Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

For some reason sales began falling off. Would times get better before they ran out of certificates? Luke was sure things were on the upgrade, the worst of the Depression was over and they would have certificates left they would have no use for. But Fort felt the Depression had just begun. Things were going to get a lot worse he foretold, and would stay that way longer than anyone believed. Then the bottom would fall out.

Nonetheless, whenever they returned, shrimpless or shrimpified, the odor of sirloin, hamburger or chops made the air of the little room muggy, and Fort would be blowing off the odor with clouds of Cuban cigar smoke. Somebody was doing all right.

‘If you boys would only let me know whether I could expect you, I’d be only too pleased to put your name in the pot,’ he would complain. ‘Had steak again .’

‘I’m not peckish, I’ll eat anything, even steak,’ Dove provided for any such future event – ‘put my name in your pot anytime, Fort.’

But the only name in Fort’s pot was spelled F-O-R-T.

To show his gratitude for the night before, Dove invited Luke to turtle soup in the Old French Market.

In the dim familiar place they had to make way for a beggar in dark glasses, poking his way through seafood odors with the help of a white cane. ‘Excuse me, girls,’ Dove heard him murmur as he passed, ‘excuse me.’

The turtles had been given a twenty-four hour reprieve. No beheading being done today. So they ordered bowls of gumbo and gumboed bowl after bowl. Then it was catfish time and they catfished till they foundered. By the time they left the heat in the street had passed and the catfish sun itself had foundered.

‘I’ve just about et myself into the creek,’ Dove decided.

He felt so full of fish and gumbo he didn’t even mind when a collie in a well-kept yard charged him the full length of her chain. A white woman, holding the brute by its collar apologized, ‘I never knowed Queenie to go after a white man before.’

Then she took a long second look at the redheaded stranger before her and added with soft suspicion, ‘She never been wrong afore, mister.’

Dove merely tipped his skimmer. ‘Thank you kindly all the same, m’am,’ – and slunk off – ‘Durned old hound smelled the catfish in me.’

Out where yards weren’t kept so well and walks were cracked like those of home, he always felt less guilty. The last door he rapped that day was on such a walk. A Negro woman with violet eyes came to the door. Dove tipped his hat, felt his heel nipped gently, and turned just in time to see a fat white mongrel whip about and dash for cover under the house as if it had done something wonderfully daring.

‘He don’t care for white folks comin’ into his yard,’ Violet Eyes smiled matter-of-factly. ‘He say he can’t go into theirs, why they come into his?’

‘Thank you kindly all the same,’ Dove told her, thinking guiltily again, ‘Durned old hound smelled the certificates on me.’

‘This walkin’ ’n talkin’ ’n rappin’ ’n tappin’ is too much like work for me,’ Luke decided, and Dove had had enough too. Though it wasn’t walkin’ ’n talkin’ Dove minded. Nor even rappin’ ’n tappin’.

It was rather that each quarter he stole weighed a bit more than the one stolen just before. The sample case was lighter after all.

‘How many them phonies you got left, Tex?’

Dove handed Luke the last of the batch. Luke took a count. Thirteen. ‘I know a place where we can get shet of these in one stop,’ he promised.

On South Rampart Dove waited out front while Luke ducked around the rear of a Negro shanty and returned with a pint of Bottled-in-the-Barn.

They drank it down to the half-pint mark. ‘That stuff is so good a feller can’t hardly bite it off,’ Dove told Luke.

‘It’s the pure quill,’ Luke agreed, ‘you can smell the feet of the boys who plowed the corn.’

Dove took another just to see if Luke were right about that.

‘It sure aint gravy,’ he reported.

‘Care to see the girls, boys?’ a little man in a flame-yellow shirt and cowboy boots asked from a doorway so wide it must once have been an entrance to a pretentious bar.

‘They givin’ it away today?’ Luke asked innocently.

The little blond man had sideburns past his cheekbones, he might have been twenty-two or forty.

‘To a couple good-looking fellows like you I wouldn’t be surprised if they did,’ he conned Luke right back.

‘Reason I suggested that ,’ Luke explained, ‘is that we’re giving things away.’ He drew forth a green-margined certificate. ‘Free finger waves at Madame Dewberry’s. Reckon the little ladies might be interested?’

‘Why, this is the very deal they’ve been wondering how they can get it,’ the little man pretended, ‘they’ll take your whole load off your hands.’

By the time the two pitchmen realized they’d been out-pitched they were inside one of those high old-fashioned parlors where a ceiling fan whirrs so leisurely in a big twilit gloom that you can’t tell whether anyone else is in the room.

Gradually the forms of half a dozen men sitting as men sit in a barber shop, collars open and Sunday’s funnies on their laps, one or two with cigars in hand, emerged from the dimness.

Something brushed Dove’s hair and he touched a spider made of metal, suspended upon so slender a wire it was not discernible until a wave from the ceiling fan swung it; then a burnished glint wound right, wound left in the soundlessly woven air.

The woven air so softly spun by spiders red, by spiders green, some low-hung and some high; some gold and others rose. Spinning webs so fine on thread unseen in a long twilit gloom.

Dove picked up one magazine, pretending to read as other men did. Till suddenly wishing somehow to outdo them all, and spying a book on a divan, he picked it up boldly and returned to his chair. He flipped its pages carelessly, as though the light were too poor for a man to strain his eyes. He had flipped almost through, then gave one more flip, and his hand trembled on the page.

For there his steadfast tin soldier stood, his musket clasped under his grenadier’s hat, and behind him waited the same platoon of two-legged soldiers. The one-legged one was still the most steadfast.

In his simple-minded amazement he thought it must be Terasina’s book.

‘The girls will be down directly, boys,’ a bespectacled mulatto woman wearing black crepe chiffon, in which she had pinned velvet flowers, came bouncing to announce.

‘Ask them do they want free marcels, Lucille,’ Luke asked her.

‘It’s been many years since anyone called me “Lucille”,’ she told Luke.

‘Many years,’ Luke agreed wistfully, ‘many, many years.’

She peered at him but the years really had been too many. Faces of others had come like waves of the sea one fast upon another. Now there was no longer any recalling what shore, what summer nor what night hour their eyes had met in love or lust or simple bargaining.

‘They call me Mama now,’ she explained, ‘I’m just the housekeeper here.’

Then she caught sight of Dove clutching the parlor’s one book.

‘That’s our Hallie’s,’ she told him.

Dove looked at the name scribbled in the front. So that was how to write ‘Hallie’s.’ And kept his finger on that name though he closed the book.

An old man in a high-backed chair hoping to make the price of a pint, and the boy beside him longing for love so hard that a name in a book was already beloved. While others waited like window-dummies, anonymous men waiting to stay anonymous. They sighed, they spat, they snored now and then, but were careful not to begin idle talk that might lead to discovery of mutual friends.