A Walk On The Wild Side

by Nelson Algren

  ‘I just don’t like to drink on someone who don’t know what he’s doing, that’s all.’

  For reply he took a whole tumbler of gin and gulped it down in a single breath, then set it back on the bar with a sigh.

  ‘What did it prove that time?’ she asked him.

  ‘It prove I can drink gin,’ Dove informed her.

  ‘That you’ve already proved. I haven’t seen you sober in a week.’

  ‘Whose money is it, mine or yours?’

  ‘Yours,’ she assured him, and turning away, left him weaving.

  Schmidt was waiting for her at the door.

  ‘What were you two whispering about?’ the cripple barred her way.

  ‘I told him I think he’s killing himself.’

  ‘Then let him. The sooner the better.’

  Yet once it was morning when she came down to the parlor carrying her lamed cat. After the long night of riot the spiders, that at midnight had twisted and swung on their metal wires, now hung motionless. The night was done and the early light lay scattered about like broken glass, as if people had picnicked in a mausoleum here. And as in mausoleum the air felt exhausted. So close, so very still, that a sun mote in its silent play seemed like a sick-ward child told be quiet while its nurse sleeps on.

  Hallie saw the pale mote searching a floor where the dead lay against the dead: a whole platoon of cokes had been wiped out at the foot of the juke, and the juke itself looked like it might never play again.

  A single gin-fifth, the last of its line, lay face down where it had fallen, surrounded by dead butts and snipes that had burned themselves out on the floor. Bobbie pins, kleenex wads, beer caps, wine corks, a deck ripped savagely in two and tossed across the carpet in despair, made the whole place look like a field on which no quarter had been given.

  Yet from somewhere heard a murmurous breathing, regular and slow. She followed the mote that searched, like herself, for the sole survivor too.

  Hunched in a corner so deeply bent she thought he was sleeping, sat the boy with the face too young yet too old.

  ‘Wake up,’ she told him. He rose and stood trying to pull the various parts of the Big Stingaree together while hiding something behind his back.

  ‘Now what are you up to?’

  ‘I’m sober,’ was his curious reply.

  ‘But you’ll be drunk by noon.’

  ‘It’s my money.’

  ‘You told me that yesterday.’

  ‘I made sixty dollars yesterday. How much did you make?’ He had Big Stingaree’s parts almost together.

  ‘If that’s how you feel, give me back my book.’

  He brought it from behind his back. ‘I don’t know how it happen to come my way,’ he pretended. ‘Of course it must be yours because you got all the knowance of books and I got nary knowance at all. Yet I don’t see how that give you the right to mock others for ignorance.’

  ‘I never mocked you, Dove. You can have the book.’

  ‘It don’t do me no good, for I can’t read as you well know and you’re mocking me in offering it.’

  ‘If you can stay sober till noon for a week, I’ll teach you to read.’

  He took her up so quickly she grew suspicious and touched the book to take it back. ‘If you’re sober at noon you can have it back.’

  He wouldn’t let her have it.

  ‘If I’m not sober I’ll bring it back myself. That’s a promise.’

  ‘You’ll be too tight to remember any promise.’

  He was sober at noon. He was still sober at four. At five Finnerty’s show went on. At five-thirty he came to her, still sober, and without a word handed her the book.

  ‘Bartender!’ he shouted to Dockery, and his knuckles were white on the bar – ‘Gin! Gin! Gin!’

  That night Dove dreamed he was alone in a hotel in Houston. Somewhere in the room a cat was trying to throw up – it had something in its throat it couldn’t swallow. He looked under a divan for it and behind a juke and then below a cot bed but everything was swathed in a mist, he could see nothing plain. Then a shadow moved in the mist and Hallie’s cat made a dash for it right across the floor and disappeared into somebody’s room. She was hiding something there she didn’t want anyone else to see; she’d been up to something for some time now. Something was wrong with the animal but nobody dared to say what.

  Behind a radiator it had hidden the baretoothed carcass of a kitten dead for weeks, and was suckling it. The kitten’s teeth were bared to the bone of the jaw but the brindle put her mouth to the wasted belly and pushed against the death-stretched hide. Dove began beating it to make it quit but it felt no blows; though he beat it a long time. At last it looked around at him.

