He opened his eyes and through the sweat saw Applejack Katz’s good tough mug studying him gravely. And Applejack’s long, hard hand drying the tears, fears and sweat away.
‘You’re toughin’ it through the hardest sort of way, Dealer,’ he heard Katz telling him. ‘Quit stonin’ yourself. You ain’t that sick. How many guys you fightin’ anyhow? Be yourself, Dealer. Be yourself.’
‘That’s not so easy,’ Frankie whispered weakly. ‘I got to get straight first.’
‘It’s the same thing,’ Katz told him quietly.
At Applejack’s feet Frankie saw the infirmary’s gray cat sitting upon its haunches. It purred, just once, to affirm Applejack’s counsel.
As the fever lowered Frankie dreamed of someone folding and refolding bundles of newspapers right beside his cot and forced himself awake to see who it was this time.
Only the old woman of the wind, there on the other side of the pane, wrapping the great sheets of the rain.
Indian summer came and September drew toward its close. It closed in a green half-twilight, like the half-twilight of the heart. In this green-gray late September light the Prager beer signs gleamed redly as soon as the arc lamps gleamed yellow. Then the arrows of all the Old Style Lager signs began working anxiously back and forth till the yellow arc lamps dimmed and died, the scarlet Prager bulbs signed off and the overworked Lager arrows went to bed. Only the green-gray light was left, like a light left burning in a hallway entrance all night long. To light the morning’s earliest peddler waking the tenements with one clear calclass="underline" ‘Kartofflee! Kartofflee! ’
Then the trolleys, like mild-tempered elephants, approached each other slowly and paused, with a primitive graciousness, to let each other pass; and went shambling forward once more upon their predestined jungleways as though the pause had lent each a greater understanding of all things.
Frankie came down Division Street, where only arc lamps and fire hydrants grow, wearing the same woolen army trousers and the combat jacket – its sleeve patched so neatly, by a county sewing machine, the old tear was scarcely detectable. With a new checkered cap on his head and feeling as if some tightly wound spring within himself had slackened, never to stand taut winding again.
Back in the city’s littered bivouac he walked among the tenements of home like an awol private returning to barracks from which his old outfit had long ago convoyed and scattered for keeps. He felt both weakened and strengthened by his stretch. His hands hung heavily, the fingers felt like thumbs for lack of use with deck, cue, dice or drum. But he’d beaten McGantic and McGantic’s terrible monkey.
He’d paid in full. He didn’t have to punish the blood and bone any longer. Molly-O had shown him what was gnawing at his heart and the long stretch had forced him to the fight.
‘Once you got the touch it’s always with you,’ he remembered, and passed the Safari without looking in. There was no longer anyone there he needed to see.
‘When a cripple leads a cripple it doesn’t amount to much,’ he recalled someone telling him as he turned into his own dark hall.
In the dimness someone was shouting threats to someone far above. Halfway up the first flight he made out the hulking raincoated figure of Poor Peter Schwabatski pushing an artificial daisy into a crack of the stair. How long was it now he’d been trying to make them grow there? Since before that middle tread had come loose, Frankie remembered. When the dimwit had once asked his papa why his flowers never grew, Frankie remembered the Jailer saying, ‘Because it never rains indoors.’
That was a hard thing for Peter to understand. It seemed to him it rained all day indoors. All day it rained in Poor Peter’s mind upon the paper daisies of his brain: a paper garden in a paper rain. It was the reason he always wore a raincoat, sun or rain; dust storm, blizzard or summer hail.
It was of this same Poor Peter Frankie had heard the Jailer speak mournfully once, after the Jailer had been openly boasting to Violet, ‘I know how to hit them ovalries: the right one makes a boy, the left one a girl, right square in the middle is what we call a murphydyke.’
‘Where’d you hit it?’ Violet had asked.
‘I missed altogether, I guess,’ Jailer had acknowledged then with a smile so wan Frankie had wished Vi hadn’t asked that that time.
For the boy had been sitting then where he sat now, moving humbly aside as always for traffic, too absorbed in his dusty flowers to lift his half-bald head. He was not more than twenty but had been losing his hair since he’d been twelve.
As he stepped past Peter, Frankie heard Violet and the Jailer really going at it.
‘No hammering on Sunday!’ Violet was demanding. ‘Go to sleep, drunk! Get a wife and hammer in bed!’
‘One I had said no hammering on Sunday too,’ the Jailer reproved Violet, ‘she said I hammered enough all week!’
‘You’ve hammered enough around here too – and you ain’t hit a nail yet,’ she chided him. ‘Two years fixing one board!’
‘You want to come down and try my board for size now?’ he invited her. ‘You won’t mind my hammering after that!’ He sounded a trifle tight all right.
‘Shame, Schwabatski,’ Vi teased him softly, ‘drinkin’ up that boy’s milk at the bars.’
‘Leave the helpless children out of this!’ He waved the hammer, pretending to be ready to come up after her.
Frankie leaned heavily on the rail, waiting for he didn’t know what. For some reason the twenty-watt bulb of the hallway had been painted a dull red, the same as that over the visitors’ cage. As he passed the Jailer the old man’s hammer caught him by the claw and hauled him back.
‘It served that one right, Dealer – he went into that business in the wrong neighborhood – Polaks don’t need what he was selling. You see: it didn’t help him after all to have the devil for a father.’
Frankie freed himself and went on up the stairs, but the old man shambled right on up behind him, babbling away till Frankie had to turn on him to get him back to his stairs, his son and his whisky.
‘You’ll never finish that step runnin’ off at the mouth all day, Jailer,’ he urged without anger.
The old man took him by the jacket’s sleeve and Frankie looked down into the grizzled, grayish, boozed and wrinkled mug, always so intent on giving fresh heart to all those who seemed to be in need of it.
‘People like that ought to be knocked on the head!’ he whispered as though he’d overheard Frankie’s threat to Louie one night. ‘Don’t torture yourself! Myself would of give you this hammer! Myself would have done it! Don’t torture! Don’t suffer!’ The old man was pleading so, two steps there below, he seemed to be pleading on his knees. Frankie took the big veined hand and felt his own fingers’ weakness in the old man’s grip.
‘All I done was a little stealin’, Jailer,’ he told the old man softly. ‘Now I done my time for that, so let’s forget what can’t be helped no more. All sorts of things happen and then it’s done and the less we talk about it now the better for me ’n everybody.’
It was the assurance the old man needed, he sensed Frankie had found some degree of peace and let him go at last. Frankie saw him return, with a pencil behind his ear and a ruler sticking out of the back overall pocket, to his work among the paper daisies.
Overhead he heard Violet return back down the hall without a greeting. That wasn’t like Vi at all. ‘She’s gone to tell the punk I’m back,’ he guessed.
‘You heard what I said all the same,’ the old man mumbled, through two nails clenched in his teeth as he squatted on the step. ‘Knocked on the head! With this same hammer!’ Then the hammer’s rapid tapping, light and sane and calm, a good carpenter’s hammering, like the beat of a lightened heart. The Jailer felt better for having unburdened himself. Frankie could tell. But how long it had been since the old man had first wished to speak out Frankie could only surmise.