The Man with the Golden Arm

PART ONE

Rumors of Evening

KUPRIN Do you understand, gentlemen, that all the horror is in just this – that there is no horror!

The captain never drank. Yet, toward nightfall in that smoke-colored season between Indian summer and December’s first true snow, he would sometimes feel half drunken. He would hang his coat neatly over the back of his chair in the leaden station-house twilight, say he was beat from lack of sleep and lay his head across his arms upon the query-room desk.

Yet it wasn’t work that wearied him so and his sleep was harassed by more than a smoke-colored rain. The city had filled him with the guilt of others; he was numbed by his charge sheet’s accusations. For twenty years, upon the same scarred desk, he had been recording larceny and arson, sodomy and simony, boosting, hijacking and shootings in sudden affray: blackmail and terrorism, incest and pauperism, embezzlement and horse theft, tampering and procuring, abduction and quackery, adultery and mackery. Till the finger of guilt, pointing so sternly for so long across the query-room blotter, had grown bored with it all at last and turned, capriciously, to touch the fibers of the dark gray muscle behind the captain’s light gray eyes. So that though by daylight he remained the pursuer there had come nights, this windless first week of December, when he had dreamed he was being pursued.

Long ago some station-house stray had nicknamed him Record Head, to honor the retentiveness of his memory for forgotten misdemeanors. Now drawing close to the pension years, he was referred to as Captain Bednar only officially.

The pair of strays standing before him had already been filed, beside their prints, in both his records and his head.

‘Ain’t nothin’ on my record but drunk ’n fightin’,’ the smashnosed vet with the buffalo-colored eyes was reminding the captain. ‘All I do is deal, drink ’n fight.’

The captain studied the faded suntans above the army brogans. ‘What kind of discharge you get, Dealer?’

‘The right kind. And the Purple Heart.’

‘Who do you fight with?’

‘My wife, that’s all.’

‘Hell, that’s no crime.’

He turned from the wayward veteran to the wayward 4-F, the tortoise-shell glasses separating the outthrust ears: ‘I ain’t seen you since the night you played cowboy at old man Gold’s, misfit. How come you can’t get along with Sergeant Kvorka? Don’t you like him?’ As if every small-time hustler in the district, other than this strange exception before him, were half in love with good old Cousin Kvorka.

‘I got nuttin’ against Kvork. It’s just him don’t like me,’ the chinless wonder protested. ‘Fact is I respect Cousin for doin’ his legal duty – every time he picks me up I get more respect. After all, everybody got to get arrested now ’n then, I’m no better’n anybody else. Only that one overdoes it, Captain. He can’t get it t’rough his big muttonhead I’m unincapable, that’s all.’

The veteran edged restlessly half a foot toward the open door.

‘You’re unincapable all right,’ the captain agreed. ‘Your brains are screwed on sidewise – Hey, you! Where you think you’re goin’?’

The vet edged back.

‘Ever been in an institution?’ the captain wanted to know, returning to the 4-F.

‘Sure t’ing. The time my girl friend Violet hit Antek the Owner wit’ the potato-chip bowl I was in a institution: the Racine Street Station House Institution, it looks a little like this one. Only they wouldn’t let me stay. I ain’t smart enough to be runnin’ around loose but I ain’t goofy enough to lock up neither.’ The punk’s enthusiasm was growing by the moment. ‘Any time you want me, Captain, just phone by Antek, he’ll come ’n tell me I got to come down ’n get arrested. I like gettin’ locked up now ’n then, it’s how a guy stays out of trouble. I’ll grab a cab if you’re in a real big hurry to pinch me sometime – I don’t like bein’ late when I got a chance of doin’ thirty days for somethin’ I never done.’

The captain eyed him steadily. ‘You ain’t had enough dough your whole life to take you from here to Lake Street in a cab.’

‘Oh, I ride cabs all the time,’ the punk corrected him respectfully. ‘Every time I get drunk I hail a Checkerd, it seems.’

‘Good thing you don’t get drunk every half hour, you’d have traffic blocked. What’s your right name?’

‘Saltskin.’

‘Who’s “Sparrow”?’

‘That’s me too, Sparrow Saltskin, it’s my daytime name.’

‘What’s your nighttime name?’

‘Solly. Account I’m half Hebe.’

‘Half Hebe ’n half crazy,’ the wiser stray put in unexpectedly; but no one reacted to his comment and he shifted impatiently in the shifting light.

‘What were you here for the last time?’ the captain wanted to know of the Sparrow.

‘For nuttin’.’

‘For nuttin’?’

‘Yeh. For nuttin’. I jumped into the squadrol when that Kvorka stopped for the lights, so he had to bring me. I like ridin’ Checkerds best though. How many times I been pinched now, Captain?’ The punk bent curiously across the charge sheet. ‘You keepin’ tract for me? When I hit a hunnert I’m gonna volunteer fer Leavenswort’.’

‘I’ll keep tract for you all right, Solly,’ Record Head offered affably. ‘No trouble at all. When it’s a hundred we’ll hang you. You got ninety-nine now. Go on home – if you got one. Your roof is leakin’.’

‘Oney on one side,’ Sparrow protested with some dignity, putting on a dirty red baseball cap with the peak turned backward as if preparing to make a run for it.

‘I think you’re a moron,’ the captain decided at last.

‘He ain’t no moron,’ the veteran confided to Record Head, ‘he’s a moroff. You know; more off than on.’

The veteran’s flat, placid, deadpan phiz fixed absently upon an oversized roach twirling its feelers invitingly at him with a half-drugged motion from beneath the radiator: Come on down here where everything is warm love and cool dreams forever. Then, feeling the law’s eyes unwaveringly upon him, he recalled himself and advised the captain confidently: ‘We were pinched together, if the punk makes the street I do too. Otherwise it’s double jeopardy ’r somethin’.’

The punk turned upon the dealer leisurely. ‘Never saw this motherless lush in my life before, Captain. Ain’t them bloodstains on his jacket? You catch the guy sliced up the little girl yet?’

‘You’re both a couple loose bums livin’ off the weaker bums till Hawthorne opens,’ the captain concluded and called over their heads to someone unseen. ‘Throw these two in. It’ll give the suckers a chance to break even for a couple days.’

From out of the station-house shadows a hand snagged Sparrow by the neck and immediately he sounded as if he weren’t so hot about sitting in the cooler overnight after all.

‘Why does everybody grab me by the neck?’ he demanded to know. ‘It ain’t no damned pipe. You tryin’ to get it offscrewed on me? Hey!’ He wailed over his shoulder to the captain as they took the first familiar steps down to the basement tier. ‘Bednar! Bednarski! Captain Bednarski! You got to book me fer somethin’!’

‘We’ll book you for killin’ that officer in Humboldt Park if you want,’ the turnkey offered, and a moment later the bars clanged shut. Behind his easy boasting the punk concealed a genuine terror of being caged – and every officer in the Saloon Street Station knew it.

‘Bring up a couple fuses while you’re down there,’ Record Head Bednar’s voice called from the top of the stairs, ‘we’re gonna fry the goofy one at 1:01.’

‘That’s you, Frankie,’ the punk assured the dealer swiftly.

‘No, that’s you,’ the dealer corrected him slowly.

It looked like a long night for Solly Saltskin. Not even Frankie Machine would guarantee him that the officers had only been joking.

‘There’s some things to kid about ’n some you ain’t s’pposed to, Frankie,’ the punk scolded him. ‘It’s a libel suit when you do. I could sue right now. I could sue you. You got me in here. Record Head was gettin’ me ready to make the street ’n you jammed the deal – false pertenses, that’s all you are.’ He threw a long looping left that Frankie caught in one hand, then scrubbed the punk’s wispy poll with it like a man fondling a mangy pup. If Sparrow had had a tail he would have wagged it then; if they’d been in the death house together he wouldn’t be too frightened so long as Frankie Machine was by.

To manhandle him fondly and get him into jams and then get him out again, just like that, the very next day.

‘If Schwiefka wasn’t always tryin’ to chisel on the aces we wouldn’t get tossed in the bucket so much,’ he confided in Frankie in the tone of one giving strictly inside information. ‘Bednar had Kvork pick us up just to show Schwiefka he’s a week behind wit’ the payoff.’ Then turned from the dealer, as the lockup went past rattling his keys, and in the same hoarse inside-info whisper: ‘Sssss – Pokey! You got this door locked good? We don’t want none of you crooked cops breakin’ in here tonight!’

The tranquil, square-faced, shagheaded little buffalo-eyed blond called Frankie Machine and the ruffled, jittery punk called Sparrow felt they were about as sharp as the next pair of hustlers. These walls, that had held them both before, had never held either long.

‘It’s all in the wrist ’n I got the touch,’ Frankie was fond of boasting of his nerveless hands and steady eye. ‘I never get nowheres but I pay my own fare all the way.’ Frankie was regular.

‘I’m a little offbalanced,’ Sparrow would tip the wink in that rasping whisper you could hear for half a city block, ‘but oney on one side. So don’t try offsteerin’ me, you might be tryin’ my good-balanced side. In which case I’d have to have the ward super deport you wit’ your top teet’ kicked out.’

For being regular got you in about as often as being offbalanced on one side. That was the way things were because that was how things had always been. Which was why they could never be any different. Neither God, war, nor the ward super work any deep change on West Division Street.

For here God and the ward super work hand in hand and neither moves without the other’s assent. God loans the super cunning and the super forwards a percentage of the grift on Sunday mornings. The super puts in the fix for all right-thinking hustlers and the Lord, in turn, puts in the fix for the super. For the super’s God is a hustler’s God; and as wise, in his way, as the God of the priests and the businessmen.

The hustlers’ Lord, too, protects His own: the super has been in office fourteen years without having a single bookie door nailed shut in his territory without his personal consent. No man can manage that without the help of heaven and the city’s finest precinct captains.

the captains still sing together at ward meetings-

Offhand it might appear to be a policeman’s God who protects the super’s boys. Yet a hundred patrolmen, wagon men, and soft-clothes aces have come and gone their appointed ways while the super’s hustlers linger on, year after year, hustling the same scarred doors. They are in the Chief Hustler’s hand; they have been chosen.

The hustlers’ God watched over Frankie Machine too; He marked Sparrow’s occasional fall. He saw that both boys worked for Zero Schwiefka by night while the super himself gave them hot tips each day.

The only thing neither the super’s God nor the super was wise to was the hypo Frankie kept, among other souvenirs, at the bottom of a faded duffel bag in another veteran’s room. The barrel of a German Mauser and a rusting Kraut sword leaned out of the bag against the wall of Louie Fomorowski’s place above the Club Safari.

We all leave something of ourselves in other veterans’ rooms. We all keep certain souvenirs.

Sparrow himself had only the faintest sort of inkling that Frankie had brought home a duffel bag full of trouble. The little petit-larceny punk from Damen and Division and the dealer still got along like a couple playful pups. ‘He’s like me,’ Frankie explained, ‘never drinks. Unless he’s alone or with somebody.’

‘I don’t mind Frankie pertendin’ my neck is a pipe now ’n then,’ the child from nowhere admitted, ‘but I don’t like no copper john to pertend that way.’ For no matter how Frankie shoved him around the punk never forgot who protected him nightly at Zero Schwiefka’s.

Their friendship had kindled on a winter night two years before Pearl Harbor when Sparrow had first drifted, with that lost year’s first snow, out of a lightless, snow-banked alley onto a littered and lighted street. Frankie had found him huddled under a heap of Racing Forms in the woodshed behind Schwiefka’s after that night’s last deck had been boxed.

‘What you up to under there?’ Frankie wanted to know of the battered shoes protruding from the scattered forms. For this was the place where Schwiefka, urged by some inner insecurity, piled dated racing sheets. He never had it in him to throw a sheet away, pretending to himself that he was filing them here against a day when age would lend them value; as age had in no wise increased his own. Frankie used them, on the sly, for starting Schwiefka’s furnace; but advised the shoes severely: ‘Don’t you know this is Schwiefka’s filin’ cab’net?’

Sparrow sat up, groping blindly for his glasses gone astray somewhere among the frayed papers below his head. ‘I’m a lost-dog finder,’ he explained quickly, experience having taught him to assure all strangers, the moment one started questioning, that he was regularly employed.

‘I know that racket,’ Frankie warned him, trying to sound like a private eye, ‘but there ain’t no strays to steal in here. You tryin’ to steal wood?’ Frankie had been stealing an armload of Schwiefka’s kindling every weekday morning for almost two months and didn’t need help from any punk.

‘I got no place to sleep, Dealer,’ Sparrow had confessed, ‘my landlady got me locked out since the week before Christmas. I been steerin’ for Schwiefka all day ’n he told me I could sleep in here – but he ain’t paid me a cryin’ dime so it’s like I paid my way in, Dealer. It’s too cold to steal hounds, they’re all inside the houses. Some nights it gets so cold I wisht I was inside one too.’

Frankie studied the shivering punk. ‘Don’t shake,’ he commanded. ‘When you get the shakes in my business you’re through. Steady hand ’n steady eye is what does it.’ He handed him a half dollar.

‘Here. You’ll get a double case of pneumonia sleepin’ in here. Get a room by Kosciusko Hotel.’ N the next time Zero don’t pay you off come tell Frankie Machine. That’s me – the kid with the golden arm.’ He paused to brush back the shaggy mop of dark blond hair under his cap, squinting a bit with the weak right eye. ‘It’s all in the wrist ’n I got the touch – dice, stud or with a cue. I even beat the tubs a little ’cause that’s in the wrist too. Here – pick a card.’ Cold as he was, the punk had had to pick a card.

During the lonely months with Frankie overseas and Schwiefka trying to deal his own game, Sparrow alone, of that whole semicircle of 4-Fs, from Blind Pig to Drunkie John, had remembered that golden arm.

‘I’d be over there with the dealer right now,’ Sparrow had mourned quietly to himself those months, ‘if I just hadn’t got turned down for admittin’ I steal for a livin’.’

Frankie hadn’t troubled to write anyone until he began coming out of the fog into which an M.G. shell had put him: on his back in an evacuation hospital with a daylong aching from shrapnel buried in his liver for keeps. He’d gotten off a shaky V-mail telling Sophie he was coming home.

Sophie had put the letter on Antek the Owner’s bar mirror, among other wives’ V-mails. The night that Sparrow read it there all the cockiness which association with Frankie had lent him, and Frankie’s absence had taken away, returned. Dealer was coming home.

‘Guys who think they can rough me up, they wake up wit’ the cats lookin’ at ’em,’ he had immediately begun warning everyone. And spat to emphasize just how tough a Division Street punk could get.

He had looked forward to watching Frankie’s bag of corny card tricks once more. All the tricks of which he had never tired; as Frankie’s Sophie had so long ago tired of them all. As Frankie had so long ago tired of showing them to her; yet had never wearied of revealing them, the same ones over and over, for Sparrow’s ever-fresh amazement.

‘That’s one Hebe knows how bad it can get,’ Frankie sometimes explained their friendship obscurely, ‘knows how bad it can get ’n knows how good it can be. Knows the way it used to be ’n how it’s gettin’ now. I’d trust him with my sister all night. Provided, of course, she wasn’t carryin’ more than thirty-five cents.’

Frankie could never acknowledge that he squinted a bit. ‘If anythin’ was wrong with my peepers the army wouldn’t of took me,’ he argued, ‘the hand is quicker than the eye – ’n I got a very naked eye.’ Yet he sometimes failed to see a thing directly beneath that same very naked eye. ‘Where’s the bag?’ he would ask. ‘Under your nose, Dealer,’ someone would point out. ‘Well, there’s suppose to be six bucks in it,’ he’d explain as if that, somehow, were why he hadn’t seen it right away.

He squinted a bit now, in the cell’s dim light, with the ever-present deck in his hand. ‘I can control twenty-one cards,’ he boasted to Sparrow. ‘If you don’t believe me put your money where your mouth is. I’ll deal six hands ’n call every one in the dark. Name your hand. You want three kings? Okay, here we go, you get what you ask for. But watch out, punk – that hand beside you is flushin’ ’n that bird with nothin’ but an ace showin’ is gonna cop with three concealed bullets.’ And that’s how it would be whether he was showing off in a cell or in the back booth of Antek Witwicki’s Tug & Maul Bar.

‘I give a man a square shake till he tries a fast one or talks back to me,’ he warned the punk. To hear him tell it Frankie Machine was pretty mean. ‘When I go after a wise guy I don’t care who he is, how much he’s holdin’ – when you see me start pitchin’ ’em in, then you know the wise guy is gettin’ boxed.’ Sparrow nodded. He was the only hustler on Division Street who still believed there was anything tough about Frankie Machine. The times he had seen Frankie back down just didn’t count for Sparrow.

‘What you got to realize in dealin’ stud is that it’s just like drill in the army -’ n the dealer’s the drill sergeant. Everybody got to be in step ’n stay on their toes ’n there can’t be no back talk or you got no harmony left – I’m good with a cue because that’s in the wrist too. Used to get fifteen fish for an exhibition of six-no-count. No, they never put my picture on the wall but I lived off the stick three months all the same when the heat was on ’n that’s a lot of hustlers can say.’

