He walked slowly, pretending to look for a certain door but only listening for the shutting of the cage behind him so that he could get rid of the bottle in his pocket anywhere at all. When he turned to see what was keeping the cage on the third-floor level that fishy-eyed starter pointed to 315B and called out in a soft-clothes man’s command: ‘Knock!’
In a kind of paralysis, afraid to knock and afraid not to, fearing the ones who’d open the door when he did and fearing fast footsteps down the carpet behind him and the flash of a badge, he raised his ragged little claws to the indifferent wood.
And never knocked at all. The door opened to him.
Frankie.
With a line of sweat under his hair line and looking so sick Sparrow could only stammer, ‘I didn’t know who I was comin’ to.’ Frankie yanked him inside, slammed the door, took the bottle out of the punk’s pocket and unwrapped it with fumbling fingers while Sparrow protested his innocence. ‘Honest to Jesus, Frankie, I didn’t know it was fer you ’n it begun to feel like a dirty frame ’n I got scared.’
‘You always get scared too soon. You got the bull horrors. Hand me the hypo, I’m hitchin’ up the reindeers.’
The needle lay in a cigar box above the radiator and Sparrow brought it over box and all as if fearing to touch the needle itself. Frankie was swinging his arm to get the blood moving, but his legs went weak and he had to sit on the bed’s very edge. His fingers faltered on his sleeve and then pointed. ‘Roll it up, Solly. I’m in a deadly spin.’
Sparrow rolled the sleeve neatly and backed off. He wanted to go now. There was an odor near Frankie he couldn’t name. Frankie smelled green. And he didn’t want to see Frankie using that dirty stuff.
‘I don’t know if I can make it by myself,’ Frankie pleaded. ‘Don’t chill on me. Stick with me just this one time.’
But somehow had still enough toughness left to grin weakly at the fright in Sparrow’s eyes. ‘You look as sick as I feel,’ he teased Sparrow. ‘Maybe you need a charge yourself. There’s enough for us both – we’ll jump together.’
‘I ain’t jumpin’ nowheres but home, Frankie,’ Sparrow told him just as if he had one.
Frankie sucked the air out of the medicine dropper, then held a match to the morphine in the tiny glass tube. But his hand shook so that he couldn’t steady the flame. ‘Melt it,’ he pleaded with the punk, ‘melt me God’s medicine,’ and lay back with the one bared arm upflung and the light overhead making hollows of anguish under his eyes. His whole broad forehead glistened whitely with sweat and the throat so stretched with suffering that it shone bloodlessly.
A dead man’s throat.
When the cap had melted Sparrow asked, ‘What do I do now, Frankie?’ Frankie put a hand to his mouth, coughed the little dry addict’s cough and pointed to his arm. ‘Tie it.’
Sparrow took the tie off the bedpost and bound it about the naked biceps.
‘Tighter,’ Frankie begged. ‘Tight as you can pull it.’
When it was tight as a vise Sparrow took the tie’s dangling end and, involuntarily, daubed the tears out of Frankie’s eyes. ‘You’re sweatin’ awful hard,’ he pretended.
Frankie sniffled. Sweat or tears, it made no difference, all that mattered was to make the sickness stop.
‘It kills me in the heart, how you are now,’ Sparrow couldn’t keep from saying. ‘It just ain’t like bein’ Frankie no more.’
‘That’s the hardest thing of all for me to be, Solly,’ Frankie told him with a strange gentleness. ‘I’m gettin’ farther away from myself all the time. It’s why I have to have a charge so bad, so I can come back ’n be myself a little while again. But it’s a longer way to go every time. It keeps gettin’ harder ’n harder. It’s gettin’ so hard I can’t hardly afford it.’ He laughed thinly. ‘I can’t hardly afford to be myself no more, Solly, with the way Piggy-O is peggin’ the price up on me. I got to economize ’n be just Mr Nobody, I guess.’ He looked at Sparrow curiously. ‘Who am I anyhow, Solly?’
