A Walk On The Wild Side

by Nelson Algren

  ‘Red,’ she told him in the dark when the car began at last to roll, ‘put your hands under me before these boards pinch my little hump clean off.’

  With both hands cushioning her pine-knot bottom, Kitty Twist wriggled comfortably until she grew warm. She didn’t mind that Dove’s own narrow behind was freezing.

  ‘I love you, baby,’ he told her because having saved her life he supposed he ought to. ‘I’ll buy you play-pretties and posey flowers. I’ll learn me a trade ’n take care of you.’

  He felt her cold little lips and her small cold mouth, her little cold hands that felt so greedy.

  ‘Daddy, you’ll never have to work,’ Kitty Twist told Dove. ‘I’ll work hard ’n give you all my money.’

  He couldn’t see her smiling too knowingly in the dark.

  ‘The poorer people are the more likely they are to help you,’ Kitty told him the next morning after they had once again left engine and cars in charge of the crew. ‘Pick the first unpainted shack you see.’

  She followed Dove into a littered yard and waited while he rapped the door of a knocked-together-by-hand house the color of soot. A soot-colored wife came to answer.

  ‘My brother took hisself a small fall, M’am,’ Dove pleaded, ‘Would you allow him to worsh up at yer pump?’

  ‘Whut he sayin’?’ the woman looked to Kitty for help.

  ‘He wants to know can I wash up in your house.’

  ‘Come in, child,’ the woman invited Kitty, holding wide the door.

  Dove waited in the yard humming softly—

  Well hush, O hush

  Somebody’s callin’ me

  Until Kitty came out scrubbed and shining, a band-aid on her cheek and a half a bar of Ivory soap in her hand.

  ‘Oldfolks wasn’t fooled for a minute,’ Kitty reported. ‘Called me “Sis”’n set me down in the tub ’n scrubbed my back ’n made me wash between my toes – Look’ – she revealed white anklets – ‘And would you believe it? She sung to me the whole time.’

  ‘What she sing?’

  ‘Don’t Bite The Hand That’s Feeding You.’

  ‘They aint like you and me,’ Dove explained, ‘they’re simple people. But I could stand a worsh-off myself.’

  ‘You’ll get one uptown,’ Kitty promised – ‘Look – I throw like a damned man,’ and she hurled the Ivory clear across the tracks.

  ‘Mighty fine whip for a girl,’ Dove had to concede.

  ‘For a girl hell. Walter Johnson never throwed better. I’m a big-league kid from a big-league town.’

  ‘I never did see a real big town,’ Dove admitted, ‘full of store-bought marvels. They got them in Houston?’

  ‘They got ’em, but you’ll have to go shopping yourself. I go down the main stem and I’m on my way back to The Home by morning. I got a W on me, Jack.’

  ‘I’ll see law-folks don’t snatch you, Kitty,’ Dove promised.

  ‘I’ll see you get shoes and a shirt too, Red,’ she returned the favor – ‘I’ll dress you up in the finest.’

  ‘I’ll get you a red silk dress with a tasselly-sash ’n goldy year-rangs too.’

  ‘Red, what I’m trying to say is I’ll hustle for you if want me to.’

  ‘I’ll hustle for you too,’ he promised.

  ‘My God,’ the girl thought, ‘he thinks I mean I’m going to be a shoe-clerk for him. I’m going to have to straighten him out till there’s nothing left but kinks.’

  Although Kitty Twist had never hustled, she knew the trade from older hands with whom she’d been institutionalized, and had run off upon the prospect of going into business for herself.

  Down a side-street a sign invited them – PRISONERS’ VOLUNTEER AID SOCIETY.

  ‘The usual fee here is two bits,’ the ex-con at the desk confided, ‘but if you boys are short I’ll accommodate you both for that. Got two bits between you?’

  ‘What’s the accommodation?’ Kitty was curious.

  ‘One meal, one flop, one shower apiece.’

  The ex-con pocketed her quarter and they followed him into the kitchen. He put two bowls of withered cole slaw before them and two cups of cold chicory coffee.

  ‘That’s the meal,’ he explained. ‘You still got a shower and a flop comin’.’