It was more than Frankie could say too. He would have starved in those three months if it hadn’t been for Sophie’s pay checks. And although Sparrow was seldom allowed to forget, for long, what a mean job that of an army drill sergeant was, Frankie’s report was still hearsay: he’d put in thirty-six months without so much as earning a pfc’s stripe. Somehow the army had never quite realized what a machine he was with a deck.

(There were those who still thought he was called Machine because his name was Majcinek. But the real sports, the all-night boys, had called him Automatic Majcinek for years; till Louie Fomorowski had shortened that handle for him. Now, whether in the dealer’s slot, at the polls or on a police blotter, he was simply Frankie Machine.)

The bottom card squeaked as he dealt to Sparrow on the gray cell floor, and it irritated him that he couldn’t get a second off the bottom without hitting the card above. Though he never had sufficient nerve to deal from the bottom while in the dealer’s slot he liked to feel he had the knack as a symbol of his skill.

For he had the touch, and a golden arm. ‘Hold me up, Arm,’ he would plead, trying for a fifth pass with the first four still riding, kiss his rosary once for help with the faders sweating it out and zing – there it was, Little Joe or Phoebe, Big Dick or Eighter from Decatur, double trey the hard way and dice be nice – when you get a hunch bet a bunch – bet a dollar and then holler – make me five to keep me alive – it don’t mean a thing if it don’t cross that string – tell ’em where you got it and how easy it was.

When it grew too dark to read the spots on the cards Frankie pulled a tattered and wadded scratch sheet off his hip. ‘Took me ten years to learn this little honey – watch the lunch hooks now.’ Sparrow watched the long, sure fingers begin to weave swiftly and delicately. ‘Fifty operations in less than a minute,’ Frankie boasted – and there it was, a regular Sinatra jazzbow with collar attached out of nothing but yesterday’s scratch sheet. ‘If it was just silk you could put it on now,’ Sparrow saw with awe. ‘Why couldn’t you just turn ’em out all day, Dealer? Everybody in the patch’d buy one – there’s a fortune in it.’

‘I ain’t no businessman,’ Frankie explained, ‘I’m a hustler – now give me five odd numbers between one ’n ten that add up to thirty-two.’

Sparrow pretended to figure very hard, tracing meaningless numerals with his forefinger in the cell’s grayish dust until it was time for Frankie to show him how. Somehow Sparrow never seemed certain which were the odd and which the even numbers. ‘Mat’matics is on my offbalanced side,’ he allowed, ‘I make them dirty offslips.’

Yet he was as accurate as an adding machine in anticipating combinations in any alley crap game; he distinguished clearly between odd and even then – sometimes before they turned up. ‘Playin’ the field is one thing, solvin’ riddles is another,’ it seemed to Sparrow, and saw nothing unusual in the distinction. ‘It’s what they couldn’t figure in the draft, neither,’ he recalled. ‘I was either too smart or too goofy but they couldn’t tell which. It was why I had to get rejected for moral warpitude.’

Frankie was making a vertical row of three ones and a parallel row of two ones. Adding the first row, he got a total of three and, adding the second, a total of two: by the proximity of the two totals he had a total of thirty-two.

‘There’s somethin’ wrong somewheres, Frankie,’ Sparrow complained, sounding distressed. ‘You got my big eyes rollin’ ’n the lights goin’ on in my head – but if I just knew some good old long division I could put the finger on what’s wrong.’

‘Nothin’ wrong at all, Sparrow. Strictly on the legit – just the new way of doin’ things we have these days. Like the new way of makin’ ten extra bucks for you out of every hundred you got in the bank. This I wouldn’t show to nobody only you. Only me ’n the bankers know this one ’n they’re sweatin’ it out that the people’ll find out ’n have ’em all broke in a week. Swear you won’t tell?’

‘Saint take me away if I tell.’

‘No good. Swear a Hebe one.’

‘I don’t know no Hebe one, Dealer.’

No oath was necessary. He would have died before betraying the smallest of Frankie’s professional secrets. ‘Of course,’ Frankie warned him now, ‘in order to get away with this one you got to give up your interest – you willin’ to give up your interest?’

The question worried Sparrow. ‘Is it a Hebe bank ’r a Polak one, Frankie?’

‘What’s the diff?’

‘If it’s a Hebe one maybe I got a uncle workin’ there, he’ll just sneak me a fistful when the president ain’t peekin’.’

‘You got no uncle in this one,’ Frankie decided firmly. ‘In fact you got no uncle nowheres. You ain’t even got a mother.’

‘Maybe I got somebody in the old country, Frankie.’ Hopefully.

‘There ain’t none left in the old country so quit stallin’ – you gonna take a chance or not? You can’t make this tenner ’n keep your interest too.’

‘Okay, Frankie. I’ll chance it.’

‘It’s just this simple, buddy-o.’ He began tearing tiny squares off the hand-fabricated jazzbow, each square representing ten dollars, until he was ready to make a hypothetical deposit of ten squares – thus with an account of one hundred dollars he pretended to withdraw that amount, then replaced it beginning with the last square he had withdrawn, in the old burlesque routine, so that by the time he had replaced the hundred he still retained one square in his hand. ‘And there’s your daily-double money ’n you still got your hundred in the bank,’ he announced triumphantly. ‘You can do it all day, they can’t stop you as long as the sign outside says the bank is open for business. It’s on the legit so they got to let you – that’s the new way of doin’ things we got these days.’

Sparrow removed his glasses, blew on them, put them back on and goggled dizzily, first at Frankie and then down at the make-believe money. It was hard to tell, when the punk goggled like that, whether he really didn’t understand or was just putting on the goof act to please Frankie. ‘Somethin’ wrong again,’ he complained, seemingly unable to put a finger on the trouble at all. Before he had time to gather his shocked wits Frankie had another sure-fire miracle working for him.

‘Here’s how you always pick up a couple bucks in a bowlin’ alley, Solly. You’re bowlin’ ’n you get a perfect split railroad – the seven ’n the ten pins. A guy offers you twenty to one you can’t pick it up. “I never seen it done my whole life,” he’ll tell you, “Wilman couldn’t pick it up.” He’ll even show you a record book where it says it ain’t been done in years. You tell him, “Put up ’r shut up.” So he puts up a double saw ’n you just stroll down the alley ’n pick ’em up with the lunch hooks. That’s all. Strictly on the legit.’

‘Is that in a Hebe bowlin’ alley ’r a Polak one?’

‘I done it on a guy on Milwaukee so I guess it’s a Polak one.’

Sparrow could see through that one right there. ‘That’s out. I’d get my little head cracked for sure. Then I’d be offbalanced on bot’ sides.’

‘That’d even you up then. You’d be just right.’ For no seeming reason Sparrow suddenly pointed an accusing finger at Frankie. ‘Who’s the ugliest man in this jail?’ he demanded to know and answered himself just as suddenly. ‘Me.’

Then sat down to brood upon that reply as though it had been offered by another. ‘What do I care how I look anyhow?’ he assuaged the insult he had so abruptly dealt himself. ‘What counts is I know how to get along with people.’

‘If you could get along with anybody you wouldn’t be in trouble up to your ears all the time,’ Frankie reminded him gently. ‘You wouldn’t be one conviction away from Mr Schnackenberg’s habitual act.’

‘I’m t’ree convictions away from Mr Schnackenberg,’ the punk assured Frankie, ‘so long as I don’t catch no two alike.’ Then confessed his offbalanced state with a certain plaintive moodiness: ‘I can get in more trouble in two days of not tryin’ than most people can get into in a lifetime of tryin’ real hard – why is that, Frankie?’

‘I don’t know,’ Frankie sympathized, ‘it’s just that some cats swing like that, I guess.’

Whatever Frankie meant by that, Sparrow skipped it to supply his own explanation. ‘It’s ’cause I really like trouble, Frankie, that’s my trouble. If it wasn’t for trouble I’d be dead of the dirty monotony around this crummy neighborhood. When you’re as ugly as I am you got to keep things movin’ so’s people don’t get the time to make fun of you. That’s how you keep from feelin’ bad.’

Yet he poked more fun at his own peaked and eager image, the double-lensed glasses and the pipestem neck, the anxious, chinless face, than did all others together. He was too quick to take the sting out of others’ jibes by putting them on his own tongue first – his anticipation of insult was usually unfounded, the others had not been thinking of Sparrow’s ugliness at all. Others were long used to him, he alone could not get used to himself. All he could do was to smile his shrewd, demented little grin and just be glad he was Solly Saltskin instead of Blind Pig or Drunkie John.

Sitting tailor-fashion on the cement floor, he blinked up at the white-washed walls as they were lit by the first half glow of the nightlights along the tier; blew the jailhouse dust off his glasses and brought his cap around till the peak was low over his eyes to express his feeling that he wouldn’t be going anywhere before morning.

‘I’ll bet you don’t have a cap on.’ Frankie was off again on his endless challenging of the punk; Sparrow fumbled a moment to be certain that he had, yet declined the challenge. ‘I’ll bet you don’t have shoes on, I’ll bet you aren’t smoking a cigarette. I’ll bet I can get on a streetcar without a transfer, say nothin’ to the conductor, pay him nothin’ ’n walk right on in. I can’t tell you the answer to all those, I don’t want to expose myself.’

‘I won’t expose you ’n don’t you expose me,’ Sparrow offered, standing up to shake hands on that equivocal pact. And having shaken, began diverting himself by swinging, hand over hand, from the great beam directly overhead. ‘Look at me!’ he demanded. ‘The Tarzan of the City!’

Frankie hauled him down by his spindling shanks.

‘It’s just the new way of walkin’,’ Sparrow explained, ‘we got all kinds of new ways to do things since you come back, Frankie.’

‘They’ll get you in trouble the same as the old ways,’ Frankie assured the punk glumly.

That night, while the little twenty-watt bulbs burned on in a single unwinking fury down the whitewashed tier, Frankie Machine was touched by an old wound fever and dreamed, for the second time in his life, of the man with the thirty-five-pound monkey on his back. His name was Private McGantic, no one knew why; yet he stood, stoop-shouldered by his terrible burden, in a far and sunlit entrance to a ward tent where Frankie lay once more on his old army cot.

No other soldier lay along that double row of neatly made-up cots, but Frankie could tell that the private squinting into the tent had been sent by the dispensary. The winter’s sun on his face revealed a hospital pallor; and the eyes looked so bleak below the dim and huddled mass on the shoulders.

‘I can’t get him off,’ he complained to no one in particular, with a certain innocence where one expected shame: a voice like that of a child confessing an unclean disease without sensing any uncleanliness. ‘Something has happened to him,’ Frankie felt. The private was pointing to where, on the ward sterilizer, a GI syrette, out of some 0 first-aid kit, lay with the GI quarter-grain ration of morphine beside it, melting whitely even as he watched.

‘A shrewd one all the same, coming between shifts. He knows I’m the guy who knows how to get the monkey off, he waited till the corporal went to chow,’ Frankie decided, ‘I’m not getting into trouble on some private’s account.’

But the fellow kept looking at him in such dumb misery, afraid to come inside and too sick to leave while he had any hope of relief, that Frankie finally heard himself say, ‘You can use my tie.’ He looked up and the private was gone, so he got off the cot, the long dull pain in his liver began kneading the gut, the needle was full and ready and the tie was hanging neatly over the suntans and there was time, just time. He had the tie about his arm, trying to bind it with one hand an inch above the elbow but his fingers fumbled with a nervous weakness, he felt fevered and had to hurry and right outside the corporal’s voice said, ‘I’m going to catch him at it today’ – the needle curved softly into some soft sort of useless rubbery fever thermometer, someone put a flashlight right in his eyes and he wakened on his back in the cell to its accusing stare. With the old pain beating behind his navel.

The pain left off slowly. Some patriot down the tier was using a reflecting mirror to waken anyone it happened to hit. The cell was full of a drifting flesh-colored light and the murmuring rumdums were being let out of the cells to wash, break wind, hawk, stretch, spit and scratch their hairy bottoms.

Frankie got up and went to the bars, without waking Sparrow, to watch the Republic’s crummiest lushes lining up to dip their hands gingerly and touch their foreheads, each with a single drop, as if it were holy water and each were on his way to confession instead of to twenty dollars or twenty days on the Bridewell floor.

Frankie Machine had seen some bad ones in his twenty-nine years. But any one of these looked as though all the others had beaten him all night with barrel staves. Faces bloody as raw pork ground slowly in the great city’s grinder; faces like burst white bags, one with eyes like some dying hen’s and one as bold as a cornered bulldog’s; eyes with the small bright gleam of hysteria and eyes curtained by the dull half glaze of grief. These glanced, and spoke, and vaguely heard and vaguely made reply; yet looked all day within upon some ceaseless horror there: the twisted ruins of their own tortured, useless, lightless and loveless lives.

Though he had seen not one man of them in his life before, Frankie knew each man. For each was seared by that same torch whose flame had already touched himself. A torch which burned with a dark and smoldering flame from within till it dried a man of everything save a dark-charred guilt.

The great, secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one. Guilt that lay crouched behind every billboard which gave each man his commandments; for each man here had failed the billboards all down the line. No Ford in this one’s future nor ever any place all his own. Had failed before the radio commercials, by the streetcar plugs and by the standards of every self-respecting magazine. With his own eyes he had seen the truer Americans mount the broad stone stairways to success surely and swiftly and unaided by others; he was always the one left alone, it seemed at last, without enough sense of honor to climb off a West Madison Street Keep-Our-City-Clean box and not enough ambition to raise his eyes back to the billboards.

He had not even been a success in the taverns. Even there he could not afford the liquor that lends distinction nor the beer that gives that special glow of health, leading, often quite suddenly, to startling social success. He had snatched snipes, on the fly, of the cigarette that clears the mind for the making of swift decisions in sudden crises with the fire still alive in the tobacco. Yet always, somehow, by the time the paper had touched his lips the tobacco had long gone stale. There must be something wrong with his lips.

All had gone stale for these disinherited. Their very lives gave off a certain jailhouse odor: it trailed down the streets of Skid Row behind them till the city itself seemed some sort of open-roofed jail with walls for all men and laughter for very few. On Skid Row even the native-born no longer felt they had been born in America. They felt they had merely emerged from the wrong side of its billboards.

And yet they spoke and yet they laughed; and even the most maimed wreck of them all held, like a pennant in that drifting light, some frayed remnant of laughter from unfrayed years. Like a soiled rag waved by a drunken peddler in a cheap bazaar who knows none will buy, yet waves his single soiled ware in self-mockery – these too laughed. And knew not one would buy.

These were the luckless living soon to become the luckless dead. The ones who were fished out of river or lake, found crumpled under crumpled papers in the parks, picked up in the horse-and-wagon alleys or slugged, for half a bottle of homemade wine, in the rutted tunnels that run between the advertising agencies and the banks.

Then, only one day too late, they became VIPs at last. Front and profile photographs and a brass tag looped about the neck to await none other than the deputy coroner himself, a police hold order and a genuine pauper’s writ.

Some the Demonstrators’ Association would invite to attend an autopsy party. For these the cold white dissector’s table would be the grave; there wouldn’t be enough left to honor with American earth or the simplest sort of cross.

Yet some who had been unlucky so long might turn out to be the very luckiest after all: they were to be embalmed through the courtesy of the Balmy-Hour School of Beautification & Sanitary Bloodletting. Not many, of course, could be so lucky; for so few deserved such luck.

When thirty had gathered together, resigned to their fortunes at last, the merry county carpenters would come with bright new pencils behind their ears, black lunch buckets in their hands, nails in their teeth and Social Security cards in their pockets to make thirty clean pine boxes. Thirty stiffs in a whitewashed basement room, heavy with disinfectant in place of flowers, listening, with an inscrutable disdain, to the cheerful ringing of happy hammers and the pleasant talk of living men.

Occasionally one of the stiffs, still stubbornly intent on making trouble for everybody, would require one longer or broader than he had any real right to at all. Gas and river cases gave the most trouble this way. There were not many giants any more.

When the boxes were ready and paid for the We Haul Anything Cartage Company would send around a moving van which fancied itself a hearse. The driver wheeled the dishonored dead out to Elm Forest, where a county sewer-digging machine excavated a trench long enough to hold thirty boxes, no more and no less. Over that single trench, in a cemetery like a forgotten battlefield, the inevitable and inimitable mimic, with the Holy Book in hand and hat held to the side out of respect to his modest fee, would say a few words – all holy – over these unholy dead.

This was all a part of their secret knowledge as they touched the jailhouse water to their foreheads, this was why they laughed so lightly from time to time. For they had had the ultimate joke played upon them prematurely: more ambitious men would have to wait a bit to find out. It was why they grinned so knowingly at the most casual of jailhouse companions; they’d all be taking the same road, down the same littered street, to the same single trench together. It was why they nudged each other familiarly and leered a little: ‘Take my advice, buddy. Don’t die broke.’

