A Walk On The Wild Side

by Nelson Algren

  ‘Spared half a steak for you boys,’ he recalled, blowing mosquitoes off in a T-bone shaped cloud – ‘but you didn’t show up so I said to myself, “You better knock that steak off before the flies get it.” Had to force myself, but I did. Sure would have admired to share it but it’s no use kicking myself for not waiting now.’

  Sure enough. A steak’s remains had been fried right there on their own stove, and Fort didn’t spend that night in search of shrimps. Instead, he laughed at them both in sleep.

  He never laughed except in sleep but Dove and Luke took their laughter waking. In the days that followed they stayed drunk, off and on, most of the summer day and often well into the summer night. They had no reason for not being drunk.

  The days of peeking timidly into a backyard to check on telephone wires were past. A businessman like himself, Dove had come to feel, hadn’t time to bother with that sort of thing. He rapped fast and hard at front doors these days, and once when a housewife answered he challenged her before she had a chance to ask what he wanted – ‘Go ahead ’n call up! See who cares!’ – and with a tip of his straw floater was gone in an evening mystery, down a gently weaving street.

  For some reason sales began falling off. Would times get better before they ran out of certificates? Luke was sure things were on the upgrade, the worst of the Depression was over and they would have certificates left they would have no use for. But Fort felt the Depression had just begun. Things were going to get a lot worse he foretold, and would stay that way longer than anyone believed. Then the bottom would fall out.

  Nonetheless, whenever they returned, shrimpless or shrimpified, the odor of sirloin, hamburger or chops made the air of the little room muggy, and Fort would be blowing off the odor with clouds of Cuban cigar smoke. Somebody was doing all right.

  ‘If you boys would only let me know whether I could expect you, I’d be only too pleased to put your name in the pot,’ he would complain. ‘Had steak again.’

  ‘I’m not peckish, I’ll eat anything, even steak,’ Dove provided for any such future event – ‘put my name in your pot anytime, Fort.’

  But the only name in Fort’s pot was spelled F-O-R-T.

  To show his gratitude for the night before, Dove invited Luke to turtle soup in the Old French Market.

  In the dim familiar place they had to make way for a beggar in dark glasses, poking his way through seafood odors with the help of a white cane. ‘Excuse me, girls,’ Dove heard him murmur as he passed, ‘excuse me.’

  The turtles had been given a twenty-four hour reprieve. No beheading being done today. So they ordered bowls of gumbo and gumboed bowl after bowl. Then it was catfish time and they catfished till they foundered. By the time they left the heat in the street had passed and the catfish sun itself had foundered.

  ‘I’ve just about et myself into the creek,’ Dove decided.

  He felt so full of fish and gumbo he didn’t even mind when a collie in a well-kept yard charged him the full length of her chain. A white woman, holding the brute by its collar apologized, ‘I never knowed Queenie to go after a white man before.’

  Then she took a long second look at the redheaded stranger before her and added with soft suspicion, ‘She never been wrong afore, mister.’

  Dove merely tipped his skimmer. ‘Thank you kindly all the same, m’am,’ – and slunk off – ‘Durned old hound smelled the catfish in me.’

  Out where yards weren’t kept so well and walks were cracked like those of home, he always felt less guilty. The last door he rapped that day was on such a walk. A Negro woman with violet eyes came to the door. Dove tipped his hat, felt his heel nipped gently, and turned just in time to see a fat white mongrel whip about and dash for cover under the house as if it had done something wonderfully daring.

  ‘He don’t care for white folks comin’ into his yard,’ Violet Eyes smiled matter-of-factly. ‘He say he can’t go into theirs, why they come into his?’

  ‘Thank you kindly all the same,’ Dove told her, thinking guiltily again, ‘Durned old hound smelled the certificates on me.’

  ‘This walkin’ ’n talkin’ ’n rappin’ ’n tappin’ is too much like work for me,’ Luke decided, and Dove had had enough too. Though it wasn’t walkin’ ’n talkin’ Dove minded. Nor even rappin’ ’n tappin’.

  It was rather that each quarter he stole weighed a bit more than the one stolen just before. The sample case was lighter after all.

  ‘How many them phonies you got left, Tex?’

