A Walk On The Wild Side

by Nelson Algren

  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—

  ‘I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier

  I brought him up to be my pride and joy.’

  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.

  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 wome
n 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.

  Tres Moricas tan lozanas

  Mas lindas que Toledanas

  Iban a cojer manzanas a Jaen.

  Axa, Fatima, Marien.

  Dixayles quien sois señoras

  De mi alma robadoras

  Christianas de ramas Moras de Jaen.

  Axa, Fatima, Marien.

  Three Moorish girls of spirit

  More lovely than Toledan girls

  Went out to harvest apples in Jaen

  Axa, Fatima, Marien.

  Say who you are, Señoras,

  The robbers of my soul,

  Christian girls of Moorish roots from Jaen.

  Axa, Fatima, Marien.

  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—

  Sometimes I live in the country

  Sometimes I live in town—

  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—

  Sometimes I have a great notion

  To jump in the river and drown—

  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—

  Sometimes I have a great notion

  To jump in the river and drown—

  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:

  LA FE EN DIOS

  Bien venidas, todas ustedes

  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.

  By 1930 the old way West led nowhere but to the shade of a water tower where old bums drained sterno through ragged bandannas and left such small earnest tokens of their passing as a tennis sneaker with the sole gone through, an undershirt ironed brown by the wind or an empty half-pint labeled White Swan Gin – Bottled in Chicago.

  Crease-faced or rosy, shaggy or bald, faded or florid, spare or stout, fried by sun or bedraggled by showers, one by one they came through the door of La Fe En Dios. To stand, shifting a cap from one hand to the next between the juke box and a potted fern till the Mexican women finished serving her paying customers. Then they received the last cold dregs from the coffee urn, half a day-old pineapple pie and a bar of American Family soap.

  If they wanted more than that they would have to come by daylight and work for it. Bald or barefoot, old or young, each promised eagerly, even with gratitude, to be on hand at seven a.m. sharp.

  And to a man seven a.m. found them riding as fast and as far from the little lost town as any S.P. freight could carry them. Yet let the east-bound freights pass by if a west-bound freight was due. They still sought the old way home.

  The old way home that was now no more than any stretch of broken walk you reach at the end of any American town on any Saturday afternoon. Where blocks of paving stone lie severed by wind, sand and W.P.A. And a sign that may say TRUCK TURNING.

  Where black-eyed Susans grow out of the separating sand and a rusty beer can with two holes punched in the lid awaits the Resurrection or one more real estate boom.

  The old way home that led, at last, to nothing more than a tossing gas-flare over a sign at the walk’s very end:

  YOU ARE NOW ENTERING ARROYO

  Pop. 955

  A statistic that didn’t include the Mexican woman whose residence was just far enough beyond it to keep her free of local taxes. Whose own way home, eleven months of twelve, was up a flight of careworn stairs to a room guarded only by the Virgin Mary.

  Terasina Vidavarri slept within a double ruin. Within the wreck of her own hopes, insid
e what was left of the Hotel Crockett. The last guest had left and all along the long uncarpeted hall, the doors, like her own soul’s door, were boarded on both sides.

  Yet in sleep sometimes heard a pianola play. The boarded doors opened, the place came alight with the light that shines in dreams; to show men taking women on all the beds till she wakened. And saw a full moon rising with a yearning all its own.

  ‘It is lucky to love any time, for then you have someone to live for,’ Terasina thought, ‘but if you are not in love that is lucky also. Because then you have no problem.’

  Actually she’d hardly tried her luck. Her first and only lover had pitched such a fright into her that she’d taken no chances since.

  A girl of no family, a chambermaid in hotels catering to American tourists down in Merida in old Yucatán, Terasina, at sixteen, had become engaged to a bald, middle-aged Floridan of Spanish extraction.

  In his youth a second lieutenant, in his middle age a florist both by vocation and avocation, a carrier-off of prizes in flower shows, an exporter of day-lilies. An ancient wet-lipped orgiast in an American Legion cap – what a rare plant her florist was the girl had had not an inkling until their wedding night.

  She had wakened from a light sleep. Beside the bed a little lamp threw a deep orange glow. She heard the ex-lieutenant moving about the bathroom and it had struck her that he had been in there an unconscionably long while. She called his name. No reply.

  And was looking straight at that door when he strode out naked but for a helmet and swagger stick borne like a rifle – ‘Ein! Svei! Drei! What? Afraid of a soldier?’ Yet the impulse to laugh froze fast in her throat, for his face was a mask that brooked no laughter. Goose-stepping high past her bedside, three times past her bed, he came to attention in a light that seemed swathed in a sweltering mist. And touched the swagger stick with disdain between her eyes.