Entrapment and Other Writings by Nelson Algren Read Free Book Online Page A

night. Hadn’t had me a drop all day nor a woman all the week. Feeling good too I was and knowing I could win, and weighed myself in feeling high as any lark.
    It weren’t till the night and the great lights comin on in the streets, and the little sign-lights in between beginnin their flickerin off and on, and everythin else gettin dark again, like the only way I remember Cork, as though nothing might ever be light again. Then I sat alone in the hotel room recalling what a fool I been all my days, and what foolish things I’m still after doin. The foolish women always in my way, the foolish drink and all. And all the while the great night comin on the other side of the little window. And the foolish way I’ve wasted my strength on those streets.
    What small difference could it make after all then, I asked myself, did myself or this I-talian lad win tonight? I asked it out loud, being there so alone by myself, and it seemed in that moment there was no other human voice in that whole great hotel. Nor anythin quite human on the street below. Nor in that whole great city. And how my own mother no longer cared in her heart, as she used to when I was a child in Cork and her only one, did I die on the street this very night.
    And the whole great city I’d never been in before and nobody in it any longer knowin or carin. And my own manager, for all I could tell, bettin my own money against me, and me with no certain way of finding him out for sure. I looked then once at myself in the cracked dresser mirror. And even to myself then, I saw I looked like a ragged stranger. The unclane kind you send his ways before he finishes his whimperin just for the very foul look of him. And none of them, not even Sol Singer, knowin the sort of thing I wanted the whole time. And myself with no real way of showing them at all.
    It was a sort of place I wanted, all my own mind you, a kind of a room I must have been inside of, one time or another far back, a very small sort of room it must have been and I a very small sort of child. For I first recall wishing to be back within it with mother, when we were yet in Cork. A small room, surely, quiet in there and warm, withno small sign-lights going on and off in the street below. And no way of getting dark in there as though nothing at all could be light again.
    Surely it was only for the wanting of such a place that I loved the drink instead. It would take four good preliminaries in New York, Sol would say, and me in the best shape of my career, to pay the rent of a month of such a place as often as I told him I wanted, the best way I could tell him. And how it was all he could do to keep getting me on once or twice a month at White City. Had he just not brought me along that fast, had it just not been for the drink and that holy-talkin Marge, perhaps then I might well have gotten those New York fights and even won them too. Then I would have set up in contracting with the old man, I should of clane forgot the drink. I should of set with my feet on the desk like Judge Costello hisself and never be after gettin my mouth bust open of a Monday night off some Chicago Av’noo Polack for twelve dollars and expenses, just because a crowd likes to see an Irishman take it. I would’ve got myself married to some quiet sort from around St. Columbanus. But no one like that holy Marge—how is a man supposed to respect a woman he has his own way with all the time, any night of the week, every night he has nothing to do and time on his hands, in the park or the fun-house at Riveriew or out at Danceland when they dim the lights? I had my way with Marge the first night ever I seen her, up at the Merry Gardens it was, and many’s the night since I’ve wished I’d not gone dancin that night. The very righteous way she’d carry on about gettin married and all, when all I wanted was peace and quiet and some little way of livin, of gettin along just from day to day without gettin my puss bust in of a Monday. But she