A Walk On The Wild Side

by Nelson Algren

O hush, one mornin’

  Death come creepin’ in the room—

  Within the fire Terasina’s eyes saved him from Riley as the dream wheel died with the dream.

  ‘Old grandpaw came last night,’ was how Fitz said hello one morning to the frost that had come in the night. The roofs of Hooverville shown white and nothing to burn but grapefruit crates and precious few of these.

  The single spigot froze, but a Mexican couple two houses down made neighbors welcome to their well. Rumors of a coal train coming through raced from door to door like news of a wedding come June. True or false, it made happy telling: all people would soon be warm once more.

  Dove and a boy called Jehova went down the tracks carrying a clothes pole and a sack. Half a hundred men, women and children huddled at the water tower. Barrows and boxes stood about. A Mexican girl held, in a fold of a yellow shawl, a carnival kewpie to her breast. The shawl’s dusty fringes, tumbling past her ankles, had gathered enough soot to start a fire itself. Kewpie and child guarded an empty doll buggy on knock-kneed wheels.

  ‘Your baby will catch cold, sis,’ Dove teased her, but she gave him only a glance of unmoving enmity for reply.

  ‘When you’re spoken to, answer,’ Jehova reproached her; but got no more answer than Dove. ‘Wetback fraidy-cat,’ Jehova apologized for her to Dove as the cars came grinding to a clanking screech and the engine began to take on water.

  Staking out one side of a car as their own, Jehova climbed atop the coal and lined the iron shelf that runs the length of the car with the biggest lumps he could handle, requiring both his hands. Neither knew why it had to be done this way, except that the other ways were too easy. Dove stood below with the pole. The problem wasn’t only to get the biggest lumps in the shortest time but to keep neighbors from snatching them first.

  Jehova finished filling the shelf just as the cars began rolling again. And got down just in time to get the sack open at the shelf ’s end. The first lump, hitting the pole held by Dove, tumbled into the sack. One by one the lumps fell and not one was lost.

  As they fell Dove asked Jehova above him – ‘What if these were yams?’ He got no answer, so only asked himself – What if they were onions? At thought of onion gravy his mouth watered – just let somebody tell Dove Linkhorn where he could steal onions and Byron would make the gravy. Somebody shouted – a plain-clothes man was humping down the spine. They lunged down the embankment with the sack between them. In the ditch at the embankment’s foot a doll buggy lay upside down, its wheels still turning this way then that. A few feet away someone had slung a yellow shawl. It stirred. Then its yellow began seeping to black.

  ‘The wheel caught the buggy but she wouldn’t let go of the handle,’ he heard somebody say.

  ‘Wait for the priest,’ said somebody else in such a tone that Dove assumed that the priest, when he came, would explain, in low, simple tones, how a child so small could love a doll so much that she had not feared even a freight train’s wheels.

  In the final week of January he stood in the woodshed of the Fe warming a glass egg between his palms in remembrance of chickens of summers past. He heard someone trying the front door. His heart raced out of the woodshed before him and his raggedy knees raced after.

  Terasina.

  Wearing long black gloves and looking so much like one of the unattainable New York tourist women that he stood stock still, barefoot and abashed.

  She smiled her wide white smile. She smelled like Mexican sunlight and pecked his cheek when he came. He handed her the egg and said, ‘A little girl got kilt,’ for a thank you.

  ‘Tell me later,’ she told him, and he went up the old stair so worn by human care, lugging her suitcase that also had had a bit of battering. At the door to her room he stood aside and she went in before him.

  He had drawn the blinds and fastened them fast. The room smelled of darkness, soap and peace. His mouth fell full on her own and his mouth was a boy’s: she felt the big deep warmth of all his being in it. Till the kiss grew into a man’s that parted her lips, and flowed into her own. That arched her spine and made her heart drink wine. Her tongue-tip teased his till he gave her his tongue; eyes shut, she drew softly upon it. Her strength began draining as his gathered power till only his enfolding hand held her up. The other he brought up between her thighs so possessively she felt how kind he is to touch so gently and spread herself in gratitude. Of a sudden the blinds were too tight for gratitude, they were being stretched to the point of pain as his lips found her throat and her back felt the bed. She twisted from under and leaned for breath against the bed, the front of her skirt hooked onto her belt. Shame mixed in her with anger. She smoothed the skirt down.

