Rumdum, jealous of Molly’s arms about Frankie, padded up and put his head on Frankie’s knee and Frankie caressed the big ugly muzzle absent-mindedly.
Molly wouldn’t let him go.
‘If you want that girl to get well you ain’t going to do it by gettin’ as sick in the head as she is. It’s what you’re doin’ every single time you pay off Louie to use that dirty hypo on you-’
‘It ain’t just that, Molly, it’s that lead I got in my gut, it still hurts sometimes.’
She shoved him away from her. ‘Don’t give me that Purple Heart romance. It’s nothin’ of the kind ’n you know it. If things were right with you you wouldn’t be runnin’ to Louie because you got a pain in the belly. You’re runnin’ over there because you get to thinkin’ the whole thing is all your fault, that you smashed her up on purpose. She’s got you lyin’ to yourself, Frankie. You got to believe that that girl was wrong before the accident and the accident was just somethin’ that could have happened to anybody who’d had one too many.
‘It happens every day, there wasn’t anythin’ special about yours – you think your accident was like made in heaven? Can that bull. It was made right down at the Tug & Maul at the bottom of a whisky glass ’n you better start pickin’ up the pieces ’n start livin’ again with what’s left over. If she don’t want to put the pieces together for herself you got to do it for yourself.’
Her hand, with its wrist as thin as a child’s, lay firmly upon his own.
‘Things have sure went to hell on a handcar since the accident,’ he acknowledged.
‘Were they ever the way they should be between you ’n Zosh? Before the accident, Frankie. That’s somethin’ I got to know.’
He shook his head. No. It never had been. It hadn’t ever been right. ‘She never trusted me.’ He’d brought it out at last, avoiding Molly’s eyes.
‘Look at me. You think I can?’
It had been a long time since Frankie had looked at anyone steadily. How could he expect anyone to trust him who could not trust himself?
‘I always trusted you, Frankie, from way back. I trust you now.’
‘I trust you too, Molly-O,’ he said mechanically, and she let his eyes go at last. She unbuttoned his field jacket, he looked so warm, and tripped the knot of the little blue jazzbow about his throat like tripping the knot which held his innards so tightly of late. He felt the knot within loosen with the realization that he could talk straight to somebody at last.
For how does any man keep straight with himself if he has no one with whom to be straight? He had never fully trusted Sparrow, the punk thought too fast for him. In their world of petty cheats, phony braggarts, double clockers, elbow sneaks, small-time chiselers, touts and stooges and gladhand-shakers, one had always to be on guard. He had been on his guard since the day he’d been chiseled out of two steel aggies back of the Mc Andrew School, when he was nine. He had been on guard with everyone since and with Sophie most of all. He had a blurred, reasonless conviction now that, somehow, it had been she who had stolen his two steel aggies, never to be replaced.
She’d never given his aggies back. He lost them anew to her every day. Well, let her keep them then, let her keep everything. Let it be as she said, all his fault, and let him go at last. He felt an almost animal-like yearning to let his guard down and take all the blows there were in the world till there were no blows left: to sink under them in utter weariness into sleep and wake up being the real Frankie Majcinek. The Frankie who was straight with himself as he was with the world. The Frankie he had never been.
To sleep a bit in this small room and waken to see the curtain flutter and feel a trust of all things near. To sleep so long, on this small woman’s olive breast, feeling her trust of him binding him like her arms, that he would waken to become what Molly once had glimpsed in him. What she knew he yet might be.
He had never been trusted. He had never trusted himself. The thought of being trusted hit him like a double shot on an empty stomach. He wasn’t ready for anyone’s trust. He had been too long trained in wariness to drop his guard that low. That low, and that fast.
Wary of all straight answers. On all the backstreets of home he had learned how a straight answer could land a man in the lockup while the boy with the quickest lie stayed on the street. Yet – if there were just one person to whom one’s answers were always straight, just that might make the whole twisted world come straight – he looked up to see Molly reading him like reading yesterday’s race results.
‘All we done, from the first time we went roller skatin’ together, was fight,’ he told her. ‘We battled all the time we went steady, we battled the weddin’ night till 4 A.M., we started in again when we woke up ’n kept it up till I went in the army ’n started all over the day I got discharged. We kept it up till the night of the accident ’n we ain’t quit yet.’
The naked bulb that burned overhead, by night, by noon, by twilit hours, hung like a little bald yellow skull on a chain like a twisted rope. Below it she had a candle burning, a candle red as wine. Its tiny flame pointed, upon the yellow wall, to the skull burning overhead: it glinted a bit on the bottle of cheap cologne and in the depths of dark-haired Molly’s eyes. On the other side of the window a prairie snow fell across backstreet and tenement, looking for dry leaves upon which to rest and finding only concrete and steel.
‘I know,’ Molly laughed with that laugh so soft one hardly heard the small rasp in it. ‘I heard you two goin’ at it one night, it sounded like all the dishes in the place gettin’ bust. I had to hold my ears. What went on?’
‘“What went on?” Why, that’s just what went on: all the dishes in the joint gettin’ bust. She started it just to show me she didn’t care one way or another, for dishes ’r me ’r anythin’ no more. So I helped her out to show her I didn’t neither. I don’t.’
‘You just think you don’t,’ Molly decided. ‘So now you’re eatin’ out of paper plates?’
‘I ain’t eatin’ up there at all. Vi brings her soup in a bowl ’n I eat by Messinger’s on Milwaukee, it’s where you can lay your dirty head right down on the table ’n go to sleep ’n they don’t bother you if they seen you spent for coffee.’
‘I like Violet,’ Molly told him as if thinking of something else, then said what she was trying to say. ‘Don’t go by Messinger’s no more when you want to put your dirty head down somewheres. I got a table ’n you don’t have to buy coffee to put it there. I’m settin’ here three days now waitin’ for you, listenin’ to the Els go by, countin’ how many cars it sounds like. You don’t know how lonely it gets, waitin’ for El cars. Frankie, let’s both quit stonin’ ourselves.’
He didn’t know she was crying till her tears touched his lips.
‘I know how lonely it gets waitin’ for Els,’ Frankie Machine told dark-haired Molly.
Frankie sat in the dealer’s slot but he did not see the players. He saw only their shadows along the pale green baize and he dealt only to shadows.
For each sat in the same seat every night and he knew each shadow well. The heavily crouching one to his left was Schwiefka’s, the trembling, pinheaded one was Sparrow’s; the humble, headless and hunched-up one was Umbrellas’, bent as though still carrying his daytime burden. And the ever-shifting, wavering one, that seemed to change shape as its owner reached in a shadow pocket for the shadow of a single cigarette, was the tallest, leanest shadow of all.