A Walk On The Wild Side

by Nelson Algren

  ‘Promise you’ll never pull a sneaky trick like that on me again?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘Then I forgive you.’

  ‘You’re good to me. Real good. Just one thing I don’t understand.’

  ‘What’s that, Red?’

  ‘What’s wrestling with the bear?’

  ‘Solitary.’

  And exhausted by forgiveness and good works, they slept the late light down.

  ‘Let’s hear your whistle, Red.’

  Dove made a kind of feeble piping. Kitty waited.

  ‘That was it,’ he had to admit.

  She put two fingers to her lips and sirened a low-pitched shriek. ‘When I put on the steam you can hear it two blocks – it means drop everything, it’s the nab.’

  He stood, shifting from one foot to the other in the unlit areaway.

  ‘What’s the matter, Red? Afraid?’

  ‘Afraid of steppin’ on glass is all.’

  She triggered a dime-store flashlight – ‘Follow the spot.’ Dove followed.

  ‘We’re lookin’ for Cousin Jim,’ she explained.

  ‘Got no cousin of that name,’ he thought he saw a way out of this – ‘fact is I got no cousin. See you later.’ She hooked his belt and hauled him along to the rear door of a shop. She knocked so imperiously that his feet tried to turn right around. Her hand around his waist held him still. He hoped she couldn’t feel him trembling. She knocked again. But all was locked and barred.

  ‘Make me a step.’

  He made a stirrup of his hands and raised her until she secured a grip on the open transom; then it was up and over.

  She dropped so softly on the other side that, though Dove listened, he did not hear her land. Then the door swung silently, he felt the flash placed in his hand. How had she gotten behind him? ‘Straight ahead to the register,’ she took command – ‘I’m backin’ you.’ And gave him a forward shove that carried him through to the cash drawer of exactly the same model of Ohmer register he had banged for his brother. So he banged this one too and the whole side fell out. He stuck his hand in the side, grabbed a handful of something papery. Under his feet a house cat leaped from sleep. Dove went headlong, shattering the flash and on his knees felt wings brush his hair – the fool cat was halfway up a wall trying to get at something big as an owl. Clutching his bills in a flurry of feathers and fur he saw the thing flutter, wall to wall, for the open door. Its wings got through just above the cat and Dove stumbled crazily after both just as the whistle-shriek rang out.

  By the alley entrance light a small figure struggled with one twice its size. ‘Folks are certainly active tonight,’ he marveled.

  The entrance was his only way out. He walked slowly till he was almost upon the wrestling pair – then jumped for it, felt a big hand reach and miss him and bounded free to the open street.

  Over a fence and down the dark, over another and down a wall, big feet going every which way till he fell in a grassy plot.

  With no sound but that of one sleepy cricket to heed the pounding of his heart.

  ‘I’m not sure whether you’d call that runnin’,’ he congratulated himself breathlessly – ‘but if I’d had a feather in hand I could call it flyin’.’

  His hand had fastened so hard onto the bills he had to rub his palms to get the circulation going again. Then he stuffed them into the pocket of his jeans. This was no time for counting, what he needed was a railroad track.

  If Dove had one sure instinct it was, like the rabbit’s, for keeping out of sight till you reach the end of town. He turned this way and that, till a signal tower’s red and green stars led him at last to a railroad embankment.

  ‘Which way to the S.P., Mister?’ he called down to a lantern swinging in the dark.

  The light swung up. ‘You’re walkin’ the S.P. now,’ the lantern assured him – ‘keep off all trains not in motion.’

  Dove put his back up against a telephone pole and waggled his loose tooth a while, but it wouldn’t come loose all the way. And as he waggled it seemed to him the pole he was braced against was in the middle of the track. A headlight came bearing down at ninety an hour but no hurry, it had been coming on for days. He slept on.

  The clackety-banging roar of boxcars a dozen yards away woke him at last. Far down the line a little red caboose joggled and swayed like a caboose on a toy railroad.

  Dove put his hand on his bankroll to make sure it didn’t jump out, and clambered into a rocking gloom.

  ‘Anybody here?’

  No word but a creaking floor.

