a parking lot, for Tommy to come back. The law forbade the room, as it forbade the gallows, to be demolished until O’Connor was hanged. It looked like a long wait.

For it well might be that the little room would be the great city’s most immemorial monument, more lasting than the Art Institute lions on the boulevard, Bushman in his cage near the Lincoln Park Lagoon or Colonel McCormick in his bomb shelter below the river.

‘Just tryin’ to make a little joke,’ Frankie apologized for his reference to skipping the rope. And the pale gray laundried light wavered, with an unwavering wonder, along the laundered walls.

‘I think the stuff is almost done,’ Applejack confided that night to Frankie after a long visit to the ventilator. ‘Give it one more day.’

With the pungent reek of the stuff on his breath as he spoke.

Each man knew the hour. Each man knew the day. Lester had not slept well the night before, the word was going about. He had wakened and played casino with the night screw through the bars. The night screw had taught him the game, the punk had grown to like it. Somebody who had it right from the night screw himself said that Lester had had one good last laugh at some misplay the guard had made. He’d been happy because he’d beaten the guard at the guard’s own game.

Yet when the warden had gone to the death cell, the word went around, to read the death warrant, Lester had looked at him without fear and said, ‘Wait a minute, Frank, I want to finish this cup of coffee.’

Such calmness seemed somehow more terrible to Frankie than if they’d said Lester was lying on his bunk in a dead-cold nightmare sweating out the hours. Instead he was sitting there killing the hours with cards just as Frankie had killed so many; while a clock had ticked away below a luminous crucifix.

There were no luminous Christs for Lester. Neither Christs nor clocks nor calendars.

Yet each man knew the hour. As each man knew the day.

But what if the laces broke on the way? Would he stop to tie them – or demand a new pair before he took another step? It seemed so wrong to trouble tying laces at such an hour, to comb and oil your hair and make corny jokes about going to the dentist’s chair. It seemed so wrong to laugh because you caught a winning deuce against one of the men who was going to help strip you for the cold white slab. To brush your teeth or write a letter to your mother in California.

‘If that letter goes out tonight,’ Frankie reckoned, ‘he’ll be buried by the time his old lady reads it ’n he knows that when he’s writin’ it ’n when he tells the screw to send it air mail ’n seal it good – “it’s somethin’ personal.”’

Would he have to add that same old crack, used twice already in that same cell, ‘This is certainly going to be a good lesson to me’?

‘One more white shirt is all you’ll wear,’ Frankie told Lester, though Lester lay many cells away. ‘Shine your shoes like you’re goin’ to get married. Five’ll get you ten, you forget your act when they fit you into them tight black tights.’

Frankie lay on his cot half fevered with the idea of Lester’s trip to the chair, suddenly uncertain that he himself had really missed it after all. In his mind Little Lester and himself had merged.

‘Let’s see you trot through the little white door,’ he challenged this Frankie-Lester: ‘Three steps to the right ’n now take a load off your feet and don’t let the smell of vinegar bother you either. That’s only a couple drops on the sponge that fits between the voltage ankle and the clamp to keep the sponge from burning – all for your own good you know. Now just put your nose through the little black helmet. That’s right – now let’s hear you wisecrack, wise guy.’

The wise guy of Frankie’s fantasy had no word that one could hear through that dead-black hood.

Some other con, with his own private burden of guilt, cried out, in sleep or waking, and the lights in the corridor seemed to flicker a moment. The sleepers wakened, a long murmur went like a wave from wall to wall. It was that hour when men cried out in voices not their own.

For each man knew the hour. As each man knew the day.

They said, between the bakery, the laundry and the mess, between the printshop, the library and the little white infirmary, they said he’d come out of the death cell hooded all in black. The black tights shimmering under the lights, that final white shirt buttoned over one shoulder like a fencing master’s, he had stepped forth into that hooded hour. They said it had taken a full minute and a half, from the moment he’d stepped into the big glass cage to the moment the switch had been pulled.

Some said it had taken nearer two. The voltage clamp had required adjustment after he was in the chair and there had been no smell of vinegar after all. They told just how it had been.

Between the darkened infirmary and the clean, well-lighted mess, between the sweating boiler room and the cool dry dorm – ‘the left knee kicked up, just once, after the switch was thrown.’ The voltage clamp behind the neck had fitted nicely on the very first try – only the one on the pale right ankle had seemed a trifle loose – but the laces, the laces – Frankie had to know – had he tied them up first or had he just let them loose? Did one of the screws tie them for him so that he wouldn’t trip and skin his knee? The laces, the laces-

But no one had noticed if the laces were tied at all.

The single shoulder button had been stripped off when the shirt had been ripped down to expose the flesh above the poor seared heart. Five doctors – which one had pulled the button off? No – it certainly had been six – had pronounced the heart as dead as any hustler’s heart can get: a charred lump of ashy flesh that sagged where the living heart had burned.

There had been one hundred and twenty men and two women on the witness benches, they said. It had all been spick and span behind the glass, everything had gone off in tiptop order, there had been not even the telltale flickering of the lights throughout the building.

Four buttons had been pushed by four unnamed men. They said. Yet only one of these had pushed the live one. None would ever have to think it was himself had sparked the living flame.

But the laces, the laces-

They had used an amperage of eight, everyone knew, because that was the usual amperage for a white man. Everyone said. Just as the usual amperage for a Negro was seven and a half.

Everyone knew.

Then they’d thrown him nine hundred extra volts just to make certain. Everyone knew about that too. Everyone told everyone else just how it had gone off. Everyone but Frankie had been there it seemed.

But the laces-

What laces? You think they let him walk in there with shoes on? Those tights cover your feet like an acrobat’s tights, there aren’t any shoes to it. Just a strip of black cloth sheared neatly halfway around the right ankle.

It wasn’t until weeks after he’d been released that Frankie learned Little Lester had died on his bunk with eleven hours yet to live.

A heart attack, the warden had concluded.

Arsenic, the coroner’s physician had insisted.

His heart had stopped beating too soon, the afternoon papers had reported.

And neither the evening nor the morning press would ever be able to prove a thing, one way or another, under any old buffalo of a moon, by flat-nosed, buffalo-eyed Frankie Machine.

Now, as the moon of other nights mounted the arch of June, he felt the touch of other Junes along the bars. Remembered how the orange Blatz signs of Wolcott Street would be glowing now each night more softly as the brief month passed trailing smoke, and July came on in a haze. And every arc lamp’s reflection along the rain-wet, moon-wet, sun-wet, and summer-dusted walks would burn more deeply as the days burned longer.

Frankie could tell himself at last that he had buried his monkey as deeply as the county had buried Little Lester.

Each Saturday afternoon now the good soldiers were led into the yard for a game of softball. Whenever he found himself out there in the open, after the long week in the laundry, he was seized with the need of hearing Molly Novotny’s teasing voice and a longing for the dark appeal of her eyes. He felt he didn’t care whether he dealt another hand of stud in his life or not.

Playing first base on the last Saturday in August, he took off his shirt in the fading West Side sunlight and a swift squall, as if waiting all the bright afternoon behind the sentry box for some fool to do just that, swept the field in chilling gusts. By the time they’d played out the inning he was sneezing and by the time he got back to his cot he was in a wringing sweat. The laundry had weakened his resistance more than he’d known.

By chow time he was rocking down Fever Street in a sidecar attached to some Good Humor vendor’s bicycle, racing east down Division with little pennants whirling in the white-walled wheels and the vendor, wearing a meter reader’s cap and waggling a finger at Frankie to sentence him to life imprisonment in a broom closet for stealing Captain Bednar’s only electric iron.

Sitting upright there among the brooms was good old McGantic wearing a sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve, dead as a doornail in line of duty. Dead for days. The face had withered to a monkey’s face, one dead brown paw pointed to where, upon an empty beer case, lay the same old hypo and two new quarter grains.

‘If he wants water give him water,’ the major was telling Applejack, ‘and water is all he gets. He’s still tryin’ to kick the habit. Let him sweat it out. If his ticker ain’t bad he’ll make it.’

Intern Katz understood. He knew how to get a half a cap of morphine out of the infirmary as well as how to fashion a needle out of a common pin. But he believed in Frankie Machine as he believed in his own applejack. ‘It won’t be me to put him back on, Major,’ he promised. Then he was left to watch alone beside the narrow cot in the narrow little infirmary. Because its looseness seemed to be causing Frankie distress, Katz rolled up the nightshirt’s sleeve.

Frankie felt McGantic rolling his sleeve to give him the one big fix that would fix him forever and for keeps. With all his remaining strength he pried at those fingers to get them off his precious arm. But the fingers had no strength left at all, something that was surely a hypo glinted in the light and in an access of hopeless dread Frankie cried like a sick baby for help: ‘Molly! Molly!’

But no Molly was near to reply. Only the sheet roller rumbling down the tier to punish him for what he’d done to Zosh. He ducked down Schwiefka’s alley and around the shed to pick up an armful of kindling for Jailer. Deep under the wood lay a soft green hat with a small red feather in its brim.

Strong hands held him down while others fastened the voltage clamp to the back of his neck but he was too smart for all of them – he rested one moment to make them think he had really given in at last and then shouted out of his very bones, ‘A Polak never gives in!’ – and kicked off all the hands at once. But it was all up with Frankie – the sponge was pressing his forehead and a voice was warning him through glass – ‘Don’t let your life go with it, Dealer.’

He opened his eyes and through the sweat saw Applejack Katz’s good tough mug studying him gravely. And Applejack’s long, hard hand drying the tears, fears and sweat away.

‘You’re toughin’ it through the hardest sort of way, Dealer,’ he heard Katz telling him. ‘Quit stonin’ yourself. You ain’t that sick. How many guys you fightin’ anyhow? Be yourself, Dealer. Be yourself.’

‘That’s not so easy,’ Frankie whispered weakly. ‘I got to get straight first.’

‘It’s the same thing,’ Katz told him quietly.

At Applejack’s feet Frankie saw the infirmary’s gray cat sitting upon its haunches. It purred, just once, to affirm Applejack’s counsel.

As the fever lowered Frankie dreamed of someone folding and refolding bundles of newspapers right beside his cot and forced himself awake to see who it was this time.

Only the old woman of the wind, there on the other side of the pane, wrapping the great sheets of the rain.

Indian summer came and September drew toward its close. It closed in a green half-twilight, like the half-twilight of the heart. In this green-gray late September light the Prager beer signs gleamed redly as soon as the arc lamps gleamed yellow. Then the arrows of all the Old Style Lager signs began working anxiously back and forth till the yellow arc lamps dimmed and died, the scarlet Prager bulbs signed off and the overworked Lager arrows went to bed. Only the green-gray light was left, like a light left burning in a hallway entrance all night long. To light the morning’s earliest peddler waking the tenements with one clear call: ‘Kartofflee! Kartofflee! ’

Then the trolleys, like mild-tempered elephants, approached each other slowly and paused, with a primitive graciousness, to let each other pass; and went shambling forward once more upon their predestined jungleways as though the pause had lent each a greater understanding of all things.

Frankie came down Division Street, where only arc lamps and fire hydrants grow, wearing the same woolen army trousers and the combat jacket – its sleeve patched so neatly, by a county sewing machine, the old tear was scarcely detectable. With a new checkered cap on his head and feeling as if some tightly wound spring within himself had slackened, never to stand taut winding again.

Back in the city’s littered bivouac he walked among the tenements of home like an awol private returning to barracks from which his old outfit had long ago convoyed and scattered for keeps. He felt both weakened and strengthened by his stretch. His hands hung heavily, the fingers felt like thumbs for lack of use with deck, cue, dice or drum. But he’d beaten McGantic and McGantic’s terrible monkey.

He’d paid in full. He didn’t have to punish the blood and bone any longer. Molly-O had shown him what was gnawing at his heart and the long stretch had forced him to the fight.

‘Once you got the touch it’s always with you,’ he remembered, and passed the Safari without looking in. There was no longer anyone there he needed to see.

‘When a cripple leads a cripple it doesn’t amount to much,’ he recalled someone telling him as he turned into his own dark hall.

In the dimness someone was shouting threats to someone far above. Halfway up the first flight he made out the hulking raincoated figure of Poor Peter Schwabatski pushing an artificial daisy into a crack of the stair. How long was it now he’d been trying to make them grow there? Since before that middle tread had come loose, Frankie remembered. When the dimwit had once asked his papa why his flowers never grew, Frankie remembered the Jailer saying, ‘Because it never rains indoors.’

That was a hard thing for Peter to understand. It seemed to him it rained all day indoors. All day it rained in Poor Peter’s mind upon the paper daisies of his brain: a paper garden in a paper rain. It was the reason he always wore a raincoat, sun or rain; dust storm, blizzard or summer hail.

It was of this same Poor Peter Frankie had heard the Jailer speak mournfully once, after the Jailer had been openly boasting to Violet, ‘I know how to hit them ovalries: the right one makes a boy, the left one a girl, right square in the middle is what we call a murphydyke.’

‘Where’d you hit it?’ Violet had asked.

‘I missed altogether, I guess,’ Jailer had acknowledged then with a smile so wan Frankie had wished Vi hadn’t asked that that time.

For the boy had been sitting then where he sat now, moving humbly aside as always for traffic, too absorbed in his dusty flowers to lift his half-bald head. He was not more than twenty but had been losing his hair since he’d been twelve.

As he stepped past Peter, Frankie heard Violet and the Jailer really going at it.

‘No hammering on Sunday!’ Violet was demanding. ‘Go to sleep, drunk! Get a wife and hammer in bed!’

‘One I had said no hammering on Sunday too,’ the Jailer reproved Violet, ‘she said I hammered enough all week!’

‘You’ve hammered enough around here too – and you ain’t hit a nail yet,’ she chided him. ‘Two years fixing one board!’

‘You want to come down and try my board for size now?’ he invited her. ‘You won’t mind my hammering after that!’ He sounded a trifle tight all right.

‘Shame, Schwabatski,’ Vi teased him softly, ‘drinkin’ up that boy’s milk at the bars.’

‘Leave the helpless children out of this!’ He waved the hammer, pretending to be ready to come up after her.

Frankie leaned heavily on the rail, waiting for he didn’t know what. For some reason the twenty-watt bulb of the hallway had been painted a dull red, the same as that over the visitors’ cage. As he passed the Jailer the old man’s hammer caught him by the claw and hauled him back.

‘It served that one right, Dealer – he went into that business in the wrong neighborhood – Polaks don’t need what he was selling. You see: it didn’t help him after all to have the devil for a father.’

Frankie freed himself and went on up the stairs, but the old man shambled right on up behind him, babbling away till Frankie had to turn on him to get him back to his stairs, his son and his whisky.

‘You’ll never finish that step runnin’ off at the mouth all day, Jailer,’ he urged without anger.

The old man took him by the jacket’s sleeve and Frankie looked down into the grizzled, grayish, boozed and wrinkled mug, always so intent on giving fresh heart to all those who seemed to be in need of it.

‘People like that ought to be knocked on the head!’ he whispered as though he’d overheard Frankie’s threat to Louie one night. ‘Don’t torture yourself! Myself would of give you this hammer! Myself would have done it! Don’t torture! Don’t suffer!’ The old man was pleading so, two steps there below, he seemed to be pleading on his knees. Frankie took the big veined hand and felt his own fingers’ weakness in the old man’s grip.

‘All I done was a little stealin’, Jailer,’ he told the old man softly. ‘Now I done my time for that, so let’s forget what can’t be helped no more. All sorts of things happen and then it’s done and the less we talk about it now the better for me ’n everybody.’

It was the assurance the old man needed, he sensed Frankie had found some degree of peace and let him go at last. Frankie saw him return, with a pencil behind his ear and a ruler sticking out of the back overall pocket, to his work among the paper daisies.

Overhead he heard Violet return back down the hall without a greeting. That wasn’t like Vi at all. ‘She’s gone to tell the punk I’m back,’ he guessed.

‘You heard what I said all the same,’ the old man mumbled, through two nails clenched in his teeth as he squatted on the step. ‘Knocked on the head! With this same hammer!’ Then the hammer’s rapid tapping, light and sane and calm, a good carpenter’s hammering, like the beat of a lightened heart. The Jailer felt better for having unburdened himself. Frankie could tell. But how long it had been since the old man had first wished to speak out Frankie could only surmise.

‘The old man got good heart,’ Frankie told himself. Everyone, even those who left doors ajar just to bait him a bit, knew the old man had the truest sort of heart.

It was only that there was so little demand for the truer sort of heart of late.

Hearts shaped like valentines aren’t at all the fashion. What is more in demand are hearts with a bit of iron – and a twist to the iron at that. A streamlined heart, say, with a claw like a hammer’s claw, better used for ripping than for tapping at old repairs – that’s what’s needed to get by these days. It’s the new style in hearts. The non-corrugated kind don’t wear well any longer.

Hearts with a twist to the iron – that’s what makes a good hustler’s heart.

Behind the narrow yellow door bearing the red tin 29 he himself had nailed there, Frankie heard the old clock below the crucifix tick once – warningly – and pushed in without knocking.

Sophie sat with her head thrown back and eyes closed, looking debauched in the dim tenement light. Apparently assuming it was only that nosy Violet again, she said tonelessly, ‘You come in yourself this morning, did you? You only sent things yesterday.’

The room certainly looked as though Violet only sent things these days. It didn’t look as if it had been swept in a month; cigarette butts, Kleenex, bottles and hairpins littered the floor. The walls had grown darker.

Her scrapbook lay on her lap. ‘You pastin’ pictures, Zosh?’ he asked.

She opened her eyes, smiled wanly and lifted her hands listlessly toward him.

The gesture told him she had known it was himself in the doorway all the time, that she had been playing some strange game with herself after hearing his voice on the stairs, pretending she had not heard anyone at all. Yet he held both her hands in his. He had seen so many weary homecomings at the Pulaski. Till her fingers began to work like small claws upon his palms.

‘You’re stronger than you were,’ he told her. For her hands seemed to have gained a chilly ferocity all their own. They felt so cold, so cold. He dropped them gently and went behind her chair to rock her shoulders awhile.

‘That’s nice, Frankie,’ she told him thinly, ‘you learned your lesson. God punished you. Always be nice after this fer what you done.’

Violet’s voice at the open door: ‘When did that sonofabitch break out?’

Frankie saluted her from where he stood. ‘Hi, Sergeant – come on in – but don’t bring your army.’

For the punk’s shadow fell behind her.

‘He didn’t mean no harm, Frankie,’ Violet pleaded for him like a mother for a wayward child, ‘he just got scared ’n run.’

‘Then he can keep on running – right back up them steps. He’s got somebody’s nice fat bankroll up there to count and he’s gonna get plenty of time to count it. I’m goin’ back to work by Schwiefka tonight ’n that mocky ain’t workin’ no door where I’m dealin’. I’m the guy who got him the job ’n I’m the guy who’s visin’ him off it. That’s the first thing I’m doin’ t’night, it’ll be my first good deed for society.’

He heard Sparrow retreat as softly as he had come. As though knowing for months that that would be Frankie’s answer. He’d run like a scalded dog all right, no two ways about it.

‘What makes him so brave?’ Frankie asked Vi with heavy irony. ‘He ain’t got a bad conscience about anythin’, has he?’

But Violet was gone, to console or upbraid her Sparrow, and Zosh was waiting for him to turn toward her so that everything could begin again, just like it used to be.

‘Your bonus dough is gone, Frankie,’ was her opening shot. ‘I tried to make it last. The last two mont’s I been livin’ off yer disability dough -’ n even then I had to borrow a double sawbuck off Vi I ain’t been able to pay back.’

‘You don’t have to pay it back,’ Frankie assured her, ‘if it come from where I think it come from.’

‘She said it was Old Man’s insurance dough,’ Zosh told him, ‘but the way she’s actin’ I don’t care if I pay her back either. You really goin’ back to work so soon, Frankie?’

‘Just till I get back on my feet,’ he assured her. ‘I’m out for a real job, Zosh. Beatin’ them tubs. I’m gonna be a drummer just like I always said.’ Then he noticed that no Rumdum crouched beneath the dresser. ‘Where’s the hound?’ he wanted to know.

‘Vi took him, she got more room. How could I take care of him all day here by myself? He didn’t like me anyhow. Why don’t you get me a nice little puppy-pup, Frankie? You said you would. You promised.’

So nothing had really changed after all. She would own a dog and he would be a big-name drummer. He would practice every night.

But she’d seen spurts of golden hope in him before. It would wear off now as it always had. He’d be back dealing where he ought to be and she’d be sitting where she ought to be and everything would be just the way it had been, just as it ought always to be.

He was pulling the practice board out from under the sink and brushing the months of dust off its scars and dents and picking up the sticks to get the feel of them again. Then put them down gently, for he saw she was nodding where she sat, the brief half sleep of invalidism.

‘Let’s do like regular people now,’ she murmured, as though in sleep. ‘Like regular people ’n go by the Aragon.’

He stood behind her chair with his hands on the wood, ready to wheel her if she wakened. Then, as her head nodded, told her softly: ‘Have a good dream, Zoschka. Have a good dream you’re dancin’ again.’

He could not see the trace of a smile that strayed so knowingly across her lips.

Neither the Tug & Maul nor the Safari saw Molly Novotny any more. She had drifted into the vast web of backstreet and alleyway, crosslight and traffic warning, of the overnight hotels and those little nameless restaurants that burn all night under the single sign: DOOD EATS.

‘She’s workin’ in some boog honky-tonk,’ Antek told Frankie. ‘Ask Meter Reader, he’s the guy who goes out scoutin’.’

Frankie waited half a day for Meter Reader to show up, and got only the vaguest sort of information for his patience. ‘All I remember is a cat settin’ on a piano. I was so boiled I don’t know where I was. But I remember talkin’ to Drunk John’s girl. She was a little boiled herself.’

So all nights ended for Frankie now with a firm resolution, renewed each morning, to scout around Lake and Paulina before the day was over. But 10 P.M. found him in the dealer’s slot and he couldn’t afford to miss a single night: he had to get a small stake together. He couldn’t come to Molly broke and begging.

Yet the week ran out on Saturday night and he was no richer than he’d been on Monday morning. The old merry-go-round was rolling again and he had to ride as hard as any.

Once more the yellow arc lamps bloomed in the shadow of the El. Pumpkin-colored posters appeared in the bakers’ windows among the round brown loaves of morning, announcing that Mickey Michaels’ Melody Masters would play at St Wenceslaus Kostka Saturday evening for the Endless Belt Invincibles S.A.C.

In front of Piechota’s Poultry & Fresh Eggs Market a single gander stood gawking between its legs at a cord that forever held it fast.

Umbrella Man came in to Schwiefka’s every noon with the Times morning line crumpled in his pocket, the daily double checked off and fifty cents in his hand. He never won and never complained. He came in with a bottle on his hip, made his bets like a man paying a bill, and left with the relieved air of one who has settled a long-overdue debt. The only return he seemed to expect was the privilege of climbing the same stairs and trying again another day.

He wasn’t permitted to climb those stairs after the last race had been run. Since Frankie had been gone Cousin Kvorka had forbade him to sit in any poker game. So that, after his fifty-cent bet was made, Umbrella Man spent the evening drinking instead of playing poker. By the next noon, as often as not, he would still be weaving a bit.

