Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

No chicken farm story was likely to catch Five. She had been brought up on one, and had had enough of that . Yet she was wide open to the Cadillac story, which was nothing more than the chicken farm story on wheels.

Oh, that long easy rider with the real careful driver. When promises would buy Cadillacs, Five would own a whole fleet.

Until that time Five would go on her feet.

The courts were against them, the police were against them, businessmen, wives, churches, press, politicians and their own panders were against these cork-heeled puppets. Now the missions were sending out sandwich men to advertise that Christ Himself was against them.

‘If it weren’t for Mama who’d take our side?’ Frenchy demanded to know, and stick up for them Mama did. She took their side against Oliver, ordered him out of her house, and told him not to come back till he could show respect to ladies and forced him to apologize to one or the other at least once a week.

A cruel game, tricking children. For one word from Finnerty would be enough to send the woman back to the alley stalls from which she’d risen. Colored women were not legally permitted to manage houses employing white prostitutes. But every house was required to keep a maid on the premises during working hours. To the police therefore Mama was a maid. This was Finnerty’s arrangement, and he didn’t let her forget it for a day.

Leaving Mama troubled by the part she played. At times she tried to justify herself by remembering that she had been deceived by many white men; therefore it was only fair that she should now deceive their daughters. Yet disappointment wide as the world would surprise her out of her sleep: When had she ceased to belong to herself? Some mornings she would have to go for the cognac before she could go downstairs and say, ‘How is my chick today?’ to each and every one.

Between forenoon and evening her chicks descended the stairwell like separate blessings, one by one.

Hallie came down first, with a cup of tea steaming in her hand and the brindle cat limping at her side. It was a cat that took offense at nothing simply to have some sort of life. It walked beside her down the stone, but when it felt dew beneath its paws it drew back. Then Hallie would point her foot, the cat would leap, hobble and claw its way clear to her shoulder. Then they went together to say good morning to the jonquils growing between the cobbles. Though between the cobbles of Hallie’s heart no jonquil would grow again.

A heart like a lonesome gravestone, winter weeds covered it now. Below the weeds the child lay buried who had been but three when he’d died. One who had surprised his mother that sad and sudden fall by asking ‘Mother, are my mittens ready for winter? Are my earlaps ready? Will my coat be warm?’

His last Christmas he had put a hand behind a glowing ornament, passing it about his face, dreamily taking up the heat until she had made him stop.

Now nine shuttered Christmases later she walked powdered, Maybellined and gowned in the mascaraed evening light and something swollen in a mushroom’s shape, boredom like a living growth, bore down on her heart and brain.

Morning was not the hardest time, for the lame cat needed her, and the other women were not yet about to smile a little to themselves when they talked to her: ‘How you doin’, philosopher?’ they would ask, though she could not recall who, nor why, anyone had first called her that. But she had once been a country schoolteacher, so it must have something to do with that.

‘I got no philosophy but I topped you last night,’ Frenchy especially liked to tease her.

So she and the cat went visiting jonquils, and had a bit of fur-to-ear chatter in the ancestral understanding of woman and cat. Sometimes she read, in the quiet forenoon, out of books she still loved. But when the morning was past and the cat lay stretched on the window ledge through the sweltering afternoon, then she was left alone in this strange house, and ennui came down like a foe on her mind and she shaded her eyes with her hand.

To hope she might spend her yet unspent hours bedside to bed in some common ward, under some final quarantine, some ward where go all those whose lives are untouchable, from streets for whom nobody prays. Where it is one where evening falls and one the sad return of day.

Till the violet evening had mercy at last. Then she stood in the portiere and chose what guests she would.

The other women regarded her with a strange mixture of admiration and pity. They felt she held herself apart because she had once taught school – yet at other times they perceived she was somehow defenseless against all of them. Then it was that, hearing the low grinding of metal on stone, they looked the other way to spare her, while Finnerty held the big doors wide.

They did not look, yet sensed as if the lights had gone up a bit, that at the sound of little wheels, life was beginning again in Hallie.

Her lover was the legless man.

‘I’m a philosopher, too,’ Reba challenged Hallie – ‘because I got my own goddamn philosophy. For instance. You take a woman married to a good man and she cheats on him. Their baby is born dead. Well she had it coming to her, didn’t she? Everyone gets what’s coming to them, that’s my philosophy. I picked it up working for loryers. They said they never heard anything like it.’

‘I can believe that,’ Hallie was inclined to agree with loryers.

‘I had to run down two flights and up one across the street to get a coke,’ Reba recalled, ‘because across the street is a whorehouse with a coke machine. Why wear myself out running stairways? A job is a job. One with cokes is better. That’s my philosophy too.’

‘Say you don’t go for cokes, you’re on hard liquor. Okay, be a B-broad and get drunk every night. Say you’re a heavy eater, a regular fat glutton, get a job as a waitress ’n stuff yourself. Say you’re rapping doors with a box of silk stockings under your arm and you start freezing. So what? Get a job as a dance-hostess and work up a sweat.

‘I got half my choppers out and no ovalries. So what? I can still be a practical nurse, can’t I? My people come from that part of Europe where they say “fis” for “fish.” I don’t know where it’s at exactly but when my mother sent me to the store she’d always say “Honey, bring back a nice piece fis.” Hey! How’d you like all the cigarettes you could smoke? Just go down to American Tobacco and give my name, they’ll give you all you can haul in one trip.’

‘Baby, I don’t know what you’re on,’ Five marveled, ‘but I never heard nothing like it neither.’

Reba read all the papers, and always shook her head when she’d finished one. Someone in South Carolina had received two boxes of poisoned candy by mail, signed merely ‘B’rer Rabbit, R.F.D.’ Now what did anyone hope to get out of poisoning somebody else by mail? ‘If you got a grudge like that hire somebody to bust his damn legs, don’t go sneaking around signing yourself a damn rabbit.’

Postal delivery poisoners were among the few who fell out of the range of her sympathy. It troubled her to read that a tenant farmer had drowned his three daughters in a well because ‘Jesus says we got to go.’ ‘If Jesus said that why don’t he jump in the well hisself and let Jesus decide for the babies?’ Nor was she satisfied with the explanation of the brakeman who killed his wife with a hammer. ‘Grace aint fitten to raise a dog. This is the only way I know to make a lady of her.’

‘I don’t know what people are coming to, they act like a bunch of damned pistols,’ was Reba’s reaction. When she read of a widow woman who fell and broke her leg on a downtown street and someone stole forty-eight dollars out of her purse while she lay helpless, Reba was helpless too. ‘That’s too much’ was all she had to say for that day, and threw the paper away.