‘Mister,’ Dove tried to get his little finger unhooked, ‘Mister, that old gal quoted you a mistruth.’
‘I hope you aren’t thinking I’d take a hustler’s word against that of my own sample case buddy? The very buddy who broke in my top-earning broad for me?’ Oliver was hurt that Dove should even suspect him of forgetting a favor like that – ‘Naturally she lied. Who ever heard of a hustling woman who wouldn’t rather lie than ride a passenger train? Buddy, what I’m telling you is I’m going to get you out of this. Man, I been to Hurtsville, I know what it is. They made me regret the day I was born there but they aint going to make my sample case buddy regret the day he was born. What if she does claim she was underage when you transported her across a state line in a moving vehicle? That don’t cut ice with Oliver Finnerty.’
‘Mister,’ Dove got in a word at last – ‘I never transported nobody. We just rode a old freight train a ways together, that was all. You’d scarcely call that “a moving vehicle” I don’t reckon.’
Finnerty unlocked his little finger as though that had been Dove’s idea – ‘What would you call it, Mr Bigass? A possum up a telegraph pole?’
‘Well, it weren’t no passinger train.’
‘Brother,’ Finnerty put a hand on Dove’s shoulder, ‘Brother, it don’t matter was that a box car or on roller skates, that broad can swear out a hold order for you in any district station in town—’
‘I pulled her out from under the wheels!’ Dove remembered in a shout – ‘I treated her good!’
Finnerty shook his head solemnly. ‘You can always treat one too good,’ he reminded Dove, ‘but you can never treat one too bad.’
‘I saved her dirty fool life,’ Dove added, yet felt his courage sliding down all drains.
‘I’m sure you did,’ Finnerty agreed sympathetically, ‘but still it don’t cut ice.’
‘She were willin’,’ Dove recalled desperately. ‘Fact is, she were more willin’ than me. She got more willin’ all the time. Fact is I took to sleepin’ on my stomach, she were that willin’.’
‘Willin’ don’t matter. Under-age is statutory rape though she put a gun at your head.’
‘She didn’t have no gun,’ Dove conceded, ‘but I sure didn’t sexutory-rape nobody, mister—’ yet strangely flushed with guilt.
‘We’ve all done crazy things from time to time,’ Oliver lowered his voice for he read that flush aright – ‘What I always say is if you’re not champeenship material, you might as well let the women get you now. Buddy, a broad is only a broad but a pal is a pal, so put your mind at rest. I’m not letting Texas get no holder on you because some broad wants to cry off. It’d be as good as her life and I’ve told her as much. “Baby,” I told her, “when you held out on me that was one thing, but crying off on my pal is another.” Now do you want me to see you through this sorry situation you got yourself into or don’t you?’
Dove was beginning to feel scared in a way he had never been scared before.
‘I’d be mighty grateful for your help, mister.’
‘One good turn deserves another. But I’ll expect your complete cooperation from here on out. I’m the general. You’re the private – when I give an order I expect to see it carried out. For I’m not without help,’ he added softly.
‘You’re my captain,’ Dove agreed, ‘I’m your hand. But there just one little favor I’d like to ask.’
‘What’s that, old buddy?’
‘Don’t call me Mr Bigass.’
‘Shake – Tex.’ Finnerty extended his hand.
Dove shook it with gratitude.
‘I’ve kept my part of the bargain, mister,’ Dove told Finnerty in Mama’s parlor half an hour after.
‘That you did, and I’m that proud of you I’ll brag you up all over town,’ he promised – ‘Come and get it.’
He held out a five dollar bill.
Dove turned it over as though the number on the other side might be different, then passed it to Frenchy.
‘Tell ’em where you got it and how easy it was,’ he told her, and walked indolently toward the door.
A huge disbelief dawned in Finnerty’s brain. He caught up with Dove at Dockery’s door. He was a little out of breath and waited till they were inside to offer Dove a drink.
‘Give this man what he wants to drink,’ he told Dockery breathlessly, ‘any time he wants it.’
