Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

‘I allow there was hell to pay in the pigsty when Riley got loose Monday morning,’ Fort conceded.

‘He never bothered her weekdays,’ Dove reported, ‘just when his wife weren’t well. He spent day after day in the domino parlor and seldom lost. He could tell every piece by running his fingers over it once.’

Fort sighed.

‘Either that or he couldn’t find her during the week. As I say, he was guided entirely by a sense of smell.’

Fort got him back on the main highway, ‘Don’t you go gawking . Just look straight ahead and keep saying “Who is it? Who is it? Who’s there? Who is it?”’

‘Who’s there? Who is it?’

‘That’s right. You’re learning.’

‘Who’s there? Who is it?’

‘You can open them now. I’m going to let you lead me until you get the hang of the thing,’ Fort promised. ‘Sunday morning in front of a Catholic church is worth from ten to fifteen dollars.’

‘That leak’ll be wide by morning if this rain keeps up,’ Dove judged. And blinked up to where the next drop clung, lost its grip and plunged, to become one with the eternal waters.

‘How would you like to eat at the best restaurant in town tonight, Tex? Set down at a white tablecloth right amongst the people who got this thing whipped and tell a waiter what to bring you?’

‘Thank you kindly all the same, but I lack the means to return the favor.’

‘Tell you what, Tex,’ Fort persisted, ‘you go on the blink with me and I give you my word of honor here and now, the day we get a stake we throw away the glasses. Think it over, son.’

Dove thought it over as long as it took for two more drops to ping into the dishpan.

‘My stated in tent is to rise in the world,’ he decided at last, ‘but playing blind man on Canal Street just don’t seem the proper way. In fact I’d rather see my box a-comin’ than to be led by another as though I were helpless, when all the while I can just about see through that wall.’

‘Opportunity has knocked,’ Fort announced like an undertaker. ‘Opportunity is now going through that door. Opportunity aint coming back.’

And left like a man who would search all day, and half the night if need be, for the right flavor of chocolate ice.

To leave Dove alone to tote up the chances a single day had offered.

‘I could of took a position as a leader of the blind but I turned it down. That’s one. I could be a plain condom mechanic with a chance to do fancy work should I qualify. That’s two and I aint yet turned down the second. The way things are coming my way today it must be hard times are over.’

He went to the window to see the city. There were lights in the haze but no sun was out. He was about to turn away from the window when he caught a brief glimpse of a sun he had never seen before. It was hiding behind the corner of an eave like a chicken thief at dusk. Dove stood quietly to see what its next move would be, thinking itself unseen. Sure enough, it edged softly off, showed a bit more of itself – a sneak thief sun, a sun with a hooded look. A sun of the alley stalls ready to do anything for a fiver.

Dove didn’t want to see what a sun like that was up to. He opened his Bull Durham sack and sure enough, folded neatly quartered so as to let him read the ‘100’ without unfolding it, Finnerty’s c-note still waited to be spent.

‘As long as I done it, it was just as well I got paid,’ he philosophized his guilt away.

Out in the lake-palmed suburbs, far from the dong and the glare, in a house that had once been human, Dove climbed a soundless stair.

The stilly stair to O-Daddyland in a pale hygienic glow. Feeling some sign he could not read must say ZONE OF QUIET. For the weather in the streets, and the seasons there, are no more permitted in O-Daddyland than in a surgeon’s washroom. Rainwinds washing children’s voices have nothing to do with O-Daddies. Step up in an airless quarantine, go down a passionless hall. Stand before a door without knocker or bell.

Till an anesthetic odor, as of gas or seeping ether, trails from below; as though abortions might be performed here.

Stranger on a strange-lit stair, you have come to a strange frontier.

The frontier of a principality whose only law is Rhino Gross and Gross’s many moods. A totalitarian state whose single industry is a curious craft in Goodrich rubber, worked out in forms sufficiently fanciful. Rhino Gross is his state’s sole industrial designer and Gross is a fanciful man. Indeed, abortions are aborted here.

(At night in the deep and dead time, old Gross hears again the soft scraaap of his curette against the uterus wall in a room that holds no other sound. Scraaap scraaap scraaap .)

Now the daylight man, ex-physician, ex-abortionist, ex-quack, ex-con, ex-man, ex-everything, enfolded and armored by layer across layer of swart encrusted fat, clasping his distended gut to keep it from slipping down over his rusted truss, is an aging animal come to the jungle’s rim whose hearing is excellent but whose sight is waterish, ready to turn at a tiny twig’s crack and lumber back to his forest’s protecting gloom. Yet stands one moment snout upturned and quivering, to sniff the dangerous air: now he is wondering whether it would be perfectly safe to try a little mock-charge on whoever that was across the room.

Dove caught a good strong whiff of the sniffer at the jungle’s rim without knowing that what he whiffed was actually burning rubber. When you work with guano you live with guano till you smell of guano. Gross’s hide was impregnated with it clear down to his money that stank of it.

(Who else but a disbarred gynecologist could have devised that technicolor fantasy so long before technicolor, of liverish yellow dipped at its obscene head in firehouse red and tipped by a delicate rainbow silken as baby’s first down? An improvement in style, function and line worthy of its proud name O-Daddy, The Condom of Tomorrow .)

‘First you learn your craft,’ Gross told Dove. ‘How else do I tell what you’re worth?’ Then deciding to show Whoever-It-Was that he really was a furious charger at heart, lowered his snout and trumpeted terribly – ‘ Welma! Welma! ’

A swift light step and there materialized a woman whose life had been consumed. She may have been thirty-five or sixty but wasn’t quite through burning yet. She was wearing a rubber apron over a gum-colored dress and pigtails bound by a big pink bow that bounced as if the very hair were rubberized. Apparently her sight wasn’t much better than Gross’s, for she stood dangling one glove, specs in hand, looking about for some way to clean them of particles of reddish dust. At length she stooped, brought up a corner of her slip far enough to serve as a lens-cleaner.

‘Look the bow ribbon!’ Gross squeaked with mocking glee – ‘Welma the wulcanized woo min! Aint a wife! Aint a mother!’ – his voice turned stern with shame for her – ‘What are you? You think a bow ribbon makes a woo min?’

The woman snapped her specs on and beamed upon Dove through them as benignly as if Rhino’s derision had been praise. ‘He’ll mouse on me and he’ll mouse on you,’ she explained without heat. ‘He’s a forty-faced pigeon straight from Rat Row, quack from head to toe. Rather steal from his mother than ride a passenger train and I give him eighty percent the best of it at that. Now if you want to see how we get these things out come back here and I’ll show you how.’

The kitchen, so commodious it might once have served as a slave quarter, was now largely given over to half a dozen small molds of individualized design. About the molds stood cans of liquid rubber, open paint-tins and brushes soaking in solutions. Above a wide white oven a line of O-Daddies hung like sausages to dry.