It was said that he had taken to begging secretly for drinks at Widow Wieczorek’s. That though he never begged anywhere with his lips, for fear of Cousin Kvorka, he managed to pick up a beer or two at the Widow’s simply by using his eyes to express his need.

‘The gray cat’s purred for Umbrellas,’ Frankie heard Antek say.

All things remained the same; yet all things had changed. No one sat under the short-card sign waiting to bring up coffee and cigarettes for the players. Blind Pig spent his nights in the Safari now and lived in the room where Louie had lived, among Louie’s abandoned possessions. ‘I’m takin’ all I can get,’ Pig reassured the troubled ghost of Louie Fomorowski.

For Louie’s old customers still found their way: they came now with cold, hard silver. Pig wouldn’t touch folding money. ‘I can’t get nobody to give me a square count,’ he complained of everybody.

The Prager legend above the Tug & Maul still came on at the same moment every night. Above the bar mirror, and all down Owner’s wall, hung fresh ads for Budweiser, Chevalier, Nectar and Schlitz. As if in honor of Frankie’s return.

And why was it, Frankie wondered, getting his own little beer paunch back, that the faces in Owner’s ads were always so clean and healthy and wholesome and glad? There was the freshly scrubbed young housewife winking broadly at her own cleverness in having kept two bottles of some green offgrade brew in the icebox in event of company: evidently she was one of the few women in Cook County who had heard of beer. For her husband’s enthusiasm over such foresight scarcely knew bounds.

Beside her was some usurer togged out in woodsman’s gear, preparing an enormous t-bone – where had that come from? – over a smokeless fire in a clean green land of night-blue lakes and birch trees so straight and tall they looked like ivory-tipped cues. ‘He must of gone up there ’n shot it hisself,’ Frankie decided, missing the entire point of the ad, which was simply to take note of the cold beer mug waiting in the blanket-roll by that smokeless fire.

Down the line a pink-cheeked, overstuffed illiterate with a shot glass at his side looked benignly down, over volumes heaped by a cynical photographer, upon the barflies of the Tug & Maul who actually drank the stuff.

The barflies returned his gaze, from time to time. But a slight glaze so commonly clouded their sight that they thought, as often as not, that the man in the private library was Errol Flynn.

This freshly blooded race bred by the better advertising agencies looked down upon the barflies of the Tug & Maul, trying to understand how it was that these battered wrecks could look as though not one of them had ever seen a land of night-blue lakes with poolroom cues for trees. Nor any man’s private library at all. They appeared not even to have discovered the public ones.

There were only boys with bad teeth, wives with faces still dented from last night’s blows and girls whose hair was set so stiffly it looked metallic. There were only old drooling lushbums with faces like emptied goboons. There was only a long line of faces that had passed straight from the noseless embryo into the running nose of senility. And had seen no birch tree at all.

‘I got to get a lib’ry card myself,’ Frankie determined.

That was only one of several matters he had to tend to right away. Another was the business of getting a job on the legit so that he could break clean with Zosh instead of running off like some sneaking punk. He was going to start on that the minute he finished his shot – he finished it. And was right on the verge of getting up to look up a certain name in the telephone directory five feet from where he sat – a name that had been told to him once, right in here, of a party who could put a man to work on the drums with or without a union card. But just at that moment he noticed that Antek’s glasses had been broken while he’d been gone. ‘What happened to the goggles, Owner?’ he asked urgently, needing to know the answer right away.

Antek made no reply. He felt he was being razzed and walked off with the string tied over one ear and knotted to the stump of the glasses’ frame. Antek suffered occasional defeats, and these humiliated him more deeply than blows.

His deaf-and-dumb cat had also, it seemed, come under fire. She came gimping across the floor on three legs and somebody’s hound, on a leash, made a run for her. Antek’s wife, holding the leash, let the hound go just far enough to make the old cat scramble for it on all threes.

‘The old cat’s no good,’ Mrs Owner explained herself righteously, ‘she’s the one what trampled her young ones to deat’ – somebody ought to give it to her good for that.’

A dull compassion for all old cats hit Frankie. ‘She did it to make room for her next litter,’ he told the woman. So just to show everyone how she felt she hollered, ‘Get her, Bummy!’ and let the leash go altogether. The old cat barely made it, half crawling and half slipping up the piled beer cases to safety.

And the old bums drooled and drooled.

Frankie turned away. It seemed that everything that ever happened to him had begun with some hound or other’s aimless yapping.

Outside the traffic warnings flashed from red to green and back again. In the bar mirror he saw the door open and Sparrow wander in pretending he wasn’t looking for anyone in particular. Then just happen to spot an old buddy who hadn’t been around for a while.

‘Hi, Dealer,’ he sounded Frankie out from the front of the bar, signaling to Antek for two shots. Frankie let his shot stand before him without even acknowledging that he’d seen anyone come in.

But out of the corner of his eye, turned toward the mirror, he studied the punk as never before. So this was the joker for whom he’d done nine months in County. ‘He left me holdin’ the bag for sure that time,’ Frankie reminded himself firmly; so that he’d never, never weaken.

Sparrow leaned over the bar to Antek, whispered confidentially, and a minute later Antek ambled down toward Frankie with a far too casual air.

‘He wants to talk to you,’ Antek reported, ‘somethin’ about gettin’ back on the door by Schwiefka. Says you got him awfully wrong about somethin’.’

‘If a guy wants a job by Schwiefka,’ Frankie said loudly enough for the punk to hear, ‘let him go by Schwiefka. I don’t run no joint, I’m just dealin’.’

Antek, duty done, reported back to Sparrow and the punk picked up his courage at last. Catching Frankie’s eye in the mirror, he asked, in a small peaked voice, ‘You still got them hard feelin’s, Dealer?’

‘I got no kind of feelin’s.’

‘It wasn’t no sense bot’ of us gettin’ busted, Frankie.’

‘No sense at all,’ Frankie agreed readily. ‘Who’s arguin’?’ Frankie certainly wasn’t. It was all over and done so far as Dealer was concerned. He turned on the stool, leaving the shot the punk had bought him with his last two bits, and brushed past him to the door.

Sparrow plucked pleadingly at Frankie’s sleeve. ‘Let me talk to you, Frankie.’

Frankie looked down at him. The punk was looking shabby all right. And a bad time of year for dog stealing. ‘There’s lots of things I got wrong awright,’ he told the punk, ‘but you ain’t one of ’em. You’re the one thing I’m real right about.’

He turned up his jacket against the evening cold and left without looking back.

Each morning now the tide of his loneliness rose, to ebb only when he took his evening place in the slot. To rise a bit higher, by the following morning, than it had the morning before. If it hadn’t been for the punk, it somehow seemed, he’d be on the legit now somewhere with Molly instead of still hustling suckers all night long. His eyes, under the night-light, no longer reflected the light.

It’s all in the wrist, with a deck or a cue; yet the fingers had lost the touch. The feel of the deck wasn’t there any more. And it had all been better before.

He practiced squeezing a sponge ball one evening. ‘Tunney stren’thened his hands like this,’ he explained to Sophie. And fancied the fingers felt stronger.

He gave the sports a shaky deal three nights running. On the fourth he settled down. Till, toward morning, one sport sat with a low straight and three others drew to two pairs. The second player’s final card slipped face upward, matching the pair of sixes already showing on the board. Frankie reddened and gave the others theirs face upward too, with a mumbled ‘sorry’ to the one whose hand he had so clumsily betrayed, a youth known to him only as Bird Dog.

Four players turned up their cards with real relief; the dealer had saved them money from home. But Bird Dog shoved the pot toward Frankie.

‘You won this one, Dealer,’ Bird Dog assured him, slapping his corduroy hat against the flat of his hand to indicate he was casing out, and tossed two bits of his own into the pot. ‘You win that too.’

‘Take your money, Bird Dog,’ Frankie begged off, ‘it’s yours.’

‘No hard feelings,’ the boy assured him with a flat little laugh. Everyone watched him leave while Frankie boxed the deck, pretending it had all been the fault of the cards, and opened a fresh deck. The pot stayed in the middle for the next hand’s winner.

His palms were sweating and the deck, that had always slipped so lightly, seemed half glued to them. On the very first go-round with the fresh deck he dealt a card to the missing player’s empty seat and the cards had to be shifted all around the board. Schwiefka put his hand on Frankie’s arm with a meaningful touch.

‘Go down ’n get a drink, Dealer. You’re dealin’ like you got hairs in your teet’. I fired one guy awready who could deal that good.’

Frankie shoved back the chair, slapped on his cap, and all the way to the door fancied small laughter behind him.

And right in the downstairs doorway, just as though he didn’t know he’d ever been fired, the punk was waiting again. ‘How long you been waitin’ for nothin’?’ Frankie wanted to know. A cold wind came down the alley and the punk blew on his hands.

‘A long time, Frankie. Get me my job back. I’m broke.’

‘You always were,’ Frankie reminded him.

When he reached the Tug & Maul Sparrow hustled in right behind him and stood watching while Frankie ordered a double shot for himself. His right hand was shaking so that he had to lift the glass with his left. Anybody’s hand would shake, having a punk shadow him all night. The punk must be practicing to be a Pinkie again. He kept the hand in his pocket. He had two doubles before it stopped trembling.

‘You got a loose crowd up there tonight, Frankie?’ The punk sounded homesick all right. ‘You got to get back up there right away?’

‘I don’t got to go nowheres right away.’

When Frankie ordered a third double shot Sparrow sensed that something had gone wrong in the slot. Frankie stuck to coffee between shifts when things were going as they should.

‘Ain’t you goin’ back upstairs all night, Frankie?’ And felt a faint little twinge of hope that, just maybe, Frankie had been fired too.

‘Not tonight ’r any night. Nobody’s stairs. I’m gonna try downstairs awhile.’ The hand was fine now, steady as a die. ‘I’m gonna find out what’s doin’ in the basement.’

‘You still got rent to pay,’ Sparrow reminded him meekly.

Frankie turned on him. ‘It looks to me like you’re fallin’ behind in yours,’ he accused the punk, looking him up and down from the worn shoes and the pants so thin at the knees to the coat that had once been old Stash’s: it still bore the marks of an ice tongs faintly visible across the left shoulder. ‘You look like Vi has fired you too,’ he threw in.

‘I’ll get my own racket.’ Sparrow tried, at the last possible moment, to salvage something of his pride.

‘It’s pretty cold for rollin’ stiffs,’ Frankie observed.

Sparrow saw then it was no use; no use at all. He wasn’t even good for a shot with Frankie any more.

‘What’s yours?’ Sparrow really wanted to know. ‘What’s yours?’

And didn’t stay for an answer.

Frankie saw his tattered coat catch in the door as it closed behind him, then the punk extricated himself and was gone into the November night. ‘It was toward this time of year I first hooked up with him,’ Frankie remembered with a heart homesick for many Novembers.

Owner came up with the bottle. ‘On the house,’ he told Frankie, and poured evenly for both the dealer and himself. Frankie shoved a half dollar toward Antek. He wasn’t so hard up as some people seemed to think.

‘See that sign of yours?’ he asked, pointing to one of the bar legends:

Our cow is dead

We don’t need your bull

‘Well,’ Frankie told Owner, ‘my cow’s dead too. So don’t gimme none of your bull. Just give me a square count on my change.’ And spat, slowly and provocatively, making a great show of the act, between his knees and down to the floor at his feet.

Antek was hurt. He’d only been trying to patch things up between a couple old buddies and this was what he got. He withdrew the bottle and his own glass, returned with change for the half dollar and said, ‘Suit yourself, Dealer.’

Then spat, just as slowly, just as provocatively, between his own feet.

‘You call that spittin’?’ Frankie laughed with a huge contempt, hawked once and blew a beautiful round gob straight over the bar to splash across the mirror where the photographs of Antek’s wife and daughter hung in gilt-edged frames. Antek picked up a sodden bar towel and slung it straight into Frankie’s face.

Frankie wiped his face absent-mindedly with the rag precisely as though it had been handed to him politely for just that purpose.

‘After all, Frankie,’ Antek apologized in all humility, ‘a bartender got feelin’s too.’ Then saw that Frankie was crying.

Antek watched this spectacle a minute, figuring something slowly to himself. Frankie handed him back the towel.

‘I’ll say this much about somethin’ that’s none of my business at all,’ Antek told him, measuring each word as though fearing to say one word too many. ‘I think you’re dead wrong about the punk. That’s all.’ And turned away.

So it really had been Pig – and the punk had been right in guessing that it had been Owner who’d given Pig ‘some kind of count’ on Louie’s roll. Then his pride came up to deny flatly what all his senses had told him at last. If he’d been wrong this long he’d just stay wrong. If the punk had gone, let him go. Let everyone, let all of them go.

It was too hard to get slapped in the teeth with a wet bar towel twice in a row.

He didn’t tell Sophie of his determination to quit Schwiefka. Why hang on? He didn’t even tell Schwiefka. The whole day following the night of the shaky deal he lay on the bed waiting for the old strength to return, in a single jump, to his wrists. He lay fully clothed, with his cap in easy reach of his hand; as though in order to be ready to go back to work the moment the touch returned.

But the feel of the deck had died with the light that had died in his eyes, leaving only a loneliness that was a loneliness for more than any lost skill.

More than a loneliness for careless nights when he and the punk had first gone on drunks together. More even than the gnawing need for Molly-O.

A loneliness that took on substance and form, like a crouching man wearing some sort of faded, outworn uniform.

He was lonely all right. He was lonely for his old buddy with the thirty-five-pound monkey on his back.

Neither Sophie nor Sergeant McGantic wanted him to practice at the board any more. She sat by the window and McGantic roamed the long, cold hall. It had been some hours since she had spoken. It had been some time since McGantic had called.

But toward the end of the afternoon she began telling him of all the things he had missed when he’d been gone. She had seen a movie about ‘Jack London in the Klondikes’ and another wherein Joan Crawford had changed hats without a change of scene. ‘I’m gonna write to Screenland about that,’ she threatened to snitch on Joan, ‘they pay five bucks fer movie boners they call them.’

She never wrote. But had added several morbid memories to the five-and-dime loose-leaf volume, her Scrapbook of Fatal Accidence. Yet there were long hours between them now when the book lay open on her lap and she had no word to say.

As if realizing at last that there was really nothing for her to do in the world. No true place of her own at all. Nothing to do but to wait. For what? For the booby hatch or a miracle, she didn’t much care which.

‘Why don’t Vi come to see me no more, just to say, “How you feelin’?” like she used?’ she suddenly demanded to know.

‘She’s havin’ trouble with the punk is why,’ he answered, not knowing himself just what he meant. ‘Vi is up to somethin’,’ he guessed indifferently and let it go at that.

Thus Sophie knew, more clearly with each hour, what she had so long suspected: that they were all in secret league against her. Violet and Frankie, Owner and Jailer, just the same as they’d been before Frankie had gone away; the overnight guests and creaky old Pin Curls down the fourth floor rear who played, over and over, just to get Sophie’s goat, the same old creaking tune:

‘Painted lips, painted eyes,

Wearing a Bird-of-Paradise…’

‘You only make the same mistake once,’ she advised him abruptly.

‘Whatever that means,’ he answered mechanically.

‘Oh, don’t always pertend you don’t know what I’m talkin’ about,’ she persisted, ‘a woman is the downfall of every man ’n a man is the downfall of every woman. You’re my downfall ’n I’m yours.’

‘Quit fallin’ down ’n say what you’re tryin’ to say,’ he urged her irritably, ‘quit beatin’ around the bushes.’

‘What I mean is there’s nuttin’ deader’n a dead love,’ she told him sternly, ‘nuttin’ deader.’

‘Sure there is,’ he assured her lightly, ‘dead people. They’re deader’n anybody.’

Her reply was simply to weave her hands in front of her face like a Hawaiian dancer and to sing saucily:

‘Hello, Aloha, how are you?

I’m bringin’ you kisses

From over the sea.’

She watched him slyly while they ate a cold-cut supper out of paper plates. There wasn’t enough strength left in her wrists, she claimed, to slice bread or cut sausage. She watched while he cut everything into small cubes for her and then sat weaving her hands instead of eating.

‘Others you’ve met

May call you coquette…’

‘Quit yawpin’ ’n scoff,’ he told her, ‘you sound like a lost orphan in a rain barrel.’

For now she fancied herself a vocalist with an all-girl band. Over the sausage she smiled faintly at the unseen players, encouraging one with a nod here and another with a nod there. There was something really distracted about her smile.

‘What the hell are you – a bird?’ But his eyes were clouded with concern for her.

‘Evelyn ’n her magic violin,’ Sophie explained easily. ‘I can do magic too.’

‘Well,’ he sighed, realizing he was in for a long, long night, ‘here we go again.’

‘… mean to me’

she sang,

‘Why must you be mean to me?’

and broke off abruptly to ask directly, ‘What do you think of the A. F. of L.?’

Frankie looked up, genuinely startled. ‘What the hell – you don’t even know what the A. F. of L. is. I think you’re tryin’ to act crazier just ’cause I’m back. If nobody was here you’d have more sense. Quit disguisin’ your eyes. Quit showin’ off.’

But whether she was just showing off or not he couldn’t be certain. Half an hour later she overdid herself. He was dozing and wakened to see her tracing, with one forefinger upon the dust of the unwashed pane, the single word: Perdition. Just as she finished tracing it the sirens sounded, the hook-and-ladder pulled past and patrol cars, insurance cars and all the frantic traffic of a 4-11 alarm came crashing by with a sense of imminent doom. She wheeled to the door and shrieked up the stairwell to Violet, ‘It’s goin’ up! Loop ’n all! It’s all goin’ up!’

Violet came down the stairs at a gallop; she had to phone the papers to learn what was burning, how far it was spreading, and a kind of elation seized Sophie while Vi was at the phone behind Jailer’s desk.

‘It’s just a short circuit by Fish Furniture’s basement,’ Vi reported dryly from the doorway. ‘All under control.’

But Sophie herself stayed out of control the rest of the evening. Neither magazines nor scrapbook nor the promise of beer could give her consolation. Just to realize that that was all it had come to, that that was all anything could ever come to. Just the way Vi had said that – it made a person want to cry, that was all.

‘The whole fire was in my head,’ she mourned.

He left for Schwiefka’s toward eleven o’clock. There was no other way to make the long night pass.

And wondering, the minute he sat down in the slot, how in the name of sweet Jesus Christ he was going to make it without a charge till morning.

Solly Saltskin wasn’t as happy, sleeping in the late Stash Koskozka’s bed, as he’d once thought he’d be. If he could, occasionally, have slept there alone it might have been endurable. Sneaking in for an hour of fast woo a couple times a week when Old Husband had still been padding about had been one thing: being tied down to these same four bedposts all night long, night after night, was strictly something else. Of late the bedposts had taken to leaning together with a faintly disapproving air. They’d seen them come and they’d seen them go: this one wouldn’t last as long as some of the others, they calculated, the reckless way he was going about things. A cooler head was what was needed; a cooler head, an older hand, a bit more restraint and snatches of sleep between rounds.

But Vi was so hothanded he didn’t get a chance either to sleep or even to cool off between rounds. Once he evaded her senseless stroking with some such thin excuse as, ‘I’m just gonna have a fast cup of coffee in the kitchen – you go to sleep, you need your rest, you’re gettin’ to look like a wornout movie actor.’

But just as he was putting the cup to his lips her fingers encompassed his throat from behind and he squawked like a strangling duck.

‘Don’t do that when you see I’m swallerin’,’ he protested.

‘That’s when it’s most fun, when you’re not expectin’ – you didn’t even hear me creepin’ up, did you, Goosey? Still love me, Goosey-Goo?’

And crushed down upon his lap to feed him coffee from a Pixley & Ehlers spoon, howling with joy at his every wretched gulp.

‘You look so unhappy, Goosey.’ She never ran out of new nicknames for him, each more revolting than the last. ‘Ain’t there enough sugar in it? Now tell me I’m sweet enough for you, you don’t need sugar with me settin’ here.’

All Sparrow had heart enough left to say was, ‘Let me up, Vi. I don’t know what’s gettin’ into you lately, you didn’t use to be like this all the time.’

She didn’t give him time to figure out a thing. She chirped kisses upon him instead. In time to the coffee’s steady perking.

‘The coffee’s perkin’ over, Vi.’

He never remembered for a moment that the Jailer had never once scolded Widow Koskozka for leaving her door a bit ajar.

She let him up at last and, as he turned, shaken, to the percolator, goosed him with a single loonlike warning – whoop! He went clean off the floor on the point of her thumb, half a foot into the air, staggered hysterically into the wall and wheeled like a wounded rabbit to get his back up against something solid and looked at her in a panting despair, awaiting some final blow.

‘Never do that,’ he warned her weakly, hysteria darkening his eyes. ‘Never do that ’n never call me that.’

‘Wait’ll I get you in bed,’ she consoled him. ‘I’ll make it all up to you, Goosey-joosey.’ And followed him mercilessly all the way back to the bedroom, breathing on his neck and tossing her flaming henna helmet about like a conquering lion’s mane. He had been an entertaining toy in his time – but how could a girl afford a toy that never brought in a dime and drank up every stray nickel left lying loosely about? He wasn’t weakening nearly as fast as had Old Husband, who’d given out entirely at the end of the first week. Sparrow only seemed to be a bit frayed around the edges. And the rent three weeks overdue.

Somebody had to go.

And she didn’t mean Rumdum.

‘You don’t know how I miss Old Man, now he’s gone,’ she tried for some reason to convince the punk, ‘you don’t have no idea how sweet that old man could be when he wanted.’

‘Don’t come on with the cheap romance,’ the punk scolded her. ‘You married him for his fifty a week ’n all you miss is that fifty.’

‘Well,’ she admitted,’ he wasn’t as much fun as you. You’re the most fun I ever had with pants on,’ she flattered him with a knowing nudge. ‘You ’n your bedroom eyes.’

‘I think I’m the most fun you ever had with ’em off,’ he agreed dismally.

‘’N just to think,’ she went on breathlessly, ‘I’m all yours, Goosey Lover.’

‘Don’t call me that, it sounds like goosey liver.’ But what he really felt was that she wasn’t all his so much as he was all hers and that there was no rest for the weary. It wasn’t just coincidence that her favorite tune about the house, day after day, began to be:

‘All of me,

Why not take all of me?’

He devised a more subtle means of evading her than that of the midnight snack. It was too easy for her to seduce him

right there on the kitchen floor to the tune of the percolator’s perking. He took to heading for the bathroom.

‘Don’t, Vi,’ he’d plead, as she’d drag him off the bed’s edge down into the sweaty sheets. ‘Don’t – I got to go by the bat’room.’ From beneath the bed Rumdum listened with sympathy; and a dull foreboding.

She’d relent then. For five minutes. Then he’d hear her making for the bathroom door; he’d grasp the knob firmly – there was no lock – and haul back like a crazed paralytic while she’d pull, shrieking at her discovery of this new game, on the other side of the knob.

Once, drowsing contentedly on the can beside the little five-watt bulb glimmering above the paper holder in the tiny darkened cavern, he understood, dreamily, Old Husband’s love of the broom closet and failed to hear her tiptoed approach – when she rattled the board above his head he almost went into shock.

