Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

On the Desire Street dock Dove turned into the first place he saw where beggars and bummies can lie down to rest.

‘Look like you been a-fightin’ a circle-saw, son,’ the desk-clerk told him.

‘No. Just sortin’ wild cats.’

‘I’ll give you a nice quiet room then, where you can rest up undisturbed. I came to town barefoot myself, so green you could scrape it off me with a cob.’

‘I’m a quarter light of proper change, mister,’ Dove observed without touching his change, ‘I think you’ve made a small errow.’

The clerk came up with the palmed quarter. ‘You’ll be wearing shoes sooner than I did,’ he laughed. ‘Up the steps and first room to your right.’ Between the first room to the right and the tenth there was no difference. All were equally keyless.

The ceiling was chicken wire. By the smell the chickens were still somewhere near. But the bed was exactly what an exhausted bum needed.

Dove slept through the dusty evening into the feverish night. And all night heard the river boats call and call.

Once he heard a woman, sounding like she was standing alone on a corner, telling the world all about it—

Under wire on either side other dime-a-nighties slept out their ten-cent dreams. Till the hundred harps of morning struck on strings of silvered light.

And down the long unshaded street a vendor of colored ices beat a rainbow of tin bells. A bell for every flavor as he tinkle-tinkled past. Every flavor made of water sold to tunes made out of tin.

Come bummies, come beggars, two pennies per tune.

With occasional glances at the metal net to see no one was peeking, Dove was bringing each bill before his eyes, memorizing its denomination and adding that to the one before. Stretching each carefully in the hope that two might be sticking together.

When he reached forty, one loose single still lay on the bed. So he began all over with the one loose child. And was only satisfied that he was the owner of forty-one dollars when he had counted back once again.

A Linkhorn was rich at last.

Old-time sterno drinkers and bindlestiff nomads made the flophouse forenoon murky with their hard-time breath. But he was a Linkhorn in a cubicle all his own. He owned neither shirt nor shoes – but joy to a world full of shirts and shoes. One loose tooth was a small penalty enough to wake up being Dove Linkhorn.

Too bad, of course, about that little fool gal who hadn’t been smart enough to keep from getting herself pinched. Kids like that shouldn’t try crime till they knew what they were doing. ‘I hope this proves a lesson to that child to go straight before it’s too late,’ he hoped. ‘She weren’t cut out for the life like us crim’nals with a more natural bent.’

A little handkerchief, torn nearly in two and gray now with soot, dropped out of his pocket onto the floor. When he brushed off the soot he saw it was black and had once had lace on it. He felt a certain stiffness in its folds. And felt a shadowy apprehension that he might never hurt anyone except those who were dearest.

That he would know an abundance of pangs, some swift, some slow, some merely passing, and one that would never let him go.

‘Hopes I didn’t hurt you bad, Señora,’ he explained. ‘Just when I was gettin’ ready to help you up to say I didn’t mean what I done, that fool engineer blew his whistle and I had to hasten on.’

Yet the light lay pasted like a second-hand shroud against a guilt-stained wall: she had held a handkerchief out to him and he’d wiped his mouth with the back of his hand instead.

‘I’ll get somebody to handwrite a letter,’ he promised himself, ‘to tell I’m sorry now for what I done.’

Down the long unshaded street a rainbow of tin bells pinked out two pennies worth of applause and moved off to some far wider street. Morning seemed done.

A looming fear followed down the darkened stair. The bannister had been greased with another’s guilt, step by slow step down an echoing well. Where regrets of strangers burdened all the air.

Out on the open street he felt like a parolee released on some promise he could never keep.

Dove left all guilty loomers behind for a while in the wide wonder of Canal and the hurly-burly holler-and-bounce of its sun-bound whisper and roar. Theatre marquees, mounted policemen, a red motorcycle with a blue sidecar and a popcorn machine popping right out on the street. A woman’s perfume turned him clean about – O, look at her legs moving under her dress! Here comes another! He found his way into an awning’s shade and leaned there against a barber’s pole until his senses steadied.

‘Why do I act so derned suspicious? ’ he complained to himself – a man with forty dollars don’t have to take a back seat to no man. Why, a man who owned that much was already on his way to being a captain.

A banana or a cotton captain, a peanut or a popcorn captain, a coffee or a whiskey or a corn-likker captain – though of course nobody got to be a captain of anything just like that. First you had to help those already captains to haul their coffee and pop their corn, drive their black locomotives or steer their big white boats. Not even a captain could do everything himself. ‘I could be a tooth dentist,’ he thought. ‘A doctor is good too, account he can cut ’n slash ’n have license to do it.’

You began at the foot of the ladder and when somebody tried pushing past you he got your big foot in his face – he’d have to get a pair of waterproof boots right soon. Though there wasn’t, of course, much danger of anyone being foolhardy enough to try wise stuff on a Linkhorn—

‘I count purty fair too,’ he considered a bookkeeping or banking career ‘though I do have that one little dee fect, that I never got beyond B.’ Nevertheless, he took measure of his varied powers, ‘I do have a very strong mind. I reckon a man with a mind as strong as mine could in time prize up creation and put a small chunk under it.’

In the window the barber was signaling something with a bottle of hair tonic in his hand. Dove grinned to see if the man wanted to make friends. When the man made for the door with shears in his hand Dove judged not and shambled back to Canal.

He bought two colored ices, an orange one and a green, from a vendor wearing sunglasses, and slipped him a Mexican nickel. Sure enough, he got an American penny in change. ‘Good deal, Linkhorn,’ he congratulated himself, ‘when it comes to figuring I’m already well past B. Got to git me a change purse for these smaller operations.’

He followed a St Charles Street trolley up to Lee Circle. There, one hand stained green and the other orange, he crowded an elderly fellow with a bandaged foot off a bench to make room for his own big feet. The old man went off stabbing the pavement with his cane.

‘Crip got all fired up about somethin’,’ Dove sensed, ‘Now I wonder who that captain might be,’ and squinted up in perplexity at a heroic sculpture. ‘Must be somebody from the Rebel War,’ he finally decided.

A bald-headed man in a soiled suit and a Hoover collar came up to Dove’s bench with a sheepish air. ‘I’m not a beggar,’ he explained, ‘actually, I’m in the diplomatic service. They’re holding a post for me in Washington and when I get there I’ll sleep in the best hotels, of course. Tonight, however, it will be necessary for me to sleep out again unless someone like you should loan me fifteen cents.’