‘I don’t feel proud, like I done somethin’ so great,’ Frankie told her with a grin at once both grateful and heartsore.
Seeing the defeat in that smile, Molly thought, He’s going to have to run for it all right. ‘When you’re ready to take off I’ll take off with you,’ she told him matter-of-factly. ‘But let’s not start runnin’ till we’re chased, Frankie. We run now we give the game away. Let’s tough it out till it blows over a little. If we run we split it wide. Give it a chance to heal. Let them pick you up ’n haul you down to Record Head, there’s nobody around here who’ll testify up against you ’n nobody who can prove anythin’ if they did. Tough it out, Frankie. I’ll tough it with you. We’ll tough it together.’ And took his tough little mug in her hands, gave him one small tough kiss and held it for luck. When she released him he grinned in the way she remembered best, with something of the old hope in his eyes.
‘I took over the traps for the drummer tonight,’ he told her as proudly as a boy, ‘I didn’t miss a beat the whole time.’
‘Where’d you disappear to?’ Sophie was parked in the dance hall’s vestibule and the party was over for her too.
The party was over for everyone. The crap game was over, losers and winners alike had left, the orchestra was packing its instruments and a janitor was pushing a broom down one side of the floor. All that remained of the night’s many dancers were the shadows of two drunks on the walls, clinging to each other in a freakish caricature of a dance like a couple drunken bears: Meter Reader hauling Umbrella Man around and around the hall for no reason anyone could see at all. Their shadows fell across the wheelchair’s arm like a derisive memory of all the boys she had danced with and now would dance with no more. He hadn’t thought she’d noticed him slip away.
‘I had to see a clocker. He give me a good thing for Tropical tomorrow.’
An anxious wind hurried past them like the old year’s last latecomer, Umbrella Man fell to his knees within as though to beg or pray and Meter Reader hauled him across the floor by the collar with the janitor nudging both playfully at the heels across the floor and out of sight while the wind went seeking someone in all the littered corners.
‘It wasn’t so good as the dances we used to go to, was it, Frankie?’ she asked, hoping for some reason it hadn’t been.
He tucked the blanket in about her feet without reply and wheeled her out onto the street, the chair making a tiny trail in the light new snow all the way down to Division. To be blown, as soon as they passed, into the footsteps of the night’s thousand revelers. And into their own dim hall. He shoved the chair into the alcove below the staircase and she leaned her full weight upon him for the climb. He had to hold to the railing, she had never leaned so heavily upon him. The steps rose, into a wan yellow light, more steeply for him than ever before.
‘Don’t lean so hard, Zosh. I can’t hardly make it.’
She lightened her weight a bit up to the second flight.
There, across the hallway window, the Division Street Station’s signal tower stood out clearly and abruptly, its red and green ornamentation glowing down the tracks like an iron caricature of the Christmas tree they had left behind in a half-lighted hall.
With his arm about her they paused to see the snow falling aslant the crosslights as far as the night would let them see.
To Frankie that quarter-moon sky looked darker and all the iron apparatus of the El taller than ever. The artificial tenement light seeping across the tracks made even the snow seem artificial, like snow off a dime-store counter. Only the rails seemed real and to move a bit with some terrible intent. ‘Your hands ’r so cold I can feel the ice t’rough my mittens,’ Sophie told him, thrusting her damp, mittened hand out of his in a child’s sudden displeasure.
So cold, so cold, hands, wrists and hearts: the old quarter-moon of the tenements shone no colder tonight than the blood crying for warmth in his wrists.
And though her eyes were still bloodshot from crying Sophie suddenly sang to him with a certain phony gaiety, ‘You’re gonna miss your big fat mamma one of these days – you know why I like that song?’ Cause it reminds me of one I really like.’
In the icy dark the street lamp’s frosty glow lay like hoar across dresser and wheelchair and bed. The clock was beating out its heart on the wall in a freezing pain and the luminous Christ gleamed all around with an icy, creaking mystery. Below the crucifix Rumdum whimpered, shaking in all his limbs and pounding the floor with his whiskbroom tail in hope of some ultimate warmth.
‘That sneak of a hound been curlin’ up on the chair again,’ she snitched on Rumdum, he had so often been warned against shedding hair anywhere in the room except on the floor. The floor was all right because there Violet would sweep it up sooner or later.
‘He was just tryin’ to get warm,’ Frankie told her in the darkness, fumbling about the gas plate in the corner.
‘Then why does he have to sneak about it, jumpin’ off ’n pertendin’ he been under the dresser the whole time we was gone?’
‘’Cause he’s scared he’ll get rapped in the snout with the hair curler like the other time he tried it,’ he reminded her.
‘I’ll rap him wit’ somethin’ more than a hair curler,’ she warned them both, ‘if he got rapped wit’ a little rat poison in his dirty beer we’d see how much sneakin’ he’d do then.’
A little blue flame spurted upward in the dark beneath Frankie’s hand.
‘You wanted a dog,’ he told her, ‘you got one.’ He sat on the bed’s edge and smoked a cigarette while Rumdum nuzzled between his knees. Once the latch rattled suddenly and he wondered why he could never get used to the way the El rattled it.
‘Wheel me a little, Frankie.’
That meant she would sleep in the chair tonight, and he wheeled her till her head slipped onto her shoulder in a light doze. Beside the gas plate’s feeble warmth she napped lightly, with the little blue flames playing on her nodding head; beneath the chair Rumdum shivered. The overhanging blankets kept the cold off his hide a bit down there.
From under the heaped army blankets on the bed – blankets stolen from army camps all the way from Fort Bragg to Camp Maxey – Frankie peered out, with one limp eye, upon the new year’s calendar: January 1, 1947. Outside the pane the year’s first snow turned into the year’s first rain.
Time, Frankie saw by that calendar, was some old man with a scythe. Time was always an old man with a scythe, for some reason. Yet as he drifted toward sleep it seemed that Time was really Antek the Owner’s great gray deaf-and-dumb cat, that simply sat all day on the bar and studied the barflies with such unwavering tolerance.
Everyone said the cat was dumb, all insisted he had never even been heard to purr. Antek alone knew differently; he alone had heard the old cat purr. ‘’N when you hear that one purr you’re through,’ Antek was convinced. ‘That one keeps track of how many shots you put down every day. So long as you’re just a sociable drinker he don’t purr. But when you take the one that puts you on the lush for keeps, then he knows you’ll never get off the bottle all your life,’ n he purrs once at you. He purred at me ’n he’ll purr at you ’n with my own ears I heard him purr at Rumdum.’
The old cat knew, Frankie realized dreamily, only the old cat knew. Watching and waiting for the finishing shot that each hustler came to with the cat-gray stroke of the years.
Dreamed he heard Molly-O cry out only one flight down; in a voice made remote by many walls. And muffled by a slow slant rain.
By walls, by rain and by years to be when he would hear no voice at all; muffled by the slow slant rain of a night he would never know.
Some rain that beat, like forgotten tears, against some other room’s single pane: the rain of that far-off night when his name would be the name of nobody at all, as the name of one who had never lived. Save in the memory of Molly-O, grown too old to remember.