The Man With the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren Read Free Book Online

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, withoutever 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