The Devil's Stocking

by Nelson Algren

  “Mr. Escortez departed,” Ben Raymond continued, “without extensive cross-examination. No rebuttal. Would you say then that a young man like Escortez, who told a story not favorable to the state, would be more likely to say, ‘I will tell the truth regardless of consequences,’ than a Baxter with five armed robberies, breaking and entering and an escape to account for to the state? The price is high, ladies and gentlemen, but the state is prepared to pay.

  “Calhoun is a young man in fear of his life. Iello and Baxter have only to gain here. Can you believe that this man, who did not run, who did not hide, did these things?

  “But that is not, of course, the question. Did the state prove its charges beyond a reasonable doubt is the question. Of course you have to answer No. Violet Vance could not identify Calhoun within feet. Eric Heim said, No, the gunman was six feet in height and light-skinned. Do you write that off? Or do you feel that the crime is so terrible somebody must be sacrificed?

  “You must decide whether Iello and Baxter testified for the sake of truth, or for the hope of obtaining leniency in sentencing on the charges both are facing.

  “I ask you to consider a maxim: Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus: False in one thing, false in all. Both Iello and Baxter have testified that under prior judicial proceedings they testified falsely. This entitles you to disregard all their testimony.”

  Judge Turner judged the testimony of Esteban Escortez and ruled it out of court. He then turned to the woman who’d been seated beside the bench throughout the trial.

  “You may proceed,” he instructed her.

  She rose and began to turn the lottery box containing names of fourteen jurors.

  Calhoun didn’t understand. He looked questioningly at Ben Raymond.

  “Two of the fourteen have to go,” he explained.

  The first to go was the black juror.

  “The killings for which you were indicted and tried were of innocent persons wholly unknown to you,” Judge Turner advised Calhoun on June twenty-ninth. “There is no single factor in these murders which might serve as mitigation of the offense. There is no understandable reason for the commitment of these murders. And the killing of each person represents a separate crime.

  “Upon the charge of the murder of Donald Leonard, this court sentences you to be imprisoned in the New Jersey State Prison for the remainder of your natural life.

  “Upon the charge of the murder of Nicholas Vincio, it is the sentence of this court that you be imprisoned in the New Jersey State Prison for the remainder of your natural life. This sentence shall be consecutive to the sentence of the first count.

  “Upon the charge of the murder of Mrs. Helen Shane, it is the sentence of this court that you be imprisoned in the New Jersey State Prison for the remainder of your natural life, and this sentence shall be concurrent with the sentence imposed upon the second count.”

  Calhoun turned and, without a flicker of change of expression, lifted Jennifer’s hands to his lips.

  “You have performed a public service which should be encouraged,” Judge Vito Carrera congratulated Dexter Baxter for Baxter’s demonstration of good citizenship. “You gave the state great support in the trial of New Jersey vs. Calhoun. I am therefore going to modify your sentence in order to express the state’s appreciation. Is there anything you care to say, Mr. Baxter?”

  “Just on the point of the reward.”

  “I have nothing to do with the reward, Mr. Baxter.”

  “I wrote to the mayor of Jersey City. I told him I planned to use the money to fight juvenile delinquency. But I haven’t yet received it.”

  Judge Carrera appeared momentarily confused.

  “I’m not certain that you are motivated by being a good citizen or by hope of money. But thank you for coming here all the same,” he finally decided, “and I wish you good luck in your courageous battle against juvenile delinquency.”

  2

  The

  Wall

  Multitudes have mounted this midnight stair. Students risen from 2 A.M. beds have taxied down here. Husbands, young and old, have spent whole nights here. Here comes the young man off a date with a girl who permitted his hand to fondle her breast until its nipple had begun stiffening and had then wriggled free.

  Weirdos’ time is the early afternoon: they don’t want to sit waiting, in the night hours, among other men. They don’t like being observed lest they be identified. They are weirdos because the attraction of sex does not derive, in them, from love, but from a deep sickness of the soul. They buy secondhand copies of Playboy and read them secretly.

