Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

At last he shook hands all around, and last of all with Dove. ‘See you a hundred stretches hence,’ he promised and Dove was sorry to see him go.

To go in a driving rain, when the Mardi Gras was done, but night bulbs still burned on.

The night bulb that usually dimmed at six was allowed to burn that morning till the courthouse chimes rang at nine. A minute after the bulb began fading. Slowly, as though burning out. And the cells were left shadowed by the night that had passed.

A dark and lost hour, the first Dove had spent in a cell all alone. When a faraway train called like a train going farther and farther from home and he thought, ‘That engineer sounds terrible lonesome.’

Later, by standing at the run-around window, he saw they were at it again in the Animal Kingdom. But he had lost all desire to keep count. Someone was trying to get a spitting contest going for a sack of Bull Durham, but no one wanted to play. A green Lincoln wheeled around the yard, swaying a bit down the unpaved alley, its siren rising as it hit the open street with headlights fighting the fog.

‘There go the nabs!’ he announced to the tier, and everyone came crowding to see, but by then it was gone.

Still its siren rang on the iron faintly and he felt dead sick for home.

All that wintry afternoon the Southern rain never ceased. In the run-around the prisoners gathered together uneasily as dark came on, to read the rules of the Kangaroo Court like men reading Genesis on a raft at sea. Toward evening came a lull in the rain: in the lull they heard boots climbing stairs as though burdened.

It always took the sheriff longer to open the Tank Ten door than the outer doors because it was opened by the brake locked in a box on the outer wall and the key to the box, smaller than his other keys, always eluded him for a minute.

The men listened while he fumbled. ‘Somebody with him,’ everyone sensed.

The sheriff and a deputy with a badge on his cap, and between them Country Kline bent double, and all three soaking wet. He looked somehow smaller and his toes kept scraping the floor as they half-dragged and half-carried him.

Beneath the cocky red cap his face was so drained of blood it held no expression at all. Somebody bundled a blanket and stuffed it through the bars. Country sagged, mouth agape.

When he was stretched out he clutched his cap against his stomach and drank the rain running off his hair. The fingers began searching feebly for the wound.

‘I knew I had him when I seen him vomick,’ the deputy explained. Country’s face was more gray than Dove had ever seen a living face and his eyes kept dilating with shock.

‘Shouldn’t have turned rabbit on us, dad,’ the sheriff reproved him while the doc swabbed the belly with cotton batting.

‘He jumped out of the car,’ the deputy seemed to feel he owed the men peering through the bars an explanation, ‘I hollered, but he just bent over and started zig-zagging. Not sure as I blame him. Ninety-nine years is a mighty long time.’

Country’s throat was the same dead-gray as his fingers; the color of the concrete that had held him so long; the color of his only home; as well as the hue of that new and untried shore to which for so long he had half-wished to go.

‘We’ll have to op-rate, dad. Say “Okay,”’ the sheriff asked.

Caught between the double disappointments of dying too soon or staying alive to no purpose whatsoever, his eyes looked inward to make a choice; unaware that the choice had been taken from him. Behind his eyes Dove saw the man racing like a fox in an ever-diminishing circle. It was so hard to go, it was so hard to stay, it was all so hard all the way. The fingers, wet with rain or sweat, twisted weakly on the cap, trying to keep hold; the eyes kept trying to understand.

The sheriff put one ear to his lips to hear the whisper of legalized consent. If it had been himself with the gun he would have gotten the man at the knees, he felt.

The fingers abandoned the cap and wandered about the wound’s gray edge, tracing the torn tissue to make sure it was at last his own.

‘Tell us we can op-rate, dad,’ he asked. ‘I ought to sew you now.’

Outside the rain ceased a minute, as though it too listened for the whisper. The doctor looked up at the sheriff and the sheriff looked down at the doctor, his face a mask of impassivity. He’d been sued once; he wasn’t getting sued again. The odor of iodine began filling the tank.

‘Say yes,’ Dove urged him, ‘Say yes, Country.’

The turnkey came up, trying to hurry and walk softly both at once. ‘They got some broad downstairs claims she used to be his old lady. Got papers to prove it, I didn’t look too close. No, I didn’t search her, I was afraid of what I’d find. Maybe she’ll say yes for him.’

‘“Used-to-be” don’t git it,’ the sheriff shook his head like a weary mastiff, ‘as I understand it, as long as he’s conscious he’s suppose to say it hisself. If he aint, it takes a legal relation, else I’m liable. First aid is as far as law give me the right to go.’

Outside the rain began again, Dove heard the wind blowing between the wash of it, trying to say ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’

But no one heeded the brainless rain and nobody heard what the wind tried to tell. For the wind and the rain came every day and whispered like two unpaid lawyers together all night, fixing to say what, in the coming day, what everyone wished to hear said.

‘It’s awful when it’s like this,’ Dove thought, ‘and it’s like this now.’

Out of the corner of his eye he felt he was being watched, yet did not turn his head. Something moved in the corner – that cat! Hallie’s brindle again! She made a dash for it right across the floor and as she turned a corner invited him, by one whisk of her tail, to follow. He followed into a room where a virgin burned vaguely high above and, closer at hand, a woodstove cast a heartshaped flame the flowing hue of blood. A woman’s black lace slip and a man’s blue jeans were entangled on the floor and he could not tell where the cat had gone. A layer of dust had fallen, long ago, across the floor and the walls. The entangled slip and the jeans that had, but a moment before, been clothing, was a heap of dust. Panes, pictures, doorways, curtains; all were dust.

He touched a speck to his tongue and it was not dust, but salt. As the light of the virgin too high on the wall began burning too bright and he wakened with the night bulb shining right in his eyes.

And the taste of salt on his tongue.

‘What’s the word on Country?’ he asked.

‘Turned his face to the wall half an hour ago,’ the turnkey replied.

And heard Gonzales grieving—

‘I feel like I been everywhere God got land,’ Dove thought, ‘yet all I found was people with hard ways to go. All I found was troubles ’n degradation. All I found was that those with the hardest ways of all to go were quicker to help others than those with the easiest ways. All I found was two kinds of people. Them that would rather live on the loser’s side of the street with the other losers than to win off by theirselves; and them who want to be one of the winners even though the only way left for them to win was over them who have already been whipped.

‘All I found was men and women, and all the women were fallen. Sports of the world, poor bummies, poor tarts, all they were good for was to draw flies I was told. You could always treat one too good, it was said, but you never could treat one too bad. Yet I wouldn’t trade off the worst of the lot for the best of the other kind. I think they were the real salt of the earth.’