The Man With the Golden Arm (30 page)

‘When I get out I’ll be straight as a cue,’ n Molly-O’ll be so proud we’ll stick together the rest of our lives ’n everythin’ on the legit,’ Frankie assured himself.

And meant every word of it, too.

It was during that loneliest of all jailhouse hours, the hour
between chow time and Lights-On, when empty pie plates stand in a double row, one or two before each cell waiting for a trusty to return them to the kitchen. Those within the cells slept the uneasy evening sleep till a buzzer sounded a measured warning and the sleepers wakened. Then all said at once that there, out there, just the other side of the green steel door, the snickerers were coming in. To accuse someone of everything and almost everyone of something and snicker at everyone in between.

A holiday air seemed suddenly to festoon the tier, as if a play for which all had rehearsed many times was to have an audience on the other side of the footlights at last. No one seemed worried about catching a finger out there. Everybody was in on a bad rap so how could anyone get fingered?

Already the snickerers were waiting restlessly, in darkened rows, to identify the man who’d slugged the night watchman and the one who’d snatched the purse through the window of the moving El; for he who’d chased somebody’s virgin daughter down a blind alley or forged her daddy’s signature; tapped a gas main or pulled a firebox; slit the janitor’s throat in the coalbin or performed a casual abortion on the landlord’s wife in lieu of paying the rent. All the things that had to be done to help someone else out of a jam. The little things done in simple fun and the big things done for love.

The snickerers were really too serious-minded. They suspected everybody and helped no one; they were afraid of one another and had almost no fun at all.

Frankie, offstage among other bit players, heard the voice of the evening’s star and caught glimpses of that noble brow whenever the door opened and shut: Record Head Bednar lowering the mike to question a cap the color of any district-station corridor above a shirt broken out with blood spots.

‘What you cuffed for?’ Record Head longed to know.

‘Took a cab home was all,’ Frankie heard Blood-Spots explain.

‘That’s no crime. Did you pay the driver?’

‘I couldn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘He wasn’t in the cab.’

‘That’s the chances you take. Next man.’

The mike was moved before an old hallroom boy who stepped forward as proudly as a newly appointed ward committeeman at a politician’s banquet, quavering importantly.

‘Now I realize the true wort’ of friendship – if a man has friends that’s all he needs.’

‘You weren’t looking for friends with a nine-inch file in a dentist’s office. You were prospecting.’

‘I’m a maintenance engineer at Thompson’s.’ As if that explained the file.

‘You mean you have charge of the doughnuts?’

‘I got a good record there.’

‘You got a good one here too.’ The captain waved the charge sheet before the mike and passed on to the next funny fellow.

‘Back so soon, Julius?’

‘
Back?
I ain’t even been
gone.
’

‘Silly Willie here hustles schoolboys out of their lunch money with phony dice,’ Record Head explained and returned his attention to Julius. ‘What were you carrying a pistol for?’

‘For pertection.’

‘Protection from who? Those seventh-graders?’

‘I brought it back from the service.’

‘How long were you in?’

‘Thirty-eight days.’

‘How many times were you wounded?’

Julius permitted himself a derisive little one-sided smile,
faintly contemptuous of all non-combatants, and let the listeners wait.

‘Okay,’ Record Head forgave him impulsively, ‘we’ll lock up the officer who pinched you. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Then we’ll give you back the gun and an extra box of shells if you promise not to sue the city. Promise?’

‘Suits me fine.’

It suited Julius fine.

As the first line was led off the line behind the green steel door inched up a few feet and Frankie stood with a backstage view of the rows where, here and there among the listeners, a police badge glistened and all faces were dark and featureless. While upon the stage all faces were lined up under a glare that brought out every wrinkle, pimple and scar. A girl in plaid slacks was being urged forward by a police matron. Casting her eyes downward, the black arrows of the girl’s lashes became dipped in two great tears.

‘Save it for the jury, Betty Lou,’ the captain counseled her and turned to the listeners. ‘This is the slickest little knockout broad in seventeen states. How come you always pick on married men, Betty Lou?’

Betty Lou lifted the long damp lashes: the eyes held a wry and mocking light.

‘They’re the ones who don’t sign complaints,’ she explained softly. And gave the audience a hard profile.

