Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

Dove waggled that chopper that would never come quite all the way loose.

On the wall above his blanket someone who’d checked out long ago had scratched: Poor John Mendoza. He went East. He went West. He went the way he thought was best. He loved his girl but nobody believed him .

In the weighted hours of the blue-moon night Dove thought about Poor John Mendoza and wished that his girl had believed in him.

He learned how to get an extra drag out of a cigarette by wetting his lips when the snipe was too small to be held in the fingers. He learned how to split a match four ways. And every night, before turning in, pursued lice across his blanket with burning matches. When a louse was caught he crackled once, and died.

One morning Make-Believe Murphy suddenly appointed himself meal distributor. Although all the tins were practically identical, he began a pretense that each had been designated for a particular prisoner. For some reason everyone submitted to this nonsense, while Murphy identified each with an eye for minute differences in the way the cornbread had been sliced.

‘ Yo tengo hambre, Campañero ,’ Gonzales complained when he felt himself shorted.

‘We’re all hungry, buddy,’ Murphy assured him but keeping his left palm closed, ‘nobody’s getting shorted.’

‘Then you can open your hand,’ Dove told Murphy, ‘so we can see for sure nobody is getting shorted.’

‘I don’t have to open my hand to nobody,’ Murphy clenched his fingers so fast cornbread crumbs pinched out of his fist, ‘Or do you figure you’re big enough to make me?’

‘I don’t have to make you,’ Dove conceded, ‘if you don’t it’ll just go to prove you are shortin’ the man.’

Murphy opened his fist slowly, as though hoping enough of the bread had pinched out to make it look like a fair distribution after all. But at least half of Vicente’s slice lay there pleading guilty to everything. Dove picked it out of his palm and tossed it to Vicente.

Murphy reddened but said nothing more.

‘I wouldn’t of done that if I were you,’ Country warned Dove, ‘that was the Mexican’s quarrel, not yours. What did I tell you about shaking another man’s jolt?’

‘We’re all shaking somebody else’s jolt anyhow, Country,’ Dove decided.

Kline was the only one of the prisoners who didn’t care whether he got cornbread or not. ‘Eat mine,’ he sometimes told Dove, extending his plate, and while Dove ate would wail a cheerful dirge—

Great itching lumps formed below Dove’s skin, and traveled so fast he could see them move. If he touched the cluster above his knee and then touched his ankle, in a minute his ankle was swollen and itching too. He waited till the turnkey passed, then threw open his shirt – ‘These whelps give me a terrible eetch, mister.’ The turnkey saw the nauseous lumps and returned with a spray-gun filled with insecticide.

‘All you got is the nettle hives,’ he told Dove, ‘this’ll burn your hide but it’ll cure it.’

Dove declined. ‘I’d ruther have my hide scrofuloed than scalded,’ he voted to stick with the nettle hives.

That night he saw himself lying asleep in a bed two stories over a murmurous street. Lights like fireflies went on and off, a piano played in an unseen court. And under the music as he slept and saw himself asleep, Dove heard a metal whirring as of tiny wheels on stone.

And sidewise, hand over stump and stump over hand, heard the hard ascent of the legless man up a gaslit stair begin.

Coming on as he’d been coming for years, by bar light, by star light, by mist light by stair, breathing heavier with each step, yet sure in his final hour to claim his own at last. There was time, just barely time, to lock the door against him. The key was in the lock but he lacked the strength to give it a full turn. Dove saw the rubber point of the short-hand crutch, that the cripple used to help him up stairwells, come through the wood of the door like the door was dust and wakened wishing he had never dreamt.

Bad air and boils – yet sometimes there came a day so blue it caught at the heart like a sense of loss – all these days too blue, all lost. Rainy days were melancholy but sunny ones were worse. When it was raining out there he could sink into a sullen half-dream where nothing could touch him. But blue days recalled his every folly and he’d think, ‘So much time gone! So little time left! Scarcely time left for a boy to rise!’

Murphy sat in his own cell, bent above a small digest called Guidance , which revealed, for one dollar a year, how to grow rich through prayer.

‘It don’t do no good for a man to rise these days, son,’ was Country Kline’s curious philosophy, ‘for that can’t be done any longer except on the necks of others. And when you make it that way, all the satisfaction is taken out of it. Son, I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but you got pimp wrote large all over you – but that’s the sorriest way of all to rise, and the reason I’ll tell you why – if God ever made anything better than a hustling girl He’s kept it to Himself. There’s no trick in not going down the drain if you don’t live in the sink. But you take a woman who makes her living where the water is sucking the weaker bugs down and she don’t go down, she’s twice the woman that one who never had to fight for her soul is.’

One day the tank grew strangely still. Murphy came to lean too casually against his door. He and Dove hadn’t been on speaking terms for a week.

‘What’s the extent of your education,’ he suddenly demanded of Dove.

‘It don’t extend nowheres, account I got none,’ Dove acknowledged.

‘What’s your excuse for being in here?’ Murphy persisted.

‘I was drinkin’ heavy,’ Dove told him.

‘Most you Injuns do.’

Apparently Murphy had given some thought to this.

‘I aint even part Injun, mister,’ Dove went along.

‘If you aint, what you squattin’ like one for?’

Dove, on his haunches with a blanket about his head, let smoke trail through his nostrils before he answered, knowing any answer had to be wrong.

‘My folks always set this way, mister. I notice sometimes you do yourself.’ And flicked his cigarette through the bars.

That was it.

‘Get up ’n put that snipe out,’ Murphy commanded. ‘You trying to burn the place down with all us white folks inside?’

‘I wouldn’t go throwin’ fire around, mister. That snipe is put out.’

‘Put it out again.’

‘Mister,’ Dove called to the African-violet fiend lounging in the run-around pretending he had been promoted to trusty, ‘Would you mind puttin’ out that put-out snipe for me?’

‘I didn’t give him the order,’ Murphy interrupted, ‘I give it to you.’

‘Then put it out yourself, mister.’

‘Deputy!’ Murphy called parties unseen, ‘bring in the prisoner of the court!’

Somebody spun Dove about, shoved him through the open door and down the run-around into a cell full of prisoners. He had never seen all the tenants of Tank Ten assembled, and now he wished he hadn’t till he felt stronger.

They looked like bulldogs, they looked like coyotes, they looked like real hard cases. The human dishrag with hair and brows so colorless he seemed more like something hung out to dry than anything actually living. His faithful timberwolf beside him, holding a spoon in event the rag should want it washed, shined or dipped in gravy. Wayback without a tooth in his head, standing beside Out-Front who had enough teeth for two. Wren, holding Dundee’s lunch bucket to keep Feathers from laying an egg in it, and Chicken Spanker himself, looking as though he’d like to peck somebody. And Gonzales, without his shovel. But who was ready to go all the same.