  One was an unemployed fry cook, a man in his mid-twenties, slight of frame and passably handsome. He was dressed neatly albeit not quite up to Fifth Avenue standards; nor standards of Harlem or the Bronx. Nor could he be placed as identifiably New Jersey. The fact was that he was nothing at all, and this was why women did not respond to him. It wasn’t looks or dress or some ugliness that stopped them. It was that he could awake no interest in others. Others’ eyes did not perceive him. As if he were a zero.

  He was a zero. He had no personality of his own. How he lived, in his hours away from frying onions, wandering the city day after day, looking for someone he had never seen, without knowing it was his own lost self he pursued, nobody knew. Nobody cared.

  “I’m Ezio Pinza’s favorite child,” he would present himself to some waitress after someone whose name he’d recently seen in print. “Who is Ezio Pinza?” the waitress had asked. He had also tried being an illegitimate grandson of Charlie Chaplin: “My mother was Lila Lee.”

  “Lila who?”

  Then he had tried being the illegitimate son of Warren G. Harding.

  “Why brag about something like that?” a bartender had put it to him.

  Teachers of biology, mailmen or neurologists, waiters out of Chinese restaurants, subway motormen, janitors, unemployed water-ski instructors, jockey’s valets and some lonesome all-night hackie with his meter still running when he ought to be dead—heading home.

  All come in search of love.

  Young lake-boat sailors off Lake Huron and old-time seamen from seven oceans wander in, from the Seaman’s Home, in search of some ship long foundered and beached. Railroad porters from the Deep South at the end of their runs come here, and saxophone players from the East Bronx; and officers of the U.S. Marine Corps.

  There is also the black from the Village who mixes an ancestral awe of the white woman with an equally ancestral contempt of her: it sometimes makes him hard to handle. Like a child, he tries to see how far he can go; he goes so far then gets slapped down. Now he knows.

  And always the senior citizen who’s just cashed his Social Security check to prove to himself he is still among the living, though a lifetime of lusts have all now settled dustily behind his ears: he’ll hang in there till he dies.

  All come in search of love with money in their jeans.

  Masters of industry, politicians, clergymen Christian or Jewish, TV celebrities, members of the Bar, professors of ancient Greek, violinists with perfect pitch and editors of newspapers with a million circulation: all come in search of love with fifty-dollar bills in their wallets.

  The women saw such a variation of naked males, some so undersized they were almost dwarfs, to great gangling dudes so tall they’d been rejected for army service: no regulation army uniform would fit them.

  There were men of such mottled hue they were neither white nor black nor red nor brown nor yellow. There were those with skins so white they gleamed and some so black—perhaps a seaman from Senegal—that his skin held a bluish sheen.

  On occasion there appeared some youthful athlete, boxer, dancer or first baseman who moved with such natural grace that a secret homesickness crept into the hearts of these women who had so long forgotten that a male body could be beautiful. To be followed immediately by some trick whose belly was so swollen that he had to walk with two canes to support its terrible weight.

  Some came in smiling faintly i
n self-mockery. Others with a serious air as if to say: “I won’t put up with nonsense. I’m a busy fellow. My time is limited. Here’s your money. I want exact change.”

  “When I found out my mother wasn’t dead,” Ginger recalled, “like my father had always told me she was, I was sixteen then, that was how it began with me. She was living in the next town with the guy she’d took off with. I begun going down on every dude in town, I can’t tell you to this day exactly why. It felt like I was taking revenge on her. If I hadn’t of got out of town, the wives and girlfriends would have run me out.

  “I got off the bus at the Port Authority and before I got to Eighth Avenue I had one runner walking beside me and two more following. I let the one beside me buy me a meal, then I took off through the ladies’ room. I never been pimped and never will be.”

