Walking home with Sparrow where the long arc-lamp shadows slanted across the snow-wet walk, as on any lost corner at 4 A.M., they heard a switch engine’s burdened coughing.
‘Trying to get up steam,’ Sparrow whispered as confidentially as if he had just had it straight from the engineer.
But to Frankie Machine it sounded more like a man trying to cough with a thirty-five-pound monkey on his back. One breath to the second, no more and no less, as the hairy little paws tightened about his shoulders to get set for just one more ride. Under the shoulders, deep in the stomach’s pit, some tiny muscle like a small cold claw probed upward toward his heart, didn’t quite reach it and contracted again, leaving the heart fluttering with anxiety for the whole stomach to turn over: he retched, wanted to vomit and had nothing to vomit at all. That small cold claw would reach again, in its own good time, as mechanically as he himself could shuffle a cold deck at will. It would reach. It would get there and he’d fight it down.
It was just so damned hard to fight alone, that was all, with so little to fight for. A half pint of good whisky would keep it down until he could get to sleep; but only for an hour. Then he’d waken and no whisky would do him good in that hour. He’d need Molly-O to hold him then. It would be Molly-O or a quarter-grain fix, he’d never make it alone.
Every time he got sick lately it seemed the damned punk was on his heels, staring at him through those foggy glasses, trying to pretend he didn’t know a junkie when he saw one. Why didn’t the little chiseler speak out?
At the corner of Damen and Division he turned abruptly on Sparrow. ‘Which way you goin’?’ Just like that.
‘Why – home, Frankie. Same as you.’
‘You tellin’ me where I’m suppose to go now?’
Sparrow saw Frankie’s face then, peaked with suffering in the arc lamp’s feeble glow, and wanted to help and didn’t know how and didn’t want to understand.
‘I got business.’ Frankie let him have the edge of the knife turning in his breast. ‘Case out.’
Twice now within the week Frankie had turned on him like this, he was beginning almost to expect these sudden changes, meaningless and swift. With no further word the punk turned, feeling there was no place for him in any joint on Division Street, nor in the whole wide world, without Frankie Machine.
Shuffling down the shadowed street, Sparrow hoped a squadrol would pick him up just so that he could feel, for ten minutes, that he was going somewhere. He wanted to feel walls and safety about him, needed to be inside something. Frankie had been his wall and the wall was gone, leaving him as defenseless as he had been in the years before he’d hooked up with the dealer. When he reached Paulina he realized Frankie must be kidding, wanting to teach him a lesson for something, making him walk just to see how far he’d go before looking back – Frankie would be standing there waving to him to come back and get shoved around, pretending he was mad about something – Sparrow turned with swift hope.
But no one waved in the arc lamp’s feeble glow for any punk’s returning.
No one stood waiting under any arc lamp for any lost sparrow at all.
Something tugged just hard enough at her foot to waken her; the army blanket had fallen across her toes. Yet she sensed a secret message in being awakened so: someone was trying to tell her she must not sleep tonight.
Down both sides of Division Street the occasional arc lamps burned and it was late, so late, there should be a light step on the long dark stair and someone to cry out that the night was too long.
And come up to wheel her a little while.
Whatever time it was, he was long past due. Unless there were two kinds of time in the world these days: Gamblers’ Time and Cripples’ Time and cripples must now set their watches by gamblers.
All her life, it seemed in this winter hour, he’d been standing her up somewhere. This time would count against him like the others, not one time would be forgotten. He’d go to purgatory with what he had done to her on his soul and she’d sit there then just as she sat here now. He wouldn’t be getting rid of her in the hereafter, if there were any sort of justice at all, any easier than he could get rid of her on West Division. And wondered cloudily how she’d get the chair into purgatory. It would be shipped right along with her best clothes, she supposed, and the Special Dispensation showing she really didn’t belong in purgatory herself, she was just there to make sure that that Frankie Majcinek paid off.
‘He’s fixed me so’s I can’t have no kid,’ she pitied herself for the thousandth time, ‘that counts against him just as much as if he’d killed somebody. He got to be fait’ful now ’r he won’t even get as high as purgatory,’ she assured herself confidently, and a twinge of perverse pleasure took her, twisting her lips into a loose and sensual line. ‘A man just got to stick by a wife who can’t stand on her own two feet five minutes at a time,’ she felt with the same sense of a long-stale triumph.
For if she’d made a secret bargain with herself, in that darkened corner of the mind where all such bargains are made, she would stand by the deal. She was bound now by it as irrevocably as Frankie was bound to her and she was bound to the chair: she would not now return to that corner except in dreams. Not to that curtained hide-out, not to that secret place. She had gone to that bookie in the brain where hustlers’ hearts pay off to win, place or show. She had bet her health on a long one and waited each night to be paid off in her turn.
A door slammed downstairs and the Jailer’s voice, heavy with sleep, called down irritably, ‘No rooms! Too early! Go by Wieczorek and sleep on pool table!’
But still no hand on the door below. No step on the long dark stair.
Nor ever yet had wondered why she dreamed, so often with the same deep dream, of a distant cousin, a girl of nineteen who had died in Sophie’s childhood. She saw Olga in a nun’s habit walking down a long white corridor. It was night, the whole great hospital was stilclass="underline" only the faint sweet smell of anesthetics and the sound of the nun’s slippered tread. Sophie saw the girl, all in white and immeasurably far away, as though looking through a minifying lens. The lens turned in her dreaming brain, a narrow dark door opened and her own face, like a face seen under water, the eyes wide and brimming with joy: ‘Olga! Honey! Look! I’m on my feet again!’ She was crying for happiness in that dark door and wakened with a sob breaking like a small bone in her throat.
Then the sense of loss that deepened as wakefulness widened, till the whole world seemed one great room wherein she had lost something long ago, something so dear, so dear. ‘Why should I worry?’ she asked herself suddenly, with a certain self-derision. ‘I got mine.’
That was, seemingly, true enough. She had got exactly what she had wanted more than anything else in the world. Frankie Majcinek. Had him forever and for keeps and all for her very own. For there was no other place in the world for him, since the accident, save this one small furnished room. So now it was time to feel her victory in her heart, sweeter than all the dances she had missed through that perverted victory.
Then why did it feel as though the all-night movies had all been emptied, why did it feel they must be showing broken reels to empty rows and that the all-night bakery fires had gone out: that the loaves would grow cold and mold slowly to dust in ten thousand rusting stoves?
Why did it feel so late, so late that she would never get there in time after all?