A Walk On The Wild Side

by Nelson Algren

  ‘Don’t intend to disappoint you, m’am.’ And in the arm he placed about her she felt a commanding gentleness.

  ‘What is a woman to do with such a cunning man?’ then waited for him to begin apologizing and so spoil everything.

  Instead he hauled her shoulder straps down as though he had paid for her clothes, cleared her of everything to her waist, and made her lean against him. Then lifted her breast to study it: a brown melon tipped with pink. Apparently satisfied with that one, he replaced it and studied the other.

  ‘It’s the same,’ she assured him. ‘Is there anything else I can do for you, useless cunning man?’

  For answer, Useless gave her breasts an approving squeeze.

  ‘Ready for crating,’ he told her. Then the touch of his lips made her eyes come wet as his hands went gently wild. In a kiss that went on and on, in an everlasting kiss. Till her eyes that had darkened with desire now lighted in electric bliss.

  His hide-tight jeans and her black lace slip lay tangled inextricably on the floor. ‘Empuje’ and her arms drew him down and in. Compressing her pleasure till she threshed for release. He eased the pressure then; precisely as slowly as he had pressed.

  And began a kind of controlled abandon that made her half marvel and half mourn at all she’d missed – ‘So slow. I did not know, I did not know.’

  Right to the precipice’s edge he brought her, letting her subside only to draw her yet closer to the brink. Prolonging her pleasure till it verged on pain. Then, needing to rid herself of all this, locked him more fiercely in, beat at his chest with both her fists, and upon the peak, with one flame-like thrust, fell and fell in a weightless delight released from all pleasure, all pain.

  Down and down in a dream of falling where nothing lived but two far-off voices in a Mindanao Deep of peace, some bottomless depth of perfect rest. Hearing a man’s slow-drawn breath and a woman’s grateful sobbing.

  Till somebody’s hands lightly wandered her face and she realized remotely it was her own eyes someone was trying to dry. Tears were sealing them.

  After the moment of joy, he had had that deep pang of guilt that lasts less long than the flesh hangs limp, and is gone, good riddance to it.

  Her hands traced his back to show she understood, though she understood nothing at all. Then fell languidly away. Terasina Vidavarri slept like a great baby then.

  ‘I don’t know what kind of great I’m bound to be,’ Dove considered his prospects calmly, ‘all I know for certain is I’m a born world-shaker.’

  And drew on his hide-tight jeans like a victor.

  The born world-shaker was tying an apron around his waist, preparing to clean up pans and pots, when he saw Byron hurrying barefoot through the dust. Certainly didn’t take long for word to get around this shite-poke town. Dove had just time to snatch a cigarillo from the tobacco counter and light it for courage before Byron pushed in and looked around. In the dappled gloom of early morning he wasn’t able to see a thing.

  ‘Mornin’, Byron,’ Dove introduced himself.

  ‘Mornin’, Dove.’

  ‘Do anythin’ for you this mornin’?’

  ‘Reckon not. Just happen to be passin’ by.’

  ‘Care for coffee?’

  ‘I’m a mite low in funds.’

  Dove drew the coffee. ‘On the house. Sweet roll?’

  ‘Mighty kind of you, Dove. Mighty kind. It appear you’re makin’ it pretty good.’

  ‘I’m makin’ it.’

  ‘How’s Dolores Del Rio?’

  ‘I didn’t mean makin’ in that particular sense’ – Dove got a good strong whiff of danger – ‘I just work here, Byron.’

  ‘How old is that Mex, Dove?’

  ‘She give her age as twenty-one.’

  ‘I reckon she lost her measuring stick. How much she pay you?’

  ‘Aint no business of you’rn.’

  ‘Taint likely Dear Little Pappy approve.’

  ‘Taint likely I’m to tell Little Pappy.’

  ‘Mighty likely I’m to.’

  ‘I’d name that right onfriendly.’

  ‘Why then, let’s be friendly.’

  ‘You want a cigar too, Byron?’

  Byron coughed his little dry cough. He shook his head, though the very invitation made his throat tickle pleasurably. Holding his bandanna to his mouth, he pointed to the register and held up a single finger.