  “Pimps,” Fortune interrupted, “pimps—God bless them. He gives the girl what her daddy never gave her at home. He never gave her affection. He never gave her the feeling like he cared what became of her. He made her feel she wasn’t of use. She never had an older brother, she never had a kindly uncle, she never had a lover. She never had anyone to tell her right from wrong. The pimp is her daddy. He’s her big brother. He’s her kindly uncle. He’s her lover. He tells her right from wrong. If what he says is right, and the world says is wrong, she’ll take his word. The world gave her nothing. He gives her everything. And he tells her out front she’ll go to jail sooner or later. By that time she’s anxious to get locked. Just to prove herself to him. And when she is, he’s the one, not her daddy, who comes down and gets her out. She may have been brought up in a four-bedroom home with two cars in the garage and servants, too. She may have gone to a private school and had a summer place on the shore, as well. But she’s never had a home. ‘We do everything we can for her,’ her parents boast; yet they do nothing at all.

  “The pimp parks her in his attic above the alley, two flights down to the bar, and he’s brought her home. Best of all, she learns how to hold her own on the street. It’s exactly the sort of life her parents spent a lifetime guarding her against and it’s exactly the life she needs the most. Ten days of it and it would take two cops and a matron to get her back to her four-bedroom home. And, the first chance she got, she’d run away back to the Village looking for her pimp. He doesn’t have to chase her. She’ll come to him. Thank God for pimps, they do more for kids coming out of the suburbs than the kids’ parents ever did.”

  “Like I was saying,” Ginger went on as though Fortune hadn’t said a word, “I was eighteen and looked fifteen. I sat in the lobby of the Manhattan Hilton with my shoulder bag slung over my shoulder and begun fixing my hair. That hikes the skirt up like accidentally. A middle-aged dude at the bar caught the flash and I knew I had him pinned.

  “‘Waiting for somebody, honey?’ he wants to know, sitting down beside me …”

  “I used to get up in the dark and get down to the bus stop rain or snow,” Fortune picked up her own story as if feeling it was, basically, of greater interest than Ginger’s. “I’d ride crosstown to sit all day at a sewing machine, and go back home dead beat and then do it all over again. Now I sleep till noon and make as much, even on a poor day, as I used to make in two weeks of sewing.

  “Of course you have to keep on top of the situation. The police have to be provided for. Taking a cut is what cops are for.

  “Men are men, of any color, but the tightest ones are the white dudes. They don’t like paying off. Once—I was still so young I didn’t collect off him first—refused to pay and called me a dirty chink. If I want money off him, he tells me, I can wash his shirt.

  “I brought out a springblade knife and sprang it.

  “‘You’re not going to leave this room alive, mister,’ I told him.

  “‘I was only fooling,’ he told me, laying out the ten-dollar bill he owed me. ‘Put a twenty on top of that,’ I told him. ‘I’m fining you ten for trying to beat me and another ten for what you called me.’

  “He paid off. White guys are tight but they’re easy frightened. Black guys aren’t so tight, and they don’t scare so easy, but they’re mean. Really mean. They get pushed around so by their own women, when they come to a woman who isn’t black, they try to push her. … ”

  “‘For my Uncle Mike,” Ginger resumed her own story, “lowering my eyes and trying to keep that skirt down. He didn’t try to touch but there were only two tiny pearl buttons between his hand and my tits, and he’s a tit man, I can tell. I’m wearing a type of bra that pushes the nipples right up into a trick’s face.

  “‘Can we have a chocolate soda, sweetheart, while we’re waiting?’ he invites me, ‘or do you prefer strorberry?’

  “‘A double martini, is what I would prefer, sir,’ is what I thought but I didn’t say it. All I said was, ‘What will I do if Uncle Mike shows up, sir?’ Putting on a baby lisp.

  “The lisp did it. ‘We’ll have him paged.’ he tells me, and takes my hand. ‘Pertend I’m Uncle Mike.’

  “‘Uncle Mike always been like a daddy to me,’ I tell him, ‘account my real daddy died,’ and I go with him toward the restaurant where he decides, ‘Room service will be better, sweetheart,’ and we go eight floors to his room. He pulls the shades and gives me a chance to go on the nod on the bed. After all, I’m only a child and I’ve had a hard day. When he thinks I’m asleep it’s off with his pants and I don’t wake up until he’s on top and in.