‘Go back to bed,’ he begged, ‘for God’s sake,’ but she fetched him in an iron grip, pants dragging and the plumbing’s antique roar in his ears, flat down upon the cold linoleum.

While Rumdum galloped excitedly about them, nipping their heels.

Ten minutes later he rolled over, panting, wishing he had a pillow under his head. ‘Pull up the shade, Goosey,’ she ordered him, ‘let’s see if it’s gettin’ light.’

‘If I pull up the shade I’ll go up with it,’ he recalled the ancestral burlesque retort without humor. ‘I know now what they mean by “mortal coil,”’ he decided to himself, ‘’cause I got one I got to shuffle off before they haul me out of here with my toes turned up.’

Twelve weeks of their hot-breathed union and the mornings were finding him faint. The punk woke to his ninetieth common-law dawn, on the first day of December, feeling he’d never make the ninety-first. He rose like a haunted ghost, washed in cold water and took one last fond look at the friendly percolator: that had revived him many an ardent midnight and now would revive him no more.

Beneath the sink Rumdum slept with one ear alert for the coffeepot’s first perk. Vi was trying to wean him off beer with coffee.

Sparrow couldn’t take the chance, even now, of putting the pot on the stove. She wakened to its contented perking as to some slow aphrodisiac and the time was come to go. He found three halves, wrapped in a ten-dollar bill, in her apron. The last of Old Husband’s insurance money, and a pang of conscience flicked him. ‘So long as she don’t shoot herself when she finds out I ducked on her,’ he hoped anxiously. ‘Maybe she’ll get over the shock some day.’ And left as if it had been the percolator he had loved here so long and so well; it was all he truly regretted leaving.

He could not know that even then Violet lay wide awake and listening to his every secret move, scarcely daring to breathe for fear he might change his mind. ‘If he decides to hang on any longer I’ll have to hurt his feelin’s, that’s all,’ she determined firmly. ‘I’ll have to tell him right out I can’t afford him no more.’

She heard the door shut ever so softly and turned over on her side with the sighing relief of a job well done.

‘I always wanted to get out of this crummy neighborhood anyhow,’ Sparrow rationalized going downstairs. ‘One more winter with Vi ’n I’d be tearin’ all my pieces off the calendar too.’

He went past Frankie’s door noiselessly these days; there was no use trying to talk to the dealer any more. ‘When a Polak gets an idea in his head you can’t get it out wit’ a crowbar,’ Sparrow decided ruefully.

And so returned, with the city a golden roar in his ears, to the horse-and-wagon alleys of his childhood; with a rueful renascence in his heart.

For the alleys never changed. It was as though no time had passed since he had first escaped down them: playing hooky from that first truant officer as he was on the hook from Violet now. It seemed the same morning of golden escape.

The alleys had always been his sanctuary; they had been kinder to him than the streets. He had spent those long-ago days searching the ashcans for the tinfoil in discarded cigarette packs. Though the boulevard gutters had been better for tinfoil prospecting, the alleys had always been safer.

The tinfoil racket had been abandoned for the pursuit of beer corks. A still on Blackhawk Street had paid a dime a hundred for them in those days.

Beer corks were money: they were lagged, in lieu of pennies, along the sidewalk cracks. One red beer cork was worth five of the common brown-and-white rootbeer variety, and once Sparrow had hoarded a pearl beyond price: an orange-and-green job with an owl engraved upon it. No one in the neighborhood had ever seen one like it, he was offered as high as a hundred to one, in rootbeer tops, for it. Then he’d lost it out of a hole in his pocket and it had left a ragged little hole in his heart.

‘Five up!’ He recalled how the lagger’s single toss had represented a gamble of five corks and the lagger nearest the line had gotten first toss – five from each player – and could keep all that turned up heads. He could then toss them one at a time or all at once just as the whim took him. Then the runner-up got second toss and by the time tossings came around to Solly Saltskin there was usually only one left anyhow and that was his by default, there were no other tossers. But he’d toss it anyhow, just because the others had; it wasn’t often there was anyone farther off the line than Solly.

Even then he had always been last. The decisive crack in the sidewalk had always, somehow, seemed farther away to him than it had to the other alley stubs. Even then he had blinked and goggled and furrowed his forehead and bit his tongue in tossing while those who lagged easily did the winning. Twenty years – and he still put his face too close to others when he spoke, still peered hopefully through double-lensed glasses as if trying to see whether there’d be a beer cork or two left for Solly.

Still sauntered down the one-way alleys between Division Street and the Armitage Avenue carbarns with some forgotten eye of childhood alert for anything that might be turned into a spot of cash.

The sights and sounds of the alleyways by morning were different for Sparrow than those of the boulevards and the car lines. He heard them as familiarly as a nature lover hears murmurs of a forest morning. The clomp-clomp of Western Dairy steeds and the clatter of tardy milkmen up back stairs and down two steps at a time, the newsboy wheeling down a gangway on a bicycle and the morning greeting of the rolled paper thudding neatly and accurately against the wrong door, the odor of fresh rolls off the bakery truck – home sights, home sounds and home smells for Solly Saltskin.

He stole a copy of the Tribune off some newsboy’s two-wheeled cart and two chocolate-covered bismarcks off a bakery truck, just to feel freedom returning to his shaken spirit.

‘I may die poor,’ he felt with his returning strength, ‘but I won’t die tied. It’s not for me, the common-law life.’ And fed the second doughnut to Bogacz the Milkman’s horse. ‘You married, horse?’ Sparrow asked in his rasping whisper.

The old stallion rolled one white, derisive eye: he saw so many of this aimless order of alley wanderers, forever emerging out of the shadows to feed him stolen restaurant sugar or doughnuts or salt he didn’t really want. He took them only because he sometimes got lonely himself over the week ends. Though knowing there are worse things than loneliness along the long hard road to the glue works.

Sparrow heard the milkman’s container tinkling somewhere behind him and a hangover of guilt, from some half-forgotten caper among some other milkie’s quarts and pints, caught him and he crossed the avenue to scurry down the opposite alley.

Toward noon he spotted a likely-looking terrier frolicking by itself in a yard behind a chili parlor. He had it wagging its stump of a tail, his hand on its collar – worth a dollar-fifty itself – when he glanced over his shoulder and saw an overweight gorilla in an apron stained with chili like freshly spattered blood and a meat cleaver in one paw, surveying him silently from behind the screened doorway.

Sparrow cooed swift love words at the pup and fed it an invisible dog biscuit – the screen door opened and again he ran for it. When he glanced back the cook was leaning over the fence, cleaver dangling and the whole man measuring him for future decapitation.

Sparrow didn’t linger: the incident had proven to him that the heyday of dog stealing was gone with the miniature golf courses and Star and Garter burlesque. There was no sort of living left in the alleys, it seemed. It was all on the streets nowadays.

He had been dependent upon Frankie and Violet too long. Where would he go when the sawbuck out of Vi’s apron was gone? he wondered uneasily. It looked like a long cold winter for Solly Saltskin.

He caught up on his sleep curled up on the Widow Wieczorek’s pool table, curtained off from her bar, using a rack wrapped in his baseball cap for a pillow. The Widow had been widowed so long she’d cut her hair short and grown a mustache. She didn’t mind one of the boys sleeping on the table if he lifted a couple with her first. She shook him awake toward two o’clock and he idled the rest of that bright afternoon away watching Gringo Guns in the roaring darkness of the Pulaski.

When he came out the evening light lay like a dreamer with sunburned flanks across the dreaming city: water towers, steeples and rooftops, all lay adrift in an amber sea; till the wind below began to search, in hallway and alley and yard, for the place where pale night was hiding.

A wind that stirred nothing else than a kite caught on a telephone wire. A kite of such a darkling red, with that lowering orange sun behind it flooding the heart-shaped wound where the wires ran it through, that it looked to be bleeding. The merciless city wires, upon which it tried to turn a bit, first this way and then that so helplessly, were tinted red from that enormous wound. Sparrow watched it flutter up there with the first rumors of evening, and his own heart pinked with the wind. The frail cross of the kite’s frame hung as piteously as his own heart had hung, since Frankie had gone to jail, to the taut and insulated steel. Goggling upward at it, shivering a bit in the shabby coat, he felt for a moment as if he too were something impaled on city wires for only tenement winds to touch.

He had nine dollars left in his pocket and knew just the place to build it up to forty. All you needed to sit in on a stud session at Kippel’s was a five-dollar bill on the board before you. ‘I could lick them rag sheenies every day ’n twice on Yom Kippur,’ he decided, taking the alleys toward Damen and Division.

He took a seat at the corner table, folding his nine singles to look like eighteen and declared himself casually – ‘from the pocket’ – to indicate he reserved the privilege of reaching for his empty wallet. It was seven-card, two down, four open and the last one closed and he didn’t glance at the closed pair till the first open card hit him: two blood-red jacks hiding just as the third jack slid in face up to meet its relations. Three J-boys wired, this was Solly Saltskin’s night. He glanced one suspicious second at the dealer, saw he was just some run-of-the-mill houseman and that three jacks were just luck for one punk whose luck, God knew, was long overdue for a change. All he had to do was to suck the mockies in softly.

The mockies were wary of the new hand: he looked too simple to be quite true. Each felt he had seen the punk around before; but none could give him a name or place him. Kippel’s players were Jews and this was a Jew – yet one who didn’t somehow belong. They sensed a renegade.

They sensed it in the first-generation Polish inflection which association with Frankie Machine had lent him. They sensed it in the baseball cap, tilted at the jaunty Polish angle, instead of a conservative felt pulled down a bit over the ears. Kippel’s customers wore white shirts and dark jazzbows and not one tie in that whole circle gave promise of lighting up even for a moment. ‘What’s the matter – no gamblers in the house?’ Sparrow asked with real resentment as, one by one, they dropped off from the challenge of the hidden jacks.

For, like the Jewish fighters, the Jewish gamblers were counterpunchers. They could wait on the defensive forever, hoarding their strength, their cunning and their cards for the single opening as though one opening were all that were granted a man in one lifetime.

They had learned that the one blow, the one ace, the single chance had to be the decisive one. They knew that for them there would be no consolation honors and no second chance. There was the knowledge of the long-hunted: to turn swiftly, with open claws at the very moment of disaster, upon the undefeated hunter.

For the hunter there was always another day. When the hunted lost they lost for keeps.

Therefore they had to win every day, they had to win tonight, tomorrow and forever. The long chance was the pursuer’s luxury, the short one the necessity of the pursued. The pursued had to be certain beforehand, make no mistake in timing and do it all within rules laid down long ago by the hunter.

‘If this was a Polak game nobody’d drop,’ Sparrow decided.

For the Poles shoved the law of averages off the table and chased the longest possible chance down fantastic myriad ways. With three kings face up about the board and not enough in the pot to warrant a 5-1 risk, they took the 52-1 chance without hesitation and went for the case king as if it were a hope of heaven. If they did hit it the very idea of having had the brassbound nerve to play a chance that long was as exciting a reward to them as the money it had won.

So long as they could still borrow from the bartender they played like men who never lost a round; though they might have been losing steadily for a month. The Jews recalled last year’s losses and forgot this hand’s winnings. The Poles played the game for its own sake, to kill the monotony of their lives. The Jews played to make the hours return to them of what other hours, in other cities, had robbed their fathers; their lives were less boring away from the board than at it. The Pole, even when playing on borrowed money and the rent overdue, still felt, somehow, that he could afford to lose all night because he was so sure to win everything in the end. The Jew knew that the moment he felt he could afford to lose he would begin losing till the bottom of the world fell through and he himself went through the hole. It was more fun being a Polish gambler; it was safer to be a Jewish one.

Now, after he had raised the bet to a dollar on his three jacks, only two players came along with Sparrow. He hadn’t yet filled but had an open six and an open deuce to draw to and on the sixth card the player to his left suddenly bet into him. Sparrow raised it a dollar without faltering and the third hand dropped. The final card was down and the man who’d taken over the driver’s seat checked. Sparrow sensed him to be hiding. With only a single left in front of him he said, ‘Two in the dark – one buck light.’ He was that certain his card was there. It had to be there.

‘Owes the pot a buck,’ the dealer announced and Sparrow caught High Man’s eyes measuring him as if he were a badly marinated herring and shoved two singles and a silver trail of quarters into the pot. ‘Two and two better.’ The dealer counted swiftly – ‘but not so fast as Frankie’ – Sparrow thought loyally. Then lost courage and said, ‘I see.’

‘Three bucks light,’ the dealer warned him, and the punk’s greedy little heart fluttered weakly.

‘Turn ’em over.’

High Man flipped his hand: two little deucies and three little treys. He’d caught. Sparrow revealed his three jacks wired. Beside a six, a deuce and a queen. All the closed card had to be was a deuce – but the deuces were dead – a trey – but the treys were dead – a queen then or the case jack – the dealer flipped the card for him.

Nine of clubs.

‘That nine of clubs is the devil card every time,’ somebody sympathized.

‘I owe you t’ree, friend,’ Sparrow assured High Man. ‘Be right back with the bundle – save my seat, Dealer.’

‘It’s a long night till morning,’ someone surmised dryly. But Sparrow was almost to the door before the bouncer collared him. ‘You owe the gentmuns some money over there.’

‘Holy Jumped-up Jesus,’ Sparrow protested with real indignation,’ I just told the man what I owed him myself – it’s where I’m goin’ now, to get it. Where the hell you think I’m goin’?’

‘Out to steal it for all I know – but the gentmuns can’t wait.’

‘If he can’t wait let the house pay him off.’ Sparrow faltered then and he whispered in strict confidence, ‘I’m a steerer myself, friend. Us steerers got to stick together.’

‘Let him go, Ju-ju,’ someone said behind the bouncer. It was old man Kippel, looking as professionally tolerant as a Southern senator. Old man Kippel didn’t go for rough stuff for sums under five c’s. ‘Just see the lad don’t sit in the dollar game no more.’

‘I’ll remember you all the same, sheenie,’ Ju-ju told Sparrow, to let his boss know that his heart was in his work. But the punk had fled pockets empty and feelings wounded savagely. ‘Callin’ me a sheenie, him the biggest rag sheenie on Division – he couldn’t get no job except in a rag-sheenie joint.’

And wondered whether that kite was still caught up there, so high on the city wires.

That was how Sparrow was still feeling when he wandered back into the Tug & Maul hoping that his credit might still somehow rate a shot and a beer. His rating had slipped badly with Antek since Old Husband had checked out. A new sign above the register apprised him that it was lower than ever today:

I think you think you think you know what I’m think ing but I’m not thinking what I think you think I think: Credit.

While in the place of the Our cow is dead legend a more forceful one expressed Owner’s current attitude toward everyone:

Once a rat always a rat

And who, standing up to be counted, can say that not once has he played the rat?

So there wasn’t any use reminding Owner how freely he had spent Old Husband’s Christmas bonus and then had gone right on through the old man’s insurance money while Frankie was sitting in the bucket. Owner had a bad memory for long-spent rolls. It hadn’t even been a good idea to spend it with Owner, Sparrow realized regretfully now. ‘It seemed like I was buildin’ up my credit then. But I was oney tearin’ it down,’ he was forced to conclude these many months after. ‘All the good I done was to get Frankie saltyback at me.’ While the big bass juke mocked his present poverty.

‘Wrap your troubles in dreams

And dream your troubles away …’

In the back booth, where he and Frankie had so often drunk together, Umbrella Man sat with his great unskilled hands folded gently over his bell and his head lying sidewise upon his hands, so that the bell’s rain-rusted handle made a long crease in his unshaven cheek. The bottom had pretty well fallen out of things for Umbrellas when Frankie had taken the ride to Twenty-sixth and California. He had been drunk most of the time since. His credit had fallen to a state even lower than Sparrow’s.

Once Cousin Kvorka had had him locked up overnight to keep him from gambling and had then told him he was only out on parole. Umbrellas had believed, ever since, that if he should ever be caught gambling, at any table where anyone but Frankie Machine was dealing, he too would be sent out to Twenty-sixth and California.

Now he raised his battered brow, called to some dealer of his dreams for the one card that could save his life and waited, with a dull glaze over his eyes, till it seemed to fall right in front of him. He studied the hypothetical card, turning it over and over with fingers that seemed to feel it and read with heavy lids: ‘Fulled up. Aces.’ Then boggled his eyes about at the hypothetical players with whom he played so often of late: now one of them would have to buy him a drink. And fell forward across his bell as though he’d been struck from behind with the handle of his own umbrella.

They say it’s hard enough to find a needle in a haystack. Sometimes it’s even harder to find five dollars in a city of four million people, most of them millionaires. So that when Sparrow heard a familiar shuffle behind him he turned on the stool and said, ‘I want to talk to you, Piggy-O.’

Pig, wearing his everlasting smirk with that same air of fresh prosperity he’d worn ever since Nifty Louie had checked out, tapped on toward the eyeless juke without hearing a word, leaving behind the same old smell of unwashed underwear.

Tapped on more softly than before. Sparrow looked down. The big flat feet had been squeezed into a pair of long, narrow, two-tone jobs more fit for a race track in August than a bar in December. Nifty Louie’s very shoes: Sparrow could still see them coming down that long dark stair. ‘My God,’ he thought with something of awe, ‘I don’t think he even left Louie his socks.’

At the juke Pig turned his black snout up as if to identify the numbers on the box by smell; the very hairs within the nostrils seemed to quiver. And though his hands were as grimy as ever Sparrow saw that the nails had been manicured; to go with the suit that fitted him like a hide. He lifted the cane’s begrimed tip till it touched the lowest of the box’s numbers, then moved upward, exactly like a nervous spider, in little leaps from one number to that above till it attained the top row and punched his favorite number at last.

‘O tidings of comfort and joy,

Comfort and joy…’

Sparrow waited till the juke had finished, then moved swiftly up to Pig’s ear: ‘Borrow me a dirty sawbuck, Piggy-O.’

Pig looked down at his hand, lying flat on the bar, just as though he could see the soot imbedded in the wrinkles there. Slowly it began to crawl with desires all its own, one manicured finger at a time, one inch at a time, to rest till the next finger caught up; then all went on together, in a miniature burlesque, till the bar’s very edge was reached, and returned to the exact spot from which they’d begun that neurotic carnival.

‘You made me dance to your music, brother – now you dance to mine,’ he told the punk at last.

‘I was just a guilty culprit them days, Piggy-O. Times is different now. I’m not takin’ no more gas off the dealer. Account of him I got the gate by Schwiefka. Hinges ’n all. What you think of a buddy who’ll turn on a fellow like that?’

Pig looked over Sparrow’s shoulder with a certain pursued look. ‘Schwiefka’s is a good place to hang away from these days anyhow,’ he confided in Sparrow.

‘You don’t look like you need to shag coffee ’n cigarettes for him no more.’ Sparrow admired Pig’s new look. ‘You look like you’re doin’ awright, Piggy-O.’

‘Even a blind guy can see an openin’ sometimes,’ Pig boasted a bit.

Louie must have left an opening big enough to shove a suitcase full of little brown drugstore bottles through, Sparrow decided to himself. ‘Blind guys can hear real good sometimes too,’ he ventured, studying Pig’s fat face. And saw the faintest sort of flattered smile stray a moment over those bloodless lips.

‘The dealer off you?’ Pig asked at last.

‘Like a filthy shirt,’ Sparrow assured him. ‘He makes me feel like a heel. Not even a heavy heel. Just a light heel.’

‘Why don’t you try steerin’ by Kippel’s, Steerer?’

‘By Kippel’s?’ Sparrow felt shocked at the idea. ‘Not for me, Piggy-O. That’s the sheenie cheaters’ joint. I’ll go on the legit before I go to work for sheenie cheaters.’

‘A guy workin’ for me gets his dough in advance – he can’t get cheated that way, can he?’

Sparrow’s heart took a small, tight stitch. ‘Couldn’t you just borrow me a sawbuck? It ain’t my line of work, what you got in mind.’

‘It’s up to you, Steerer,’ Pig told him coldly and turned to go. Sparrow caught the cane with real despair.

‘I got no place to sleep tonight, Piggy.’ And sensed, even as he held the cane and would not let it go, that Pig had come into the Tug & Maul looking for him. That he’d simply let the talk run on until it had been Sparrow doing the seeking. He should never have talked that hard about Frankie.

‘It’s two bucks a delivery, Steerer. All I can afford.’ Then hearing no reply other than that despairing grasp on his cane, brought out a tiny package, wrapped by cleaner hands, out of an unclean vest. ‘I got friends who get sick. It’s a good deed, deliverin’ medicine to sick people.’

‘Bringing tidings of comfort and joy,’

the big brass juke agreed.

Sparrow needed a shot and a beer. But Pig let him sit feeling that his tongue was drying onto the roof of his mouth.

‘This one needs it real bad, and a hot little piece, I heard – if she wants to show you she’s grateful it’s awright – but get the sawbuck first – bring it back ’n you get the deuce for delivery – Antek’ll break the ten for me awright, he gives a guy a square count ’n don’t ask questions neither. Yeh,’ n I’ll buy you a double shot too. You stick with me you’ll have your own sawbuck by twelve o’clock.’

‘Is it real far, Piggy-O?’ It felt very far indeed.

And yet – how unlucky could one punk get in just one night? He’d had all the bad luck there was already and enough left over for a month to come. The image of the kite caught on the wires returned.

‘It’s a couple dirty miles for me but it’s only around the corner for a guy with eyes. Kosciusko Hotel. I’ll wait in the back boot’.’

And the little drugstore package lay on the scarred bar between them. Pig moved it with the cane’s curved handle toward Sparrow. If that Frankie wasn’t so stubborn, it was all that Frankie’s fault. As it moved toward him Sparrow saw, irrelevantly, that for some reason Pig had wrapped the cane’s handle in tinfoil. When Frankie found out how mean he’d been he’d be real sorry.

The cane’s bright silver luster had been stained, by those same hot blind hands, into a gutter-colored gray. ‘The dealer was laughin’ in here today,’ Pig reminisced, ‘he was tellin’ Owner how you couldn’t pick up a dime no more ’cause you lost his backin’. He said it was gonna get pretty rough for you when the Jailer moved in by Violet. He said-’

‘Don’t tell me what nobody said,’ Sparrow interrupted him, ‘let’s have the dirty bottle.’

‘T’ree-fifteen B,’ Blind Pig directed. ‘Go around the side door ’n use the elevator.’

Sparrow yanked the baseball cap down over his eyes – it would be just his hundred-to-one luck to have Cousin Kvorka pick him up on general principles at the corner.

But at the corner there was only the amputee who sold papers there, his cap wrapped in the Daily News and folded into his crutch’s handle to rest his armpit while he whooped, ‘Graziano suspended!’

Somebody was always suspending somebody, the punk reflected moodily. And the way the arc lamp swung one moment over newsstand and car line and curb gave a lilt of fear to his heart.

The lights were against him crossing Ashland but he wove in and out till he gained the opposite curb, keeping close to the store windows down to Cortez, and turned down a gangway where half-soled poverty has so long sought hotel side doors that Sparrow could feel, beneath his own thin uppers, the worn places in the walk’s cold stone. He remembered it was the hotel at which he had first registered with Violet as man and wife and no more luggage between them than that carried by the pigeons drowsing in the eaves.