An old wino dragging a pair of mottled suspenders to the floor wandered in from somewhere and asked wonderingly: ‘You fellows remember me?’ When none remembered he repeated the question to himself, with moving lips, as though he himself had nearly forgotten. Yet with each pulse beat his blood demanded to know, once and for all before it went cold for keeps, who remembered him and his mottled suspenders.

‘Remember me? I used to be night watchman on the old Wabash.’ Not one remembered any night watchman off the Wabash, old or new.

‘That’s a good job all the same,’ Frankie explained earnestly to Sparrow. ‘You watch over people while they sleep. It’s when everybody depends on you, nothin’ bad should happen. When you’re asleep, that’s when you can’t protect yourself; even Joe Louis is like a little kid then. It’s why you shouldn’t laugh at some old guy if he’s been a good night watcher.’

‘I seen Fitzsimmons at the old Academy,’ the dodderer reported. ‘Remember the old Academy?’

‘No,’ Frankie told him respectfully, ‘but I want to introduce you to a real live millionaire.’ He shoved Sparrow around so that the old man could take in all of the punk at once. ‘Look at that cap he’s wearin’ – Pop Anson give it to him, it’s worth a fortune today.’ The old man sensed some mockery and, turning his behind upon them both deliberately and leaning so far forward he creaked, began a compulsive sort of scratching through the yellowed underwear, the fingers working with a life of their own, starting below the low sagging hill of the fallen thighs and laboring methodically upward as if pursuing the blood like a dog following its fleas; up over the hill and there paused, digging with blunted fingernails but yet without haste and even with something of pleasure. A full five minutes they watched him, he seemed to be pacing himself, knowing just how long this job would require; then up with the pants and, suspenders still dragging the soiled concrete behind, moved forward once more toward the one thing the blood asked as insistently as it itched in the buttocks: ‘You fellows remember me?’

The dying blood sought to renew itself by finding someone – anyone – to share a recollection of the old Wabash where so many nights had been shared. If but once somebody would say, ‘I remember,’ the blood would be touched; to make him for one moment as he once had been.

But those who remembered were gone with his strength, all down the drain with last year’s rain; friends and family and foes together and the blood soon to follow the rains.

‘Remember me?’ Paused in his ceaseless scratching in that ancestral light, for it seemed that the men about him had all just wandered in off the old Wabash; they too had wandered away their lives in a flesh-colored light and now moved toward him for that final reunion beside a fog-colored trench. ‘They don’t remember people around here any more,’ he complained aloud at last. So returned to his ceaseless scratching, rump pointed insultingly and suspenders trailing the mottled dust.

‘A good turnkey can do better than a patrolman on a beat,’ Sparrow informed Frankie, ‘if he gets a houseful that’s thirty-four bucks right there.’

‘It all depends on the neighborhood,’ Frankie told him out of his wider knowledge of the world. ‘You take a patrolman up there in Evanston, he’s just walkin’ around smilin’ ’n tippin’ his cap, sayin’ how nice the lawn looks this morning, Mrs Rugchild – he’s like a watchman is all, up there. He’s got to be polite ’cause that means good tips, it ain’t like down here in hustlers’ territory where they got to line up guys like Schwiefka by pinchin’ guys like us before they can pick up anythin’ on the side. It’s why they got you dead to rights if they catch you duckin’ through a Division Street alley after twelve – you’re guilty the second that spotlight hits you ’cause you’re a wrong guy in a wrong neighborhood out at the wrong hour. If it wasn’t for guys like you ’n me guys like Cousin Kvork could be walkin’ a North Side beat, they figure. It’s why they’re down on us, we interrupt their careers.’

‘Kvork ain’t the worst,’ Sparrow put in, ‘he just does what he has to do. The time I was up for robbin’ he didn’t testify, he knew what one more conviction’d do to me.’

‘Kvork is the best,’ Frankie agreed, ‘he don’t forget when you do somethin’ for him. But it’d serve that pokey right if somebody slapped him silly. He’s been shakin’ down the greenhorns in here fourteen years. Someday he’ll shake down the wrong dino.’

‘He’s done that five-six times awready,’ Sparrow remembered, ‘but he always gets reinstated. How can a man get that hungry?’

‘It’s not hard to mistreat the homeless,’ Frankie explained.

A roach had leaped, or fallen, from the ceiling into the water bucket, where a soggy slice of pumpernickel and a sodden hunk of sausage now circled slowly, about and about, although there was no current. Belly upward, the roach’s legs plied the alien air, trying dreamily to regain a foothold; while Frankie, leaning dreamily on one elbow, knew just how that felt.

It was, he decided, the same wanderer that had waved so invitingly to him from under a radiator while he was being questioned and felt half inclined to help the poor devil now just for old time’s sake. He started to poke it over upon its belly so it could try for the bucket’s walls, then decided against such charity.

‘You ain’t gettin’ out till I get out,’ he scolded it aloud, recalling that he too had leaped, or fallen, between walls he couldn’t scale; that he too plied the air at times. ‘We’re in the bucket together for not watchin’ them lights,’ he nagged the insect as Sophie so often nagged him; while Sparrow listened without laughter. ‘Maybe next time you’ll look where you’re drivin” – he imitated Sophie’s rattling whine – ‘“yer fault, yer fault, takin’ everythin’ in yer own hands when you’re stewed to the gills, all yer dirty fault.” Next time maybe you’ll know better,’ Frankie consoled himself by consoling the roach. ‘This’ll be a good lesson to you, bug.’

The growing light began making a stairway to nowhere out of the shadows of the bars: a stairwell lit feebly by the reflecting mirror’s glow as it competed with the lightening day.

‘I’m no good but my wife’s a hundred per cent,’ somebody down the tier confided aloud to everyone in hearing distance.

‘Mine stinks,’ Frankie Machine thought softly; immediately his conscience kicked him in the shin. ‘I got a good one too,’ he answered loudly to make up for everything.

And his conscience kicked him in the other shin for lying.

The night’s first shadows, nudging each other down the corridors, slipped quietly aside to let a paunch draped in a candy-striped shirt and a greasy black mortician’s suit pass by: Zero Schwiefka threw out his big flat feet so that the soles squeaked painfully, like little live things being crunched beneath the full burden of his weight.

He stood before Frankie’s cell rubbing his hands together breathlessly, clear to the elbows, like a great bluebottle fly preening its front legs, then tilting its head and body forward to preen the back ones; the hand-rubbing became an arm-rubbing, his head tilted darkly forward from the dark and twisted lapels till one almost expected him to tilt forward on his palms and start pressing his legs together with the same mechanical insectlike intent.

‘Where you been, cabbagenose?’ Frankie greeted him, sitting up. ‘Gettin’ married?’

‘Who’d marry that?’ Sparrow asked from the cell’s safety – ‘A woomin?’

‘Got here as soon as I could, Dealer,’ Heavy-belly apologized, holding the belly up with the hamlike hands. Between his jowls, loosened by idleness and drink, the bulbous nose overhung a mouth like a half-healed knife wound. ‘You’ll be out in half an hour, Dealer – leave Non Compis here till the dogcatchers go home.’ And spat to show his contempt for Division Street punks.

Sparrow spat in turn. Right into the water bucket where the roach now floated passively. ‘We ain’t eat since last night,’ he accused Schwiefka. ‘How many suppers you eat tonight, Mr Barrymore?’

‘Do they have a charge?’ Frankie interrupted politely.

‘I made ’em put it down a misdemeanor. It’ll be dismissed in the morning. They been holding it open.’

‘I’ll still be open after they let me out,’ Sparrow pointed out, ‘open for anythin’. You got somebody’s legs you want bust, spigothead? T’ree-fifty fer one ’n two fer five – you save a deuce gettin’ ’em both done at once ’n it’s easier on the mark, too. He oney got to go to the hospital once, my way.’

‘When I want to hear from you I’ll holler,’ Schwiefka advised the punk sternly, ‘and when I holler you come in on a shovel.’

Nobody took Solly Saltskin seriously any more.

‘You think I’m gonna sleep in this crum dump tonight again?’ Frankie wanted to know. ‘Get us out tonight if you have to get Zygmunt to do it.’

‘Where you sleep is your own business,’ Schwiefka reproached him mildly. ‘What I said was you’re gettin’ out in half a hour ’n the super hisself couldn’t put the fix in faster. The case’ll be dismissed by noon whether you’re in court or not. Depend on Big Zero.’

‘The oney place you’re big is in the belly, bakebrain,’ Sparrow told him from behind Frankie, ‘you’re the guy put his mother on a meathook for a quarter one time, I heard all about it from your old man, he was sore you wouldn’t split wit’ him.’

‘If your old man hadn’t been out of work you’d never been born,’ Schwiefka told him, and lit a cigarette for Frankie, through the bars, with a silver lighter.

‘Don’t worry, Sparrow,’ Frankie spoke assuringly, ‘we can depend on Zero – he’ll get us out if it takes ten years.’

‘I don’t even ask how come you’re in,’ Schwiefka complained, ‘I just come to spring you – what’s the big squawk?’

‘You know all right why we’re in, that’s the big squawk,’ Frankie let Schwiefka know. ‘Every time you duck Kvorka for his double sawzie he cruises down Division till he spots me or the punk ’n pulls us in on general principles. This time he caught us together. The next time it happens you’re payin’ me off ’n the punk too.’

‘Next time they’ll hang me,’ Sparrow put in moodily.

‘We’re layin’ low a couple days,’ Schwiefka evaded the accusation, ‘till I get the tables moved back to the alley joint. We ought to get a loose crowd up there Saturday night. What time you be around?’

‘Not early enough to move no tables, that’s a lead-pipe cinch,’ and turned away.

Schwiefka was long used to the turned back. He had brought news of salvation to men before. Frankie listened to the retreating shuffle of those big flat feet in the oncoming gloom, testing each iron step of the stairwell as if each might be the last iron step of all.

‘We won’t have to see the old toad for a couple days, anyhow,’ Frankie sighed.

‘You told him off just right, Dealer,’ Sparrow assured him. ‘He took off like a scalded dog. I guess you scared him, Frankie.’

‘Ain’t nobody scared of me my whole life,’ Frankie conceded regretfully.

‘Them Krauts was scared of you, Frankie,’ Sparrow reminded him in his rasping whisper, ‘you were a big man in the army.’

‘I was a big man awright – I was the guy had to pick the fly crap out of the pepper with boxin’ gloves,’ Frankie mocked himself.

‘’N that Nifty Louie been scared of you, too, ever since you caught him that time, tryin’ to sell Soph them funny kind of cigarettes.’

‘Funny cigarettes ain’t all that one pushes, it ain’t no big secret,’ Frankie observed and thought bitterly: ‘If I didn’t need a fix now ’n then I wouldn’t even let that creeper take a hand at the table I’m dealin’.’

‘How’d you catch him that time, Frankie?’ Like a child asking for some familiar bedtime tale.

‘It wasn’t him. It was Piggy-O. He wasn’t sellin’ ’n I didn’t catch him.’ There was an old defeat in Frankie’s voice now. ‘I just smelled ’em ’n asked her ’n she told me, “Piggy give me four sticks,” that’s all. So I told him to lay off her.’ Adding to himself: ‘One customer in the family is all we can afford.’

‘Tell you what’s funny, Frankie,’ Sparrow promised, ‘Louie bein’ scared of you, Zero bein’ so scared of Louie, ’n you bein’ scared of me – how come a little guy like me runs all you cheap hoods around, Frankie? How come a little guy like me bein’ such a little vterrer?’

‘Just because you’re so strong, I guess,’ Frankie conceded absently, his mind still occupied with Louie and Louie’s many moods.

He’d been in short pants in the days when Louie Fomorowski was beating two murder raps. They’d gotten a one-to-life jacket on him for the second one, of which he’d served nine months in privileged circumstances.

Yet now Nifty Louie was pushing a heavily cut grade of morphine and having his own troubles pushing it. Where he got it only the blind bummy called Pig, who peddled it for him, might have guessed. Pig never cared to guess. ‘How could I tell where the stuff comes from when I can’t even see where it goes?’ he’d put it to Frankie. ‘It’s why I’m the peddler,’ cause I can’t see what the people ’r doin’.’

‘I never asked you where the stuff comes from,’ Frankie reminded him, ‘but I’ll tell you one place where it ain’t goin’, ’n that’s upstairs where I live. I’m kickin’ the stuff altogether this week end, I don’t want you hustlin’ Soph onto no kick like that. I can’t afford.’

Blind Pig always agreed. ‘I never come around with the stuff till you send to Louie for me to come, Dealer,’ he pointed out. ‘If you’re kickin’ it I wish you luck. I hope you go from monkey to zero ’n never get hooked again.’

Both Blind Pig and Louie knew there was no harm in wishing any man luck. They called those using the stuff only occasionally ‘joy-poppers’ and wished them all great joy. For the joy-poppers had no intention of becoming addicts in the true sense. They had the will power, they felt, to use God’s medicine once or twice a month and forget it the rest of the time.

Nor did Louie acknowledge that a student had ceased to be a joy-popper because he had reached a once-a-week compromise with his need. Once a week wasn’t being hooked in Fomorowski’s book. On a quarter grain a week a man was still just a student. It wasn’t till a man needed a quarter of a grain a day that Louie felt the fellow was safely in the vise. ‘You’re not a student any more,’ he would offer his felicitations. ‘You just graduated. Junkie – you’re hooked.’

‘C’mon’ – Frankie roused Sparrow – ‘hearts for noses,’ and they squatted together over the battered deck. Sparrow always played with some trepidation. For the winner was privileged to slap the loser across the nose with five of the cards ten times and Sparrow always lost. He would take his punishment then almost – but never quite – without flinching, trying very hard not to let the tears come into his eyes at the swift sting of the cards. For it always seemed a punishment, the way Frankie would slap him then, for something unspoken which Frankie held against him secretly.

So he stalled, knowing the turnkey was due with the keys, yet owed Frankie two games – twenty slaps – before the pokey appeared at last.

‘Up in there!’

‘I’ll collect sometime when you got it comin’ ’n I got more time,’ Frankie assured the punk as they reached for their caps. And Sparrow knew that, for no real reason he could name, Frankie had the right to collect, game or no game: that the game was really only an excuse to exact some ancestral tribute he owed the dealer.

At the open door Frankie remembered something. He grinned wryly with his flat pug’s mug under the tawny tousle of his hair and went to the water bucket. ‘I promised to give him a hand when I got out of the bucket myself,’ he explained softly, eying the roach while the turnkey eyed him with deadpan suspicion. ‘Only look – it’s too late awready.’

It was too late all right. Too late for roaches or old Skid Row rumdums; it was even getting a little late for cripples and junkies and punks too long on the same old hustle. The water-soaked corpse was only half afloat, the head submerged and the rear end pointing to the ceiling like a sinking sub when the perpetual waters pull it downward and down forever. ‘I could have saved him,’ Frankie realized with a faint remorse. ‘It’s all my fault again.’

‘Guys like you,’ the turnkey warned him, ‘I handle them every day,’ and watched the pair mounting the narrow steps toward a narrower freedom. On the street they waited for a northbound car.

A car that came on slowly, but not too slowly for Frankie Machine. If it would just sort of keep on coming forever, like streetcars sometimes did for him in dreams, without ever really arriving, he wouldn’t have to go anywhere any more. The dealer didn’t want to go home. Sophie did all the dealing there.

‘Mama, deal yourself another hand,’ he hummed idly, deciding to himself, ‘If she starts that screaming about What was it for this time Why don’t I get a broom in my tail ’n go to work on the legit Why don’t we move out of the neighborhood the spades are moving in it’s gettin’ smokier every day ’n if it wasn’t for me she wouldn’t be strapped to no wheelchair when she could be out dancin’ – Come on upstairs with me,’ he asked Sparrow, out of need of a barrier between himself and Sophie’s crossfire.

Sparrow shook his head. He’d been trapped in that barrage before. She gave it to him first and hottest because she got so few chances at him. ‘I got to look for a job,’ he explained. Frankie understood.

Just as the street lamps came on the streetcar paused and went dark half a block down. It had slipped its trolley and against the last light of evening the pole groped blindly for the wire overhead, found it at last and came on again, slowly, but with all self-confidence gone; yet bearing its precious load of light caught from that magic wire with a sort of tenderness. And screeched to a stop like Sophie’s opening volley.

Frankie boarded it feeling done up and Sparrow followed whispering hoarsely: ‘You want to bet on the transfer numbers?’ Trolley transfers had a serial number on the lower right-hand corner that could be bet on like a stud-poker hand, the loser paying both fares. It was the one game which the punk won more often than he lost against Frankie.

But Frankie held his transfer listlessly, unaware that he held it at all. Sparrow slipped it out of his hand.

‘Beat you again, Frankie, I got two pair. You owe me eight centses.’

‘You owe me twenty slapses.’

‘Call it square, Frankie?’ He held onto Frankie’s transfer.

‘All square.’

