Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

‘—O! Look yander! Comen down the streets of gold! I do see a great bloodwashed throng all robed in white!’

A dozen heads turned quickly to see God only knows what, but all they saw was Dove Linkhorn looking forsaken. As though wishing his poor crazy pappy would come down off the courthouse steps. When the crowd’s eyes moved toward him he turned away to follow his brother into the dark.

He passed the little movie where Thomas Meighan was being featured in ‘Young Sinners.’ But paused in front of the curio shop to admire the little fringed souvenirs festooned there, pretending to be made of buffalo hide and to be engraved with a branding iron.

Byron had read the words to him long ago. All over town were signs and posters, legends, warnings and invitations Dove had learned by heart. Now it was his amusement to stand making his lips move with his memory, so that some passerby might get the impression that he was actually reading. He even frowned now and again to pretend he’d hit one that was tough enough even for an educated boy like himself.

Passersby paid little heed to the sloucher with the hair in his eyes. So he paused below the barred window of the old jail. Prisoners, at least, had time for him.

But the only one the jail held this night, his fingers wound whitely about the bars, was Chicken-Eye Riley, an Indian gouged in a brawl years before. He wore his hair long, pioneer-fashion, with a tucking-comb in the back. And stood with his scooped-out skull bent between the iron, trying to get a breath of the night he could never see. Dove saw light glint off the comb.

‘Got t’bacco for me down there?’ Riley demanded.

Dove picked up a pebble, slipped it into his Bull Durham sack for ballast, and glanced about for the sheriff. The old man raged at the townsfolks’ habit of tossing sacks of this and that or anything, even grapefruit, through the bars, for it forced him to plod a steep flight of stairs to make the prisoner stand inspection.

‘Stand back, Chicken,’ Dove told Riley. Then tossed the tobacco – he heard the stone hit the floor with a tiny clink. The skull reappeared.

‘Thanks, son.’

‘What’s it for this time, Riley?’

‘Same old thing. Refusing to make love to my wife when she was sick. What kind of a man do they take me for anyhow?’

‘What kind of sickness have she got, Riley?’

‘You sound like a pretty well-growed boy. You know how women are. Wouldn’t a man be a beast to go to his wife at that time of the month?’

‘Reckon he sure would.’ Dove took a hazy guess.

He actually didn’t know how women were.

‘Now if I’d took her against her will – if I’d beat her, if I’d tortured her, that would be something to arrest me for. If I did a thing like that I’d turn myself in. I’d give myself up.’

‘You oughtn’t whup a woman, Chief.’

‘I didn’t whup her, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. I wouldn’t hurt my sow, far less my wife.’

‘You oughtn’t whup either one, Chief. A dumb brute like that.’

‘I’m glad you see it that way. But just suppose I did? Suppose I was kicking my sow and the sheriff happened along. Do you think he’d interfere?’

‘I should think he ought.’

‘Well, he wouldn’t. You know why? Because the sow is mine to do with as I please. He would no more tell me how to deal with her than he’d tell the barber how to cut hair. So why should he interfere now if I’m not kicking my sow at all but just being tender to her till my wife is well? Can I help it if my wife is even more jealous than usual at that time of the month? A little kindness and they treat you like a monster.’

‘You shore aint no monster, Chief,’ Dove didn’t sound too certain, ‘but I got to get to work now. I’m maintenance engineer at the hotel up the road. Come in when you get out. I’ll have my cook fix you up.’

Dove left the tender monster puffing contentedly against the bars. ‘Mighty mannerable fellow,’ the maintenance engineer decided, feeling pleased with the impression he himself had made.

He had to step carefully over the gulleys that the townsfolk called ‘love-holes’ because they were supposed, in horse-and-buggy days, to throw lovers into one anothers’ arms.

He passed the ramshackle Negro church where the town’s dozen Negroes gathered to pray, and heard them beginning as he passed:

It was that moment before frogs begin, when Mexican women and Mexican men draw their shawls across their mouths to keep the night damp out. In the dust-blue dusk the boarded windows of La Fe looked down as blindly as Riley. The careworn stairway, the windworn walls, the sandworn doors down a heart-sore hall, all remembered Terasina.

Terasina Vidavarri.

Frost knocked at the window. Though she had not asked him to remember, yet he lit her virgin every night. By its light he got the stove roaring. Then lit himself a little stick of Byron’s home-grown potaguaya and drew a deep, defiant breath.

‘Crazy Old Hasteth! Little-Time-to-Repent! Old-Cut-Off-Your-Nose-to-Spite-Your-Face – if you’d but hasted me to school instead of playing Gawd for a pack of utter fools I’d have a readin’ ’n writen trade tonight.’

With each draw he rose another inch off the floor.

‘Buggy old Just-As-I-Am’ – suddenly, the stick dangling from his lip, he crossed himself and genuflected, though his knees touched nothing.

‘Pump that out of your hose, old man,’ he told Fitz – ‘let that do fer you, Hell-’n-Brimstone.’

Here was her bedside, here was her bed. Of late she had lain here restless or dreaming and soon would lie dreaming again.

Between the white kerosene lamp’s glow and the virgin’s flickering yellow, he looked at the words of the story that told HOW A GOOD MAN IS ALWAYS RIGHT, for he knew that one by heart:

‘“Always going downhill, and always merry! That’s worth the money.”’

The tip of his narrow cigarette danced like a tiny ballerina in the dark. He turned the page to where the Eastwind, dressed like a Chinaman, told the Prince to hold tight or he might fall.

‘“Oh, have you come from that quarter?” said the mother, “I thought you had been in the Garden of Paradise.”

‘“I am going there tomorrow,” said the Eastwind. “It will be a hundred years tomorrow since I have been there. I have just come from China, where I danced round a porcelain tower till all bells jingled. The officials were flogged in the streets. The bamboo canes were broken over their shoulders and they shrieked, ‘Many thanks, Father and Benefactor,’ but they didn’t mean what they said. And I went on ringing the bells and singing ‘tsing, tsang, tsu!’”’

A scent of the Orient came to him. He left the book and followed his nose, sniffing like a rabbit, right up to a bureau drawer.

A chiffon blouse, a white slip frayed at the hem and a black brassiere like the vestments of some holy order. Dove felt of them with that special reverence of men who have lived wholly apart from women. Under these clothes, it came to him like a mystery, the señora walked naked. The realization weakened him so that he sat on the bed’s edge with the slip lying limp across his knees and stroked it as if it were her flesh. In the nippled cup of the black brassiere he smelled her special smell, like that of Russian Leather .