He really didn’t know any longer. From one day to the next, he no longer knew. For he answered himself in an oddly altered little voice, a voice Sparrow had never before heard. ‘Meet Sergeant McGantic, Solly – the guy they give the stripes to ’cause he got the golden arm. It’s all in the wrist ’n he got the touch, it’s why they had to give him the stripes. See them little red pinholes, Solly – it’s the new kind of stripes us sergeants are pinnin’ on the arm these days. The new way of doin’ things we got, you might call it. You know who I am? You know who you are? You know who anybody is any more?’
‘I don’t know, Frankie.’
‘Tell me just one thing you do know then.’
Sparrow watched closely to see whether Frankie was putting on a bit of an act, to get at something he still wanted to find out. It was hard to tell. ‘I’ll tell you if I know, Frankie,’ he offered.
‘Then tell me just this – why do some cats swing like this?’
Solly didn’t know that either. He didn’t know what to make of the answer any more than he’d known what to make of the question. Yet Frankie was laughing, weakly on and on, just as if he’d said something funny. While that naked arm looked far too white to have any gold left in its veins.
‘You know the heartaches, Solly, I’ll say that for you,’ Frankie took breath long enough to say. ‘You always knew the heartaches. Why don’t you learn the good kicks too?’ Then the weak laughter began again, with something almost convulsive in it now, as though he lacked the strength to laugh but somehow felt he had to – till it ran into tears of such a barbed despair that Sparrow called to him like calling to someone far away, ‘Be yourself, Frankie!’ For a second he thought he was going to have to slap him to bring him back.
Frankie came back to himself, brushed the sweat off his forehead with the back of his arm and began flattering Sparrow. The punk heard the false note clearly now. ‘It ain’t just knowin’ the heartaches you’re good for, Solly. You know how to do a thing, too. I’ll say that much for a kid like you.’ Cause you’re the one kid knows how to fix the old junkie when Old Junkie needs a little fix.’ He shook his head like a drunk. ‘Whoof! Old Junkie’s spinnin’ like never before. Hit the main stem ’n make me right.’
Across the disheveled bed a new deck lay scattered. ‘He must of been shufflin’ a few hands to hisself just to keep in shape,’ Sparrow deduced and told Frankie, ‘I don’t know if I can find it, Frankie, it ain’t my line of work.’ But felt Frankie’s hand, cold as a surgeon’s glove, guiding his fingers. ‘There. Press. Slow. Now.’
Frankie clenched his fist tightly to bring out the vein. Above the elbow a little inflamed knot began to point right at the needle. ‘Operation McGantic,’ Sparrow heard him murmur.
Sparrow saw the blood spray faintly, tingeing the morphine pink – and pressed while his own eyes went blind. ‘It feels like I’m puttin’ it right into your poor heart,’ he thought. As the needle came out a slow trickle of blood followed halfway to the elbow.
Frankie lay sprawled loosely with his eyes shuttered; but with the first faint flush touching the pallor of his cheeks. As the pale morphine had been tinged by the suffering blood.
‘How’s my complexion?’ he asked teasingly, without opening his eyes at all.
‘Your complexion’s awright, Frankie. But you can’t deal on that stuff. Remember “Steady hand ’n steady eye. It’s all in the wrist ’n you got the touch”? Remember, Frankie?’
‘It’s all above the elbow now,’ Frankie answered, scratching his calf indolently. ‘I’m out of the slot,’ he assured Sparrow with a fresh confidence in his voice. The stuff was starting to hit, his eyes were dew-bright and the glow of health was on his cheeks. ‘Didn’t I tell you I got a chance to start beatin’ the tubs at a hundred-fifty a week? Krupa been askin’ around at the Musicians’ Club where can he get in touch with me, I guess some guys told him about that night at St Wenceslaus when I got everybody goin’ like fools the way I was in the groove. I may take it, I’ll have to see what he got.’ He went right into some little old tune or other, rapping his knees with his knuckles, tongue between his teeth and his neck waggling an imagined rhythm.