The New Black Mask Quarterly (No 1)

Nelson Algren Say a Prayer for the Guy

Though he never wrote mystery stories, Nelson Algren shared with hard-boiled detective writers a fascination for the inhabitants of the backstreets. His ability to understand his grotesque characters allowed him to sympathize without sentimentalizing them. “Say a Prayer for the Guy” combines two of his favorite subjects — saloons and poker. This uncollected story first appeared in 1958 — nine years after The Man with the Golden Arm.

Nelson Algren died in 1981 at the age of seventy-nine.

That game began as it always began, the drinkers drank what they always drank. The talkers said what they always said, “Keep a seat open for Joe.”

Frank, John, Pete, and I, each thinking tonight might be the night he’d win back all he’d lost last week to Joe. Yes, and perhaps a little more.

Joe, poor old Joe, all his joys but three have been taken away. To count his money, play stud poker, then secretly to count it once more — and the last count always the best — that there is more there than before is no secret.

Joe, old Joe, with his wallet fat as sausage and his money green as leaves. Who needs sports, cats, them like that? That call for mixed drinks and blame God if they’ve mixed too much? Who needs heavy spenders, loudmouth hollerers, them like that? Drinking is to make the head heavy, not the tongue loose. Drinking is for when nobody shows up to play poker. You want to make the feet light? Go dancing. Dance all night.

“Here come Joe,” Phil, the bartender, told us, and sure enough, here he came. With his wallet full.

“Joe, you don’t look so good,” John told him as soon as he sat down, “you look so peckid.”

“I don’t feel so good,” the old man told us, “I feel peckid.”

“You feel peckid, take it easy,” advised Frank.

I put a dime in the juke, all on Perry Como. I don’t care what Ferry sings, so long as he sings. The box coughed once and gave me back my dime. It doesn’t like Perry. Well, it was my dime. I put it right back. I like Perry.

This time it didn’t cough. It picked Elvis Presley singing All Shook Up. I got nothing against Elvis. It was just that it was my dime.

But that Frank began humming and shaking along with the song as if it had been his money.

Then the game went as it always went, the drinkers drank what they always drank, the talkers said what they always said, “Looks like Joe’s night again.”

Yet, just as Joe reached for the deck, as the juke cried out I Need Your Love, everything went strange.

The juke coughed on a note, and went on coughing, how it does when someone leans against it. I saw Joe’s hands shuffling, but he shuffled too slow. A red deuce twisted out of the deck and dropped to the floor like a splash of blood. Joe fell forward onto the table, without a gasp, without a sound.

Up jumped Frank, the first to realize. “Joe! Wake up!” He seized Joe’s wrists and began massaging them. I opened the old man’s collar and his head flopped like a rooster’s. O, I didn’t like the looks of things in the least. Now I wanted the juke to play anything.

“Please wake up,” Frank pleaded. “Old friend! My one true friend!”

But his one true friend didn’t hear.

So we lifted Joe, old Joe, onto the long glass of the shuffleboard. We lay him down gently under the lights that say GAME COMPLETED. Frank began to massage his heart.

“I saw something wrong the second he sat down,” John boasted. “I told him.”

“Now you look a little peckid yourself,” I told him. He didn’t like that.

“You typewriter pounder,” he told me, “how some clay you look,” and drew back his lips in a grin almost as bad as Joe’s.

“How you look, too, someday, old dummy John,” little Pete suddenly took my part, and stretched his mouth back and made a horrible face, so that he looked even worse than Joe. Then he ducked under the table to gather the cards.

“Give up,” I told Frank, “if he comes to now, he’d be an idiot the rest of his days. When the breath stops the brain starts to melt, right that same second.” It was something I’d read somewhere.

“That would be all right,” Pete said from under the table, “maybe that way we’d win some of our money back.”

“He was my one friend, my only friend,” Frank reminded us, and went right on massaging. Yet more in sorrow than in hope of winning back his friend. He didn’t give up till the pulmotor squad arrived. How they found out I still don’t know. I think they just stopped in for a drink on the way home from some job and found another.

They tossed a coin, and the one who lost hauled the inhalator over to the shuffleboard.

“One side, buddy,” he told Frank, but our Frank stood his ground. After all, he’s from this neighborhood.

“Let him try, too, Frank,” I told him. “We stand for fair play.” Actually it wasn’t fair play I wanted to see so much. It was just that it had been some time now since anyone raised anyone from the dead and I wanted to be on hand if it happened again.

