The Man With the Golden Arm Read Free Page B

livin’.’
    Frankie hadn’t troubled to write anyone until he began coming out of the fog into which an M.G. shell had put him: on his back in an evacuation hospital with a daylong aching from shrapnel buried in his liver for keeps. He’d gotten off a shaky V-mail telling Sophie he was coming home.
    Sophie had put the letter on Antek the Owner’s bar mirror, among other wives’ V-mails. The night that Sparrow read it there all the cockiness which association with Frankie had lent him, and Frankie’s absence had taken away, returned. Dealer was coming home.
    ‘Guys who think they can rough me up, they wake up wit’ the cats lookin’ at ’em,’ he had immediately begun warning everyone. And spat to emphasize just how tough a Division Street punk could get.
    He had looked forward to watching Frankie’s bag of corny card tricks once more. All the tricks of which he had never tired; as Frankie’s Sophie had so long ago tired of them all. As Frankie had so long ago tired of showing them to her; yet had never wearied of revealing them, the same ones over and over, for Sparrow’s ever-fresh amazement.
    ‘That’s one Hebe knows how bad it can get,’ Frankie sometimes explained their friendship obscurely, ‘knows how bad it can get ’n knows how good it can be. Knows the way it used to be ’n how it’s gettin’ now. I’d trust him with my sister all night. Provided, of course, she wasn’t carryin’ more than thirty-five cents.’
       
    Frankie could never acknowledge that he squinted a bit. ‘If anythin’ was wrong with my peepers the army wouldn’t of took me,’ he argued, ‘the hand is quicker than the eye – ’n I got a very naked eye.’ Yet he sometimes failed to see a thing directly beneath that same very naked eye. ‘Where’sthe bag?’ he would ask. ‘Under your nose, Dealer,’ someone would point out. ‘Well, there’s suppose to be six bucks in it,’ he’d explain as if that, somehow, were why he hadn’t seen it right away.
    He squinted a bit now, in the cell’s dim light, with the ever-present deck in his hand. ‘I can control twenty-one cards,’ he boasted to Sparrow. ‘If you don’t believe me put your money where your mouth is. I’ll deal six hands ’n call every one in the dark. Name your hand. You want three kings? Okay, here we go, you get what you ask for. But watch out, punk – that hand beside you is flushin’ ’n that bird with nothin’ but an ace showin’ is gonna cop with three concealed bullets.’ And that’s how it would be whether he was showing off in a cell or in the back booth of Antek Witwicki’s Tug & Maul Bar.
    ‘I give a man a square shake till he tries a fast one or talks back to me,’ he warned the punk. To hear him tell it Frankie Machine was pretty mean. ‘When I go after a wise guy I don’t care who he is, how much he’s holdin’ – when you see me start pitchin ’ ’em in, then you know the wise guy is gettin’ boxed.’ Sparrow nodded. He was the only hustler on Division Street who still believed there was anything tough about Frankie Machine. The times he had seen Frankie back down just didn’t count for Sparrow.
    ‘What you got to realize in dealin’ stud is that it’s just like drill in the army –’ n the dealer’s the drill sergeant. Everybody got to be in step ’n stay on their toes ’n there can’t be no back talk or you got no harmony left – I’m good with a cue because that’s in the wrist too. Used to get fifteen fish for an exhibition of six-no-count. No, they never put my picture on the wall but I lived off the stick three months all the same when the heat was on ’n that’s a lot of hustlers can say.’
    It was more than Frankie could say too. He would havestarved in those three months if it hadn’t been for Sophie’s pay checks. And although Sparrow was seldom allowed to forget, for long, what a mean job that of an army drill sergeant was, Frankie’s report was still hearsay: he’d put in