A Walk On The Wild Side

by Nelson Algren

  ‘Why, then lead me, goodbuddy,’ Fort asked without opening a lid. ‘Lead me.’

  Dove rose dutifully and led the big man once about the room.

  ‘Now that’s all there is to it,’ Fort took off his glasses and opened his eyes. ‘Now wasn’t that easy?’

  ‘We had a blind Indian home name of Chicken-Eye Riley,’ Dove recalled, ‘Wore a tuckin’-comb. But he never went around with his eyes shut. Didn’t have to. He’d been gouged.’

  ‘Indians don’t have to fake it,’ Fort revealed resentfully, ‘all you got to be to get sent to a reservation these days is be some damned kind of Indian. The government’ll be given out pensions for bein’ Hebrew next. A white man don’t stand a chance no more if he’s poor.’ Fort suddenly left off complaining and used his executive-type voice – ‘You understand this is merely a temporary expedient until we get up a stake to get us into the oil business, goodbuddy?’

  ‘I don’t follow you, Fort.’

  ‘In Cameron County between Harlingen and Rio Hondo. Half a day’s hike from your own hometown. All we need to get it is to give the Sinclair man twenty dollar for a tankful of gas. He’ll furnish us cots and blankets out of his own attic. One of us takes care of the pump and the other buys up produce from the Mex farmers round about and wholesales it in the valley stores. The Sinclair man don’t have to know about the produce. So long as one of us is at the pumps when he calls is all that matters. You dig as good as you sell coffee to Negras, Red?’

  Dove rolled up his eyes like a doll’s. ‘I can dig real good for I’m bedcord strong – what do I have to dig?’

  ‘Gas tanks, son – one on each side of the station! You dig one and I dig the other!’

  ‘To be part owner of a gas station,’ Dove offered dreamily, ‘I’d start to work before good day. I’ll dig ’em both sides.’

  ‘There’s a deal, goodbuddy.’

  ‘When do we start, Fort?’

  ‘Soon as you lead me around a couple days. Then I’ll lead you.’

  ‘What do I do when the policeman comes up ’n sees I’m not really blind?’

  ‘Never said you was,’ Fort explained, ‘all your sign says is “Help Me.”’

  ‘Don’t hardly seem fair after we whupped them so bad,’ it struck Dove.

  ‘Whupped policemen?’

  ‘No. Indians.’

  ‘Stop worrying about Indians. What you got to realize is the blind eye don’t reflect the light but yours do. That’s why you got to keep them shut. If you’re really blind you can go around with them open, people take one look and slip you a buck or two. Over and above that you get a state pension.’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘Not you. Really blind people.’

  ‘So do Indians. That’s why I figure to be a blind Indian must be the best deal a person could have. Still, this fellow back home didn’t have it none too good. In fact he spent all his weekends in jail.’

  ‘They’re strong for that firewater, or so I’ve heard,’ Fort agreed impatiently.

  ‘Weren’t firewater. It was a sow Riley was so strong for. He’d find his way to her guided solely by the sense of smell and his wife would come home and find him missing. She’d go down to the sty and put the flashlight on and there they’d be. That woman got so jealous of that beast she had Riley locked up every Friday night.’

  ‘I allow there was hell to pay in the pigsty when Riley got loose Monday morning,’ Fort conceded.

  ‘He never bothered her weekdays,’ Dove reported, ‘just when his wife weren’t well. He spent day after day in the domino parlor and seldom lost. He could tell every piece by running his fingers over it once.’

  Fort sighed.

  ‘Either that or he couldn’t find her during the week. As I say, he was guided entirely by a sense of smell.’

  Fort got him back on the main highway, ‘Don’t you go gawking. Just look straight ahead and keep saying “Who is it?

  Who is it? Who’s there? Who is it?”’

  ‘Who’s there? Who is it?’

  ‘That’s right. You’re learning.’

  ‘Who’s there? Who is it?’

  ‘You can open them now. I’m going to let you lead me until you get the hang of the thing,’ Fort promised. ‘Sunday morning in front of a Catholic church is worth from ten to fifteen dollars.’

  ‘That leak’ll be wide by morning if this rain keeps up,’ Dove judged. And blinked up to where the next drop clung, lost its grip and plunged, to become one with the eternal waters.

  ‘How would you like to eat at the best restaurant in town tonight, Tex? Set down at a white tablecloth right amongst the people who got this thing whipped and tell a waiter what to bring you?’