‘Any time this man wants a drink,’ Dove assured Dockery, ‘he’ll pay for it hisself,’ and laid a C note on the bar before the pander’s eyes.
Finnerty started to reach for it. Dove put his hand gently down.
‘I understand the price is ten bucks per peeper, Oliver,’ he told Finnerty. ‘You had a full house. I’ll take my thirty now.’
Finnerty went for his wallet. Slowly. Yet he went.
‘I’d never of believed it,’ he admitted, laying three tens on top of the C note, ‘I wouldn’t of give you the credit for the having the cold nerve.’
‘You provide the virgins, mister,’ Dove promised, ‘I’ll provide the nerve.’
‘I guess you know I had to give a poor broad a ninety dollar whupping account of you?’ Finnerty reproved Dove as he watched a hundred and thirty dollars disappear in Dove’s wallet.
‘It’s what I always say,’ Dove told him cheerfully, ‘you can always treat one too good. But you never can treat one too bad.’
Airless days when panties of purple and braes of black, silver G-strings and dappled halters hung on the clothes lines in a kind of joint-tog jungle still as all Brazil. A jungle whose foliage was such garments of bright shame as were washable, whose cries were those of the pepper pot man—
All hot! All hot!
Makee back strong!
Makee live long!
Come buy my pepper pot!—
Odors, and cries, a chemise stained by mascara, the spill of water into a basin before the long day’s first-risen lover locked with the last girl left awake. They went at it like foes, navel to navel, till his two dollars of passion was spent. Then just as he stood with one sock drawn on and the other foot bare, he was touched by a perfumed disgust.
Disgust like a perfume pervading a forenoon that felt perpetual; till noon mixed with evening and evening with night.
Then a reddish scent as of soap or blood and the voices of women and an air of haste began somewhere upstairs or somewhere down. Then cigar-smoke mixed with eau-de-cologne and incense with whiskey and whiskey with gin. Then sometimes upstairs and sometimes down Dove Linkhorn could always be found.
Sometimes in a red shirt, sometimes in a yellow, wearing cowboy boots and a black silk bandanna, one foot on Dockery’s bar-rail or leaning on Dockery’s juke, he wasted no time in letting strangers know who he was.
‘Shake hands with Big Stingaree! Just up from the Rio Grande! See these boots? They cost forty dollars. See this hat? Cost thirty-five. I do most of the drinking here ’n all the buying. Anything you want, just point. I take care of my friends. You want to say hello to a girl, just say which one. They’re most of ’em mine but I’m not the jealous kind, I pass ’em around ’cause I know they’ll come back. They always come back to their Daddy-O. It’s what they call me, their Daddy-O, but you can call me Tex. Any time you drop by and I aint here just tell that old man behind the bar you’re waitin’ for Tex. Tell him what you want to drink – he works for me – and sooner or later I’ll be by with one on one arm and one on the other and most like a new shirt one of ’em’s just bought me. See this belt? A girl give me that.’
The whiskey brown, the rum so black, the beer so dark, the gin so pale.
‘Couldn’t read my name were it wrote a foot high on the side of a barn but I make more in a single day than some educated fools earn in a month. Drink up.’
Whiskey, corn liquor, gin or rye, Big Stingaree drank it down. Big Stingaree drank whatever was poured, till drops dribbled down his shirt red or yellow and beer stood in his boots. Once he stood up in a puddle of urine or wine, and his face lo
oked lopsided with its load of rum. He waved his arms till somebody shut off the juke. Big Stingaree had something to tell all panderdom.
‘Burn down your cities!’ he demanded; and wove a moment to remember what else had to be done. ‘Burn down your cities ’n save our farms,’ he concluded lamely.
‘Well, go on, go on.’
But whatever it was he was trying to recall, that was all Dove could remember.
For sometimes once a day, sometimes twice, Finnerty’s gentlemen stood with eyes fixed to a wall to achieve vicariously that ancestral lust: the deflowering of a virgin.
Finnerty was right: it was a fantasy that had pursued them, every one, all their lives; they had not pursued it. They had only made of it a secret mystery that never could come true.