Both had won.

Yet, all the way home, Sparrow had the restless feeling that someone must have lost.

‘I’ll buy you a drink by Antek,’ Sparrow offered suddenly when they reached Milwaukee Avenue and Division Street.

They entered Antek Witwicki’s Tug & Maul Bar together. At the corner table the little terrier called Drunkie John was scolding Molly Novotny, a girl scarcely out of her teens who supported both herself and John hustling drinks at the Club Safari in the early morning hours. A small girl with a heart-shaped face and eyes dark with exhaustion, she sat listening to John, a man close to forty, with a sort of dull hopelessness. Each evening she had to listen here, while paying for the drinks, to all the things she had done wrong since morning. She herself sat without drinking and without once moving her eyes off his bitter mouth as if fearing to miss a single word.

Frankie noticed that John’s hair, thin as it was, had been parted so precisely in the middle it must have taken him ten minutes before the mirror to achieve the part. His comb hand trembled, even as Frankie watched, when reaching for his glass. The girl kept her own glass out of his reach. John’s own had certainly been emptied too often and Frankie heard her pleading, under the rise and fall of the uproar about them, to pick up his hat and come home with her, he had had enough.

Drunkie John never had enough. ‘The nuthouse is the best place for you,’ he began shouting at her for some reason, ‘babies your age ’r hoppin’ up ’n down out there!’ He reached for her glass just as she drew it back, his hand struck hers and sent the whisky trickling down the front of her flowered cotton dress.

‘Have your own way then, have your own way,’ she placated him, not even knowing what way he wished to have next: her days were made up trying to guess what he might want next, a thing John could never tell himself. For he was a man with certain fancies on his mind. Once he’d gotten Molly drunk in here and had decided that what he really wanted to do next was ‘to make the people laugh’ by pinning her dress up to the small of her back. She had staggered blindly about trying to unpin it while the barflies had snickered and she herself had laughed in a loose self-derision.

The next day John would have nothing to do with her, she had made such an exhibition of herself, how could a man like himself ever face his friends again?

John was as unpredictable as the weather in the streets. Sometimes he told her to put on her coat and leave him forever. And the minute she had it on would demand that she strip and get into bed right away, he was going to show her what a bull she had for a man. But once in bed the years of boozing would betray him and he would succeed only in showing her what a freak she had.

A good kicking around was what she had coming then, making a freak of a decent sort like himself. For he never used his hands on her. It was always a businesslike kick with the toe of his outworn dancing pumps, delivered not so much in rage as with a certain matter-of-factness, even a kind of contentment.

‘Don’t say you won’t,’ he warned her about something or other now. ‘Don’t never say you won’t nothin’.’

‘Just drink up,’ Molly pleaded, ‘the people ’r watchin’.’ She was trying to fit the nipple of a little blue balloon into the brown beer bottle beside her glass.

‘What you doin’ here anyhow?’ he wanted to know as if only now realizing who she was. Then grinned slyly, bringing his face so close to her own that she drew back a bit. ‘You gettin’ drunkie too, honey?’ he asked insinuatingly, as if meaning that there was a great deal more between them than just getting drunk together again; and began shaking her by both shoulders in an access of drunken humor. ‘Now you’re a big-time entertainer!’

She protested with strained laughter. ‘Johnny! Stop it!’

‘Start singin’ ’n dancin’ ’n somethin’! Makin’ the people laugh! That’s right! Make the people laugh!’ He added reprovingly: ‘I can’t do it all myself, honey.’

‘Give that kid somethin’,’ Frankie told Sparrow, ‘I took her to a dance when she was fourteen ’n Soph slapped her face for goin’ around wit’ older men. I was twenty-one, I guess.’ He pushed Sparrow’s change toward Sparrow. ‘Put a dime in the juke ’n give her a dime to sing along with it, she used to be singin’ all the time.’

Sparrow cocked his head to one side, studying Frankie dubiously. ‘Give it to the kid yourself, I don’t interfere in fam’ly situations.’

Frankie rose, handed a dime to Molly, and Drunkie John slapped it out of her hand.

‘I pervide fer her,’ he told Frankie. ‘Who sent for you?’ He really wanted to know. He wanted to know so badly that his head waggled weakly as he asked; and one shove, anyone could see, would send him sprawling. Frankie returned, red in the face from more than whisky, to his own table.

Down in the sawdust Molly saw the dime and studied it while Johnny studied her, waiting for her to make a move for it.

‘Go ahead,’ he encouraged her, ‘you got no more damned pride left than to go pickin’ up dimes off tavern floors – go ahead, the people know about you awready anyhow, what you are. They ain’t forgot the time you danced around here with your fatal ass stickin’ out – go on, let the people see how low a woman can get. It makes a man feel mighty fine, I can tell you, to watch his girl crawlin’ on her hands ’n knees in a whisky tavern for a dime some cheap cardsharp tosses her. Go ahead, don’t mind me, you’re so low now you’re two floors under the basement.’ He was trying to work up his anger like a man pumping a dry well; she touched him with real gentleness.

‘Don’t excite yourself, Johnny.’

With the pointed toe of the dancing pump he kicked at her ankle, skinning the defenseless flesh. She turned and, with no further word, walked toward the door, bending once to rub the ankle as she went.

At the door bald Antek, with a plumber’s plunger in his hand, blocked Drunkie John from following her onto the street. ‘All I ask is you give her a head start,’ he told Johnny. ‘I’d give a dog that much.’

‘You callin’ my Molly a dawg?’

‘No. I’m just calling you one.’

‘That’s better, that’s all right,’ Johnny assured him, actually gratified. ‘I don’t care what you call me. I’m no good. But that girl is a queen, there’s nothin’ she don’t deserve: I just hope I never catch her.’

‘I think what you need is a steady job hustlin’ pins in the bowlin’ alley,’ Antek judged him. ‘All that’s wrong with you is you don’t know what to do with yourself so you take picks on that girl. Why she puts up with you you’ll never make me understand.’ He let John pass to the street at last.

It was true. He was simply a man who didn’t know what to do with himself, for he didn’t yet know who he was. It’s sometimes easier to find a job than to find oneself and John hadn’t yet gotten around to doing the first. How could he know who he was? Some find themselves through joy, some through suffering and some through toil. Johnny had till now tried nothing but whisky. A process which left him feeling like somebody new every day.

There were days when he haunted the bookies without a dime in his pocket but with a pair of street-carnival binoculars, a child’s toy strung by a cord about his throat: a big-time horse player but business had kept him in the city, he’d just dropped in to see how his stable was doing out there at Hawthorne.

Other days he sat at Antek’s with a golf bag containing a single club between his scrawny knees. He had just come from the links, it had been too hot out there, he’d had to quit on the seventh hole.

In his room hung a yellowing photograph, thumbtacked to the wall, of a slack-jawed youth in loose black wrestler’s trunks in the attitude of an advancing wrestler. He had been a wrestler in his youth, he would have the nerve to say while standing under this image, the proof lying in the signature below the picture. The photograph was without doubt of himself; no other could boast of a mouth as loose as the trunks themselves, those billiard-cue arms and that face of an underfed wanderoo.

He was many men and no man at all. He was a hysterical little bundle of possibilities that could never come true. He was a mouth at the end of a whisky glass, a knock-kneed shuffle in dancing pumps. Pumps – ‘for when I used to win them marathons all the time’ – kept with the semblance of a shine by a girl with a heart-shaped face and the wonder gone out of her eyes.

‘She got too big a heart, that girl,’ Antek explained of Molly when John had left. ‘A guy can walk into her heart with army boots on.’

Frankie and Sparrow sat silently a moment after Antek had passed. Until Frankie said at last, ‘There ain’t many hearts like that no more, Sparrow.’

‘Sophie’s gonna be real worried about you, Frankie,’ Sparrow chose the moment to remind the dealer. Frankie rose and pushed back his chair as though he thought it might somehow be Molly Novotny to whom he was going home tonight.

To the tenants of 1860 West Division Street Landlord Schwabatski was seldom referred to as the landlord. He was Schwabatski the Jailer. Though his only uniform was a pair of faded army fatigues and his only weapon a hammer with which he pretended, from time to time, to repair a loose tread on the stairs. To prove he really was the landlord he had hung a sign above his desk on the second floor:

QUIET

Or out you go too

But both the desk and the sign seemed somehow lopsided. The whole vast frame rooming house, and Schwabatski as well, seemed lopsided. If the desk leaned a bit to one side it only went to show that the Jailer was no more skilled in carpentry than at playing landlord.

He certainly appeared the kind of man more likely to be found behind cell bars than the one turning the key in the lock. Yet he had to be a door-shutter and key-turner for guests who insisted, summer or winter, on leaving doors ajar. It was true that most of the rooms were small and close; but Schwabatski felt it wasn’t always for lack of air that tenants left doors a bit open.

‘Maybe you mean to have only a little air all right,’ he would argue for understanding, ‘but always somebody thinks it’s an invitation and then comes big fight, up and down, and who pays policemens for me then? If you want to make carryings-on, please do in family way, door always closed.’

‘I s’ppose I have to get dressed ’n go down ’n set on the curb like some bum to get a breath of air,’ some stray would huff at him. But the strays were forever huffing and the Jailer’s argument never varied.

‘You want to go out, go out. But you’re in, don’t be just half in – be all in. You ain’t in till door is close. A old man like me can’t be run up, down stairs every five minutes, see what goes on. Got work to do.’

Schwabatski had work to do all right. He had a dim-witted, oversized, twenty-one-year-old of a son whose sole and simple pleasure it was to plant paper daisies in the cracks of the dark old stairs. Schwabatski never gave up hope of being able to teach the boy carpentry; so brought him each day, with hammer and pencil and nail, to watch the way in which a broken stair should be repaired.

The old man’s patience was inexhaustible. How many times had that same tread been pulled out and the work begun again because the boy’s attention wandered from the hammer’s tapping to his precious daisies? Yet the boy’s patience surpassed even his father’s. He waited as hopefully for the daisies to take root as the old man hoped for some light to come into Peter’s brain. Poor Peter – he touched each daisy to his heavy underlip before each planting: he prayed for rain to come to the dark stairwell.

There was nothing seriously wrong with the boy’s understanding, the old man felt. It was just that, whenever the boy began to get the idea of the hammer and nails, one of those strays would start some uproar or other and hammer and nails and stair and son would have to be forgotten while he rushed to make peace at his own price before the Saloon Street aces made it at theirs.

Why would anyone want to eat peanuts in the dark with the door exactly two inches ajar? Yet there it was, the door open and swinging a little and a sound of peanuts being crushed and the shells tossed onto a newspaper in the darkened room. He couldn’t tell whether it was a man or a woman, so he called in a voice good for either:

‘That don’t seem right to me in there! You like peanuts – eat them right. Turn on light. Close door.’

A woman’s voice answered, heavy with drink or sarcasm, ‘You got a house rule says I got to have the light on when I eat peanuts?’

‘I’m an old man, I can’t stay up all night to stop funny business.’

‘Nobody sent for you.’

‘Nobody sent for you, neither, lady. Keep closed.’

He would close it and closed it would remain, though he had to lock it himself from the outside and keep the key in his pocket all night.

Hardly a week passed but someone, on one of the floors commanding a view of the street, seeing a pair of aces from the Saloon Street Station making for the entrance, would give the old man joyous warning over the banister: ‘Visitors, Jailer! Company!’

And always it was the new ones who gave the most trouble. The old-timers, like the dealer and his wife, battled, like respectable people should, behind closed doors. Schwabatski’s ears had long ago turned out the sort of roarer that the dealer and his Sophie sometimes put on. To a stranger it would have sounded like one word short of murder; but the Jailer would shuffle past, explaining it to himself: ‘They want to love each other – but they don’t know how.’ And shrug upon his way.

It was the rooms from which no sound came at all, while man and wife were together in there, that caught Schwabatski’s ear. It was from such rooms that real trouble came, the sudden glass-splintering crash, the moment of panting stillness and then the unspeakable flat-level scream of straight terror as the woman stumbled out of the room with the blood down the side of her face and her particular prize behind her with the broken bottle in his hand.

Schwabatski never worried about the dealer’s yellow door. There Sophie sat, her ash-blond hair in pin curls, one hand on the wheelchair’s arm and her army blanket across her knees, toying aimlessly with a combination flashlight-pencil, pressing the tiny light off and on, on and off. A dog howling down Schwabatski’s shadowed stairs recalled a casual promise made down her memory’s spiraled stairwell.

‘When you gonna get me the dawg you promised?’ she asked as Frankie closed the door carefully behind him. ‘You promised me you was sure gonna bring me a sweet lit-tul dawg. Well, I’m still settin’ ’n waitin’ but I don’t see no damned kind of dawg except a jailhouse dawg ’n that’s you. Why you always promisin’: “I’m gonna bring you the cutest puppy-pup” -’ n then a beat-out deck ’n a dirty shirt is what you really bring – I suppose you think I don’t even know where you was again?’

‘It wasn’t no pet shop, Zosh.’

‘Who told me?’

‘Who always travels the news around here? Piggy-O, the Information Bureau.’

‘He asks me how am I feelin’, he don’t just shove in here without even sayin’ how’s anyone feelin’.’

‘How you feelin’, Zosh?’

‘Don’t call me “Zosh,” I ain’t no greenhorn, I wasn’t born in Slutsk, I was born on eart’ on Awgoosty Boulevard ’n my name is Soph-ee-a – say it.’

‘How you feelin’, Soph-ee-a?’

‘No damned good at all. I got gas on the stomach. You got gas on the stomach?’

Something more subtle than gas weighed on her stomach. Behind the curtain of loneliness which had sheltered her childhood a sick dread had grown. Of being left, some final evening, alone in a room like this small room with no one of her own near at all.

A dread she sometimes evaded by reaching for an outsized album labeled, in her own childish and belabored hand, My Scrapbook of Fatal Accidence. When she had finished scissoring these letters out of red and green Christmas wrapping paper they had looked so large and cheerful she had gone on to embroider the title with comic-strip cutouts: Superman and Bugs Bunny, Tarzan and Little Abner cavorted in a wanton carnival among lady spies in sheerest negligee and announcements of double-horror features and double-feature horrors from the tabloid movie directories.

She had begun the book with the Times photo of her own ‘fatal accident’ and had gone on to add to it all manner of lurid cries from the depths: of unwed mothers who plunged newborn infants down dumbwaiters in an oatmeal box or tossed them into a furnace in a cornflake carton because ‘God told me to.’ To announce, when a visitor remarked that the house seemed rather warm: ‘I know. I just put the baby in the stove.’

She loved to pull out the one captioned Death Was Driving, to which she’d added, in her own crude art, a skull and crossbones; because she had learned that that gave Frankie what he called ‘chicken flesh.’

In fact she had been so altogether tickled with the crinkling effect it had had on his skin, reminding him as it did of the night when he’d supported her onto a cold white hospital bed with her eyes still dilated with shock, that she had gone on to wider fields: a whole family wiped out in a secondhand Chevvie one bright May morning at an Indiana Harbor crossing.

The movie directory captions she had clipped and hoarded like an aging coquette treasuring old dance programs.

EVERY KISS

EVERY EMBRACE

Brought a nameless terror…

A sinister jealousy!

ADULTS ONLY!

What do gorilla kidnappers do

with their women prey?

Do native women live with gorillas?

VOODOO SECRETS!

Best of all was the yellowing photo from the Times that proved to him, each day anew, that it had all been his fault. So much his fault that he could never leave her alone again.

‘Wheel me a little, Frankie,’ she begged. There were moments when not even the scrapbook sustained her. She would feel she was falling and only being wheeled back and forth could arrest that endless plunge into nowhere.

Some nights she wheeled herself while he slept. When he wakened he would see her in the corner where the light and darkness met, half her face in the fading shadows of Saturday night and half in Sunday morning’s rain-washed light. With her hair in papers, in crimpers or pins, she would be ready for the day and all day long would move, little by little, following the light, till the night’s neon carnival began once more below.

All day long, alternately picking at the army blanket about her knees with her tinted fingernails and then at her chin. ‘Whiteheads, blackheads,’ she had a little song for the very loneliest hours, picking at the chin’s flesh till it was raw: ‘I like to tweeze ’em ’n squeeze ’em, it’s when I get in the mood.’

Till the same old shadows took her anew.

Sometimes it seemed to Frankie there was no end to the wheeling at all. So now for reply he pulled a homemade drummer’s practice board out from under the sink, seated himself before it, sticks in hand, on a little backless chair. He used the sticks lightly a moment, just enough to shut out the pleading punctuated by the flashlight’s irregular clicking. Till he could get the feel of the drums again.

‘That’s right, just duck your puss over that dirty board ’n make off like I ain’t even alive. I ask you to wheel me so you make like I’m dead – it’s what you’re hopin’ all the time anyhow.’

For one moment there was no sound in the room save that of the battered clock below the phosphorescent crucifix on the wall, its sturdy old pulse beating quietly, without a single flutter. He rapped out a long, sure, steady workmanlike beat.

