Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

‘To your people, hiding out in the Cookson Hills, any cause but that of making corn likker was sorry.’

‘It was for your people to drink.’

‘ My people? My people. What do you mean by that? – My people?’

‘You know darn well what I mean alright,’ for he was touched to the quick himself, ‘just because you have nappy hair—’

‘I’m French and Spanish and one-sixteenth Indian.’

He had her going now and wanted to keep her going. ‘Now about that one-sixteenth—’

‘I’ve had enough.’ She was out of bed, the light was lit, she was pulling clothes out of closet and drawer.

‘Where you goin’, Hallie?’ Dove was frightened.

For reply she upended a handbag, one she had not carried for weeks, and the contents rolled on the bed – all the tools of her ancient trade.

He scattered them to the floor with a kick and pulled her to him, and found her mouth with the red wine still on it. She yielded wearily, a woman who had had enough of love to last a lifetime of red wine.

Later in sleep she accused someone unseen – ‘If you had accepted the child he wouldn’t have died.’

She wore a hat of white straw that day at the zoo when the season of sun met the season of rain. That day when they were happy enough together to make it all one, rain or sun. Dove, in a blue serge suit out of a second-hand store, let her pin a little green feather into his black-and-white checked cap and felt more the sporty-O than ever. And as she pinned it, love lightened his looks a little. Love, and pride that he could read the Times-Picayune or the Item , either one.

Love, and pride. And the sense of a certain C-note yet unspent.

Merry-go-round music drew them – around and around great stallions raced, some white as snow, some black as night, but all with manes that furled and curled as the music beat, and he wanted to ride, but was ashamed to speak. Beside him Hallie smiled to herself, it wasn’t hard to tell what he wanted to do. She drew him away from temptation.

When they came to the monkey house he stopped dead. In one cage a hairy little character was banging his knuckles on his girlfriend’s skull to make her climb a tree for some special purpose all his own.

‘Why! There’s Oliver and Reba!’ Dove called to Hallie in real glee, and pitched popcorn at Finnerty. Then of a sudden it didn’t seem so funny after all, and they moved on.

A single iron-colored owl waited in the shadows of noon like a dream waiting only for nightfall to be dreamt. And a scent of decay blew off him, as though he were rotting under his feathers.

To watch where the elephant, crowned with children, swayed as he walked to excite the children. He looked like a great fool of a child himself. Yet he bore the weak upon his back.

Dove bought two boxes of crackerjack. Hallie’s prize was a tiny red and blue clown made of tin; she pinned it on Dove’s lapel. His own prize was a toy tin whistle that he blew at the candyland sun.

Crackerjack whistles and children’s voices, pony rides and merry-go-rounds, everything Dove heard and saw that day at the zoo lived within a new city innocent and bright.

Belonging just to himself and Hallie.

In the snake house the bended serpent writhed. One attendant held its tail neck and tail, another pried its jaws apart to let a third man bottle-feed it.

When the lion roared Dove backed up a step. ‘He must be hungry too,’ he told Hallie.

‘More likely homesick,’ was Hallie Dear’s guess.

The great gray wolves of the snowplain wilderness lay stretched waiting for December. But in the cages beside them the small restless foxes raced and raced as though summer never could be done.

Dove marveled at the way the changeful light followed rain across the littered grass: he had never noticed how light fell before. In his mind a hurdy-gurdy played autumnal tunes he had never heard before.

In her hay-smelling dark the quick gazelle tiptoed about in the delicate gloom, practicing a ballet of which she would certainly be the queen.

And like a sidewalk drunk careless of wet weather or dry, the great bear lay with his paws in the air while his brood toddled and wrestled about him. Slowly from out the primeval stone came forth the ancient mother of bears, all brown. A working mother wed to a useless hulk, sole support of himself and a growing family.

Came forth bowlegged, honest paws inward; as she had come toward the earliest man. Dove tossed her a peanut and just this once she decided to settle for that.

In mid-afternoon the rain came again, sprinkling walk and cavern and cage. They ducked, newspapers over their heads, into a latticed pavilion. A place for October lovers. They had just ordered soft drinks and two poor-boy sandwiches when an old woman in gray stockings came up to them with a wet newspaper in her hand.

‘Forty years a good life,’ she assured them, ‘forty years married to a good man. It is damp, so you may have it for only a penny,’ and offered them her paper.

‘It’s also yesterday’s,’ Hallie told her; and gave her a nickel. ‘Keep it.’

‘I cannot accept charity,’ the old woman replied with injured pride. And would have left. Dove made her stay.

‘I’ll buy your paper,’ he offered, ‘something happened yesterday I want to read about, so you can charge yesterday’s price.’ The woman understood. She handed over the paper. Dove handed her a dollar bill and waited for his change.

‘ Must I give back money?’ she pleaded.

There was no change.

As they ate the sun came out though rain still fell. ‘The Devil is beating his daughter,’ Hallie explained such changeful weather.

‘Is that who it was just beat me out of a dollar?’ Dove asked a little bitterly.

For some reason Hallie began telling him how she had become a prostitute. For a long time after her baby’s death and her husband’s desertion she had been unwell, and a friend of her husband had become her only white friend. She would waken and he would be standing at the foot of her bed, watching her sleep. When she grew better he brought her a pair of shoes, just the right size, with French heels. Then he took her to a beach.

He had lain in the sun watching the small waves wash the heels as she walked up and down at the water’s edge. Then he had taken her home. That was how easy it had been.

‘But I’d still rather have a man sleeping beside me than standing at the foot of my bed without my knowing he’s there,’ she told Dove, ‘it makes me afraid of what goes on in the mind of a man like that.’

Now the Devil’s daughter was back, begging for her damp newspaper as though she had never seen either Dove or Hallie before. ‘May I have your newspaper? I’ve had a good life, forty years of marriage, forty years a good life. Thank you. I don’t know how to thank you – perhaps I’ll come by another day and you’ll give me another paper.’

It felt like a lucky day for everybody.

Toward evening a small breeze came up and began blowing the minutes away until it was time to go.

As they left they passed once again the prisons where the wolves lay sentenced, though now their fur had been damped by winter’s first rain. Where still the summer foxes paced made even more restless by the changeful weather.

And still the obedient elephant went bearing children on its back, swinging its trunk like an orchestra leader conducting an old-fashioned waltz.

Where the white-maned merry-go-round stallions raced, one a nose ahead, then the other, then coasted when the music-box stopped.

The homesick lion roared for home. The iron-feathered owl waited only for night to wing soundlessly into people’s dreams and be back in his tree by morning.