Now the first full moon of December burned with a steady yellow fury, the way a night light once had burned above the dealer’s head. A pang of regret caught the punk unaware: that such nights could not come again.

Pausing to light a cigarette, the pang clung to his heart like the mist about the bulb at the gangway’s end. ‘I must be cheatin’ on somebody,’ he told himself uneasily, ‘I got that guilty-culprit feelin’, like somethin’s goin’ to happen.’

As he stepped inside the side door of the bright little lobby the elevator starter beckoned to him.

Sparrow didn’t name the floor: he simply stood eying that starter until the cage paused on the third level and the fellow slammed the door open with confidence that it was the third floor the shabby little man in the baseball cap wanted. It came on Sparrow like a voice. ‘Go back, Solly. Go back or you’ll never get back.’ But there was no place to go but out of the cage and into the long red-carpeted lobby.

He walked slowly, pretending to look for a certain door but only listening for the shutting of the cage behind him so that he could get rid of the bottle in his pocket anywhere at all. When he turned to see what was keeping the cage on the third-floor level that fishy-eyed starter pointed to 315B and called out in a soft-clothes man’s command: ‘Knock!’

In a kind of paralysis, afraid to knock and afraid not to, fearing the ones who’d open the door when he did and fearing fast footsteps down the carpet behind him and the flash of a badge, he raised his ragged little claws to the indifferent wood.

And never knocked at all. The door opened to him.

Frankie.

With a line of sweat under his hair line and looking so sick Sparrow could only stammer, ‘I didn’t know who I was comin’ to.’ Frankie yanked him inside, slammed the door, took the bottle out of the punk’s pocket and unwrapped it with fumbling fingers while Sparrow protested his innocence. ‘Honest to Jesus, Frankie, I didn’t know it was fer you ’n it begun to feel like a dirty frame ’n I got scared.’

‘You always get scared too soon. You got the bull horrors. Hand me the hypo, I’m hitchin’ up the reindeers.’

The needle lay in a cigar box above the radiator and Sparrow brought it over box and all as if fearing to touch the needle itself. Frankie was swinging his arm to get the blood moving, but his legs went weak and he had to sit on the bed’s very edge. His fingers faltered on his sleeve and then pointed. ‘Roll it up, Solly. I’m in a deadly spin.’

Sparrow rolled the sleeve neatly and backed off. He wanted to go now. There was an odor near Frankie he couldn’t name. Frankie smelled green. And he didn’t want to see Frankie using that dirty stuff.

‘I don’t know if I can make it by myself,’ Frankie pleaded. ‘Don’t chill on me. Stick with me just this one time.’

But somehow had still enough toughness left to grin weakly at the fright in Sparrow’s eyes. ‘You look as sick as I feel,’ he teased Sparrow. ‘Maybe you need a charge yourself. There’s enough for us both – we’ll jump together.’

‘I ain’t jumpin’ nowheres but home, Frankie,’ Sparrow told him just as if he had one.

Frankie sucked the air out of the medicine dropper, then held a match to the morphine in the tiny glass tube. But his hand shook so that he couldn’t steady the flame. ‘Melt it,’ he pleaded with the punk, ‘melt me God’s medicine,’ and lay back with the one bared arm upflung and the light overhead making hollows of anguish under his eyes. His whole broad forehead glistened whitely with sweat and the throat so stretched with suffering that it shone bloodlessly.

A dead man’s throat.

When the cap had melted Sparrow asked, ‘What do I do now, Frankie?’ Frankie put a hand to his mouth, coughed the little dry addict’s cough and pointed to his arm. ‘Tie it.’

Sparrow took the tie off the bedpost and bound it about the naked biceps.

‘Tighter,’ Frankie begged. ‘Tight as you can pull it.’

When it was tight as a vise Sparrow took the tie’s dangling end and, involuntarily, daubed the tears out of Frankie’s eyes. ‘You’re sweatin’ awful hard,’ he pretended.

Frankie sniffled. Sweat or tears, it made no difference, all that mattered was to make the sickness stop.

‘It kills me in the heart, how you are now,’ Sparrow couldn’t keep from saying. ‘It just ain’t like bein’ Frankie no more.’

‘That’s the hardest thing of all for me to be, Solly,’ Frankie told him with a strange gentleness. ‘I’m gettin’ farther away from myself all the time. It’s why I have to have a charge so bad, so I can come back ’n be myself a little while again. But it’s a longer way to go every time. It keeps gettin’ harder ’n harder. It’s gettin’ so hard I can’t hardly afford it.’ He laughed thinly. ‘I can’t hardly afford to be myself no more, Solly, with the way Piggy-O is peggin’ the price up on me. I got to economize ’n be just Mr Nobody, I guess.’ He looked at Sparrow curiously. ‘Who am I anyhow, Solly?’

He really didn’t know any longer. From one day to the next, he no longer knew. For he answered himself in an oddly altered little voice, a voice Sparrow had never before heard. ‘Meet Sergeant McGantic, Solly – the guy they give the stripes to ’cause he got the golden arm. It’s all in the wrist ’n he got the touch, it’s why they had to give him the stripes. See them little red pinholes, Solly – it’s the new kind of stripes us sergeants are pinnin’ on the arm these days. The new way of doin’ things we got, you might call it. You know who I am? You know who you are? You know who anybody is any more?’

‘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 us 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 broadminded 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.

Bednar behind Kvorka. Both in citizen dress and their hats on their heads. With nothing in their hands.

Bednar put his back to the door. ‘Get the hypo, Sergeant,’ he told Kvorka.

‘Now you know why Pig sent you?’ Frankie taunted everyone. ‘This time you’re comin’ with me, punk.’

‘’N we hope you’ll stay longer this time than the last,’ Bednar assured Sparrow with one hand in the punk’s narrow belt.

Frankie rose, forever yawning, and studied Kvorka tearing up the bedclothes. ‘Holy Mother, look at that cop go,’ he laughed shrilly. ‘They still payin’ sixteen bucks for turnin’ in a hypo, Cousin? Make the cap split it with you – it’s in the cigar box on the radiator, right there under your nose, it ain’t even dry yet.’

‘On your feet, Dealer,’ Bednar scolded him. ‘We’re takin’ a little ride.’

Some poolroom sharpie lounging in the lobby came to a sitting position when he spotted two hustlers being pulled in by a couple soft-clothes dicks and looked like he wanted to help get them to the station. But Bednar guided his little caravan unobtrusively out the side entrance and into the panel wagon waiting in the alley and wheeled away without a witness. It wasn’t the sort of pinch to which Bednar wanted a witness.

As the wagon wheeled around the corner newsstand Sparrow heard the amputee, still pushing his papers there, call into him confidentially: ‘Graziano reinstated!’

Someone was always reinstating somebody. And all the way to the station listened to Frankie, still jabbering away, catching at all sorts of ragtags as if the stuff had given him some kind of delayed kick or other. He was going to beat the tubs with a big-time band, he was on his way now to the La Salle Street Station to catch ‘the fastest flier they got there, I ride it lots of times, they call it the Twentieth-Century Note, somethin’ ’r other.’ Then he had just bought out Schwiefka and was adding four tables and a line direct from the track – ‘Now’s your chance to talk payoff,’ he told Bednar and when Cousin Kvorka urged him, ‘Take it easy, Dealer, we’re still for you,’ he answered Cousin quickly: ‘How’d you like to transfer up to Evanston, Cousin? Just say the word.’

He was buying a new Nash, he was getting divorced, he was sending Sophie to ‘Myer brothers,’ and he was getting married as soon as ‘all the dough I got outstandin’ starts comin’ in.’

‘Outstandin’ is right,’ Sparrow put in. ‘Standin’ out in the alley, you mean.’

‘Yeh,’ Frankie agreed strangely, ‘’n then I wonder why I feel so cold the next day.’

Whatever he meant by that, his tongue had ceased to rattle. The rest of the way to the station he diverted himself simply by rapping the bench between his knees with his knuckles and humming idly.

‘I’m a ding-dong daddy from Duma

’N you oughta see me do my stuff-’

till he sensed just by the way Sparrow sat so stiffly across from him that the punk was freezing with fear.

‘Looks like you’re goin’ to move out of this crummy neighborhood just like you always said you was goin’ to,’ Frankie mocked him.

‘I always try to keep my word, Frankie,’ Sparrow told him miserably.

Zygmunt the Prospector’s full-moon face and Zygmunt the Prospector’s full-moon smile lit up the query room for Frankie Machine without letting its mellow glow waste itself on Sparrow Saltskin. He took Frankie firmly right below the elbow; for a second Frankie fancied the other hand was trying for the pocket.

‘Could you set bond for our friend here tonight, Captain?’ Zygmunt had his hand around Frankie’s shoulder now and Frankie felt himself coasting in at last.

‘I’ll set his bond at a hundred bucks right now,’ Bednar replied before Zygmunt had finished asking. ‘I’ll let the court set bond for the guy who peddled it to him.’

‘Sounds like it was the punk Bednar was really layin’ for,’ Frankie figured foggily. Something was awfully wrong, Bednar sticking it to Solly that hard. Bond in court would be a grand and a half if it were a dime.

‘We’re not interested in anyone but Mr Majcinek,’ Zygmunt informed the captain blandly, clutching furtively at Frankie’s sleeve. Frankie shook his head to clear it. Whoof. And just that fast felt someone had winked.

‘Don’t worry about a thing,’ Zygmunt confided in Frankie on their way back to West Division. ‘I signed for you on the super’s orders. He takes care of his kids in the clutch.’

‘I didn’t know I was one of the kids any more,’ Frankie confessed in real bewilderment. ‘How can I be when I ain’t even workin’ nowheres?’ He was filled with an aching drowsiness, but he was back on the ground.

‘You ain’t said nothin’ about wantin’ a job,’ Zygmunt decided, ‘Schwiefka says you walked out on him. But if you want to go back dealin’ Super’ll find you a loose slot to fill in.’

‘How can I be settin’ in a slot ’n settin’ in the bucket too?’ Frankie wanted to know.

‘You ain’t gonna be settin’ in the bucket,’ Zygmunt told him firmly, ‘you’re gonna cop out for this deal tonight. You’re gonna tell the judge you’re a user but it’s the first time. It’s no felony, Frankie. Not the first time. It’s a misdemeanor is all. Super’ll take care of that.’

‘Will Super take care of Solly too?’ Frankie asked with a long sense of regret. He’d given the punk a bad time all right.

‘The punk is a different case,’ Zygmunt advised his client sternly.

‘Maybe it’s none of my business,’ Frankie told Zygmunt when they paused on Ashland for the lights to change, ‘but I can tell Bednar if it’s the guy who pushes the junk around a certain corner he’s lookin’ for, he ain’t got him. All the punk ever done, since he took that bad fall by Gold’s, is steer guys into Schwiefka’s.’

There was a queer little silence. Zygmunt seemed to be trying to swallow something that wouldn’t quite go down.

Whatever it was, he got it down. Zygmunt could put anything down. ‘He delivered the stuff, that’s all the captain needs. He been waitin’ to get it on the punk a long time now.’

‘He certainly picked a funny night for it,’ Frankie brooded, dissatisfied with Zygmunt without knowing why. ‘Seems like he didn’t want to pinch the true peddler at all.’ He was groping through an uphill darkness toward some door that must be there; yet with an increasing feeling, the closer he came to it, of being hopelessly trapped. ‘Seems like what he wanted was the punk – with somethin’ that can’t be cut down to a misdemeanor.’ Cause if it was Pig he wanted all he had to do was pick him up, Bednar knows who the peddler is as well as you ’r me.’

‘You’re cuttin’ in too close, Dealer,’ Zygmunt warned him softly. ‘Why don’t you try to get some sleep? We’ll talk it all out in the morning. You ain’t yourself tonight.’ Frankie felt a touch at his sleeve so light he wasn’t sure whether it was the Prospector or the wind.

In front of the yellow door with the red tin 29 nailed to the wood, Zygmunt shook Frankie’s hand and counseled him warmly, ‘Don’t worry, Dealer. You still got friends.’

He had said something true at last. In his heart Frankie knew he still had friends. Two of them.

One who was lost somewhere beneath the web of the Lake Street El; and another lost behind bars.

Sophie was sleeping in the chair beside the window. The clock’s hands lay like a single horizontal cue across its face: a quarter to three. He fell across the bed without waking her.

He had been sleeping scarcely an hour when he sensed someone had just called up to him from the hall. But all the familiar sounds of night were missing below. He lay listening for the beating of the clock beside the cross.

The clock had stopped, he read its hands in the phosphorescent crucifix’s glow, right-angled now precisely upon the hour: three o’clock in the morning.

With no child’s voice down the steep dark stair nor one lonesome drunk singing out from the one long bar below.

By the glare of the great double-globed arc lamp filtering through the dark and battered shade he saw that Sophie had left the chair at last and in its place had left a doll, some sort of mangy-looking straw-stuffed monkey of the kind that is won at street carnivals. Over its eyes and below them some mimic had painted in shadows of a purple harlotry with lipstick or rouge: the eyes surveyed the room gravely through its livid yet somehow dignified little mask. Like those of a child whose face, seared by disease, accepts the horror it reads in the eyes of others as its rightful heritage.

Pretending unconcern for its unwavering regard, he pulled the combat jacket’s collar up about his neck – and saw of what it was so terribly ashamed: the rip in his sleeve was still torn. Molly had broken her promise to sew it after all. Even the stripes on the sleeve seemed tattered. For he himself felt so frayed. Small wonder the thing in the chair felt ashamed of him. It wished him to be better dressed hereafter, always to be on time everywhere and not to be seen talking on corners at all hours of the night to people others didn’t even recognize at high noon.

‘I’m going to Stash’s New Year’s party,’ he apologized.

Of course everyone had already left the hall. Except a woman sleeping, head heavily upon her hands, below the sign that read NO REFUNDS. When she raised her head he saw it was Molly, drunk as always. Drinking all day and drunk once more.

She must be back with John, he heard the wind pick up in the street. Heard himself call some name in sleep and across his brain the dream flowed back like the flow of a wide wave over sand.

A faded trinket of a hat, topped by two paper daisies and soiled by a decade of free beers and dollar-a-minute love, lay beneath Molly’s soiled hand: the hand of an aging woman. Someone had scattered a handful of change, halves and quarters and dimes and one silver dollar, beside the hat. Louie had forgotten his change – the hat, the hand, the daisies and the dollar were all so darkly soiled.

He knew she had been waiting for him here for ever so long. For news of some new hope. And he had come to her, as always, broke and hunted. Broke, beat and hunted, needing her help. So touched the paper daisies just to please her.

When she raised her eyes he hardly knew her, so careworn had she become, and a nameless regret touched him because she followed his fingers with her own with such ineffable tenderness, not blaming him, even now, for the way he’d made everything turn out for her after all.

‘Them flowers been beat out for some time,’ she apologized for the daisies.

‘You been a beat-out flower yourself awhile, looks like, Molly-O,’ he told her gently so that by his tone she would understand it made no real difference: she would always be a flower to him.

‘We only bloom once,’ she told him in a voice that sorrowed because it wished for nothing any more except that she might bloom just once for him again.

Then tapped his fingers too familiarly. ‘Buy me one short beer, sport, I’m on my final uppers.’ And lifted the sole of her shoe to show him she wore only a pair of bowling shoes, still marked, in chalk, with the price it had once cost to rent them for a single hour: 10¢. With both bows so neatly tied, though the soles were worn to the ball of the foot and a line of dirt encircled the naked ankle like a chain.

‘I think you turned out to be one of them kind after all,’ he reproved her.

‘I always was one of them kind except with you,’ she admitted cheerfully and from somewhere the other side of the wall a low, agonized laugh, hoarse and significant, made him feel that some young girl was being either transported with rapture or murderously beaten in there.

‘That’s the other side of the wall, poor thing,’ he heard Molly telling him, ‘he does that to her every night, some nights it’s worse’n others. Some nights, though, there ain’t a sound – that’s when it’s worst of all.’

‘Does what to her?’ Frankie asked with a certain fear.

Molly looked up at him with a dumb appeal, like a beaten animal’s. ‘There ain’t words for some things any more, Frankie,’ she told him with an effort. ‘There ain’t no key to that room and all sorts hear about it. They come in at any hour at all ’n do whatever they want with her – she don’t seem to care for nothin’ since you went away like that.’ The fingers upon his own were chilled. It must take a whole lifetime for a woman’s fingers to grow that cold, he thought as they listened together to the silence from the other side of the wall.

There that tortured laugh had rung. And Frankie understood slowly. ‘It’s true. It’s worse now when it’s still.’

So wakened to the silence on his own dark walls and Sophie’s chill fat hand flat upon his own.

His own dark walls where a battered clock still beat the listening hours out. And an empty wheelchair stood beside a dark and battered shade. ‘It’s worse when it’s still,’ he repeated, wading heavily toward shore through the ebbing shallows of sleep.

The radiator began squealing as the heat strove to drive the night air out of the coils, like an uncovered child crying with sudden cold.

Coming out of the coils of his dream, with only a faint trace of morphine lingering along the edges of the brain, Frankie dismissed his nightmare for the more imminent one being woven, by hands as hard to grasp as those of any dream, about his waking hours.

He wrapped his shoulders in a blanket and sat by the window overlooking the abandoned tracks. ‘It’s Louie that Record Head got on his mind awright,’ he decided with an odd lack of dread at the realization.

Somewhere a single warning bell, by dock or crosslight or bridge, yapped like a farm dog far away and went yammering into nothingness till the velvet dark surged back.

No, it hadn’t been any accident that it had been the punk to whom Pig had passed the bottle. No accident, either, that Bednar had let him walk out of the station so easily while holding the punk so hard.

‘It ain’t the punk he wants, that’s plain enough.’ Nobody needed any punk that badly. ‘All Record Head needs him for is to testify up on who slugged Louie. Clearin’ that one up’ll get Super off Record Head’s neck.’ But how much pressure could the punk stand? How long would he be able to stand being wakened in the middle of the night and wheeled to a different station two nights a week without being booked in any?

‘He either got to take a rap for peddlin’ or finger me. He got to see it’s his turn to take a rap for me like I took one for him. Or he got to cry off.

‘Solly said he run from those irons before he had a chance to think,’ Frankie brooded. Well, now the kid was going to get all the time in the world to get things clear in his head. He would have to see it, Bednar wouldn’t be able to move until Solly saw it as clearly as the captain. As clearly as Frankie himself saw it now.

‘I got to sweat it out till I hear what the punk does,’ Frankie cautioned himself. ‘Settin’ my bond at a hundred bucks – it’s almost like the man wants me to jump bond.’

There’d always be time to jump it. If he ran now, leaving Zygmunt to forfeit the hundred, he’d have to stay on the run. It would be the super’s c-note Zygmunt had put up, he wouldn’t be able to go back to work on Division Street till he’d squared that hundred.

While Bednar would have captain’s men looking in every back-room slot on the Near Northwest Side for a dealer with needle marks on his arm and a slight squint in his eye.

He caught a picture of himself, wearing a little blond mustache and evening clothes, beating the drums with a big-name band on one of the revolving stages he’d seen in short features at the Pulaski – taking the bobby soxers’ applause with Carmen Bolero. ‘I’ll call myself Jack Duval ’r somethin” – the fantasy collapsed of its own weight and he straightened himself out with bitter counsel. ‘A better name’d be Jack McGantic.’

Someone turned on the water down the hall and all the second-floor faucets chirped at once, like so many crickets in a row.

It was too soon to run. For if the punk could take the punch there would be no need of running at all. He’d be clean of everything but possession of a hypo and it would be up to Zygmunt to put in the fix for that. If he ran too soon the game was lost before that last card had been dealt. ‘It’s that last card that counts,’ he recalled.

Yet his heart was running already.

Down some rickety backstreet fire escape, his feet in heavy army brogans feeling, step by step, for the iron leading downward into some basement doorway, down any old dead-end alley at all. Headlong and heartsick down into any dark-curtained sanctuary where no one could find him at all.

No one but Sergeant McGantic.

It was always December in the query room. A light like a mustiness left over from another century filtered through the single window, far above, too high for anyone but a fireman to wash. It had been so long since it had been cleaned that, even on summer noons with the sun like a brass bell across pavement and rooftop and wall, the light sifted down here with a chill autumnal hue. It was always December in the query room.

When someone yanked the cord of the unshaded night bulb suspended from the ceiling like an inverted question mark – it had once held a gas flare instead of a Mazda – shadows would leap from the corners in a single do-or-die try for the window; only to subside and swing awhile with the bulb’s slow swinging.

Then the wooden benches along the walls, where so many outcasts had slept, would be lit by a sort of slow, clocked lightning till the bulb steadied and fastened its tiny feral fury upon the center of the room like a single sullen and manic eye. To burn on there with a steady hate. Till morning wearied and dimmed it away to nothing more than some sort of little old lost gray child of a district-station moon, all its hatred spent.

It was not so much a room as a passage wherein were conveyed the pursued, by squadrol, panel wagon and Black Maria, out of the taverns, into the cells and thence swiftly down all the narrowing corridors of tomorrow.

Belonging, as it did, to no one and everyone, a place through which all passed and not one stayed, no one knew what it really looked like. Not even Record Head could have told its color, not even men who had confessed premeditated murder in it could have said whether its ceiling was low or high. Yet exactly as in the cells below, idlers wrote upon its walls: This is my first affair. So please be kind. Never once seeing how the walls upon which they wrote had been hallowed by pain. Only that bleak autumnal light, that had drifted down on so much anguish, told how these walls had been thus made holy.

For these were the very walls men meant when they said of another that he had his back to the wall. Here it was that they put their stubborn necks hard up against the naked brick, lied first to the right and then to the left, denying everything, explaining with scorn, swearing truth was truth and all falsehood wicked: and every word, from the very first burning oath, one long burning lie.

Indeed your query room is your only house of true worship, for it is here that men are brought to their deepest confessions. The more false and farfetched their lies, the deeper and truer the final passion of their admission.

It was here that the truth, so calmly concealed from priest, mother, lawyer, doctor, friend and judge – from their very selves indeed – rose with such revealing fury at last to the tongue. It was here that certain couples, after sleeping beside each other for a decade, came to know one another at last: here the hardened tissue of lies was slit to expose the secret disease. Here the confession which salvages whatever love may remain was brought forth.

As well as the one word spoken too late. Sometimes penitently, sometimes triumphantly, sometimes shamefaced or feigning cynicism, the one word was spoken within this gutter-colored gloom. Too late.

That could, but for pride or fear, have been spoken in daylight and ease only a few hours before.

It was also the place to which they brought those for whom all was over and done, the final hope wrung out like last year’s dishrag and washed down the Drainage Canal. Out to where the walleyed sturgeons roll.

Here too guilt was fashioned, like a homemade church-bazaar cross, out of those materials handiest to the law: a pack of greasy cards, a shopping bag with its bottom ripped out; or a little brown drugstore bottle.

It was here they brought Sparrow Saltskin, a baseball cap clutched in his hand, to sit in a cell by himself and think with a pang: ‘I’m in for it now.’

