Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

‘There I was with my ice in Wilmington Harbor, clean of my own jobs but tagged for two other guys’ and on my way to San Q.

‘I was still laughing. But for some reason I kept gagging.

‘I don’t mind getting roughed up, everybody gets roughed up. Everybody, in jail or out, is shaking somebody else’s jolt. The thorn that sticks my side to this day is the one time in my life I was innocent was the one time that I got it. You through with them funnies, buddy? Let’s see ’em here. Maybe some of ’em’s in trouble ’n I’ll have to help ’em out.’

Country Kline claimed it was because of his good behavior but it must have been bad bookkeeping – he had been released from Leavenworth nine days before his last sentence had expired officially. When he’d learned of the error, he was in the South and had raced all over Louisiana and Mississippi trying to get some local official to lock him up for nine days in a county jail, give him a receipt and thus square him away with Federal law. He was uneasy about surrendering directly to Leavenworth lest he have to go to bat again against the same judge who’d already sentenced him once. ‘He might just get mad and give me a year for contempt or something,’ was what Country still feared.

He’d driven for days, asking gas station attendants whether they thought he was a fugitive, but no local official would lock him up. ‘You don’t owe us nothing down here, son,’ sheriffs and constables alike had told him. ‘You owe it to Broomface, not to us. Go on back to Kansas, son, we don’t want you. They got to take you.’

Now he waited for the feds with a mixture of hope and fear he could never clearly divide, his cap tilted cockily on the side of his head and a plug of Red Seal in his cheek. Dove studied that philosophical mug creased like a first-baseman’s mitt and concluded he couldn’t possibly have done better for a cell mate.

Whatever happened, it was Country’s consolation, he had Broomface where it pinched. He owed so much time here and there that even were he to serve it concurrently, he was sure to die owing at least fifty years. They’d never be able to collect.

He saw new ways and means of beating the law even in devices invented by madmen. One day Natural Bug came up with a brand new one. When told by a turnkey, ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ Bug replied quickly, ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ When the doctor poked his head into his cell to ask ‘How you feeling?’ Bug answered as fast, ‘How you feeling?’ Every attempt at conversation with him whether about the weather, death or parole withered on the vine.

‘One conversation with you is its own cure,’ his own cell mate abandoned him in disgust, and sure enough – ‘One conversation with you is its own cure,’ Natural Bug replied.

‘He’s no more bug than you or I,’ Country felt certain, ‘all he wants is privacy and I can’t blame him. I don’t even want to think of the trouble I could have saved myself if I’d thought of a thing as simple as that years ago.’

All of the inmates of Tank Ten were white. At night they heard laughter from the Negro tier one flight above, and most of the trusties were short-term Negroes. Murphy insisted it was his influence that kept the tank lily white, but Dove suspected privately that the authorities had something to do with it.

These were neither the great gray wolves of the snowplain wilderness nor fanged cats treed and spitting; but only those small toothless foxes of summer someone had chased and someone had chained, barking at changes in the weather.

The tricked, the maimed, the tortured and the sly, doers of small deeds from the nation of furnished rooms, they came off streets half as old as time to buy a little and sell a little and take their adventure in penny arcades. Their lives had been bounded by those windows SAYING ROOM FOR TRANSIENT. SLEEPING ROOM. LIGHT HKSP., where across a book of a thousand names the clerk who proffers the pen suggests, ‘Give me a phony, mister. We’re both safer off that way.’

Everybody is safer off that way.

They emerged from between those long green walls and those long spook-halls that are shadowed by fixtures of another day. That damp dull green the very hue of distrust; where every bed you rent makes you accessory to somebody else’s shady past.

They were the ones who’d rather play a pinball machine than put in a claim to a desk in an ad agency. Above gutters that run with a dark life all their own or down cat-and-ashcan alleys too narrow for a Chrysler, they hid out in that littered hinterland behind the billboards’ promises, evading the rat-race for fortune and fame. Their names were ‘Unemployed Talent Scout’ and ‘Part-Time Fry Cook,’ ‘Part-Time Beautician’ and ‘Self-Styled Heiress,’ ‘Water-Ski Instructor’ and ‘Dance-Instructress.’ And they strolled as matter-of-factly through their part-time nightmares into a self-styled daylight no less terrible than all their dreams. Their names were the names of certain night-blue notions and they seldom lay down to rest.

Their crimes were sickness, idleness, high spirits, boredom and hard luck. They were those who had failed to wire themselves to courts, state attorney’s office or police. Hardly a stone so small but was big enough to trip them up and when they fell they fell all the way.

Fell all the way and never got up. If life was a cinch by the inch, they did it by the yard. They always found someone named Doc to play cards with. They went out of their way to eat in a place called Mom’s. They slept only with women whose troubles were worse than their own. In jail or out, they were forever shaking somebody else’s jolt, copping somebody else’s plea, serving somebody else’s time. They were unwired to anything.

Lovers, sec-fiends, bugs in flight, the tricked, the maimed, the tortured, the terribly fallen and the sly. All those who are wired to nobody, and for whom nobody prays.

That the public defender defends by saying, ‘Your Honor, this man has had his chance.’

Country Kline rolled a cigarette one-handed, drew the string of the sack with his teeth and lit it with a flint device cupped carefully in his palm, as though fearing Dove might divine its magic and patent it; it looked like Dove would see freedom first. ‘My glin-wheel,’ he explained cryptically, and handed Dove a cigarette already lit.

Dove took a deep drag. ‘I made a small errow myself,’ he admitted, ‘I figured it would work better the second time than the first, being as I’d already a bit of practice at it.’

And he waited for Country to ask ‘Practice at what?’

‘Practice at what?’ Country at last obliged him.

‘Practice at playin’ dead. It seemed to me that was the coward’s way out so I took it. I held my breath ’n stared straight up ’n never moved a muscle. All I fergot was not to talk. So whenever they didn’t have anything else to do that week, they’d put me on a stretcher n’ carry me in the police wagon over to another station ’n set me down ’n tell the other policemen, “He’s dead, you don’t have to feed him,”’n then they’d leave me there. When it came meal time all the other guys got bologna except me. “Lay down, ghost,” they’d tell me. I wasn’t suppose to get no bologna because I was dead, you see.’

‘I see,’ Country assured him, ‘go on.’

‘Well, all the other criminals caught on and they’d holler, “How you feeling today, ghost?” “I feel like hell is a mile away ’n the fences is all down” is what I’d tell them. Because I felt like hell was a mile away ’n all the fences was down.’

‘How long did that keep on?’

‘Why them fellows acted like they now thought nothing could kill me. I was in five stations last week. Finally I told them if I didn’t get something to eat pretty soon I really would die ’n then the joke would be on them. So they finally give me something but I still don’t know what it was. I guess the joke begun to wear. You know another funny thing – not eating like that loosed up every one of my choppers but except the very one I could best have spore?’