Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

‘School’s out!’ Dove decided in a shout, and made for the nearest swing. Standing spreadlegged, he got it pumping high. Kitty’s little sexless face looked up at him from below. Every time he swung past her she said, ‘We don’t have time for fooling, Red.’

He came down off the swing in a shambling run. She watched to see what was next.

The rings: around and around, toes scraping the ground, his hair in his eyes and his mouth in a shout, ‘Look at me! Look at me! ’

‘I never seen anything like it.’ She decided to watch a while.

‘How’s this? ’

Dove had looped his knees into the rings and was hanging head down, hat gone and hair brushing cinders and sand.

‘Just let me know when you’ve had enough, Red. I got all day.’

But his childhood had just begun and he hadn’t had nearly enough.

‘Catch me when I come down!’ he warned her from the top of a chute. And she, the wingless jay of alley and areaway, had to stand at the foot of the chute as he came down head first to prevent him from breaking his neck. He grabbed her hand and hauled her to the teeter-tawter.

‘Break your back or bust your ass,’ Kitty Twist had had enough – ‘I’m New Orleans bound myself.’

Dove sat on the useless teeter-tawter, a see-saw boy with no one to see-saw. And watched his only friend go out the playground gate. The teatless little fly-by-night outcast wandering the wild earth just to get even with everything upon it.

‘She acts like she done me a favor letting me save her life,’ Dove thought, ‘let her go.’

He pumped himself high again on the swing. He took a flyer, even faster than before, on the rings. Then climbed the highest chute in the yard. When he reached the top he was breathing hard and had strangely lost heart for sliding. He slid down at last only as a way of getting back to the ground. Stumbling with loneliness, he hurried after anyone who could keep him from being alone again. Leaving his boyhood at the top of the chute and his true manhood still unreached.

Kitty was nowhere in sight. Nobody at all down the sunstricken street. Dove wanted to run back home.

‘Here’s your hat.’ She stepped out of the shadows so softly that he knew she had been watching him.

‘I’m not yet sure you’re real, Red,’ she told him as though to explain his suspicion.

‘If I don’t ask you to prove something like that yourself,’ he told her thoughtfully, ‘then you wont have to have ask proof of me.’

‘I’ll watch it after this,’ she told him, always wary. But he was lost, she saw, in wonder of the houses lining either side of this avenue where private footpaths led to every door.

‘How many folks you figure live in jest that one place?’ he asked, pointing at one.

‘None at all,’ she informed him, ‘the sign says FOR SALE.’

After that Dove noticed many such signs on houses whose paint was beginning to crack. Weeds grew in the paths guarded by oaks that had guarded Indian trails.

In a small suburban park they came to a line of sleepy stores, in several of which no business was done any more. Kitty took him for a leisurely arm-in-arm stroll down one side of the little half-dead town and up the other.

‘You got kin-folks around here?’ Dove asked because of the way she lingered.

‘Neither chick nor child,’ she assured him, bringing him up in front of a window where sawdust lay scattered. As they watched, a musty-looking rabbit hippety-hopped from a corner, got halfway across the window and turned back to its home-corner. Kitty left Dove to conduct inspection of the areaway behind the shop and returned briefly.

‘We’ll look in here after dark,’ she reported back, ‘I’ll need a little boost. Don’t worry – I’m the best damn stinker for my size and age in the business.’

‘I can’t help you in that business, sis,’ Dove informed her, ‘account I prefer a daytime trade. Like on one of them big white boats I seen a picture of in N’wawlins.’

‘In where? ’

‘A book. Picture-book.’

‘I mean where was the place you just said?’

‘N’wawlins.’

Kitty thought everything over. Even then she didn’t sound too sure. ‘You wouldn’t by chance be talking about New Orleans, would you?’

‘It’s what I said. N’wawlins.’

‘I see. And when you get there you’ll walk into the steward’s office without a shirt, barefoot, needing a haircut ’n ask him if he needs a captain?’

‘I weren’t intended to be no captain,’ Dove told her. ‘I weren’t meant to be more than a private. But I don’t figure to try even for private without I first look genteel.’

‘What size shoes you wear, Red?’

‘Haint wearin’ none. Walkin’ barefooty.’

She studied the feet he kept throwing from one side of the walk to the other.

‘Thirteen and a half,’ she judged.

‘That’s pretty close,’ Dove agreed.

‘Close to what?’

‘Close to fourteen.’

‘You can stop putting on the weakminded act for me any time now,’ Kitty Twist advised him. ‘I’m on.’

Down in Houston’s Mexican slum there stood, that June of ’31, a three-story firetrap with a name:

That’s all: Hotel Hotel.

‘Never did try sleepin’ in a skyscraper afore,’ Dove looked up – ‘Whut do it costes here?’

‘Thirty-five cents apiece,’ Kitty informed him, ‘and some places go yet higher.’

‘In that case,’ Dove decided, ‘we’ll have to find an inexpensive place.’

‘We get breakfast throwed in here though.’

‘What gits throwed?’

‘Mission donuts ’n coffee black.’

‘Then we’re too far north.’

Kitty tried to let it go but the temptation was too strong.

‘How do you figure that, Red?’

‘When folks stop puttin’ out liverpuddin’ for breakfast, everyone’s too far north.’

‘And I’m not in the least surprised,’ Kitty agreed. And supporting herself on his arm she slipped her sneaker off a moment, slipped it back on and released his arm.

‘Well what do you know? Just look here what I found in my shoe, Red.’

A five dollar bill lay folded in her palm.

‘That’s purely luck, sis. How it git there?’

She gave him a knowing nudge. ‘Didn’t I tell you colored folks are the friendliest? Why does everyone think that their kitchen matchbox is the First National?’

‘I never would of pecked that door if I’d knowed that that was what you were up to,’ Dove told her.

‘That’s why I didn’t tell you.’

‘It aint right to steal off folks while they’re doin’ you a kindness, Kitty. Do unto others as you would be done by.’

‘I’ll try to remember that too—’ she swung him about. ‘Why, Red, do you know what a pair of three-dollar shoes and a two-dollar shirt would do for you? People would be calling you Preacher, that’s what.’ She took his arm and hurried him into the lobby. ‘And you wouldn’t be the first country boy to turn into a town pimp neither,’ she added to herself.

‘My pappy was a preacher of sorts,’ he told her. ‘The sort to make you throw your Bible away.’

He stood on one side while she conferred with the desk clerk, and eyed himself sidelong in the long lobby mirror. She was right at that: if anything could improve him it was clothes.

‘The only bedtime story my old lady ever told me began and ended with “You leave me cold,”’ Kitty Twist recalled. ‘That’s what she’d say when she’d sober up. When they took me away from her and put me in Juvenile I was a real little terror there. I was mad ’cause I hadn’t stole things like the other kids. I wetted the bed and a matron snitched so I had to sleep in the Skunk Room. That’s the dorm with rubber mattresses for bed-wetters. I was eight. They were afraid by the time I was ten I’d flood them out.