  Dove handed Luke the last of the batch. Luke took a count. Thirteen. ‘I know a place where we can get shet of these in one stop,’ he promised.

  On South Rampart Dove waited out front while Luke ducked around the rear of a Negro shanty and returned with a pint of Bottled-in-the-Barn.

  They drank it down to the half-pint mark. ‘That stuff is so good a feller can’t hardly bite it off,’ Dove told Luke.

  ‘It’s the pure quill,’ Luke agreed, ‘you can smell the feet of the boys who plowed the corn.’

  Dove took another just to see if Luke were right about that.

  ‘It sure aint gravy,’ he reported.

  ‘Care to see the girls, boys?’ a little man in a flame-yellow shirt and cowboy boots asked from a doorway so wide it must once have been an entrance to a pretentious bar.

  ‘They givin’ it away today?’ Luke asked innocently.

  The little blond man had sideburns past his cheekbones, he might have been twenty-two or forty.

  ‘To a couple good-looking fellows like you I wouldn’t be surprised if they did,’ he conned Luke right back.

  ‘Reason I suggested that,’ Luke explained, ‘is that we’re giving things away.’ He drew forth a green-margined certificate. ‘Free finger waves at Madame Dewberry’s. Reckon the little ladies might be interested?’

  ‘Why, this is the very deal they’ve been wondering how they can get it,’ the little man pretended, ‘they’ll take your whole load off your hands.’

  By the time the two pitchmen realized they’d been out-pitched they were inside one of those high old-fashioned parlors where a ceiling fan whirrs so leisurely in a big twilit gloom that you can’t tell whether anyone else is in the room.

  Gradually the forms of half a dozen men sitting as men sit in a barber shop, collars open and Sunday’s funnies on their laps, one or two with cigars in hand, emerged from the dimness.

  Something brushed Dove’s hair and he touched a spider made of metal, suspended upon so slender a wire it was not discernible until a wave from the ceiling fan swung it; then a burnished glint wound right, wound left in the soundlessly woven air.

  The woven air so softly spun by spiders red, by spiders green, some low-hung and some high; some gold and others rose. Spinning webs so fine on thread unseen in a long twilit gloom.

  Dove picked up one magazine, pretending to read as other men did. Till suddenly wishing somehow to outdo them all, and spying a book on a divan, he picked it up boldly and returned to his chair. He flipped its pages carelessly, as though the light were too poor for a man to strain his eyes. He had flipped almost through, then gave one more flip, and his hand trembled on the page.

  For there his steadfast tin soldier stood, his musket clasped under his grenadier’s hat, and behind him waited the same platoon of two-legged soldiers. The one-legged one was still the most steadfast.

  In his simple-minded amazement he thought it must be Terasina’s book.

  ‘The girls will be down directly, boys,’ a bespectacled mulatto woman wearing black crepe chiffon, in which she had pinned velvet flowers, came bouncing to announce.

  ‘Ask them do they want free marcels, Lucille,’ Luke asked her.

  ‘It’s been many years since anyone called me “Lucille”,’ she told Luke.

  ‘Many years,’ Luke agreed wistfully, ‘many, many years.’

  She peered at him but the years really had been too many. Faces of others had come like waves of the sea one fast upon another. Now there was no lo
nger any recalling what shore, what summer nor what night hour their eyes had met in love or lust or simple bargaining.

  ‘They call me Mama now,’ she explained, ‘I’m just the housekeeper here.’

  Then she caught sight of Dove clutching the parlor’s one book.

  ‘That’s our Hallie’s,’ she told him.

  Dove looked at the name scribbled in the front. So that was how to write ‘Hallie’s.’ And kept his finger on that name though he closed the book.

  An old man in a high-backed chair hoping to make the price of a pint, and the boy beside him longing for love so hard that a name in a book was already beloved. While others waited like window-dummies, anonymous men waiting to stay anonymous. They sighed, they spat, they snored now and then, but were careful not to begin idle talk that might lead to discovery of mutual friends.

  A little black boy in a shirt that reached no farther than his navel studied each client in turn. Some smiled, some looked the other way. He would look till he had his fill of each, then move onto the next. If offered a penny he would pocket it yet never crack a smile.

  A feminine scent, as of incense mixed with cologne, stirred the portieres. Dove gripped the book tighter.