  Along its whiskers fresh milk gleamed, and the dream went out slowly, like a twenty-watt light bulb saying goodnight.

  Nobody on Perdido Street considered the legless man a freak. No one told that once, for a few brief weeks, he had once let himself be billed as one. For no one who knew that lion-browed gaze could doubt his profound naturalness. Below the heavy brows his eyes, set wide, burned even as candles in a room with no wind. Schmidt never blinked. He sat his platform like a saint of the amputees and gave you gaze for gaze. When at last you turned your eyes away he touched his little brown beard as much as to say, ‘I’ve seen enough of you too, friend.’

  He sold his wares and made his bets and drank his beer both dark and light and never forgot his dignity; nor permitted others to forget it. Once a girl had told him, ‘Keep your money, you need it worse than me,’ and had meant it kindly. But the man waiting like a mutilated statue on the low bed’s edge, had paled below his tan.

  ‘You should never have said that, sis,’ he told her and lowered himself and left.

  Yet, the very next afternoon, the same girl had handed him a five dollar bill for a twenty-five cent bottle of perfumed water and he’d pocketed the five without even the pretense of making change.

  Some saint. When you gave, he felt, you gave it all. When you took you took it all.

  Now, nearing forty, having rebuilt his whole life on the rock of sheer courage, he felt the rock shift and could not believe it. Surely a man who has been once destroyed and fought back to the land of the living would not be picked for destruction twice. God would not permit it.

  He was Schmidt who needed nobody, he was Schmidt who could never lose. And yet when he thought of Hallie, surely the rock slipped. How had his life, that he’d held so hard, come to be cupped lightly in a woman’s palm, and the woman herself to be held in any nameless stranger’s arms?

  The thought sent him kneewalking about his small room, pounding his stumps in a blood-colored tantrum; for the neon traffic light beside his window flashed from red to dull gold and back to the hue of blood again. The stumps! The stumps were to blame for everything!

  ‘One at the hip and one at the knee’ – he punished both at once with his hands like hammers, sending a wire of white pain zig-zagging through his breast to his brain.

  The stumps! The dirty stumps! He gasped like a great seal for air, air. Not again. Not twice.

  Then composing himself began to wheel slowly, for wheeling was therapy for his rage. And as he wheeled remembered, and remembering, loved again. Saw her standing in a bead-curtain doorway as though even now she were waiting only for him; and how she would turn her head slowly when he rolled in, and how she would not look at him with pity, and how her mouth would say ‘darling’ just to him.

  ‘I’ll get this out of my system tonight once and for all,’ Schmidt promised himself.

  But before he’d go to Mama’s he’d have a taste of Dockery’s booze, to numb the pain in the stumps before making love. And a bit of talk with other cripples to numb the pain in his breast.

  Dockery catered to cripples, and one that was almost sure to be on hand was Kneewalking Johnson; whose handicaps were greater even than Schmidt’s own. Johnson was a Negro, and owned no platform. He had padded his stumps with leather and reinforced the pads with t
in. To Schmidt there was something so backward about stumping up and down the city’s walks on tin plates that he felt it his duty to modernize Johnson.

  ‘Get on this thing,’ he ordered. Johnson didn’t want any part of the platform, yet didn’t wish to offend the Big Half.

  ‘I get along alright, Mister ’chilles,’ he reported without looking at the raft, ‘I got my own way.’

  ‘Can you back?’ Schmidt demanded. ‘Can you swivel? Can you move sidewise? Can you make good time?’ And to show just what he meant he wheeled straight toward the juke, made an airbrake stop – ‘back!’ he backed, ‘swivel!’ he swiveled, ‘sidewise!’ his hands on the wheels seemed mechanically driven, pimps and cripples and their girls scattered while cool heads got chairs in front of them – it was like being in a swimming pool with a rudderless motorboat.

