Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

He offered Dove his calling card, stained yellow at the edges. Dove pretended to read it and became so impressed that he owed the man a nickel, ‘Since it’s for the country,’ he explained.

The St Charles Street trolley swung about the circle. ‘Have to ride that sometime,’ he promised himself.

An Anglo girl in a white sailor tam and an over-the-shoulder bag sauntered into the shadow cast by Lee’s boot and paused to smile directly at Dove. He glanced back over his shoulder but saw nobody waiting for her there. She popped her gun smack at him – ‘Well?’

Dove rose, bowed from the waist hand over heart, thus sweeping his straw skimmer almost to the earth.

‘Howdy, m’am.’

The girl left without looking back.

No matter. When he got that good old gee-tar and picked himself out a couple good old tunes he’d have his pick of the merry lot.

And coasted, easily and unseeing, past broken men and breaking ones; wingies, dingies, zanies and lop-sided kukes; cokies and queers and threadbare whores. Ulcerous panhandlers lame and cancerous, tubercular pencil peddlers, staggering lushes. Old sick cats from everywhere yowling as they went.

All was right with the world.

Till he caught an unexpected glimpse of himself in a window and saw nothing was right after all. No wonder that girl had shied off.

Who ever heard of a captain of anything going barefooty?

From the Barracks Street wharf to Bienville, drydock to drydock, dead ocean liners lay like ruined whales, their great white hulls turning to rust. The whole town was in drydock.

Over all, in a coffee-hued haze from happier years, one still smelled the big brown smell of coffee. The warehouse walls, like the hulls, were stained with it. The planks of the wharves were embedded with it. Below the planks ancestral sacks were rotting in the lap and wash.

The whole town was in drydock, the whole country in hock, but the pit of the Depression, a secretary of labor announced, was past at last. The President’s stand on wages had averted an even worse slump, the secretary added, ‘Business is starting back.’

‘Nobody goes hungry,’ said Little Round Hoover, wiping chicken gravy off his little round chin. A man with the right stuff in him didn’t need government help to find work. That would make him lazy. He might even get sick. Self-reliance for the penniless and government help to the rich, the Old Guard was in again. Hoover patted the chicken inside his own pot. ‘ I got it made,’ said Little Round Hoover.

And in all those miles of wharves and docks the one boat still shipping water was a freighter under an Argentine flag and the proud Spanish title of Shichi-Fukujin .

In his dizziest daydream Dove had never dared to dream up anything this big. All he could do was gape as the shallows slapped, a little man looking up at a little man looking down.

The one looking down waved to him to come up. As soon as he got on deck Dove saw his help was needed here. For one thing, the sailors were too small to steer anything this big. With eyes too little to tell the difference between a lighthouse and a dock till they’d be right on top of it and then it would be too late.

His friend who had done the waving began talking something neither English nor Spanish and pointing at the smoke stack with a paint brush. Dove had never seen a brush that big nor a stack that high. But if needed he could make that old chimbley look like new.

He reached for the brush but the little man held it back, pointing now to a dock window at dock level:

‘Boss man.’

‘Wait for me,’ Dove warned the crew. He hurried down the gangplank, into the warehouse and up a spiral stair. Through an open door he saw a framed photograph of an ocean liner that took up half a wall. Below it a drydock foreman sat wishing he were rich.

‘Papers’ – the man held out his paper-taking hand without looking up.

‘Aint the newsboy,’ Dove explained.

The man glanced up, then wished he hadn’t. Before him stood something in a pitch helmet off a Walgreen counter, share-croppers’ jeans, sunglasses, a dollar watch with a tick like grandfather’s clock, and butter-colored shoes.

‘You the bull-goose here?’ Dove asked, ‘I’m lookin’ for boat-work.’

‘There’s ship captain lookin’ for that, son,’ the foreman told him.

‘Didn’t reckon on bein’ no captain right off,’ Dove offered to compromise, ‘I’d be mightily satisfied just to swab the deck – or if by chance,’ – he added cunningly – ‘you happened to have a chimbley needs a fresh coat of paint I’d admire to try my hand.’

‘You have to have your able-bodied seaman’s papers.’

‘More able-bodied than most,’ Dove persisted. ‘Whatever you’d pay me I’d be mighty grateful and praise you most highly for. I’m a very light eater, I might add.’

‘Son you aren’t implying you’d scab , would you?’

‘Mister, I’ll cook, I’ll cuss, I’ll mend yer socks, I’ll stoke yer engines ’r catch you a damn whale barehand.’ N if you want me to scab somethin’ I’ll scab ’er fore to aft. For I want to learn the sailing trade ’n I’m strong enough for four.’

‘You do know that there is a seafaring man’s union?’ He gave Dove the benefit of a serious doubt.

‘Mister, I’m a Christian boy and don’t truckle to Yankee notions. Put my name in your ship’s dinner-pot and you’re my captain, I’m your hand. Just tell me ever-what you want done and I’ll ’tend it, for I’m bedcord strong. If I don’t turn you out what in your eyes makes a fair day’s work you can put me off at the first port of call. Aint that fair enough?’

‘Mighty fair, son. If more boys were willing to work for nothing there’d be just that many more millionaires.’

‘It’s how I figure it too, mister. You got to work for nothing or you’ll never get rich, that only stands to reason.’

‘You know,’ the foreman put a brotherly hand on Dove’s shoulder – ‘I liked your face the moment you came in here. Would you take off your glasses so I can see more of it?’

Dove snapped off the sunglasses and snapped to attention.

‘I liked the way you entered, too,’ he assured Dove, ‘without bothering to knock.’

‘I judged you had time and to spare.’

‘And the intelligent way you stated your case.’

‘I reckon I measure up,’ Dove admitted modestly.

‘You measure up to something,’ the foreman thought, ‘but I’m not sure to just what.’

What the foreman was actually measuring was the stack through the window that went sixty feet up from dock level; and the shaky union scale that rose every foot after twenty-five. An eight-hour day at two-seventy per hour for ten days, the foreman made a mental estimate of what he could claim on the books.

‘I’ll pay you a buck-fifty an hour to paint that stack, Son.’

Dove came scurrying back up the gangplank like the flightless kiwi, a bird not built to fly. He heard the foreman holler from window to deck, ‘Put this man in the chair, boys!’ By the time he reached the deck the scrapers, brushes, paint and thinner were ready. Dove jumped right into the bosun’s chair and shouted, ‘Haul steady, maties!’ Then glanced down and found himself nearly twenty feet off the deck.

‘Okay, boys!’ he called down cheerfully, ‘I’ll start here ’n work up!’ But the chain kept going higher.

Who would ever have thought such a fine breeze would be stirring here while other fellows had to sweat out the heat below? He was about to take a second look but the chair began to swing like a cradle and he changed his mind.

Up and up. Above him leaned the rust-flaked stack, below the river tilted oddly. The hands of his watch seemed strangely bent, but seemed to say 10:55. Good – in five minutes he’d have his tools together so he could begin right on the hour. A full day’s pay for a full day’s work, that was the way to rise in the world.