So the men came on again: the ragged, crouching, slouching, buoyant, blinking, belligerent, nameless, useless supermen from nowhere. ‘For climbin’ a telephone pole at t’ree
A.M
. wit’ a peanuts machine on my back.’ ‘For makin’ anon’mous phone calls to call my wife dirty names.’ ‘Twice as big a crowd as here ’n a woman picked on me.’ ‘Went upstairs with a girl ’n came down with a cop.’

A shock-haired razorback with a bright Bull Durham string
hanging over his shirt pocket’s edge: ‘Just throwed a rock at a wall ’n it happened to go through a window instead. So I followed through. But I didn’t have no
in
tent of stealing.’

‘You never have. But you’re in and out like a fiddler’s elbow all the same. What was the stretch in the Brushy Mountain pen for?’

‘I got the wrong number was all.’

‘I think you did. The wrong house number.’

‘That’s right. The people were home. I was drinking pretty heavy.’

‘What do you do when you’re drinking light?’

‘Mind my own business.’

‘You haven’t got any business. For a quarter you’d steal the straw out of your mother’s kennel.’

The razorback tossed his tawny shock and his face in that light looked tawny too. ‘What I’d do for a quarter you’d do for a dime.’ And held the captain’s gaze to prove it.

Record Head’s heart felt suddenly as if it were beating without love for any man at all. The finger of accusation leveled at him so steadily by a shock-haired boy revived in him the dream in which he was the pursued.

‘How’d you like it in the pen?’ he asked in old routine.

‘I didn’t.’

‘Why not? Wouldn’t the warden give you his job?’ That was always the answer to
that
one. They always stepped into it the same way.

Yet the light titter of lip laughter that followed, as it was always so sure to follow, didn’t fill the emptiness down the dry well of the captain’s heart. He listened to the next youth, an epileptic in a dark green wool sweater and a stocking cap, without really hearing the boy’s words at all.

‘Just havin’ fun with a little girl – I was in Dixon but my old man got me out, I was gettin’ worse. When I fool around a little I get better.’

‘Well,’ the captain thought absently, ‘we all feel better if we fool around a little’ – and caught himself up sharply. ‘I need a rest is all,’ he decided, and forgave himself uneasily.

As he could not forgive one of those up there under the lights.

‘A friend of mine went to sleep and I took his money before somebody else did.’ ‘For unbecoming words to a lady, I think it’s called.’ ‘For tryin’ to talk a friend out of trouble – he was settin’ in a patrol wagon, I told him to come out of there, so they put me in with him.’ ‘Went down to the West Side to round up bums for a labor gang ’n got picked up for one myself.’ ‘Picked up at an unreasonable hour.’

Of late all hours to the captain seemed unreasonable. ‘I know you,’ he thought cunningly of all outlaws. ‘I know you. I know you all.’

Till the next line’s shadows came on, and the outlaws followed their shadows.

Followed their shadows into the glare; and left the glare once more to shadows.

It made the captain want to shield his own eyes; for a moment he looked ready to cup his head in his hands. ‘The old boy is drivin’ himself as hard as he’s drivin’ the bums,’ Frankie thought with a certain malice. Then the glare hit his own eyes.

A glare that made any man look like a plastic job with a prefabricated expression grafted on, according to some criminologist’s graph or other, to fit the crime of which the captain’s charge sheet had him accused: here was a pickpocket’s deadpan mask and here a shoplifter’s measured manner. Here the brutal lines of the paid-in-full premeditated murderer and there the coneroo’s cynical leer.

Yet the man behind the murderer’s mask was under the lights for stealing a bushel of mustard greens and the coneroo’s
leer had been picked up for oversleeping in a Halsted Street hallway.

‘Why you living on Skid Row?’

‘’Cause I’m on the skids. That’s plain enough.’

And the black and bitter orange of the brownskin buck’s sweater standing out so strongly and strangely against the fluffy white and pale blue of the aging white beside him.

The listeners watched the captain survey the next man, up and down, head to toe and back again, to ask at last: ‘Where’s your shoes, boy?’

‘Left ’em in the tavern.’

‘Hadn’t there been a fight in there?’

‘Lord, there’s always a fight in
there.
’

‘Then you know the place.’

‘Sure. I hang in there.’

