Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

‘Old Dominion thanks you, Miss,’ Dove assured her, ‘I’ll deliver both pots tomorrow.’

‘My girlfriend might like one too,’ Minnie-Mae invited Dove to step one landing up.

‘You oblige me again,’ Dove assured her as she urged him ahead, with Awntie and Mothaw following heavily. It was just one of those days when everyone is on your side.

For from window to window, lightless passage to lightless hall, the wakening whisper went – ‘Come git you a cawfee pot.’ Doorway to door, to friend to foe, Awntie and Mothaw went spreading the word. Whether it was Huey Long or Old Dominion giving things away again, nobody cared a doodle in a wood. Negroes dark or Negroes light, high-yellow, blue-black, gold-toothed or toothless, everyone liked coffee. Minnie-Mae was ripping receipts and handing them for upreaching hands to sign and return as fast as she could reach and tear.

‘Come git yo’ goddamn pot!’

Dove couldn’t make out a word of the lingo ringing about – it was that Negro-to-Negro jargon that accents English like French and French like English then slurs the rest when white ears of any nation listen.

Dove didn’t care – he was getting rich. When Minnie-Mae ran out of blanks he raced down to the street for more. Business was progressing on a downward grade to new rates of normality, opportunity was being equalized, time was money.

Wreneger, with two of the crew, were waiting for him at the corner.

‘Where you been, son?’ Without a word Dove handed him fifty orders, signed and sealed. Smiley’s aides, one a towering Florida cracker and the other a pint-sized Georgian, crowded in to see how Texas did it.

Smiley thumbed through the packet swiftly, thumbed part way back as though to make certain of something scarcely credible, then ripped it straight down the middle and fifty French Dripolators went blowing like confetti down Elysian Fields Avenue.

Dove ran one down before he understood – then let it blow after the others like watching all hope die.

‘ Goodbuddy ’ – a sort of soft horror had caught in Smiley’s throat – ‘Who told you we sold to Negras? ’

Dove sat heavily on the curb, took off his left shoe and pressed the sockless toes. Smiley mounted post above him.

‘Git up, boy.’

Dove switched to the right-foot toes. They hurt like everything.

‘Face up to it, boy,’ the Georgian urged him.

‘ Got to face up,’ the Floridan counseled him.

Dove’s glance took in all three. ‘I resign from you-all,’ he resigned from all three.

Smiley bent swiftly, scooped up Dove’s proud shoes, handed the left to the Georgian and the right to the Floridan – ‘Whut’s it going to be, boy – pot or shoes?’

Dove, risen, found his voice at last – ‘Them shoes costes more ’n any ol’ tin pot!’

‘Aint no ol’ tin pot, boy,’ the Georgian defended Old Dominion, ‘you know right well that there’s a genuine French Dripolator.’

‘Get goin’, son,’ the Floridan advised him.

Dove shuffled down the grass while Smiley padded the pavement the whole barefoot way back to the tenement.

‘Mister,’ Dove promised Smiley Wreneger at the door, ‘you wait here. I’ll git you back your sorry pot.’

Smiley snapped open his watch, gave it a glance and closed it with a decisive click. ‘Don’t like to law a man. You got five minutes.’

The moment Dove got a door between himself and Smiley he thought, ‘This might take more than five,’ and latched it. Then poked his head inside the beaded curtain Minnie-Mae called a door. Her eyes glowed upon him from a farther corner like two plums in a bowl of cream.

‘Don’t stand half in and half out, cawfee man,’ she invited him, ‘either come visit or go away.’

Dove stepped inside, apologizing, ‘Don’t mean to appear ongrateful, miss, for you’ve been pure-quill kind. But a certain party has carried me back here account of one old coffee-pot. Now aint that as sorry a circumstance as ever you heard tell?’

The girl was sitting in an old-fashioned rocker wearing only a white wisp of a slip. Somewhere in the room punk was burning. But her own scent, burning more darkly than that, cut through it.

‘Why, where your fine yellow shoes, cawfee man?’

‘The company’s holding them against that same pitiful pot. O miss ,’ Dove broke with the disappointment, ‘I do try my very hardest . Other boys rise without scarcely tryin’ – Why don’t I rise like other boys?’ He covered his eyes with the back of his hand.

‘Why for very shame ’ – she took his hands down and caught them softly below her own along the rocker’s arms – ‘shame and double double shame on a great big cawfee man like you takin’ things so hard as this. Of course you’ll rise as high as other boys and likely even higher!’

‘I’m not as right sure of that as I once was, miss, however kind on your part to say so. You see, I got handicaps others haven’t got.’ His knees pressed her own and she let them press. ‘You don’t appear handicapped, cawfee man.’

‘In more ways than one, miss,’ he leaned as he mourned, ‘more ways than one. First, I can’t so much as read my own name. For another, there’s a man right outside your door waitin’ to law me. Now if that aint as pitiful a set of circumstances for a country boy to overcome I never heard of pitifuller.’

‘O caw fee man,’ she chided him tenderly, tucking his hands back below her own, ‘you are the biggest country fool ever to walk barefoot to town. Now tell me true – What color wuz that mizzly old pot you keep grievin’ so about?’

Dove rocked her forward to get a closer look at the pot, gleaming like a burnished treasure in the gloom on the mantel just above the girl’s head. ‘Mostly green, Miss.’ Could he get a hand loose he could reach it.

‘ Caw fee man, you upsettin’ me’ – and putting her feet wide behind him and her full weight forward, forced him to grasp the rocker back of her neck to keep from being upset himself.

— ‘and a spot of red on the handle.’

‘O so you say ’ – she hooked her ankles behind his and her arms about his waist to help him keep his balance – ‘So you say, but who ever heard tell of a red ’n green cawfee pot? I don’t think you’d lie, yet it’s hard for a girl to believe – a red ’n green pot.’ Yet for one in grave doubt her voice sounded curiously approving; and let him rock her forward again. ‘What I really wants to know is do it make good cawfee?’

‘Why, they tell me it cook pretty fair, miss. Yet it could be that they lied. It’s a thing I’d not take another person’s word for, were I you.’

‘I ’spects it depend some on whether I grinds my own.’

‘It’s always best do you grind your own, miss. For that way it’s much fresher.’

‘So you say. But what good is fresh if there aint enough to satisfy? Mister, if you talkin’ ’bout some little old scrawny-size pot I aint interested. What I needs is a great big pot , enough for both morning and night.’

‘So long as it make good cawfee, miss, size don’t scarcely matter.’

‘It matter a lot if it so small it boil over the minute your back is turned.’

‘This is a slow-boiler type pot, miss,’ Dove recalled, rocking her back so far that her slip slid to her navel, ‘with a spot of red on the handle.’

Minnie-Mae let her head rest on the chair’s cushioned back and looked up still unbelieving. ‘So you say. But you talks so smooth I begin to doubt you’s a country boy at all. You a city boy without shoes – Now aint you?’