  He took a step toward her and she showed him her nails, inviting him to try again. In the dark they glinted like delicate knives forged especially for use against men’s eyes. He tossed his hair back off his forehead and grinned weakly.

  ‘You find yourself another job,’ she told him.

  He turned, disgraced in a groping haze. ‘I think the fire needs fixin’,’ he guessed.

  A minute later she heard the big stove begin to roar – whenever he didn’t know what to do with himself he threw kindling into it as though kindling came cheap. She waited until she heard the door close below.

  From the window she saw him shambling, the boy who would be a man if she would be a woman, missing steps down a broken walk and every time he missed, she stumbled. ‘It has nothing to do with me.’ Terasina guarded herself all around.

  Yet high in the windless light a flight of pelicans ferris-wheeled to the Gulf, the tail-bird supplanting the leader after the manner of pelicans, in a ceaselessly changing cycle; down to a useless sea.

  ‘Well, a man stays sad when a woman makes a fool of him,’ went through her mind, and a twinge of compunction took her. Where was such a dunce to find another friend?

  That night, as the drift of snow in her hair slept in the woodstove’s dreaming light, she knelt before sleep and confessed all her fault. A woman of thirty with a boy of sixteen – she tried her best to feel ashamed, but a sense of contentment rose instead. And contentedly let her head rest on the bed, the better to hear, from some far-off square, old-fashioned music blowing faint across an old-fashioned sea.

  Girls were passing hand-in-hand and boys counterclockwise, sizing them up. But herself walked a bit to one side as befitted one luckier than some but lonelier than any. And she saw she was followed by some sort of luckless mongrel bitch looking for its owner, its leash dragging dust. It had a broken tail, as though it had been very nearly run over; people laughed for the way the broken bone bobbed this way then that, inviting males from anywhere. It ran the alleys dawn till dark, lolling its tongue in ashcan corners and any strip of shade that could hide her; then her scent would catch and she’d run on weakening legs again.

  Panting for protection, the bitch stretched in exhaustion at Terasina’s feet, blood on her hindquarters and eyes unseeing.

  ‘Don’t laugh because others follow it,’ Terasina defended it to those who dared mock – ‘she is a leader, the one who decides what game dogs shall play, and now she is thirsty from play, that’s all.’ ‘What game shall we play now?’ she asked, to teach it there was no shame in being a leader, ‘if you were not so ugly I would take you home with me.’ (Yet how it panted in that airless heat!)

  Its flesh was so thin the reddish meat shown through, and letting her hand pass caressingly down its spine felt her hand becoming part of that flesh. What she held in her hand was certainly no dog.

  ‘Not mine!’ she explained to everyone – ‘It kept following me!’ And wakened still kneeling, firelight flickering down all the walls and one hand wringing the other.

  ‘Fill your tires, mister?’ Terasina heard Dove, bright and early on the job the next morning as though nothing had happened between them. She looked out at him one story down, pressing hose to valve. He wore fresh jeans, his hair was parted and slicked down, his face scrubbed to shining. Around h
is neck he flaunted a clean green bandanna – even his ankles were clean! Had he thought he’d been fired for lack of neatness?

  When he came in for coffee she hadn’t the heart to tell him she’d meant it when she told him to leave. She saw it would be of no use. He would go on working all the same.

  Yet she could make things tough for him. Before he’d gotten the fires going she was on him about last night’s dishes. Before the sink was cleared she was after him because the coffee in the urn was low. How had she ever gotten by without him, he wondered; and she wondered a little too. He was perched on a chair filling the big chrome percolator when she leaned a broom against him – ‘Floor needs a good sweeping.’

  ‘O, put it up my tail,’ he told her below his breath, ‘I could sweep and wash the walls at the same time that way.’

  ‘You say something to me?’

  ‘A little girl got kilt.’

  She glanced at him dubiously and turned away. He felt better for having fooled her, but fooling her earned him no rest.