All day long the voices of women came down to him. Sisters, sweet-hearts, mothers and wives bringing packages and messages, arguments and pleas. Money and tears and light, forced laughter.

Or just hope wrapped in an old comic strip.

The packages had to be left at the desk but fresh hope could be carried all the way down to the very last cell. Where some poor mutt of a cabbie, his tongue still burdened by a dying jag, kept boasting that his Gracie had actually come to see him. Just as if Solly Saltskin had ever said she wouldn’t.

‘Gracie came. Like she said she would. They wouldn’t let her past the desk but she hollered down at me, “Still wit’ you, DeWitt!”’ – all his worries solved because some dowdy old doll with a double chin and hair cascading down to her ears had hollered down to him through the concrete, the steel and the stone. He could face one to fourteen now with a splitting headache and a double-crossing lawyer because some Gracie or other had called some nonsense to him. Hope, tears and nonsense.

Borne on the FM waves of the heart.

There was neither sister, mother, wife nor any Gracie at all to call nonsense down to Solly Saltskin. Only Pokey, one button off his fly and one button on, pouring fuel oil from a rusty little tin can about the legs of the stool where he would keep an all-night vigil. The oil kept the bugs from crawling up his legs and the stool kept his elephantine bottom off the floor.

Only some muttonheaded Pokey. And Record Head Bednar.

The captain kept the punk waiting for him in the query room so long that, when he entered at last he saw, with an inner gratification, that the punk started to his feet – then changed his mind merely to sit looking bleakly anxious.

With the light from some long-dead December filtering down from that one window so far above that even the tireless last leap of the evening shadows could not reach it.

It was always December in the query room.

‘Cards on the table, Steerer,’ Record Head told Sparrow right off, with no intention of revealing his own hand at all. The punk sat with his cap in his hand as if he’d just dropped in for a bit of a chat and would take off as soon as Bednar began to bore him. ‘We got a jacket for you that’ll fit as close as nineteen does to twenty,’ Bednar told him. ‘This ain’t malicious mischief or tampering, that you can get cut down to thirty days, Solly. We can call it the Harrison Act this time. Then it’s the government holdin’ the hammer.’

‘Don’t start the heavy stuff till you feed me,’ Sparrow protested. ‘I was the oney one in the block didn’t get coffee this morning.’

‘It’s the new way we have of doin’ things these days,’ Record Head explained. ‘First you answer the questions, then you eat. You know how long you’re going to fall this time?’

‘I was under the influence of a dramshop, somethin’ legal like that, I didn’t know what I was doin’,’ was the best the punk had for reply. ‘Anyhow you’re s’pposed to feed me just like anybody. I was the oney one in the block didn’t get coffee this morning.’

‘If you didn’t know what you were doing you were out of your mind ’n we’ll put you away in a room of your own. Is that what you’re drivin’ at, Solly?’

‘What I’m drivin’ at is somethin’ to eat.’

‘In the booby house you eat every day.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ Sparrow answered earnestly. ‘You’re not allowed to do that because I just ain’t that crazy. I don’t have all my marbles so I ain’t responsible for no Harrison Act. But I got too many marbles to get put away. I was the oney one in the block this morning-’

‘I don’t want to hear about your diet. I want to know about them marbles.’

‘Well, if a guy got twenny-one he’s all there, so you can give him time.’ N if a guy got only eleven you can put him in the booby house. But I’m right in between, I got nineteen, it’s not enough to give me time ’n too many for the loony roost. It puts you on the spot, Captain, you can’t do nuttin’ wit’out two sikology doctors ’n they’ll never get together on me, it’ll end in a draw like the other time. They’ll be up there testifyin’ against each other about what is it goes on in my ubconshus till they testify me right back onto the street -’ n the first thing I’m gonna do when I get there is to walk right into a hamburger stand ’n get somethin’ to eat.’

‘Don’t stop,’ the captain urged Sparrow to let his tongue run on a bit more. ‘I want to hear it all.’

‘You just heard it all,’ Sparrow acknowledged weakly. ‘I’m not a legal goof, I’m just a street goof, you got to find a guy like that a guard-yun ’n turn him loose. We eat real soon, Captain?’

‘Maybe never,’ the captain cheered him, ‘your logic is too much on the side of what the courts call “ten-you-us.” It means you been walkin’ the same hairline too long ’n now we’re yankin’ it out from under you like an old rag carpet.’

Sparrow sat with the cap dangling uselessly from his fingers: his hands felt as useless as a paralytic’s. They’d made so much trouble for everyone he hoped they wouldn’t make any more.

‘Sure we give you the breaks because you’re a little retarded,’ the captain went on. ‘You hand the boys a laugh so they go easy. But all the time we know you really ain’t that retarded. We know it’s just your act. But it’s a good act, it’s different, and we don’t get many good acts around here any more.’ He paused to imply that the old days were gone for everyone. ‘Now you’ve worked the act straight into the ground. It was all right for dog stealin’ ’n drunk ’n disorderly ’n Prospector got you off light for that cowboy caper at Gold’s – who wants to rap a punk for a caper as goofy as that? But now you’ve pulled Uncle Sam’s whiskers ’n Uncle ain’t gonna care whether you talk goofy ’r straight. When you pull Uncle’s whiskers, you go.’

‘I don’t want to go.’

‘No, and I don’t want to send you. What good would that do me? What good would it do me to add up a man’s convictions ’n then have to tell him, “Now you’re a habitual. Good-by”?’

‘I ain’t,’ Sparrow corrected Bednar.

‘This one’ll make just enough,’ Bednar assured him.

‘This one don’t count toward the habitch act,’ Sparrow spoke up confidently. ‘This is a G offense, you just got t’rough sayin’ it yourself. It got to be state ’n it got to be a crime of the same nature for you to call me habitual. What’s more, usin’ that stuff in the bottle is a misdemeanor the first time, that’s all. Don’t you figure I know anythin’, Captain?’

‘You weren’t using. You were peddling,’ the captain pointed out.

‘Well,’ Sparrow reflected aloud, ‘everybody’s a habitual in his heart. I’m no worse’n anyone else.’

The captain put both his elbows upon the table, leaned heavily upon them and studied Sparrow through fingers crossed before his eyes. Sparrow thought for one second that Bednar was smiling at him behind those great hands and a kind of panic took him to get this thing over one way or another, any way at all and the faster the better. When Bednar looked up there was no trace of a smile on his lips: he wore a certain fixed look. ‘Now it’s comin’,’ Sparrow thought shakily, trying to hold that heavy gaze.

‘You should of been a lawyer, Solly,’ the captain told him at last. ‘You know somethin’ all right. The dealer knows somethin’ too. You know who slugged Fomorowski and he knows who left him holdin’ the bag at Nieboldt’s. There’s your crime of the same nature, Solly. You try beatin’ Gold’s ’n come right back tryin’ Nieboldt’s.’

‘I wasn’t there.’

‘Frankie says you was. Frankie says it was your idea. Frankie says he done one stretch for you, now it’s your turn to do one for him.’

Sparrow stretched his narrow neck in his oversized collar. The cap dropped to the floor. He didn’t feel it drop. Bednar waited.

‘When did Frankie say it?’

‘He ain’t said it yet, Solly. He won’t say it till we pick him up ’n ask him. What do you think he’d say, sittin’ where you are? It’s your skin or his, Solly.’

‘I don’t know who slugged Fomorowski.’

The captain sighed heavily. It was all to do again. He’d almost had it driven home into that narrow forehead; then somehow it had slipped off the skull.

‘Look at it this way, Solly. You got two felonies against you – both state offenses so it works automatic: you’re busted for life ’n no parole. You know the habitch act as well as myself. You can take that and we’ll still get your buddy, sooner or later, for manslaughter. But we’d rather get him sooner. Later on it doesn’t do anybody any good. Right now it helps some people a lot to get that Fomorowski thing cleaned up. So we give you a chance. You help us and you don’t even get booked for peddling, you get booked for nothin’ except maybe creatin’ a public nuisance, just somethin’ to cover the deal. Then you’re back on the street ’n you’ve learned your lesson.’

‘Where’s Frankie when I’m back on the street?’

‘He’ll be back on the street with you in eighteen months, you can take my word. The longer it takes to bust him the tougher we’re going to make it on him – you’ll be doin’ him the biggest favor of his life by coming clean.’ But he seemed to be looking over Sparrow’s head. The punk sensed that that was going to be a mighty long eighteen months.

‘I don’t want to do Frankie no favors,’ he told Bednar, ‘he’s mad at me for somethin’.’

‘Then this is your big chance to patch things up with him. Who got Louie’s roll, Solly?’

‘They said Louie died from a hit on the head,’ Sparrow answered foggily. ‘Can I have a cup of coffee now, Captain?’

‘You didn’t have to have nobody tell you, Solly. You were there.’

‘I was by Schwiefka’s that’s where I was. I went out fer coffee ’n that’s when it must of happened, when I was stirrin’ the spoon. Why don’t you talk to Schwiefka, Captain?’

‘Schwiefka’s clean ’n you know it. Tell us how Louie got it ’n walk out of here clean too. I’ll see you go back to work by Zero’s. A deal is a deal.’

‘The blood ain’t on my paws,’ Sparrow said ever so quietly.

‘You got no idea how bad unsolved murder looks on the books in an election year,’ the captain began from a new flank, feeling he was hitting the proper tone at last: one of confidential reasonableness between two practical politicians. ‘The Republican precinct captains are handin’ out handbills rappin’ the super – they’re tellin’ the people if it wasn’t one of Super’s boys done it why don’t he put a finger on who really done it then? Louie owed too much, Solly. His connections were too good. That’s where the pressure’s on Super ’n that’s where I put it on you. Louie owed more dough than you ’n me could count if we set here together countin’ all night. Who got the roll, Solly?’

Sparrow looked at his hands, saw his cap was gone but his eyes didn’t seek for it. Instead they stayed fixed on his hands, as though unsure whether he might not yet find a spot of somebody’s blood there.

‘They’re pointin’ your way, Solly. Louie had a roll on him that wasn’t his own. Who got it?’

‘They ain’t pointin’ me, Captain.’

‘I didn’t say they was pointin’ you. I said they’re pointin’ your direction. You were there, Steerer.’ The captain rose, came behind Sparrow’s chair and put both hands on the punk’s thin shoulders to steady him. ‘You go along with me ’n Super,’ Sparrow heard that confident voice so low and reassuring, ‘’n you’ll be runnin’ a game of your own. Some nice quiet back room ’n no trouble at all ’cause you’ll have me ’n Super givin’ you the protection. You could live by Kosciusko Hotel in a room of your own, when you want a girl you just pick up the phone ’n they send up two, you should take your pick. You don’t even bother goin’ out to eat, you just pick up the phone ’n tell ’em to send up an order of shashlyk.’

‘Don’t like shashlyk.’

The captain didn’t press the point. He watched the punk wipe sweat off his glasses. The punk looked sick to death. He felt the shoulders tremble under his hands and took his hands away – the captain didn’t like the feel of a trembling man.

Then looked at the punk just as at some sort of thing, and his tone came as hard as newly forged manacles. ‘Pick up your cap. Either you’ll play ball or I’ll give you to Mr Schnackenberg. I’ll be in court myself to make it stick.’

Just outside the room someone was trying to strike a bargain with a couple arresting officers. ‘You let me alone ’n I’ll let you alone.’ In that moment the captain saw the punk more clearly than he had ever seen him before: a sharp little alley terrier driven to the wall, trying to understand, out of cunning and unmixed fright, what his pursuer’s next move would be.

‘You’re nailin’ me to the cross, Captain,’ Sparrow pleaded.

The captain started, he hadn’t really seen it in that light at all. ‘I’m nailin’ you?’ he wanted to know with genuine indignation. ‘What the hell you think they’re doin’ to me?’

‘I’ll take the rap first myself,’ Sparrow told him with something like finality.

For that was just how that Chester Morris had said it that time he was Boston Blackie at the Pulaski. Yet a tiny bubble swelled in his throat and could not burst. ‘You must think you’re talkin’ to some kind of stool pigeon ’r somethin’,’ he challenged the captain. Just as if Bednar had seen Boston Blackie that time too and knew his own part, he leaned over and touched Sparrow’s shoulder paternally.

‘Get a lawyer, lad,’ he counseled the punk gently. ‘Get a good lawyer. I want to see you get every break you got comin’. You’re going to need every one of them.’

‘Can I have coffee now, Captain?’ Sparrow asked wistfully.

But the captain had put his head upon his hands as if he were the one in need of confession. Sparrow leaned forward and saw, with a strange uneasiness, that the captain was feigning sleep.

They didn’t call him Machine any more. The marks didn’t want a junkie dealing to them. He didn’t look regular to them any longer, they were not certain why. They sensed something had gone wrong, he looked so like a stranger at times. He saw this in their eyes and felt it in their voices; and somehow didn’t care at all. He had the feeling he wouldn’t be hanging around Schwiefka’s long enough for it to matter.

Bednar was working on the punk was the word at Schwiefka’s. There was no word that Bednar had broken him down. Frankie saw a small bet made, between Meter Reader and Schwiefka, that the punk wouldn’t break at all. But it was Meter Reader who believed in Sparrow – and who had ever heard of Meter Reader winning a bet on anything? ‘I’ll wait till I see Umbrellas backin’ the kid,’ Frankie thought wryly, ‘when I see that I’ll know it’s time to run.’

Meanwhile he wandered restlessly between the room, the Tug & Maul, and Schwiefka’s. He couldn’t stand the room and he couldn’t afford to drink all day with Antek and he no longer belonged at Schwiefka’s.

‘The dealer’s on the needle,’ was the whisper, and overnight he was an outcast of outcasts and a new dealer – that very Bird Dog to whom Frankie had misdealt – sat in the slot. If Frankie wanted to take a hand the boys made room for him. Just a bit too much room, he fancied; the way they’d make room for a syphilitic. For the man on the needle, though he be your brother, is a stranger to every human who lives without morphine.

He sensed pity mixed with fear in the voices of those who spoke to him now. Yet Schwiefka let him take care of the door that Sparrow had so long and so faithfully guarded. He drew five dollars a night and tips, the same wage Sparrow had drawn. And each night, when he paid Frankie off, Schwiefka averted his eyes and asked, ‘You tried Kippel’s, Frankie?’ Frankie would shrug, he understood well enough. Schwiefka wanted him to be working for somebody else if the punk should start pointing.

Frankie would try to look as though he didn’t know he were hot at all. He needed that fiver too badly. Each night now, after closing time, he spent half of it for a quarter-grain fix in Louie’s old room. He paid Blind Pig the two-fifty in quarters and halves and fixed himself with the help of one of Louie’s flashy ties and that same hypo he’d stolen overseas. ‘Just enough to put me to sleep,’ he would tell Blind Pig, ‘I ain’t doin’ no joy-poppin’ these days. All I want is enough to keep from gettin’ sick.’

‘Thought you was off the stuff, Dealer.’ Pig would feign surprise that anyone who wanted to be off it should go on feeding the habit all the same.

‘When you come to the end it’s the end, that’s all.’ Frankie acknowledged his defeat in the wan winter light.

Each night at Schwiefka’s felt like the last night of guarding any man’s door: as each day seemed now it must surely be the last of all with Sophie. Sometimes he wondered idly how long it could be before she caught on to what was wrong. Then it would come over him that she had known from the day he’d come back and every day since. ‘She don’t say nothin’ because it’s her one big kick. Like watchin’ me crawl around the floor pickin’ up the dishes that time.’ An hour later, recalling that he had entertained such a suspicion, would reproach himself. ‘I ought to be ashamed of myself, thinkin’ of Zosh like that – how could she know about me when all I’m ever doin’, when we’re in the room together, is layin’ on the bed?’ He would make up his mind, there and then, to run for it. If she knew it was time to run and if she didn’t know it was time to run before she found out.

Yet each night found him back at the door trying to overhear some mention of Solly Saltskin’s name. Though he listened every night for word of the punk all he could learn was that the punk was still being held in one station or another. And would try in his heart to believe that Sparrow wouldn’t finger him in any station at all.

The dread stirred with his every waking. ‘This is the day Bednar busts the kid.’ Then the need of the quarter-grain charge would start coming on so strong he would have to admit, even to himself, that the reason he hadn’t yet run, in the very teeth of arrest, was that he feared to go far from the room above the Safari. ‘That’s just what Bednar’s bankin’ on too,’ he felt.

One night when the table was filled and Schwiefka didn’t want the door opened for anyone for a while, Frankie stood on the fire escape and saw how the unseen lights of the Loop were reflected in the sky like light from some gigantic forge beating in the pit of the city’s enormous heart. A heart seeming now to beat in suppressed panic. A panic lying in wait, each midnight hour, at his own heart’s forge.

Night of the All Nite restaurants, the yellow-windowed machine-shop night where daylight was being prepared on lathes. Night of the thunderous anvils preparing the city’s iron heart for tomorrow’s iron traffic. Night of the city lovers, the Saturday Night till Sunday Morning lovers, making love on rented beds with the rent not due till Monday.

Night of iron and lovers’ laughter: night without mercy. Into a morning without tears.

From where the narrow alley ran a child’s cry, high-pitched, brief and cut off sharply, came up to him like the cry of a child run down in the dark by a drunken driver. A cry that held no hope of help at all, a cry that pitched the very darkness down. Tautly, as he himself had pitched his tent that winter on the Meuse, with the stakes driven through the cloth like the cloth of the heart, the way darkness pinned any child down between tavern and trolley and tenement.

The darkness through which all such children of the broken sky line moved, their small white faces guided only by a swinging arc lamp’s gleam and the swift-changing neon guide lights of the city’s thousand bars. Till the difference between daylight and darkness seemed to them only the difference between the light of the alleyways under the El and the light down any gin-mill basement.

That was why, Frankie guessed, everyone from the neighborhood he knew, from the punk to himself, tried to be something different than what he was. The minute some kid with an accordion began playing for pennies in the corner bars he fancied himself a musical-comedy star. If a neighborhood girl got a Loop switchboard job she considered herself a career woman. Nobody bred around Division Street ever turned out to be a cheap crook: they were all Dillingers or Yellow Kid Weils to hear them tell it. Just as though the dead wagon didn’t cart off the international embezzler as surely as it bore off the musical-comedy headliner and the crummiest stewbum who ever turned up his toes between Goose Island and the carbarns.

Sometimes, as Frankie walked to the Safari in the earliest morning light, after the night’s last deck had been boxed, Division Street was deserted from the Dziennik Chicagoski to the El. Then the changing traffic lights seemed to warn no one but himself: STOP.

And so waited prudently, though there was no traffic in sight and the wind so bitter, till the amber light counseled him to look both ways, for enemy and friend alike, before crossing carefully.

Until the green told him to pull up his collar and keep moving straight ahead, warning him it was just as dangerous to stand in one spot too long as it was to try to beat the lights. That it was more dangerous now, with every hour, to stand unmoving in a bitter wind; that it was his one chance to plunge blindly ahead looking neither this way nor that.

For now, in this season of caroling, when fir trees were sold in every corner lot, no morning brought tidings of comfort and joy.

Morning brought only church bells and dock bells, river bells and barge bells, freight bells and fire bells – and the ceaseless charging of the westbound, southbound, northbound, Loopbound Els.

The green light itself had turned informer.

It grew pretty lonely without Frankie. No fun like the other times at all. Only the lost cabbie, one cell down, by turn boasting of his Gracie and repenting of his own manifold weaknesses.

‘Ask fer me on Wabash ’n Harrison,’ he began inviting everyone late one night, his tongue still sounding burdened to Sparrow. ‘I’m the guy wit’ the right connections. Ask fer me on the hotel corner, I wheel the GI Joe cab there. Gracie brings me sandriches but I got no damned matches. Pokey’d gimme some but I don’t want to wake him up. He let me make a phone call fer free when I told him I was crashed but the morning guy is no good, he wants a buck or no phone. I showed that marked-down lushworker, I thrun his moldy baloney on the floor. “There’s yer breakfast,” I told him straight.’

Sparrow was too preoccupied with his own woes to listen to any cabbie’s. ‘The captain’s gonna see I get all the breaks I got comin’,’ he brooded now upon Bednar’s words. ‘How the hell did he mean that?’

Yet knew in his heart just how Record Head had meant that.

‘Tomorrow I’m gettin’ out,’ the cabbie decided aloud, as he decided around this time every night, ‘first thing I’m goin’ to the Rye-awlto. You guys remember Eddie Cicotte? I knew a guy once used to pinch-hit fer Rockferd in the T’ree-Eye League. My old man never hit a bar in his life but he kept a little bottle in the medicine cab’net, he said it was his healt’ tonic. The old lady was hitched to him twenny-eight years before she found out it was Old McCall. You guys know some good pinched-hitters? She did say she’d noticed he’d act a little strange on Saturday nights. Swap me a couple cigarettes, soldier?’

All Sparrow could see of the cabbie was one tattooed forearm wrapped about the bars. ‘I ain’t no soldier,’ he assured the cabbie, ‘I got rejected for moral warpitude.’ And a dull calamitous light like a madhouse light began filtering dimly down from somewhere far above, making an uphill queue of shadows aslant the whitewashed walls. Nudging each other upward inch by sullen inch, they gathered strength for some sudden and swift descent by midnight behind queues of shadowy escapees from a hundred other cells. Down to a shadowed street.

Between the bars and down the disinfected corridors, unseen by captain’s men and soft-clothesmen, undetected by the confidence detail the sullen shadows sidled, by-passing the pawnshop patrol and the cartage squad while the auto-theft hawks were giving tomorrow’s winners to two dog-tag detectives and a single plain-clothes bull. Past pressmen and citizen-dress men, evading fire dicks and gumboots, fingerprint experts and rookies in harness, the night’s last bondmaker and the morning’s earliest, most eager bailiff, down many a narrow long-worn wrought-iron way, to be delivered at last from the grand-jury squad and the Bail Bond Bureau into the dangers of the unfingered, unprinted, unbetrayed and unbefriended Chicago night.

‘You should see my Gracie,’ the cabbie invited everybody, waking or asleep, ‘she’s a hundred per cent ’n her petticoat hangs like crazy. But I got a good record too, I never hit a mailman in my life. Never hit a conductor. Who wants a couple lousy cigars for a couple tailor-made cigarettes?’ He laughed derisively.

Then added as apologetically as though suddenly confronted by a teetotaling judge: ‘I been in five rackets, sir, but I supported my sister’s kids two years, that’s in my favor. Once I lost a hunderd-eighty in a fixed crap game, worked overtime t’ree mont’s to make it back ’n then got rolled by my best friend for a hunderd-ten. Didn’t even get downhearted, just started on that overtime slave deal again, pinchin’ them little red pennies, gettin’ back on my feet wit’ the little woman helpin’ all the way ’n never askin’ nothin’ except once a while a piece of my little pink body. Never heard her squawk once. “My little red wagon is hitched to yours, DeWitt,” she tells me, “I take the bad wit’ the good, the bitter wit’ the sweet.” So I knocked her off the back porch to learn her some sense.