  Dockery stayed in the dark of his bar so that none might see his narrow smile. He loved seeing men and women in panic and flight, did old Doc Dockery, closed in with all their sins. Whatever ran over them only served them right, that smile revealed.

  ‘Now let’s see you try it,’ Schmidt paused at last.

  Johnson had no choice. Hands lifted him and other hands buckled him fast, then everyone stood back.

  ‘Give the man room,’ Schmidt commanded, ‘give the man a chance.’

  So the old man with kinked hair gone white, and nothing beneath his chest but a pair of short pants that small boys wear, put his hands, that were only half the breath of Schmidt’s and yet a full inch longer, to the wheels. And rolled himself gently back and forth, forth and back. Only a timid roll forward, only a shy roll back. As though he had not a room as big as a dance floor to move in but just a tiny cell.

  It was no use. Nobody could get Johnson to be more daring. It grew tiresome watching him roll those few feet up and back till someone put a coin in the juke thinking that music might liven the old man up.

  But when the music began all that happened was that the old man sang along with it and rolled no faster than before.

  Ninety-nine year so jumpin’ long

  he made a strange, sorrowing cripple’s dance—

  To be here rollin’ an’ caint go home

  Oughta come on de river in 1910

  Dey was drivin’ de women des like de men

  Well I wonder what’s de matter, somepin’ must be wrong

  I’m still here rollin’ but everybody gone—

  ‘Now you see how much better it is my way?’ Schmidt told him when he’d performed as best he could and had been allowed to unbuckle himself and kneewalk to the bar for the beer that was his reward. ‘Once you get used to it,’ Schmidt assured him, ‘you’ll be ashamed that you ever went around in that old-fashioned way. I’ll get you the wood, I’ll get you the skates and straps, I’ll even put it together for you. Man, you’ll be proud to be on skates.’

  ‘Mister ’Chilles,’ the Negro felt obliged to assert himself at last, ‘what you don’t keep in mind is I caint work main-town routes like you. I aint allowed on Canal, I aint allowed in white neighborhoods. They tells me to get my livin’ off my own people ’n the walks is all bust and cracked out there. Lots of places aint no walks at all, just old rutty wagon roads. I come to a broke walk or a mud-hole after rain, what I’m gonna do with a big old board like that? I got to unstrop myself, haul that old board through the mud or down a drop, then strop me up again. So you see, Mister ’Chilles, I wouldn’t be savin’ time, I’d be losin’ it.’

  But Schmidt had suddenly lost interest. Turned to a total stranger at the bar and asked, ‘Jack, what’s your frank opinion of a woman who’ll go to bed with a man she don’t even know his name?’

  He’d torture himself like that, as lovers always have.

  For what would begin when he’d wheel into Mama’s was one of those mysteries born only in brothels – a relationship with a deep river’s surpassing strength: that had swept two unready people into its current and now carried them past dumb faces on the shore. Faces awe-struck or compassionate at sight of so strong a woman and so strong a man suddenly made more weak than those still safe on shore.

  Finnerty was holding the big door wide when Schmidt rolled in.

  Like a statue of serenity calmly smiling.

  ‘Hallie! At last your husband’s come!’ Mama called at once.

  He had a greeting and a smile for every girl in the place but Hallie. Floralee kissed his big hand, Frenchy stroked his hair dark yet silvered, the one half-out-of-her-mind child and the other with no mind to be out of, letting the pair of them compete to see which could get his straps unbuckled first. When each stepped back with a captured strap it was as though his stumps had springs – he leaped right into the center of the divan, tottered, regained his balance and glanced all around with triumphant pride.

  Yet had not so much as noticed Hallie. Instead he shoved his hands down his pockets and came up with his palms filled with nickels, dimes, even half dollars – ‘Count it, girls! Count it!’ – and slung every cent into the mildly astonished air – ‘Count it! Count it all!’

  Frenchy and Floralee went down on all fours, diving under divans, hopping like rabbits, scurrying like mice. In a moment Kitty Twist followed, crawling, creeping, elbowing the others.

  But the sallow woman in the portiere standing so silently never moved, though a coin rolled right to her feet.

  ‘The most generous man I’ve ever known,’ Mama decided right there.

  ‘Just buying like everyone else as far as I can see,’ Kitty Twist perceived.

  ‘I notice when he’s “buying” you’re right in there with your elbow in everybody’s eye getting your full share,’ Hallie reminded the new child.

  ‘You get yours,’ Kitty told Hallie quickly – ‘You stoop like everyone else.’

  ‘Why, I make my living here, honey, if that’s what you mean,’ Hallie replied without heat, ‘what line of work are you in?’

  Kitty grew more careful after that, for as much as the women heckled one another about their dates, they spared Hallie’s relationship to Schmidt.

  ‘You in the brown dress,’ he called to her as though he had not noticed her till now, ‘step out here where we can see what you got.’

  Hallie was obliged to stand alone in the parlor’s center between Schmidt and the juke’s unblinking eye. Like a sultan, he gripped the point of his little brown beard as he studied her manner of walking. And like a sultan swung his hand, to indicate he was now ready to view her from behind.

  ‘Is this one healthy?’ he asked Mama after a moment. ‘I hold you responsible.’

  But Mama was counting her beads, the others were looking out window or door – it was plain they felt their big daddy was overdoing things tonight.

  Big Dad didn’t feel he was overdoing a thing. He slid down off the divan and kneewalked around his selection.

  And turning her head on her olive throat to follow the torso as it stumped, she thought, ‘What a man he must have been!’ For even on stumps Schmidt moved with grace.

  ‘I’ll have a go at this one,’ he decided aloud, and swung himself after her through the portiere, his head just barely higher than her waist, with the satisfied pride of a man who has driven a cunning bargain.

  But the moment the door shut behind them both pride and satisfaction fled – he seized her hand, kissed each separate finger, pressed his head hard right under her heart and clasped her as though she were the life he had lost. It was the stumps made him act like he had, he told her. It was all the fault of the stumps.

  Hallie stood quite still, pitying the power that could not be contained. And after a while smiled down, stroked his hair and agreed as with a child: yes, it was all the fault of his stumps.

  To such tenderness he reacted like an enormous cat. And rolled within his massive arms, pressed to the great cave of his chest, his lion’s breath against her breast, she felt his passion relentlessly driving. And then it was as though no man till Legless Schmidt had possessed her.

  Many h
ad rented her, none had possessed her. Not for one moment, not even to the man she had married, had Hallie been subjugated as this shattered athlete subjugated her. To be reduced to a thing for the use of lust was her trade, and to that trade she was long resigned. But to feel, below his lust, love running like a river in flood terrified her; for she abandoned herself to it, she lost herself in it, she could not help herself against it. And then was ashamed – not that she had given herself to a cripple, but that she had violated the first rule of her craft.

  There were moments with him when she cried weakly and begged his flesh, as if it were something apart from him, to let her be. And at the same moment drawing his flesh so tight and deep toward her heart, so fierce not to let him escape her, that the man himself was brought close to tears as he lay back limp and done.

  Schmidt had never felt a woman like that before. With him it was as if he had never had a woman completely till Hallie. Only with her, not until her, never at any moment except those with her was he a man, able, loved, possessing and possessed – his own true man again.

  In her he spent a lifetime’s wrath. In him she too lived once more. Nine Christmases she had been buried, and twice that many for him. And with each time together, each lived a little while again.

  Once, waking from sleep she became aware again of how the Santa Fe wheels had rolled back his thighs, one at the hip and one at the knee, into raw volcanic folds. She threw the sheet across him to conceal, at once, his deformity and her own disgust.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll catch cold,’ she pretended.

  ‘Don’t worry’ – she hadn’t fooled him for a moment – ‘you don’t look no better to me than I do to you.’

  It always ended like that. And she never tried directly to answer his insults, as bitter now that he’d had her as before.

  ‘I don’t want to go through this anymore,’ she told him what she had told him often. ‘I’m clearing out.’

  ‘Sister, if you think I’m going to say “Please don’t go,” you’re barking up the wrong tree. When I get a bit of the booze in me it don’t make no difference what girl I pick. All you tramps look alike to me.’