Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

‘Everybody got to eat. Everybody got to die,’ a white-haired Greek sitting cross-legged told them like it was big news.

A wisp of a creature beside Dove squeaked happily right in his ear – ‘I’m the littlest guy here,’ n the oldest. Wouldn’t be surprised if I was the smartest too. I know I’m the sassiest.’

Dove’s eyes followed his friend’s hands. Such a careful way with the smallest pebble, yet so much quicker than his own.

‘I once growed the biggest crop of these yet seen in Northern Michigan,’ a florid-faced fellow in a frayed sheepskin boasted. ‘Fact is, it was the biggest crop in that part of the state that year if not in the entire state. Done it without help, too. Cooked my own meals. Done my own laundry. Put up my own preserves. Didn’t have no wife. Didn’t need none. Didn’t have a hired hand. Didn’t want one. Biggest cooperative farm in the state, likely biggest in the country, right next door to mine. Fifty able-bodied men workin’ night ’n day with tractors ’n every farm instrument known to modern man. Four professors to study their soil. All I had was a old-fashioned plow my grandpappy made out of a pine tree he felled hisself, and iron he’d worked out of ore he dug hisself. I turned out a crop near to double of theirs – a mite better than double, truth to tell. Didn’t have a hired hand neither. Didn’t need none. Didn’t have a wife. Didn’t want none.’

‘I reckon the sun didn’t hinder none,’ Dove observed.

As soon as one sack was finished, the hant dumped a sack of black-eyed peas, and for some reason this lightened everyone’s spirits, almost as though he had brought in a sack of cherries and told them to eat all they wanted.

Once he came in with a basket of tomatoes and offered them around. Everyone took one or two except Dove. ‘I wouldn’t eat love apples,’ he warned his friend, ‘it’s a poison fruit.’

The careful afternoon trickled through their fingers with less and less care. The big room darkened and dampened, walking wounded came and went. Dove’s thick thigh pressed his friend’s slender one and he felt the pressure lightly returned. Their fingers touched one moment in the sack.

‘You think these times are hard?’ the Michigan farmer was asking. ‘Why compared to times I’ve seen, these are absolutely flush . If you just look at it right, we’re right spang in the middle of the biggest boom this country ever seen. Look at us settin’ here stuffin’ ourselves to bustin’ on cornbread ’n beans!’

‘That’s right,’ Dove agreed, ‘we eat so much it keeps us skinny just carryin’ it around.’

‘Why,’ the farmer went on, ‘when I was a boy in Northern Michigan we didn’t know there was anything else to eat on earth but skim milk ’n wild onions. Drunk branch water ’n et sheep sorrel ’n counted ourselves more fortunate than most. Mother run a highly successful boarding house on them two victuals in fact – biggest boarding house that part of the state. Never seed a toilet till I was seventeen year old. I’d heard of backhouses but never seed one. Never seen a well pump. Full grown man afore I tasted ice cream.’

‘My own folks lived mostly on pawpaws,’ Dove agreed. ‘It were mighty hard sleddin’ when the pawpaws didn’t hit and the wind died down.’

‘I’ll never forget the winter of 1917,’ the farmer went right on. ‘The snow was deeper than the world. Wolves killed my goats, hawks got the chickens, night-riders burned my barn an’ mother run off with a preacher. Made me of half a mind to quit farming and go to work.’

The encircling faces looked like so many tin plates on a shelf. They gave off a faint odor, as of disinfectant with smoke in it. The locked-in and the locked-out lived between the smoke of small wood fires and the odor of jail house disinfectant in 1931.

‘I’m the oldest ’n the littlest,’ the happy mouse introduced himself eagerly to each newcomer. ‘I’m the sassiest too. Wouldn’t be surprised if I were the randiest. How come I be first in everything? ’

‘You’re last in pickin’ beans,’ Dove told him.

‘But I was the first to vote for Hoover,’ the old man snapped more now like a youthful rat than an ageing mouse – ‘’n the first to admit I was wrong.’

‘Hoover is a great man,’ the Michigan farmer was certain – ‘but he’s too far ahead of his time. The whole Republican Party is ahead of its time.’

‘I lived through Hoover myself,’ somebody agreed. ‘It give me real strength. Now I can live through anything.’

The kitchen-hant came blowing a whistle. All hands quit on the second’s split. Dove stepped over the sack gingerly.

By the time he got to the mess hall the hant had put on a greasy beany just to direct traffic. Mexicans to the right, Negroes to the left. But Dove he directed straight ahead, to where the white Americans ate at the longest board of all.

‘Pappy wouldn’t approve this kind of carrying-on,’ Dove realized, ‘mixin’ Cath’lics ’n Protestants this way.’

‘Where’s the Reb table?’ his friend came asking.

‘Take the elevator, Yankee,’ the hant instructed her.

Dove got a slab of cornbread in molasses and a stack of beans piled so neatly they appeared to have been counted one by one. When he considered how many he had picked he felt that, percentage-wise, he was getting a bad count.

‘Everyone always gets more than me,’ he complained, and the girl pushed her plate before him again.

‘Why you so good to me?’ Dove asked.

‘Because I want you to be good to me,’ she told him so frankly that he felt he must be doing her a favor and cleaned up every crumb.

‘Everybody got to eat,’ somebody lamented, ‘everybody got to die.’

Dove had hardly finished his third helping when they heard the Man to Houston whistle. ‘Let’s scram out of here before that fool makes us chop down that tree,’ the girl urged him – ‘Put that stuff in your pocket, Red.’

Dove shoved the cornbread into his jeans and they ran for it.

Most of the cars were empties and came clattering past too fast to chance. They waited, flat on their stomachs on the under embankment until the ore cars, whose ladders hung lower, began sliding by.

Dove counted them coming. ‘It’s plumb mass-dark and they’re travelin’ fast,’ he warned her.

‘It’s the last one to Houston before tomorrow night,’ she answered. ‘You comin’?’

Straddling the car, Dove saw its sides were merely chutes slanting straight to the rails. She piled past him and over with a victor’s cry and he caught her wrist as she felt no floor. She pulled him powerfully over but his free hand caught the iron edge and held.

Just held. Then froze like floorless death itself on the iron.

He could not pull her up. He could not let her go. Her double-grip on his wrist, pulling the ribs out of his side, informed him if she were going he was coming with her. The wheels glinted green lightning in the black, he heard pebbles clicking against her shoes in the roar. His right hand no longer held the iron: the iron held the hand.

Her little stricken face, lighted briefly, tried to tell him some last something. Dove caught her overall strap in his big buck teeth and hauled, neck backstraining till she got her fingers onto the side and drew herself onto the edge. He steadied her though his arm trembled to the shoulder.

She was caked with coal-dust, fright had hollowed her eyes. When the train slowed to go into a hole for a passenger train he helped her down. ‘It sayz keep off all trains not in motion,’ he reminded her. Her trembling turned weakly to laughter then.

They rested their backs on the lee side of a heap of coke. There she let her laughter turn to sobbing.