Frankie liked the drums. That was in the wrist too. He beat through his own version of ‘Song of the Islands’ twice.

‘Cute,’ Sophie announced the moment he’d finished.

A single meaningless word like that: cute. But what and who and why everything had to be so damned cute there would be no telling.

‘I knew that Gertie Michalek, the one wit’ the birt’ mark like a p’tato on her wrist,’ Sophie went on, ‘when she got preg’ant she could always tell if it was going to be a girl ’cause she’d get that cravin’ for cold p’tatoes.’ N you know what, Frankie? To this day when Michalek’s little girl eats a p’tato, the p’tato eyes come out on Michalek’s birt’mark. What you think of that?’

No answer. He would be trying not to feel unnerved at her meaningless discontent. Around and around she would go now upon the breathless merry-go-round of her ceaseless mysteries; till his mind would be dulled by its whirling and he would try talking her back to reality.

‘I’m lookin’ for a job beatin’ the tubs, Zosh,’ he told her, leaning forward to begin again just as she signaled to him with the flashlight – dot-dot-dash-dot-dot-dot – in a code she had just invented. ‘What am I signalin’ now?’ she wanted to know. She’d had enough drumming for one night. If he wouldn’t wheel her he’d have to play games. He would have to guess something.

Brushing back his hair with his forearm, he felt the sticks growing cold between his fingers. ‘My guess is your roof is leakin’,’ he ventured at last. Knowing that if he didn’t play the game she would rap-rap-rap with the metal against the wheelchair’s arm, translating the secret code into an even more secret Morse while a faint and knowing smile would stray across her lips.

A smile that veiled her knowledge of his latest trickery: from the first night he’d lugged it up the stairs she had been on to him. Just one more excuse to keep from wheeling her, that’s all the practice board was. All the talk about wanting to play in a real band, join the musicians’ union and be on the legit were just so many more corny tricks to get out of doing his proper duty toward her.

Well, she still had a proper trick or two of her own up her sleeve. She watched him as he tried not to pay attention to the flashlight, wondering just what moment she’d begin signaling again.

For one moment she held the flashlight poised like a vicious little club above the wheelchair’s arm while he held the sticks tensely above the board. Then shoved board and sticks back under the sink and lay his head on his arm across a soup plate. She put the flash down with a pervasive sense of triumph.

‘That’s right. Don’t bother puttin’ on no kettle fer dishes. Just lay wit’ your head on the sink, that’s the sure way to get ’em done.’

Frankie raised up, took a battered deck off the shelf, shoved the dirty plate to one side and riffled the deck through his fingers.

‘Sure. Just shove to one side fer the maid. Start dealin’ to yerself now like a goof goin’ soft in the head.’

‘There’s only fifty cards in your deck tonight, honey,’ Frankie reproached her gently. ‘I think you got a little repercussion again today.’

‘You mean a concussion, dummy.’ For once she had him.

‘No, I mean a repercussion. Like you been bounced on your head twice.’

‘My head is airtight. It’s yours is leakin’ – bot’ ways. Your own stepmother said if you wasn’t married you’d be settin’ in the pen right now. Your own stepmother.’

‘She wasn’t no “stepmother,”’ Frankie contradicted her flatly with genuine resentment.

‘I s’ppose she was your real mother. Don’t you think I know about you?’

‘She wasn’t no “stepmother.” She was a foster mother ’n she done the best she could. She wasn’t no “stepmother,” the way you say it.’

‘She done so good you don’t even know if she’s dead ’r alive.’ Sophie knew when she had him in the vise and gave it the final turn. ‘She done so much she didn’t even come to the school when you ’n them other punks got caught in the boiler room with the dice. If she’d of come you could have finished like them others.’

‘It wasn’t she didn’t want to come, Zosh,’ Frankie insisted. ‘She was ashamed, she couldn’t talk good English, you know that. She done the best she could.’

Sophie returned to the frontal attack.

‘I got more brains in my butt than your whole scrumblebug fam’ly got in their heads – scrambled eggs is what your fam’ly got for brains. You gonna bring me a damned dawg ’r ain’t you gonna bring me no damned dawg? That’s what I want to know.’

A plaintive howling came circling up the stairwell. Sitting with his slim back toward her, the dealer asked wearily, ‘You really want a dog, Zosh?’

No answer. She was studying the short hairs on the back of his neck. And waited, in the most cunning silence of all, to see whether he would pick up her thought. If he did, then she would know it was true, what old Doc Dominowski had told her about thought transference, how every mind was really a sort of radio set capable of both broadcasting and receiving thought waves.

‘You couldn’t keep no dog in here anyhow,’ Frankie pointed out.

‘It don’t have to be no damned wolf from a zoo, goofy t’ing. It could just be a soft lit-tul puppy-pup. Sort of smoody-like ’n cute, what I could pet. You promised.’

‘He’d mess up the joint. What would you do when he had to go? Set him in the sink? So don’t talk no more. I got scrambled eggs for brains ’n yours is poached, they ain’t even settin’ on toast – When do we eat?’

‘As soon as you heave them greasy cards out the window ’n jump out after ’em,’ she informed him. ‘It’s oney two stories.’

‘I’m afraid of losin’ the joker that way,’ he told her with indifference, jamming a match, in lieu of a toothpick, between his teeth.

‘You’re the biggest joker around here.’ And studied him with a child’s huge scorn: ‘Some toot’pick.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘A little bit of what, Zosh?’

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

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

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

With yesterday’s empties crouching behind her chair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I know, Zosh-’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What you breakin’ the dishes for?’

‘’Cause I feel like it.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

she sang among the ruins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tug & Maul

Shove & Haul

Old Fitz, Old Crow or Old McCall-

When you’re broke go home-

That’s all.

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

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

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

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

‘Television don’t work, Owner?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet the strange cats of the Safari returned the contempt of the barflies across the way. They called Antek’s boys ‘bummies’ and considered Antek himself simply too common.

Now the old blind noseless bummy called Pig sat at the scarred bar of the Tug & Maul with the fresh sawdust beneath his soles and the old hope in his heart: he wanted a beer. But nobody would come to sit on the stool to his right nor on the stool to his left.

For he gave off an odor of faintly rancid mutton, moldering laundry, long dead perch and formaldehyde. He sat only one stool away from the lavatory, where Antek had long ago assigned him, claiming that the odor of disinfectant from that room somewhat modified the peddler’s special odor. ‘I kill two birds with one stinkin’ stone,’ Antek had explained to Pig, ‘I use a extra half can of Bowlene ’n people can’t hardly smell you at all. Just don’t try movin’ up to the front where the people who wash theirselves sit. When you move up that way keep on movin’ right through the door ’n take it all out onto the street.’

‘Some of them clean guys buy me drinks,’ Pig would point out in protest.

‘When someone buys you somethin’ they don’t mean they want to drink with you. You stay where you are ’n I’ll bring it down to you. I can stand you, I’m used to you, it’s my job. But the customers come here to get numb off Schlitz; not off you.’

Pig was always secretly pleased at such insults, though he might pretend to be a bit offended. ‘That Bowlene ain’t as strong as you think, Owner,’ he would challenge Antek. ‘Gimme six more months ’n you won’t have to use it at all – I’ll just set here ’n the people’ll think the can been disinfected even if it ain’t. Bowlene, that ain’t nothin’. D.D.T. – that’s the stuff.’

A faded blue merchant mariner’s cap was rolled far down over his brows and his fingers drummed restlessly on the bar. Hearing others drinking all about him, his thirst deepened and his fingers began working like an insect’s feelers sensing an obstacle in their path. Pig’s obstacle was forever Antek. Owner was getting harder to get around every day.

For Owner didn’t like the way Blind Pig’s fingers had of struggling upward and wriggling excitedly against each other: they whispered obscene gossip while pressing each other’s flesh with an incestuous understanding.

‘If I had fifteen cents I’d be all right!’ he called gaily to the hubbub about his ears. But the hubbubers heard only their own gaiety.

Nobody heard but Owner. And Owner, in his clean-shaven, bald and bespectacled indifference, cared not a bartender’s button.

Yet the fingers crept slyly across the bar, slowly reversed and began a crawling descent down the grimy vest into a tobacco pouch suspended from his neck; the string left a line on the nape faintly whiter than the rest of this shapeless, ageless, anonymous, discolored, mindless and eyeless sack of cold cunning and hot greed.

‘I seen some crummy bums in my time on this street,’ Antek called out defensively, ‘but you’re what D.D.T. was invented for – you think ’cause you can’t see people they can’t see you?’

Pig wore a creamy, dreamy smirk to veil a long-standing grudge against everybody. He could smile like a chicken-fed tomcat while wishing everyone bad luck without exception.

‘They don’t have to see me,’ he assured the black bar mirror of his mind with that smug and buttery smile, ‘they could just thmell me.’

‘They can “thmell” you awright,’ Antek mocked him. ‘I’d borrow you the soap myself – only you ain’t got the natural pride to use it.’

Pig agreed, with the downcast eyelids of the man being warmly flattered. ‘I got my kind of pride ’n you got yours – I’m proud of bein’ how I am too.’

To Pig light and cleanliness were inseparable: if he could not have the one he would do without the other. From his eyeless malice he derived a sort of twisted glee in offending men with eyes.

The Eyes were a hostile race. They were those who washed themselves, out of a common pact, because they could see each other. Though he had been excluded from that pact, yet they wished him to be both helpless and clean all the same. They did not wish him to trouble their sight any more than they wished him to see. They asked too much.

Yet before the offense he so deliberately offered their noses and their sight they became a bit helpless too. They had to look at him, they had to feel their stomachs balk a bit at the smell of him as at the reek of spoiled liver.

‘Look, Owner – I got twelve’ – the blackened fingernails were prying at the pouch’s strings and into the greasy little bag. One entered at last, then two, to return bearing a single penny, place it with caution upon the bar and return for a second like two black ants going for a heavy load, following tirelessly until a dozen pennies lay on the bar before him. ‘Look!’ he told the darkness. ‘I got twelve.’ And pressed the fingers cunningly across the pennies, turning one over here and another there, for no reason apparent to Antek at all.

All the filth of West Division Street clung to those fingers and to the frayed ends of the army surplus underwear curling beneath the cuffs. He wore heavy underwear, an army overcoat and the mariner’s rolled cap whether it were roistering August or mid-December. The accumulation of filth on his face and clothing made him appear nearer sixty than the forty-odd he really was. The pouch slipped out of his fingers and somebody stooped and picked it up for him.

‘You dropped somethin’, Piggy-O.’

Nifty Louie, his amber eyes and two-tone shoes, his sea-green tie and soft green fedora with the bright red feather in its band above the pale, asthenic face touched faintly with a violet talc.

‘Oh boy,’ Pig sighed with relief to feel the pouch between his fingers again. ‘What if I had a couple of G’s in there ’n somebody else found it?’ The thought caused the fingers to run so nervously over the pennies the coins themselves seemed to start sweating.

Louie seldom drank in the Tug & Maul and Pig got into the Safari only by the back door; so their little business was done between schooners for Pig.

‘How you doin’, Piggy-O?’

‘I’m doin’ wit’out – how’s Fomorowski doin’? You gonna buy one or be one?’

‘What you drinkin’?’

‘Oh boy, what do I want, you mean? I want all I can get’ – he waved the white cane, shouted into the beery air, shifted the cane swiftly under the armpit to get his drinking hand free and the cane stuck there as if caught by sheer grime.

‘Service! A little service here!’ Blind Pig demanded.

‘Fomorowski, that’s the name,’ Amber Eyes boasted of himself quietly, ‘Nifty Louie hisself from Downtown on Clark Street. Owner, give my fat friend here a beer.’ He rolled a new dime, with proper disdain, along the littered bar. Then nudged Pig and whispered obscenely: ‘What’s your habit, Jack the Rabbit?’

For some reason this meaningless query amused the blind man. He tittered, leered and flushed to the temples. Antek came up with an eight-ouncer in a ten-cent glass and scooped up the dime.

‘Here’s a schooner, Piggy’ – Antek winked at Nifty Louie – ‘here’s that big sixteen-ouncer, fifteen cents to everybody else but only a dime to you.’

Pig’s lower lip loosened, he licked a string of reddish spittle off it, from where his gums bled constantly, licked at the beer with the weak half grin of a drugged lecher and said ‘aaaaaah’ as if he were tickling himself with his tongue. Then felt the glass with those lewd feelers at last and cried out as painfully as though cut: ‘In yer mother-law’s icebox it’s a schooner! Yer mother-law’s icebox! Yer mother-law’s snatch!’

Yet quickly pointed that lascivious tongue so as to lose no more time, into the foam like a cat into cream, dipped swiftly and deliciously with its narrow pink point, lapped the foam loosely and aimlessly about for the sheer joy of knowing he could feel it in his throat any moment he wished now, then emptied the glass so swiftly it left his face smudged whitely about the lips like those of a dog trying to vomit. Felt the beer back up in his throat, half rose over the bar, clutching his throat to choke the precious stuff back; and sank back with utter relief.

This debauched, blunt-snouted, abject, obscene lush sloshed beer about his mouth in a way that made Antek want to hit him every single time. It made anyone want to hit him, there was that deliberately offensive manner about it. He sat there in all his veiled malice and secretly mocked them all. Knowing it made everyone want to hit him, knowing not one would dare.

And smiled, to reveal his gums. They were gray and lined by a livid margin of rawest red, where the teeth bled at the rotting roots; as he sloshed the beer around them it became infected with the pinkish spittle. Antek saw and backed off from that awesome breath, wishing he hadn’t quit school so early.

Pig turned the glass to his lips till a stream of beer ran down both sides of his mouth and dripped in tiny rivulets down the grease of his clothes and formed a glistening boutonniere of rosy spittle on his lapel. Gasped, choked, sighed, grunted, put the glass down at last and every barfly in the place sighed with relief.

‘Boy! Can I drink beer!’ N smoke too! All I can get!’ he told the shrouded bar mirror he saw forever in his mind. ‘I’d like to get somebody’s gir-rul in the back boot’ – a guy’s wife got drunkie once ’n mmmm – oh boy you in that back boot’ – I can do that too, I take all I can get.’ His lips worked loosely at the memory. ‘Oh boy, oh man, if I just had more of that.’

‘You like girls, Piggy-O?’

‘And how!’

‘You like potatoes ’n gravy, Piggy-O?’

‘Oh boy – them mashed potatoes ’n unyunz in the gray-vy!’ Pig was drooling. ‘Gir-ruls too – you thed it. Your mother-law’s big beer belly, you thed it!’

‘Broke again, Piggy-O?’

‘You thed it!’

He whistled slyly to himself, seeing, over Nifty Louie’s shoulder, a slow and stiff burlesque moving down the curtained runway of his mind: and endless all-night carnival playing for blind Piggy-O alone. As it had played, off and on, since he had last had eyes.

His sight had first clouded watching the runway of a true burlesque, and for months after that final curtain had come his own inner stage had remained curtained; till the shock of blindness had worn off. Since then, clearly and more clearly with the months, he could see once more that last burlesque, peopled with clowns that had not been there before and with women more beautiful and more obscene than ever had danced before his lost sight. He never told men with sight of this private burlesque. And did not even wonder why the figures behind his shuttered eyes moved so stiffly, as if on strings. Though they looked as real as life.

Swaying on the stool like a pianist in the throes of a stormy concerto, the fingers pointed, retreated, advanced, curled, straightened tensely, wilted slowly and slid along the scarred bar leaving a damp little sticky track, like an insect’s track, around and between the pennies.

‘Do a small errint for me, Piggy?’

‘I’ll take all I can get.’

‘I’ll fix you with a little honey -’ n no back-boot’ drunkie neither. Clark Street hotel stuff.’

‘Oh boy, that hotel stuff – lead me to it, Fomorowski.’ Then felt Nifty Louie’s quiet nudge, knew someone had entered both knew too well and buttoned his trap in an old understanding.

Frankie Machine, looking beat to the ground, brushed past the pair of them without a word or a nod to either.

‘Lookin’ for someone, Dealer?’ Louie asked, not so much to get a reply as to let Pig know that Dealer was out of the clink again.

But Frankie went on toward the back of the tavern, where a single drunk sat tilted perilously against a green 7-Up sign. There, crouched at the feet of the drunk while others watched in mild unconcern, Solly Saltskin was preparing a prairie bonfire.

Methodically he had piled papers, scratch sheets and emptied cigarette packs below the tilted chair and was filtering fresh sawdust around. ‘I’m givin’ Shooie a hotfoots,’ he explained gravely to Frankie, like a man being paid by the hour.

‘Looks to me more like arsony,’ Frankie commented, kicking paper and sawdust aside, ‘ain’t we got enough troubles without you burnin’ people down? C’mon, I’ll buy you a beer just to keep you out of the cooler tomorrow.’