A mystery as false as it was secret. Yet Finnerty made it whirl with fiery colors, like a pinwheel in the dark; that becomes, when it is not spun, no more than a piece of painted wood. He instructed the girls not to yield their chastity easily, but only with tears, after a bit of a struggle.
At this game Floralee was no hand at all, for she couldn’t understand that the old game now had a new twist. Nor did she wish to understand. As soon as Dove entered and hung up his stetson she threw off every stitch and in a voice like little bells on a silver string began play-partying—
Cat had a kitten, kitten had a pup
she invited Dove to clap hands with her—
Say old man is your rhubarb up?
Nobody could make her understand that that wasn’t at all how lovely reluctant virgins carried on.
There’s plenty of rhubarb all around the farm
And another little drink won’t do us any harm.
Reba, on the other hand, played her part too well. Racing from one corner to another, she would shrink like a wild trapped thing, burying her face in her hands and crying ‘Never!’ to the walls, ‘Never! Never! Never!’
Beating Dove’s chest with both her fists, again her plate slipped as she pled for her honor. Yet that in no wise dismayed her. Good trouper that she was, she kept right on beating her gums in time to her fists, ‘Never! Never! Never!’
Considering the abortions she had survived, she was surprisingly fleet. Feinting Dove out of position, she would leave him breathless there in nothing but red garters and boots. At length he was forced to complain to Finnerty.
‘I admire talent in a woman,’ he protested, ‘and I don’t expect one to make things easy for me – but chasing that one up and down and around is simply wearing me out. She’s a fine little broad and all of that, but she’s just too zeelious.’
Sometimes the virgin was Frenchy. Kitty clamored to get into the act but the amateurish tattooing on her arms and legs, that she had inflicted upon herself as a child, disbarred her.
‘Who ever heard of a tattooed virgin?’ Finnerty dismissed her.
‘I’ll keep my clothes on,’ she offered.
‘They’d want their money back,’ Finnerty told her, ‘get down to the door where you’re supposed to be and don’t let me catch you off your post again.’
She did not perceive that had she only acted reluctant about performing, he would have appointed her to be deflowered upstairs instead of merely to stand guard below, hour upon dull hour.
It was never Hallie. It never could be Hallie. Yet what Finnerty would have given to get that one in there! There was no way of debauching her. She had been in a thousand corners with a thousand men and had come away with herself untouched.
It gnawed at him, just as it gnawed him that every time one of these Never! Never! innocents was deprived of her maidenhood he had to divide sixty dollars with Dove – admittedly a generous wage for that type of work.
‘There are those who’d be happy to give me a hand for nothing,’ he told Dove.
‘Fly-by-nighties,’ Dove reminded him, ‘here today and gone tomorrow.’
It was true, and Finnerty knew it, that Dove could not be replaced. Every time Finnerty put an eye to the wood to check on him, he was giving an honest day’s work for an honest wage. Reliable to the bone. And, nothing, it seemed, impeded his tidelike powers.
Like the sea, he came and went.
Indeed, Finnerty could not contain his secret enthusiasm for Dove’s prowess. ‘You never seen nothing like it,’ he invited Legless Schmidt to see, ‘God has put His arms around that ungodly clown.’
‘Why would God put His arms around something like that? You can leave God out of it, for I won’t pay a nickel.’
‘I wouldn’t think of asking you to pay,’ Finnerty employed his injured air. ‘I just thought you’d get a laugh out of the thing.’
‘It’s nothing to laugh about,’ the big half told the pander.
‘How can you tell till you’ve seen it?’ Finnerty insisted – ‘How this mad stud comes on! Man, it’s educational.’
‘Thank you, I’ll stay ignorant,’ the cripple decided firmly.
‘Think it over, friend,’ Finnerty suggested, ‘the offer is good any time.’
Why he wanted to involve Schmidt, Finnerty himself wasn’t clear in his own mind. He resented the crippled man’s air of independence as unbecoming when able-bodied men were out begging, but that wasn’t all of it. It was Hallie’s dismissal of his own charms, made so lightly, that was at the bottom of it. How could a woman prefer a man without legs to a little beauty like himself?