  ‘Thank you kindly all the same, but I lack the means to return the favor.’

  ‘Tell you what, Tex,’ Fort persisted, ‘you go on the blink with me and I give you my word of honor here and now, the day we get a stake we throw away the glasses. Think it over, son.’

  Dove thought it over as long as it took for two more drops to ping into the dishpan.

  ‘My stated intent is to rise in the world,’ he decided at last, ‘but playing blind man on Canal Street just don’t seem the proper way. In fact I’d rather see my box a-comin’ than to be led by another as though I were helpless, when all the while I can just about see through that wall.’

  ‘Opportunity has knocked,’ Fort announced like an undertaker. ‘Opportunity is now going through that door. Opportunity aint coming back.’

  And left like a man who would search all day, and half the night if need be, for the right flavor of chocolate ice.

  To leave Dove alone to tote up the chances a single day had offered.

  ‘I could of took a position as a leader of the blind but I turned it down. That’s one. I could be a plain condom mechanic with a chance to do fancy work should I qualify. That’s two and I aint yet turned down the second. The way things are coming my way today it must be hard times are over.’

  He went to the window to see the city. There were lights in the haze but no sun was out. He was about to turn away from the window when he caught a brief glimpse of a sun he had never seen before. It was hiding behind the corner of an eave like a chicken thief at dusk. Dove stood quietly to see what its next move would be, thinking itself unseen. Sure enough, it edged softly off, showed a bit more of itself – a sneak thief sun, a sun with a hooded look. A sun of the alley stalls ready to do anything for a fiver.

  Dove didn’t want to see what a sun like that was up to. He opened his Bull Durham sack and sure enough, folded neatly quartered so as to let him read the ‘100’ without unfolding it, Finnerty’s c-note still waited to be spent.

  ‘As long as I done it, it was just as well I got paid,’ he philosophized his guilt away.

  Out in the lake-palmed suburbs, far from the dong and the glare, in a house that had once been human, Dove climbed a soundless stair.

  The stilly stair to O-Daddyland in a pale hygienic glow. Feeling some sign he could not read must say ZONE OF QUIET. For the weather in the streets, and the seasons there, are no more permitted in O-Daddyland than in a surgeon’s washroom. Rainwinds washing children’s voices have nothing to do with O-Daddies. Step up in an airless quarantine, go down a passionless hall. Stand before a door without knocker or bell.

  Till an anesthetic odor, as of gas or seeping ether, trails from below; as though abortions might be performed here.

  Stranger on a strange-lit stair, you have come to a strange frontier.

  The frontier of a principality whose only law is Rhino Gross and Gross’s many moods. A totalitarian state whose single industry is a curious craft in Goodrich rubber, worked out in forms sufficiently fanciful. Rhino Gross is his state’s sole industrial designer and Gross is a fanciful man. Indeed, abortions are aborted here.

  (At night in the deep and dead time, old Gross hears again the soft scraaap of his curette against the uterus wall in a room that holds no other sound. Scraaap scraaap scraaap.)
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br />   Now the daylight man, ex-physician, ex-abortionist, ex-quack, ex-con, ex-man, ex-everything, enfolded and armored by layer across layer of swart encrusted fat, clasping his distended gut to keep it from slipping down over his rusted truss, is an aging animal come to the jungle’s rim whose hearing is excellent but whose sight is waterish, ready to turn at a tiny twig’s crack and lumber back to his forest’s protecting gloom. Yet stands one moment snout upturned and quivering, to sniff the dangerous air: now he is wondering whether it would be perfectly safe to try a little mock-charge on whoever that was across the room.

  Dove caught a good strong whiff of the sniffer at the jungle’s rim without knowing that what he whiffed was actually burning rubber. When you work with guano you live with guano till you smell of guano. Gross’s hide was impregnated with it clear down to his money that stank of it.

  (Who else but a disbarred gynecologist could have devised that technicolor fantasy so long before technicolor, of liverish yellow dipped at its obscene head in firehouse red and tipped by a delicate rainbow silken as baby’s first down? An improvement in style, function and line worthy of its proud name O-Daddy, The Condom of Tomorrow.)

  ‘First you learn your craft,’ Gross told Dove. ‘How else do I tell what you’re worth?’ Then deciding to show Whoever-It-Was that he really was a furious charger at heart, lowered his snout and trumpeted terribly – ‘Welma! Welma!’

