Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

‘That was when Mama went on the wagon to show them she meant it when she said she wanted me back. Got a crowd of ex-alkies to back her so I had to go. “All for my baby” was how she’d put it.

‘“If that’s the case you can step down any time,” I finally told her, “Because now you leave me cold.” Mama couldn’t stand a tie – in her book somebody had to win and somebody had to lose. When she fell off the wagon you could heard the crash for miles.

‘But if I was going to do another stretch I was going to do it for something I done, not on somebody else’s account. They caught me crossing some bridge. If I’d made that bridge I would of been alright. I would of been out of Illinois.

‘By the time I was fourteen I was back with kids a full head shorter than me. I wetted the bed the first night. Imagine – fourteen years old and right back where I’d been at eight! I realized then I wasn’t getting ahead.’

She pulled up the sleeve of her right arm. It was tattooed from shoulder to wrist.

‘Got ’em on my legs too. Done ’em myself with plain needles ’n plain ink. I had thirty-two days wrestling with the bear so I worked on myself to keep from getting even crazier. I wanted to do something they could never undo. That nobody could undo. Now I’d give anything to be rid of the damn things. But at least it showed the others I wasn’t no rat.

‘Did you ever see four big men hold a girl down on a table while the fifth does the whipping? It was how they done me with a leather belt four feet long. It had a silver buckle I can’t forget yet. And how they did drag it out! I could count up to ten between wallops. One hundred licks – I took the most they were allowed to give. And didn’t cry Tear One. That showed I wasn’t a crybaby.

‘Why’d they do it? I flooded the toilet with cotton, that’s why. Why’d I do that ? Search me. I’m always doing things I don’t know why. Maybe I just wanted to be a character. You know how you get to be a character? You sit in your room like the living dead, that’s how. They take everything away. There’s nothing to read – not even a candy wrapper. You can’t write letters neither. You get half a cup of dry cereal for breakfeast, two slices of stale bread and a piece of bologna for lunch and half a cup of sloppy stew for supper. That’s how you get to be a character.

‘I found a friend. A skunkie just like me. A little deaf-and-dumb Spade chick, used to lay there on the floor shagging and counting on her fingers. I stuck around, even when I had a chance to run, on her account. She was my friend. When they put her in some sort of hospital I had no reason for sticking any longer. Next time I came to that bridge I took the trolley. How long you been on the run, Red?’

‘Things did get a mite hot around home,’ Dove acknowledged, ‘so I just tuck with the leavin’s.’

She misunderstood. ‘Stealing is kicks alright. I like to get in there and do the job myself. There’s something about going through an empty joint when it’s dark and empty and you can take what you please that’s got kicks like crazy. It’s so much fun you want to do it all the time. You know what the best kick of all is, Red? It’s when you put a gun on grownups and watch them go all to pieces and blubber right before your eyes. That’s the best . How long you say you been on the run?’

Dove didn’t answer but he was on the run all the same. Making good time down Dream Boulevard. She watched him curiously. In sleep his mouth looked as if he’d just been insulted. She couldn’t know that he was standing on the courthouse steps in Fitz’s split-tail coat, leading the singing—

while a figure with a shaded face, astride a howitzer, kept swaying in solemn delight.

a prison where it cost ten cents to go in and see a corpse from which the spirit had actually fled. Kitty Twist, wearing black elbow gloves, was selling tickets just the other side of the wall. They had grown rich and famous traveling from town to town but she giggled too much and he woke to her giggling. For she had locked him to her in a vise and it was a moment too late to get loose.

‘I’m just so ashamed ,’ she told him later. ‘What ever got into you to make me do such a thing?’ In her eyes stood the same glass tears.

‘I must of just got carried away,’ Dove decided.

‘Promise you’ll never pull a sneaky trick like that on me again?’

‘I promise.’

‘Then I forgive you.’

‘You’re good to me. Real good. Just one thing I don’t understand.’

‘What’s that, Red?’

‘What’s wrestling with the bear?’

‘Solitary.’

And exhausted by forgiveness and good works, they slept the late light down.

‘Let’s hear your whistle, Red.’

Dove made a kind of feeble piping. Kitty waited.

‘That was it,’ he had to admit.

She put two fingers to her lips and sirened a low-pitched shriek. ‘When I put on the steam you can hear it two blocks – it means drop everything, it’s the nab.’

He stood, shifting from one foot to the other in the unlit areaway.

‘What’s the matter, Red? Afraid?’

‘Afraid of steppin’ on glass is all.’

She triggered a dime-store flashlight – ‘Follow the spot.’ Dove followed.

‘We’re lookin’ for Cousin Jim,’ she explained.

‘Got no cousin of that name,’ he thought he saw a way out of this – ‘fact is I got no cousin. See you later.’ She hooked his belt and hauled him along to the rear door of a shop. She knocked so imperiously that his feet tried to turn right around. Her hand around his waist held him still. He hoped she couldn’t feel him trembling. She knocked again. But all was locked and barred.

‘Make me a step.’

He made a stirrup of his hands and raised her until she secured a grip on the open transom; then it was up and over.

She dropped so softly on the other side that, though Dove listened, he did not hear her land. Then the door swung silently, he felt the flash placed in his hand. How had she gotten behind him? ‘Straight ahead to the register,’ she took command – ‘I’m backin’ you.’ And gave him a forward shove that carried him through to the cash drawer of exactly the same model of Ohmer register he had banged for his brother. So he banged this one too and the whole side fell out. He stuck his hand in the side, grabbed a handful of something papery. Under his feet a house cat leaped from sleep. Dove went headlong, shattering the flash and on his knees felt wings brush his hair – the fool cat was halfway up a wall trying to get at something big as an owl. Clutching his bills in a flurry of feathers and fur he saw the thing flutter, wall to wall, for the open door. Its wings got through just above the cat and Dove stumbled crazily after both just as the whistle-shriek rang out.

By the alley entrance light a small figure struggled with one twice its size. ‘Folks are certainly active tonight,’ he marveled.

The entrance was his only way out. He walked slowly till he was almost upon the wrestling pair – then jumped for it, felt a big hand reach and miss him and bounded free to the open street.

Over a fence and down the dark, over another and down a wall, big feet going every which way till he fell in a grassy plot.

With no sound but that of one sleepy cricket to heed the pounding of his heart.

‘I’m not sure whether you’d call that runnin’,’ he congratulated himself breathlessly – ‘but if I’d had a feather in hand I could call it flyin’.’