Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

‘M’am, I can’t help thinking there’s something dead up the tree.’

She raised one pencilled brow in the mildest of inquiries.

‘Yes?’

‘Last night I bought a sody the other side of the station ’n it were only five cents.’

‘That’s the other side of the station. They got a price war there.’

‘Hope nobody got kilt,’ he hoped and put down a third dime.

This time she opened the bottle, wiped it off, inserted the straw, rang up the dime, shut the register and stepped back all in a single motion. Yet the strap failed to fall. Dove drank slower.

Nothing.

‘How many sodies you sell in a single day m’am?’

‘’Bout as many as there are crows at a hog-killin’,’ she made a close guess.

‘Why, that’s a good few,’ Dove decided.

‘What did you come in here for, mister?’

‘Got barred from the water-founting.’

‘I think you’re wasting your money.’

‘After all, it’s my money.’

‘And so long as it’s money, it’s a-plenty,’ she pointed out – ‘but when it’s all spent it can get right scarce.’

‘I’ve heard that sometimes money don’t hardly last till it’s gone, that’s true. Or so I’ve been told. You think my forty-dollar might last that long?’

‘You spend it all on cokes it wont, if you follow me.’

‘I don’t follow you too near. All I know is this coke tastus right fine.’

‘It what? ’

‘Tastus right fine. But what if I should put a dollar down here?’

‘Try one.’

Dove put it down and she had snapped it up before it touched the counter.

‘ Now see if you can follow me.’

Somewhere at the bottom of that narrow passage a girl was laughing mirthlessly like a girl laughing at herself, and all its doors were numbered.

No light, no window, no sound. Dove stood lost in a burning blackout till he heard someone hooking a door. Then a little green light came up in a corner and the beer-and-whiskey beauty stood stripped to her slippers in a glow, a girl delicate as a deer.

‘Never did see such a purty girl afore even though you are a mite scarce-hipped,’ he told her. ‘I’m gittin’ a mighty urr to lewdle. Would you care to lewdle too?’

Later, with one foot planted on the floor to keep himself from falling off the narrow cot, he grew confidential.

‘My stomach is swoll,’ he told her.

‘Next time drink whiskey,’ she advised him and added, ‘Country boy, your time is long up.’ Then hooking his trousers on one green-tinted toenail, derricked and dropped them with dainty disdain across his knees at the same moment that his wallet dropped from the pocket and curiously vanished beneath the sheets.

‘M’am,’ Dove declared, ‘you are the very darnedest galperson ever I have met up with.’

‘How’s that? ’ she sounded suspicious about something.

‘Why, them toenails.’

‘You’ve had your money’s worth and more,’ she decided as though suddenly resolved not to be good friends after all. ‘Get dressed and get out.’

‘I’m just layin’ here gettin’ myself up an apology to you, m’am. I’ll have it done quite soon.’

‘Apology for what? ’

‘Why, for callin’ you scarce-hipped like I done. There was no call for my takin’ an advantage such as that. As a matter of fact, you got what railroading folk call a mighty trim caboose.’

‘The bathroom’s to the right.’

‘M’am, I’m right sorry, indeed and double-deed I am. But the fact is I’m plumb fatigued and now I got to rest a spell.’

She padded around the bed and peered out into the hall. ‘I’ll get a party who’ll restore your strength,’ she promised.

Her back was to him, her hand on the knob and the pocket of her parade pantie bulged with his wallet so plainly he could see the grain of the leather through the sheer of the cloth; but he didn’t try to snatch it. Instead he hooked a fingertip in the rubber-band that bound it, stiffened his arm exactly as he had just seen her stiffen her leg, and thus derricked it as neatly and nervelessly as she had derricked his pants.

She sensed a slight movement behind her and whirled toward the bed. There the big boob lay pretending to sleep and anyone could see at a glance he was faking. ‘Mister, I don’t know who you think you’re fooling, but it isn’t me,’ she gave him final warning and stepped into the hall – ‘Knifey! Knifey-Love! A party to meet you!’

Dove sprang out of the cot, into his pants and was out the window shoes in hand.

Two Negro girls directly across the way, watching for men to come out the front – they spent their afternoons keeping count – appeared mildly surprised to see one come out the window instead. How do you count that?

Someone, it seemed, was forever thinking up ways of doing things that no one else had thought up before.

There’s one advantage women have over men: they can go down to hell and come straight up again. An old song says so and it says just right. Yet it fails to allow for special cases like Dove Linkhorn’s.

Dove knew he’d been underground all right. The moment he stepped back onto the Canal Street side of the Southern Railway Station it seemed he had either come up out of somewhere or else the sky had risen an inch.

The city fathers, Do-Right Daddies and all of that, Shriners, Kiwanians, Legionaires, Knights of this and Knights of that, would admit with a laugh that New Orleans was hell. But that hell itself had been built spang in the center of town – this they never could admit. For panders and whores are a plain disgrace, and Do-Right Daddies are family men whose families are part of themselves like their backs.

But not many a daddy (do-right or do-wrong) is satisfied simply to own a back. He has to kick loose of home and fireside now and again. He has to ball with outlaws, play the fool on the door-rock, and have a handsome hustler call him by his first name in the presence of an out-of-town friend. That makes daddy feel like a man again. Three shots of corn likker and the whole stuffed zoo – Moose, Elks, Woodmen, Lions, Thirty-Third Degree Owls and Forty-Fourth Degree Field Mice begin to conspire against the very laws they themselves have written.

It was all right to take a slug of whiskey from your own flask in a taxi, but forbidden on a trolley-car. That didn’t help those who rode trolley-cars. You couldn’t carry liquor down the street, but if you owned a car you just bypassed that. For every statute they had a little loophole – that by coincidence fitted their own figures as if measured for them. Those who had no hand in writing statutes – panders and madams and such as that – had a harder time squeezing through.

It was an ancestral treachery that all do-righters practice. When opening time was closing time and everyone was there, down where you lay your money down, where it’s everything but square, where hungry young hustlers hustle dissatisfied old cats and ancient glass-eyed satyrs make passes at bandrats; where it’s leaping on the tables, where it’s howling lowdown blues, when it’s everything to gain and not a thing to lose – when it’s all bought and paid for then there’s always one thing sure: it’s some Do-right Daddy-O running the whole show.

There were stage shows and peep shows, geeks and freaks street. It wasn’t panders who owned the shows. There were all down old Perdido Street. But it wasn’t geeks who ran that chippified blondes and elderly rounders, bummies and rummies and amateur martyrs. There were creepers and kleptoes and zanies and dipsoes. It was night bright as day, it was day dark as night, but stuffed shirts and do-righties owned those shows.