The Man With the Golden Arm (8 page)

‘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
ho
tel stuff.’

‘Oh boy, that
ho
tel 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.