  This would be Hallie.

  But it was only the fan overhead that had stirred the curtain. Now the metal spiders hung more still, now the barber shop boredom grew yet heavier. Across the street a man in a black stetson was offering a bag of something to a girl in the corner door. Dove saw her look both ways down Rampart and look both ways down Perdido. Then reached swiftly into the bag and dodged as swiftly back. A moment later she reopened the door just long enough to spit a peanut shell into the street. Any transaction, even for peanuts, made with one party still on the walk could mean a pinch for the girl.

  But the risk she’d taken paid off, for the stetson girded up his loins and entered clutching his bag big enough to provide a peanut for every girl in the place and still leave two for himself.

  The first street lamp came on, looked both ways down Rampart then both ways down old Perdido; then steadied itself for the long night ahead. When God alone knew what peanutless monster, what penniless stray, might come there seeking rest.

  A moon-faced blonde with her hair in a bun sauntered in, her face dead-white and her brows pitch-black. Dove gave a start, then relaxed: no, this one never could be Hallie.

  ‘Reba, these boys got marcel waves to give away,’ Mama told her.

  ‘You got insurance?’ Reba demanded.

  ‘We got insurance to keep your hair from getting nappy,’ Luke stepped right in. Reba held out her baby hand and he clapped a certificate right in it.

  ‘That’ll be a quarter, miss.’

  ‘You said it was free.’

  ‘The quarter is just by way of a courtesy,’ Luke told her.

  ‘Keep it. I aint courteous,’ and gave him back his gift.

  ‘She’s from Chicago,’ Mama explained.

  But a girl with a face made up to look like a death mask of Joan Crawford, a real plastic mask of a face, began to plead for one.

  ‘Mama sweet, give the man a quarter for one for me.’

  ‘For God’s sake, she don’t even know what the guy is sellin’ ’n she’s buyin’,’ Chicago shook her head in disbelief at the ways of Southern hustlers.

  ‘Meet Frenchy,’ Mama introduced the mask, ‘and this is my grandson, Warren Gameliel. Pledge allegiance, Warren G.’

  The little black boy wasn’t pledging a thing. He wasn’t even saying hello. ‘I do it back,’ he warned everyone. No one knew what he meant by that.

  ‘—and this is our Fort Worth girl,’ Mama introduced a blonde twice the size of the first, with breasts that could better have hung on a cow. No, this never could be Hallie.

  Mama handed Luke a quarter for Frenchy, the girl received her paper, gave it one bored glance and handed it to Fort Worth – ‘You use it, honey, I never go downtown.’

  She had bought like a child, for the sake of the transaction, and like a child had made a gift of it to the nearest friend. Dove saw that there was nothing easier than selling to hustling women. Reba was the only one who wouldn’t buy just for the sake of buying.

  Warren Gameliel seemed less a child than the women. Clutching a penny of his own, he watched each transfer of ownership so intently that Mama declared, ‘I swear I believe that child can add and subtract.’ And added, perhaps to put the salesmen into a mood that would get the girls their quarters back, ‘We get lots of married men down here. I’ve been married four times myself. Shod the horse all around as it were. Once to a businessman and three times to thieves, and the businessman was the only one I was unhappy with.’

  ‘Is Looney up yet?’ someone asked.

  ‘Which looney?’ Fort Worth wanted to know.

  ‘There’s no one in this house name of “Looney” that I know of,’ Mama defended the missing chick. ‘If you’re referring to Floralee, she’s putting on her clothes. I forbade her ever to come down again without them. You know what she told me? “I don’t see the use of all this onnin’-’n-offin’,” – that’s just what the poor thing told me.’

  ‘What’s so looney about that?’ Fort Worth wanted to know.

  ‘After last night I don’t see how that broad can get downstairs with or without clothes,’ Frenchy marveled from behind Joan Crawford’s eyebrows, ‘I don’t even see how she can rise.’

  ‘She’ll rise and she’ll get down here and eat grits and ham enough for six, too, you’ll see if she don’t,’ Fort Worth promised. ‘She don’t even know she got a stomach, that one.’

  ‘Any broad that’ll make love back to her tricks,’ Reba reflected sadly, ‘—no wonder she got a appetite.’