  A swift light step and there materialized a woman whose life had been consumed. She may have been thirty-five or sixty but wasn’t quite through burning yet. She was wearing a rubber apron over a gum-colored dress and pigtails bound by a big pink bow that bounced as if the very hair were rubberized. Apparently her sight wasn’t much better than Gross’s, for she stood dangling one glove, specs in hand, looking about for some way to clean them of particles of reddish dust. At length she stooped, brought up a corner of her slip far enough to serve as a lens-cleaner.

  ‘Look the bow ribbon!’ Gross squeaked with mocking glee – ‘Welma the wulcanized woomin! Aint a wife! Aint a mother!’ – his voice turned stern with shame for her – ‘What are you? You think a bow ribbon makes a woomin?’

  The woman snapped her specs on and beamed upon Dove through them as benignly as if Rhino’s derision had been praise. ‘He’ll mouse on me and he’ll mouse on you,’ she explained without heat. ‘He’s a forty-faced pigeon straight from Rat Row, quack from head to toe. Rather steal from his mother than ride a passenger train and I give him eighty percent the best of it at that. Now if you want to see how we get these things out come back here and I’ll show you how.’

  The kitchen, so commodious it might once have served as a slave quarter, was now largely given over to half a dozen small molds of individualized design. About the molds stood cans of liquid rubber, open paint-tins and brushes soaking in solutions. Above a wide white oven a line of O-Daddies hung like sausages to dry.

  This was also the place where Cupid’s Arrows came warm off the forge and Ticklish Tessies lounged about. The craze in Laughing Maggies had almost died but Ding-Dong Darlings had a promising future. Happy Hannahs roomed here; Barney Googles were having their noses pinched by clothespins on a wire line. Here Gross moved Love’s Fancies by the gross; and a reddish dust lay over everything. For the O-Daddy was not the only creation of the hand and heart and brain of this dishonored genius. It was only his masterpiece.

  Yet through the air made thick by gum, by paint, by turpentine, Dove smelled something better than any of these – something was doing inside that oven for sure. When Velma peered in he caught a glimpse of a chicken roasting on a bed of yams.

  ‘Don’t mind Gross,’ she reassured him, ‘all it means when he hollers is he’s scared. I’m sure I don’t know what he’s scared of because there’s nobody here but me. The creature is ill of bad conscience and don’t have long to go.’

  ‘I didn’t pay him particular heed,’ Dove told her, ‘but your ribbon bow strikes me as mighty purty, m’am.’

  ‘Thank you, son.’ She seemed genuinely flattered. ‘Now let me show you how to turn out a condom you can trust.’

  Painting a skin with a film of liquid gum, she nodded her head to indicate that Gross was listening at the kitchen door and deliberately spoke loudly enough for the old man to overhear. ‘He’ll give it out that his only trouble is that Broomface wants a word with him, but that aint his real worry. He’s a man with a double-W on his forehead and Broomface is the least of it. Those other parties who would like a word with him won’t bother to give warning.’

  Gross’s big head came through the door: ‘Old-time shoplifter stealing all her life!’ he announced like a station caller. ‘Wanted by everyone but the church! One hand over her heart and the other in your pocket!’ He slammed the door before she could insult him in turn.

  Velma the Vulcanized Woman, Dove saw, retained a faint copperish tint to her ash-blond hair and her face bore traces of Saxon beauty. She was humanized as well as vulcanized, he perceived.

  ‘Every bare window in this town reminds me of Arkansas,’ she admitted to Dove. ‘I might as well be in jails as the way I am.’

  Sitting at the window she looked out upon a world of rogues with innocence and wonder, and both her cheekbones smashed. Her ash-blond bangs, streaked broadly now with gray, belied the fact that there wasn’t much on the books Velma hadn’t tried and a few deals she’d thought up by herself.

  Goin’ to town Mama, what’ll I bring you back? she invited herself, and answered—

  Just a great big bag of candy and a J. C. Stetson hat

  She came of a long line of country thieves that had grown shrewd in the mountains. Velma had grown yet shrewder in town. And at last, too shrewd to trust on the common highway, had become the shrewdest inmate at the Women’s Reformatory at Aldington. Not yet twenty when she’d been first sent up, she had immediately distinguished herself by saying to a colored matron – ‘Hold this for me’ – and had shoved a tableknife with a friction-taped handle into the woman’s abdomen.

