‘A shrewd one all the same, coming between shifts. He knows I’m the guy who knows how to get the monkey off, he waited till the corporal went to chow,’ Frankie decided, ‘I’m not getting into trouble on some private’s account.’
But the fellow kept looking at him in such dumb misery, afraid to come inside and too sick to leave while he had any hope of relief, that Frankie finally heard himself say, ‘You can use my tie.’ He looked up and the private was gone, so he got off the cot, the long dull pain in his liver began kneading the gut, the needle was full and ready and the tie was hanging neatly over the suntans and there was time, just time. He had the tie about his arm, trying to bind it with one hand an inch above the elbow but his fingers fumbled with a nervous weakness, he felt fevered and had to hurry and right outside the corporal’s voice said, ‘I’m going to catch him at it today’ – the needle curved softly into some soft sort of useless rubbery fever thermometer, someone put a flashlight right in his eyes and he wakened on his back in the cell to its accusing stare. With the old pain beating behind his navel.
The pain left off slowly. Some patriot down the tier was using a reflecting mirror to waken anyone it happened to hit. The cell was full of a drifting flesh-colored light and the murmuring rumdums were being let out of the cells to wash, break wind, hawk, stretch, spit and scratch their hairy bottoms.
Frankie got up and went to the bars, without waking Sparrow, to watch the Republic’s crummiest lushes lining up to dip their hands gingerly and touch their foreheads, each with a single drop, as if it were holy water and each were on his way to confession instead of to twenty dollars or twenty days on the Bridewell floor.
Frankie Machine had seen some bad ones in his twenty-nine years. But any one of these looked as though all the others had beaten him all night with barrel staves. Faces bloody as raw pork ground slowly in the great city’s grinder; faces like burst white bags, one with eyes like some dying hen’s and one as bold as a cornered bulldog’s; eyes with the small bright gleam of hysteria and eyes curtained by the dull half glaze of grief. These glanced, and spoke, and vaguely heard and vaguely made reply; yet looked all day within upon some ceaseless horror there: the twisted ruins of their own tortured, useless, lightless and loveless lives.
Though he had seen not one man of them in his life before, Frankie knew each man. For each was seared by that same torch whose flame had already touched himself. A torch which burned with a dark and smoldering flame from within till it dried a man of everything save a dark-charred guilt.
The great, secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one. Guilt that lay crouched behind every billboard which gave each man his commandments; for each man here had failed the billboards all down the line. No Ford in this one’s future nor ever any place all his own. Had failed before the radio commercials, by the streetcar plugs and by the standards of every self-respecting magazine. With his own eyes he had seen the truer Americans mount the broad stone stairways to success surely and swiftly and unaided by others; he was always the one left alone, it seemed at last, without enough sense of honor to climb off a West Madison Street Keep-Our-City-Clean box and not enough ambition to raise his eyes back to the billboards.
He had not even been a success in the taverns. Even there he could not afford the liquor that lends distinction nor the beer that gives that special glow of health, leading, often quite suddenly, to startling social success. He had snatched snipes, on the fly, of the cigarette that clears the mind for the making of swift decisions in sudden crises with the fire still alive in the tobacco. Yet always, somehow, by the time the paper had touched his lips the tobacco had long gone stale. There must be something wrong with his lips.
All had gone stale for these disinherited. Their very lives gave off a certain jailhouse odor: it trailed down the streets of Skid Row behind them till the city itself seemed some sort of open-roofed jail with walls for all men and laughter for very few. On Skid Row even the native-born no longer felt they had been born in America. They felt they had merely emerged from the wrong side of its billboards.
And yet they spoke and yet they laughed; and even the most maimed wreck of them all held, like a pennant in that drifting light, some frayed remnant of laughter from unfrayed years. Like a soiled rag waved by a drunken peddler in a cheap bazaar who knows none will buy, yet waves his single soiled ware in self-mockery – these too laughed. And knew not one would buy.
These were the luckless living soon to become the luckless dead. The ones who were fished out of river or lake, found crumpled under crumpled papers in the parks, picked up in the horse-and-wagon alleys or slugged, for half a bottle of homemade wine, in the rutted tunnels that run between the advertising agencies and the banks.
Then, only one day too late, they became VIPs at last. Front and profile photographs and a brass tag looped about the neck to await none other than the deputy coroner himself, a police hold order and a genuine pauper’s writ.
Some the Demonstrators’ Association would invite to attend an autopsy party. For these the cold white dissector’s table would be the grave; there wouldn’t be enough left to honor with American earth or the simplest sort of cross.
Yet some who had been unlucky so long might turn out to be the very luckiest after alclass="underline" they were to be embalmed through the courtesy of the Balmy-Hour School of Beautification & Sanitary Bloodletting. Not many, of course, could be so lucky; for so few deserved such luck.
When thirty had gathered together, resigned to their fortunes at last, the merry county carpenters would come with bright new pencils behind their ears, black lunch buckets in their hands, nails in their teeth and Social Security cards in their pockets to make thirty clean pine boxes. Thirty stiffs in a whitewashed basement room, heavy with disinfectant in place of flowers, listening, with an inscrutable disdain, to the cheerful ringing of happy hammers and the pleasant talk of living men.
Occasionally one of the stiffs, still stubbornly intent on making trouble for everybody, would require one longer or broader than he had any real right to at all. Gas and river cases gave the most trouble this way. There were not many giants any more.
When the boxes were ready and paid for the We Haul Anything Cartage Company would send around a moving van which fancied itself a hearse. The driver wheeled the dishonored dead out to Elm Forest, where a county sewer-digging machine excavated a trench long enough to hold thirty boxes, no more and no less. Over that single trench, in a cemetery like a forgotten battlefield, the inevitable and inimitable mimic, with the Holy Book in hand and hat held to the side out of respect to his modest fee, would say a few words – all holy – over these unholy dead.
This was all a part of their secret knowledge as they touched the jailhouse water to their foreheads, this was why they laughed so lightly from time to time. For they had had the ultimate joke played upon them prematurely: more ambitious men would have to wait a bit to find out. It was why they grinned so knowingly at the most casual of jailhouse companions; they’d all be taking the same road, down the same littered street, to the same single trench together. It was why they nudged each other familiarly and leered a little: ‘Take my advice, buddy. Don’t die broke.’
An old wino dragging a pair of mottled suspenders to the floor wandered in from somewhere and asked wonderingly: ‘You fellows remember me?’ When none remembered he repeated the question to himself, with moving lips, as though he himself had nearly forgotten. Yet with each pulse beat his blood demanded to know, once and for all before it went cold for keeps, who remembered him and his mottled suspenders.