  Just before noon two jungle bums diverted her. One was a kind of Mexican bear, a regular little Pachuco, sideburns and all, arm in arm with a frayed-looking Swede twice his height and three times his age.

  ‘We stopped by to wish you good luck in your new location,’ the youth congratulated Terasina in Spanish. ‘Our family ate with yours often in past times, better times.’

  ‘The location is not new,’ she advised him in his own tongue. ‘I’ve been here ten years and have no family.’

  ‘Meet my father,’ he switched to English. ‘He has just been offered the job of district manager in Dallas and needs only fare to get there. Kindly to loan him one dollar fifty cents. If he doesn’t mail it back to you in two days I’ll make good on it myself – for sake of past times, better times.’

  ‘Talk English you sonofabitch,’ Dove heard Father whisper.

  ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, a nice Spanish boy of such good breeding,’ Terasina scolded the Pachuco and put two cups of coffee down for sake of past times.

  Father dipped right for it but the Pachuco had more pride.

  ‘We take our trade elsewhere, Father,’ he decided for both, hauling the Swede, complaining, to the door.

  Immediately Terasina applied herself to a new sign, laboring pencil to tongue the better part of an hour before it was done and hung on a handle of the coffee urn:

  No warm-ups. No wee bits.

  ‘What it mean?’ Dove wanted to ask after she’d read it to him as though it were self-explanatory. Things being as they were between them, he didn’t presume to ask what it meant, but merely sat and wondered.

  ‘You are paid for sitting?’ she asked, and he again hopped to it.

  Simon the Pieman drove up in time to pay for a piece of his own pie.

  ‘I admire Latin women,’ he admitted with a chocolate smear for a chin, for Simon always ordered the most expensive kind, ‘and I’m thinking of marrying and settling down.’

  He got no answer out of her to that, so he tried erudition on her.

  ‘I’m the intellectual type,’ he confided. ‘Here’s an example: Did you happen to know that Indians don’t react to lie detectors?’

  ‘Maybe Indians don’t lie.’

  ‘You always got an answer. Answer me this: Did you know that Navajoes eat grasshoppers?’

  She worked up a mild astonishment. ‘Imagine that.’

  ‘I’ll tell you why, too. If you really want to know—’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they come from a different culture. That’s why.’

  ‘So would you if you did,’ Terasina assured him, putting a lettuce-and-tomato sandwich before him in which she’d replaced the lettuce with cole slaw.

  ‘Will you warm this up?’ – he shoved his half-empty coffee cup toward her – ‘just a wee bit?’ Terasina pointed to the new warning; he saw too late that filling the cup would cost him another nickel.

  ‘What are you trying to do?’ he asked, ‘be the richest woman in the cemetery?’

  Yet he tickled her palm when he left, the simple chocolate pieman.

  They weren’t exactly stallions made of moonlight, these kings of truck and trailer. They were clods whose vices ran over weakly like coffee into their saucers. Over-eaters, over-drinkers, snuff-chewing chiselers, doers of great sins to hear them tell it, though tilting the pinball machine was actually their greatest. Their conquests were many, they let it be known. How to deal with the envy of lesser lovers their perpetual problem. Yet when she pretended to one that the weekend trip to Matamoros really sounded interesting, he changed his plans. It wasn’t to Matamoros, after all, but only to Brownsville. Not for a weekend but just for the day. And naturally he would have to bring his family.

  The only man she’d met in ten years whose flattery she found difficult to resist, because it was unintended, was Dove’s. In his eyes she read dedication.

  ‘Is that fresh choklut pie?’ he asked as if thinking it might be banana cream.

  She slapped a bar of Bon Ami down. ‘Call this pie.’

  He went to work on the windows – loveless, shoeless, choklut-pieless. When the windows were done she handed him a flyswatter – but had not reckoned he would keep track of the score.

