Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

Girls were passing hand-in-hand and boys counterclockwise, sizing them up. But herself walked a bit to one side as befitted one luckier than some but lonelier than any. And she saw she was followed by some sort of luckless mongrel bitch looking for its owner, its leash dragging dust. It had a broken tail, as though it had been very nearly run over; people laughed for the way the broken bone bobbed this way then that, inviting males from anywhere. It ran the alleys dawn till dark, lolling its tongue in ashcan corners and any strip of shade that could hide her; then her scent would catch and she’d run on weakening legs again.

Panting for protection, the bitch stretched in exhaustion at Terasina’s feet, blood on her hindquarters and eyes unseeing.

‘Don’t laugh because others follow it,’ Terasina defended it to those who dared mock – ‘she is a leader, the one who decides what game dogs shall play, and now she is thirsty from play, that’s all.’ ‘What game shall we play now?’ she asked, to teach it there was no shame in being a leader, ‘if you were not so ugly I would take you home with me.’ (Yet how it panted in that airless heat!)

Its flesh was so thin the reddish meat shown through, and letting her hand pass caressingly down its spine felt her hand becoming part of that flesh. What she held in her hand was certainly no dog.

‘Not mine!’ she explained to everyone – ‘It kept following me!’ And wakened still kneeling, firelight flickering down all the walls and one hand wringing the other.

‘Fill your tires, mister?’ Terasina heard Dove, bright and early on the job the next morning as though nothing had happened between them. She looked out at him one story down, pressing hose to valve. He wore fresh jeans, his hair was parted and slicked down, his face scrubbed to shining. Around his neck he flaunted a clean green bandanna – even his ankles were clean! Had he thought he’d been fired for lack of neatness?

When he came in for coffee she hadn’t the heart to tell him she’d meant it when she told him to leave. She saw it would be of no use. He would go on working all the same.

Yet she could make things tough for him. Before he’d gotten the fires going she was on him about last night’s dishes. Before the sink was cleared she was after him because the coffee in the urn was low. How had she ever gotten by without him, he wondered; and she wondered a little too. He was perched on a chair filling the big chrome percolator when she leaned a broom against him – ‘Floor needs a good sweeping.’

‘O, put it up my tail,’ he told her below his breath, ‘I could sweep and wash the walls at the same time that way.’

‘You say something to me?’

‘A little girl got kilt.’

She glanced at him dubiously and turned away. He felt better for having fooled her, but fooling her earned him no rest.

Just before noon two jungle bums diverted her. One was a kind of Mexican bear, a regular little Pachuco, sideburns and all, arm in arm with a frayed-looking Swede twice his height and three times his age.

‘We stopped by to wish you good luck in your new location,’ the youth congratulated Terasina in Spanish. ‘Our family ate with yours often in past times, better times.’

‘The location is not new,’ she advised him in his own tongue. ‘I’ve been here ten years and have no family.’

‘Meet my father,’ he switched to English. ‘He has just been offered the job of district manager in Dallas and needs only fare to get there. Kindly to loan him one dollar fifty cents. If he doesn’t mail it back to you in two days I’ll make good on it myself – for sake of past times, better times.’

‘Talk English you sonofabitch,’ Dove heard Father whisper.

‘You should be ashamed of yourself, a nice Spanish boy of such good breeding,’ Terasina scolded the Pachuco and put two cups of coffee down for sake of past times.

Father dipped right for it but the Pachuco had more pride.

‘We take our trade elsewhere, Father,’ he decided for both, hauling the Swede, complaining, to the door.

Immediately Terasina applied herself to a new sign, laboring pencil to tongue the better part of an hour before it was done and hung on a handle of the coffee urn:

‘What it mean? ’ Dove wanted to ask after she’d read it to him as though it were self-explanatory. Things being as they were between them, he didn’t presume to ask what it meant, but merely sat and wondered.

‘You are paid for sitting?’ she asked, and he again hopped to it.

Simon the Pieman drove up in time to pay for a piece of his own pie.

‘I admire Latin women,’ he admitted with a chocolate smear for a chin, for Simon always ordered the most expensive kind, ‘and I’m thinking of marrying and settling down.’

He got no answer out of her to that, so he tried erudition on her.

‘I’m the intellectual type,’ he confided. ‘Here’s an example: Did you happen to know that Indians don’t react to lie detectors?’

‘Maybe Indians don’t lie.’

‘You always got an answer. Answer me this: Did you know that Navajoes eat grasshoppers?’

She worked up a mild astonishment. ‘Imagine that .’

‘I’ll tell you why , too. If you really want to know—’

‘Why?’

‘Because they come from a different culture. That’s why.’

‘So would you if you did,’ Terasina assured him, putting a lettuce-and-tomato sandwich before him in which she’d replaced the lettuce with cole slaw.

‘Will you warm this up?’ – he shoved his half-empty coffee cup toward her – ‘just a wee bit?’ Terasina pointed to the new warning; he saw too late that filling the cup would cost him another nickel.

‘What are you trying to do?’ he asked, ‘be the richest woman in the cemetery?’

Yet he tickled her palm when he left, the simple chocolate pieman.

They weren’t exactly stallions made of moonlight, these kings of truck and trailer. They were clods whose vices ran over weakly like coffee into their saucers. Over-eaters, over-drinkers, snuff-chewing chiselers, doers of great sins to hear them tell it, though tilting the pinball machine was actually their greatest. Their conquests were many, they let it be known. How to deal with the envy of lesser lovers their perpetual problem. Yet when she pretended to one that the weekend trip to Matamoros really sounded interesting, he changed his plans. It wasn’t to Matamoros, after all, but only to Brownsville. Not for a weekend but just for the day. And naturally he would have to bring his family.

The only man she’d met in ten years whose flattery she found difficult to resist, because it was unintended, was Dove’s. In his eyes she read dedication.

‘Is that fresh choklut pie?’ he asked as if thinking it might be banana cream.

She slapped a bar of Bon Ami down. ‘Call this pie.’

He went to work on the windows – loveless, shoeless, choklut-pieless. When the windows were done she handed him a flyswatter – but had not reckoned he would keep track of the score.

‘ Uno! ’ he reported from the kitchen. ‘ Dos! Tres! Cuatro! ’ He was lying; she could tell by the swish of the swatter he wasn’t hitting a thing. Yet listened to his triumphs mount as he mounted the high dry stair – ‘ Seis! Siete! Ocho! ’ He was nueve from the top, diez would bring him to the bedroom door, once would bring him to the bed, at doce she heard him swatting above her head, pretending to pursue a greenbottle that wasn’t there, around the bed and around. He feinted it this way – she heard his feet reverse in a dramatic presentation of a man fooling a fly on the wing – then vaulted right over the bed and brought the swatter down smash as though pinning it to the floor. Then silence.