  ‘Don’t begrudge the child her food,’ Mama reproved them all, ‘she got her ways and you got yours.’

  ‘If that pimp of hers had a saltspoon of sense in his head,’ Frenchy decided, ‘he’d wise her up. What’s a pimp for?’

  ‘You tell me,’ Fort Worth put Frenchy down fast, ‘you work for one.’

  The door was swung wide and a legless giant, buckled onto a sort of street-going raft built over roller skates, wheeled in like one who came here every day, making a hollow thunder across the planking as he came. Dove watched him unbuckle his straps and leap, in a single bound, onto a low divan.

  The little black boy came up to this enormous torso without fear, to study him comparatively. The great cripple gave him a coin, but the boy remained unsmiling before him. Suddenly he asked, ‘What they done to you?’

  ‘Such a serious child,’ Mama marveled. ‘Will you boys stay to party?’

  ‘We got a little work to finish,’ Luke decided to save them both money, ‘We’ll be back later.’

  As they left, the man no higher than five feet in cowboy boots opened the door for them.

  ‘Come back by yourself,’ Dove was almost sure he heard the little man whisper; yet it had been said so low that they were a full block away before the whisper began to draw him back.

  ‘Sure would of admired to tarry there,’ he sighed heavily, ‘a little ying-yang never hurt a man.’

  ‘Terrible waste of hard-earned money, son,’ Luke counseled him like a father.

  ‘Just speaking for yourself, I deem,’ Dove corrected him like a friend.

  ‘Too much of that thing and they’ll be carrying you away, boy.’

  ‘Nothin’ wrong with that,’ Dove reflected, ‘inasmuch as it was that thing that brought me here. I’ll tell you just what, Luke,’ he stopped right where he stood: ‘I’m just urnin’ for ying-yang.’

  ‘See you back home, boy,’ Luke dismissed him. ‘Just don’t bring anything home with you.’

  Dove hurried back up the street, afraid the little man might have left. It didn’t seem to him that he could regain entrance without being authorized by a friend.

  ‘My name is Finnerty,’ he told Dove, ‘follow me.’

  And led Dove downhill toward the docks. Halfway downhill he turned into
a tiled doorway that still held rusted hinges of a time when the place had had swinging doors. A one-story building built on its incline toward the river.

  Although Prohibition was good as done, habits it had formed in those who had had their living off it for years could not be changed overnight. Every self-respecting speak-easy devised its own secret knock, peep-hole and password. Buyers wanted more than to walk through an open door, they wished to be admitted to a mystery. More, they wished to belong to a mystery.

  After Finnerty had given the buzzer three quick shots, he waited a moment and added a fourth; then both stood in silence before a silent door.

  ‘Maybe aint nobody home,’ Dove ventured.

  ‘He’s squirrel-eyeing us this minute from behind the curtain,’ Finnerty confided without glancing at the window, ‘to see if we’re the type that demands service. If we buzz him again, we don’t get in. Doc just won’t be bossed.’

  At last the door opened enough to let a white bug of a nose materialize before them. ‘Password?’ the nose demanded.

  ‘Respect is the key,’ Finnerty replied, and got past the old man. So Dove said it too and both were inside.

  Where along the back bar’s thousand bottles, Old Doc Dockery’s hundred dolls remembered the twisted twenties.

  Dark-eyed, dressy little town dolls and dutch-bobbed blondies from windmilled countrysides, redhaired colleens and gypsy dolls, a cowgirl cutie in a fringed buckskin and a Broadway baby in a fur boa, a geisha whose eyes were quarter-moons and another who had bobbed her hair and gone all out in Babylon; for her eyes were dollar-signs.

  A penny-eyed doll and a button-eyed doll whose buttons said ‘Vote for Cox’; a cross-eyed doll no longer comical, and a doll wearing a bird of paradise. And one little down-and-out bum of a Raggedy Ann with patches on her skirt and wrinkles in her neck; right in the middle where the bar lights could make a small halo about her.

  Yet birds of paradise or Raggedy Anns, though one pretended to be Dutch, one Irish and one Japanese, all had seen the headlines on St Valentine’s Day and had dated Harry Greb. Some had had good luck and some had had bad, but all had been born to the twenties and had died when the twenties were done.