  “‘You like this, honey?’ he starts, ‘ain’t this better’n both chocolate ’n strorberry?’ I could barely feel him but he still keeps trying to get me hot. I wanted an awful lot by way of room service.

  “‘Oooooo—Da-ady!’ I finally let out a whoop at the very top of my voice, ‘Oooooooo—Da-aad-dee!’ You could have heard me hollering down in the lobby, ‘Give it to me Daddy! Give it to me!’

  “‘No, honey, No! No!’ he tries to tell me, and I could feel him getting limper as he begun getting scared. I kept it up until he’d gotten out of bed and was pulling on his pants, scared to death of the knock on the door.

  “‘Before you leave, Uncle Mike,’ I told him in my grown-up voice, leave a hundred on the dresser. I’ll be sixteen come Sunday.’

  “He was so relieved to get out at that price he was shaking. I could have made it tougher but I didn’t want to get into a big hassle with the house dick and then have to split it down the middle. I gave him time enough to pack and get out. Then I went down to the bar and broke his hundred.

  “The house dick was at the bar, not drinking just watching. He knew his trade. When the bartender asked for my I.D. card, he gave the bartender a nod. He knew a baby pro when he saw one.

  “He’d caught on to the play in the lobby and hadn’t interfered. We worked together half a dozen times after that, but he never took money off me. All he wanted was a piece of the same once a week. Maybe he wasn’t getting along with his old lady, I don’t know.”

  “White guys are the most boring,” Fortune decided, “because they want to put their story on you—their big business deals, their wife troubles, all of that. Sometimes I think they come to put out a story as much as to screw. Their wives won’t listen to them anymore and I can’t blame them.

  “I only had one white trick worth listening to. He’d been at sea most of his life and he knew about the far-off ports, how it was in Cebu—that’s in the Philippine Islands—and the Port of Marseilles—that’s in the Mediterranean Sea. It’s all blue and sunny in that sea, there are dozens of ships and big restaurants and women who sell fresh fish on the harbor front. And there’s a ship that takes tourists out to an island that used to be a prison. It’s empty now, but it used to be like Alcatraz. But a guide will take you through and show you the cells where the prisoners were kept. And one prisoner, nobody knew who he was, and the government didn’t want anyone to recognize him, so he wore an iron mask all day, and he wore it for twenty years, and he was buried with the mask on, so nobody knows even today who he was—isn’t that a killer?
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  “My favorite way of spending a day is going to movies. Especially ones about far-off places in the world I know I’ll never see.

  “Have you been to the zoo, Dovie-Jean? The one in the Bronx? I never been, but I’d like to go, only I got no one to go with. You want to go out there one day with me?”

  Dovie-Jean nodded. “I’d like that.”

  “I’d like to too,” Big Benjamin told them, looming above them like a huge child. “I’d like to go to the big zoo too.”

  Late in the night hours and the lights too bright, the women’s faces becoming careworn and the big electric fan no longer able to blow off the odors of tobacco mixed with cheap perfume and Benjamin’s transistor sounding weary, all heard Spanish Nan scream.

  King Benjamin came out of his shadowed corner, crashed through Nan’s door and clamped a full nelson onto a stark naked stud wielding a knife. The stud dropped the knife as Benjamin lifted him, lashing and kicking off the floor, aimed his skull at a corner and crashed him head-on. The stud went limp: out cold.

  Hauling the stud like a leg of mutton down one rear flight, Nan following with the stud’s clothes and one of his shoes, across the areaway and into a tiny walled patch of garden, Benjamin dumped him. Nan tossed the clothes and the single shoe, then followed him back up the rear flight.

  If the police picked up the stud, that was okay with the King. If he came to before and tried to figure out, while putting on his clothes and casting about for his missing left shoe, how he’d gotten to wherever it was he was: that was all right with the King too. And if he lay in a pelting rain until the homicide detectives arrived, that was just as well with King Ben too.

  The women of the parlor gave him welcoming smiles when he returned. A wide shy smile came to the King’s big weatherbeaten face, to see how proud they all were of him.