‘You know where a man goes wrong? It’s on them dirty gas bills every time. I didn’t owe a dime in the world yesterday afternoon – then she sent me out to square up wit’ People Gas Light ’n Coke ’n I stopped off for a quick one ’n all I got to do now is restitute the insurance company for a four-hundred-buck plate-glass window ’r do it on the knees. “Let’s settle this out of court,” I says. “Wit’ what?” they want to know – can you beat that? They’d been to see Gracie awready ’n found out I don’t own a dime of my own ’n now Friendlier Loans knows where I’m at too. Them dirty gas bills is a man’s downfall every time.’

‘Go back to the beginning,’ Sparrow requested politely, ‘I lost tract in the middle.’ But DeWitt was too busy hauling that little red wagon of piled-up woes to heed anyone.

‘Can they get their money back if I do a stretch?’ he asked himself with a sort of angry perplexity. ‘They won’t get penny-one that way ’n that’s where I got ’em by the old jalino. I’m goin’ to work for them plate-glass people till the insurance people is all squared up – so now all I’ll have to do is drop one of them windows now ’n then ’n I got me a steady slave deal the rest of my dirty life.

‘All I hope is that bartender don’t clunk the bucket, the cop said he got cut pretty bad when he went t’rough the glass. If he clunks it, then it’s all over. Then it’s on the knees the rest of the way ’n no Gracie, no gas bills, nothin’.

‘Bills ’n humiliations, troubles ’n degradations,’ DeWitt told himself softly, ‘’n it’s on the knees the rest of the way all the same.’

‘I’m a lost-dog finder myself,’ Sparrow informed the cabbie brightly. ‘You want to buy a Polish airedale?’ but DeWitt remained too preoccupied. ‘I try to get the fool salty at me but the fool won’t salt. Brings me cigarettes ’n says she’s still wit’ me. If she’s still wit’ me how come she fergets the matches? Are they all like that? Once I shoved her out of the cab ’n all she done was sniffle a little ’n come up lame. I should of shoved her harder. But one thing they can’t pin on me, I never hit a mailman in my life. Say, who wants to swap me a couple cigarettes for a couple lousy stogies – where’d I get these things in the first place?’

‘The same thing happened to a fellow in Pittsburgh,’ Sparrow consoled DeWitt.

‘How many in there?’ the lockup wanted to know.

‘One,’ Sparrow told him and the lockup, peering closer, recognized the punk in the dimness. ‘Oh, it’s you – the captain says any time you want to get in touch with a lawyer, just say the word.’ And moved on to ask DeWitt, sitting hoarse and limp from his night-long efforts, ‘Are you the guy was hollerin’ all night?’

‘No, sir,’ the little cabbie lied meekly, ‘I just been settin’ here waitin’ for the brother-law.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘He’s a sergeant detective wit’ the attorney’s office.’

‘What attorney?’

‘State’s attorney.’

‘Don’t give me that cheap romance. You’re a loose bum with a streak of pimp ’n if you got a brother-law he’s pimpy too. Yer whole fam’ly’s pimpy.’

The outraged cabbie rose, tore the top button off his shirt to give his throat room, squeezed his forehead forward between the bars till the temples were pinched by the steel.

‘You insultin’ my fam’ly? Awright, let’s have your number, fellow, you’re gonna be on the job as long as John was in the army ’n John wasn’t in there long. Don’t try givin’ me the business, when Big Eye Lipschultz gets here we’re puttin’ in a little beef on you to the state’s attorney ’n there goes your number. No use tryin’ to shove me around from one station to another neither – I’m the guy got friends in all of ’em, Big Eye ’n me don’t care what bond you set, Big Eye’s takin’ over this case person’lly now. Ever hear of Defamation of Character, sucker? That’s what you just done. Ever been sued for false arrest? Ever heard of the U.S.A. Constitution?’

‘I didn’t even know the fellow was sick,’ the turnkey advised DeWitt solicitously at last. ‘Could you let me know when he gets back to town?’ He turned softly away, thinking soft and killing thoughts. ‘I tawt that was the guy was hollerin’,’ he explained further up the tier, ‘I just wanted to make sure. For when he starts askin’ favors.’

‘I’ll need favors from you like I need a chop in the head with a dull ax!’ DeWitt had found his voice again all right. ‘You lead wit’ yer nose!’ Then bent his troubled forehead against his fist and his fist about the cold blue bars, brooding desperately upon the duplicity of policemen in general and Chicago cops in particular.

‘You got to know a desk man or a bailiff if you want to get out before Monday,’ Sparrow consoled him, ‘but you’re a man all the same, cabbie. You’re a victim of circumstance but you’re a man all the same.’ Sparrow laid it on heavy in the hope of getting DeWitt started on the turnkey again.

‘I’m just a nobody,’ DeWitt decided gloomily, confessing himself aloud. ‘Just a down-’n-out, hard-luck, no-good, slow-dwindling drip.’ Adding wistfully, ‘But Gracie’s a hundred per cent.’

‘That lockup wouldn’t of talked that way if there hadn’t been bars between you, champ,’ Sparrow flattered the little man as if picturing him as some oversized strongarmer not likely to be subdued by less than four patrol-loads of the city’s finest.

‘I couldn’t whip nobody, pal,’ the moody DeWitt resumed his self-denunciation like a man with a fixed idea. ‘I couldn’t battle my way out of a wet paper bag. I’m just a know-itall, know-nuttin’ jerk. A drag-ass ignoramus. A stooge. A bottom-of-the-heaper. I guess I’m the biggest bust out of the museum. Small potatoes ’n few in the hill, that’s me.’

‘Yeh,’ Sparrow agreed, ‘but he didn’t have to call you no bum. You want to buy a dog?’ Implying that a dog, any dog, was the one certain solution, in an uncertain world, to any cabbie’s troubles.

‘I couldn’t buy the lice off a sick cat,’ the cabbie answered from the very depths of self-deprecation.

‘I wouldn’t sell you one with lices,’ Sparrow assured him lightly. ‘I take the lices off ’n sell them sep’rate.’

‘I wouldn’t buy one wit’out no licenses.’ De Witt’s confusion grew.

Then down the dusty jailhouse hours Sparrow stood watching the long light rise and spread, shift slowly when the noon chow cart tinkled and ebb drowsily down, like feathered hours, upon the sleeping strays. All through that brief December day the castoffs and the outlaws slept, rebels and wrecks and heartbroken bummies, cell after cell and tier upon tier, wakened only by the weary chow cart’s call or the sudden clanging of a cell door upon some forenoon coneroo, afternoon penny matcher or early evening lush arguing fiercely while being locked up for cooling off.

Watched and remembered Frankie Machine and the arm that always held up. Remembered in the evening light, when cards are boxed and cues are racked, straight up and down like the all-night hours with the hot rush hours past. Remembered that golden arm.

Till he saw how Bednar would beat it at last.

Pokey came past dragging a drunk by the scruff of the neck and the toes turned toward the ceiling: he bounced by wearing a smile of serenest peace, as if fancying he were riding in a cab while his heels scuffed stone and his arms dangled like a puppet’s on broken strings. Pokey held him with one ham of a hand while opening the next cell with the other.

Sparrow heard the body land like a sack, Pokey’s twin cats tiptoed up to see whether they’d surveyed this particular abomination before and nodded to each other judicially: ‘It’s him again all right’ – and tiptoed tastefully out of sight.

‘Cats are all stooges anyhow,’ Sparrow felt an old preference, ‘a dog’ll never squeal on a pal’ – as his own predicament began breaking in on him at last.

Going. This time he was really going.

He heard a girl’s voice crying out a single question, she was being brought in off the street a full floor above him; but in a voice so agonized it seemed she spoke directly to himself:

‘Ain’t anybody on my side?’

She was really asking him.

‘Nobody, sister. Not a soul,’ Sparrow answered, she suited his own mood so well. ‘You’re all on your own from here on out. Ain’t nobody on anybody’s side no more. You’re the oney one on your side ’n I’m the oney one on mine.’

But no one, on the long streets above, off which both had been taken, cared one way or another. For up there each was the only one on his own side. Under one moon or another, he knew not one man on the side of men.

‘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 neon 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.

‘I know you,’ Bednar assured them quietly, ‘I know you all. You think you’re all members of one another, somethin’ like that.’

They thought they were putting something over on him in there; while all the while it was himself who was putting it over on them.

Yet the glare in his eyes seemed to fill some small part of a need he had never felt before. And the unrecorded arrest slips littering his desk seemed written in a code devised by ancestral enemies.

‘If you don’t pull out of the blues you’ll be writin’ your own name on the sheet,’ Cousin Kvorka had joked with him that forenoon. Since that moment Bednar had been trying to rid himself of a compulsive yearning to write his name there where for so long he had written only the names of the guilty and the doomed.

The guilty and the doomed. He saw that steerer’s small white face, exhausted like a child’s from crying in his cell, and in one moment his own heart seemed a bloodstained charge sheet with space left upon it for but one more name.

In a suffocating need of absolution he took the pen and wrote, in a steady hand, corner to corner across the sheet, the meaningless indictment: Guilty.

Immediately he had done that through his mind there careened a carnival of rogues he had long forgotten. All those he’d disposed of, one way or another, from behind this same scarred desk. A shambling gallery of the utterly condemned. With that same exhausted small white face following everyone so anxiously, from so far behind. ‘I only done my honest copper’s duty,’ the captain defended himself against the steerer and against them all, his fingers spreading involuntarily to conceal the word written across the sheet.

Yet somewhere along the line a light in his heart had gone out like an overcharged light bulb, leaving only some sort of brittle husk for a heart; a husk ready to crumble to a handful of dust. ‘My honest copper’s duty,’ he repeated like a man trying to work a charm which had once worked for someone else: to cast out blue-moon moods, low-hanging memories and all bad dreams.

He said it twice and yet guilt like a dark bird perched forever near, so bald and wingless and cold and old, preening its dirty feathers with an obscene beak. ‘I’m one sick bull,’ Bednar decided, ‘it’s time to go home.’ But it had been time to go home for hours and yet he sat on as though manacled to his unfiled arrest slips and that single word so firmly written beneath his hand.

He dried the sweat off his forehead with a blood-red bandanna, then tossed the rag aside as if he had touched his temples with the blood of others. ‘He wasn’t nothin’ to nobody, the punk,’ the captain recalled.

Then why did it feel like turning informer, why did he feel he had sold out a son, like being paid off in gold? For if everyone were members of one another – he put the notion down. That would mean those on the other side of the wall were his own kind.

It could not be. For if they were anything less than enemies he had betrayed himself a thousandfold. It would be too much to make a traitor out of a man for having done his simple duty. But what if he had done traitor’s work all his life without realizing it? He tried to rise, for he had to find out, he had to find out what he had done to himself by doing his simple captain’s duty.

‘Cut out that racket in there,’ he warned the ceaseless murmur behind the wall: for a moment he had the delusion that they were examining his anguish through some peephole, nudging each other and winking, as convicts do, as they watched. ‘I never hated a man of you,’ he tried to appease them. And heard a knowing reply: ‘Nor loved any man at all.’

Heard his own lips say that and felt himself growing angry. What ghostly kind of good would it have done a soul if he had? What except to delay justice awhile? For every man of them, he knew, had been guilty to the hilt, guilty of every sort of malice of which the human heart is capable. What they hadn’t done to others had been only through indolence and lack of a proper chance.

For every man was secretly against the law in his heart, the captain knew; and it was the heart that mattered. There were no men innocent of intent to transgress. If they were human – look out. What was needed, he had learned long ago, was higher walls and stronger bars – there was no limit to what they were capable of.

Somewhere along the line he had learned, too, that not one was worth the saving. So he’d been right in saving none but himself. And if that had left them all to be members of one another, then it had left him to be a member of no one at all. Had, indeed, left him feeling tonight like the most fallen of anybody.

The captain realized vaguely that the thing he had held secretly in his heart for so long against them all was simply nothing more than a hostility toward men and women as men and women.

And now so lost to all men and women that the murmur beyond the walls troubled him like the voices of friends he had denied ever having known. ‘The bums ’r gettin’ my goat, that’s all,’ he decided, pulling himself together. They had begun by stealing his sleep. He listened in fevered hope of hearing them call out to all the world that he was no better than the very worst of them. That he knew as well as themselves who was guiltiest tonight.

Silence. They blamed no one. They had the brassbound nerve to take the rap and forgive him for everything. Everything.

So that suddenly the captain wished to do something so conspicuously noble, something at once so foolish and so kind, so full of a perfectly useless mercifulness toward the most undeserving of all, that prisoners and police alike would laugh openly at him. Would laugh without pity as at an old enemy gone balmy at last.

He wished them all to speak to him directly, without trace of respect, make some sort of obscene joke out of his uniform and his badge and his unassailable record – he wished suddenly to be insulted so grievously and accused so unjustly that there would be no use of defending himself: so hopelessly misunderstood by everyone that there would be nothing left to do but keep his silence while everything he had labored so long and so faithfully to build was torn down, overnight, right before his eyes.

His heart paced with the prospect of such a fall as if in anticipation of an orgy. Then slowed, stanching its own excitement. ‘It sounds like they’re all on their knees prayin’ for me in there,’ he fancied. And did not wish to be prayed for.

For it was time to be stoned. He had been so proud to be an enforcer of the laws men fell by, of being the kind of man who tempered Justice with Mercy. Now it was time to see himself whether there were any such things at all. If there were neither one nor the other for himself, he would do without. An iron life, an iron heart, he could wish for an iron death.

Alone below the glare lamp in the abandoned query room, stifled by a ravaging guilt, he knew now those whom he had denied, those beyond the wall, had all along been members of himself. Theirs had been the common humanity, the common weakness and the common failure which was all that now could offer fresh hope to his heart.

Yet he had betrayed them for so long he could not go to them for redemption. He was unworthy of the lowliest – and there was no court to try any captain for doing his simple duty. No place was provided, by church or state, where such a captain might atone for everything he had committed in his heart. No judge had been appointed to pass sentence upon such a captain. He had been left to judge himself.

All debts had to be paid. Yet for his own there was no currency. All errors must ultimately be punished. Yet for his own, that of saving himself at the cost of others less cunning than himself, the punishment must be simply this: more lost, more fallen and more alone than any man at all.

Thieves, embezzlers and coneroos, all might redeem themselves in time. But himself, who had played the spiritual con game, there was no such redemption. There was no salvation for such self-saviors.

Only his own heart might redeem him: through tears or laughter. His heart that felt stopped by dust.

It had been too long since the captain had laughed. Even longer since he had wept.

Someone – could it still be that steerer? – cried out in sleep on the other side of the wall – bringing him, out of the wisdom of some ancestral dream, news of salvation to policemen and prisoners, dealers and steerers and captains, blind men and hustling girls, cripples and priestlike coneroos alike.

To the hunter as well as the hunted.

Record Head wept.

Crocodile tears: he belonged to no man at all.

Long after Bednar’s men had come and gone and the whole great gray tenement had murmured once and grown still, Sophie sat on by the window and saw the snow, in a slow, suspended motion, begin to measure her hours. Heard the clock above the dresser begin keeping count with the snow; like a clock with a broken heart.

Counting out the weather in all the streets of evening with no true hope for the bright alarm of morning any more. Each tick suggested, to her stunned and brooding mind, a slow dying down of wheels, till everything would be the same as though she and Frankie Majcinek had never been born to listen to clocks. Nor see the slow snow trailing the evening trolleys.

Tavern and tenement, all was still, under the new year’s first still snow. Bakery and brothel, carbarn and bar, all lay under the dreaming snow. The night’s first drunks came padding through it: out of the Safari, out of the Widow Wieczorek’s, out of the Tug & Maul. Sometimes one cried a name up to her with the glow of the neon like drifting fog on his face and passed on in a neon-colored mist. Once a whole group of them stopped to look up together, laughed a single knowing laugh right in her face and went off laughing together about what they had just done.

The smell of despair, the odor of whisky and the scent of the night’s ten thousand dancers, the perfume and the powder sprinkled across the deep purple roar of barrelhouse laughter, the armpit sweat cutting the blue cigar smoke and the hoarse cries of those soon to grow hoarser with love, scents and sounds of all things soon to be spread up through a thousand rooms into her own room. Till the drinkers and the dancers, the gamblers and the hustlers and the yearning lovers came dancing and loving, came gambling and hustling in a wavering neon-colored cloud down her walls.

And died away forever in the room’s coldest corner as the neon beer signs died one by one along the street below.

Leaving her nothing but the dull gray clamor of those same night-weary locals she had heard when she had first yearned toward Frankie, in this same room, between the night’s last local and the morning’s first express, out of the very pit of sleep.

Now, between the wavering warning flares, the all-night locals paused, as always, and passed across the thousand-girdered El down the tunnel of old El dreams and were gone.

All night she saw the January watchfires flicking the swirling snow. And could not sleep for saying his name to the swirling snow. The snow that changed to rain, from time to time, while the radiator’s suggestive whisper was drowned, each time it changed, by the oncoming thunder of the cars: as their thunder receded the same secret gossiping would begin again.

Gossiping of whisperers who paused, fingers to lips, as the rattling clatter of the empties shook the old house and bent the vigil flares, like a single flare, all one way; and not another whisper then till the flares had come upright once more all down the line. To guard the constant boundaries of night.

Then heard them go right back at it again and it was lies, all lies. They told each other Frankie’s name, and named things he’d been doing she knew he hadn’t done at all no matter how tired he might have gotten. The nastiest sort of gossip and not a word of it true, they’d never get her to believe a single word. Then pretending they hadn’t said any such a thing, she had just imagined someone had said it – it must have been somebody else they’d tell her. Who ever would dream of saying such a thing about Frankie?

And the whispering would die away like a whisper dying within a dream.

Till all her nights seemed suddenly to have passed like local stops seen hurriedly from some long Loopbound express through windows streaming with an unabating rain. A violent city, in an unabating rain. So swiftly they all had gone, and could not come again: the handsome blond boys with the laughing mouths dancing her around and around: that would not dance her again. The brief and magic nights in Frankie’s arms, so sinewy, tight and warm: never ever so briefly to hold her so again.

Her fingers plucked phantom specks, like phantom memories, from the blanket across her knees. Old Pin Curls turned on the radio down the fourth-floor hall and its beat, without words or music or even a tone – only that muffled beat-beat-beat to which one’s fingers must keep plucking time like threads forever – it stopped and she lay back as slowly as though the back of the chair was sinking beneath her weight and passed her hands once over her eyes.

Voices, deliberately muffled – right next door. Schwiefka was running his game in there, she heard Sparrow and Blind Pig and Meter Reader and once, just once, Nifty Louie’s voice, all making one soundless laugh together at the way she had slept in this same chair while Frankie had slept with that piece of trade one flight down. All night. And how, when he’d come crawling back upstairs, everyone in the house but herself had known.

A lie. Just one more of Nifty Louie’s lies. Making up things about Frankie like that because he wanted to get Frankie’s job in the slot and then – because of a sudden they knew she was listening they all stopped their gossiping at once, gesturing to each other that she was there at the wall again listening for all she was worth: they winked quietly at each other then. She knew. For she heard the cards going around.

Heard cards slapping softly or sharply down and drew a circle about her temple to show them what she thought of them all and then as plain as day one said, ‘That one ain’t worth a nickel,’ and the latch shook with the long El’s passing.

Under its roar they all took their chance to laugh, so strange and noiselessly, till it had passed.

To pretend then no one had laughed at all.

When she looked up it was a night without a moon and the luminous crucifix on the wall had begun to glow dimly. She wheeled toward its small sorrowing face, wondering that it could seem so filled with some inner motion while the whole great house could seem so still. With no light down Division Street nor either way down the El.

It had seen all things that had passed in this room since she and Frankie had first slept in it together, she saw now. It had watched her every time she had taunted him, it alone had known that she had wished him to be as crippled as herself.

Mad, of course, quite mad. The Christ above her eyes, she saw, was no less mad for seeming so gentle: and knew she shared that madness. That she had become wiser and more gentle than anyone in the world for sharing it.

With no light in the long cold hall, nor down the steep and treacherous stair.

Only the flowering neon glare of streets where nothing grows save a far-off glimmer of track or girder, crosslight or carbarn or rail.

All the way down to the streets where the dark people live and Frankie Machine drank alone.

Two monkeys were caged above the bar, huddling and blinking together, with ancestral wisdom, down upon the barflies shrieking insults at them from below: ‘Bingo bongo bongo – how’d you like it in the Congo?’

Across the tables, above the piano and over the tiny stage there hung some sort of pungent pall, a bit like the autumnal odor of stale blood dried on a leaf-strewn walk the day after a sudden death between the curbing and the wall. A little, too, like the wet yellow smell of insanity when the white ward wakes in the midwinter Monday morning. A little something, too, of the flowered scent of a young girl’s armpits in first love. Something of death in autumn, something of early summer love, and something as flowered as the last day of April – touched by something as cold as a surgeon’s glove.

And something as bittersweet as the slow irresistible seep of marijuana in a darkened, curtained, locked and windowless room.

Out on the narrow Negro streets the wind blew the rain and the snow down from the Saloon Street Station, searching together in every alley and dim-lit rooming-house hall between Record Head Bednar’s desk and the monkeys who yearned for the Congo.

Frankie Machine sat among the strange cats of the Kitten Klub, drinking the dark people’s beer.

He’d been sitting here all afternoon and the five-spot that had been plastered to his arm was remembered there now only by a single end of a bandage still clinging to the skin.

The high-yellow M.C., whose sole wage was in the nickels and dimes tossed at his feet, was doing his first stint of the night, with a sort of merriment part strut and part convulsion.

‘This show’ll kill you, folks,’ he threatened everyone in the place, ‘them it don’t kill it’ll cripple.’

Nobody laughed.

‘It’s the cocktail houah, cats,’ the high-yellow urged them all, ‘get drunk ’n be somebody.’

‘It’s better to be yourself, friend,’ Frankie thought mechanically, he’d been through that particular hope before. A pair of deadpan amber strippers waiting for a live one at the table beside his own purred softly in agreement.

The M.C. began a mock strip himself, down to a pair of lacy orange silk shorts, till some paid-by-the-shot-glass shill shouted, ‘Take ’em off, Mr Floor Show!’ And Mr Floor Show picked up the paid-in-full challenge by retorting, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t dare!’ And began an idiotic crooning with a wild backflinging of his head and a demented weaving of his arms. ‘Bless your little G strings,’ he called familiarly to the deadpan brass ankles waiting so quietly in the shadows, ‘you’re so sweet! And now we’ll have a little song entitled “Honey, If This Isn’t Love You’ll Have to Wait Till I Get More Sleep” – that’s right, we’re giving you the best show in the country. I don’t know about the city. And it’s all for youah benefit – most of you look like you need a benefit.’ And laughed with the lightest, most silvery sort of laugh to veil the whole wide gray world’s despair. ‘Get off youah hands! What youah want? Blood?’

Frankie got off his hands. ‘You tell ’em, Mr Floor Show,’ he applauded weakly; and drank on in the hope of somehow postponing the sickness. ‘Can’t afford to get sick now,’ he mourned the long-gone fiver.