  ‘Good deal, Linkhorn,’ he congratulated himself. ‘Got yourself a private car and by God you’ve earned one.’ He closed the door and turned on his side. Sometimes crooks rode these trains.

  The day and the night that followed always remained a hazed kind of memory to Dove. All he recalled clearly was opening the door the next morning and seeing a veil of mist so blue it blurred the outlines of house, hill and tree. And as the morning warmed the whole big blue world began to smoke faintly.

  Louisiana.

  In the long afternoon the clouds stacked. And still, over it all, that pale shifting veil.

  A real southland haze in which one sees whatever one wishes to see. A haze that seeps behind the eyes and makes a wish-dream of everything.

  ‘I figure I’ll learn me to play the gee-tar,’ he dreamed against the boxcar door, ‘I’ll just go around playin’ a gee-tar – that’s what brings the purty girls around.’

  Louisiana.

  He saw a taller Dove in shining pants, astride a stallion white as snow, playing a guitar with one hand and holding the stallion back with the other, singing and prancing into New Orleans.

  Louisiana.

  His fingers wandered over unseen strings

  Bold brave and undaunted stood

  young Brennan on the moor—

  Dove reined in a bit to let the people see him better.

  Wishes and hopes in a blue-smoke dream as the big car rolled and his head lolled lightly. Nothing but peace and pretty weather. Dove dreamed that whole blue-smoke day away till the milking-stars came out.

  Later, while lying prostrate on the top of the car, and the train was taking water in the wilderness, he thought himself unseen while flashlights and lanterns inspected couplings and wheels. But just as the train pulled out, someone called up laughingly, ‘Keep stretched or get down inside, son.’

  So he stayed prostrate smack into a roaring blackness with a tunnel-roof scraping his back. Coal fumes piled down on him. He got his bandanna over his mouth and nose and hooked one arm under the wooden spine. All that kept him from fainting was the hope that no tunnel can last forever.

  This one nearly did. When air hit him again his senses were reeling. He spat coal dust half across that fool state.

  Dove had a railroad bull to thank for his life, and other bulls less to thank for. They wouldn’t come into the cars by day, when they were crowded, but hurried discreetly past as if the cars were empty. But at night they’d get four or five ’boes off by themselves and really go to work on them.

  One noon an armed nab stuck his nose in a boxcar door – ‘Come on out of there one by one!’

  Nobody moved. Each knew that the first to go out would get bloodied, while those who followed might get by unscratched.

  ‘I said “Come out” by God!’

  Nobody moved.

  ‘By God you don’t come out, we come in.’

  Their silence dared him.

  ‘You know,’ he turned with feigned boredom to someone behind him, ‘I’m so tired of kickin’ asses I just think I’ll start crushing skulls.’

  The second he said that somebody leaped to be the first – the deputies mobbed him while the others scattered free. Three bulls with gun butts to one unarmed stray was the common yardstick of the railroad bull’s courage. No man with the nerve to go after another with only a gun against bare fists could become a railroad bull: you had to have at least two other guns on you
r side to measure up to a vocation wherein ferocity betrayed innate cowardice.

  Sometimes the bulls took everyone off a train, marched them downtown, fingerprinted and photographed the lot, then released them with the warning, ‘Now we got a record on you. If you try riding through here again you go to the pea-farm.’ Thus the homeless were blocked out of town after town, until almost any town you could name had issued fair warning to anyone what would happen to him if he tried it again.

  Another afternoon Dove jungled up with four others beside a creek. Those who had used this patch of jungle before had left a sign asking those who came after to leave it as clean as they’d found it. Moreover, someone had left a pair of almost new shoes for Dove to find. They fitted as though made for him.

  A couple of the boys got a mulligan going. Dove lay naked in the creek smoking a cigarette and smelling the mulligan. It was his first peaceful moment since leaving Arroyo.

  He didn’t see the officers until he heard the shots. One put six holes into the mulligan pot – it steamed into the fire while the strays fled. Dove’s head peeked out of the water like a sitting duck’s. He came out dripping and sheepish.

