‘Escalator is the best,’ Frankie decided, and Frankie always decided right. You couldn’t get out of an elevator fast.
He looked around and saw Sparrow back at the refrigerator, examining the vegetable bin; the punk caught up with him at the head of the stairs. ‘My roof always leaks a little faster in January,’ he apologized, before Frankie could start scolding, ‘that’s the time of year I first started gettin’ dizzy when I was a sprout.’
At the top of the second flight the bottom dropped out of the bag.
Frankie watched them tumbling down the narrow escalator stairs as if they were on rollers and wanted to laugh when one barely missed a salesgirl’s ankle – the bag slipped from his hand, he shouldered the girl to one side, saw her mouth widen with indignation and then knew it was no use running, no use at alclass="underline" two floorwalkers, a house dick and a dozen bosomy saleswomen clamored around, pecking at him like over-fed hens.
‘They had an ace hidin’ in the drapes,’ Frankie realized wryly, ‘the punk caught somebody’s eye foolin’ wit’ that vegetable bin.’ And told the house dick quietly, ‘Let’s go where we’re goin’.’
They came down that littered aisle in a sort of carnival with the house dick holding his belt from behind and a floorwalker on either side holding his arms and the bosomy biddies following behind, cackling as they came. Under their feigned horror Frankie heard their easy laughter. He caught a glimpse of a butcher holding a broken-necked rooster, both butcher and rooster sliding one limp dark eye sidewise at him as he passed.
He felt the patrol car wheel out from the curb and saw the wan early January sun lying in a checkered pattern across the car’s scarred floor. It was evening, the snow was drifting a bit toward the curbs and when the car stopped for the lights he heard the wind getting up all down the trolley tracks trying to hurry the patrol along a bit: it would be long melted before he saw any trolley run again.
‘The punk saw that ace ’n ducked without givin’ me the word,’ Frankie decided bitterly. ‘If I ever find out for sure it was him rolled Louie-’ He touched his left hand to his shoulder: in the excitement one of the biddies had torn the sleeve again.
The young men had engraved their bitterest disappointments upon the walls beside their fondest hopes. They had exposed their betrayers there, mocked their lawyers and doubted their wives. One had assured his sainted mother he was going straight the moment he could make bail and with the same stub end planned straight mayhem, the moment bail was made, upon one Crash Kolkowski. No reason was offered; yet the emergency stood plain:
If it wasn’t for Crash Kolkowski I wouldn’t be in here and where he should be is in hell with his back broke. Every time he comes around shooting off that big flannel mouth us good guys should get together and break his back five or six times. Nobody should even buy him a shot.
The prospect of Kolkowski sweating out an eternity with his spine in a cast while all the good guys in purgatory stood around refusing him just one small snort was sufficiently dismal. Yet even sadder, it seemed to Frankie Machine, was another second guesser’s plea:
Don’t go by Dago Mary she give bad drink
Had Dago Mary prepared the sodium amytal the night before? Or was it only that the coils hadn’t been cleaned? A deed premeditated by midnight and executed with deadpan deliberation in the dangerous noon? Or some casual midweek evening’s error achieved in innocent merriment? Upon the gray confessional of the walls Frankie Machine found no answer at all.
With tedious attention to detail someone had illustrated precisely how a certain aging judge would look, gavel in hand, wearing nothing but high-button shoes and a flowered cravat, while sentencing a sensibly clothed civilian to the electric chair for indecent exposure: a single button had been found loose upon the offender’s fly.
To leave nothing to the imagination the chair, sizzling invitingly, had been sketched in beside his honor. To show how no time was lost, locally, in appeals for pardon, parole or probation, the judge had his hand in reaching distance of the switch and was sweating with impatience to fry this miserable joker personally. There would be no commutation of sentence here.
Chicago justice was in a bad way all right. One could see that at a glance: not a single finger of scorn was pointed at the judge for his own nakedness.
Indeed the Irony of It All had inspired another amateur to scratch a second portrait: a beat-out, tattered, crooked-limbed wreck, groping in two directions at once and captioned Chicago Justice Deaf Dumb Blind and Falling Apart.
In for a bum rap, one hand explained, I never rolled a drunk in my life.
While another commented knowingly: In for a bum rap too I never rolled a sober one.
That’s how it is, another had confided, when you hit some lousy bum the dough falls out of his pocket and you get the blame.
By the yellow night light’s glow Frankie saw how the four walls, as well as the floor – and by some frenzied acrobatics the very ceiling – recorded with equal fame the damned and the saved: those who would surely ascend the golden escalator reserved for good guys and their true-blue pals, the real sports and square johns capable of breaking any Kolkowski’s back; while upon the rusty freight elevator clanking miserably downward forever would go all copper johns, double clockers, lush workers and mush workers, deadpickers and turncoats, rats, pigeons, stooges, short faders and crap catchers, deadheads and deadbeats who had ever stood drinks for Kolkowski, loaned him a dollar or applauded that big flannel mouth.
Frankie could smell the walls. They were closer now than they had ever been; they bent together above him till the door seemed a part of the walls.
Walls which revealed that, by and large, the young men preferred the simple, straight-from-the-shoulder take-it-or-leave-it sort of warning:
All cops are stooges
Never rat on a pal
Get a steady job and stay home nights and keep off
N. Clark.
While at the very bottom of the cell some latter-day Moses had written off all preceding commandments: Everybody shut up. If you were any good you wouldn’t be in here.
In the growing light the wall legends continued like the continuation of a dream begun in another place: the legends that follow upon each other in all the tongues of man, from cell to cell and jail to jail, linking seas to cities and cities to plains, down the streets of all the world wherever a thief stands waiting behind steel bars and a turnkey waits by the wall.
In one corner some repentant bravo had inscribed a prayer for the salvation of all such sinners as himself, recommending them to John 3:7, and adding piously that he’d leave his body to the Board of Health and his ivory-tipped cue, locked in the middle rack at Spongy Kaplan’s Snooker Palace and Pool Parlor, to Hines Memorial Hospital, providing such sacrifice would bring just a bit more sunshine into the lives of his fellow men.
Have Doc Bunson call for my body personlly, this soldier of the Lord had directed in a testament above the water bucket, He is a personl friend of mine and no autotopsy is necessry.
While dated in the same week some revived will to live and still to do great deeds had come into the same wavering hand. Couched there in formidable obscenities the repentant bravo promised that same Lord he’d burn his old man’s house to the ground within the hour he made the street and found the matches; adding an invitation to all rogue males within the city limits to enjoy his wife’s favors on their first night out of the clink.