A Walk on the Wild Side (14 page)

‘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 sloppy 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—

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

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.

‘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

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 your 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.’