  Dove stared. Byron snapped his fingers. ‘Pronto! Pronto!’

  Dove hurried to obey, hoping to make as tiny a ring on the register as possible. There were bills, there was silver. He picked four quarters and weighed them a moment as though changing his mind.

  Byron’s open palm reached over the counter. The quarters fell one by one.

  It was only when Byron slammed the screen that Dove realized the cash drawer was still standing open.

  She wakened slowly, feeling more well than she had in years. A great white sun was making a Mexican mosaic across the floor.

  She felt lazily grateful to it for going to all that trouble just on Terasina’s account. She felt she had been ill and the sun had healed her. Mighty nice of the sun.

  But who had slammed a door?

  Then saw a small handkerchief of black Spanish lace still damp from her own tears. Remembrance returned like bad news from a stranger. News of some injustice that could never be undone. And visualizing herself convulsed on a bestiary bed, the room that had smelled of soap and chastity smelled now only of lust. She picked her night dress off the floor as gingerly as though it were befouled.

  Just as the cash-drawer banged shut.

  She composed her features and her hair, dressed unhurriedly and came downstairs assuring herself that nothing was different than yesterday, though a slow-burning fury shook her every step of the way.

  Dove appeared to think a number of changes had been made. He was toting a cup of coffee with the look of a daydreaming idiot’s, mild and satisfied. The stump of a cigar burned in his mouth as smugly as if it had been paid for.

  ‘Come here to me you,’ she told him from the register, ‘I want to show you funny theeng.’ Her English had no Spanish accent unless she were under emotional stress; he should have taken warning just from that. ‘A funny theeng – look!’

  She was pointing to a peso note. ‘See. Is made by American company – Mexico must have Americans to make even their money!’

  He nodded thoughtfully. It didn’t seem quite right at that, and came a step nearer, balancing his coffee carefully.

  ‘But it is alright,’ she reassured him – ‘Mexicans make the money for Chinamens’ – and with an upsweep of her open palm spun coffee and saucer and all; he stood running coffee from eyes to chin, his mouth unhinged for coffee to run in. Saucer and cup crashed at his feet.

  Clenching his overall strap in one fist and gripping the seat of his jeans with the other, she rushed him forward so fast his toes touched the floor only twice on the trip – and with a single two-handed shove sent him stumbling into the dust where she’d found him.

  Dove knelt on all fours in the road as though looking for something he’d lost. He picked himself up heavily, brushed himself slowly down. To study her sunstriped figure behind the fast-hooked screen.

  ‘I tell you once,’ she reminded him – ‘Go. I tell you now Go. Go. Go.’

  She watched him out of sight.

  Then all her anger drained and died.

  Leaving her just a small careworn woman with one stocking fallen under a sign that said—

  Bien venidas, todas ustedes

  Half that night Dove listened to Byron and Fitz arguing whether the world moved or stood still.

  ‘Take a butterfly,’ the old man kept insisting, ‘the way it keeps hovering over the ground just above one patch. If the earth moved, he’d come down in the next yard, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘That butterfly got more brains than you have, old man,’ Byron replied. ‘He knows the world is round and that’s more than you do. So he moves just fast
enough to keep up with the patch. It may look to you like he’s just fluttering, but he’s keeping even all the same.’

  ‘Did you ever throw a ball in the air and catch it coming down?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Then common sense will tell you that if the earth actually moved you’d be too far away to catch it coming down, wouldn’t you? Now tell me the ball knows the earth is moving.’ The old man had victory within reach.

  ‘For God’s sake, when they say the earth moves it don’t mean it goes forty miles an hour, old man,’ Byron protested.

  ‘What’s to keep it from going forty?’ Fitz asked dryly, ‘if it’s round as you claim it ought to be going faster and faster like a snowball down a hill. I’ll tell you the reason it don’t move is the same reason it aint round – it got corners to keep it from moving. I’ll prove it by the good book.’

  Dove heard him rustling about with the battered Bible, trying to find the passage that proved him right.

