Frankie passed his hand ruminatively across his cheek just the way that Bogart did it when they were hunting him down and he needed a shave. Somebody had squealed, that was it, it was between himself and Edward G. Robinson now.
‘We could go look for Pig in the Coney Island Diner,’ Sparrow suggested, for he dearly loved this movie game. Like the reading of serial numbers on streetcar transfers, it was one game he played faster than Frankie.
‘What’s the use of goin’ to the Coney? You said he was at the Safari.’
‘That’s just why we should go to the Coney,’ cause he won’t be there. We just come in ’n look around at the menu ’n when the counter guy asks what do we want we tell him somethin’ that’s crossed out.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘You just don’t see the right movies then. We ask the counter guy what people do in this town ’n then you say, “They come in here to order the crossed-out dinner – ain’t that right, smart boy?”’
‘Does Pig eat there now?’ Frankie was at sea and not even drifting.
‘Forget it,’ Sparrow told him, ‘I’m just too educated for you. We can pick up Pig at the Safari if there’s somethin’ you want to see him about. You sure you want me along?’
‘You’re just the guy I want along,’ Frankie assured him.
‘I’d like to have a cam’ra ’n just go around gettin’ pictures when somethin’ big happens,’ Sparrow began daydreaming innocently as they came out on the street, but Frankie dismissed his innocence. ‘You may be the richest guy in the cemetery yet,’ he warned Sparrow.
They found Pig at the Safari with his face shaved and washed, a new haircut and wearing a new suit and new shoes. The suit was already crumpled about the thighs and the shoes were two-tone jobs such as Louie once had worn; but it was still Pig inside the glad rags all the same.
Pig smoking a cigarette through a holder.
‘Waitin’ for a live one, Pig?’
Pig smiled straight ahead with nothing abject in his smile at all. ‘Yeh. Who you guys waitin’ for? A dead one?’ His humility was gone with his half lisp. He talked like a man in the driver’s seat with one foot on the brake.
‘Bring it to the table,’ Sparrow told the bartender, preceding the peddler to the rear with Frankie following. In the corner, beneath a frosted bulb, Pig sat looking out upon that dark and wavering shore which only the eyeless may see and only the dead may wander.
‘They tell me you’re in the bucks these days, Peddler,’ Frankie attacked him directly.
‘I know who you guys are,’ Pig informed them in a dead-level tone.
‘Of course you do,’ Sparrow agreed. ‘I’m the steerer ’n my buddy’s the dealer, he got somethin’ he wants to find out.’
‘You’re the guys awright,’ Pig told them both in that same flat knowing voice.
Now it was time to say: ‘You heard Louie get slugged. Heard us run and tapped down the alley till the odor of violet after-shave talc hit you. You touched him where he lay, bent above him and found the heavy roll you’d heard him bragging about half an hour before. Then pushed a few papers above him and tapped away to someone who’d give you a square count.’
But there was no way of asking a thing, it dawned on Frankie at last, without betraying himself. As if sensing Frankie’s thought the blind man told him, ‘I believe in live ’n let live, Dealer. Nobody asks me questions, I don’t ask nobody questions. I got to live too.’
His fingers found Frankie’s knuckles and touched a ring, of heavy German gold, that Frankie had worn since returning from overseas. ‘I ain’t no big snitch, I ain’t puttin’ no finger on guys who don’t put no finger on me. It’s just live ’n let live, how I look at it.’
‘I think you got a good sense of direction some nights all the same,’ Frankie told him, but Pig didn’t seem to hear. ‘I’m just one more poor blind bummy peddlin’ pencils,’ he mourned, ‘just a poor old down-’n-out bummy ’n you two guys muscle me back in some corner ’n talk like I got to watch my step, like I’m some guy killed some guy ’r somethin’. A blind guy couldn’t even rob nobody, he wouldn’t know who was a-watchin’.’
Suddenly he lolled his tongue at them both: he’d been laughing at them the whole time he’d been pleading.