  ‘Uno!’ he reported from the kitchen. ‘Dos! Tres! Cuatro!’ He was lying; she could tell by the swish of the swatter he wasn’t hitting a thing. Yet listened to his triumphs mount as he mounted the high dry stair – ‘Seis! Siete! Ocho!’ He was nueve from the top, diez would bring him to the bedroom door, once would bring him to the bed, at doce she heard him swatting above her head, pretending to pursue a greenbottle that wasn’t there, around the bed and around. He feinted it this way – she heard his feet reverse in a dramatic presentation of a man fooling a fly on the wing – then vaulted right over the bed and brought the swatter down smash as though pinning it to the floor. Then silence.

  A silence in which she ached to cross her ankles behind his back on that same good hard bed. And leaned her head on her hands, made half sick by that natural goodness of body and heart she had been taught was mortal sin.

  ‘En Jesus tengo paz,’ she tried to pray the good hard bed away.

  No warm-ups, the sign behind her warned: No wee bits.

  While on the bed Dove waited for her.

  He came downstairs at last swinging the swatter disconsolately, hung it where it belonged and pushed out the door.

  ‘Now I give you pie,’ she tried to call him back.

  He spat through his teeth to lay all dust and was gone.

  Gone in the silver end of day under a sky emptied of the last pelican.

  Terasina abandoned her friend on the wall that night. It was no night for virgins, that was all.

  Closed inside and shuttered out, alone in the shuttered dark she heard a small clock say ‘sick sick sick’; a prim little clock alone as herself yearning the small second hand around for the long silken lunge that could ease her. For the stroke to fill the wellsprings of her unused delight.

  What a devilish kind of clock, to tick and tick as if minutes spent lying chastely alone were the only actual sin.

  She breathed in a season without sound, not a breath of wind nor cricket to chirp. But only a clock offering alibis for playing the beast with a boy half her age.

  Till the very stillness took pity, and sleep tossed her about for a while.

  Wearing a low-backed evening gown of midnight blue spangled with green sequins but disgustingly smeared with chocolate, she asked ‘Which way to the church?’ of an elegant little humpbacked gentleman in black tie and tails, – ‘I wish to become a nun today.’

  ‘I am a great admirer of nuns,’ the elegant little gentleman assured her, and bowed even lower, ‘in fact, my father was Bishop of Seville. Our family knew yours well, Señora.’

  ‘Sire,’ she replied respectfully, ‘our family and yours descend from Cortez. Perhaps you remember my father?’

  ‘Of course. He was a lame pimp from
Puebla.’

  ‘There has always been a good pimp in our family,’ she reported with quiet pride.

  ‘There has always been a good whore in ours,’ he boasted modestly in turn. ‘Perhaps you remember my mother?’

  ‘Who could forget that royal lady who kept the pool tables where one might sleep for no more than the price of three games? How is she?’

  But before she could hear how the royal lady fared the dream trailed off and she lost her way to the church.

  She was sitting in her black lace slip, on the bed’s edge, the following morning when Dove pushed in, both arms heaped with firewood for an excuse, without troubling to knock.

  ‘Take the doors down,’ she told him, ‘we don’t need them any more.’

  He evaded her eyes, yet her own stayed hard upon him: she saw the hand holding the match tremble slightly, waiting for the flame to take hold. When it took, the weaving light flowered down his countrified face.

  Then within her a valentine of gladness struggled bravely up, there was no use denying fire.

  ‘You come to me here you,’ she ordered him, and he came to stand at attention like a summoned private. Looking past her shoulders at something outside; prepared for any order. Submitting himself so completely that it came to her heart sweetly as an old revenge.

  She pushed the suitcase slyly with her toes until it touched his own.

  ‘Why do you stand so? Do you expect me to decorate you for bravery?’

  ‘Never been in no army, m’am.’

  ‘Why not? So afraid of being a soldier?’

  ‘Aint afraid to soldier. Never been asked.’

  ‘I see. Afraid only of Terasina.’

  ‘I respect you most mightily, m’am.’

  ‘Then you have changed mightily since yesterday. Then your hand did not respect me’ – abruptly she seized both his hands in hers, turned them palm upward and flung them from her in feigned dismay – ‘Why! The very same. Only dirtier by a day. Why do you always disappoint me?’

  The stove door opened and blew an orange-colored passion across his face. His face so young yet so old.