  ‘Don’t bother, old man,’ Byron sounded tired. ‘I know what you’re lookin’ for – “and the winds blew from the four corners of the earth” – so how can anything round have corners? Go to sleep, fool old man.’

  The light was turned down. Dove heard the old man creep onto his cot bed. So long as the world was flat he would sleep well upon it. Only round worlds left Fitz sleepless.

  As softly as if he’d been saving it Byron asked – ‘On what day of the Creation did God say “Let there be light and there was light”?’

  ‘The first, of course,’ Fitz answered contentedly.

  Dove heard a little silence run about around the room and back. Byron had a sense of timing.

  ‘And when did He make the two great lights, the greater to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night?’

  ‘The fourth, naturally.’

  ‘Think that over, old man.’ Byron turned on his side. He slept best upon a rounded star.

  Dove heard the old man thinking it all over; tossing then fuming. While Byron slept the sleep of the just, snoring softly.

  Dove was glad Byron had won for once. But personally didn’t care if the planet was shaped like a pretzel. He had issues more pressing to solve.

  ‘First she totes me on and the next thing I know I’m standin’ on my haid in the middle of the road. She could have spore me that.’

  Well, he wasn’t the sort to hang around a door he’d been shoved through. She’d have to send for him before he’d work for her again. That much was certain.

  All the same, there is no statute forbidding a man to walk down the common highway.

  Dust puffs filed behind him early the next morning, and an anxious wind went sniffing ahead like a hound favoring a sore forefoot; gas lamp to telephone pole, one side of the road to the other. Till it came to the lamp that leaned toward the La Fe as the La Fe leaned toward it. There it scooted suddenly around the corner into the yard, abandoning Dove altogether.

  He hadn’t heard of any law forbidding a man to go around the corner of a broken-down chili parlor either.

  Terasina’s back was toward him. Her earrings glinted green against the white of the wash like news of an early spring. Slips and step-ins, yellow and pink, flapped about her like invitations to love in the morning. The strong forenoon light silhouetted her thighs to the full and the wide.

  Sure enough, she was hanging yesterday’s black night dress. He watched the wind pawing it and saw it turning a little away from the wind like a girl evading a jealous lover. A wind that could not let matters be, but had to twist things around to suit itself.

  Raising herself on her sandaled toes to reach the topmost point of the line, she stretched her brown sleeveless arms and her haunches pressed hard together.

  As he had pressed them with his own large hand, when his other had pillowed her head.

  That he would not pillow again. He spat across the fence and saw his spittle strangle itself on a thorn.

  Look who’s hangin’ out her dirty underdrawers.

  Out of the corner of her eye Terasina saw him leaning. One more tramp come to stare. So stare. If it helps your health it does me no harm. I did not send for you.

  Won a wetback beauty contest forty years ago and thinks she’s the Queen of the May.

  Go when you wish to go.

  Let’s people see her make a-purpose. Thinks she got so much to show because she sells old fried beans. Wouldn’t be the least surprised if folks run her back across the river one of these nights.

  If I am to play the whore I will play for my own people.

  Better lookers than this Pachuco would be giving him the eye in Dallas or Houston one of these days. ‘Let me spend my money on you, Big Boy,’ is what they’d be asking him. Big Boy wouldn’t be wasting time on Pachucos then. He’d have some trim blue-eyed Anglo all his own, to cook him up real American meals. There wouldn’t be any frijoles in that house by God. And she’d say ‘think’ instead of ‘theenk’ and go to a Christian church and wear enough clothes on her back to keep every passerby from seeing how she was built between ankles and belly button. In Houston. Or was that Dallas?

  ‘No work today,’ she took the clothespin out of her teeth to announce.

  ‘I got a better job,’ he assured her.

  ‘Oh? That is nice.’

  ‘Aint in this old shite-poke town neither.’

  ‘What poke town is it in?’

  ‘Dallas, natcherly.’

  ‘What do you do there, in Dallas?’

  ‘You’ll read about that in the paper.’

  ‘You bring the paper and I read about it, so you know what you do there too.’

  ‘It’s not hard to make fun of weakness in others. I’ll pay you the dollar I borrowed.’

