Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

‘ Them two fools,’ Finnerty scoffed merrily, ‘you don’t think I’d let a couple city clowns like them on my chicken farm, do you? You and I know what hard work is, we know what chicken farming is. Now wouldn’t I look good trying to tell a smart country girl like yourself that all she had to do is candle? That’s why with you I’m sincere . A country girl and a country boy. We know you don’t get nowheres without hard work. Don’t we, little baby?’

‘What country exactly is that, Little Daddy?’

Not until then did Finnerty see he’d been had.

‘Go on turning tricks till you’re sixty,’ he gave up on Hallie. ‘Just don’t come running to me for help, that’s all.’

‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t .’ Hallie kept a baitless string bobbing.

Yet when Frenchy would shake her head and say sadly, ‘Reba, poor thing. I really don’t dislike her, I just feel so sorry for her, the fool Oliver is making of her,’ Hallie would be noncommittal.

For Reba was equally concerned about poor Frenchy, and worried what would happen to the girl when she and Oliver left for the farm.

Hallie pitied both, and Floralee as well, and nearly everyone.

Everyone, that is, but Oliver Finnerty. There was no place in her heart, inside or out, that did not freeze over at sight of him gnawing his little nail. And while Finnerty could respect her lack of interest in his farm, he could never forgive her indifference to his physical charms. He was hurt.

‘The broad carries herself mighty high for one I got reason to think aint even got the right to be working the doors of a white house.’ He had tried and she had mocked him. There was only one answer now: force.

So he caught her alone petting her lame cat, the very one that had crippled his mouse, and came right to the point:

‘Baby, you got all that education working for you, let’s see you walk to that bureau drawer, take out every penny and come back here and hand it to me. If you hold out so much as a nickel it’s as bad as trying to hold out the whole roll and that’s plain stealing. Move, you.’

Hallie stopped petting the cat long enough to give the pander a gray, grave look. Then bundling the cat comfortably in the crook of her arm so as not to jog it, went to the bureau and put her back solidly up against it. In the bathrobe once red now faded to rose, her hand dropped casually to her pocket.

Finnerty closed the door behind him and dropped the key into his pocket. ‘You know I’m not without help, little baby,’ he warned her.

‘I don’t plan to cut you,’ Hallie told him quietly. ‘I got cut once myself. I won’t scratch you because I don’t like to see a man walking around with scratches on his face. I won’t throw acid in your eyes because it makes me sorry to see a blind person. All I’ll do is kill you where you stand. If you get through the door I’ll kill you on the stair. If you make the stair I’ll kill you in the parlor. If you make the street I’ll kill you on the curb. I’ll kill you in the alley. I’ll kill you in God’s House. I’ll kill you anywhere.’

Finnerty stood with his head slightly bent, his brow lined by doubt.

‘Did you lose something, Oliver?’

‘My key,’ he told her, ‘I lost my key.’

‘ My key I take it you mean.’

‘ Your key.’

‘It’s laying in your cuff. You got a hole in your pocket. Bring your pants up later and I’ll make you a new pocket.’

Had he actually appeared with the pants she would have sewed both pockets to the seat, but he gave her no such chance.

It was Mama upon whom he conferred that opportunity, Hallie was later mildly surprised to discover. There she was, the bespectacled mulatto housekeeper-informer with gray in her poll, a rosary around her throat and Finnerty’s boy-size trousers across her knees, plying needle and thread as though she were his mother. ‘I’m putting in a new pocket for Oliver,’ she explained, chattering on as the needle plied. ‘Oh, I know people say a pimp is the most pitiful shame, but little they know what such a man has to go through for his hustler’s sake. What if she’s sick or in jail? Who else has the poor thing to stand by her side?

‘Oliver didn’t invent his trade no more than we invented ours. I never heard of a pimp being elected mayor nor even of one who bothered to vote, so why blame them for the way things are? They weren’t the ones who made the laws that let the trade go on. If nobody wanted there to be pimps, honey, there wouldn’t be no pimps. Isn’t it strange that it’s the very ones who say we’re a public disgrace who pay us best? You know yourself that it’s the ones from the Department who come down early on Saturdays to holler, “Bring us two women and a bottle!”’

‘What’s wrong about two women and a bottle?’ Hallie asked, just to find out.

‘Honey, there’s nothing wrong with two women and a bottle, or three or four women and a whole case, so long as you don’t sneak it and preach against it the next day.’ Mama wetted the thread and pointed it through the needle. ‘If there was another craft open to Oliver he’d try it, and make quite a success.’

Sometimes Hallie wondered a bit about Mama.

For how disapproving Mama looked later, in the kitchen, while Reba and Finnerty were having a bite together.

‘Are you having coffee, baby?’ she heard Finnerty invite Reba.

‘Yes, daddy.’

‘Then make enough for two and bring mine here.’

‘Alright, daddy,’ Old Faithful agreed, ‘but butter me a little piece bread. After all, I work for you.’

Reba had been brought up in a Chicago orphanage although both her parents were living. They had taken turns visiting her on alternate Sundays – but one Sunday neither had come. ‘See,’ one of the other girls had told her then, ‘your father’s no good,’ – and had shoved Reba’s head against a flathead nail. The accident had caused a permanent squint in the girl’s right eye.

Now she had found a sort of father, one who was surely no good at all, but at least he came to visit her every day and sometimes twice. It was ‘My Oliver this, my Oliver that’ and ‘My Oliver is just so tickled with them raw silk lounging pajamas I bought him he been lounging two whole days so I’m going to get him cowboy boots to go with them. Won’t that be cute? ’

‘Not the way I heard it it aint cute,’ the big girl from Fort Worth needled her. ‘How I heard it, you’ve been hiding them pants to keep him from loading up a sheeny wagon of green bananas and making hisself a nice profit by the time he got to Chicago.’

‘If my Oliver ever worked a sheeny wagon I’ll kiss your ass before God!’ Reba came swiftly to the defense of her household honor. ‘His whole life he aint worked one single mothering day! Never rolled up his sleeves except to exercise horses a little. Even then he was just settin ’ up there, takin’ his own good time. Why, he won’t even take off his own shoes to climb in bed!’

That nothing could lower human dignity faster than manual labor was understood. ‘Go get yourself a lunch bucket and get back in your ditch’ was the ultimate insult on Perdido Street.

‘Any pimp whose broad don’t take off his shoes for him,’ Finnerty backed up Reba, ‘I defy him to claim he got good conditions.’

‘Oh, who cares what conditions you and your old lady got?’ the Fort Worth blonde dismissed them both. ‘Why, I got a daddy friend don’t take a dime off me. He buys me things. He’s going to buy me a Cadillac so long I’ll have to back up to turn a corner.’ Whatever Fort Worth’s real name was, no one ever called her anything but Five, to honor a navel formed to that figure. When asked to show her wonderful navel she would show it, sweetly and simply, just like that. Men pinched her bottom, yet she did not hold herself proudly just because of that.