‘He’s just tryin’ to get a rise out of us,’ Katz cautioned Frankie, ‘he wants to see if he can get us in a little trouble, arguin’ with him about somethin’. One of the screws asked his lawyer to make the guy lay off him, he kept askin’ things like is them fuses all screwed in good ’n tight, he don’t want no slip-ups ’cause he’s invited his folks as witnesses – it’s how he gets people’s nerves jumpin’. If you ask me the guy is suck-silly.’
‘If you ask me it’s his nerves is jumpin’ the highest,’ Frankie surmised.
Applejack and Frankie stalled around at the far end of the block, for two soft-clothes men were coming up on either side of a little man with a bandaged eye and all three tagged by some joker in a spring topcoat, wearing the coat with the sleeves hanging emptily, like a woman’s cape.
‘That’s a newspaper joker,’ Applejack assured Frankie, ‘I don’t know who the bandage is but only newspaper guys drape a coat on them like that. You know why?’
Frankie didn’t have the faintest idea.
‘He ain’t got time to button it ’cause he gotta keep his hands free of his sleeves to take notes, in case somethin’ big happens real fast. If he takes time to get his hands out of his sleeves some other guy’ll beat him to the phone ’n get a scoop on him. I saw all about it in a movie at Jeff City.’ Old Katz was proud of his knowledge.
Frankie understood. ‘You’re right. I seen one come into the Victory on North Clark one night ’n set down with one bottle of beer ’n wrote in a little book-like, everythin’ that was goin’ on, what the people said. Then he picked up ’n didn’t even touch his beer. He didn’t touch his beer was how I knew there was somethin’ wrong with him.’
‘It’s sort of a club,’ Applejack explained, ‘they all get together ’n write a book.’ Though neither he nor Frankie could hear what either the bandage or the draped topcoat said to Little Lester, there was no difficulty at all in hearing the punk’s jeering reply.
‘Sure, ya stinkin’ squeala, I’m the guy shot out ya eye. It was easy as eatin’ a ice-cream comb. So what? Prove I’m nuts I go to the buggy bin – they feed you there, don’t they?’ N if I ain’t nuts I get the seat – so what? Then I don’t have to bother with stinkin’ squealas no more. It don’t make me no difference.
‘Naw, I don’t feel nuttin’ good ’r bad. Good ’n bad is strictly for stinkin’ squealas. You know what? I chew t’ree packs of gum a day but I don’t smoke. I don’t even eat much. I don’t even play ball. Movies I like better’n anythin’.
‘But what I really like is mechanics. I don’t like readin’ about crime stuff, they don’t put it down how it really is. What I really like is readin’ about takin’ t’ings apart ’n puttin’ ’em togedder so they stay, like in airplanes. I used to go out to the airport just to watch, I seen them fancy squares all come down the gangplank like in them square movie pictures.
‘But what I really like is gym-a-nastics. That’s for me, it’s what I took up in the neighborhood. I crooked four days a week from school – you know what I was doin’? I was workin’ on the parallela bars.’
Abruptly his mind returned to the point of the interview. ‘You know what made me sore?’ Nodding toward the bandaged eye. ‘It wasn’t when that pig of his scratched me, what really got me was when I shoot his dirty eye out ’n he says, “Don’t shoot me.” After I done it he comes on wit’ a pitch like that.’ He imitated a high-pitched squeaclass="underline" ‘“Don’t shoot me, please don’t shoot me” – boy, I would of let the stinkin’ squeala have it for real then only the dirty gun jammed on me, I should of cleaned it wit’ somethin’ good first.
‘Naw, I never went for playin’ wit’ other kids, all they do is jump up ’n down. Girls ’r poison. Once though I had one of ’em “I-got-to-get-in-tonight” romantic deals, we went down to Hubbard Street ’n got a free blood test. She was on one side of the screen ’n I was on the other ’n we hollered over to each other. A real romantic deal.
‘My old man? His one big trouble is he’s always a pallbearer ’n never a corpse. He’d look better to me wit’ his dirty head off five inches beneat’ the shoulders. You know what I told him that time he called the aces on me for sellin’ the icebox while he was out stiffin’ some piece of trade? I told him, “Daddy darlin’, you been workin’ for me for twenny-two years. Now go out ’n get a job fer yourself.” It’s what I told him, he’s a stinkin’ squeala too.’
Applejack Katz looked at Frankie Machine and Frankie Machine looked at Applejack Katz. ‘Let’s get the detail done,’ Applejack urged, ‘I got a deal on with a guy who got his hands on six bennies.’
‘What a loudmouth,’ Frankie whispered of Little Lester.
That was the name by which the screws knew Lester too.
Yet, when on the last Saturday afternoon in April Frankie sat for an hour at the same dayroom table where Little Lester sat, the punk spoke softly all the while. This was an assigned group permitted to write letters or play cards under the eyes of two screws, between four and five o’clock. If you didn’t have a letter to write and didn’t care for cards you went all the same. Neither Frankie nor Lester wrote letters. They sat across from each other with a soiled deck between them while Frankie showed him some of the tricks which had once seemingly confounded Sparrow.
‘It took me ten years to learn this one,’ Frankie explained, ‘pick a card.’
‘Show me one that don’t take so long,’ Lester reminded him humbly. Once away from his cell bars, he abandoned his tough-guy act; exactly as if he needed it only when locked behind steel for others to stare at and question.
He was only days from the chair if his last appeal were denied, yet slept and ate much as Frankie slept and ate. Therein lay a horror and a marvel for Frankie. Each saw the same gray corridors all night, each night, with the same yellowish fog wadded about the night lights. Each wakened from dreams of lifelong deadlock to the same muffled sounds: down the tier the long day was beginning.
Something of this awe was in Frankie’s eyes when he noticed how neatly combed and oiled Lester’s dark hair looked, and Lester caught Frankie’s glance. ‘I’ll have to wash the oil out the night before,’ he explained earnestly, not even in the same voice he had used for the reporters at all. ‘Oil leaves a burn ’n they don’t like to leave a man burned even from sweat.’
He spoke without any challenge to the world beyond the bars. ‘Here,’ Frankie insisted, wanting to do something for Lester, ‘here’s one it only takes two weeks to learn. Pick a card.’
But Little Lester had lost interest in cards and without a word picked up a book in which he sat immersed, not once raising his eyes till their hour was done. A book called How to Write Better Business Letters.
Frankie didn’t see Lester again for several weeks, though he once or twice saw the boy’s lawyer swinging down the corridor on that business of the last appeal.
Then, on a morning early in April, Frankie came out of the laundry with Applejack Katz to see two guards bringing Lester, uncuffed, to some unknown destination. He turned cheerfully toward Frankie as he passed.
‘Hi, Dealer!’ he greeted Frankie. ‘Take a look at a man on his way to the chair!’ and sounded really deeply relieved.
A face like any stranger’s face, slightly slant-eyed in the Slavic way. A face at once as old as the moons of Genghis Khan and as youthful as a child’s playground in May. He seemed smaller than Frankie had remembered him. It had seemed, in the weeks since, that he was a big man. Small but rugged and built all in one piece, with a heavy-legged stride, a little bowlegged as if he had learned to walk too early about the West Side’s broken walks.