Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

‘Just one thing I’d like to ask, mister.’

‘What’s that?’ Finnerty was too close behind him.

‘I’d rather you call me Tex ’stead of country boy.’

‘Right-o, Tex,’ Finnerty agreed, and shook Dove’s hand to seal the deal.

Dove shook, and stepped through the door Oliver held wide.

A girl with the pallor of one who lives indoors, one low of flesh but high of bone, in red shorts and red halter. Dove heard the door lock behind him.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked her.

‘Floralee,’ she told him, ‘and I sing like a damned bird. But how did I fly here?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know, country girl,’ Dove told her, ‘but I’m to give you this.’

He took his last ten dollar bill and handed it to her. Just as Finnerty had said, she had a greedy little heart, for she stuffed it down her slipper right away without even bothering to glance at it and snapped the button that held up her shorts.

If Dove, in the minutes that followed, heard murmured laughter from behind a wall, he didn’t let that divert him from the sums he had now to do in his head.

‘It costes me ten dollars to make a hundred,’ he figured, ‘at that rate I don’t see how I can lose.’

On a morning so damp the salt wouldn’t dust Dove wakened feeling like something chewed up and spat out. His seersucker, hung on a nail on the wall, looked like something fished out of the river. Everything his eyes fell upon looked fished-out or spat-out. He had a big bad head and held it hard, mourning ‘Oh, it drinked dandy but Lord the afterwards. The way the world is going I don’t think it’ll last.’

But the Financial Counsellor was whistling cheerfully as he buttoned himself into a freshly pressed financial-looking suit.

‘Happened on a most curious certificate,’ he announced as soon as he saw Dove get one sick eye wide, and drew it forth like a document. ‘What do you reckon happen when one of them girls trots all the way downtown for a free marcel?’

‘Reckon she gets herself fixed up right pretty,’ Dove took a hazy guess.

‘Reckon she do if she got three-fifty. Which you know very well she don’t. Did you read this thing you’re selling?’

For once Dove was glad he couldn’t.

Fort touched a prong of his sunglasses to the fatal figures. ‘I warned you to stay clear of that Georgia hand,’ he reminded Dove, ‘now my advice is that you stay indoors. There must be a chance of husbands on the lookout for a country-lookin’ gin-head by now.’

‘I was only tryin’ to make an honest dollar in a crooked sort of way,’ Dove explained.

For reply Fort fastened his face one moment to the mirror and must have been pleased by what he saw. For he left with a confident, executive stride, a man who’d be rich in six weeks if not in five.

Dove went to the window. Street to sky, New Orleans looked shrouded. He saw its fearful loneliness. He felt its dreadful heat. ‘It’s a misling day,’ he thought, ‘I reckon I don’t deserve to rise, doin’ that innocent country girl the way I done. What’s to become of her now?’

Fort was back in the doorway. ‘Was two blocks down afore I missed ’em,’ he explained, picking up his blue sunglasses.

‘Sun aint bright,’ Dove observed, ‘fact is it look like we might have a little weather.’

Fort snapped his glasses on and left.

‘Weak eyes,’ Dove concluded as the first drums of the rain began. Began, and paused, and began again to a slow and funerary beat.

‘I would most likely be married and well-fixed by now, keepin’ my clothes in a sweetwood chest and taking the paper in the baseball season if I could but make words out of letters,’ Dove dressed himself in his daydream now wearing terribly thin, ‘with a girl who could read ’n write too.’ N little kids – I’d learn them how to do it my own self.’ Anything could happen to a man who could make words from letters.

The smells of coffee-and-banana dock, warehouse and orange-wharfed shore were borne into the room on the wash of a rain that had no shore at all. Beneath it banana boats were moving out to sea. Trailer and truck were bringing peanuts and grapefruit to town below it. Endless freights moved east, moved west, by plane, by boat, by passenger train. By highways dry and highways wet everyone but himself was getting to be a captain of something or other.

Everyone but one forgotten Linkhorn bogged down in a room where the blues came on and the old rain rapped this door then, like somebody’s grandmother seeking forever her long lost first born.

And it seemed to Dove that the sun had gone down the same morning that Terasina’s arms had last locked in love behind his neck, that her good thighs in love had last drawn him down and her good mouth had last loved his.

‘You were my onliest,’ he admitted at last, ‘but we only got to B. These days when I don’t get to see you are plumb squandered like the rest of all them letters. My whole enduren life you were the only human to try to see could I live up to the alphabet. Then I would of had a chance to rise like others.’

Luke came in on a skip and a grin and stood in the middle of the room drenched, drunk, hatless, the laces out of his shoes, the shirt out of his pants, the pants half-buttoned; the picture of a contented man.

‘Take off your jacket, Luke,’ Dove invited him, for the jacket was clinging to the skin.

Luke slapped his thigh and did his little joy-jig. ‘It’s all in people’s minds , boy – business is better than ever if you only let yourself think it is.’ And shook himself like a duck.

‘You’re soaking,’ Dove pointed out.

Luke turned stern. ‘What the hell is the matter with you, son? Opportunity is knocking the door down and you’re beefing about a little rain.’

‘You looked kind of damp is all I meant.’

‘Son, you been alone too much, brooding here by yourself. Smile, damn you, smile. Let a smile be your umbrella, boy.’

‘Reckon I am a mite fevery at that,’ Dove conceded. ‘Havin’ no breakfastes ’n thinkin’ of bygones give me the morning-wearies.’

Luke brought the flat of his palm down on the table so hard he almost lost his balance. ‘Why didn’t you say so, son?’ He began turning dirty plates over looking for something. ‘Where’s my check? I have a small check somewhere around here.’

‘Must be so small it’s not to be seen with the naked eye. Fact is, the landlady came up but she didn’t bring no check. She come up for to tell she wants three-thirty a week for the set of us.’

Luke stared at Dove unseeing while his brain, like a pinball machine, toted an unexpected score. His face lit triumphantly. ‘Chargin’ us for a place where the roof leaks so bad a man gets his bedclothes soaked in his sleep!’ He leaped on Fort’s bed, stabbed the ceiling with a jackknife and down he jumped again. Dove rushed the dishpan to the bed in time to catch the first raindrop.

The second drop preened its muscles a moment in preparation for the death-defying dive, then dropped dead center with a tiny pingg .

‘Man would be a fool to pay rent for a room where he’s like to catch his death by dew and damp,’ Luke sounded ready to sue. ‘Borrow me a half buck till Monday, Red?’

‘Ef ’n I had money I’d buy flour ’n shortenin’ for us to have a pan of poor-do gravy,’ Dove told him.

‘You like poor-do gravy, son?’

‘Mister, I like any kind gravy: red-eye gravy, pink-eye gravy, black-eye gravy, speckledly gravy and streakedy gravy, piedy gravy, calico gravy, brindle gravy, spotted gravy, white gravy ’n grease gravy,’ n skewball gravy. I can eat lavin’s ’n lashin’s of gravy. Ef ’n we had us flour ’n shortenin’ now I’d pour a little coffee in the pan too. Yes sir, I do like gravy.’