A Walk on the Wild Side (33 page)

‘Some days I feel rotten about you too, Oliver,’ Mama admitted.

The little man sat clasping his stomach as though in pain. ‘What kind of a sport wouldn’t hop to a chance like we’re offering? Why, it’s like having a girl’s very soul. Love he can get at home – but the
soul
, the
soul
 – Did his mother neglect him? Did his auntie seduce him? Did his mother-in-law rob him? Did his wife desert him? Did his mistress betray him – Here’s a chance to get even with them all.’

‘Calm yourself, Oliver,’ Mama urged him, ‘because no man is coming for no such purpose to any house of mine,’ Mama found her voice at last, ‘I’ve been an underworld woman all my days. I have faith my Lord will forgive me for that. For I’ve been straight with Him and straight with myself—’

‘—and straight with your girls too, of course,’ Finnerty stopped her. His very tone stopped her. ‘Sit down, old woman. There’s something I’ve been meaning to have out with you and this is as good a time as any.’

Mama sat down.

‘It’s a little matter of a bill that went into your hand a C note and came back to me as a ten-spot. If it had been any broad but the Looney I’d think maybe it was her and not you. But it’s true that the girl never actually looked at that bill – I’ve watched her take money time and again and she never looks at it, just puts it away until she sees me, then hands over the lot. So I know she gave it to you as she got it – old woman, it was you pulled the gypsy switch on your best, your only friend. Do you call that being straight for the Christian-killing Moses’s sake, old woman?’

‘Oliver, if I know what you’re talking about I’ll kiss your behind before God.’

Finnerty cocked his head a bit at that. ‘You know what you just said is as strong a statement I’ve heard a Louisiana nigger make to a white man for some time?’

‘Oliver, it’s the truth. I
don’t
know what you’re talking about.’

‘Look,’ he began losing patience. ‘I whupped the broad and she said “No.” I whupped her harder and she still said “No.” Finally I took my mittens off, ready to give her the real thing. She still said “No.” Mama, I don’t want to whup
you
. But I
know
it wasn’t the broad. I
know
it was you.’

Mama could scarcely bear the injustice of this. ‘For God’s sake, boy. What makes you so sure it wasn’t the mark who switched on you?’

Finnerty smiled thinly. ‘I was wondering how long it was going to take you to come up with that. It don’t go, old woman. I never took eye off that bill from the moment I put it in the mark’s pocket.’

‘Were you
in
the room when he gave it to the girl?’

‘As good as. I had my eye to the hole.’

‘How could you see the number on the bill through a keyhole?’

The shadow of a doubt passed across the pander’s mind – but he recalled the sheer simplicity of Dove’s face and the shadow passed. It just couldn’t be. For that redheaded country boy hadn’t been just an ordinary mark. He had been a mark’s mark, the kind a man might wait a lifetime to meet, so simple it was pathetic.

‘Anyone but
him
, Mama,’ he told her – then suddenly realizing how very near she had come to throwing him off the track he made up his mind twice as firmly as before – ‘Mama, I’m going to hear from your own lips that it was you who switched on me and nobody but you.’

Mama knew that tone and could only sit shaking her head miserably, ‘No. No. Let me die the worst death there is if I took it.’

Finnerty rose.

‘Oliver, I know what you’re going to do. But I just can’t fix my mouth to say what you want me to.’

Finnerty pulled on a single mitten. He drew the cloth down tight over each separate finger. When every wrinkle had been smoothed he turned his wrist slowly to test its hinge. Then he drew on the other glove.

‘Yes,’ Mama told him. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’

‘I knew you done it all the time,’ Finnerty said, ‘and I’m not billing you for it. But never let me hear you say again that you play it straight. Not to
me
you don’t say it. