The D.A.R. demanded that unemployed aliens be deported; a mob lynched a man at Atwood, Kansas; a detachment of the Nicaraguan National Guard killed its American commander; a crisis in unemployment relief was imminent; somebody shot the President of France; cotton was up slightly following wheat and Huey Long said the time had arrived to redistribute the wealth. Russ Columbo was still singing Please.
Cuban sugar was held to imperil our own; Mayor Walker announced that New York Had Kept The Faith. The search for the missing Lindbergh infant was extended to England; Al Capone was on his way to Atlanta. Mayor Walker decried local pay reductions and Huey Long said he would vote Farmer-Labor before he’d vote with the ‘Baruch-Morgan-Rockefeller Democrats.’ Cotton was down again following wheat but the Congress decided not to redistribute the wealth after all.
In the curious April of ’32 Mussolini wrote a play and Calvin Coolidge had to make public apology and pay a St Louis insurance man twenty-five hundred dollars for calling insurance abstractors ‘twisters’ in a radio speech. Max Schmeling was taking his forthcoming fight with Sharkey seriously; California refused to pardon Tom Mooney and people were still singing I Surrender Dear. Senator Borah demanded that arms be reduced and atoms of hydrogen were transmuted to atoms of helium. The president of the University of Wisconsin announced that statesmanship had come to a full stop; Herbert Hoover was having his portrait painted; the Congress was asked to unseat Senator Bankhead and the crisis in unemployment relief was more imminent than ever.
In curious, long-ago ’32 so many people were saying that Prohibition was a failure that the New York Chamber of Commerce said it officially. Cotton was up again following wheat and domestic wine-growers demanded that domestic wines be made legal. A fragment of a human jawbone found near Lake Victoria was believed to be that of the earliest man. The Congress refused to unseat anybody. Kansas was the last state still voting dry and even Kansas was close to going wet. Sharkey was taking his forthcoming fight with Schmeling seriously and an ash-dust obscured the sun over Buenos Aires for forty hours.
‘The darker the valley the more the spirit of Christ-like charity appears,’ said that same cardinal in that strange brief spring, and New Orleans began planning a beer parade.
There, in Dockery’s Dollhouse while the juke played
Chinatown My Chinatown
When the lights are low—
a straight-haired flat-chested hard-of-eye hustler called Tough Kitty was trying to get credit for just one little beer.
But the bartender, acting as oddly as Hoover, didn’t seem to hear.
‘Did my husband leave owing you money or something?’ she wanted to know. ‘Is that what’s making you so salty over a simple deal like a glass of green beer?’
‘If you’re talking about a party name of Finnerty,’ Doc advised the girl, ‘he surely did, for he’s gone and he’ll never return.’
‘So long as I’m around you can be sure that sooner or later he’ll show up,’ Tough Kitty promised upon her word. ‘He thinks too much of me to leave me stranded and broke.’
‘He thinks so much of you,’ the old man asked mildly, ‘where is he now?’
‘I’m not free to tell,’ the girl answered before he’d finished asking.
‘And I’m not free to hand out free beers,’ Doc answered almost as fast.
So she drew from the pocket of her faded blue jeans a small change-purse and emptied it on the bar: twelve pennies and one nickel.
‘I got enough for a beer,’ she took count, ‘but not enough to get drunk on.’ And looked left-out of everything.
The old man brought the beer and scooped up half her pennies. ‘I’ve got a little money put by,’ he recalled casually, ‘I’d like to invest in a chicken farm. Do you know where I can go for advice?’
‘Why, that’s exactly what my Oliver—’ she cut herself short, the shrewd hard girl as gullible at the last as any. And the old man turned back to his dolls.
His dolls that were never drunken.
Someone pressed the buzzer just right and, peering out, he saw that bully, missing many days, that once had called himself Stingaree.
It was plain enough, the moment Dove came in, that if he wasn’t just out of hospital he was just out of jail. But so many had been in and out since the old man had last seen this one he had lost track of who was in where and who was out. And didn’t much care which.
