The Devil's Stocking

by Nelson Algren

  Down the old fool went.

  A scent rose, into Dovie-Jean’s nostrils, of a sick, or dying chicken.

  The Puerto Rican bally-man who’d been standing in the door watching switched off the lights when the old man fell. The barflies fled into the dark.

  The Carousel had just closed for the evening.

  Back in the hotel, Dovie-Jean sat waiting for Red. She was looking at a TV screen without seeing it.

  She remembered that she had been pleased to see Flash-from-the-Track again. He had always paid his own way and had never demanded that sort of excessive respect some tricks, being unsure of themselves, demanded from the whores. Flash had been perfectly contented to play the fool.

  It was ironic that, tonight, he’d paid so dearly to preserve his dignity.

  She became aware of the goings-on on the screen. It was the Uriah Yipkind show. Uriah was explaining to his audience that his guest for the evening was an executive of the business world who had been stone drunk for ten years. Now he had not had a drink for six months. Could he keep it up?

  “What are you doing these days, Mr. Markheim,” Uriah asked his guest, “other than staying sober?”

  “That’s a full-time job in itself,” Mr. Markheim replied.

  Both Uriah and Mr. Markheim laughed over that one.

  “Tell us how you got started on your career as an alcoholic, Mr. Markheim,” Uriah urged him.

  “It began when I was in college,” the guest recalled, giving Dovie-Jean an impression that the man had only given up alcohol for pills. He had that glassy look. “I went stone drunk to an examination in the law school, and passed it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in the law school. I missed the examination I was supposed to be taking in agronomy.”

  Dovie-Jean switched the program off, unable to follow it.

  It just goes to show you, she thought, how much it takes to get a spot on TV. Just stay sober for six months and you’re a TV celebrity.

  She fell asleep in the lounge chair, a reading lamp burning above her, and dreamed.

  She dreamed she was in a strange house, up a flight of stairs and into a room where a dozen Puerto Rican women had gathered about a bed.

  She could not see their faces, they were all shawled, there was a sense of death in the place. It was lit only by candles, and the women were looking at a sick infant on the bed. By its color, it was either dead or dying.

  Above the infant a doctor, dressed in black, stood with a stethoscope in hand. She knew that the doctor was ready to give up hope for the infant’s life. The women were about to start grieving.

  Suddenly the doctor swung his foot at the infant, kicking it bodily off the bed onto the floor. He had kicked it so violently that it had landed face down—yet not a word of protest or surprise from the women watching.

  They understood, and what Dovie-Jean understood also, was that what the doctor had attempted was to shock the infant’s system so that death would release its grip and life would return.

  It didn’t work. Even as she looked, Dovie-Jean saw the small body grow chalk white and thicken. It lay there looking as if were a knife thrust into it, it would not bleed.

  She wakened feeling that her own life had gone somewhere far away. Red was sneaking in, shoeless, like a small boy who had committed some mischief. She could feel his evasiveness without opening her eyes. She didn’t open them until he’d climbed into bed and began pretending to be sleeping. She could feel his fear in the dark.

  She waited until he’d had coffee the following morning.

  “What happened?”

  Red looked at her steadily over the rim of his cup. Then he put the cup down.

  “You saw him swing on Moon, didn’t you?”

  “What happened?”

  “What the hell do you think happened? What do you do with a clown, he drops dead because you slap him the side of the head? You want us closed a month—maybe sixty-ninety days? You think I’m getting paid just to draw beers? What do you think Moon is paid three bills a week for? We’re paid to keep the joint running. Accidents will happen. Now forget it. It was an accident.”

  “I knew the old man.”

  “So you knew him.”

  “Where’d you leave him?”

  Another shrug.

  “Where’d you leave him?”

  “Where the cops’ll find him.”

  “How much money did he have on him?”

  He hadn’t expected that one.

  Red put his spoon down. “Look, I’m not a jack-roller. It ain’t my trade. I never touched the old fool’s pockets.”

  “He was wearing an expensive watch.”

