Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

He could tell carnie hands and circus roustabouts because they took their money out of grouch-bags, pouches drawn by string, like tobacco pouches.

Once he saw a grizzled old hand passing a woman’s black elbow-length glove, the kind that strip-teasers once tossed to the front rows. As it passed from hand to hand, each man sniffed at it and swore he could smell its perfume yet. Its owner finally pocketed it as if secretly relieved that he didn’t have to fight anyone to get it back.

And one told of a young boy found bleeding to death in an empty somewhere up the line.

Dove felt the uneasy guilt go around them like the perfumed glove; it too had made the circle of homeless men.

Their home was ten thousand water towers, their home was any tin-can circle. Their home was down all lawless deeps where buffalo-colored box cars make their last stand in the West.

He saw their nightfires burn and burn against the homeless heart, and felt he had himself gone West. That it had come to nothing then, and yet that he would go again.

Someone had done some cheating all right.

‘I’m getting the evening-wearies,’ he decided, and returned to the penetrating odor of cold collards in a bowl above a stove coated with grease. Where dish towels hung in a low festoon from the damper of the stovepipe to a spike above the sink. The sink was a tin trough salvaged from a dump heap. Unwashed dishes and pans lay in it. It had no spigot.

The spigot was outside and served shanties on either side of the Linkhorns’. These three shanties, upended green-pine clapboard so dried and shrunk it left chinks for rain and wind, made a kind of slum Alamo right in the middle of Mexican-town. Their men were either swart, like Fitz and Byron, or tended toward a certain thinness of color, like Dove. The women were fading for lack of forests. Davy Crockett was gone for good.

Old forests had shaped their hands to gunstocks but never to cotton-picking. They couldn’t bear mill work and could neither buy nor sell. Hill and plain no longer claimed them. They had lost their claim to hill and plain and Crockett would not come again.

They were backwoodsmen without a backwoods, the last of those who never would pick cotton. Plantation and mill were blocking them off like rabbits when a field is mown. They scorned both factory and town and wore brown jeans in preference to blue.

And all night long, down that unlighted road, sometimes low and sometimes shrill, Dove heard an alien music. In their smoking, unlighted halls Mexicans sang and were well.

Mexicans had no old forests to mourn.

The old way West, the old trails: wagon trail and cattle trail lost in miles and miles and miles of chaparral and mesquite. Gone and grown over in dry cacti. Old hopes, fierce hopes, pride and patience alike in vain. All the love they had once had for that big brown land blown like dust off the heart’s chaparral.

The road West now led only to a low, dark and battered chili parlor in what had once been the big, white and merry Hotel Davy Crockett.

Behind the darkened parlor’s pane a lamp’s reflection, doubled and blurred, burned like the double-ghost of a great chandelier that once had lighted a lobby like a ballroom at sea. Then its hundred-glassed gleam had flared all night like a light that could never wane. On brandy, brandy glass and wine.

DANCING BY ELECTRIC LIGHT – that had pulled the bloods into the old Davy Crockett of Saturday nights. The wild boys from the wells, wearing those big red and green bandannas, come to drink down their wild girls. Their girls that could drink down the moon.

The old Aztec moon of the Rio Grande, buffalo-robed to its outlaw eyes, that had watched the wild boys from the wells blowing their gold like beer-foam across the mirrored bar and heard the pianola rolling—

and a guitar player from Arkansas twanging – for drinkers and dancers, hard-rock drillers, gaffers and gamblers, all alike. Drinking and dancing and gambling by real electric light—

a changeless twang that once had trembled the springs beneath one wild girl on an upstairs bed wearing a silver comb in her red-gold hair; black-mesh hose and nothing more.

Fitz had been a man past thirty that year of 1909, but a real wild boy all the same. Who always went right for the wild girls the hour he came to town. Till he sat one night on the redhead’s bed putting the last of a bottle to her lips. Eyes shuttered tight against all light she drank as long as whiskey would pour without once lifting her red-gold head. It had burned her throat inside and out – then his mouth had been sweeter even than that. It had held her own so firm while his flesh, thrusting deep, held firmer even than that. Till the whole room rocked in the looking light and had locked them heart to heart.

While the moon that could never wane looked on, on brandy, silver comb and wine.

While in all the rooms upstairs or down, beds wide or beds narrow, the lights had flared brighter and more bright.

On marble, mirror-shine and wine.

Till the dice players had begun crying out with despair at something more than merely losing, the roulette wheel had begun to spin as if each turn must be its last; and the pianola began a beat that rolled as though all hope were gone—

keeping time to the rolling man lashed fast between those black-meshed thighs, breathing her breath as she breathed his till she moaned his lips apart: the pianola roll below flapped loose, the music stopped yet the roll whirred on. Her eyelids fluttered in the drains of her passion – it had not happened to her before like this. Fitz had felt the flutter against his cheek. The pianola roll whispered on and on, it had not happened to him before so heart-shakingly as this.

And the moon that could never wane dimmed down to no more than a gas lamp’s leaning glow. Drinkers and dancers, gaffers and gamblers, all had gone.

Out in the sand and the Spanish Dagger, in chaparral-pea and honey-mesquite where under the thorn the horned toad waits, the prairie dog slept in his burrow. White bones bleached in the sun. Before the music was over; before the dancing was done.

And a little wind went searching in circles to ask, Where had those lovers gone before the dance was done?

All was well. They had breathed each other’s breath. All was well: they had drunk of each other’s lips.

All was well, for what was dust had when living been loved.

Fitz had married his wild girl, who had turned out not so wild after all. She had given him two sons. And since her death he had returned but once to the side of town where the Davy Crockett still stood.

To find nothing left but boarded windows above and a dim-lit chili parlor below. Whose name was painted across its pane:

The town that had begun with a ball by electric light was dying by the glow of kerosene lamps. Time had gone backward in the little lost town.