Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

For a Do-Right Daddy is right fond of money and still he don’t hate fun. He charged the girls double for joint-togs and drinks, rent, fines, towel service and such. But before any night’s ball was done, he joined in the fun.

Later he had to be purged of guilt so he could sleep with his wife again. That was where the pulpit came in. There had to be something official like that to put the onus on the women. The preachers, reformers, priests and such did this work well. Some girls were just naturally bad, they explained. Others were made bad by bad men. In no case was it ever the fault of anyone who profited by the shows. Daddy, you can go home again.

Pulpit, press, police and politicians pushed the women from crib to crib and street to street – yet never pushed any but diseased ones out of reach. Daddy still wanted some healthy good-looker available for his weekend and there had to be a retriever to fetch her. That was what helped keep pulpits filled, increased newspaper circulation, made the arrest blotters look respectable and gave politicians a record to ride.

When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only one way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don’t have enough. If everybody has more than enough, what good is my more-than-enough? What good is a wide meadow open to everyone? It isn’t until others are fenced out that the open pasture begins to have real value. What good is being a major if you can’t have more than a second lieutenant? What good is a second lieutenant for that matter?

The girls themselves read of the latest crusade, but their eyes skimmed idly over the print. When the last sermon was preached, the last editorial written and the last raid done, then those who had preached, written and raided would be coming down to see them for a bit of fun again.

That was the ancestral treachery no one would admit.

Yet over the treachery, under the revelry, there hung, that airless summer, a feeling that this was all as sad as hi-jinks in an invaded land. In the ravaged faces of young girls and the painted faces of boys in secret bars there hung the sense of impending defeat.

Lonely bones of the old French Graveyard, that had slept contented decades through, felt it and wakened to work their dusty way out through brick, through wood, through stone.

Dove Linkhorn, passing a crumbling wall, peered in and saw how harshly death dealt with old bones.

Old bones that death would not let lie still. Spaniard and Frenchman, Creole and Kentuckian, bones of sailor and hunter alike, women of honor and women kept, all bones bleached the same in the Saturday sun. They too had been to Hell and come up again.

Dove’s own bones felt sore. ‘Too dern much runnin’ ’n jumpin’,’ he scolded himself, ‘nothin’ to show for it but a suit of clothes ’n a pair of shoes ’n a dollar watch. Things could be worse.’

When a girl with eyes that could only have been gotten in a box of tacks demanded, ‘Boy, you got a dolla?’ Dove didn’t feel it was right to lie to her.

‘I got a dolla,’ he admitted, ‘but I don’t feel like foolin’.’

She opened the door. ‘Come in here. I’ll make you feel like foolin’.’

Ten minutes later Dove came out hungry enough to eat snake. There was a poor-boy sign at the end of the block, but before he could reach it another girl stopped him by swinging a screen door right in his path. ‘Boy, you got a dolla?’

‘I got a dolla but I need it for eatin’.’

‘You can eat here,’ she promised him. He stepped inside. It didn’t look like a restaurant.

Ten minutes later he came out, leaned a moment against the crib, then proceeded slowly, head down to get past the rest of the doors till he came to the sign with the poor-boy painted on it. But when he looked inside all he saw was one more brassiereless girl opening a coke.

He shuffled on and on, block after block, finding his way toward food more by scent than by sight.

And so at last entered a certain sea-cave acrawl with the living smells of lobster and shrimp, steaming with simmering oyster stew and awash with gumbo in which little snails paddled about. He sat at a table as scarred and aged as the Old French Market itself.

When his eyes had got used to the deep-sea light he discerned a Negro the size of Carnera, naked to the waist and shining with iron-colored sweat, decapitating snapping turtles with silvered precision.

Now the trouble with turtles is that they believe all things come to him who will but struggle. There’s always room at the top for one more, they think. And in this strange faith the snapping kind is of all the most devout. For it’s precisely that that makes them the snapping kind. Though the way be steep and bloody, that doesn’t matter so long as you reach the top of the bleeding heap.

The dark butcher looked to Dove like Doctor Death in person.

Doctor Death whose patients come one by one along an ever-narrowing plank, each confident of ultimate mercy: a last-minute reprieve, with full civilian rights restored – the knife would snap in mid-air, a modern miracle. Death was all right for certain classes, sand turtles and such, but didn’t suit noble old sea-going families of true terrapin lineage.

Losing his head didn’t lose one his footing. His legs kept seeking yet bloodier heights. Say Not The Struggle Naught Availeth, Onward and Upward was the cry.

Indeed, once the knife had done him in, to raise oneself in the world became more urgent than ever. Sensing that time was against him, he worked all the harder to succeed. Till the floor about the pyramid streamed black with blood, with some on their backs and some on their bellies.

Dove felt another’s eyes watching the growing pile: down on the floor beside him a severed terrapin’s head, big as his own hand, stared cataleptically at its own body slipping and flipping up the distant heap. It could be no other’s body, for it alone matched the king-sized head that stared with faith unshakable.

Stepping on the stumps of a hundred bleeding necks, hauling itself over other backs, giving one a kick there and one a shove there, the body sent a dozen rival climbers sprawling over the cliff to failure. Dove and the Head watched together to see if the Body would make it.

Driven by some strength greater than that of others, wading contentedly over mothers and orphans, it got its blind flippers at last onto the tail of a red snapper, hauled itself onto the snapper’s back, pushed Red out from under and landed smack in the middle of the heap.

He was the King of the Turtles.

The king waved his arrogant flippers triumphantly – ‘Always room for one more at the top’ – just as something bumped him hard from behind and his short day was done. Sliding, sprawling, skidding, he slipped off the heap in a bloody skein and landed flat on his back below the table wigwagging frantically.

‘Dear friends and gentle hearts,’ he wigwagged, feeling the final cold creep up – ‘Will you stand by to leave your old friend die? I wanted nothing for myself – money, comfort, power, security – I worked for these only because those dear to me wanted them. (Of course, as long as they were handy I shared them from time to time.) Would you really leave me here to die?

‘True, I ate well. But that was only to keep up my strength for the sacrificial ordeal of my days. For I never knowingly harmed a fellow creature unless he got in my way. I never took unfair advantage unless it profited me. Can you really leave so lovely a turtle to die?

‘A devoted father, a loyal citizen, a faithful employee, a kind employer, a considerate neighbor, a regular church-goer. Out of purity of heart I respected the laws of God and man. Purity, and fear of jail. Could you really stand by and watch so saintly a turtle die?