‘I knew there was somebody out there,’ Mr Floor Show observed, squinting far over the little line of red-white-and-blue footlights, ‘I heard breathing’ – and resumed his fluttering about in the orange shorts for want of anything better to do, like a crazed burlesque queen, pausing only to stamp his foot with a girlish petulance and assert, ‘I’ll have you know I’m every inch a man!’ Then, seeming suddenly to tire of everything, began torturing himself in a voice full of a hoarse glee at its own pain: ‘Boop-de-oop-doop ’n razz-muh-tazz, kizz muh feet ’n kizz muh azz – interdoosin’ to you ouah supah-sulphous walkin’-talkin’ seeeepia doll, ouah tiny mite of dynamite – Miss Dinah Mite! Meet her ’n greet her! Come out, honey! Mello as a cello ’n merry as a berry – Boys! The strain from hernia!’ The three-piece band began beating it out while Miss Mite took over.

‘I wonder who’s boogin’ my woogie now.’

Yet the strange brown cats of the Kitten Klub all sat wanly smiling, like copper cats that never bled, whose blood was formed of others’ tears.

Copper cats out of some plastic jungle wherein only the neon kitten above the bar felt pain, only the Budweiser bottles sweated tears of joy, and only the monkeys overhead knew better.

FEED THE KITTY

the legend below the neon kitten commanded. Off and on, off and on, with a sort of metallic beggary unmatchable by any human panhandler.

GET UP A PARTY

FEED THE KITTY

GET UP A PARTY

FEED THE KITTY

An outsized octoroon venus began galloping about on spindle legs just to make her belly shake – it was distended as if with some malignant growth; her absurd finery flew behind her, she paused only to beg breathlessly:

‘Daddy, I want a diamond ring

’N everything-’

Her G string was upheld by court plaster and a gilded cardboard crescent swung for some reason from her navel while she went into a convulsive series of bumps; like some dark Diamond Lil just fed on Spanish fly.

‘You got to get the best for me-’

with the G string bounce-bounce-bouncing.

Frankie Machine squeezed his temples, to keep the panic down till it ebbed back down his nape. Leaving him a reasonless desire to go hurrying out through the snow to the nearest station, whatever the cost, in the hope of getting some sort of charge at County. ‘They got to give it to you when you’re really sick,’ he assured himself, ‘they can tell when a guy got to have it, doctors can tell, they ain’t like cops, they help a guy get to sleep.’

– and the ram-bam of the drums going into ‘Song of the Islands.’

Above the empty iron-banging din a waitress dropped a trayful of drinks. The shattering of the glass tinkled, in the sudden silence that followed, like an echo of soiled laughter along any soiled bar and Frankie applauded clumsily, numb with bar whisky and an utter weariness.

‘Tough it out, kid, tough it out,’ he tried to urge himself, feeling the first line of sweat forming along his forehead. But the whole business of escape seemed so hard, so useless, so endless and so long, a voice like another’s voice answered his anguished blood: ‘Tough it out for what? What for? What’s it all for anyhow?’

A brownskin buck feigning drunkenness bumped the edge of his table, upsetting his beer, then pretended to apologize by wiping it all into Frankie’s lap with a blue silk handkerchief. Frankie stood up weaving. ‘What you up to, cousin?’

‘I wasn’t lookin’, man,’ the buck apologized, ‘I’m tryin’ to get my bearin’s, where the people are.’ He went off waving the silk handkerchief as if trying to dry it on the drifting smoke.

Then the noise came on again, the juke began, the singing seemed more shrill, the lights changed from a delicate nursery pink to a raw and bleeding scarlet so that the barflies’ faces beamed, one moment, like so many tawny-pink cooks in a Cream of Wheat ad and in the next were flushed by an apopleptic light as though caught, in the very instant of the hemorrhage that bathes the brain without warning, into so many cream-colored plastic horrors.

‘Bingo bango bongo

I don’t want to leave the Congo …’

The monkeys above the clamor regarded each other in genuine fright, for the octoroon war horse was on the loose again, charging furiously about in a skirt of pale pink grass while Mr Floor Show pursued her playfully, bounding like a man trying to goose a butterfly and finally leaning over the piano to deal the pianist a blow as weak as his humor. ‘I could just smaaash you!’ In one corner somebody sniggered.

‘I want the frim-fram sauce,’

the war horse went into some two-year-old novelty tune,

‘With the aussenfay

And cha-fa-fa on the side.’

‘We go till gangrene sets in!’ Mr Floor Show threatened everyone with ferocious gaiety and under the curtain of perfume and smoke, under the pall of all their lives, poisoned by the shame they had somehow been taught to feel at not being white, their voices ceased altogether, the singing and the laughter ceased; and only the dead-flat whirring of the fans came on like a wind rising from the world they had left behind their tenement doors. In the sudden silence one of the brass ankles at the next table put her palm slantwise beneath her nose, sniffed once and said with prim pride: ‘This is one thing you don’t see me do’ and right outside the door someone smashed a bottle on the walk, the juke cried out, the music went on, the laughter picked up in the very teeth of that dead-flat warning wind.

While out of the years when the world had gone only half wrong the juke picked up a faded and raggedy tune.

‘Red sails in the sunset,

All day I’ve been blue.’

Till the strange cats looked all around.

It was time to be going home, if he could just find out where one was. It was time for bed, time for a drink, time for a charge and time to give himself up. There was nothing left for Frankie Machine, with his hands pressed so hard to his temples, but the bottles behind the bar, the age-old monkeys above the bottles, and the voice of the wind, bringing snow, rain and sleet, down all the streets where the squadrols sought him.

‘Nobody can stand gettin’ this sick,’ Frankie told himself. ‘Nobody can stand gettin’ this sick ’n not havin’ no place to go.’

Afraid to stay and afraid to leave, afraid of those at the tables about him and wanting to fight them all, he sat on with his right hand trembling so that he had to use the left to bring a glass of beer to his lips; he tried to keep the tiny stage in focus as he drank on.

A white girl with a mouth like a baby carp’s was trotting around up there as though being moved on strings, singing in a tinny little sing-song.

‘When the lights go on again

All over the world…’

with three sets of lights and carrying the battery concealed in one hand. ‘Take ’em off, honey,’ someone called. ‘The war’s over!’

But all she did was to prance like a little circus pony with the light on her navel flickering weakly, like a symbol of all such purchased humanity: purchased, marked-down, remaindered and sold out.

In the uproar and the odor, in the heavy sweat and the crash of bottles, within the smash of the drums and Mr Floor Show’s incessant shrieking, watching the passion of the octoroon venus and studying Frankie Machine’s dead-cold despair, the two amber strippers sat wanly on and on.

Once one laughed restlessly while the other drank without pleasure. Idling over the amber glasses, both were careful, Frankie saw, to put the glasses down softly after drinking so as not to clink them vulgarly upon the table; both drank and put them down together, in some sort of cunning pact, then raised their brown eyes each to each.

And both sat wanly smiling.

‘That’s how I got sin-ukul,’

the baby carp bawled to the neon cat.

‘Ya put me on a pin-ukul

’N then ya let me do-ow-own,’

and went up so high on ‘down’ that the neon kitten closed his eyes, drew in his ears and arched his back a bit to indicate his suffering. For only the neon cat felt pain and only the bottles wept small tears. Only the monkeys yearned for home.

‘Bingo bango bongo

I don’t want to leave the Congo…’

While all sat wearily, wisely, wanly. All sat faintly smiling.

A brown and white chorus came out one by one, seemingly too indifferent toward each other to come out together, till there were five. Though each wore only slippers and a G string, all seemed overdressed, so studiously had their nakedness been donned. Each pore powdered, each taut pink nipple tinted with fingernail polish and dusted with some mauve talc, the armpits shaven and deodorized, each navel dusted and the hair swept back behind each small catlike ear.

The last one came out shading her eyes with her hand while bumping listlessly, as if half in shame. It was only the glare in her eyes and a general indifference to her public. When she’d bumped out of the glare she dropped her hands, wetted the fingertips with her tongue in a gesture Frankie knew so well that his hands came away from his temples – it took his heart in a single hot, tightening stitch and would not let the taut heart go and would not let him breathe. She daubed each naked nipple moistly, threw back her head and began stroking the hair coiled on her nape in a slow and sensual indolence. He brushed his shot glass off the table and stood up.

Molly could not see him weaving against the table out there in the dark while he was trying to understand to himself whether it was time for him to leave, before she saw him, or time to go to her before he lost her again.

He felt a sickening sort of shame, this was just the way he wished not to be in finding her again: broke, sick and hunted. What was it someone had said of her long ago? ‘She’s the kind got the sort of heart you can walk in ’n out of with boots on.’

Then the act was done and she was gone, they were all gone as if they hadn’t been there at all. As though the whole act had been a kickback from an overcharge, something he’d formed in his brain out of beer fumes and smoke.

Yet went weaving heavily through smoke and fumes toward the tiny dressing room offstage.

Wearing army brogans on his feet.

All that day, aslant the window, a long-forgotten, tangled black aerial wire touched continually at the pane as if Poor Peter had at last found another game than that of planting paper daisies to pass his days. He was jerking it from the roof just to taunt her – who else would be up there in such weather, with the wind like a whip and the ice on the walks? She turned on the radio to muffle its constant tap-tap-tapping; but all she could get was some fire-eating preacher offering her a choice of salvation or brimstone and even that was better than the tapping. What troubled her most was that, even when the wind seemed still, yet the wire tapped on.

She pried the sash up an inch with a shoehorn. But it dangled on just out of her reach. So she shut the window, realizing it was just one more trick they were playing on her.

And that Vi was no better than the rest of them any more. For all her fine talk about poor man’s pennies, the way she was carrying on with the Jailer, it seemed she thought more of landlord’s nickels these days.

Vi and the Jailer and that Frankie, leaving without so much as a word of good-by, all he ever thought of was himself. The preacher, droning eternally on and on, began hinting certain things about certain people, he was worse than any of them and in sudden fitlike fury she pulled the radio off the dresser, wheeled into the hall and dropped it over the rail without so much as looking to see whether someone might be coming up the stairs to catch damnation on the point of his skull.

She heard the crash below and the Jailer’s startled voice: ‘Who t’rows t’ings?’ The set had missed him by inches.

‘It’s that priest talkin’ against me again,’ Sophie explained, knowing she’d done just right, and wheeled back into the room, locking the door behind her. Then called, to answer the Jailer’s angry rapping, ‘You’ll all get just what you got coming! I’m giving it to all of you now!’

There was no further knocking at her door all that endless afternoon. Only, toward evening, the rapping of Jailer’s hammer where he was putting a couple final raps to the radio. ‘He’s always better at knockin’ somethin’ apart than puttin’ somethin’ together anyhow,’ Sophie told herself with pleasure.

The evening of the night that no one came at all and she wanted the moon to move.

Only the moon to move, it seemed so little to ask, for it moved for everyone else.

All anyone ever did for her was to flush the toilet down the hall and when would he ever quit flushing that nasty thing anyhow?

Not one of them heard, hours later, the stranger’s step in the hall below, listening there to hear whether he were expected, then begin coming on heavily, like one almost too tired to mount one more flight. She peered out, the door an inch ajar, like an animal expecting pursuit and knew: ‘It’s Frankie comin’ home.’ To make it all up to her for leaving like that without even saying goodbye.

Without even telling her what it was for that the wagon men had wanted him. Without even telling her it was all a lie about him and that public hide on the first floor front. Without giving her so much as a word to fight with when the neighbors said things behind her back. It would serve him right if she told him now: ‘You’ve brought it all on yourself. It’s every bit your fault.’ But by the way he came on, so heavily with every step, she could tell how sorry he really was. He was sorry at last, truly truly sorry, he’d come back to make it all up to her now.

To make it all up, and have something to eat, a place to sleep and a place to hide – what was the difference whether he’d slept with this one or that, whether he’d hit some other bum on the head sometime or other – the main thing was he was coming back, he was sorry, for he loved her after all. She bit her nails with excitement.

Heard the struggler below lean for breath hard against the rickety rail – she hoped he just wasn’t drunk again. If he was she’d have to get him sober right away, she would have to work fast and be ever so still, he’d be so tired, so hungry and sick and broke and everyone against him – he would need her so badly and she whispered through the door all the way down the stairwell: ‘Hurry, honey,’ as loudly as she dared.

Then that same old fool down the hall, who by right should have been in bed for hours, began the same old record on the same dreary old all-night vic.

‘It all seems wrong somehow…’

The struggler heard, she heard him turn, he thought there was a party going on and had best not take such a chance after all. The door closed though the record went on.

‘That you’re nobody’s baby now.’

When it stopped she realized he must be going around the block, he was going to use the fire escape and fool them all, she would have to have the fire-escape door open for him.

Then down the hall he would come so softly, no one would hear his step at all. No one would know where her Frankie was so safely hiding.

No one, not even that Vi would know, she would feed him and bathe him and make him sleep and take care that passers-by didn’t waken him.

But the moon seemed too bright. Past all the blind doors to the rust-colored escape window that only long disuse had fastened: she got the shoehorn between the door and the sash and it came wide with a tiny flaking of rust onto the blanket across her knees. She had to stand up to let him know it was safe now to come up from the alley shadows.

Yet heard no steps on the iron stairs. No feet feeling for rusted rungs. No low whistle in the winter night to tell he was coming at last to her now.

Leaning upon the rust-colored wall, her feet felt blindly for the iron, her eyes blurred with winter moonlight; a tenement moon, a fire-escape moon, so bright, so steady, so unmoving – if it would move just ever so little, then he could come – he was afraid while it was shining so bright, and from behind her, from the room where the vic had played, a woman’s head was thrust out of a bright-lit door to ask, ‘Who’s prowlin’ around here?’

Then saw the vacant wheelchair and Sophie leaning for support upon the rail. From the moonlit air above, the troubled air below and the unbalanced air all about Sophie heard their voices clamoring toward her.

She could walk by herself if they just didn’t all hold her so tightly, she knew.

‘Take it easy, sister. One footsy at a time. That’s our girl.’

She was going, much too fast, down the gutter-colored hall between two square-capped voices and the pin-curled neighbors in their doors watching all the way down to the very last door of all. Where that double-crossing Vi stood wringing her hands because everything in the world happened to her even when it happened to somebody else.

‘All night she been wheelin’, back ’n fort’, back ’n fort’,’ someone complained, ‘I couldn’t get a wink, but I know what troubles she’s had so I let her be, I’m not the kind to make trouble for others, I’ve had too much myself.’

Then Violet’s compassionate voice, telling the neighbors just how everything had happened. ‘Them two, him ’n her, wantin’ to love each other just ever so long. Wantin’ so much ’n never knowin’ how, neither one of ’em.’

Sophie felt the Division Street wind slap her cheek and the winter air nip at her throat – it had been so long since she’d been in the open. Then the air came close and stuffy, houses and store fronts and people were passing in great dips exactly as though she were riding the roller coaster once more. And laughing softly to herself at such a pleasant surprise, felt herself coasting right down into some whitewashed hall toward a cornerless room.

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 steady 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.’

‘What good is any lush’s promise?’ he asked her. He was lying stretched out on the army cot and she sat on its edge with her hand holding the hair back out of his eyes. ‘You can’t keep payin’ him off all your life, Molly-O.’

‘I got to cut your hair tonight,’ she told him, and put a finger to his lips. ‘I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t waitin’ for me when I come back at night.’

‘You’d be back on the lush yourself,’ he told her truthfully. And saw how the past months had tired her. She was twenty-four and looked thirty, with a sort of unsatisfied compassion in her eyes he had never seen before. It made him want to fathom the dark well of her love. ‘What makes you take care of a no-good guy like me, Molly-O?’ was the only way he had of putting it.

She laughed a pleased little laugh, shrugged and told him, ‘I don’t know, Frankie. Some cats just swing like that.’

But her face looked careworn.

A short, cold spring. By morning a musk-colored murmuring drifted down from all the flats above and the amber afternoons passed with music-making: a snatch of rhythm by the door, shouts from porch to porch and laughter rocking down the stairs. Till all the weekday morning murmurs, all the back-porch calls and all the laughter on the stairs mounted to a single Saturday night shout, when the whole house shook with Negro roistering. To the din above his head Frankie would tap away on his practice board though hardly able to hear the radio’s beat for the slap and slam, the shambling and the clattering of heavy feet, right overhead all night long.

He slept on the army cot and Molly on a couch which served, by day, as his orchestra pit. On nights when his single blanket wasn’t enough to keep him warm she took him beside her on the couch and kept him warm till morning.

A listless sort of light seeped in, toward noon ice would be melting down the windows. He kept the little fuel-oil stove going most of the day but shut it off, for economy’s sake, as soon as the nights began growing a bit less cold. At noon they used it for heating coffee or a can of soup or beans. The only sink was out in the hall, it was there she washed the plates and forks; she felt it unsafe for him to be seen in the hall. Sometimes one of the Negro women came out of her own private cavern with a couple cracked plates and a handful of tarnished silver to say ‘Good morning, ma’am,’ and share the sink. Molly kept such conversations down to the barest formalities.

As his restlessness grew he took to sneaking out for round-the-block walks while she slept. When she wakened she would see the mud on his shoes and would realize he couldn’t be pent up much longer. Once, when he returned smelling like a brewery, she became the outraged mother, locked him in and wouldn’t take him for their evening walk between shows by way of punishment. ‘Remember that the first time you’re picked up for drunk ’n disorderly you’re on your way to where you won’t come back,’ she scolded him. ‘Why do you take such chances, hon?’ His face lighted up with that half-malicious little grin. ‘Some cats just swing like that, Molly-O.’

He knew. He knew, yet each day wandered nearer the haunts of home. He had to get to someone who knew the score on the punk before he could make another move. He had to get it off his mind and thought of walking straight up Schwabatski’s steps and asking for Vi.

On the first warm day of March, while Molly was washing dishes in the common sink, he took off without a word, but she saw him leaving and called to him.

‘I’m just gonna look around, the places where the people are,’ he reported over his shoulder.

‘When you get enough of them on your tail run the other way,’ she offered her final warning.

On Damen and Division he spotted Meter Reader, empty-eyed and empty-handed, and ducked him; he didn’t want to hear how proud Meter Reader was of his boys. Instead he slipped around to Antek the Owner’s side door and waited just inside the door till Antek motioned him toward the back room and followed Frankie there. Antek’s short-haired wife nodded to Frankie sullenly and went up to take care of the bar while Antek filled two shot glasses and drank off his own before looking straight at Frankie.

‘You’re hotter than ever, Dealer,’ Antek told him at last, ‘you won’t cool off till after the elections. They got out another handbill about “Alderman’s Sluggers Go Free in Strongarm Murder,” somethin’ like that. What I know is the super is gonna lose his job if Record Head don’t clear the books on Louie. They’re pertendin’ now that somebody got paid off to slug Louie ’n you’re the guy Bednar needs to clear hisself.’

‘Skip the politics, Owner,’ Frankie cut him short. ‘What’s the score on the punk?’

‘It’s the punk who’s in the crack, Dealer. That’s for sure. Bednar got him thinkin’ he can beat the rap if he plays along. He’s had two continuances ’n he’s out stealin’ everythin’ in sight to pay off the lawyers. They don’t want him in a jacket till after he’s fingered you, so the aces got him out stealin’ everythin’ layin’ loose, they know what’s layin’ loose ’n it’s up to him to snatch it ’n turn it over. Every time he tries to holler about somethin’ they got lined up for him, they got to go through it all over again for him, how one more conviction adds up to life ’n no parole -’ n all the time they’re gettin’ so much on him he can’t say no. They got enough on him now to hang him – but what’s the punk gonna do? Either he goes along or he’s gone for keeps.’

‘Don’t he know he’s gone for keeps anyhow?’ Frankie felt a cold disgust with everyone. ‘Don’t he know the day he crosses me in court like he’s promisin’ Bednar, Bednar’s gonna cross him the day after?’

‘The punk just can’t figure it that far, Frankie,’ Antek tried to soften Frankie, ‘nobody can figure that far. A guy got to hope, it’s all the punk got left now is hopin’. He thinks they’ll cut down his time if he plays along ’n that’s all he can think of. He can’t back up now, he got to keep goin’ no matter what’s at the end for him ’r you ’r anybody. The day they fixed his bond he come in here ’n tells me, “I won’t do more’n a year ’n a day, Owner. I got the captain’s word. Then I’ll make the street like a little woolly lamb.” ’N he looked that sick when he said it I had to pour him two on the house. He looked that sick when he said it, you’ll never know how sick. Trouble is he’s spendin’ more than they let him keep. He don’t bother pourin’ the stuff into shot glasses no more – he goes right for the bottle, like he thinks it’s the last one he’ll get his hands on all his life.’

Antek paused to go for a small one from the bottle himself, then set the bottle down with a certain decision; the drink had convinced him it was time to wise the dealer up all the way.

‘God knows it wasn’t him rolled Louie, Frankie.’ For a moment Antek looked like a man caught rolling a corpse himself.

‘I had a good hunch it wasn’t all along,’ Frankie decided, things coming clearer at last. ‘I get it now. Pig had to frame the punk that night with the package to save his own hide. Bednar guessed that the punk was the one guy who could give him the straight story on Louie and he guessed right.’

‘It was a dirty one awright,’ Owner agreed, ‘puttin’ Pig on the payroll to get the punk.’ Antek looked white about the mouth. ‘You can see the spot I was in, Frankie, just to keep my nose clean – but don’t think we’re blamin’ you. You done what you had to do, it wasn’t just one guy’s fault. We all got caught in it one way or another.’

Frankie got his shot down. ‘It’s hard to tell whose fault a thing like that is,’ he told Antek. ‘There’s so many things seem like they’re all my dirty fault, I don’t know just why.Even the punk got plenty to blame me for now, I wanted to jam him up – but I didn’t want to jam him so’s he couldn’t get out, ever. Seems like everyone I get close to ends in the vise – what’s the score on Zosh?’

If Antek had looked white before, he looked as red as the label on the bottle now; yet came up with the answer straight enough. Somebody had to say it. ‘Your Zosh is one sick chick, Frankie. She flipped her wig the Sunday you left, right up there in the hall. My Mrs went to see her once when she was at County ’n Vi goes to see her too. Only she ain’t at County no more. She’s at the end of the Irving Park line ’n it ain’t your fault there neither, like you’re thinkin’ it is awready.’

As though he had known it secretly, without acknowledging it to himself, Frankie just stood looking down at the bottle. ‘How’s Vi doin’?’ he asked at last. Just to ask something and be on his way.

Antek’s voice was relieved that Frankie had changed the subject. ‘You’d never recognize that woman, Frankie. All squared up. “Lips that touch liquor will never touch mine” is her motto these days,’ n she’s got the Jailer off the bottle too. It’s just about half my rent gone to hell there, between the two of them. You know she’s hooked up with the Jailer legal?’ N all they do is count their money? Schwabatski moved her into his own flat ’n his dimwit is goin’ to a school fer tardy children, somethin’ like that. Even that broken-wind hound is off the lush, Frankie.’ For a moment Antek looked torn between tears and laughter. ‘You should just see the four of ’em goin’ down Division Saturday nights, the dummy with a big new picture book all about flowers under his arm, leadin’ the hound with a new dog collar ’n all brushed ’n combed – you wouldn’t even recognize the hound. He goes for milk ’n dog biscuit now ’n brings home the newspaper instead of a bottle in his teeth.’