  “So?”

  “If you didn’t get it, Moonigan did.”

  “Moonigan’s trade is one thing. Mine is another. He’s an honest man. He laid everything out plain as possible for me before I went to work. If I wasn’t willing to go along with him, I had my chance to say, No, I won’t work with you. I told him I would work with him. I told him so for your sake as well as for mine. Do I have to remind you that we’re both wanted in Jersey City?”

  “Does Moonigan know about that deal?”

  “Certainly not.”

  Dovie-Jean looked out the window, feeling a slow grief rising. How had she gotten into this in the first place? She had hurt no one; yet now, for the second time, she was involved in a killing.

  She didn’t understand. How to get away? Where did she have to run to? There was nothing left back home, there was nothing left in Jersey City. Wherever she left a place it was as though she had never lived there. She tried to swallow down her grief, but it would not go down. She put her head into her arms to conceal it.

  Red came around the table and put his hand on her shoulder. He didn’t perceive what was troubling her so terribly, but he knew she was feeling badly, and that she was a woman who didn’t feel badly without good reason. She touched his hand on her shoulder. Not because it was his hand, but because it was somebody’s, anybody’s. She had never felt so alone in her life.

  When she looked up, her eyes were tear-stained.

  “He was a nice old man,” she told Red.

  “Sweetheart,” he told her, and put out his hand toward her. She rose quickly. “Oh, no, not that again,” she rejected his sympathy. She went to the bathroom to wash her face. When she came out he had gone.

  Dovie-Jean dressed slowly and deliberately. She had not had to make up her mind consciously. Her mind had been made up for her. It had made itself up.

  Where she’d go she was uncertain. What she was certain of was that she was leaving Red.

  When she was fully dressed she wrote a brief note and put a fifty-dollar bill on top of it:

  “This is what I made last night. Now we’re square. Good luck. D.”

  When she reached the door she looked back, hesitated, then returned to the dresser, picked up the fifty and tore up the note.

  An iciness began forming about Red’s heart as he was rising in the little old-fashioned Hotel Chester elevator. It rose slowly, so slowly, it stopped at every floor whether its bell had been rung or not, its door opened so slowly to nobody waiting there, nobody at all. Then closed so slowly. The iciness began closing in.

  That tap he’d laid on the old man had been nothing. He’d hit opponents ten times that hard and they’d done nothing but blink.

  It had been enough. “This fool is gone,” Moonigan had said when he’d lifted the body.

  Old fool running around town with a bad ticker, anything he’d run into would have stopped its beat. He had had to run into the fist of a man hiding out on a murder rap. There’s such a thing as bad luck, Red grieved, but this is outrageous.

  Moonigan had done the stripping, fast and rough, there in the shadowed place, while Red had kept watch. He’d seen Moonigan’s hand move from Flash’s pocket to his own, but nothing since had been said about a wallet. Moonigan wasn’t being paid just for pitching drunks onto Eighth Avenue.

  When the elevator let him out into his own
room at last, Red stood looking puzzled. Her clothes were gone.

  Red knew then why the ice was closing in about his heart: not out of fear of that old fool’s death, but out of fear of losing Dovie-Jean.

  Or was that the true fear? Was not his true fear his recollection of her warning: “You letting Ruby take the rap. I won’t stand for that.”

  And yet she had stood for it.

  She had stood for it because she did not think it had been Red who’d done the shooting. He had never told her he had not. The closest he had come to an explanation with her was, “It must be one of them crazy nigger street kids.”

  What then was his great need of her? How could he need a black woman?

  Because she was black, his heart whispered: You need her because she makes you feel you are black.

  Standing now at the window overlooking the rooftops, chimneys and telephone cables, so black against this gray December sky, and the traffic moving, so far below, as in a slow pantomime, he wondered what it had been that had made such a difference between himself and Hardee.

  Of his own mother he had only the dimmest of recollections: only that she had been white. Yet, of Hardee’s mother, a black woman, the memory remained vivid. How old had Hardee been the day she had brought him to live with Matt and himself?

