‘Let’s see you trot through the little white door,’ he challenged this Frankie-Lester: ‘Three steps to the right ’n now take a load off your feet and don’t let the smell of vinegar bother you either. That’s only a couple drops on the sponge that fits between the voltage ankle and the clamp to keep the sponge from burning – all for your own good you know. Now just put your nose through the little black helmet. That’s right – now let’s hear you wisecrack, wise guy.’
The wise guy of Frankie’s fantasy had no word that one could hear through that dead-black hood.
Some other con, with his own private burden of guilt, cried out, in sleep or waking, and the lights in the corridor seemed to flicker a moment. The sleepers wakened, a long murmur went like a wave from wall to wall. It was that hour when men cried out in voices not their own.
For each man knew the hour. As each man knew the day.
They said, between the bakery, the laundry and the mess, between the printshop, the library and the little white infirmary, they said he’d come out of the death cell hooded all in black. The black tights shimmering under the lights, that final white shirt buttoned over one shoulder like a fencing master’s, he had stepped forth into that hooded hour. They said it had taken a full minute and a half, from the moment he’d stepped into the big glass cage to the moment the switch had been pulled.
Some said it had taken nearer two. The voltage clamp had required adjustment after he was in the chair and there had been no smell of vinegar after all. They told just how it had been.
Between the darkened infirmary and the clean, well-lighted mess, between the sweating boiler room and the cool dry dorm – ‘the left knee kicked up, just once, after the switch was thrown.’ The voltage clamp behind the neck had fitted nicely on the very first try – only the one on the pale right ankle had seemed a trifle loose – but the laces, the laces – Frankie had to know – had he tied them up first or had he just let them loose? Did one of the screws tie them for him so that he wouldn’t trip and skin his knee? The laces, the laces-
But no one had noticed if the laces were tied at all.
The single shoulder button had been stripped off when the shirt had been ripped down to expose the flesh above the poor seared heart. Five doctors – which one had pulled the button off? No – it certainly had been six – had pronounced the heart as dead as any hustler’s heart can get: a charred lump of ashy flesh that sagged where the living heart had burned.
There had been one hundred and twenty men and two women on the witness benches, they said. It had all been spick and span behind the glass, everything had gone off in tiptop order, there had been not even the telltale flickering of the lights throughout the building.
Four buttons had been pushed by four unnamed men. They said. Yet only one of these had pushed the live one. None would ever have to think it was himself had sparked the living flame.
But the laces, the laces-
They had used an amperage of eight, everyone knew, because that was the usual amperage for a white man. Everyone said. Just as the usual amperage for a Negro was seven and a half.
Everyone knew.
Then they’d thrown him nine hundred extra volts just to make certain. Everyone knew about that too. Everyone told everyone else just how it had gone off. Everyone but Frankie had been there it seemed.
But the laces-
What laces? You think they let him walk in there with shoes on? Those tights cover your feet like an acrobat’s tights, there aren’t any shoes to it. Just a strip of black cloth sheared neatly halfway around the right ankle.
It wasn’t until weeks after he’d been released that Frankie learned Little Lester had died on his bunk with eleven hours yet to live.
A heart attack, the warden had concluded.
Arsenic, the coroner’s physician had insisted.
His heart had stopped beating too soon, the afternoon papers had reported.
And neither the evening nor the morning press would ever be able to prove a thing, one way or another, under any old buffalo of a moon, by flat-nosed, buffalo-eyed Frankie Machine.
Now, as the moon of other nights mounted the arch of June, he felt the touch of other Junes along the bars. Remembered how the orange Blatz signs of Wolcott Street would be glowing now each night more softly as the brief month passed trailing smoke, and July came on in a haze. And every arc lamp’s reflection along the rain-wet, moon-wet, sun-wet, and summer-dusted walks would burn more deeply as the days burned longer.
Frankie could tell himself at last that he had buried his monkey as deeply as the county had buried Little Lester.
Each Saturday afternoon now the good soldiers were led into the yard for a game of softball. Whenever he found himself out there in the open, after the long week in the laundry, he was seized with the need of hearing Molly Novotny’s teasing voice and a longing for the dark appeal of her eyes. He felt he didn’t care whether he dealt another hand of stud in his life or not.
Playing first base on the last Saturday in August, he took off his shirt in the fading West Side sunlight and a swift squall, as if waiting all the bright afternoon behind the sentry box for some fool to do just that, swept the field in chilling gusts. By the time they’d played out the inning he was sneezing and by the time he got back to his cot he was in a wringing sweat. The laundry had weakened his resistance more than he’d known.
By chow time he was rocking down Fever Street in a sidecar attached to some Good Humor vendor’s bicycle, racing east down Division with little pennants whirling in the white-walled wheels and the vendor, wearing a meter reader’s cap and waggling a finger at Frankie to sentence him to life imprisonment in a broom closet for stealing Captain Bednar’s only electric iron.
Sitting upright there among the brooms was good old McGantic wearing a sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve, dead as a doornail in line of duty. Dead for days. The face had withered to a monkey’s face, one dead brown paw pointed to where, upon an empty beer case, lay the same old hypo and two new quarter grains.
‘If he wants water give him water,’ the major was telling Applejack, ‘and water is all he gets. He’s still tryin’ to kick the habit. Let him sweat it out. If his ticker ain’t bad he’ll make it.’
Intern Katz understood. He knew how to get a half a cap of morphine out of the infirmary as well as how to fashion a needle out of a common pin. But he believed in Frankie Machine as he believed in his own applejack. ‘It won’t be me to put him back on, Major,’ he promised. Then he was left to watch alone beside the narrow cot in the narrow little infirmary. Because its looseness seemed to be causing Frankie distress, Katz rolled up the nightshirt’s sleeve.
Frankie felt McGantic rolling his sleeve to give him the one big fix that would fix him forever and for keeps. With all his remaining strength he pried at those fingers to get them off his precious arm. But the fingers had no strength left at all, something that was surely a hypo glinted in the light and in an access of hopeless dread Frankie cried like a sick baby for help: ‘Molly! Molly!’
But no Molly was near to reply. Only the sheet roller rumbling down the tier to punish him for what he’d done to Zosh. He ducked down Schwiefka’s alley and around the shed to pick up an armful of kindling for Jailer. Deep under the wood lay a soft green hat with a small red feather in its brim.
Strong hands held him down while others fastened the voltage clamp to the back of his neck but he was too smart for all of them – he rested one moment to make them think he had really given in at last and then shouted out of his very bones, ‘A Polak never gives in!’ – and kicked off all the hands at once. But it was all up with Frankie – the sponge was pressing his forehead and a voice was warning him through glass – ‘Don’t let your life go with it, Dealer.’