The drunk raised his head and tilted forward as if he too had been invited: but the head returned heavily to the laboring chest and the mind returned to an argument with some bartender of his dreams. ‘Tell him Shooie’s a regular guy! Tell him! What Shudefski promises Shudefski does! Keep me straight. Shake – here’s the best pal you ever had. You know Shudefski? C’mere! I want you to meet the best pal a Polak ever had.’

‘I want you to get a dog,’ Frankie told Sparrow in the back booth, ‘’n I don’t care where you steal him. Not one of your alley wolves though. Somethin’ that’s housebroke ’n won’t be much trouble ’n don’t have lices. Somethin’ playful-like, to give Soph somethin’ to do to get her off my neck. But no bitch that’s gonna litter next week. You get it?’

Sparrow was happy to have a mission. He twirled his cap about till the peak pointed backward, started going somewhere and returned. ‘What’s the matter with Rumdum?’ he asked. ‘Rummy needs a home. Hey! Rummy!’ And something moved in the shadows.

There, as his eyes became accustomed to the dark, Frankie discerned Antek’s deaf-and-dumb cat nibbling affectionately at Rumdum’s ear in an attempt to rouse him. But Rumdum only barked dreamily, pursuing some deaf dream cat. While above them the tilted drunk with the sawdust scattered across his shoes began humming softly to himself; then tilted forward again to ask loudly and clearly, ‘Who always lets the air out of these seats?’ And tilted right back again.

The question wakened Rumdum. He rose, stretched his flanks, licked the cat tolerantly while it arched its back in feigned fright, and shuffled into the dim blue gleam cast by the juke box’s dreaming glow.

Frankie felt a choking sensation as he surveyed this scandalous-looking freak. The dog was both bloated and ravenous-looking.

‘He’s a real pedigreed, Frankie,’ Sparrow asserted, reading Frankie’s dismay, ‘a Polish airedale, sort of,’ n every crawlin’ hair of him mine. I wouldn’t trust him to nobody but you.’

‘I’ll say he’s a pedigreed – a pedigreed trampo. I couldn’t keep a brewery horse like that unless I want to go to work days too.’

‘He’ll bring back empties, Frankie. I got him trained how to do it.’ He whistled softly and the dog ambled toward him, one blear red eye showing like a warning signal in a fog – Frankie felt the cold and dripping nose shoved into his hand and heard the great hound break wind discreetly, then hiccough apologetically.

‘Here, beauty,’ Sparrow ordered, and crouched with an empty in his hand for the hound to retrieve. Rumdum got the bottle securely between his jaws and lurched dutifully about in an erratic circle, like a circus pony with a fixed idea, for Frankie’s admiration.

‘He’s one fourt’ retriever is why he does that so good,’ the punk explained.

‘Yeh.’ N three fourths stewbum,’ Frankie added. ‘He thinks he’s earnin’ a drink on the house.’

‘That ain’t nothin’ to be ashamed of, is it?’ Sparrow reproached him.

‘Maybe if he had a home he’d settle down,’ Frankie guessed hopefully.

‘Maybe if I did I would too,’ Sparrow agreed wistfully, thinking of the Division Street kennel he called a room. Although he had abandoned his dog-stealing racket, save for an occasional foray ‘just to keep in shape,’ that room still smelled of the transients it had sheltered in the days before he had met Frankie. The room still held an assortment of secondhand dog collars, stolen dog tags, moldy muzzles and greasy leashes.

He remembered; while Rumdum went around and around, breaking wind politely with every step.

All it took, in the old days, to place an order with Sparrow for anything from a Pekingese to a sled dog was a fifty-cent deposit. ‘It ain’t that your credit ain’t red-hot wit’ me,’ he apologized to a client, ‘it’s all account of the hamburger shortage. You say you want to buy me a drink?’

He had never wheedled more than two shots out of a customer before he’d be on his casual way to the nearest hamburger stand. It had never occurred to the punk to go to a butchershop. ‘What’s the hamburg stands for then? Besides, I like the fresh-ground kind myself. Leave the onions off one.’ He was fond of onions himself but had learned that some dogs, particularly chows, disdained them. Toward dark he would start tiptoeing down alleys, his eyes just over the back-yard fences and the single onionless hamburger in his hand.

‘I knew the alleys pretty good when I had my dog-stealin’ route,’ he told Frankie now, ‘I knew all the best windows, them days,’ n the quick short cuts to get there, account I run a peepin’-tom route before I caught on to how to snatch hounds. That’s how I got to know the yards that had dogs in ’em ’n the ones that just had signs sayin’ they did but they really didn’t.’

He would unlatch a gate quietly in the violet twilight and silently permit the hound to start snooping anxiously for the hamburger’s scent. One glance would tell him whether the hound was bribable: he had yet to meet man or dog that wasn’t. The animal’s snout would trail the meat around the corner and up to the very door of the drafty old five-story frame tenement he called home.

Coaxed five flights up, an amiable puppy could be scooped up like a tired baby and softly encouraged to forget his past. But Sparrow had never forgiven the cynical, double-crossing spitz that had consumed three whole hamburgers, pickle and all, before he’d gotten it forty feet off its home grounds – then had sunk its teeth in his hand and set up a hysterical barking as if Sparrow had bitten it, bringing its mistress onto the punk’s heels. He’d spent that night in the Saloon Street Station booked for dog theft until Record Head had advised the woman to drop charges and Sparrow to ‘stay in the light where we can see what you’re up to after this.’

Sparrow had planned to poison the dog’s mistress after that one; but had ultimately contented himself with poisoning the spitz.

Once inside the room, any hound, regardless of pedigree, had become half drugged by the odors of the hundred breeds that had preceded him there. That close little room had never lost the special smell of shanghaied dogflesh: the captives had snuggled down on the shedded hair of some wayward collie to snooze like lotus-eaters. Sparrow would remove the collar and tag, substitute a less incriminating one and go for the shears. By dint of ingenuous hair clipping, a daub of black paint there and daub of white there, French poodles had come to impersonate ‘Cocky Spaniards’ and Irish pointers had become ‘daubered-up pinchers.’

A two-month-old poodle would waken looking like a debauched terrier: adhesive over a telltale marking on the left foot, dark circles under the eyes and the tip of one ear in the sink. Such a betrayed pup had passed for any breed the market might demand.

Sparrow had sold them, crossbred them, clipped their tails until each had emerged, no matter how many mongrel strains had brought him forth, a ‘pedigreed blood-typed turo-breed.’

His masterpiece, the unholy freak now making circles in the hope of a short beer, was a cross between ‘an English sheepy ’n a Division Street beagle – only I call him a square-snapper for short. What he’s best for is catchin’ squirrels ’n shakin’ the dirty walnuts out of ’em,’ the punk explained earnestly. ‘In his native hab’tat you got to have a dog like this if you’re out to pick up a sack of walnuts. But the trouble is he’s just trained to chase them one kind of squirrels ’n they’re gettin’ kind of rare over here account of the climate changin’ so fast. So he don’t have nothin’ to do but hang around taverns ’n wait for the climate to change back a little.’

Certainly Rumdum was the luckiest hound in Chicago. For he alone, of all the city’s countless dogs, had received Professor Saltskin’s postgraduate course in square-snapping. He had studied at the feet of the philosophers who lounged out their lives on the curb in front of the Tug & Maul waiting for a live one. He had earned his degree by snapping suspiciously at all uniformed toilers: mailmen, milkmen, Good Humor men on bicycles, streetcar conductors and anyone carrying a lunch bucket – everyone, indeed, who didn’t smell of beer or unemployment. Rumdum could tell a square with nostrils so clogged he had once mistaken molasses for beer.

‘He got a degree what I call D.D.S. – Doctor of Dirty Square-snapping,’ Sparrow liked to boast. ‘Here’s a dog got a better start in life than most humans. I named him Rumdum when he was two mont’s old ’n told him straight out, “I ain’t givin’ you no water ’cause I don’t want to raise you prej’diced against somethin’ better.” Too many dogs get offsteered onto water right off, they don’t get no chance to make up their own minds what they really like best, beer ’r water ’r just plain whisky. The people should let a helpless beast make up his own opinions, otherwise it’s croolty to our weak-minded friends, like takin’ advantage of little birds, they ain’t even learned how to fly yet. Today you could put Rummy in the bat’tub ’n he keeps his dirty snout up so’s he don’t have to taste that other stuff.

‘But he ain’t the kind to just beg beers off you ’n then go to sleep on you. Rummy, he’s a natural entertainer, he pays his own way – look – he’s dizzy but he’s still in there’ – Sparrow reached over and set the hound to circling in the opposite direction, which for some reason caused the dog to begin breaking wind again.

‘You wouldn’t hire no M.C. if you was needin’ a detective, would you? Well, Rumdum’s field is strictly entertainment. He don’t guard no cash register. He don’t even howl when somebody’s gonna croak. He just hiccups. He don’t care whether his hair is smood down or not, he don’t care how he looks or what becomes of him. He don’t even bark. He just whines when the brew’ry truck guys come to take back the empties, account he don’t know they’re empty. He figures they’re takin’ away all the beer in the world ’n there won’t be enough left for him. He sure looks sad when they do that on him. I tell him, “Look the other way, Rummy,” when I see ’em comin’. But he peeks ’n then that tail droops.’

‘He don’t bark is right,’ Frankie agreed. ‘He won’t even bark at a cat. I seen Antek’s deaf tom tree him wit’ my own eyes.’

‘Let’s face facts, Frankie,’ Sparrow protested. ‘It wasn’t no tree. He just jumped up on the bar to avoid a disturbment was all. He knew it wouldn’t look dignified, a big fat hound like him lickin’ a poor skinny little old deaf-’n-dumb cat. That dog got real pride, Frankie. He won’t fight out of his weight when there’s no principle involved.’

‘If there’s no bowl of beer involved, you mean. That’s the only time I ever seen him show his teeth – when somebody took his dirty beer away.’

‘He got no teet’,’ Sparrow reminded Frankie, ‘they got dissolved in beer bubbles.’

‘You better start him the other way round again,’ Frankie suggested.

But Rumdum had given out, with one final windbreaking roar. He dropped the bottle at Frankie’s feet and stood looking up for a refill, his great bloodshot eyes swimming in the melancholy hope that only chronic alcoholics know.

‘He thinks you’re the bartender ’cause you got on a tie,’ Sparrow explained.

‘Take him up to the room,’ Frankie ordered, ‘I got to case out of here.’

Sparrow took off his glasses to see Frankie better. ‘Can’t I case out wit’ you, Frankie? Where you goin’?’ He hadn’t been left out of any fast hustle of Frankie’s since they’d been together. ‘Maybe I could help like before.’

‘Do like I said.’ Frankie’s knuckles shown whitely where he pressed them to his temples.

‘I don’t get what you’re salty about,’ Sparrow began – then gathered up Rumdum in both arms and shuffled out past Louie and Blind Pig.

‘The dealer ain’t hisself, that Zosh is stonin’ him too hard,’ he decided. ‘I’ll have to speak to her.’ Yet Frankie had been stoned up there before, hard and often, and had always been able to forget it in the back booth at Antek’s. ‘He don’t act like the booze helps him no more,’ Sparrow realized.

He waited in Frankie’s doorway, with the hound whining against his legs, without knowing just what he was waiting for. Frankie had told him what to do, it was up to him to do it.

As he turned toward the stairs he saw Frankie heading across the street toward the Safari.

Behind him Blind Pig waited on the curb for someone, anyone, to help him across.

Inadvertently Sparrow looked around for Fomorowski.

The clock in the room above the Safari told only Junkie Time. For every hour here was Old Junkie’s Hour and the walls were the color of all old junkies’ dreams: the hue of diluted morphine in the moment before the needle draws the suffering blood.

Walls that went up and up like walls in a troubled dream. Walls like water where no legend could be written and no hand grasp metal or wood. For Nifty Louie paid the rent and Frankie knew too well who the landlord was. He had met him before, that certain down-at-heel vet growing stooped from carrying a thirty-five-pound monkey on his back. Frankie remembered that face, ravaged by love of its own suffering as by some endless all-night orgy. A face forged out of his own wound fever in a windy ward tent on the narrow Meuse. He had met Private McGantic before: both had served their country well.

This was the fellow who looked somehow a little like everyone else in the world and was more real to a junkie than any real man could ever be. The projected image of one’s own pain when that pain has become too great to be borne. The image of one hooked so hopelessly on morphine that there would be no getting the monkey off without another’s help. There are so few ways to help old sad frayed and weary West Side junkies.

Frankie felt no pity for himself, yet felt compassion for this McGantic. He worried, as the sickness rose in himself, about what in God’s name McGantic would do tomorrow when the money and the morphine both gave out. Where then, in that terrible hour, would Private M. find the strength to carry the monkey through one more endless day?

By the time Frankie got inside the room he was so weak Louie had to help him onto the army cot beside the oil stove. He lay on his back with one arm flung across his eyes as if in shame; and his lips were blue with cold. The pain had hit him with an icy fist in the groin’s very pit, momentarily tapering off to a single probing finger touching the genitals to get the maximum of pain. He tried twisting to get away from the finger: the finger was worse than the fist. His throat was so dry that, though he spoke, the lips moved and made no sound. But Fomorowski read such lips well.

‘Fix me. Make it stop. Fix me.’

‘I’ll fix you, Dealer,’ Louie assured him softly.

Louie had his own bedside manner. He perched on the red leather and chrome bar stool borrowed from the Safari, with the amber toes of his two-tone shoes catching the light and the polo ponies galloping down his shirt. This was Nifty Louie’s Hour. The time when he did the dealing and the dealer had to take what Louie chose to toss him in Louie’s own good time.

He lit a match with his fingertip and held it away from the bottom of the tiny glass tube containing the fuzzy white cap of morphine, holding it just far enough away to keep the cap from being melted by the flame. There was time and time and lots of time for that. Let the dealer do a bit of melting first; the longer it took the higher the price. ‘You can pay me off when Zero pays you,’ he assured Frankie. There was no hurry. ‘You’re good with me any time, Dealer.’

Frankie moaned like an animal that cannot understand its own pain. His shirt had soaked through and the pain had frozen so deep in his bones nothing could make him warm again.

‘Hit me, Fixer. Hit me.’

A sievelike smile drained through Louie’s teeth. This was his hour and this hour didn’t come every day. He snuffed out the match’s flame as it touched his fingers and snapped the head of another match into flame with his nail, letting its glow flicker one moment over that sieve-like smile; then brought the tube down cautiously and watched it dissolve at the flame’s fierce touch. When the stuff had melted he held both needle and tube in one hand, took the dealer’s loose-hanging arm firmly with the other and pumped it in a long, loose arc. Frankie let him swing it as if it were attached to someone else. The cold was coming up from within now: a colorless cold spreading through stomach and liver and breathing across the heart like an odorless gas. To make the very brain tighten and congeal under its icy touch.

‘Warm. Make me warm.’

And still there was no rush, no hurry at all. Louie pressed the hypo down to the cotton; the stuff came too high these days to lose the fraction of a drop. ‘Don’t vomit, student,’ he taunted Frankie to remind him of the first fix he’d had after his discharge – but it was too cold to answer. He was falling between glacial walls, he didn’t know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-colored walls of Private McGantic’s terrible pit.

He couldn’t feel Louie probing into the dark red knot above his elbow at all. Nor see the way the first blood sprayed faintly up into the delicate hypo to tinge the melted morphine with blood as warm as the needle’s heated point.

When Louie sensed the vein he pressed it down with the certainty of a good doctor’s touch, let it linger a moment in the vein to give the heart what it needed and withdrew gently, daubed the blood with a piece of cotton, tenderly, and waited.

Louie waited. Waited to see it hit.

Louie liked to see the stuff hit. It meant a lot to Louie, seeing it hit.

‘Sure I like to watch,’ he was ready to acknowledge any time. ‘Man, their eyes when that big drive hits ’n goes tinglin’ down to the toes. They retch, they sweat, they itch – then the big drive hits ’n here they come out of it cryin’ like a baby ’r laughin’ like a loon. Sure I like to watch. Sure I like to see it hit. Heroin got the drive awright – but there’s not a tingle to a ton – you got to get M to get that tingle-tingle.’

It hit all right. It hit the heart like a runaway locomotive, it hit like a falling wall. Frankie’s whole body lifted with that smashing surge, the very heart seemed to lift up-up-up – then rolled over and he slipped into a long warm bath with one long orgasmic sigh of relief. Frankie opened his eyes.

He was in a room. Somebody’s dust-colored wavy-walled room and he wasn’t quite dead after all. He had died, had felt himself fall away and die but now he wasn’t dead any more. Just sick. But not too sick. He wasn’t going to be really sick, he wasn’t a student any more. Maybe he wasn’t going to be sick at all, he was beginning to feel just right.

Then it went over him like a dream where everything is love and he wasn’t even sweating. All he had to do the rest of his life was to lie right here feeling better and better with every beat of his heart till he’d never felt so good in all his life.

‘Wow,’ he grinned gratefully at Louie, ‘that was one good whan.’

