The Man With the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren

John had left. ‘A guy can walk into her heart with army boots on.’
    Frankie and Sparrow sat silently a moment after Antek had passed. Until Frankie said at last, ‘There ain’t many hearts like that no more, Sparrow.’
    ‘Sophie’s gonna be real worried about you, Frankie,’ Sparrow chose the moment to remind the dealer. Frankierose and pushed back his chair as though he thought it might somehow be Molly Novotny to whom he was going home tonight.
       
    To the tenants of 1860 West Division Street Landlord Schwabatski was seldom referred to as the landlord. He was Schwabatski the Jailer. Though his only uniform was a pair of faded army fatigues and his only weapon a hammer with which he pretended, from time to time, to repair a loose tread on the stairs. To prove he really was the landlord he had hung a sign above his desk on the second floor:
    QUIET
    Or out you go too
    But both the desk and the sign seemed somehow lopsided. The whole vast frame rooming house, and Schwabatski as well, seemed lopsided. If the desk leaned a bit to one side it only went to show that the Jailer was no more skilled in carpentry than at playing landlord.
    He certainly appeared the kind of man more likely to be found behind cell bars than the one turning the key in the lock. Yet he had to be a door-shutter and key-turner for guests who insisted, summer or winter, on leaving doors ajar. It was true that most of the rooms were small and close; but Schwabatski felt it wasn’t always for lack of air that tenants left doors a bit open.
    ‘Maybe you mean to have only a little air all right,’ he would argue for understanding, ‘but always somebody thinks it’s an invitation and then comes big fight, up and down, and who pays policemens for me then? If you want to make carryings-on, please do in family way, door always closed .’
    ‘I s’ppose I have to get dressed ’n go down ’n set on the curb like some bum to get a breath of air,’ some straywould huff at him. But the strays were forever huffing and the Jailer’s argument never varied.
    ‘You want to go out, go out. But you’re in, don’t be just half in – be all in. You ain’t in till door is close . A old man like me can’t be run up, down stairs every five minutes, see what goes on. Got work to do.’
    Schwabatski had work to do all right. He had a dim-witted, oversized, twenty-one-year-old of a son whose sole and simple pleasure it was to plant paper daisies in the cracks of the dark old stairs. Schwabatski never gave up hope of being able to teach the boy carpentry; so brought him each day, with hammer and pencil and nail, to watch the way in which a broken stair should be repaired.
    The old man’s patience was inexhaustible. How many times had that same tread been pulled out and the work begun again because the boy’s attention wandered from the hammer’s tapping to his precious daisies? Yet the boy’s patience surpassed even his father’s. He waited as hopefully for the daisies to take root as the old man hoped for some light to come into Peter’s brain. Poor Peter – he touched each daisy to his heavy underlip before each planting: he prayed for rain to come to the dark stairwell.
    There was nothing seriously wrong with the boy’s understanding, the old man felt. It was just that, whenever the boy began to get the idea of the hammer and nails, one of those strays would start some uproar or other and hammer and nails and stair and son would have to be forgotten while he rushed to make peace at his own price before the Saloon Street aces made it at theirs.
    Why would anyone want to eat peanuts in the dark with the door exactly two inches ajar? Yet there it was, the door open and swinging a little and a sound of peanuts being crushed and the shells tossed onto a newspaper in the darkened room. He couldn’t tell whetherit was a man or a woman, so he called in a voice good for either:
    ‘That don’t seem right to me in there! You like peanuts – eat them