Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

Everyone in the city slept save one whose hand rested on the knob of her door as though it had rested there for hours. ‘It is so hot in the street,’ the listener beyond her wall complained in a voice much too used to lying. ‘May I have water?’

‘Only Jesus may drink here,’ she forbade him, and wakened with a sense of dry loss clutching her throat. Outside the rainwind was making mirrors of every ditch. She saw the true stars walking hand in hand down paving stones to the end of town. And then walk back again – like lovers coming home.

Suddenly the cup in her hand looked so empty, she dashed the water across the floor, poured it running-full of tequila; till it too ran over.

And drank, with her hands shaking and her back turned to the wall lest the Virgin Mary see her.

After Sesos lampreados , coffee and makin’s left Dove as dissatisfied as had the Sunday funnies, once he had seen a book.

So after the day’s last driver had gone Terasina opened her other book to him.

Now Dove saw a Chinese prince in flight, bearing lightly on his back a flaxen-haired boy with a green feather stuck in his hat; a fairy princess in a nutshell afloat on a leaf, cowering from a gigantic bullfrog saying ‘“Croak croak croak” was all her son could say for himself;’ a little patched man driving a herd of cows while smoking a clay pipe; and reindeer, Santa Clauses, dancers, goblins, ducks, mandarins, angels, castles and teapots and trees half as old as the earth.

But the one that trapped Dove’s interest completely was the steadfast tin soldier who shouldered his musket bravely although he had but one leg.

He had been made last, there had been not quite enough tin to finish him. Yet he stood quite as well on his one leg as others did on two. Dove guessed right away that, of the whole army, this was the very one who would get to see most of the world, have the greatest adventures and at last win the love that all the others wanted too.

The steadfast soldier didn’t have far to look: she was a paper dancer dressed in lightest gauze, with a blue ribbon across her shoulders pinned by a spangle as big as her face. She was standing tiptoe, stretching both arms toward the soldier so that, so far as he could see, she too had but one leg. This made him feel very close to her, though it made Dove uneasy. A mistake as bad as that could lead to nothing but trouble. Yet the soldier had made up his mind, and lay down full length behind a snuffbox, so that when the other soldiers were put in their box and the people of the house went to bed, the soldier still had an eye on his dancer.

‘Then the clock struck twelve, when pop! Up flew the lid of the snuffbox, but there was no snuff in it. No! There was a little black goblin, a sort of jack-in-the-box.

‘“Tin soldier,” said the goblin, “have the goodness to keep your eyes to yourself.” But the tin soldier pretended not to hear.

‘“Ah! You just wait till tomorrow,” the goblin threatened him.’

Just as Dove had guessed, there was trouble coming. The very next morning while standing guard on a window sill, the goblin blew him off the sill, the soldier fell head foremost from the third story and landed with his bayonet fixed between two paving stones. People went by without seeing him and some almost trod on him. It began to rain, a regular torrent, and when the rain was done and the gutters rushed, two small boys found him, made a boat out of newspaper, put the soldier in the middle of it and away he sailed into a long wooden tunnel as dark as it had been in his box.

The current grew stronger, the paper boat began to take water and sank beneath him. The soldier was swallowed by a fish, yet shouldered his musket as dauntless as ever until a flash like lightning pierced his darkness and someone called out loudly, ‘A tin soldier!’ The fish had been caught, taken to market, sold, and brought to the kitchen, where the cook cut it open with a large knife. She took the soldier up by two fingers and carried him into the parlor, where everyone wanted to see the wonderful man who had traveled so far. They set him up on the table and – wonder of wonders! – there were the same children, the same toys on the table and in the middle, with a sort of glow about her, his own tiptoe dancing girl! He was home once more!

The soldier was so moved at all this, especially at sight of his beloved, that he was ready to weep tears of tin joy. But that would hardly have befitted a soldier. So he looked straight ahead, a bit to one side, as one returns an officer’s look; but she looked directly at him. At that moment one of the little boys took up the soldier and without reason or rhyme pitched him into the fire, where he died, true to duty, looking straight ahead but directly at no one.

Dove leaped up, slammed the book so hard he caught Terasina’s thumb – ‘ Basta! ’

Enough of fairy tales. He hadn’t liked an ending like that, it appeared. For he raced to the juke, tripped it and began to dance as though trying to forget the soldier’s sad end as soon as the juke began to sing—

Raising one foot then the other, he began a slow swaying with his head, arms hanging loosely in a dance wherein, the woman saw, love strangely mixed with despair.

‘See the King of the Elephants!’ Terasina encouraged him, and applauded only to conceal her uneasiness. Somehow, that dance didn’t look right; though she could not have said where it was wrong.

He put his hands on his haunches and, grinning obscenely, sweat on his lip and breath coming faster, invited all women in a grind so purified by lust Terasina felt her own thighs start to part. A look half anguish and half shame made his face go gray and he sank to the table with his head on his hands. She saw his shoulders tremble as the music died all around.

When she touched his shoulder he gave her a smile that suffered too much, that pulled at her heart like an animal’s plea.

Holding the fingers of her left hand together, away from the thumb, she sprinkled salt on the stretched tendon and licked it up with her quick small tongue.

‘You must get yourself a girl,’ she announced as though salt had made her suddenly wise. And held the salt of her hand out to him, that he might become wise as herself. He pinched a speck of it, gave it to his tongue, thought for a moment and decided, ‘There aint no girl in this whole fool’s valley worth a second look.’ Then, swallowing the salt at last, had a cunning afterthought: ‘’ceptin’ yourself of course, Señora.’

‘Well,’ she pretended not to have heard the afterthought, ‘it is true things here are not so good. But if just this one little part of the world had everything, pretty girls and good crops too, bad men would come from the bad parts of the world bringing ugly daughters. Then things would not be so good as they are now. So it is good things are not so good.’

That night Terasina slept poorly. Half in sleep and half in waking she saw the smile that suffered too much.

A week before Christmas she gave him the key to the Fe , to play caretaker and watchman for her till she should return. She could not always go home when her heart was troubled. But this year the trouble came at Christmas, providing her with a pious excuse.

Through the drought of 1930, when old friends’ pennies counted most, merchants tossed Kiwanian greetings from all the doors of the little town’s stores, and smiled, smiled, smiled. But when the drought was relieved and tourists Matamoros-bound again began to get lost between the curio shop and the post office an hour, they were much too busy to smile. Business was business and time became money then.

The barefoot men and boys in overalls would walk around some tourist’s Buick, pointing its advantages to one another so solemnly that it seemed the days of walking from place to place must be over for everyone. Had anyone thought of letting the air out of the tires he would have been prevented, for their interest was proprietary. What they hoped for was many miles per gallon, no nicks on their fenders, contented journeying and no blowouts.