Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

At times he could catch his brother Byron in such strange life-glimpses. One second he would be moving about the kitchen, his useless brother about his useless tasks, and the next he would be a total stranger, doing no one knew what. A picture of him not moving but rigid; tensed with life yet still as death. In after years Dove never heard the long thunder of passenger cars across a bridge in the dark but he caught a brief glimpse of a smoky dawn through an opening door – never heard the white steam whistle in the night but saw Byron stretched, mouth agape like the dead, brown boot-toes pointing upward on a disarranged cot bed in a corner. Yet never learned, his whole life, who Byron really was.

Another mystery was the bougainvillaea. It grew beneath a bicycle frame nailed high on the shack’s north wall – now why should anyone nail a bicycle, front wheel gone and frame rusted by rain, against a clapboard wall? No one could tell him, yet nobody took it down. The bougainvillaea stretched for those useless spokes. It almost touched the down-slung handle-bars. The bougainvillaea yearned to conceal all things in leaves. The plant seemed half asleep in the early morning, but became restless toward night. Sometimes a dustwind made it shudder as though dust-hands touched it roughly. And once when the sun was directly overhead the whole plant bent in pain.

The house itself looked as if one peart wind would blow it down.

Its floor was dirt. The curtains were guano bags. The stovepipe was stuck through a hole in the wall. Behind it rose a jagged cliff as old as America.

One night a small rain lay the dooryard dust. Dove heard the drops tap dancing. And the sleep-drawn breath of two drunks wearied once again of useless drinking.

He turned the smoking bitch lamp low. In the yard the Mexican stars were out, the Mexican dogs were barking. Someone was singing ‘ Poy! Pooey poy! ’ so shrill he must have been mocking the dogs. Dove touched his plant with eyes closed fast the better to understand the leaves. Beneath his fingers he felt it blooming.

In the morning the bicycle lay in the dust and the bougainvillaea grew about it. No one so much as noticed that Dove had taken the bicycle down. He himself wasn’t sure just why.

Yet as the magic spring of 1930 died in endless drought, Dove’s hours too grew drier day by day. Till filled with a nebulous homesickness he would shamble down a dead-end road that long ago had led men west. That led now only to tin-canned circles where hoboes hopped off the Santa Fe.

Years before a box car had slipped a coupling, scudded downhill and turned onto its side in the chaparral. Half sunk now in sand, ruined and stripped, only its bare iron skeleton and a few beams remained to cast a meager shade on days when shade was precious as water. There were always a couple of hoboes resting there.

One day Dove came there, curiously seeking he didn’t know what, and saw a man in khaki pants and torn shirt lying flat on his back with a bottle in his hand. When he came closer he saw it was his brother and stood studying him: a stranger sinking in the sand, like the box car ruined and stripped. He had often seen Byron drunk at home; but lying like that for everyone to look at left the boy pale with shame.

Yet he saw boys there no older than himself passing a bottle. They boiled black coffee in open tins and ate beans stuck on a twig; rolled cigarettes singlehanded and boasted of time in jail.

Hard time and easy, wall time and farm time, fed time and state, city time, county time, short time and good time, soft time and jawbone time, big house, little house and middle house time, industrial time and meritorious time – ‘that’s for working your ass off.’

In jails where food was inedible, as it was in most county clinks, the men, Dove heard, bought their own by levying each newcomer to the extent of whatever he carried. If he didn’t have money he paid with his shoes. If he came in broke and barefoot too the other inmates took as many slaps at his behind as the court decreed for the felony of breaking into jail without consent of the inmates. Yet, barefoot or shod, man or mouse, he always shared in food bought outside the jail.

He heard of a jail in Southern Louisiana where prisoners had built up a treasury of over two hundred dollars and dined the turnkey and sheriff once a week. That at the Grayson County Jail prisoners got out a weekly paper called the Crossbar Gazette .

In Laredo the cells were all on one side, he learned. The whip boss at Huntsville was named Crying Tom. In Hillsboro, Missouri, prisoners got sheets and mattresses.

They spoke too of good fortune: one had once been taken into a minister’s home for two months; another had come upon a drunken girl in a cattle car; another had found a new jacket hanging in a reefer into which he had climbed one night in Carrizozo.

Dove learned that Beaumont was tough. That Greensboro, in some place called Nawth Klina, was a right mean little town to get through. That Boykin, right below it, was even harder. That toughest of any was any town anywhere in Georgia. If you were caught riding there you heard the long chain rattling. But they gave you fifteen cents every week and a plug of tobacco on Sundays. ‘ That part’s not so bad,’ thought Dove Linkhorn.

‘Stay ’way far from Waycross,’ an old canboy warned him – ‘’less you want to do a year in a turp camp.’ And he began beating a tin-can in time with a song—

East Texas was rough but the Rio Grande Valley was easy – all the crews asked was that you get off on the side away from the station. You could get through Alabama all right provided you didn’t stand on the spine like a tourist and wave at the sheriff. And stayed off the A. & W.P.

Those A. & W.P. bulls made a point of putting you off at a water tank in the wilderness called Chehawee and you walked forty-four miles to get to Montgomery. For a fiver, cash down on the barrelhead, you could ride.

Look out for a town in Mississippi called Flomaton, because that’s Wing Binga’s town. One night he pistol-whupped two ’boes and they came back and shoved him under the wheels. That was how he lost his right wing. He was mean before that but he’d gotten meaner since.

Look out for Marsh City – that’s Hank Pugh’s. Look out for Greeneville – that belongs to Buck Bryan. Buck’ll be walking the spines dressed like a ’bo – the only way you’ll be able to spot him is by his big floppy hat with three holes in the top. And the hose length in his hand.

Your best bet is to freeze and wait. You can’t get away. He likes the hose length in his hand but what he really loves is the Colt on his hip. So just cover up your eyes and listen to the swwwissshhh . He’s got deputies coming down both sides. God help you if you run and God help you if you fight. God help you if you’re broke and God help you if you’re black.

Look out for Lima – that’s in Ohio. And look out for Springfield, the one in Missouri. Look out for Denver and Denver Jack Duncan. Look out for Tulsa. Look out for Tucson. Look out for Joplin. Look out for Chicago. Look out for Ft Wayne – look out for St Paul – look out for St Joe – look out – look out – look out—

Dove saw a crippled one caught like a rabbit in the great head-lamps’ glare, turning blinded eyes to the engineer and the engineer waving – ‘Go on, go on —’

Of their pathetic efforts to keep clean, merely to keep clean, Dove never heard them tell. Yet they were forever begrimed and begging soap and water. As soon as his thirst was quenched, the ’bo was washing his one shirt. On every fence post at every junction faded shirts hung, wet weather or dry. Combs, pocket mirrors and toothbrushes, carried by a string around the neck, were treasured.