A Walk on the Wild Side (11 page)

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.’

‘It sayz all that, sis?’

‘It also sayz Laughable Fools with Dirty Feet Keep Off All Trains Not In Motion, Laughable Fool. It says your best bet is to do what you see the smart people do. So crawl your weak-minded ass after mine and do what I do.
Don’t do nothing you don’t see me do first
. And
don’t
call me sis. Call me brother.’

‘You reckon yourself one of the smart folks ’n me just a big ignoramus?’ Dove considered the preposterous notion.

Brother raised a cautioning finger. ‘I got a jacket. You got no jacket. I got a shirt. You got no shirt. I got shoes. You got no shoes but we’re both up against a knife and fork. I ate last night and I ate this morning and you haven’t eaten since God knows when. Now who’s the smartest, me or you?’

The raggedy line shuffled one raggedy inch.

‘You’re so smart it’s a pure pity,’ Dove decided – ‘Just tell me this much – they got liverpuddin’ in that kitchen ahead or not?’

‘They not only got liverpuddin’ friend. They got candied yams, Virginia ham ’n possum pie.’

‘Yankee vittles is a mite rich for my blood,’ Dove was forced to decline. Brother glanced up to see who was being kidded now.

But Dove’s jaw hung so long, so mournfully from cheeks so cavernous, the hair bothering his eyes had been so long uncut and the eyes themselves so darkly shadowed, it was hard to believe anyone could kid in that condition.

‘You should of stayed in the hospital till they cut your hair,’ she advised him.

‘I bet if you taken off that hat you could stand a trim your own self.’ Dove answered. He felt a friendly hand on his shoulder.

‘Ah’ll bet y’all from the Big Bend Country, haint yo’?’ Dove tossed the hair back out of his eyes to see if it were someone he knew, forgetting for the moment that he didn’t know anybody. A Marine sergeant was studying him smilingly.

‘Me? No
sir
,’ Dove corrected him with pride, ‘I’m from Rio Grande country.’

‘Taylor ’n Halsted, pleased to meet you both,’ the terrier introduced herself so assertively that the uniform had to talk over the fedora in order to recruit Dove.

‘How’d you like three square meals a day, Red? A chance to see the tropics, chase Sandino, defend your country, get two pairs of shoes and a pension shortly after?’ He gave Dove a wink so broad that Dove winked back just as broadly – ‘and how those South American girls go for that uniform.’

‘It sounds like a right good position, mister’ – Dove decided. ‘I especially like that part about defendin’ my country. But first I got to git me a small bait of vittles.’

‘I think you’ll make a fine soldier, son,’ the sergeant was confident – ‘You got no physical
dee
fect have you?’

‘Take another look at that squint, Colonel,’ the disguised girl recommended.

‘A squint aint no
dee
fect,’ the sergeant explained authoritatively, ‘—it’s more what we term a “impedimunt.” We’ll get Red specs to correct his. Spanish women
like
soldiers with glasses.’

‘Look at them choppers.’

Without being asked, Dove opened his mouth and the sergeant put a big dirty thumb flat down on his tongue.

‘In six months the clown won’t have a tooth in his head,’ the girl seemed certain. ‘Jungle-rot will get him.’

‘Well, we don’t want him to bite Sandino,’ the sergeant already excused Dove from one detail.

‘I have one loose awready anyhow,’ Dove managed to tell simply by removing the thumb temporarily, between two of his own fingers – ‘it waggles’ – and replaced the thumb hoping the sergeant would waggle it a bit for him.

‘Let the army dentist do that.’ The sergeant took his fist out of Dove’s face. ‘You’re going to make one hell of a Marine. Wouldn’t be surprised if you caught Sandino yourself. You can close your mouth now.’

He took out a small notebook and a pencil. ‘Tell me, you got any other
dee
fects, son?’

Dove reddened. That was when you couldn’t read or write. ‘I reckon that in time
that
might be corrected too,’ he answered evasively because of those standing about.

‘Nothing serious, is it?’ He gave Dove a nudge – ‘Nothin’ you picked up from town girls?’

The sarge had girls on his mind alright.

‘The second spell he took after supper last night he foamed a bit – Would that be anything serious?’ Dove’s friend asked blandly.

‘He takes
fits?
’ The Marine grew anxious. He didn’t want to lose a rookie but he didn’t want to hook a lemon.