‘Stay as long as you got something to spend,’ he warned the fellow, ‘then get out. Don’t let me catch you cadging others for drinks.’
‘I bought drinks for others a-plenty here and you never seemed to mind, old man,’ Dove reminded him.
‘I don’t mind yet,’ old Doc assured him. ‘Buy as many for others as you want. What are you having yourself?’
‘Whiskey and wash,’ Dove told him. The old man waited till he’d put his money down.
Dove poured his whiskey into his beer, taking his time with the pouring. Then took it to a table by himself, saying hello to no one. In the dingy light the panders and their women moved like people under water. Overhead the slow fans beat like the beat of a ship’s propellers heard on a deep sea floor. Though he had known everyone in the place by his or her first name only five months before, now they seemed people from some lost lifetime hardly known at all. When he asked a woman if she had seen Hallie, all he got was a shrug. Either the woman didn’t know or was too careful too tell. Nobody was long remembered on Old Perdido Street.
The only one whose memory of himself seemed fresh was the very one by whom he wished to be unremembered, with her side-of-the-mouth wise grin. Kitty came up to him but before she could either beg for a drink or offer him one, he shook his head, No. He was having no part of her.
It was a quiet afternoon. Dockery looked out once or twice to see that nobody was sneaking his own bottle. Of course the slobs were littering his floor once more – but a kind of tittering delight took him when his slobs did that, for it promised him the later joy of making all spick and span again. It was one of the few joys the old man had left.
He noticed Legless Schmidt’s platform leaning against a wall and Schmidt himself at a table, stumps sticking straight out before him, across from Tough Kitty. The old man approved of that: she wouldn’t be with him if he weren’t spending. He even thought of bringing them a couple shots, compliments of the house, to get them started, but then thought better of it. And took to dusting his dolls, giving Raggedy Ann special attention.
He never heard the first threat. There was only a sort of half-muted babble that rose for a moment above the fans’ steady thudding, then curiously subsided. When he looked out the redhaired bully with the hospital pallor had his back planted against the wall and Schmidt was standing before him, stumps spread wide, the flat of his palm on the floor to brace himself.
‘I got nothin’ against you, mister,’ Doc heard the bully say.
‘You deny you left with her? You deny living with her?’
‘I left with her and we lived together too. I don’t deny that, mister. But if I knew where she was I’d tell you. But I been away myself.’
‘Don’t give me that camouflage. You know where she is, for she sent you here to find out what I’m doing. You came by God because she sent you.’ He seemed oddly sure of himself. Kitty Twist stood just behind him. ‘You’ll say where she is, and you’ll take me there. Or by God you’ll take the consequences.’
‘Give the men room, boys,’ the outlaws and derelicts vied now like men of public spirit working for the welfare of all.
‘If it’s what they both want, let them have it out,’ Dockery took his stand, ‘’n no interferin’ – a square shake all around.’
‘Make ’em shake hands, Doc, that shows they’re both good fellas.’
‘Then let’s see which is best,’ Kitty Twist put her two cents in.
The panders pushed the women back, and as fast as they pushed them the women struggled up front again.
Then all felt the big hush come down.
/> ‘Back up,’ Dove waved an iron spittoon, ‘I don’t want trouble,’ and took one step toward Schmidt.
Schmidt didn’t back but merely stood, figuring his man. Then turned, the women and men making room as he knee-walked to his platform and carefully buckled himself in.
‘Going home early, Big Dad?’ somebody asked, but the cripple didn’t answer that. His platform was his weapon as well as his armor, and they all knew that.
Dove began moving slowly along the wall toward where the late alley-light shown through a half-open door. If he got within one jump he’d make a run for that. And never come back.
But as he moved slowly Schmidt moved slowly, a ballbearinged monster with his hands on the bearings, ready to swivel, charge or reverse. Without closing in, the platform kept pace. Behind him, pale with pleasured terror, faces of men and faces of women followed and paused and followed again. With no sound in the place but the thud of the fans and the quickening breath, like a caught rabbit’s breathing, of one who was almost caught.