But that Frank, he wouldn’t give up. He went to the other side of the shuffleboard, yet he kept his hand on the old man’s heart. I figured he figured that, if the old man did come around, he’d get at least half the credit. If he had we would have given him all of it. After all, he’s from this neighborhood.

“If you’d stop blowing cigar smoke in his face,” the fireman told me, “he’d stand a better chance.”

“Where does it say NO SMOKING?” I asked him to show me. Why should I take stuff off him?

After a time, the fireman took the head-piece off Joe’s big blue nose and motioned to his friend at the bar. It was all over.

It took them a long time to get through the mob of kids in the door. It was a Spring night, and the kids wanted to see, but were afraid to come all the way in because it was a tavern.

But they made a path for some sort of serious little fellow with a black moustache. “I’m the doctor,” he told us as if there were only one in the whole precinct.

Still, he must really have been a doctor at that, because he had a gold watch and didn’t in the least mind showing it off. He listened to Joe’s right wrist, gave it a bit of a shake, glanced at the watch, gave the left wrist a shake and looked at the watch again. He shook his head.

It isn’t true what they say about pennies holding down a dead man’s eyes, because they didn’t hold down Joe’s. Maybe he’s got heavy eyes, I don’t know, but the pennies kept rolling off. He tried half a dozen, but they’d slip and roll down the floor. Every time one passed the table I saw Pete’s hand come out — there was one penny the doctor wouldn’t see again.

“Try a dime,” I told him to see if he would think that was heavier, and he did. When he lost that one I said, “Try a quarter.”

“Give me two nickels,” he told me, and two was just what I had. But I didn’t get a dime for them. “The dime is under the table,” he told me.

I wouldn’t bend for it. I knew it was no use.

When he got the old man’s lids closed under the nickels he wrote something in a little book, and left. “The boys will pick him up shortly,” he told us.

What boys? The boys from the Royal Barons S.A.C.? They’ve buried a couple parties, but not officially.

“He meant the ambulance boys,” Phil, the bartender, guessed. “You can’t die in a public place unless you’re a pauper. You got to go to a hospital to make it official.”

“I think he meant the boys from Racine Street Station,” Pete spoke up, and that sounded closest.

“Anyhow, say a prayer for the guy,” Frank asked us, giving up his work at last. And began one himself — “Our Father who art in Heaven” — then the whiskey hit him and he couldn’t remember the rest.

“Hollowed be Thy name,” I remembered, and that was as far as I could go.

“Let’s wait for the priest,” I told Frank.

The kids in the doorway stood aside to let Father Francis through. He didn’t look our way but we took off our caps all the same. He went right to the shuffleboard and did as fast and neat a job of extreme unction as if that old man were lying in bed. Someone brought an army blanket and covered the poor old stiff with that.

Father F. didn’t look our way till he’d made the sign of the cross and pulled the blanket up. Then he came to where we waited.

“Oh, Father,” Frank shouted like the priest had come just in time to save him. “I forgot the Lord’s Prayer, Father.”

“Remembering it isn’t your trade,” Father F. told Frank, “that’s mine. Has the family been notified?”

Nobody had thought of that. But right away everyone wanted to be the first. John wanted to run straight to Joe’s house, Sam said he’d phone. But Phil said, since it happened in his place, it was his job.

Then, it turned out, nobody knew where the old man lived or even what his full name was. Nobody had called him anything but Joe for years. Some said it was Wroblewski, some said it was Makisch, another said it was Orlov.

“Try looking in his wallet,” somebody said from under the table.

Nobody had thought of that, either.

“Bring it to me, Frank,” Father F. said.

“He was my one friend, let someone else,” Frank declined.

Father F. went over and turned the blanket down and reached in and brought back Joe’s wallet.

Joe’s wallet, fat as leaves. But when he laid it on the bar it just lay there, so thin, so flat, so gone, it looked like it must have had some sort of little stroke of its own. When Father F. reached in, all there was one thin single, nothing more.

Everybody pushed to see.

“What was he doing when he went?” Father wanted to know.

“Playing poker, Father,” we told him.

“Penny ante?”

“Two-dollar limit.”

“Put on Perry Como,” I told one of the kids, because I didn’t care how I spent just then.

Perry came on singing Whither Thou Goest I Shall Go. Oh, he sang it so easy, he sang it so free. And while he sang Phil poured a shot for John and a shot for me. He poured a shot for Father F. and a shot for Sam and a shot for Al and a shot for Frank. Then he poured a shot for himself and lifted his glass.

“To Joe, old Joe,” he made a kind of toast.

“Oh, Frank,” I heard a whisper from under the table. “How you massage! So good! How God is going to punish!”