Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

Sure enough, she was hanging yesterday’s black night dress. He watched the wind pawing it and saw it turning a little away from the wind like a girl evading a jealous lover. A wind that could not let matters be, but had to twist things around to suit itself.

Raising herself on her sandaled toes to reach the topmost point of the line, she stretched her brown sleeveless arms and her haunches pressed hard together.

As he had pressed them with his own large hand, when his other had pillowed her head.

That he would not pillow again. He spat across the fence and saw his spittle strangle itself on a thorn.

Look who’s hangin’ out her dirty underdrawers.

Out of the corner of her eye Terasina saw him leaning. One more tramp come to stare. So stare. If it helps your health it does me no harm. I did not send for you.

Won a wetback beauty contest forty years ago and thinks she’s the Queen of the May.

Go when you wish to go.

Let’s people see her make a-purpose. Thinks she got so much to show because she sells old fried beans. Wouldn’t be the least surprised if folks run her back across the river one of these nights.

If I am to play the whore I will play for my own people.

Better lookers than this Pachuco would be giving him the eye in Dallas or Houston one of these days. ‘Let me spend my money on you, Big Boy,’ is what they’d be asking him. Big Boy wouldn’t be wasting time on Pachucos then. He’d have some trim blue-eyed Anglo all his own, to cook him up real American meals. There wouldn’t be any frijoles in that house by God. And she’d say ‘think’ instead of ‘theenk’ and go to a Christian church and wear enough clothes on her back to keep every passerby from seeing how she was built between ankles and belly button. In Houston. Or was that Dallas?

‘No work today,’ she took the clothespin out of her teeth to announce.

‘I got a better job,’ he assured her.

‘Oh? That is nice .’

‘Aint in this old shite-poke town neither.’

‘What poke town is it in?’

‘Dallas, natcherly.’

‘What do you do there, in Dallas?’

‘You’ll read about that in the paper.’

‘You bring the paper and I read about it, so you know what you do there too.’

‘It’s not hard to make fun of weakness in others. I’ll pay you the dollar I borrowed.’

‘You owe me nothing but goodbye,’ she told him and bent, trim at the waist and broad at the shoulders, hitching her skirt to the backs of her knees.

She didn’t sense him coming up until his hands clamped her waist – then she wheeled like an ambushed cat and jammed the clothespin into his teeth. He rocked as if hit by fire.

‘ Segundos? ’ Terasina inquired politely.

He drew off, shaking his head and spitting splinters. No, he didn’t care for seconds on clothespins. He reached cowlike toward the blood trickling down his chin, and she held out the little black lace kerchief.

He shook his head. ‘Keep your rag.’

‘That is all I can do for you today then.’ The proceedings were closed.

‘You done nothin’ so great for me any other day,’ he told her, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand – ‘but you durn well liked what I done fer you.’

Her face showed no recollection.

‘It felt good is what you said,’ he remembered gallantly. ‘Slow you said – you liked it slow ,’ and put his hand on the nape of her neck. She sank her teeth into his palm, he felt them sink to the bone and forced her, biting still, to her knees.

‘It’ll be a little faster today,’ he assured her, ‘I’m a mite short of time.’

Spring-green and sun-yellow the clothes flapped about. Polkadot bandannas flapped a polkadot quadrille. But the night dress turned aside and a stocking hung dark as a shroud. Till she lay on her side with her head between her hands and her dress tossed back to her hips. The front of the dress was ripped to the waist. A low wind paused long enough to toss a handful of dust and pass on. It was done.

Dove picked up her handkerchief and daubed his chin. He waggled a lower front tooth. It was just a mite loose. The noon freight hooted two miles away.

Like a man walking through water he shuffled toward the S.P. water tower. The freight whooped like a Sioux who has seen too many westerns.

He stayed out of sight till the cars began passing.

The first stars arrived early that night to see how Dove Linkhorn was making out. And saw right off that here was one party who didn’t take funny stuff off anybody any more. Folks who thought this boy looked foolish felt different when they began to hurt. ‘Mighty rough customer,’ the planets agreed till Dove closed the doors on those gossiping stars.

He heaped straw for a mattress, wadded a bandanna for a pillow, pulled a yellowed rotogravure page to his chin for a sheet. Who needed Texas? Let Texas roll by.

And slept without remorse.

Only once, clasping his stomach as the car rocked and rolled him between nightmares and dreams, he whimpered a little.

When he wakened the cars were clanking an iron alarm and daybreak was shagging the shirtless and shiftless, the lame, the lost and the shoeless from under the brake beams and down the spines. Fleeing reefers, clambering couplings, climbing raggedly down off the ladders; walking wounded and battle-stragglers limped, leaned and hobbled to the closest aid-station.

‘Lots of fine folks out seein’ the country,’ Dove tried to get in step, ‘Didn’t reckon there’d be so many so early in the year.’ And stayed out of step for a quarter of a mile, to some half-sunken barns that might have stabled the federal cavalry that had once pursued Pancho Villa.

As a matter of fact, that was exactly what they had. Though the horses were gone with Villa now – mavericks and herd-bound hides alike. Hoof prints long sunk and riders unsaddled – captains and privates all alike. In rooms where the lighting was still by gas some lay drunk and others lay dying, and all were long since unsaddled. Dead or dying, drunk or derailed, Captains or privates, all alike.

The whole wide land looked disheveled as a bed in a cheap hotel.

‘Folks looken a bit peakedy,’ Dove observed, feeling slightly on the peakedy side himself. A lettered warning stopped him the way a stranger’s lips, moving silently, stop a deaf mute.

‘What do the sign sayz, mister?’ he tapped a fedora no higher than his shoulder, rambling along atop a faded plaid lumberjack.

‘It sayz here this is a city shelter,’ a foxlike bark came out of a face like that of a terrier bitch – a face neither feminine nor male, but the voice was a girl’s – ‘it sayz to scoff up here all you want ’n thank the citizens of San Anton’ for it in your prayers—’ she paused to let others give thanks – ‘but stay out of town or them same citizens will slap you right into the crummiest slammer in Texas.’

‘It sayz all that, sis?’

‘It also sayz Laughable Fools with Dirty Feet Keep Off All Trains Not In Motion, Laughable Fool. It says your best bet is to do what you see the smart people do. So crawl your weak-minded ass after mine and do what I do. Don’t do nothing you don’t see me do first . And don’t call me sis. Call me brother.’

‘You reckon yourself one of the smart folks ’n me just a big ignoramus?’ Dove considered the preposterous notion.

Brother raised a cautioning finger. ‘I got a jacket. You got no jacket. I got a shirt. You got no shirt. I got shoes. You got no shoes but we’re both up against a knife and fork. I ate last night and I ate this morning and you haven’t eaten since God knows when. Now who’s the smartest, me or you?’