Dockery saw Schmidt’s lips moving silently, like a man trying a combination mentally before executing it. He feinted Dove to left, to right, and each time Dove switched the spittoon, left to right. ‘I don’t know where your wife’ – at ‘wife’ Schmidt gave his wheels one hard swift twist and thundered in, his forearm protecting his eyes.
Dove swung the heavy spittoon like a discus under the protecting arm. Schmidt rocked like a loosened stump in a storm but the platform kept coming in. Dove swung again.
The force of that second blow swiveled Schmidt’s wheels, he banged blindly in the wall and rebounded, wheels going this way then that.
‘Get him,’ Dove heard the whisper from every side, ‘Now. Now. Now. Brain him while he’s blind.’ For Schmidt’s head was so low that his bald-spot looked at Dove.
‘Now. Now. Now.’
Yet Dove stood with his weapon, gaping at that helpless head; and couldn’t lift the hand.
The cripple’s face, when he uncovered at last, was smeared by blood down the whole left side where the spittoon’s edge had ripped above and below the eye. Dove held out his own bandanna, for no one else offered Schmidt help. And watched while the half-giant daubed the blood off his face till he could see again. Then he touched the bandanna’s ends together as if to apologize for soiling it, and returned it to Dove. ‘Thank you son,’ he said.
Perhaps it was his tone that made Dove think that was it. For he pushed his way into the crowd. ‘The fight’s done,’ he said.
The crowd closed ranks.
‘The fight’s only begun,’ he heard Schmidt behind him say. ‘Get your best hold, son.’
And reached.
Dove leaped onto the small table at the bar’s far end and crouched upon it, trembling in the legs like a panicking puppy up there. Schmidt hurled the table with a single twist, sending Dove sprawling comic-strip fashion, all arms and legs, while the spittoon went clanging like a clock gone insane. The cripple held Dove face down to the floor, steadying him as he floundered. Then lifting him between his great hands, gave his hands that twist of a coiling spring. Dove hit the floor on his side, one arm outflung and the other across his eyes. Schmidt straddled the outflung arm by riding the platform over it and lifted the other off Dove’s eyes. When he let it go it fell loosely, as something unattached, an arm without a bone.
‘He’s had it,’ somebody said.
It was true: they crowded in to see. Whether stunned by his fall or fogged by fright, he lay like some animal whose final defense lies in complete helplessness, eyes bright and unseeing, open to anyone’s blows.
Schmidt looked down at the face suddenly like a child’s. Then he brought back his right arm till its knuckles touched the floor behind him. There were two men standing who could have put a foot upon it. But one stood looking down at the way the knuckles stretched the sunburnt skin. And the other said, ‘Cold as a frog,’ nothing more.
‘Faking,’ was Schmidt’s answer to that, and brought the arm high in a full-swinging arch – and down.
It broke with a soft and sogging sound, the very bones went oof.
‘I like to get up close to accidents,’ Kitty Twist pushed in, and put her ear down to Dove’s broken mouth, that was trying to speak though swallowing blood.
‘If you let me go,’ Kitty Twist heard him say, and repeated it for those not so lucky as to be as close as herself, ‘he says if you let him go—’
‘I’ll say a prayer for you—’
‘—he’ll say a prayer for you.’
‘Tell him to save his prayers,’ Schmidt told her, ‘I want to know where my wife is.’ He looked down at Dove. ‘Don’t think you can scare me with a little blood,’ he said.
Dove’s head wobbled weakly from side to side, still denying all.
And though, when Schmidt’s fist was raised again everyone thought ‘relent’ – panders and cripples and fallen girls, yet when it fell all felt a heartbroken joy. As though each fresh blow redeemed that blow that his life had been to him.
Later, a woman who saw that the face on the floor was no longer a face but a mere paste of cartilage and blood through which a single sinister eye peered blindly, recalled: ‘When I seen him on the floor unable to rise and fight back, it went right through my mind – Murdering. Murdering. Why give him a chance?’