  And he himself then a lanky fifteen.

  Now here he stood, a few brief years after, a washed-up light-heavy, a failed pimp suspected of triple homicide, and Hardee planning to practice law in Jersey City in the spring. What had formed such a difference? Their mothers? The times? Was this his fear, his great fear, that he was neither white nor black, talking?

  Who was he? What was he?

  She had left only out of being upset about the old fool’s death, he decided now. She’d be back tonight or tomorrow.

  And when she returned he’d sweet-talk her as he had sweet-talked her before.

  If we keep our noses out of Ruby’s trial, he’d assure her, Ruby would beat the rap. And everything would be as it used to be, he’d promise her.

  Some promise. The girl was so smart, and at the same time so simple, he could never tell what she was going to do or say. But there was no other way to go, so far as Hardee was concerned. His law career would be a shambles before it had even begun unless they all three worked together now.

  Dovie-Jean was not, he was sure, the snitching kind. She had no intention of giving evidence which might incriminate either himself or Hardee.

  Yet Hardee would have to know, in event she didn’t come back. He’d have to find her. If he could not find her he would have to go back to Jersey City and let Hardee know.

  He came up the Playmates of Paris stair shortly before midnight and paid fifteen dollars to get into the parlor. Dovie-Jean wasn’t working. The other women assured him she hadn’t come in. Whether they were fronting for her or not he had no way of telling. He waited until after 1 A.M. before he gave up.

  He stood for a moment in the dark of the room, a key still in his hand. There was somebody else in the room.

  “Dovie-Jean?” he asked in a low voice.

  No reply. He took a step farther, turned about and saw a shadow opposing him.

  “Dovie-Jean?”

  No reply. He switched on the light and saw his reflection in a mirror. And felt the doggo blues coming on.

  “It’s going to be a hard night, Edward,” he told himself aloud.

  He took a shower and tried miming under the water. He sang to himself as the water poured, using Tony Bennett’s voice:

  From all of society we’ll stay aloof

  We’ll live in propriety up on the roof…

  He came out of the shower with the towel about him, snapping his fingers in forced cheerfulness, “The cat couldn’t kitten and the slut couldn’t pup,” he sang, “and the old man couldn’t get his rhubarb up.”

  He switched on the TV and caught a fellow jumping up and down behind a storeful of auto parts.

  “Wild Willie takes the risk!” the fellow shrieked. “You take the profits! Wild Willie is on your side!”

  “You’re on everybody’s side, you sonofabitch,” Red told him, and switched the commercial off. Then he turned out the light and stretched out naked on the bed.

  He became aware of a low murmuring, like that of the crowd seeing the horses approaching the gate, and he looked about for a mutuel window but he could see none, and it was too late, and the murmur rose to a great cheer as the horses pounded to the finish line; but it was too dark to see and the great cheer broke up, then drifted away and everything became still.

  He walked through a grandstand looking for a window, but came instead to a high board fence and somebody said, “You can’t go through there.”

  So he went down a darkening way in the dead of night, toward a railroad lantern burning red. Below its glow half a dozen railroaders, wearing blue-striped overalls and brakemen’s caps, sat playing cards but he could not make out what game they were at.

  “Can you direct me to a mutuel window?” he asked.

  The cards made no sound as they touched the chips, red, white and blue in the table’s center, and nobody looked up to answer him; and nobody seemed to win the pot.

  “Can I make a bet on a horse?” he asked.

  He looked up and saw a great toteboard bearing photographs of the next race’s entrants, like photographs off the covers of racing programs; but their numbers were unlisted and no odds had been posted.

  “Is there a mutuel window near here?” He directed his question now at the only black man among the players, a man no older than himself whom he knew well, yet could not, strangely, quite recall; or what he had to do with him, except that it had been unpleasant.

  “On Genevieve,” he told the man, offering him a fifty-dollar-bill, “on the nose.”

  The young black looked at Red steadily for what seemed a long time.

