Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

‘One thing I’ve always insisted on,’ Dundee boasted wildly, ‘I never come along till I’ve finished my Saturday lunch.’

Dundee’s cell mate had also been strangely victimized. His name was Wren and he liked to buy Fords on Sunday, particularly in small towns. He’d pay a thousand dollars or so for one, by check, and show the dealer his bank balance for that amount. Then he’d drive it to the used-car agency across the street and sell it for six hundred. When the Ford dealer would have him picked up, to be held till the banks opened on Monday morning, Wren claimed he had always been sporting enough to warn the man, ‘You’re making a big mistake, friend.’

Morning would prove the check perfectly good, and Wren would sue for fifty thousand dollars for false arrest. The most he’d ever actually collected was thirty thousand.

‘I must have made a million,’ he computed. But a sinister change had come over Ford dealers on Sunday; particularly in small towns. They had begun to trust him. He had had to act increasingly furtive and fly-by-night. He had even gone to the length of pasting a stage moustache onto his upper lip that looked ready to fall off any moment; and still they wouldn’t arrest him. Wren had run into a solid wall of human faith. And every time he ran into it it cost him four hundred dollars. Finally he had such a vicious run of not getting arrested that he would have gone broke altogether but for a tiny drill, a length of wire and some colored crayon. Parish police had picked him up in a roadhouse for tampering with slot machines.

‘I drill an eighth-inch hole in the side of the machine – it’s only aluminum casting. When the three payoff bars come up I stop the works with the wire and she pays off. Then I plug the hole with crayon of matching color – usually blue, red or silver. When the chumps fill up the jackpot I come back again. Sometimes I got a buddy to cover for me while I drill, we concentrate on fraternal organizations. What can they do about it? Slot machines aint legal either.’

It was true that the authorities were uneasy about their right to hold him. Yet it seemed that somebody ought to.

Cell doors to Tank Ten were left unlocked. Only the big door to the block, operated by air brake, barred the prisoners from the outside world. This permitted the area between the jail’s wall and the cells to be used for prisoner recreation. And since this was left to the prisoners’ own devising, all it came to in the morning was someone reporting casualties in the Animal Kingdom, or a spitting contest in the afternoon. But even the spitting contests lost interest, as the tobacco-chewers always won.

The men changed cells at will. When Wren wearied of Dundee’s grievance against his brother-in-law he moved, simply for change of grievance, into the cell of a barnyard cretin called Feathers.

Feathers had been snatched redhanded in the act of chicken-spanking.

‘I never heard tell of no such crime as that,’ Dove declined to accept chicken-spanking as a crime, ‘it must have been he tried to steal that hen.’

‘Feathers wasn’t trying to steal nobody’s hen,’ Make-Believe Murphy protested. ‘All Feathers done was set that leghorn on his lap and pat its bottom. Understand, I’m not saying the man was in his rights. After all, the bird hadn’t done nothing to be spanked for.’

‘I like chickies,’ Feathers clucked from his cell.

‘I’ll represent him even if I don’t care for the case,’ Murphy assured Dove. He seemed to have appointed himself a sort of Kangaroo Public Defender. Who was defending Murphy Dove didn’t ask.

Gonzales vs. Gonzales was more to Murphy’s taste than Feathers vs. Louisiana . Gonzales, a laborer six days a week, was resting on the seventh when Mrs G. suggested idly that they go on a second honeymoon. This had upset Vicente, as they had never had a first. He had gone through the house methodically with a Number Five shovel, smashing holy images, pictures, glassware, chairs, pottery and a Victor gramophone and every time he’d brought the shovel down had cried out, ‘Call this a honeymoon!’

He had been prying the bathtub off the floor by its stubborn enamel claws when he’d heard Consuela run into the bedroom, snatch something and run out of the house again. He’d apprehended her trying to save their wedding photograph and pointed to the stove. She had always been an obedient wife, and she did what he ordered now: she threw the picture in.

Then they had stood, holding hands by side, until the flames had caught.

‘Mister Gonzales,’ Consuela told him then, ‘that just did it.’ And had phoned the police, had him booked and now promised, every time she came visiting loaded with dainties, that she was going to get him ninety days for malicious mischief if it was the very last thing she did.

‘Why you do that, Vicente?’ Dove inquired with some concern.

‘When I feel like going, I go,’ Vicente explained to his own satisfaction if nobody else’s.

‘You were in your rights,’ Murphy told him confidently, ‘you were remodeling your home. No court in the country can convict you.’

‘I’m just sorry he seen fit to remodel that photograph,’ Dove felt, ‘if you ask me that was pure meanness.’

‘I’m glad you brought that angle up,’ Murphy said, ‘I got that one whipped too. It was my client’s intent to burn only his half of the picture.’

‘It didn’t do her half much good,’ Dove felt obliged to point out.

‘I see,’ Murphy regarded him coldly, ‘you’re the type would actually deprive a man of his freedom for the sake of an old photograph. What kind of man are you anyhow?’

‘I’ll tell you just what kind,’ Dove informed him, ‘I’m the kind that’d injunct that Mexican’s shovel, if I were his wife, before I let him in my house again. That’s what kind.’

‘Shovel no matter,’ Gonzales promised everyone cheerfully, ‘when I feel like going, I go.’

‘A little on the headstrong side,’ Make-Believe Murphy had to concede, squatting beside Dove. He was a lanky stray from nowhere who’d been lost in the shuffle along the way. A year or two older than Dove. Older prisoners tolerated his make-believe practice, knowing that was as close to practising law as Murphy was going to get.

‘Great Hand of God,’ he marveled now, ‘for what it cost this country to keep us criminals in here, we could send a navy to Mexico.’

‘What for?’ Dove wondered. ‘We don’t have no war with Mexico.’

‘Well, by God,’ the boy resolved. ‘By God, if we don’t we’ll send down ’n get us one.’

The only true criminal in the whole tankful of fools, the only one who had soldiered honestly against law and order, was an old-timer named Cross-Country Kline, with a battered and seamed old round brown ball of a face that looked as if it had been lined into the grandstand and lined right back. They were having a hard time getting Country out.

‘Blow wise to this, friend,’ he advised Dove, ‘it’s always easier to convict a man of something he didn’t do than it is to prove that what he actually was doing was a crime. That’s why the nabbers are so much tougher on the man without a record than they are on the finished criminal product. They’ve got the finished product solved, they can nab him any time, so they can afford to be friendly. It’s the bird who pops up on some corner they never seen him around there before, he claims he never been arrested, he got no needle marks, he don’t act like a thief and they can’t find a set of prints on him that worries them. They figure he must be some too-wise ghee. They got to find a crime to fit him. And if he’s innocent that takes persuasion.