And when it was done Schmidt looked all around like a man in a lifting daze. He looked at them all as though there were something they knew he did not know. As if he did not understand the blood that was fouling his hands.
Kitty Twist knelt to put her thin arms around the cripple’s neck, and her lips were almost on his before he pushed her off, his eyes glassed by disgust.
‘Get this man help and open the doors,’ he commanded, and the doors were opened just in time to let the last of daylight in.
Schmidt saw the day and the open door. Yet he sat his platform without a move until Dockery said, ‘Get him out of here.’
And eagerly then, its tension relieved and its contempt wakened, the crowd went for the half-giant as though he were just some sort of thing. One shoved him from behind. Another hauled him by his hair. While another began kicking the little wheels that only a minute before he had feared; but that now didn’t move fast enough to please him. While that same poor bitchified prey, Kitty Twist, spat down the nape of his neck.
And he took it, Schmidt took it, he took it all. Like a statue of grief with a sorrowing air, as though he had done nothing more than their own work for them: a saint of the amputees.
Out of the speakeasy that had outlived its time, through the final door of a dead decade, they wheeled the deposed hero that once had been a man. Onto a downhill street.
Somebody gave the platform a shove. And waited a minute, with others who waited, to watch the thing reel from one side of the walk to the other, gathering speed as it lost control, making uphill trudgers dodge like dodging a drunken wrong-way driver – when it hit the telephone pole not one laughed. They merely stood watching to detect, from their distance, some movement from that crumpled lump, half on the curb and half on the street. But saw no movement at all.
Inside they heard the juke box begin—
You made a lot of money back in ’22
But whiskey and women made a fool of you—
And returned inside with the executive air of men ready, if need be, to vie with one another for whatever was best for the public welfare.
On Saturday nights the backland squatters came into Arroyo by Model T and by cart, but most came by foot. Some had shoes and some had none. But booted or barefoot they all shambled; and the woman stayed just a step behind all the way. She would have her shawl drawn across her mouth to keep the dangerous night-damp out and he would be breathing into a handkerchief or bandanna; after the Mexican manner.
But when they got into town there was so much talking to be done they forgot all about the dangerous air, or perhaps the air inside the city limits was made of better stuff. For the women chattered t
hrough all the stores, pointed in the windows with other wives or went to see a movie starring Rod La Roque. They all tried to get the old man to the movie too, whether he would or no: that much less chance of his getting drunk was the point.
He seldom fell for that. He sent her in and shambled off to the courthouse steps to hear if the preacher had anything to say he hadn’t said on a thousand other Saturdays.
An uneasy rumor was going around that the old man wasn’t as strong against the Pope as he once had been. In fact he didn’t seem as strong against anything as he once had been. The wrath and the fire that had been as good as a free shot of tequila seemed to have gone out of Fitz.
Was it whiskey or weariness that had caught up with him? Or just that, since Byron had been buried, there was nobody left to heckle him? Whatever it was, when he led them to the uttermost edge of Damnation now and forced them to look over the terrible rim, the fall they saw was no more than a foot or two into a coal yard of rain-wetted cinders with a few rusty beer cans lying about. Broken gin bottles lay among the dead slag that held promise of neither flame nor fire. They sniffed for the assurance of sulphur on the air: and smelled nothing but marigold that grows in old dumps.
Marigold mixed with the scent of blown dust that they knew so well it had no more scent than air. The old man had not really taken them anywhere.
Yet out of courtesy and having nowhere else to go, they still listened to the threats of his faded passion.
‘The glory is gone from motherhood,’ he told them. ‘Women who smoke and drink and wear pants are unfit to be mothers of men. What a monster-osity is a cursing, drinking, smoking, painted, bobbed-haired mother! When the Pope says modern woman is an insult to her maker he got more backbone than our own protestant preachers. Didn’t the Lord say, if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her?
A Walk On The Wild Side Page 35