If you couldn’t get at somebody yourself, Finnerty knew, your next best bet is to get at somebody who has already gotten to her.
And whether for laughs or whether for lust, his mathematics of the soul began to add up nicely. Some white collar bug would wander in pretending to look for a friend; then another friend-seeker and another, till there were five or six. One by one Finnerty would take them out for a little private talk, and then his voice could be heard, confident, promising, reassuring from behind a half-open door. Till the bargain was sealed and a ten dollar bill changed hands.
When the buyer put his eye to the peep-hole for which he had paid, he saw only a pale, demented girl, blonde braids bound tightly about her head, wearing a simple cotton frock and her pale hands folded in her lap.
Then in strode some kind of redheaded hayseed in a sheriff ’s hat with a flashy cord and boots that were all but spurred – the hiders could almost smell the whiskey on him. When the hayseed took off his hat the pale girl loosened her frock. What a dunce the fellow looked after that! The only sound in the room was his heavy breathing and the whirr-whirr-whirr of the ceiling fan slicing the obscene heat. What a clown! He was going about his job in there as though it were hero’s work, a thing no one else could possibly do.
Some felt contempt of the shameless dunce, but not all. Each watcher was affected differently.
One paled slowly as he looked and, after a minute, left for good thinking how sad such things were so.
Another laughed smugly deep as his liver, to see proven at last what he had long suspected: a man was a two-legged animal and a woman a four-legged one, nothing more. And left thinking how lucky it was, such things being so, that he had been there to see.
Yet a third looked thoughtful, as at a demonstration in carpet weaving: see, there was still money to be made in small enterprise.
Another felt stale lusts grow swift and bit his lip for lack of cash: had he every dollar in town tonight, all would be spent by morning.
But the great cripple neither laughed nor paled. Only the lines of his heavy head hardened and he swung his torso on its tiny wheels and wheeled off down the hall, making a rolling thunder to hide his indignation.
No, Schmidt didn’t believe in this sort of thing at all.
The other peepers would be sitting in the parlor once more when Dove returned downstairs – that was when the fun really began. The sight of the fellow combing his hair or playing the juke, seemingly innocent that he had performed publicly, sent such glances of cold glee back and forth that soon every one had their money’s worth. That the joke, after all, was on themselves, wa
s a bit of knowledge Finnerty took pains not to divulge. Had they understood that the dunce in the stetson was not only aware that he was watched, but was secretly proud to display his powers, they might have mobbed both Dove and Finnerty.
Schmidt, of course, knew the story, and didn’t share the amusement others felt. From a corner where the light hardly fell he studied Dove. Big Stingaree’s shirt was open at the throat and his throat was flushed to the chin, for he had thirty dollars to spend once again. And was spending it the way he’d found it went fastest, by buying drinks for everyone.
‘He don’t know the show is over,’ Schmidt realized, just as the juke began to sing—
They needed a songbird in Heaven
So God took Caruso away—
Dove began mugging silently with the singer, pretending it was his own voice mourning Caruso. ‘I wish I could sing truly,’ he would lament when Caruso was done, ‘but I lost my voice hollerin’ for gravy.’
This legless man was an old carnie hand who had lived among human skeletons, 500-pound women, dog-faced boys, spider men, living heads, geeks, half-men-half-women and dwarfs in the maimed world of sideshow exhibitions; but it seemed to him he had never seen anyone who filled him with such disgust as this grinning pimpified country braggart pretending he was Enrico Caruso.
When the song was done Dove spotted Hallie. He came up beside her, raised her glass, drained it and called – ‘Bartender! This lady needs a drink!’
Hallie covered her glass with her hand.
‘What you settin’ at the bar for if you don’t want to drink?’ Dove demanded.
‘I’d rather buy my own.’
‘What’s the matter, Hallie?’ his bravado began to crumble, ‘I done nothing against you.’
A Walk On The Wild Side Page 26