  ‘Go get your wash-off right away, Red,’ Kitty urged him as soon as she’d tasted the coffee – ‘They’re running out of well-water hereabouts.’

  An old man stood under the stream letting the water trickle in and out of his navel while keeping a worried eye on a lean and vulturous creature crouched above his clothes. The vulture had just finished examining the old man’s rags and was cupping his palms to the light; then kicked the bundle off to one side without taking his eyes off his palms. He had caught something all right.

  ‘Extryordinary!’ the old man seemed to know what it was. ‘Extryordinary!’

  The louse-runner ground his palms together under the water.

  ‘Them that don’t git crushed gits drowned,’ he announced with barbarous glee.

  Then hovered over Dove as Dove undressed in turn.

  The shower was cold but there was strong brown soap. The touch of it burned the bruise on his lip, but he scrubbed himself till his fingers went numb. The water kept getting colder and colder.

  The louse-runner returned Dove’s clothes with a disappointed air. Dove asked him for a cap, and after some rummaging was presented with a battered and sunburned floater of straw. It would keep the coal out of his hair and the sun out of his eyes. He lacked the courage to ask for shoes.

  Then down some wide and quiet street the pair trudged past windows curtained and shaded. Although it was only midafternoon everyone seemed asleep. They came to a playground where no children played.

  ‘School’s out!’ Dove decided in a shout, and made for the nearest swing. Standing spreadlegged, he got it pumping high. Kitty’s little sexless face looked up at him from below. Every time he swung past her she said, ‘We don’t have time for fooling, Red.’

  He came down off the swing in a shambling run. She watched to see what was next.

  The rings: around and around, toes scraping the ground, his hair in his eyes and his mouth in a shout, ‘Look at me! Look at me!’

  ‘I never seen anything like it.’ She decided to watch a while.

  ‘How’s this?’

  Dove had looped his knees into the rings and was hanging head down, hat gone and hair brushing cinders and sand.

  ‘Just let me know when you’ve had enough, Red. I got all day.’

  But his childhood had just begun and he hadn’t had nearly enough.

  ‘Catch me when I come down!’ he warned her from the top of a chute. And she, the wingless jay of alley and areaway, had to stand at the foot of the chute as he came down head first to prevent him from breaking his neck. He grabbed her hand and hauled her to the teeter-tawter.

  ‘Break your back or bust your ass,’ Kitty Twist had had enough – ‘I’m New Orleans bound myself.’

  Dove sat on the useless teeter-tawter, a see-saw boy with no one to see-saw. And watched his only friend go out the playground gate. The teatless little fly-by-night outcast wandering the wild earth just to get even with everything upon it.

  ‘She acts like she done me a favor letting me save her life,’ Dove thought, ‘let her go.’

  He pumped himself high again on the swing. He took a flyer, even faster than before, on the rings. Then climbed the highest chute in the yard. When he reached the top he was breathing hard and had strangely lost heart for sliding. He slid down at last only as a way of getting back to the ground. Stumbling with loneliness, he hurried after anyone who could keep him from being alone again. Leaving his boyhood at the top of the chute and his true manhood still unreached.

  Kitty was nowhere in sight. Nobody at all down the sunstricken street. Dove wanted to run back home.

  ‘Here’s your hat.’ She stepped out of the shadows so softly that he knew she had been watching him.

  ‘I’m no
t yet sure you’re real, Red,’ she told him as though to explain his suspicion.

  ‘If I don’t ask you to prove something like that yourself,’ he told her thoughtfully, ‘then you wont have to have ask proof of me.’

  ‘I’ll watch it after this,’ she told him, always wary. But he was lost, she saw, in wonder of the houses lining either side of this avenue where private footpaths led to every door.

  ‘How many folks you figure live in jest that one place?’ he asked, pointing at one.

  ‘None at all,’ she informed him, ‘the sign says FOR SALE.’

  After that Dove noticed many such signs on houses whose paint was beginning to crack. Weeds grew in the paths guarded by oaks that had guarded Indian trails.

  In a small suburban park they came to a line of sleepy stores, in several of which no business was done any more. Kitty took him for a leisurely arm-in-arm stroll down one side of the little half-dead town and up the other.