  ‘Will you spread a clean cloth for dinner?’ she asked Dove, ‘You’ll find one in that bureau.’

  Velma spread the clean cloth with Southern variety – okra, clobber, cornbread, yams, rice, chicken, onion gravy and sweet potato pie.

  But Dove had never seen anyone eat like Gross. Velma didn’t even bother to lay a knife, fork and spoon for him. He went at everything with forefinger and thumb, being particularly careful, every time he dropped a fried egg, to get every bit of it on his pants.

  ‘Mighty fine chicken, m’am,’ Dove congratulated her. The chicken was fine, the yams were dandy, the gravy was great and the clobber was super. Unluckily the small reddish dust had gotten into the food as into everything, so it all came to a single dish: rubber. Gross liked the taste of rubber. When you work with rubber you not only eat rubber, but your very dreams arrive in rubberized folds. Within twenty-four hours Dove looked and smelled like Velma the Vulcanized Woman herself. Those weren’t dead ants between his toes but only particles fallen from the Flap-Happy mold that had worked their way down his socks.

  They poured the rubber and heated the glue, forged the forms and painted the skins, glued the feathers and hung the O-Daddies and sorted the seconds and burned the culls and filled the orders; and never went dancing down below.

  Velma taught Dove never to put a Cupid’s Arrow on a King Tut rack nor to let an O-Daddy wander among the Happy Hannahs. When the sun beat steadily they risked hanging a line to dry against an outside wall; when it rained or was overcast the big room was full of skins hanging in rainbowed rows above the dark gas range’s flame.

  In the evening the three outcasts sat in the dark of their old strange house, hearing human voices rise and fall. There was an amusement park at the end of the wide-palmed street, letting laughter come to them from a place where human life was lived out on rollercoasters; while they endured the rubberish dark of O-Daddyland like three ghosts yet to be born.

  ‘Son,’ Gross always began his nigh
tly lecture with the same phrase, ‘Son, not all the O-Daddies are hanging on a line. There’s one sitting right here in this rocker. Would you mind either turning the lamp down a bit or else not look directly at me? I have a little aversion to being examined. Thank you.’ Dove turned a bit to one side.

  ‘Son, you look to me like a man of two great weaknesses, either one of which may ruin you. Women and whiskey, in that order. Take my advice, if you don’t want to wind up being one more Barney Google like me. First thing you ought to do is throw away that shirt. Never wear light colors. They catch the sun. Blue is best – mailman blue. The whole secret of not ending up an O-Daddy on a line is to look as much like a mailman as possible – who knows what the mailman looks like? Who’d recognize him if he changed suits? Get a cap with a peak that shadows the eyes. Wear glasses that throw back the light. Grow a mustache but don’t go into bars. If you must drink, lock the door and drink by yourself. Conviviality leads to fist-fighting, fist-fighting leads to rage. Look out for rage, son. People never forget a man they’ve seen in a rage.

  ‘My own appearance was always such that I didn’t have to lose my temper to catch attention. I always fitted into the by-stander’s memory, so that five minutes after a rumble, my description, complete to hat-size, would be at headquarters.

  ‘Watch out for the inclination to trust, particularly toward women. It leads to giving. Look out for that one, it’s the worst of a bad lot.

  ‘Watch out for flowers, watch out for trust, watch out for women, watch out for giving. In short, don’t give flowers to a woman you trust.’

  ‘He’ll come to the point in time. Just have patience,’ Velma assured Dove.

  ‘No woman since the world began,’ the old man kept trying to say what he meant, ‘ever accepted a flower as no more than a token of affection. Does she seem pleased at a gift so humble? “What, a daisy for me?” Why shouldn’t she be pleased? it’s a down payment on your hand, your heart and your brain and she knows that even though you don’t. If you owe her a daisy you owe a box of candy, and how long do you think you’re going to get by just on candy and flowers? Where’s the perfume? Progress, that’s what women want in a man. What is more natural than the step from perfume to wristwatch – now let’s see how long you can keep from mentioning engagement rings. Your very silence betrays that you’re considering marriage and are only trying to get up the courage to ask. Son, you’re good as done. You’re in hock to a house, a car, children, maid – you give up your freedom and there still hasn’t been a word said about what does she owe you?