‘Let’s face facts, Frankie,’ Sparrow protested. ‘It wasn’t no tree. He just jumped up on the bar to avoid a disturbment was all. He knew it wouldn’t look dignified, a big fat hound like him lickin’ a poor skinny little old deaf-’n-dumb cat. That dog got real pride, Frankie. He won’t fight out of his weight when there’s no principle involved.’
‘If there’s no bowl of beer involved, you mean. That’s the only time I ever seen him show his teeth – when somebody took his dirty beer away.’
‘He got no teet’,’ Sparrow reminded Frankie, ‘they got dissolved in beer bubbles.’
‘You better start him the other way round again,’ Frankie suggested.
But Rumdum had given out, with one final windbreaking roar. He dropped the bottle at Frankie’s feet and stood looking up for a refill, his great bloodshot eyes swimming in the melancholy hope that only chronic alcoholics know.
‘He thinks you’re the bartender ’cause you got on a tie,’ Sparrow explained.
‘Take him up to the room,’ Frankie ordered, ‘I got to case out of here.’
Sparrow took off his glasses to see Frankie better. ‘Can’t I case out wit’ you, Frankie? Where you goin’?’ He hadn’t been left out of any fast hustle of Frankie’s since they’d been together. ‘Maybe I could help like before.’
‘Do like I said.’ Frankie’s knuckles shown whitely where he pressed them to his temples.
‘I don’t get what you’re salty about,’ Sparrow began – then gathered up Rumdum in both arms and shuffled out past Louie and Blind Pig.
‘The dealer ain’t hisself, that Zosh is stonin’ him too hard,’ he decided. ‘I’ll have to speak to her.’ Yet Frankie had been stoned up there before, hard and often, and had always been able to forget it in the back booth at Antek’s. ‘He don’t act like the booze helps him no more,’ Sparrow realized.
He waited in Frankie’s doorway, with the hound whining against his legs, without knowing just what he was waiting for. Frankie had told him what to do, it was up to him to do it.
As he turned toward the stairs he saw Frankie heading across the street toward the Safari.
Behind him Blind Pig waited on the curb for someone, anyone, to help him across.
Inadvertently Sparrow looked around for Fomorowski.
The clock in the room above the Safari told only Junkie Time. For every hour here was Old Junkie’s Hour and the walls were the color of all old junkies’ dreams: the hue of diluted morphine in the moment before the needle draws the suffering blood.
Walls that went up and up like walls in a troubled dream. Walls like water where no legend could be written and no hand grasp metal or wood. For Nifty Louie paid the rent and Frankie knew too well who the landlord was. He had met him before, that certain down-at-heel vet growing stooped from carrying a thirty-five-pound monkey on his back. Frankie remembered that face, ravaged by love of its own suffering as by some endless all-night orgy. A face forged out of his own wound fever in a windy ward tent on the narrow Meuse. He had met Private McGantic before: both had served their country well.
This was the fellow who looked somehow a little like everyone else in the world and was more real to a junkie than any real man could ever be. The projected image of one’s own pain when that pain has become too great to be borne. The image of one hooked so hopelessly on morphine that there would be no getting the monkey off without another’s help. There are so few ways to help old sad frayed and weary West Side junkies.
Frankie felt no pity for himself, yet felt compassion for this McGantic. He worried, as the sickness rose in himself, about what in God’s name McGantic would do tomorrow when the money and the morphine both gave out. Where then, in that terrible hour, would Private M. find the strength to carry the monkey through one more endless day?
By the time Frankie got inside the room he was so weak Louie had to help him onto the army cot beside the oil stove. He lay on his back with one arm flung across his eyes as if in shame; and his lips were blue with cold. The pain had hit him with an icy fist in the groin’s very pit, momentarily tapering off to a single probing finger touching the genitals to get the maximum of pain. He tried twisting to get away from the finger: the finger was worse than the fist. His throat was so dry that, though he spoke, the lips moved and made no sound. But Fomorowski read such lips well.
‘Fix me. Make it stop. Fix me.’
‘I’ll fix you, Dealer,’ Louie assured him softly.
Louie had his own bedside manner. He perched on the red leather and chrome bar stool borrowed from the Safari, with the amber toes of his two-tone shoes catching the light and the polo ponies galloping down his shirt. This was Nifty Louie’s Hour. The time when he did the dealing and the dealer had to take what Louie chose to toss him in Louie’s own good time.
He lit a match with his fingertip and held it away from the bottom of the tiny glass tube containing the fuzzy white cap of morphine, holding it just far enough away to keep the cap from being melted by the flame. There was time and time and lots of time for that. Let the dealer do a bit of melting first; the longer it took the higher the price. ‘You can pay me off when Zero pays you,’ he assured Frankie. There was no hurry. ‘You’re good with me any time, Dealer.’
Frankie moaned like an animal that cannot understand its own pain. His shirt had soaked through and the pain had frozen so deep in his bones nothing could make him warm again.
‘Hit me, Fixer. Hit me.’
A sievelike smile drained through Louie’s teeth. This was his hour and this hour didn’t come every day. He snuffed out the match’s flame as it touched his fingers and snapped the head of another match into flame with his nail, letting its glow flicker one moment over that sieve-like smile; then brought the tube down cautiously and watched it dissolve at the flame’s fierce touch. When the stuff had melted he held both needle and tube in one hand, took the dealer’s loose-hanging arm firmly with the other and pumped it in a long, loose arc. Frankie let him swing it as if it were attached to someone else. The cold was coming up from within now: a colorless cold spreading through stomach and liver and breathing across the heart like an odorless gas. To make the very brain tighten and congeal under its icy touch.
‘Warm. Make me warm.’
And still there was no rush, no hurry at all. Louie pressed the hypo down to the cotton; the stuff came too high these days to lose the fraction of a drop. ‘Don’t vomit, student,’ he taunted Frankie to remind him of the first fix he’d had after his discharge – but it was too cold to answer. He was falling between glacial walls, he didn’t know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-colored walls of Private McGantic’s terrible pit.
He couldn’t feel Louie probing into the dark red knot above his elbow at all. Nor see the way the first blood sprayed faintly up into the delicate hypo to tinge the melted morphine with blood as warm as the needle’s heated point.
When Louie sensed the vein he pressed it down with the certainty of a good doctor’s touch, let it linger a moment in the vein to give the heart what it needed and withdrew gently, daubed the blood with a piece of cotton, tenderly, and waited.
Louie waited. Waited to see it hit.
Louie liked to see the stuff hit. It meant a lot to Louie, seeing it hit.
‘Sure I like to watch,’ he was ready to acknowledge any time. ‘Man, their eyes when that big drive hits ’n goes tinglin’ down to the toes. They retch, they sweat, they itch – then the big drive hits ’n here they come out of it cryin’ like a baby ’r laughin’ like a loon. Sure I like to watch. Sure I like to see it hit. Heroin got the drive awright – but there’s not a tingle to a ton – you got to get M to get that tingle-tingle.’