  “Who informed on me when I came back from overseas, Red?” he asked quietly. And turned his head away.

  A white man, wearing black judge’s robes, stood on the big scale at the finishing line.

  “Put this on Genevieve,” Red told the judge, handing him the fifty, “on the nose.”

  “Get the stalls cleaned and we’ll talk later,” the judge replied.

  A rider on a gray horse came walking slowly. Red held up the fifty to the rider and said, “On the nose.”

  The rider turned his face down to Red and it was pale as ashes. His eyes were shadowed by his cap. His lips hung loosely as though he had no teeth. His voice came down to Red in a hoarse warning whisper, “That’s a tragic horse,” the rider told him, and rode on.

  The big board began shimmering as if it were heated and the heat was going out of control. He had a smell of burning and woke to see that the cigarette he’d put out in the tray beside the bed was still smoldering.

  In the dim light he saw a figure standing over his bed.

  It was himself, yet not himself.

  The image faded slowly, as he watched, and disappeared.

  It wasn’t going to be easy to face Hardee.

  When Fortune Foo opened the door, she opened it to Dovie-Jean Dawkins.

  “Come in, honey,” Fortune invited her, “you look like the wrath of God. What happened?”

  Dovie-Jean, looking exhausted, sank back in an armchair and shut her eyes as if gathering strength. Fortune went to her tiny kitchen and lit the gas under the tea kettle.

  “Had a fight with my old man,” Dovie-Jean told her when she returned to her little sitting room. “He’s going to be on the hawks for me all over town.”

  “Park here until it blows over,” Fortune welcomed her without questioning, and switched on the TV, after she had poured the tea, in the hope of diverting her friend from her trouble.

  “Catch this creep,” she told Dovie-Jean as Uriah Yipkind came into view talking to a man no bigger than himself who appeared to be bored although the program had hardly begun.

  “You look to be in good shape, Trum
an,” Uriah congratulated his guest. “You’ve lost weight. Your eyes are bright. How are you getting on with Gore Vidal?”

  “Who is Gar Vital?” Dovie-Jean asked.

  “Never heard of her,” Fortune answered.

  “I know you’re not fond of Gore, Truman. You’re not fond of many people, are you?”

  “I’m fond of many people.”

  “But who do you love? Really love?”

  “You mean really really love?”

  “Yes. Really really.”

  The guest studied his host speculatively.

  “I love your wife,” he finally replied, “really really.”

  Uriah looked startled.

  “I didn’t know you knew my wife, Truman.”

  “You weren’t supposed to know. It’s been going on for some years now. But, since you ask who I really really, you might as well know.”

  Uriah’s face broke into an uneasy grin.

  “You’re kidding me, Truman. You’re putting me on.”

  “Aren’t you kidding me? Aren’t you putting me on?”

  “They’re putting each other on,” Fortune explained.

  “Who are they?”

  “TV celebrities.”

  “Tell us, Truman,” Uriah began a new tack, still determined to shake up his guest, “What really happened on that southern campus when you fell off the speaker’s platform?”

  “I don’t recall falling off any speaker’s platform, Uriah, north or south.”

  “Now, Truman, you know what I’m talking about.”

  “I’m not sure what you’re talking about. I do recall a dentist in Gainesville, Florida, giving me a pill so that I dozed, onstage, momentarily. Is that it? I wasn’t near enough to the edge of the stage to fall off it.”

  Uriah snickered knowingly.

  “There was more to it than that, Truman. Now, wasn’t there?”

  Truman merely shrugged as if to say, “Make what you want of it,” so Uriah tried yet another tack.

  “What is it you like so much about Studio Fifty-four?”

  “What’s ‘Studio Fifty-four?’” Dovie-Jean asked.

  “A classy dance hall.”

  “Oh.”

  “I like it because everybody goes there and boys dance with boys and girls dance with girls and everybody enjoys himself—millionaires and taxi drivers, black and white, rich and poor. I always enjoy seeing a lot of different types of people getting along.”