Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

‘How old is that Mex, Dove?’

‘She give her age as twenty-one.’

‘I reckon she lost her measuring stick. How much she pay you?’

‘Aint no business of you’rn.’

‘Taint likely Dear Little Pappy approve.’

‘Taint likely I’m to tell Little Pappy.’

‘Mighty likely I’m to.’

‘I’d name that right onfriendly.’

‘Why then, let’s be friendly.’

‘You want a cigar too, Byron?’

Byron coughed his little dry cough. He shook his head, though the very invitation made his throat tickle pleasurably. Holding his bandanna to his mouth, he pointed to the register and held up a single finger.

Dove stared. Byron snapped his fingers. ‘ Pronto! Pronto! ’

Dove hurried to obey, hoping to make as tiny a ring on the register as possible. There were bills, there was silver. He picked four quarters and weighed them a moment as though changing his mind.

Byron’s open palm reached over the counter. The quarters fell one by one.

It was only when Byron slammed the screen that Dove realized the cash drawer was still standing open.

She wakened slowly, feeling more well than she had in years. A great white sun was making a Mexican mosaic across the floor.

She felt lazily grateful to it for going to all that trouble just on Terasina’s account. She felt she had been ill and the sun had healed her. Mighty nice of the sun.

But who had slammed a door?

Then saw a small handkerchief of black Spanish lace still damp from her own tears. Remembrance returned like bad news from a stranger. News of some injustice that could never be undone. And visualizing herself convulsed on a bestiary bed, the room that had smelled of soap and chastity smelled now only of lust. She picked her night dress off the floor as gingerly as though it were befouled.

Just as the cash-drawer banged shut.

She composed her features and her hair, dressed unhurriedly and came downstairs assuring herself that nothing was different than yesterday, though a slow-burning fury shook her every step of the way.

Dove appeared to think a number of changes had been made. He was toting a cup of coffee with the look of a daydreaming idiot’s, mild and satisfied. The stump of a cigar burned in his mouth as smugly as if it had been paid for.

‘Come here to me you,’ she told him from the register, ‘I want to show you funny th ee ng.’ Her English had no Spanish accent unless she were under emotional stress; he should have taken warning just from that. ‘A funny theeng – look! ’

She was pointing to a peso note. ‘ See . Is made by American company – Mexico must have Americans to make even their money!’

He nodded thoughtfully. It didn’t seem quite right at that, and came a step nearer, balancing his coffee carefully.

‘But it is al right ,’ she reassured him – ‘Mexicans make the money for Chinamens’ – and with an upsweep of her open palm spun coffee and saucer and all; he stood running coffee from eyes to chin, his mouth unhinged for coffee to run in. Saucer and cup crashed at his feet.

Clenching his overall strap in one fist and gripping the seat of his jeans with the other, she rushed him forward so fast his toes touched the floor only twice on the trip – and with a single two-handed shove sent him stumbling into the dust where she’d found him.

Dove knelt on all fours in the road as though looking for something he’d lost. He picked himself up heavily, brushed himself slowly down. To study her sunstriped figure behind the fast-hooked screen.

‘I tell you once,’ she reminded him – ‘ Go . I tell you now Go. Go. Go .’

She watched him out of sight.

Then all her anger drained and died.

Leaving her just a small careworn woman with one stocking fallen under a sign that said—

Half that night Dove listened to Byron and Fitz arguing whether the world moved or stood still.

‘Take a butterfly,’ the old man kept insisting, ‘the way it keeps hovering over the ground just above one patch . If the earth moved, he’d come down in the next yard, wouldn’t he?’

‘That butterfly got more brains than you have, old man,’ Byron replied. ‘ He knows the world is round and that’s more than you do. So he moves just fast enough to keep up with the patch. It may look to you like he’s just fluttering, but he’s keeping even all the same.’

‘Did you ever throw a ball in the air and catch it coming down?’

‘Naturally.’

‘Then common sense will tell you that if the earth actually moved you’d be too far away to catch it coming down, wouldn’t you? Now tell me the ball knows the earth is moving.’ The old man had victory within reach.

‘For God’s sake, when they say the earth moves it don’t mean it goes forty miles an hour, old man,’ Byron protested.

‘What’s to keep it from going forty?’ Fitz asked dryly, ‘if it’s round as you claim it ought to be going faster and faster like a snowball down a hill. I’ll tell you the reason it don’t move is the same reason it aint round – it got corners to keep it from moving. I’ll prove it by the good book.’

Dove heard him rustling about with the battered Bible, trying to find the passage that proved him right.

‘Don’t bother, old man,’ Byron sounded tired. ‘I know what you’re lookin’ for – “and the winds blew from the four corners of the earth” – so how can anything round have corners? Go to sleep, fool old man.’

The light was turned down. Dove heard the old man creep onto his cot bed. So long as the world was flat he would sleep well upon it. Only round worlds left Fitz sleepless.

As softly as if he’d been saving it Byron asked – ‘On what day of the Creation did God say “Let there be light and there was light”?’

‘The first, of course,’ Fitz answered contentedly.

Dove heard a little silence run about around the room and back. Byron had a sense of timing.

‘And when did He make the two great lights, the greater to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night?’

‘The fourth, naturally.’

‘Think that over, old man.’ Byron turned on his side. He slept best upon a rounded star.

Dove heard the old man thinking it all over; tossing then fuming. While Byron slept the sleep of the just, snoring softly.

Dove was glad Byron had won for once. But personally didn’t care if the planet was shaped like a pretzel. He had issues more pressing to solve.

‘First she totes me on and the next thing I know I’m standin’ on my haid in the middle of the road. She could have spore me that.’

Well, he wasn’t the sort to hang around a door he’d been shoved through. She’d have to send for him before he’d work for her again. That much was certain.

All the same, there is no statute forbidding a man to walk down the common highway.

Dust puffs filed behind him early the next morning, and an anxious wind went sniffing ahead like a hound favoring a sore forefoot; gas lamp to telephone pole, one side of the road to the other. Till it came to the lamp that leaned toward the La Fe as the La Fe leaned toward it. There it scooted suddenly around the corner into the yard, abandoning Dove altogether.

He hadn’t heard of any law forbidding a man to go around the corner of a broken-down chili parlor either.

Terasina’s back was toward him. Her earrings glinted green against the white of the wash like news of an early spring. Slips and step-ins, yellow and pink, flapped about her like invitations to love in the morning. The strong forenoon light silhouetted her thighs to the full and the wide.