  ‘You got kin-folks around here?’ Dove asked because of the way she lingered.

  ‘Neither chick nor child,’ she assured him, bringing him up in front of a window where sawdust lay scattered. As they watched, a musty-looking rabbit hippety-hopped from a corner, got halfway across the window and turned back to its home-corner. Kitty left Dove to conduct inspection of the areaway behind the shop and returned briefly.

  ‘We’ll look in here after dark,’ she reported back, ‘I’ll need a little boost. Don’t worry – I’m the best damn stinker for my size and age in the business.’

  ‘I can’t help you in that business, sis,’ Dove informed her, ‘account I prefer a daytime trade. Like on one of them big white boats I seen a picture of in N’wawlins.’

  ‘In where?’

  ‘A book. Picture-book.’

  ‘I mean where was the place you just said?’

  ‘N’wawlins.’

  Kitty thought everything over. Even then she didn’t sound too sure. ‘You wouldn’t by chance be talking about New Orleans, would you?’

  ‘It’s what I said. N’wawlins.’

  ‘I see. And when you get there you’ll walk into the steward’s office without a shirt, barefoot, needing a haircut ’n ask him if he needs a captain?’

  ‘I weren’t intended to be no captain,’ Dove told her. ‘I weren’t meant to be more than a private. But I don’t figure to try even for private without I first look genteel.’

  ‘What size shoes you wear, Red?’

  ‘Haint wearin’ none. Walkin’ barefooty.’

  She studied the feet he kept throwing from one side of the walk to the other.

  ‘Thirteen and a half,’ she judged.

  ‘That’s pretty close,’ Dove agreed.

  ‘Close to what?’

  ‘Close to fourteen.’

  ‘You can stop putting on the weakminded act for me any time now,’ Kitty Twist advised him. ‘I’m on.’

  Down in Houston’s Mexican slum there stood, that June of ’31, a three-story firetrap with a name:

  H

  O

  T

  E

  L

  That’s all: Hotel Hotel.

  ‘Never did try sleepin’ in a skyscraper afore,’ Dove looked up – ‘Whut do it costes here?’

  ‘Thirty-five cents apiece,’ Kitty informed him, ‘and some places go yet higher.’

  ‘In that case,’ Dove decided, ‘we’ll have to find an inexpensive place.’

  ‘We get breakfast throwed in here though.’

  ‘What gits throwed?’

  ‘Mission donuts ’n coffee black.’

  ‘Then we’re too far north.’

  Kitty tried to let it go but the temptation was too strong.

  ‘How do you figure that, Red?’

  ‘When folks stop puttin’ out liverpuddin’ for breakfast, everyone’s too far north.’

  ‘And I’m not in the least surprised,’ Kitty agreed. And supporting herself on his arm she slipped her sneaker off a moment, slipped it back on and released his arm.

  ‘Well what do you know? Just look here what I found in my shoe, Red.’

  A five dollar bill lay folded in her palm.

  ‘That’s purely luck, sis. How it git there?’

  She gave him a knowing nudge. ‘Didn’t I tell you colored folks are the friendliest? Why does everyone think that their kitchen matchbox is the First National?’

  ‘I never would of pecked that door if I’d knowed that that was what you were up to,’ Dove told her.

  ‘That’s why I didn’t tell you.’

  ‘It aint right to steal off folks while they’re doin’ you a kindness, Kitty. Do unto others as you would be done by.’

  ‘I’ll try to remember that too—’ she swung him about. ‘Why, Red, do you know what a pair of three-dollar shoes and a two-dollar shirt would do for you? People would be calling you Preacher, that’s what.’ She took his arm and hurried him into the lobby. ‘And you wouldn’t be the first country boy to turn into a town pimp neither,’ she added to herself.

  ‘My pappy was a preacher of sorts,’ he told her. ‘The sort to make you throw your Bible away.’

  He stood on one side while she conferred with the desk clerk, and eyed himself sidelong in the long lobby mirror. She was right at that: if anything could improve him it was clothes.