Noiseless laughter. Yet he laughed long. While Frankie watched, unable to move. Spittle flecked Pig’s lips. And still he had not finished.
‘You guys,’ he regained his breath at last, almost helpless with soundless glee, ‘you guys can’t fool me, I’m too ignorant. You gonna break my neck too, you guys? It hurts my feelin’s, how you talk to me. Why don’t you buy me a drink ’n talk nice -a good drink -’ n then let me alone. Ain’t I lettin’ you guys alone? Okay, you guys?’
He thrust one hand before him, knowing it would not be shaken. That was like him: to seek some humiliation that flicked the long-dying membrane of his eyes and so pleased the twisted spirit. To feel that inner vindication, as of insult upon injury. Sparrow tapped Frankie’s shoulder and nodded toward the door. ‘We can’t set here all day wit’out buyin’ the bummy a drink, Frankie.’
Pig heard them leaving and called out eagerly, knowing his voice would be ignored as surely as his hand, ‘You guys! Buy a drink! I’m waitin’ for that live one!’
At the door Frankie blinked out into the winter sunlight. Slanting toward them across the street a well-dressed matron minced through the sunlit traffic’s wintry bustle. ‘I’d like to be a tradewind ’n blow down there.’ Sparrow watched her with his lewd little eyes while a lewd wind whipped her skirt. ‘You see her give me the eye? I bet if a guy had a Lincoln Park yacht ’n a captain’s outfit he’d get all he wanted.’
Frankie spun him about with both hands. ‘If I was sure it wasn’t Pig that rolled Louie you’d get all you wanted awright. If it wasn’t him it was you ’n that’s a lead-pipe cinch.’ He shoved Sparrow away from him. ‘God help you, punk, if it was.’
‘I’d be the richest guy in the cemetery then for sure, eh, Frankie?’
Sparrow goggled up at Frankie dizzily.
That was the last sad afternoon that the dealer and the steerer sat together to pretend things were as they once had been between them. While the troubled light first wavered, then slanted and darkened across the floor and right outside the ice creaked once, for the puddles were freezing over in alley and street again and Frankie himself felt half frozen. He always felt half frozen of late.
Sparrow leaned across the same table at which they’d begun the afternoon, trying to beguile Frankie away from his concern for a dead man’s bankroll.
‘Wolfin’ is just like dog stealin’, Frankie,’ he confided earnestly the minute they had returned to the Tug & Maul. ‘You find out where they live ’n wait till they’re on the loose in the back yard.’
‘I like a dame with them glasses with the string on,’ Frankie conceded reluctantly, ‘it’s dainty-like.’
‘You know the kind I like, Frankie? The Bette Davis kind – you know, with them real poppy eyes.’
‘What’s so hot about poppy eyes?’ Frankie felt irritable. ‘I know one with poppy eyes ’n a goiter too – you want a introduction to one with a goiter the size of this bottle?’
‘I don’t mind poppy-eye goiters, Frankie.’ Sparrow’s enthusiasm picked up a phony momentum. ‘I’d like a poppy-eye on that Lincoln Park yacht – it don’t even have to have no engine, just have it settin’ there to point out to the chicks we’re walkin’ through the park, accidental-like – ‘Oh, there’s our yacht, the crew must of brought her in from Belmont Harbor’ -’ n when they don’t believe it we walk ’em right on board.’
‘You take the one with the goiter,’ Frankie decided firmly, going up the gangplank without looking back.
‘Once they’re on board they got to stay all night,’ Sparrow revealed. So Frankie drifted with him, borne by Old Forester, out of the Lincoln Park lagoon onto shoreless waters while Sparrow gestured unobtrusively for two more beers. ‘We’ll drift right out into the lake,’ the punk murmured dreamily, his eyes half curtained by the small waves’ dreaming motion; for one moment, behind that curtain, his eyes surveyed Frankie with the hard cold gleam of understanding. Only to soften as the glasses were refilled. ‘Maybe we better stay in the lagoon,’ Frankie cautioned himself in a faraway voice, ‘account of havin’ no motor we might not get back to shore in time.’