‘Where? On a hook?’

‘No. By the bar. I preach salvation there.’

‘Where were you ordained?’

‘I just have a local preacher’s license.’

‘How do you get one of those?’

‘You have to see the pastor and the deacon.’

‘How about the precinct captain?’

‘He’s in jail.’

‘I think that’s where you get most of your philosophy yourself.’

‘That’s where I took up the ministry all right.’

‘Can’t you preach salvation with your shoes on? Is that some Hindu cult out there says you have to take off your shoes?’

‘No, sir. I was collectin’.’

‘But couldn’t you collect with your shoes
on
?’ The captain sounded determined.

‘It was my shoes I was trying to collect.’

The captain leaned forward, steadied his head with both
hands and pleaded as if already fearing the reply: ‘Just tell me one thing –
who
had your shoes?’

‘Why, the precinct captain, of course. That’s what I been tryin’ to tell you.’

The captain shook his head with the melancholy manner of any man who knows he can’t win and motioned wearily for the mike to be moved on.

‘Next man, what for?’

‘For standin’ by watchin’.’

‘Watchin’
what?
’

‘The officers linin’ up the boys on Thirty-first Street.’

Bednar took a moment to raise himself slowly onto his toes to make certain that this one was wearing sandals or any sort of footwear at all. ‘I don’t want to go through
that
again,’ he cautioned himself aloud. ‘They lined you up too?’

‘One of the officers called me “boy” and I told him I was a man so I had to come along.’

‘The milk’s still wet behind your ears, a boy is all you are. But you’ll be Joliet-bound before they’re dry ’n they’ll make a man of you there. Next.’

‘I’m accused of rape.’

‘How old was that child?’

‘Thirty-seven. She volunteered her services.’

‘She volunteer her ring and watch too?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What a man. Weren’t you the one who was in here last August for assaulting your baby?’

‘That’s some misidentity. All that happened was I dropped the lid when the Mrs slugged me with the fuel-oil can.’

‘What about that gun charge in 1944? Was that “some misidentity”?’

‘I was a janitor then ’n had to protect myself from tenants.’

‘Making you a janitor is like putting an automobile thief in
charge of a parking lot. You’re the biggest misidentity ever walked in shoe leather.’

The captain’s eyes went down the line. The masks were managing to change, slowly and ever so slyly, to look less like plastic men and more like some plastic zoo: animals stuffed for some State Street Toyland the week before Christmas. Here was the toothless tiger and here the timid lion, here the bull that loved flowers and there some lovelorn moose.

The toothless tiger stood in a faded yellow hat from some long-faded summer, his stripes blurred by the city jungle’s dust and sprayed blood dried on the hat’s stiff brim: but still trying to look like a tiger. It always seemed some long-faded summer for those who lived in that feral glare under one hard straw kelly or another; or any old hat at all.

‘My buddy hit me wit’ a Coca-Cola bottle,’ the toothless tiger explained, ‘so I bust his plate-glass window.’

‘You’re mixed up with so many busted windows you ought to join the fire department. Ever do time?’

‘Just a week once, for robbery.’

‘Only a
week?
’

Frankie had to crane his head to get a glimpse of this one. For every time the audience snickered Frankie snickered too. He’d have to remember all the things these fools said to tell Molly-O some day.

‘It was just a small robbery.’

The captain’s eyes besought the darkened rows for help but the rows only looked back at him bleakly. Till the next odd fish stood forth.

‘Officers don’t like my looks is all. I sell strictly American merchandise and don’t have no complaints.’

‘If they don’t complain it’s because they’re ashamed to admit buying the stuff. You sneak up and offer them phony jewelry as if it were hot stuff,’ the captain accused him.

‘It ain’t phony, it’s American-made,’ the coneroo begged off.

‘Well,’ the captain pondered, ‘you been acting funny since 1919 and most of the cops who used to arrest you are dead. How’d you beat that federal rap? You must have had a good lawyer.’

‘No lawyer at all.’

‘Who prepared the writ?’

‘Another con. He shuffled off a little time for me.’

A nerve tugged suddenly at the captain’s left wrist as if someone unseen were trying to cuff it to the mike. ‘You another one of them window smashers?’ he asked the boy in the black-and-white lumber-jack.