Nelson Algren

‘You want to buy a dog?’ Implying that a dog, any dog, was the one certain solution, in an uncertain world, to any cabbie's troubles. / ‘I couldn't buy the lice off a sick cat,’ the cabbie answered from the very depths of self-deprecation. / ‘I wouldn't sell you one with lices,’ Sparrow assured him lightly. ‘I take the lices off 'n sell them sep'rate.’

The junkie wants a bondsman though he doesn't own a dime. His life is down to a tight pin point and the pupils of his eyes drawn even tighter: nothing is reflected in them except a capsule of light the size of a single quarter grain of morphine. He has mounted the walls of all his troubles with no other help than that offered by the snow-white caps in the brown drugstore bottle. A self-made man.

Standing on the open street with the empty in his hand, he hesitated to go to the left or to the right for the refund. It wasn't that he needed the dime that badly – though he knew he was going to need every dime he could trap soon – but rather that it just didn't seem right to be hunted by the police with a half-gallon empty in his hand. [...] / For what Frankie sought, in that hesitating moment, was the place that would return him a refund on his very life, fleeing headlong, down back street and alley, so fast and so far he didn't know whether he'd ever recapture it again.

[...] the captain leaned forward on his elbows and spread his fingers gently across his temples; the light kept hurting his eyes. And didn't feel he had heart enough left to face one more man manacled by steel or circumstance until his own heart should stop hurting. / Yet they come on and come on, and where they come from no captain knows and where they go no captain goes: mush workers and lush workers, catamites and sodomites, bucket workers and bail jumpers, till tappers and assistant pickpockets, [...]; the damned and the undaunted, the jaunty and condemned.

There, across the hallway window, the Station's signal tower stood out clearly and abruptly, its red and green ornamentation glowing down the tracks like an iron caricature of the Christmas tree they had left behind in a half-lighted hall. / With his arm about her they paused to see the snow falling aslant the crosslights as far as the night would let them see. / To Frankie that quarter-moon sky looked darker and all the iron apparatus of taller than ever. The artificial tenement light seeping across the tracks made even the snow seem artificial, like snow off a dime-store counter. Only the rails seemed real and to move a bit with some terrible intent. ‘Your hands 'r so cold I can feel the ice t'rough my mittens,’ Sophie told him, thrusting her damp, mittened hand out of his in a child's sudden displeasure. / So cold, so cold, hands, wrists and hearts: the old quarter-moon of the tenements shone no colder tonight than the blood crying for warmth in his wrists.

So the men came on again: the ragged, crouching, slouching, buoyant, blinking, belligerent, nameless, useless supermen from nowhere. ‘For climbin' a telephone pole at t'ree A.M. wit' a peanuts machine on my back.’ ‘For makin' anon'mous phone calls to call my wife dirty names.’ [...] ‘Went upstairs with a girl 'n came down with a cop.’ [...] ‘Just throwed a rock at a wall 'n it happened to go through a window instead. So I followed through. But I didn't have no intent of stealing.’ / ‘You never have. But you're in and out like a fiddler's elbow all the same. What was the stretch in the Brushy Mountain pen for?’ / ‘I got the wrong number was all.’ / ‘I think you did. The wrong house number.’ / ‘That's right. The people were home. I was drinking pretty heavy.’

They wandered in from all over the ward, the invited and the uninvited, the wary and the seeking, the strayed, the frayed, the happy and the hapless, the lost, the luckless, the lucky and the doomed. Some, on the assumption that if anyone were getting out of jail it must be the punk again, to congratulate Sparrow; only to find all the more reason for celebration when they learned that, just for this once, it wasn't the punk at all. / Everyone got congratulated for something or other whether he deserved it or not. Everyone but Old Man, who couldn't even get congratulated on his new socks. [...] And Violet, finding pity at the bottom of a whisky glass, began making every stewbum, who came up to kiss her, shake hands with Old Husband first and admire his socks. Till the old man, clutching his calendar dates like so many retrieved hours, felt the party must really be for him after all.

For there was no priest to wash clean the guilt of the captain's darkening spirit nor any judge to hear his accusing heart. [...] He could not even tell the names of those who'd taken the rap for him. / To leave him, of all men most alone, of all men most guilty of all the lusts he had ever condemned in others. / What was it that the defrocked priest had said? ‘We are all members of one another.’ What had the holy-sounding fraud meant by that? Why had several snickered then and not one had laughed out from the heart? Bednar hadn't understood then and could not let himself understand now. It had been too long since he himself had laughed from the heart. / Yet the words had left him with a secret and wishful envy of every man with a sentence hanging over his head like the very promise of salvation.

The cons up there were either in bug cells or deadlock. They were the privates who went for stronger brew than applejack. These no longer cared: these were the truly unsaved. Over the hump for redemption and the hour for turning back lost forever: too late, forever too late. So they hurried forward all the faster into the darkness. / They talked in terms of police administrations and remembered in terms of police cars. ‘That was the year the aces had black Cadillacs with a bell on the side – or was that the year they had them speedy orange Fords?’

By the glare of the great double-globed arc lamp filtering through the dark and battered shade he saw that Sophie had left the chair at last and in its place had left a doll, some sort of mangy-looking straw-stuffed monkey of the kind that is won at street carnivals. Over its eyes and below them some mimic had painted in shadows of a purple harlotry with lipstick or rouge: the eyes surveyed the room gravely through its livid yet somehow dignified little mask. Like those of a child whose face, seared by disease, accepts the horror it reads in the eyes of others as its rightful heritage.

She unbuttoned his field jacket, he looked so warm, and tripped the knot of the little blue jazzbow about his throat like tripping the knot which held his innards so tightly of late. He felt the knot within loosen with the realization that he could talk straight to somebody at last. / For how does any man keep straight with himself if he has no one with whom to be straight? He had never fully trusted Sparrow, the punk thought too fast for him. In their world of petty cheats, phony braggarts, double clockers, elbow sneaks, small-time chiselers, touts and stooges and gladhand-shakers, one had always to be on guard.

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. / [...] / 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.