  ‘You owe me nothing but goodbye,’ she told him and bent, trim at the waist and broad at the shoulders, hitching her skirt to the backs of her knees.

  She didn’t sense him coming up until his hands clamped her waist – then she wheeled like an ambushed cat and jammed the clothespin into his teeth. He rocked as if hit by fire.

  ‘Segundos?’ Terasina inquired politely.

  He drew off, shaking his head and spitting splinters. No, he didn’t care for seconds on clothespins. He reached cowlike toward the blood trickling down his chin, and she held out the little black lace kerchief.

  He shook his head. ‘Keep your rag.’

  ‘That is all I can do for you today then.’ The proceedings were closed.

  ‘You done nothin’ so great for me any other day,’ he told her, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand – ‘but you durn well liked what I done fer you.’

  Her face showed no recollection.

  ‘It felt good is what you said,’ he remembered gallantly. ‘Slow you said – you liked it slow,’ and put his hand on the nape of her neck. She sank her teeth into his palm, he felt them sink to the bone and forced her, biting still, to her knees.

  ‘It’ll be a little faster today,’ he assured her, ‘I’m a mite short of time.’

  Spring-green and sun-yellow the clothes flapped about. Polkadot bandannas flapped a polkadot quadrille. But the night dress turned aside and a stocking hung dark as a shroud. Till she lay on her side with her head between her hands and her dress tossed back to her hips. The front of the dress was ripped to the waist. A low wind paused long enough to toss a handful of dust and pass on. It was done.

  Dove picked up her handkerchief and daubed his chin. He waggled a lower front tooth. It was just a mite loose. The noon freight hooted two miles away.

  Like a man walking through water he shuffled toward the S.P. water tower. The freight whooped like a Sioux who has seen too many westerns.

  He stayed out of sight till the cars began passing.

  The first stars arrived early that night to see how Dove Linkhorn was making out. And saw right off that here was one party who didn’t take funny stuff off anybody any more. Folks who thought this boy looked foolish felt different when they began to hurt. ‘Mighty rough
customer,’ the planets agreed till Dove closed the doors on those gossiping stars.

  He heaped straw for a mattress, wadded a bandanna for a pillow, pulled a yellowed rotogravure page to his chin for a sheet. Who needed Texas? Let Texas roll by.

  And slept without remorse.

  Only once, clasping his stomach as the car rocked and rolled him between nightmares and dreams, he whimpered a little.

  When he wakened the cars were clanking an iron alarm and daybreak was shagging the shirtless and shiftless, the lame, the lost and the shoeless from under the brake beams and down the spines. Fleeing reefers, clambering couplings, climbing raggedly down off the ladders; walking wounded and battle-stragglers limped, leaned and hobbled to the closest aid-station.

  ‘Lots of fine folks out seein’ the country,’ Dove tried to get in step, ‘Didn’t reckon there’d be so many so early in the year.’ And stayed out of step for a quarter of a mile, to some half-sunken barns that might have stabled the federal cavalry that had once pursued Pancho Villa.

  As a matter of fact, that was exactly what they had. Though the horses were gone with Villa now – mavericks and herd-bound hides alike. Hoof prints long sunk and riders unsaddled – captains and privates all alike. In rooms where the lighting was still by gas some lay drunk and others lay dying, and all were long since unsaddled. Dead or dying, drunk or derailed, Captains or privates, all alike.

  The whole wide land looked disheveled as a bed in a cheap hotel.

  ‘Folks looken a bit peakedy,’ Dove observed, feeling slightly on the peakedy side himself. A lettered warning stopped him the way a stranger’s lips, moving silently, stop a deaf mute.

  ‘What do the sign sayz, mister?’ he tapped a fedora no higher than his shoulder, rambling along atop a faded plaid lumberjack.

  ‘It sayz here this is a city shelter,’ a foxlike bark came out of a face like that of a terrier bitch – a face neither feminine nor male, but the voice was a girl’s – ‘it sayz to scoff up here all you want ’n thank the citizens of San Anton’ for it in your prayers—’ she paused to let others give thanks – ‘but stay out of town or them same citizens will slap you right into the crummiest slammer in Texas.’