‘Where they goin’ down Division on Saturday nights if they don’t go by whisky taverns?’ Frankie asked suspiciously.

‘Oh, they’re handin’ out literature on Milwaukee ’n Ashland, all about guardin’ an old lighthouse, somethin’ like that, they’re in a tailspin on some religious kick. That loose board we used to razz the Jailer about ain’t never gonna get fixed now, looks like, unless the dummy gets smart enough in that school to fix it hisself. Looks like the loose board is in the Jailer’s head these days.’

‘He could do worse than Vi,’ Frankie felt, slapping his checkered cap on the back of his head.

Antek held him one moment.

‘Stay out of sight till after elections, Frankie. They’ll have to get the punk into a jacket by then, he can’t keep on gettin’ continuances ’n once he’s on his way you’ll be cooler. You won’t have to be afraid of no one-to-twenty rap if you can stick it out till November. You’ll beat the rap altogether if you can get a grand together. Zygmunt’s beat tougher raps than yours for less. I’d pitch in a c-note myself ’n the other boys’d come along. Even Schwiefka’d have to pitch in the way we’d put it to him. We’ll hold a raffle every night here to get the clout together for you. How much you need right now?’

‘Slip me five to keep me alive,’ Frankie singsonged. And as he took it heard Antek add in an embarrassed undertone, ‘Lay off that happy gas, Frankie. If you can beat that we’ll beat Bednar. Is it a deal?’

‘It’s a deal.’ Frankie gave him the grin and the grip. Such deals are so easily made.

With the fiver in his pocket he let Antek scout the street both ways for him before he took off. ‘If you can stick it till November-’ Antek was beginning all over again.

At the corner a whole billboard, taken up by the features of the man behind Record Head Bednar, begged shamelessly in five-foot letters:

VOTE FOR UNCLE MIKE

‘I’ll vote for you, Uncle dear,’ Frankie assured him and reminded himself, of both the weather and the place: ‘The patch is pretty warm for March.’

As he passed the iron-fenced yard of the Mc Andrew School he paused to watch a group of punks shooting craps in a shadowy corner: the identical corner in which he’d been caught shooting craps on his last day of school. He walked on with the children’s cries rising above the traffic’s clamor like voices heard undersea: then realized he wasn’t hearing the children who shouted and cried out on this day at all, he was hearing cries that had followed him out of the schoolyard twenty years past and he shuffled on, the checkered cap shading his eyes and the threads, from where his overseas stripes had been torn off, hanging loose from the jacket’s patched sleeve.

He turned down a familiar alley, crossed a familiar street, caught a familiar trolley and, where the Ashland Avenue car rolls down Paulina toward Madison, returned to the streets of his exile. Overhead ran the Lake Street El and underneath its checkered light the Negro missions crouched. Missions, taverns and bazaars in long unpainted rows. He cut down the home alley to Maypole Street.

As his hand touched the knob he sensed trouble. Molly sat on the couch, her back against the wall and her legs drawn up protectively under her. Drunkie John was leaning over her.

‘Don’t kick me,’ Frankie heard her begging. ‘Don’t kick me.’ A plea as simple as that. Of a man with a face that belonged on the bottle on the table. John wore some sort of leather headgear, a boy’s helmet with chin straps dangling; apparently his latest fancy was that he was some kind of aviator. The face it framed, as it turned toward Frankie, was seared to a purplish red on one side and sunken and pale on the other, giving it a paralytic look; a look borne out by his old trick of speaking, without any movement of the lips at all, from the unseared corner of the mouth. ‘All in a muddle, like a whore’s handbag,’ he was saying, holding Molly’s purse in his hand. ‘She thinks I drink too much,’ John told Frankie; but put the purse down. Frankie pushed him toward the door.

‘All in a muddle,’ John laughed quietly even while he went stumbling and came up against the wall with a sly and sheepish little smile. ‘The joke’s on you,’ he told Frankie, ‘I’m not as drunk as you think.’

‘You’ve done a damned good job of trying,’ Frankie told him.

‘I ain’t really drunk till I stagger around,’ John defended his condition with anxious pride. ‘One glass of beer all morning ’n I spit that one out, it tasted green.’

‘Some of it must of trickled down,’ Frankie suggested, and turned to Molly. ‘You all right, Molly-O?’

‘Make him go, Frankie. Tell him we can’t give him no more.’

Frankie relayed the information. ‘We can’t give you no more.’

‘She’ll give it or get it,’ John answered, staying close to the open door.

‘Don’t hit him, Frankie,’ Molly cautioned, ‘don’t make him mad.’

It was true. Nobody could afford to make this amateur airline pilot angry. So Frankie just stood studying that debauched phiz with its out-thrust jaw and eyes as closely set as those of a baby alligator’s. All he could see there, for the life of him, was a little knock-kneed gin-mill fink held together by a kind of poolroom poise. ‘He’s good with a cue too,’ went through Frankie’s mind. ‘Case out, lush,’ he told John without touching him at all. ‘I’m the big dog in this kennel now.’

‘You caught the right word for it at that, junkie,’ John told him, taking sudden courage. But was half through the door before he reproached Molly: ‘I took two jolts in the workie when you’n me was together ’n you never took one. Not one. But your turn is comin’ up, sister. This McGantic man, he’s gonna fall a long way ’n you’re gonna fall right with him. I took two jolts ’n you didn’t take one. Not one.’ They heard him leave.

Frankie closed the door softly, hoping the housekeeper hadn’t heard the row. ‘Now what?’ he asked Molly-O.

The door opened behind him and Drunkie John stuck his mug back in.

‘The bottle, buddy – the bottle.’

Frankie took a long slug out of it, tossed it to John and heard him go at last.

‘That one won’t lose much time,’ Molly-O told him as if he didn’t know.

‘I’ll make it myself now,’ he pretended, yet with real fear that she might let him try going it alone. When she came to him he felt her trembling. ‘Don’t worry, he won’t be comin’ back, you can stop shakin’,’ he assured her.

‘It ain’t why I’m shakin’,’ she told him. ‘It’s account of what you said, makin’ it yourself now. How about me? What if I can’t make it myself?’

‘You’ll fall if you stick to me now,’ Frankie warned her.

‘I’d rather fall with you than make it without you, Frankie.’ He held her head on his shoulder and knew this was finally true too: it wasn’t just himself needing her any longer, it wasn’t just taking without any giving. It was nearer fifty-fifty now and that felt better than he’d ever known a thing like that could be. ‘I couldn’t make it a week by myself,’ he confessed, ‘’n you know it. I’d be back sleigh-ridin’ in two days without you, Molly-O. If I had to steal to get it.’

‘Then let’s not lose each other again,’ she decided for keeps. ‘I’ll get work in a South Side joint ’n we’ll take care of each other. Just us two.’

‘Workin’ in a South Side joint ain’t playin’ it safe at all, Molly,’ he had to remind her as she had so often reminded him. ‘They’ll be lookin’ for me through you. You can’t stay in the strip racket or the man with the manacles’ll come to take us both.’

‘Okay – so I’m a waitress – look!’ She pranced about bearing an imaginary tray. He caught her and brought her back to the business at hand. ‘You’ll be a waitress at Dwight if you don’t start gettin’ your things together. Let’s case.’

He stuffed his pockets with cigarettes, toothbrush, shaving cream, a razor and a couple blades. ‘Just like I’m takin’ my rations down to the Rue Pigalle,’ he laughed reminiscently while she put on her very best shoes – the little silver-heeled open-toed jobs – and filled a small brown five-and-dime overnight bag with underclothing, nylons and her one best dress. He caught her looking lonesomely toward the closet where other dresses hung. ‘No help for it, Molly-O. We got to travel light.’

‘It ain’t only that,’ she mourned. ‘I got six days’ pay comin’ from the club – how about that?’

‘Forget it. I loaned a fiver off Antek this morning, it’ll get us a room for a day or two. Out the back way, Molly-O. The patch is hot.’

The patch was hot all right. The patch was burning. They were halfway down the narrow gangway to the alley when he heard the tires wheel into the alley. She’d played waitress ten seconds too long. ‘Back in the house,’ he told her.

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 music 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, midnight-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.

When they gathered the cards off the floor at last and took them away in a neat little box she said in a whisper, for she knew then she had won: ‘The wind is blowing the flies away. God has forgotten us all.’

Nor ever asked again for anything more but a sense of a white-washed stillness about her rising each day higher and more white.

The everlasting walls of Nowhere Land, higher than any hospital wall.

From which is no returning.

The wind had blown the summer flies away. God had forgotten His own.

As soon as he got the shoe off he pried at the naked heel with a razor blade to get at the lead in the flesh. But the blood began again, the wrist went weak as water and he lay back with the blood-smeared paw across his forehead and the naked foot resting upon the crumpled tabloids with the pain beating straight through the morning line to the unclean cover on which he lay. He felt the blood drying on the dated headline under his ankle.

Once he got up, fetched a scrap of soap off the washstand and began rubbing it across the ankle to get the blood off. But the light was too strong and he fell back on the bed with his checkered cap doubled under his head for a pillow, still clutching the sliver of soap in his hand. He wished that somebody would make the light stop swinging or shade it.

A red paper poppy clung to the chicken wire directly overhead and he couldn’t remember tying it there at all. ‘Must of been drunk again last night,’ he decided vaguely. Unless that Peter had tied it there. He must still be drunk, he needed a drink so bad, a drink of anything at all and all the way down. His throat felt like that left foot looked – smeared with something dark, stale and brown. Something that had to be washed off and not a blessed drop for throat, foot, or tongue. ‘Fightin’ again,’ he decided about the blood. ‘Who was I battlin’ this time?’

He sat up suddenly. What was he doing here lying flat on his pratt when there was so much to be done? It was late, it was almost too late, there was just time left to pull back the last open chair and say, ‘Deal me in.’

It was blackjack and the dealer’s eyeshade was pulled down too far over the eyes just as he had always liked to wear the shade himself; while the sucker to whom he dealt wore his own checkered cap. He stood aside and watched them both. He was both sucker and dealer; yet felt he cared nothing for what happened to either. Under the night light’s feral glare a single soiled silver dollar lay stained with his own wet blood.

‘If I win that buck they’ll find out I killed some guy,’ the sucker realized as the dealer flipped him the ace of diamonds. The dealer was laughing behind the eyeshade and around the board many Bednars smiled behind their cards; each holding them before his mouth so that no sucker might guess they were on to the dealer’s game: to stick the sucker with the bad-luck buck that meant one to twenty and maybe life.

‘Don’t take everything you can get,’ Molly-O told him ever so softly from just the other side of the wall and the girl knew what she was saying all right because the bad-luck buck lengthened under the light into a glistening new hypo with two full caps beside it. About the board, behind their cards, all those sly fat Bednars smiled: they hadn’t come here to play blackjack at all.

They had come to watch Frankie Machine take the one big fix and someone began pumping his arm to get the slow blood moving. He wakened with the desk clerk tugging at his wrist. ‘What’s wrong in here?’ he wanted to know right away. ‘Where’d you get hurt?’

‘I stepped on a nail is all.’ Frankie grinned weakly through the smear of blood across his cheek. ‘I’m not the kind makes trouble, Doc,’ he pleaded feebly. ‘Can I get a drink of water?’

But there was nobody there any more and he could not tell whether he had really seen or merely imagined the clerk. It made no difference, he had to get up and phone Antek to come and get him. Antek would get here in no time at all to help him downstairs into the car so there wasn’t any use worrying, everything was as good as done, he’d just float on his back a minute to let all the little waves wash him clean. The sun hurt his eyes, he was getting too far out, he could hardly see the beach for the glare. He sat up shaking his head to clear it.

About the bulb a little rainbow-colored halo burned, the bulb swinging a bit in its colored shell as though someone had been in here and set it swinging again while he’d floated off. He mustn’t float off again that way, he had to hold on. Hold on hard and figure out how much time he had. What was it the fellow had asked: ‘How did you get hurt?’ He sat up with sweat ringing his throat, it slid like the beads of a rosary about his neck when he turned his head; and wished to Christ the bulb would stop its endless swinging. It hurt his eyes yet he had to follow its tiny arc. There was something about it he needed to understand and slowly he saw it: framed within that rainbow-colored halo Frantic McGantic looked down with gentle mockery in his eyes.

Sergeant McGantic had come to call and the sergeant brought his own small mercies. The sergeant wasn’t one to let a good junkie down. Frankie’s eyes went seeking about the room to see what the sergeant had brought him and found it at last. It didn’t make any real difference now that there was no hypo to this fix at all.

It was enough that the sergeant had tossed, across the bedpost and in a reach of a good junkie’s hand, one thin double strand of yellow newspaper twine.

Leaning upon one elbow, there on the bed soiled by sweat and blood, Frankie asked himself aloud, squinting at the brassy glint of the bedpost beneath that swinging bulb, ‘What am I waitin’ for?’ For the roll of the squadrol’s tires? For the ice in the blood to reach the heart? Or for the tread of heavy boots following a flashlight up the stairs?

‘I hope Molly-O stays clear of John after she does her time,’ he made a bit of a prayer for Molly – but there was even less time for praying than for hoping. He got off the bed, favoring the naked left foot, and supported himself against the brass of the bedpost: he felt the chill that years of flophouse nights had trapped in the metal like the chill trapped deep in his own bones. Who was it had told him, ‘That’s the other side of the wall – it’s worse there when it’s still’?

One flight below a Madison Street trolley charged past in a streamlined, cat-howling fury that left him strengthened by an odd excitement. Before the trolley’s scream had died he had the double strand in his hands and his fingers working on it as surely and steadily as if making paper jazzbows for Solly Saltskin out of yesterday’s Form.

‘It’s all in the wrist ’n I got the touch,’ he told himself in a surge of ice-cold confidence and far, so far it told him he was still seconds ahead of them all, the siren’s first metallic cry fluttered the shade, whimpering faintly along the chicken wire and then a bit louder till it was a moaning telegraphic code shaking a wavering message across the waves of the brain – ‘Have a good dream you’re dancin’, Zosh’ – and the words were whirled like leaves in a dead-cold wind blowing up from the other side of the wall. Into one brief strangled whimpering.

To rustle away down the last dark wall of all.

Witness Sheet

STATE OF ILLINOIS)

COUNTY OF COOK)

BEFORE THE CORONER OF COOK COUNTY

INQUEST ON THE BODY)

OF) FIRST AND FINAL

FRANCIS MAJCINEK) HEARING

Transcript of the testimony taken and the proceedings had at an inquest held upon the body of the above-named deceased, before WILLIAM HACKETT, a DEPUTY CORONER OF COOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS, and a jury, duly impaneled and sworn, at 199 N. Ashland Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, April 1, 1948. At the hour of 3 P.M.

LORRAINE REPORTING SERVICE

R. Jackson, stenographer.

The first witness, having been duly sworn, was then examined by Deputy Coroner Hackett and testified as follows:

Q. What is your name and occupation?

A. Anthony Witwicki. Tavernkeeper.

Q. What was the full name of the deceased?

A. Frankie – that is Francis, I think – Majcinek the right name – Frankie Machine, how people say.

Q. His address?

A. Same as mine only upstairs.

Q. His age?

A. Thirty, thirty-one, around there.

Q. Was he married or single?

A. He was married, his wife is invalid that happened one night he got drunk-

Q. Where was he born?

A. Why, right there on Division, he had a secondhand car that time, I forget the make-

Q. Where was his father born?

A. Poland same as mine. Both dead a long time now.

Q. And his mother?

A. That was a stepmother, he called it ‘foster mother’ – they got along all right. She is married again, went away, I don’t know where. He never spoke of this, that was forgotten.

Q. What kind of work did he do?

A. When he come to see me he had no work.

Q. Before that. Before he went and got into all this trouble with the police.

A. He was in jail a little now and then. Nothing serious.

Q. Before he was in jail, did he work for you?

A. No, no, he did one thing. Dealt cards. Made pretty good when he worked. Sometimes he couldn’t work every night though, how those things are.

Q. What other work did you know him to do in the past?

A. When he was a boy one summer he was a caddy, every day, the whole summer. We went together, I think they called the course Indian Hill, something like that. Once when he owed me for drinks he fixed the furnace. He could work good but not every day, he got restless then and start to drink. When he don’t work, then he don’t drink so much.

Q. Did he always drink, before all this trouble?

A. Sometimes he was a heavy drinker, then for a while he don’t drink at all, like he’s thinkin’ about somethin’. Then if he got drunk it would be awhile before he begin again. A week, maybe two weeks with hardly a drink. Just a beer or two.

Q. Does he owe you money now?

A. Nothing, nothing.

Q. When did you last see him?

A. Yesterday in the morning, I just opened up and there he was waiting, I didn’t know who it was one minute, he didn’t say. Just standing there saying nothing in the dark. I said, ‘Who’s there?’ and he says then, ‘You alone, Owner?’ When I go up to him I see. He looks like chicken with the soup out. He looks like just out of hospital.

Q. You knew the police had been looking for him. You knew it was your duty to call the police right then.

A. Nothing I knew. All I know is sometimes he is in jail a little, what for isn’t my business. I knew he was in some trouble but I don’t ask about such things, I don’t mix in politics. I just serve whisky and beer.

Q. Did he tell you he wished he were dead, that he wanted to die, that sort of thing?

A. No, no, no. That one never talked like that. Never. All he talked was he’s going to work for Gene Krupa, play ‘hot drums’ he calls it someplace downtown – then he laughs, he don’t really think so, he just like to hear how it sounds when he talks big like that.

Q. Was he nervous during this last conversation?

A. Never nervous. Just don’t feel good, too much domestic trouble, too many bills, too much beer, that’s all.

Q. Did you know of him taking anything more stimulating than beer?

A. Whisky. That’s all. Whisky.

DEPUTY: Line 16. That’s right, the full name. Your address right below it. Thank you. Next witness.

The second witness, having been duly sworn, was then examined by Deputy Coroner Hackett and testified as follows:

DEPUTY: What is your name, Sergeant?

OFFICER: L. H. Fallon.

Q. Were you the officer who found the deceased?

A. That’s right. Myself and Officer Otto Schaeffer. A bit after midnight it was.

Q. And that was at?

A. 1179 W. Madison Street, a small hotel there, we got the call on Sangamon and Adams – this is the gentleman here who called, he’d gone up to see what this fellow was hollering about.

CLERK: I went up there the first time and saw he’d been hurt some way, so I went back down to the phone and while I was phoning I heard something else and ran right back up. I couldn’t get in the door, we don’t have keys but he’d put something up against the knob. I jumped up and looked down through the top – we have that chicken-wire top like according to the Board of Health it’s permitted and I seen him hanging but I couldn’t cut him down, I couldn’t get inside. I figure this ain’t my job now it’s up to the officers – I work in this place almost three months now and it’s the first time anything like this happened except once, my first week. As soon as this man come in it seemed to me-

DEPUTY: Let the officer tell what he found.

OFFICER FALLON: When we broke in the door the deceased had fallen, the wire had given way – the wire he’d hooked the rope onto but the rope was still around his throat, it was soaped, there was still a bit of soap in his hand. He was up against the bed, huddled there like, he must have hit the bedpost with his forehead when the wire gave, it was bruised there where he hit it and tore the sleeve of his jacket. The knees were bent – like under him and the head hung on one side, toward the shoulder.

DEPUTY: Was he fully clothed?

OFFICER: Fully clothed, except for one shoe, he just had the right one on. The heel of the foot without a shoe had been torn by a.38-caliber shell. We removed him to the Polish-American Hospital where he was identified as the man who escaped them earlier in the day. There was a murder warrant out on him. He was pronounced dead by Dr Blue and removed to the County Morgue.

Q. How was he dressed when you found him?

A. He was wearing army clothes, mostly. A combat jacket, suntans, army shirt dyed green, army brogans.

Q. Were there any valuables?

A. A few dimes in one pocket. No papers. A good-conduct medal in his wallet.

DEPUTY: Line 17, Sergeant. Thank you. Next witness.

The third witness, having been duly sworn, was then examined by Deputy Coroner Hackett and testified as follows:

Q. You’re the young woman being held in connection with the death of Francis Majcinek?

A. That’s right.

Q. When did you last see the deceased?

A. Around one, maybe two o’clock yesterday.

Q. Where was this at?

A. The house on Maypole Street where the police came.

Q. What is that? A hotel?

A. Rooming house.

Q. You lived there with the deceased?

A. Since winter.

Q. I see. Did you get along well together?

A. Very well. No trouble at all.

Q. What was the matter with him?

A. Just worried all the time, no work, sorry for things he’d done, blaming himself, all like that.

Q. What I mean is, weren’t there other things – bad habits he’d picked up depressing him?

A. Drinking, that was his one bad habit.

Q. Did you ever hear him threaten to commit suicide?

A. Never. Not once. Oh well, he used to like to say things, but it didn’t mean anything.

Q. Tell us what you mean.

A. Just swing talk like musicians use. He liked to say ‘Some cats swing like that.’ Then he’d laugh, just a saying he had, it didn’t mean anything.

Q. Did you know he was wanted for murder?

A. He never told me that.

Q. But did you know it?

A. Nobody told me that.

Q. I see. And you just met him recently?

A. I know Frankie ten years. We went together before he got married.

Q. Do you understand the charge against you?

A. They haven’t told me yet.

Q. It’s called ‘Accessory after the Fact,’ that’s very serious, you will have to go to jail if you’re found guilty.

A. Are you trying me here, Coroner? If not I’d rather let the lawyers decide in court.

DEPUTY: Thank you. Line 18. Just write ‘no address.’ The statement of the coroner’s physician is as follows: ‘In my opinion death was due to asphyxiation by strangulation.’ Is there any reason why this inquest shouldn’t be closed? (No response.)

DEPUTY: Let the record show no response. The verdict of the coroner’s jury will read that the deceased came to his death from asphyxiation by strangulation, with a rope around his neck extended from a wire roofing put on with his own hands with suicidal intent, at the above-mentioned location between midnight of March 31st, 1948, and 12:20 A.M. of April 1st while temporarily insane. Close the case.

Epitaph: The Man with the Golden Arm

It’s all in the wrist, with a deck or a cue,

And Frankie Machine had the touch.

He had the touch, and a golden arm-

‘Hold up, Arm,’ he would plead,

Kissing his rosary once for help

With the faders sweating it out and-

Zing! – there it was – Little Joe or Eighter from Decatur,

Double trey the hard way, dice be nice,

When you get a hunch bet a bunch,

It don’t mean a thing if it don’t cross that string,

Make me five to keep me alive,

Tell ’em where you got it ’n how easy it was-

We remember Frankie Machine

And the arm that always held up.

We remember in the morning light

When the cards are boxed and the long cues racked

Straight up and down like the all-night hours

With the hot rush hours past.

For it’s all in the wrist with a deck or a cue

And if he crapped out when we thought he was due

It must have been that the dice were rolled,

For he had the touch, and his arm was gold:

Rack up his cue, leave the steerer his hat,

The arm that held up has failed at last.

Yet why does the light down the dealer’s slot

Sift soft as light in a troubled dream?

(A dream, they say, of a golden arm

That belonged to the dealer we called Machine.)