Nelson Algren

The time the clockmakers had locked into the stopped clocks of these corridors was a different kind of time, Frankie felt, than that they had put into the clocks outside. Just as there was a different sort of time for cripples than for junkies, and a different kind of time than either for dealers, there was a special kind of time for convicts too.

These were the ones who just wouldn't work. [...] They were the ones who had never learned to want. [...] They didn't even read comic books. They had been bored to death by all that the day before they were born. The whole business between birth and death was a sort of inverted comic strip, too dull to read even if set right.

‘I slugged him.’ The toughness was still in the grin if not in the biceps, the arms making a loose, outswinging gesture which she took to mean he'd first tried shoving that certain guy off. ‘Then his neck made a sort of dead sound 'n I knew that was it. [...] It's all in the wrists,’ he told her thinly, ‘I used to have the touch.’

‘What you cuffed for?’ Record Head longed to know. / ‘Took a cab home was all,’ Frankie heard Blood-Spots explain. / ‘That's no crime. Did you pay the driver?’ / ‘I couldn't.’ / ‘Why not?’ / ‘He wasn't in the cab.’ / ‘That's the chances you take. Next man.’

What did it mean that all the guilty felt so certain of their own innocence while he felt so uncertain of his own? It was patently wrong that men locked up by the law should laugh while the man who locked them there no longer felt able even to cry. As if those caged there had learned secretly that all men are innocent in a way no captain might ever understand.

The Jews recalled last year's losses and forgot this hand's winnings. The Poles played the game for its own sake, to kill the monotony of their lives. The Jews played to make the hours return to them of what other hours, in other cities, had robbed their fathers; their lives were less boring away from the board than at it. The Pole, even when playing on borrowed money and the rent overdue, still felt, somehow, that he could afford to lose all night because he was so sure to win everything in the end. The Jew knew that the moment he felt he could afford to lose he would begin losing till the bottom of the world fell through and he himself went through the hole. It was more fun being a Polish gambler; it was safer to be a Jewish one.

‘If there ain't nothin' in the papers about it,’ Molly told him, ‘it just means they're keepin' it out so you'll get careless 'n walk into the chair for them.’ / Frankie sounded hurt. ‘There ain't no chair about it, Molly-O. It's manslaughter is all. Happens every day of the week.’ / ‘It must be nice not to have to worry about a little thing like doin' one to twenty then,’ she feigned admiration of anyone so lucky. / He grinned wryly. ‘Don't forget that good-conduct time. I may get out in sixteen.’ / ‘You couldn't behave yourself that long if they handcuffed you to the warden.’ / Of course Molly-O was right, she had that way of knowing what was wisest and best for Frankie; it was only for herself she couldn't tell what was wisest.

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? [...] 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.

‘I'm settin' here three days now waitin' for you, listenin' to s go by, countin' how many cars it sounds like. You don't know how lonely it gets, waitin' for El cars. Frankie, let's both quit stonin' ourselves.’ / He didn't know she was crying till her tears touched his lips.

Beneath the sink Rumdum slept with one ear alert for the coffeepot's first perk. Vi was trying to wean him off beer with coffee.

He heard a girl's voice crying out a single question, she was being brought in off the street a full floor above him; but in a voice so agonized it seemed she spoke directly to himself: / ‘Ain't anybody on my side?’ [...] But no one, on the long streets above, off which both had been taken, cared one way or another. For up there each was the only one on his own side. Under one moon or another, he knew not one man on the side of men.

His voice began drifting somewhere the other side of the room, the other side of the curtained window, the other side of the street and the other side of the world. ‘There's so many little worries floatin' around 'n floatin' around, why not roll 'em all up into one big worry? Just like goin' by the loan shark 'n gettin' enough to pay off all the little debts with one big one?’