‘I seen it,’ Louie boasted smugly. ‘I seen it was one good whan’ – and lapsed into the sort of impromptu jargon which pleases junkies for no reason they can say – ‘vraza-s’vrazas’vraza – it was one good whan-whan-whan.’ He dabbed a silk handkerchief at a blob of blood oozing where the needle had entered Frankie’s arm.

‘There’s a silver buck and a buck ’n a half in change in my jacket pocket,’ Frankie told him lazily. ‘I’m feelin’ too good to get up ’n get it myself.’

Louie reached in the pocket with the handkerchief bound about his palm and plucked the silver out. Two-fifty for a quarter grain wasn’t too high. He gave Frankie the grin that drained through the teeth for a receipt. The dealer was coming along nicely these days, thank you.

The dealer didn’t know that yet, of course. That first fix had only cost him a dollar, it had quieted the everlasting dull ache in his stomach and sent him coasting one whole week end. So what was the use of spending forty dollars in the bars when you could do better at home on one? That was how Frankie had it figured that week end. To Louie, listening close, he’d already talked like a twenty-dollar-a-day man.

Given a bit of time.

And wondered idly now where in the world the dealer would get that kind of money when the day came that he’d need half a C just to taper off. He’d get it all right. They always got it. He’d seen them coming in the rain, the unkjays with their peculiarly rigid, panicky walk, wearing some policeman’s castoff rubbers, no socks at all, a pair of Salvation Army pants a size too small or a size too large and a pajama top for a shirt – but with twenty dollars clutched in the sweating palm for that big twenty-dollar fix.

‘Nothing can take the place of junk – just junk’ – the dealer would learn. As Louie himself had learned long ago.

Louie was the best fixer of them all because he knew what it was to need to get well. Louie had had a big habit – he was one man who could tell you you lied if you said no junkie could kick the habit once he was hooked. For Louie was the one junkie in ten thousand who’d kicked it and kicked it for keeps.

He’d taken the sweat cure in a little Milwaukee Avenue hotel room cutting himself down, as he put it, ‘from monkey to zero.’ From three full grains a day to one, then a half of that and a half of that straight down to zero, though he’d been half out of his mind with the pain two nights running and was so weak, for days after, that he could hardly tie his own shoelaces.

Back on the street at last, he’d gotten the chuck horrors: for two full days he’d eaten candy bars, sweet rolls and strawberry malteds. It had seemed that there would be no end to his hunger for sweets.

Louie never had the sweet-roll horrors any more. Yet sometimes himself sensed that something had twisted in his brain in those nights when he’d gotten the monkey off his back on Milwaukee Avenue.

‘Habit? Man,’ he liked to remember, ‘I had a great big habit. One time I knocked out one of my own teet’ to get the gold for a fix. You call that bein’ hooked or not? Hooked? Man, I wasn’t hooked, I was crucified. The monkey got so big he was carryin’ me.’ Cause the way it starts is like this, students: you let the habit feed you first ’n one mornin’ you wake up ’n you’re feedin’ the habit.

‘But don’t tell me you can’t kick it if you want to. When I hear a junkie tell me he wants to kick the habit but he just can’t I know he lies even if he don’t know he does. He wants to carry the monkey, he’s punishin’ hisself for somethin’ ’n don’t even know it. It’s what I was doin’ for six years, punishin’ myself for things I’d done ’n thought I’d forgot. So I told myself how I wasn’t to blame for what I done in the first place, I was only tryin’ to live like everyone else ’n doin’ them things was the only way I had of livin’. Then I got forty grains ’n went up to the room ’n went from monkey to nothin’ in twenny-eight days ’n that’s nine-ten years ago ’n the monkey’s dead.’

‘The monkey’s never dead, Fixer,’ Frankie told him knowingly.

Louie glanced at Frankie slyly. ‘You know that awready, Dealer? You know how he don’t die? It’s what they say awright, the monkey never dies. When you kick him off he just hops onto somebody else’s back.’ Behind the film of glaze that always veiled Louie’s eyes Frankie saw the twisted look. ‘You got my monkey, Dealer? You take my nice old monkey away from me? Is that my monkey ridin’ your back these days, Dealer?’

The color had returned to Frankie’s cheeks, he felt he could make it almost any minute now. ‘No more for me, Fixer,’ he assured Louie confidently. ‘Somebody else got to take your monkey. I had the Holy Jumped-up-Jesus Horrors for real this time -’ n I’m one guys knows when he got enough. I learned my lesson but good. Fixer – you just give the boy with the golden arm his very lastest fix.’

‘What time you have to be by Schwiefka?’ Louie wanted to know.

Frankie brushed the hair, matted by drying sweat, off his forehead and glanced at his watch. Sweat had steamed the crystal, he couldn’t read the hands. He dried it on the bedcover, for his shirt was still wringing damp. ‘Nine-thirty – I got an hour and a half. I’ll make it.’

‘Crawl your dirty gut over to the table,’ Louie advised him. ‘Can you take coffee?’

Frankie thought it over carefully. ‘In a couple minutes,’ he decided. ‘Half a cup anyhow.’

‘You better,’ Louie counseled him, ‘you’re likely to get so hungry around one o’clock you won’t be able to steal enough for another fix.’

Louie busied himself over the little gas plate in the corner and didn’t look around till he heard the dealer move. Frankie was swaying but he was on his feet and he’d make it fine, all night. All night and maybe the whole week end. It was hard to tell with these joy-poppers. ‘That stuff cost me more than the last batch,’ he said indifferently.

‘I know,’ Frankie grinned, ‘you told me,’ sounding bored while he used a dish towel on his chest beneath the soiled undershirt. ‘Keeps goin’ up all the time, like a kite with the string broke off.’ His eyes were growing heavy, the towel slipped out of his fingers and caught under his arm, hanging there like a flag at half-mast. The junkies’ flag of truce, to guard him as he slept. There beneath a single bulb, flat on his feet, the knees bending a little, the slight body swaying a bit, the flat-bridged nose looking peaked. Hush: he is sleeping the strange light sleep.

‘I can’t help it when they up the price on me,’ Louie added. ‘They got me, Dealer, that’s all.’

‘The way you got me,’ Frankie murmured knowingly. Then he smelled the coffee, got down to the table in front of a cup, took one sip and, smiling softly, started to let his head fall toward his chest. Louie got the cup out of the way of that blond mop before it bent to the table.

‘Now look at him sleep, with all his woes,’ Louie teased him almost tenderly; and Frankie heard from a dream of falling snow.

The snow fell in a soft, suspended motion, as snow does in dreams alone. He coasted without effort around and around and down a bit and then up like that kite with the broken string and came coasting, where all winds were dying, back down to the table where Fixer sat waiting.

‘I got no woes,’ he laughed among slow-falling flakes, seeing Louie smiling through the snow. ‘You got a woe, Fixer?’ he asked. ‘It’s what I been needin’ – a couple good old secondhand woes.’

‘You’ll have a couple dozen if you ain’t boxin’ that deck by Schwiefka’s suckers in half an hour,’ Louie reminded him.

Frankie got the rest of the coffee down. ‘Squarin’ up, Fixer,’ he assured Louie. He held the cup out at arm’s length. ‘Look at that.’ Not a tremor from shoulder to fingertip. ‘The sheep ’r gonna get a fast shearin’ t’night, Fixer,’ he boasted with a strange and steady calm.

‘I think you’re one of the weaker sheep yourself,’ Louie decided silently.

She remembered the years of their courtship like remembering an alien land. Years of the white wafer of friendship broken on Boze Narodzenie and its brittle fragments (that broke, like so many friendships, at the touch) being passed from hand to hand across the straw-strewn tablecloth. Years of the soft and wild ancestral songs: ‘Chlopek’ sung in the evergreen’s light. And on the tree’s very top a single star to which all good children must say: ‘Gwizadka tam na niebie.’ A starlet there on the heavens. Feasts of Epiphany, when she and Frankie together had marked neighbors’ doorways with the letters that remembered ancestral kings, K, M, and B, with tiny crosses between; that neighbors on waking might remember how Kasper, Melchior and Balthasar had borne gifts to Bethlehem.

Years when everything was so well arranged. When people who did right were rewarded and those who did wrong were punished. When everyone, in the long run, got exactly what was coming to him, no more or no less. God weighed virtue and sin then to the fraction of the ounce, like Majurcek the Grocer weighing sugar.

Together she and Frankie had carried Easter lamb to Old St Stephen’s for Father Simon’s blessing – could it really be so long? How had they both forgotten God so soon? Or had God forgotten them? Certainly God had gone somewhere far away at just the time when she’d needed Him most. Perhaps He too had volunteered and just hadn’t gotten His discharge yet. Perhaps He had been a full colonel and still felt the need of keeping His distance. If He had been only a private, then He must have re-enlisted. Or else the world had gone wrong all by itself.

He had been closer on those far-gone forenoons when she and Frankie had followed the malt-hop trucks down the horse-and-wagon alleys of home, each with a tin can to catch the malt-dripping. That was forbidden drink, the trucks hauled it out to the farmers for pig food. But one morning she and Frankie had drunk from the same can and gotten as stewed, all by themselves, as any two twelve-year-olds in a West Side horse-and-wagon alley can get.

Yet even then Frankie’s indifference had tortured her. So free and easy he’d been, into their free-and-easy teens, in a way she herself could never be and not like a really decent fellow ought to be at all. As careless of her love as if it were something he could pick up in any old can just by following a malt-hop truck.

‘I never run for streetcars,’ he’d had the brassbound nerve to tell her the year she was seventeen, after standing her up for half an hour in front of the Pulaski. ‘What’s the use? There’s always another big red rollin’ along right behind. Just like you dames – soon as a guy misses with one all he has to do is look back over his shoulder ’n here comes another down the block pullin’ up for a fast pickup.’

‘I just won’t stand for that kind of talk,’ she’d told him flatly, stamping with rage. ‘I want you to be where you’re supposed to be when you’re supposed to be ’n dressed like you’re goin’ to the Aragon, not to shoot six-no-count pool by Wieczorek – that’s what I want.’

‘There’s people in hell want ice water too,’ he’d grinned at her. That unforgivable, careless grin that she couldn’t get out of her system and had to have all for herself and couldn’t ever quite seem to get all for her very own for keeps.

It had almost seemed at times that he didn’t really care what she thought in those years. When she’d reproach him for going with other girls he’d confirm anything she chose to suspect with that quick, confident grin. How could anyone make a fellow like that ashamed of himself? She didn’t know how. It hadn’t seemed to make any difference to him whether he dated a schoolgirl, a nurse, a dimwit, a shimmy dancer, a hillbilly, a married woman, an aging whore, a divorcee or just some poor tired trampie: he dated everything he saw in skirts and gave each the same corny play.

One afternoon he’d been promenading down Augusta Boulevard with some good-natured piece of trade who liked to say, ‘I was a lily of the valley in my time, now I’m just Lily of the Alley. Say – didn’t I turn out to be a beauty?’

Sophie had confronted him the very next morning with the fact that her very own father had seen him with the lily. For a moment Frankie hadn’t even seemed to remember. ‘Oh yeh,’ he’d recalled at last, ‘you mean Lily Splits. Yeh, sure, we lifted a few, we always do. Splits likes me. Well, I like Splits. Poor kid was born with one foot in a cathouse, I knew her when she first started travelin’ the bars. But you know she’s a funny little bum at that – they say she still won’t do it with two guys in the same room. What she really likes best is just clownin’ around.’

‘Is that all you were doin’ – clownin’ around?’

‘Not just clownin’ – Splits got her serious side too. Just like me. We were talkin’ on that Chester Shudefski – Shudefski from Viaduct not Shudefski by Whisky Taverns – you know, the real muscle-built one, not Old Uncle. That Shudefski, that was Splits’ fee-an-say, he was bartender by Widow Wieczorek then. When she went to see him she had to sit by the bar ’n have a double shot, all Widow served them days was doubles. Only Shudefski ratted on Splits, he went into the Marines. That wasn’t so good for Splits.’

‘Is that why she been livin’ off hard-boiled eggs ’n p’tato chips ever since?’ Sophie had wanted to know in her politest, most contemptuous tone.

‘That was it awright. She just kept comin’ by the p’tatochip bowl like Chester was still workin’ there.’

‘She ain’t come out yet.’

‘Oh yeh, she had to come out, her credit give out by Widow, she had to get on the wagon. She’s gettin’ on the wagon again one of these days.’

‘You think so? Wait till the first rainy day.’

‘Yeh,’ Frankie had conceded gloomily, ‘I think that’s what lots of people are waitin’ for: the first rainy day.’

She would grasp his throat in exasperation after he’d strung her along awhile like that, pretending to choke him and really wanting to hurt him. Only when she played that way her fingers would touch the short hairs on the back of his neck and weaken till the weakness spread back to her shoulders; while his own hands would grow so firm on the slope of her hips.

‘You’re my honey, I wouldn’t choke you really,’ she’d assure him weakly at last.

He had won every single one of those skirmishes though he’d been dead in the wrong every time. And each time she’d been so right, so terribly right. Till each defeat she suffered had aroused a secret need for the sort of vengeance that a certain sort of love requires.

For that had been the endless pity of it: she had loved the clown. She had loved him deep in that curtained corner of her mind where, unknown to herself, she had planned an ultimate reckoning.

It had been in that curtained corner, at last, that her mock pregnancy had been devised. Out of that false pregnancy their marriage had been forged.

Had it been because she had really wanted a baby so badly? Or had needed so to punish him? Her breasts had swollen, she had suffered morning sickness – and after five months had wound up the game by lying nine days with an icebag instead of a baby at her breast. Empty-breasted and empty-armed while other women nursed their young. And when he’d come to see her hadn’t reproached him once. It wasn’t necessary. She had read in his eyes the realization of what he’d done. ‘Don’t look sorry, Frankie – it wasn’t your fault,’ she’d told him. He had been too miserable to reply. He knew whose fault it had been all right.

That had been the first time she’d gotten underneath his indifference. The hook was in. She had never let go since. He had been sick with concern for her.

After that no one but her father had continued to remind her that Frankie really wasn’t good enough for her. ‘A bad child often lies in a good mother’s lap,’ was the way the old man had put it. And it was true that Frankie hadn’t even finished grammar school while she’d gone on to almost a full year of high. ‘A girl like you with a good Polish education,’ the old man had sought to shame her, ‘goin’ with a gambler – for shame, Zoshka. You tell him right out when he comes tonight he isn’t good enough for you with his dice and cards and pool shooting all day – what kind of a husband is that?’

Yet all Frankie had done that night, when she’d told him, like a dutiful daughter, just what Papa had said, was to twiddle his thumb playfully in her ear till she’d protested, ‘Get out of my clean ear!’ and the dice and card playing were forgotten. Between such idle play and her thousand superstitions – ‘Always hand beer to me wit’ your right hand. A fallin’ picture means deat” – they had drifted at last, one windy Saturday morning, into marriage at Old St Stephen’s.

‘He told me he loved me that night,’ she still liked to recall. ‘I remember.’ Cause I asked him.’

‘You would of kicked me out of bed if I hadn’t said yes,’ Frankie Majcinek might have replied.

Because, right off, it hadn’t felt like holy wedlock at all. He’d celebrated his wedding night by taking over the drums in a three-piece band hired for the occasion and getting blind drunk to follow. Wedlock hadn’t changed a thing. His love-making was still maddeningly casual, a sort of routine which she couldn’t feel was anything more than he’d had with too many lilies of the valley. Once he’d even had the brass-bound nerve to ask her, ‘What’d you rather do – go to bed ’r listen to me keep time on the tubs to the radio?’

‘Neither,’ she’d told him. But had chalked up one more in her book of grudges all the same. For when he gave her pride the back of his hand she no longer protested openly. After their marriage her anger raged silently.

If only he would have hit her so that they would have been able to make it all up in bed later. ‘If Jesus Christ treated me like you do I’d drive in the nails myself,’ she told him in her mind as, in a passion of frustration, she watched him dealing, eternally dealing.

She could draw neither anger nor hate from him – until the accident that had left her in the wheelchair.

‘He nailed me to the wood that night,’ she told her friend Violet.

‘We all got a cross to bear,’ Violet assured her, ‘I got Stash ’n you got Frankie.’

‘Wrong both times,’ Sophie contradicted her flatly. ‘My cross is this chair. I’m settin’ on my cross. All you have to do is send yours to work ’n you’re back on the ground. I’m nailed to mine.’

‘Sometimes I think them nails is in your head, honey,’ Violet decided, ‘you’re drivin’ ’em in yourself.’

‘A lot you got to holler anyhow,’ Sophie evaded the accusation, ‘callin’ your meal ticket a cross – if you want to get rid of Stash all you have to do is go to work yourself.’

‘Don’t say “work”,’ Violet reproached Sophie softly as though she’d heard an obscene word, ‘it’s the nastiest word I know -’ n I know ’em all.’

So it was forever Frankie who drove in the nails and always her own palms, already bleeding, that must receive them. And all so matter-of-factly, like having some absent-minded carpenter about the house. Never once did he seem to see, even dimly, how inwardly she bled.

