Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

When the buyer put his eye to the peep-hole for which he had paid, he saw only a pale, demented girl, blonde braids bound tightly about her head, wearing a simple cotton frock and her pale hands folded in her lap.

Then in strode some kind of redheaded hayseed in a sheriff ’s hat with a flashy cord and boots that were all but spurred – the hiders could almost smell the whiskey on him. When the hayseed took off his hat the pale girl loosened her frock. What a dunce the fellow looked after that! The only sound in the room was his heavy breathing and the whirr-whirr-whirr of the ceiling fan slicing the obscene heat. What a clown! He was going about his job in there as though it were hero’s work, a thing no one else could possibly do.

Some felt contempt of the shameless dunce, but not all. Each watcher was affected differently.

One paled slowly as he looked and, after a minute, left for good thinking how sad such things were so.

Another laughed smugly deep as his liver, to see proven at last what he had long suspected: a man was a two-legged animal and a woman a four-legged one, nothing more. And left thinking how lucky it was, such things being so, that he had been there to see.

Yet a third looked thoughtful, as at a demonstration in carpet weaving: see, there was still money to be made in small enterprise.

Another felt stale lusts grow swift and bit his lip for lack of cash: had he every dollar in town tonight, all would be spent by morning.

But the great cripple neither laughed nor paled. Only the lines of his heavy head hardened and he swung his torso on its tiny wheels and wheeled off down the hall, making a rolling thunder to hide his indignation.

No, Schmidt didn’t believe in this sort of thing at all.

The other peepers would be sitting in the parlor once more when Dove returned downstairs – that was when the fun really began. The sight of the fellow combing his hair or playing the juke, seemingly innocent that he had performed publicly, sent such glances of cold glee back and forth that soon every one had their money’s worth. That the joke, after all, was on themselves, was a bit of knowledge Finnerty took pains not to divulge. Had they understood that the dunce in the stetson was not only aware that he was watched, but was secretly proud to display his powers, they might have mobbed both Dove and Finnerty.

Schmidt, of course, knew the story, and didn’t share the amusement others felt. From a corner where the light hardly fell he studied Dove. Big Stingaree’s shirt was open at the throat and his throat was flushed to the chin, for he had thirty dollars to spend once again. And was spending it the way he’d found it went fastest, by buying drinks for everyone.

‘He don’t know the show is over,’ Schmidt realized, just as the juke began to sing—

Dove began mugging silently with the singer, pretending it was his own voice mourning Caruso. ‘I wish I could sing truly,’ he would lament when Caruso was done, ‘but I lost my voice hollerin’ for gravy.’

This legless man was an old carnie hand who had lived among human skeletons, 500-pound women, dog-faced boys, spider men, living heads, geeks, half-men-half-women and dwarfs in the maimed world of sideshow exhibitions; but it seemed to him he had never seen anyone who filled him with such disgust as this grinning pimpified country braggart pretending he was Enrico Caruso.

When the song was done Dove spotted Hallie. He came up beside her, raised her glass, drained it and called – ‘Bartender! This lady needs a drink!’

Hallie covered her glass with her hand.

‘What you settin’ at the bar for if you don’t want to drink?’ Dove demanded.

‘I’d rather buy my own.’

‘What’s the matter, Hallie?’ his bravado began to crumble, ‘I done nothing against you.’

‘I just don’t like to drink on someone who don’t know what he’s doing, that’s all.’

For reply he took a whole tumbler of gin and gulped it down in a single breath, then set it back on the bar with a sigh.

‘What did it prove that time?’ she asked him.

‘It prove I can drink gin,’ Dove informed her.

‘That you’ve already proved. I haven’t seen you sober in a week.’

‘Whose money is it, mine or yours?’

‘Yours,’ she assured him, and turning away, left him weaving.

Schmidt was waiting for her at the door.

‘What were you two whispering about?’ the cripple barred her way.

‘I told him I think he’s killing himself.’

‘Then let him. The sooner the better.’

Yet once it was morning when she came down to the parlor carrying her lamed cat. After the long night of riot the spiders, that at midnight had twisted and swung on their metal wires, now hung motionless. The night was done and the early light lay scattered about like broken glass, as if people had picnicked in a mausoleum here. And as in mausoleum the air felt exhausted. So close, so very still, that a sun mote in its silent play seemed like a sick-ward child told be quiet while its nurse sleeps on.

Hallie saw the pale mote searching a floor where the dead lay against the dead: a whole platoon of cokes had been wiped out at the foot of the juke, and the juke itself looked like it might never play again.

A single gin-fifth, the last of its line, lay face down where it had fallen, surrounded by dead butts and snipes that had burned themselves out on the floor. Bobbie pins, kleenex wads, beer caps, wine corks, a deck ripped savagely in two and tossed across the carpet in despair, made the whole place look like a field on which no quarter had been given.

Yet from somewhere heard a murmurous breathing, regular and slow. She followed the mote that searched, like herself, for the sole survivor too.

Hunched in a corner so deeply bent she thought he was sleeping, sat the boy with the face too young yet too old.

‘Wake up,’ she told him. He rose and stood trying to pull the various parts of the Big Stingaree together while hiding something behind his back.

‘Now what are you up to?’

‘I’m sober,’ was his curious reply.

‘But you’ll be drunk by noon.’

‘It’s my money.’

‘You told me that yesterday.’

‘I made sixty dollars yesterday. How much did you make?’ He had Big Stingaree’s parts almost together.

‘If that’s how you feel, give me back my book.’

He brought it from behind his back. ‘I don’t know how it happen to come my way,’ he pretended. ‘Of course it must be yours because you got all the knowance of books and I got nary knowance at all. Yet I don’t see how that give you the right to mock others for ignorance.’

‘I never mocked you, Dove. You can have the book.’

‘It don’t do me no good, for I can’t read as you well know and you’re mocking me in offering it.’

‘If you can stay sober till noon for a week, I’ll teach you to read.’

He took her up so quickly she grew suspicious and touched the book to take it back. ‘If you’re sober at noon you can have it back.’

He wouldn’t let her have it.

‘If I’m not sober I’ll bring it back myself. That’s a promise.’

‘You’ll be too tight to remember any promise.’

He was sober at noon. He was still sober at four. At five Finnerty’s show went on. At five-thirty he came to her, still sober, and without a word handed her the book.

‘Bartender!’ he shouted to Dockery, and his knuckles were white on the bar – ‘Gin! Gin! Gin!’

That night Dove dreamed he was alone in a hotel in Houston. Somewhere in the room a cat was trying to throw up – it had something in its throat it couldn’t swallow. He looked under a divan for it and behind a juke and then below a cot bed but everything was swathed in a mist, he could see nothing plain. Then a shadow moved in the mist and Hallie’s cat made a dash for it right across the floor and disappeared into somebody’s room. She was hiding something there she didn’t want anyone else to see; she’d been up to something for some time now. Something was wrong with the animal but nobody dared to say what.