  The game then was to see how fast a bum could get dressed while getting smashed in the head with billys from both sides. He got one for his shirt, two for his pants, and would have gotten by with no more than that if he’d had the sense to run for it. But in the midst of blows he had to sit down and try to pull on his shoes – that got him so many that he ran without them at last.

  When he hopped off the yards in Algiers across the river from New Orleans his head was still aching.

  He got the topmost layer of blood and soot off his face at somebody’s pump. Offering a nickel to the tolltaker at the ferry, the man jerked his thumb in a come-ahead-son gesture – ‘The lady paid for you.’

  Dove saw a middle-aged woman who had walked onto the ferry ahead of him. He walked up beside her, nickel still in hand.

  ‘I’ll pay my own way, thank you kindly all the same, m’am,’ he told her, and dropped the nickel in her palm. She turned beet-red but Dove felt better.

  When the boat pulled into the pier and a deckhand hurled a coil of rope to fasten the boat to the dock, Dove rushed up and helped him tie it. But all he got for his trouble was an irritated, ‘I’ll handle this, son.’

  That was how Dove came at last to the town that always seems to be rocking. Rocked by its rivers, then by its trains, between boat bell and train bell go its see-saw hours.

  The town of the poor-boy sandwich and chicory coffee, where garlic hangs on strings and truckers sleep in their trucks. Where mailmen wore pith helmets and the people burned red candles all night in long old-fashioned lamps.

  The town where the Negro women sang,

  Daddy I don’t want your money

  I just want your stingaree

  And piano-men at beat-out pianos grieved—

  Early in the morning before day

  That’s when my blues come fallin’ down

  On the Desire Street dock Dove turned into the first place he saw where beggars and bummies can lie down to rest.

  ‘Look like you been a-fightin’ a circle-saw, son,’ the desk-clerk told him.

  ‘No. Just sortin’ wild cats.’

  ‘I’ll give you a nice quiet room then, where you can rest up undisturbed. I came to town barefoot myself, so green you could scrape it off me with a cob.’

  ‘I’m a quarter light of proper change, mister,’ Dove observed without touching his change, ‘I think you’ve made a small errow.’

  The clerk came up with the palmed quarter. ‘You’ll be wearing shoes sooner than I did,’ he laughed. ‘Up the steps and first room to your right.’ Between the first room to the right and the tenth there was no difference. All were equally keyless.

  The ceiling was chicken wire. By the smell the chickens were still somewhere near. But the bed was exactly what an exhausted bum needed.

  Dove slept through the dusty evening into the feverish night. And all night heard the river boats call and call.

  Once he heard a woman, sounding like she was standing alone on a corner, telling the world all about it—

  Didn’t have nobody to teach me right from wrong

  Tol’ me ‘Girl, you’re good for nothin’—

  Now my Mama’s gone.

  Under wire on either side other dime-a-nighties slept out their ten-cent dreams. Till the hundred harps of morning struck on strings of silvered light.

  And down the long unshaded street a vendor of colored ices beat a rainbow of tin bells. A bell for every flavor as he tinkle-tinkled past. Every flavor made of water sold to tunes made out of tin.

  Come bummies, come beggars, two pennies per tune.

  With occasional glances at the metal net to see no one was peeking, Dove was bringing each bill before his eyes, memorizing its denomination and adding that to the one before. Stretching each carefully in the hope that two might be sticking together.

  When he reached forty, one loose single still lay on the bed. So he began all over with the one loose child. And was only satisfied that he was the owner of forty-one dollars when he had counted back once again.

  A Linkhorn was rich at last.

  Old-time sterno drinkers and bindlestiff nomads made the flophouse forenoon murky with their hard-time breath. But he was a Linkhorn in a cubicle all his own. He owned neither shirt nor shoes – but joy to a world full of shirts and shoes. One loose tooth was a small penalty enough to wake up being Dove Linkhorn.

  Too bad, of course, about that little fool gal who hadn’t been smart enough to keep from getting herself pinched. Kids like that shouldn’t try crime till they knew what they were doing. ‘I hope this proves a lesson to that child to go straight before it’s too late,’ he hoped. ‘She weren’t cut out for the life like us crim’nals with a more natural bent.’

  A little handkerchief, torn nearly in two and gray now with soot, dropped out of his pocket onto the floor. When he brushed off the soot he saw it was black and had once had lace on it. He felt a certain stiffness in its folds. And felt a shadowy apprehension that he might never hurt anyone except those who were dearest.

  That he would know an abundance of pangs, some swift, some slow, some merely passing, and one that would never let him go.

  ‘Hopes I didn’t hurt you bad, Señora,’ he explained. ‘Just when I was gettin’ ready to help you up to say I didn’t mean what I done, that fool engineer blew his whistle and I had to hasten on.’

  Yet the light lay pasted like a second-hand shroud against a guilt-stained wall: she had held a handkerchief out to him and he’d wiped his mouth with the back of his hand instead.

  ‘I’ll get somebody to handwrite a letter,’ he promised himself, ‘to tell I’m sorry now for what I done.’

  Down the long unshaded street a rainbow of tin bells pinked out two pennies worth of applause and moved off to some far wider street. Morning seemed done.

  A looming fear followed down the darkened stair. The bannister had been greased with another’s guilt, step by slow step down an echoing well. Where regrets of strangers burdened all the air.

  Out on the open street he felt like a parolee released on some promise he could never keep.

  Dove left all guilty loomers behind for a while in the wide wonder of Canal and the hurly-burly holler-and-bounce of its sun-bound whisper and roar. Theatre marquees, mounted policemen, a red motorcycle with a blue sidecar and a popcorn machine popping right out on the street. A woman’s perfume turned him clean about – O, look at her legs moving under her dress! Here comes another! He found his way into an awning’s shade and leaned there against a barber’s pole until his senses steadied.

  ‘Why do I act so derned suspicious?’ he complained to himself – a man with forty dollars don’t have to take a back seat to no man. Why, a man who owned that much was already on his way to being a captain.

  A banana or a cotton captain, a peanut or a popcorn captain, a coffee or a wh
iskey or a corn-likker captain – though of course nobody got to be a captain of anything just like that. First you had to help those already captains to haul their coffee and pop their corn, drive their black locomotives or steer their big white boats. Not even a captain could do everything himself. ‘I could be a tooth dentist,’ he thought. ‘A doctor is good too, account he can cut ’n slash ’n have license to do it.’

  You began at the foot of the ladder and when somebody tried pushing past you he got your big foot in his face – he’d have to get a pair of waterproof boots right soon. Though there wasn’t, of course, much danger of anyone being foolhardy enough to try wise stuff on a Linkhorn—

  ‘I count purty fair too,’ he considered a bookkeeping or banking career ‘though I do have that one little deefect, that I never got beyond B.’ Nevertheless, he took measure of his varied powers, ‘I do have a very strong mind. I reckon a man with a mind as strong as mine could in time prize up creation and put a small chunk under it.’

  In the window the barber was signaling something with a bottle of hair tonic in his hand. Dove grinned to see if the man wanted to make friends. When the man made for the door with shears in his hand Dove judged not and shambled back to Canal.

  He bought two colored ices, an orange one and a green, from a vendor wearing sunglasses, and slipped him a Mexican nickel. Sure enough, he got an American penny in change. ‘Good deal, Linkhorn,’ he congratulated himself, ‘when it comes to figuring I’m already well past B. Got to git me a change purse for these smaller operations.’

  He followed a St Charles Street trolley up to Lee Circle. There, one hand stained green and the other orange, he crowded an elderly fellow with a bandaged foot off a bench to make room for his own big feet. The old man went off stabbing the pavement with his cane.

  ‘Crip got all fired up about somethin’,’ Dove sensed, ‘Now I wonder who that captain might be,’ and squinted up in perplexity at a heroic sculpture. ‘Must be somebody from the Rebel War,’ he finally decided.

  A bald-headed man in a soiled suit and a Hoover collar came up to Dove’s bench with a sheepish air. ‘I’m not a beggar,’ he explained, ‘actually, I’m in the diplomatic service. They’re holding a post for me in Washington and when I get there I’ll sleep in the best hotels, of course. Tonight, however, it will be necessary for me to sleep out again unless someone like you should loan me fifteen cents.’