And you couldn’t get him to Mass with wild horses any more. She even gave him his choice of even-hour or odd-hour Mass. But it seemed, either way, he still didn’t have the time. He’d have to figure the Monday morning line instead.

‘I’ll make a man of him yet,’ she’d boasted to Violet shortly before the accident, ‘just like that Jane Wyman done that time with some goof battlin’ the bottle worse’n Frankie. When I’m through wit’ him he won’t want to look at another deck ’r the inside of a whisky bar.’

She hadn’t made much of a job of it, she had to admit now. The only thing that had kept him near her had been the accident. The blessed, cursed, wonderful-terrible God’s-own-accident that had truly married them at last. For where her love and the Church’s ritual had failed to bind, guilt had now drawn the irrevocable knot so fiercely that she felt he could never be free of her again. Every time he came in stewed to the gills, with Sparrow holding him up by the belt, he’d mumble the minute he saw her waiting in the chair, ‘I’m no good. Here. Hit me.’ He would offer her his chin to hit. To make up for everything.

‘The only time I get a decent word out of him is when he’s stewed,’ she complained to Violet, ‘if he has to get stewed to realize what he done to me, let him get stewed every night.’

‘That goes to show his heart is right when he’s sober,’ Violet assured her.

‘I lost my taste for the booze the night Zosh got banged up,’ Frankie told the punk like confiding news of a secret disease.

A secret disease: the disease of his crippled joy. All those things which had once lent him pleasure were being soiled by a slow and cancerous guilt: the image of her waiting, night after night, who had so loved to dance and be with dancing people. He heard her lost laughter in that of any girl on the street below. ‘She don’t even laugh like she used no more,’ he realized with a pang.

When she sat napping, one arm resting on the wheelchair’s arm, he saw her index finger pointing its long red-tinted nail – even in sleep she accused him. And between the cards her eyes reproved him. All night long. Her face, as it once had been, returned to him like an extra queen packed into a fixed deck; with each new deal returning him, over and over and over again, to that August night when the photostated discharge in his pocket was only two months old. In a week when every tavern radio was blaring triumphantly of what a single bomb had done on the other side of the world.

They had been drinking at the Tug & Maul that night, with Owner serving something he called Antek’s A-Bomb Special, made simply by pouring triple shots instead of doubles into his glasses. It was almost time to go home and the barflies were pleading for just one more Special and just one more tune. Owner wouldn’t serve another but let the juke play one last sad bar of the final song of a world that had known neither A-bombs nor A-Bomb Specials.

While Antek’s own pallid eight-year-old scooped up the night’s last crumbs out of the potato-chip bowl.

‘Whose is that?’ Antek wanted to know, impatiently suspecting a practical joke too late in the evening. Between the juke and the 7-Up sign someone had abandoned a cracked crutch. It had struck Sophie so funny she’d wanted to buy Antek a shot on it.

‘Must be good whisky you’re sellin’, Owner,’ Frankie had flattered Antek. ‘They come in here on crutches ’n walk out by theirselves.’

‘Must be some guy got well on the horses,’ Antek decided, and bought both Frankie and Sophie a shot. So they bought him one back and by the time Antek went to turn off the back lights he was weaving so he could hardly find the switch and Frankie was so stiff he could hardly stay on the bar stool. Much too tight to worry about what fool or other had left a cracked crutch between a juke and a 7-Up sign. They were two doors down from their own doorway – but all of a sudden he had had to see ‘what the people ’r doin’ on Milwaukee’ and there was nothing to be done with him but to let him have his way.

So drunk that his head had fallen across the wheel in the late Ashland Avenue traffic – she grabbed once for the wheel and he shoved her off, mumbling some drunken singsong about ‘War’s over, war’s over, war’s over for Frankie – drives like he deals, deals like he lives ’n he lives all the time – war’s over, war’s over-’ Sophie cringed at the screech of metal upon metal as a northbound trolley pulled past and kicked his foot off the gas.

‘Pull over, goof, you scraped the trolley.’ He’d stepped on the gas and wheeled around the corner.

There hadn’t been any corner. They’d crashed into the light standard of the safety island, bounced over the broken base and slammed side-wise into a billboard offering everyone in Chicago a spanty-new paste-and-paper Nash.

In twenty seconds the abandoned Ashland Avenue midnight was thronging with sprouts who should have been in bed for hours and windows began blazing with light as if everyone had been sitting around in the dark just waiting for an accident to happen and here they came, lurching with age and skipping with youth, the lame, the sick and the lazy, the fearful, the cheerful and the tamed, recalling with laughter other local disasters – jostling, jumping and shoving with eagerness – all those for whom nothing had yet happened in the world shouting that it had happened at last, they’d always known it would happen sooner or later, that corner had always looked so unlucky.

Something had finally happened outside of the movies. Death in a blazing Chrysler or a blood-covered madman pinned to the pavement by a pair of poolroom bullies: madman, Chrysler, flash fire or a scoutmaster helping an old lady across the street, it was all one. Something had been made to happen in their lives at last.

Everything arrived in nothing flat. A fire-insurance patrol, the pulmotor squad, the hook-and-ladder boys – everything but an ambulance. Frankie and a nineteen-year-old in a staff sergeant’s uniform took over, hauling Sophie between them up and down the curb to nowhere, neither being certain who was giving the orders, while the crowd looked on admiringly at the military in action.

‘Artificial inspiration,’ Frankie explained to his audience and wouldn’t let anyone but the sergeant help him haul her about; till a stray cop, wandering out of the Safari to clear his head, nabbed the sergeant on sheer blind impulse.

‘Let’s see your papers, Sergeant.’

The soldier just didn’t have any papers. He didn’t even have a draft card.

‘I tawt you looked like some kind of spy awright,’ the cop announced, ignoring the leaning light pole, the bleeding woman and the fire department. ‘I’m gonna put you under the authority of the F.B.I.’

‘I got a draft card at home,’ the sergeant offered meekly, chastened at finding himself so heavily outranked.

‘Yeh – but where’s your license to drag this woman around at t’ree A.M.?’ He had spotted Sophie at last and could tell at a glance she was a woman. ‘You pushed her.’ The law had reached its verdict. The sergeant shook his head, No, No, he hadn’t pushed a soul. But the law wasn’t taking any such guff. ‘Who give you the right to shove a woman in front of a car anyhow – you married to her? Let’s see your license for that.’

‘This is just her boy friend,’ a helpful bystander offered, ‘that’s her husband settin’ on the curb holdin’ his dirty head. He tried to run the soldier down for datin’ his wife. Looks like an internal triangle to me. If you ask me they’re all three of them no good.’

‘Nobody asked you.’

Yet the law could see there was something to the story all right. Frankie sat on the curb with his army shoes in the gutter and his combat jacket ripped below the shoulder halfway to the overseas stripes below the elbow. Dabbing at his forehead with a handkerchief and wondering how to get the booze off his breath in a hurry.

‘You kids got a stick of gum?’ he whispered to two ten-year-old girls studying him placidly, both of them chewing like twin calves side by side. One came up with a single dirty stick, its wrapper long unpeeled, and offered it just out of Frankie’s reach.

‘Joosy Froot. Only cost you a nickel.’ Her accomplice nodded approvingly. ‘That stuff is pretty hard to get these days, mister.’

Frankie found a lone dime and when the girl had it safely in her hand she advised him further, in lieu of a nickel change, ‘You don’t have to worry about that stupid bull, mister. He’s as stiff as you are.’

‘He can fwisk you but he can’t search you,’ the other told him softly, with the softest lisp possible. ‘Don’t let him search you without a wawwant.’

The corner pharmacist brought Sophie around and slapped a bandage above Frankie’s right eye. When the wagon arrived to take the sergeant away for lack of papers Frankie was sober enough to get by by identifying himself and pleading the old tune: ‘Only two small beers, Officer, all I had. I’m a combat vet. Purple Heart. Good Conduct. Buddy of Captain Bednar by Saloon Street.’

While they waited for the ambulance the cop walked about, a wadded Tribune jutting out of his hip pocket, with the deliberate gait of any stewed flatfoot, around and around the battered car, slapping his big feet righteously up and down while the crowd grew and some newspaper joker took a flash-bulb photo of Sophie, stretched out on the wrinkled running board with somebody’s corduroy cap under her head, resting against the fender’s slope. The bulb burst, splattering glass for a dozen feet around, so that the pharmacist had to run back for more bandage and the cop had to run the photographer off, press card or no press card.

Yet the photographer remained, a small man in a raincoat almost dragging the ground, shivering with either humiliation or the cold early morning air. Pretending, on the border of the crowd, that he’d abandoned the idea of getting a close-up shot while furtively preparing another bulb. When the cop regarded him suspiciously once more he spoke up humbly, ‘I just like to watch.’ And inched up ever so little. ‘I’m neurotic, I like to get up close to accidents.’

A weak excuse.

It was half an hour before the ambulance arrived, the early morning trolleys were blocked halfway to North Avenue and everyone but Frankie and Sophie and the sergeant felt it had been well worth the trouble. The pharmacist and photographer, the cop, the audience, trolley conductors and motormen, all agreed tacitly that this had been a better summer night than most.

‘Not a bone broken,’ an intern had assured Frankie of Sophie’s condition. ‘Just shock.’ She was lying on the receiving-room table, eyes wide and pupils dilated. ‘Open the door,’ she asked in an oddly altered voice; the door to the long white corridor stood wide.

‘It is open, Zosh,’ Frankie told her, stepping close to her.

‘Open the door,’ she asked again, as though she had not heard and did not know who he was.

There was only one door to open. A closet door, and he opened it just to please her. Inside it, leaning against a wheelchair, stood a crutch with a cracked handle. He closed the door again softly. When the intern came in to look at her again she slept like one who hadn’t slept in weeks, without help of any drug at all.

Four mornings later she was back home and no worse for wear, apparently, except for a bluish wound on her lip, where she had bitten herself through the force of the smashup into the light pole and a tiny cut over her ear where the flash bulb had burst above her. Yet she did not seem to share Frankie’s elation at all. He’d gotten the super’s man, Zygmunt the Prospector, on the job and felt confident of beating any drunken-driving charge with which the Traffic Bureau might confront him.

‘You sore ’cause you didn’t get your back broke?’ he asked her. ‘You ought to be singin’ ’n you’re moonin’.’

‘I just don’t feel like it’s over, Frankie,’ she told him. ‘Last night I had a sleep warnin’ – my leg jerked ’n woke me up, it was a pre-motion, what they call it.’

‘So long as you’re feelin’ awright, what you got to holler?’ he wanted to know, and had hauled out the practice board against the time when he could afford a set of real traps of his own, quit Zero Schwiefka cold and go on the legit with a big-name band.

Listening to the light mechanical beat, it began to sound for the first time, to Sophie, like a hammer’s rapid tapping. When she’d closed her eyes his hammer went tap-tap-tapping down a thousand little bent rusty nails. She had had to clench her palms tightly to fight off the panic rising within her and when he’d looked up at her her eyes had had the same immovable stare they’d had on the receiving-room table.

It wasn’t till he’d stopped beating the board that that look had faded out and she had shuttered her eyes.

But he had known right then, however inadmissibly, that something had gone wrong with his Zosh.

Zygmunt, a man continually clutching, for one reason or another, at other men’s sleeves, had attended so many night schools in his early manhood that now, in his bustling middle age, he retained the pallor of his Kent College nights: the look of the downtown pavements after the rush-hour window-shoppers are doing all their window-shopping through the bright interiors of dreams. The light on his glasses seemed a reflection of the light of law-school chandeliers in those desperate days when he felt that if he didn’t pass the bar he’d be tending one the rest of his life. He looked like a man who had never seen a cloud.

He’d passed the bar, put out his shingle, won his first case in a blaze of patriotic oratory – and had been disbarred for representing conflicting interests three months later. Now he called himself a claim adjuster and had been known to reach a hospital ahead of the ambulance. Railroad brakemen, switchmen, ambulance drivers, nurses and interns beheld him with cries of sheerest joy. Only insurance men felt pain. Each year he gave precisely one thousand dollars worth of Christmas presents to railroad men and hospital attendants while the sour-looking insurance adjusters sent greeting cards in unsealed envelopes bearing half-rate postage.

‘Zygmunt does us poor people a big favor,’ one old contented cripple informed Frankie, ‘if it wasn’t for him I would of settled for fifty dollars ’n I would of been screwed cold. Zygmunt got fifteen hundred out of court ’n five hundred of it was all my own! It’s what I call a deed for Justice, what Prospector done for me that time. If he ever runs for coroner he got my whole family’s vote.’

The bruised, the cut, the fractured, the shocked, the maimed and the slightly frayed, all loved the Prospector with a deep, calm love. He was their Division Street Jesse James boldly defying the impersonal giants of the insurance trusts.

Zygmunt, in turn, loved the bruised, the cut and the frayed. He loved each sweet sufferer of them for all they were worth. What was more, he loved his country and, yet more ardently, the city that had given him his chance to serve mankind. ‘I’ll tell you what my ideal is,’ he told Frankie, ‘it’s to make Chicago the personal injury capital of the United States of America.’

He was well on his way toward achieving just that. Hustling down hospital corridors with a fountain pen at the ready and a legal retainer blank flying like the Stars and Bars at Bull Run, he brought news of new hope to those still under shock. It was those under shock, he had learned, in whom the true faith abided.

His tipsters gave him head starts to hospitals where doctors competed with nurses for the chance of making a ten-spot on the side. For it wasn’t always the easiest thing in the world to visit a victim still too woozy to know what had hit him. Yet as often as not Zygmunt got past the reception desk and out again without any hospital official knowing, officially, that he’d been prospecting the wards at all.

For the reception desks regarded ambulance chasing as some sort of felony or other and Zygmunt himself, at certain moments, wasn’t altogether too sure it might not turn out to be denounced as such on Judgment Day. Therefore he played it safe by hustling both sides of the street, the churches as well as the hospitals, and had more novenas to his credit than defrauded cripples. He kept the ledger balanced slightly in Heaven’s favor.

In the instance of Francis Majcinek vs. a city light standard his earliest concern was, ‘How much disability you get, Dealer?’

‘Twenty-five a month.’ Frankie had had the presence of mind to cut it down a bit.

‘In six months you’ll have me paid off. Sign here.’

Six months was exactly what it had taken. It would have taken longer had Frankie admitted to his forty-a-month disability. But fifteen of that was already going to Louie Fomorowski and a man had to keep his nose above water one way or another.

‘Just a couple lucky Polaks,’ Zygmunt congratulated Frankie and Sophie whenever he dropped in to collect his twenty-five and remind them that the drunken-driving charge had been dismissed and the light standard billed to the taxpayers at large. And clutched at Frankie’s sleeve when Sophie wasn’t looking.

‘I’ll say,’ Sophie would agree without heart. ‘If I get any luckier I’ll be the luckiest woman in the cemetery.’

For the second time Zygmunt collected she was in the chair.

On the night of V-J Day she had sat up in bed and shaken Frankie. ‘Wake up, honey. Somethin’s goin’ to happen.’ In the first faint light he had seen that her face was buttoned up like a locked purse – then something behind her eyes had shifted with fear as in those of a cornered cat’s.

‘It feels like air bubbles in my neck – honey, I feel so queer.’ She was trying to smile at him: an embarrassed, apologetic smile, not like her own smile at all. ‘I was dreamin’ about the accident, like in the car when we started tippin’-’

‘You must of been readin’ about that couple in the paper, their car caught fire.’

‘What happened to them?’ Her breath felt cut off. Her hands were crossed upon her throat and on the wall the luminous Christ glowed faintly above the clock. ‘I’m sweatin’ on my palms.’ She put one fat damp hand upon his own.

‘They were trapped, that’s all.’

‘Oh.’ With relief. Things that happened out of town never seemed to have happened to real people somehow. ‘But we didn’t,’ Frankie assured her hurriedly, turning toward her onto his side. That was the first time he had seen her breasts, full to the pink and rigid nipples, without feeling any attraction at all. ‘You got a headache?’ he asked.

‘I just feel sort of choky-like. Like I’m drinkin’ ginger ale I can’t taste.’

‘You want a real drink?’

‘No. It’s somethin’. Frankie’ – she paused as if it were too foolish to say – ‘I can’t get up.’

She tried to smile but the lips froze with a rising fright. He touched her knee. ‘A little charley horse is all you got.’ And massaged her legs gently while she braced herself by her elbows against the pillow.

‘I – I can’t feel you rubbin’ so good.’

‘Lay back ’n take it easy,’ he ordered her professionally, ‘your nerves is exhausted. I think that croaker missed a joint lookin’ you over.’

‘Don’t say “croaker,” honey. Say “Doctor.”’ She lay wide-eyed, looking up at the shadowed ceiling for some friendlier shadow there. ‘Frankie, if it was just somethin’ bust, wouldn’t it hurt like everythin’?’

‘Somethin’s bust awright,’ he decided. Not knowing quite what he meant by that himself.