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

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, Ican 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