  ‘The only bedtime story my old lady ever told me began and ended with “You leave me cold,”’ Kitty Twist recalled. ‘That’s what she’d say when she’d sober up. When they took me away from her and put me in Juvenile I was a real little terror there. I was mad ’cause I hadn’t stole things like the other kids. I wetted the bed and a matron snitched so I had to sleep in the Skunk Room. That’s the dorm with rubber mattresses for bed-wetters. I was eight. They were afraid by the time I was ten I’d flood them out.

  ‘That was when Mama went on the wagon to show them she meant it when she said she wanted me back. Got a crowd of ex-alkies to back her so I had to go. “All for my baby” was how she’d put it.

  ‘“If that’s the case you can step down any time,” I finally told her, “Because now you leave me cold.” Mama couldn’t stand a tie – in her book somebody had to win and somebody had to lose. When she fell off the wagon you could heard the crash for miles.

  ‘But if I was going to do another stretch I was going to do it for something I done, not on somebody else’s account. They caught me crossing some bridge. If I’d made that bridge I would of been alright. I would of been out of Illinois.

  ‘By the time I was fourteen I was back with kids a full head shorter than me. I wetted the bed the first night. Imagine – fourteen years old and right back where I’d been at eight! I realized then I wasn’t getting ahead.’

  She pulled up the sleeve of her right arm. It was tattooed from shoulder to wrist.

  ‘Got ’em on my legs too. Done ’em myself with plain needles ’n plain ink. I had thirty-two days wrestling with the bear so I worked on myself to keep from getting even crazier. I wanted to do something they could never undo. That nobody could undo. Now I’d give anything to be rid of the damn things. But at least it showed the others I wasn’t no rat.

  ‘Did you ever see four big men hold a girl down on a table while the fifth does the whipping? It was how they done me with a leather belt four feet long. It had a silver buckle I can’t forget yet. And how they did drag it out! I could count up to ten between wallops. One hundred licks – I took the most they were allowed to give. And didn’t cry Tear One. That showed I wasn’t a crybaby.

  ‘Why’d they do it? I flooded the toilet with cotton, that’s why. Why’d I do that? Search me. I’m always doing things I don’t know why. Maybe I just wanted to be a character. You know how you get to be a character? You sit in your room like the living dead, that’s how. They take everything away. There’s nothing to read – not even a candy wrapper. You can’t write letters neither. You get half a cup of dry cereal for breakfeast, two slices of stale bread and a piece of bologna for lunch and half a cup of slo
ppy stew for supper. That’s how you get to be a character.

  ‘I found a friend. A skunkie just like me. A little deaf-and-dumb Spade chick, used to lay there on the floor shagging and counting on her fingers. I stuck around, even when I had a chance to run, on her account. She was my friend. When they put her in some sort of hospital I had no reason for sticking any longer. Next time I came to that bridge I took the trolley. How long you been on the run, Red?’

  ‘Things did get a mite hot around home,’ Dove acknowledged, ‘so I just tuck with the leavin’s.’

  She misunderstood. ‘Stealing is kicks alright. I like to get in there and do the job myself. There’s something about going through an empty joint when it’s dark and empty and you can take what you please that’s got kicks like crazy. It’s so much fun you want to do it all the time. You know what the best kick of all is, Red? It’s when you put a gun on grownups and watch them go all to pieces and blubber right before your eyes. That’s the best. How long you say you been on the run?’

  Dove didn’t answer but he was on the run all the same. Making good time down Dream Boulevard. She watched him curiously. In sleep his mouth looked as if he’d just been insulted. She couldn’t know that he was standing on the courthouse steps in Fitz’s split-tail coat, leading the singing—

  In solemn delight I survey

  A corpse when the spirit has fled—

  while a figure with a shaded face, astride a howitzer, kept swaying in solemn delight.

  To mourn and to suffer is mine—

  While bound to this prison I breathe—

  a prison where it cost ten cents to go in and see a corpse from which the spirit had actually fled. Kitty Twist, wearing black elbow gloves, was selling tickets just the other side of the wall. They had grown rich and famous traveling from town to town but she giggled too much and he woke to her giggling. For she had locked him to her in a vise and it was a moment too late to get loose.

  ‘I’m just so ashamed,’ she told him later. ‘What ever got into you to make me do such a thing?’ In her eyes stood the same glass tears.

  ‘I must of just got carried away,’ Dove decided.