Tapped on more softly than before. Sparrow looked down. The big flat feet had been squeezed into a pair of long, narrow, two-tone jobs more fit for a race track in August than a bar in December. Nifty Louie’s very shoes: Sparrow could still see them coming down that long dark stair. ‘My God,’ he thought with something of awe, ‘I don’t think he even left Louie his socks.’
At the juke Pig turned his black snout up as if to identify the numbers on the box by smell; the very hairs within the nostrils seemed to quiver. And though his hands were as grimy as ever Sparrow saw that the nails had been manicured; to go with the suit that fitted him like a hide. He lifted the cane’s begrimed tip till it touched the lowest of the box’s numbers, then moved upward, exactly like a nervous spider, in little leaps from one number to that above till it attained the top row and punched his favorite number at last.
‘O tidings of comfort and joy,
Comfort and joy…’
Sparrow waited till the juke had finished, then moved swiftly up to Pig’s ear: ‘Borrow me a dirty sawbuck, Piggy-O.’
Pig looked down at his hand, lying flat on the bar, just as though he could see the soot imbedded in the wrinkles there. Slowly it began to crawl with desires all its own, one manicured finger at a time, one inch at a time, to rest till the next finger caught up; then all went on together, in a miniature burlesque, till the bar’s very edge was reached, and returned to the exact spot from which they’d begun that neurotic carnival.
‘You made me dance to your music, brother – now you dance to mine,’ he told the punk at last.
‘I was just a guilty culprit them days, Piggy-O. Times is different now. I’m not takin’ no more gas off the dealer. Account of him I got the gate by Schwiefka. Hinges ’n all. What you think of a buddy who’ll turn on a fellow like that?’
Pig looked over Sparrow’s shoulder with a certain pursued look. ‘Schwiefka’s is a good place to hang away from these days anyhow,’ he confided in Sparrow.
‘You don’t look like you need to shag coffee ’n cigarettes for him no more.’ Sparrow admired Pig’s new look. ‘You look like you’re doin’ awright, Piggy-O.’
‘Even a blind guy can see an openin’ sometimes,’ Pig boasted a bit.
Louie must have left an opening big enough to shove a suitcase full of little brown drugstore bottles through, Sparrow decided to himself. ‘Blind guys can hear real good sometimes too,’ he ventured, studying Pig’s fat face. And saw the faintest sort of flattered smile stray a moment over those bloodless lips.
‘The dealer off you?’ Pig asked at last.
‘Like a filthy shirt,’ Sparrow assured him. ‘He makes me feel like a heel. Not even a heavy heel. Just a light heel.’
‘Why don’t you try steerin’ by Kippel’s, Steerer?’
‘By Kippel’s?’ Sparrow felt shocked at the idea. ‘Not for me, Piggy-O. That’s the sheenie cheaters’ joint. I’ll go on the legit before I go to work for sheenie cheaters.’
‘A guy workin’ for me gets his dough in advance – he can’t get cheated that way, can he?’
Sparrow’s heart took a small, tight stitch. ‘Couldn’t you just borrow me a sawbuck? It ain’t my line of work, what you got in mind.’
‘It’s up to you, Steerer,’ Pig told him coldly and turned to go. Sparrow caught the cane with real despair.
‘I got no place to sleep tonight, Piggy.’ And sensed, even as he held the cane and would not let it go, that Pig had come into the Tug & Maul looking for him. That he’d simply let the talk run on until it had been Sparrow doing the seeking. He should never have talked that hard about Frankie.
‘It’s two bucks a delivery, Steerer. All I can afford.’ Then hearing no reply other than that despairing grasp on his cane, brought out a tiny package, wrapped by cleaner hands, out of an unclean vest. ‘I got friends who get sick. It’s a good deed, deliverin’ medicine to sick people.’
‘Bringing tidings of comfort and joy,’
the big brass juke agreed.
Sparrow needed a shot and a beer. But Pig let him sit feeling that his tongue was drying onto the roof of his mouth.
‘This one needs it real bad, and a hot little piece, I heard – if she wants to show you she’s grateful it’s awright – but get the sawbuck first – bring it back ’n you get the deuce for delivery – Antek’ll break the ten for me awright, he gives a guy a square count ’n don’t ask questions neither. Yeh,’ n I’ll buy you a double shot too. You stick with me you’ll have your own sawbuck by twelve o’clock.’
‘Is it real far, Piggy-O?’ It felt very far indeed.
And yet – how unlucky could one punk get in just one night? He’d had all the bad luck there was already and enough left over for a month to come. The image of the kite caught on the wires returned.
‘It’s a couple dirty miles for me but it’s only around the corner for a guy with eyes. Kosciusko Hotel. I’ll wait in the back boot’.’
And the little drugstore package lay on the scarred bar between them. Pig moved it with the cane’s curved handle toward Sparrow. If that Frankie wasn’t so stubborn, it was all that Frankie’s fault. As it moved toward him Sparrow saw, irrelevantly, that for some reason Pig had wrapped the cane’s handle in tinfoil. When Frankie found out how mean he’d been he’d be real sorry.
The cane’s bright silver luster had been stained, by those same hot blind hands, into a gutter-colored gray. ‘The dealer was laughin’ in here today,’ Pig reminisced, ‘he was tellin’ Owner how you couldn’t pick up a dime no more ’cause you lost his backin’. He said it was gonna get pretty rough for you when the Jailer moved in by Violet. He said-’
‘Don’t tell me what nobody said,’ Sparrow interrupted him, ‘let’s have the dirty bottle.’
‘T’ree-fifteen B,’ Blind Pig directed. ‘Go around the side door ’n use the elevator.’
Sparrow yanked the baseball cap down over his eyes – it would be just his hundred-to-one luck to have Cousin Kvorka pick him up on general principles at the corner.
But at the corner there was only the amputee who sold papers there, his cap wrapped in the Daily News and folded into his crutch’s handle to rest his armpit while he whooped, ‘Graziano suspended!’
Somebody was always suspending somebody, the punk reflected moodily. And the way the arc lamp swung one moment over newsstand and car line and curb gave a lilt of fear to his heart.
The lights were against him crossing Ashland but he wove in and out till he gained the opposite curb, keeping close to the store windows down to Cortez, and turned down a gangway where half-soled poverty has so long sought hotel side doors that Sparrow could feel, beneath his own thin uppers, the worn places in the walk’s cold stone. He remembered it was the hotel at which he had first registered with Violet as man and wife and no more luggage between them than that carried by the pigeons drowsing in the eaves.
Now the first full moon of December burned with a steady yellow fury, the way a night light once had burned above the dealer’s head. A pang of regret caught the punk unaware: that such nights could not come again.
Pausing to light a cigarette, the pang clung to his heart like the mist about the bulb at the gangway’s end. ‘I must be cheatin’ on somebody,’ he told himself uneasily, ‘I got that guilty-culprit feelin’, like somethin’s goin’ to happen.’
As he stepped inside the side door of the bright little lobby the elevator starter beckoned to him.
Sparrow didn’t name the floor: he simply stood eying that starter until the cage paused on the third level and the fellow slammed the door open with confidence that it was the third floor the shabby little man in the baseball cap wanted. It came on Sparrow like a voice. ‘Go back, Solly. Go back or you’ll never get back.’ But there was no place to go but out of the cage and into the long red-carpeted lobby.