The Man With the Golden Arm Read Online Free PDF Page B

though he himself had nearly forgotten. Yet with each pulse beat his blood demanded to know, once and for all before it went cold for keeps, who remembered him and his mottled suspenders.
    ‘Remember me? I used to be night watchman on the old Wabash.’ Not one remembered any night watchman off the Wabash, old or new.
    ‘That’s a good job all the same,’ Frankie explained earnestly to Sparrow. ‘You watch over people while they sleep. It’s when everybody depends on you, nothin’ badshould happen. When you’re asleep, that’s when you can’t protect yourself; even Joe Louis is like a little kid then. It’s why you shouldn’t laugh at some old guy if he’s been a good night watcher.’
    ‘I seen Fitzsimmons at the old Academy,’ the dodderer reported. ‘Remember the old Academy?’
    ‘No,’ Frankie told him respectfully, ‘but I want to introduce you to a real live millionaire.’ He shoved Sparrow around so that the old man could take in all of the punk at once. ‘Look at that cap he’s wearin’ – Pop Anson give it to him, it’s worth a fortune today.’ The old man sensed some mockery and, turning his behind upon them both deliberately and leaning so far forward he creaked, began a compulsive sort of scratching through the yellowed underwear, the fingers working with a life of their own, starting below the low sagging hill of the fallen thighs and laboring methodically upward as if pursuing the blood like a dog following its fleas; up over the hill and there paused, digging with blunted fingernails but yet without haste and even with something of pleasure. A full five minutes they watched him, he seemed to be pacing himself, knowing just how long this job would require; then up with the pants and, suspenders still dragging the soiled concrete behind, moved forward once more toward the one thing the blood asked as insistently as it itched in the buttocks: ‘You fellows remember me?’
    The dying blood sought to renew itself by finding someone – anyone – to share a recollection of the old Wabash where so many nights had been shared. If but once somebody would say, ‘I remember,’ the blood would be touched; to make him for one moment as he once had been.
    But those who remembered were gone with his strength, all down the drain with last year’s rain; friends and family and foes together and the blood soon to follow the rains.
    ‘Remember me?’ Paused in his ceaseless scratching in that ancestral light, for it seemed that the men about him had all just wandered in off the old Wabash; they too had wandered away their lives in a flesh-colored light and now moved toward him for that final reunion beside a fog-colored trench. ‘They don’t remember people around here any more,’ he complained aloud at last. So returned to his ceaseless scratching, rump pointed insultingly and suspenders trailing the mottled dust.
       
    ‘A good turnkey can do better than a patrolman on a beat,’ Sparrow informed Frankie, ‘if he gets a houseful that’s thirty-four bucks right there.’
    ‘It all depends on the neighborhood,’ Frankie told him out of his wider knowledge of the world. ‘You take a patrolman up there in Evanston, he’s just walkin’ around smilin’ ’n tippin’ his cap, sayin’ how nice the lawn looks this morning, Mrs Rugchild – he’s like a watchman is all, up there. He’s got to be polite ’cause that means good tips, it ain’t like down here in hustlers’ territory where they got to line up guys like Schwiefka by pinchin’ guys like us before they can pick up anythin’ on the side. It’s why they got you dead to rights if they catch you duckin’ through a Division Street alley after twelve – you’re guilty the second that spotlight hits you ’cause you’re a wrong guy in a wrong neighborhood out at the wrong hour. If it wasn’t for guys like you ’n me guys like Cousin Kvork could be walkin’ a North Side beat, they figure. It’s why they’re down on us, we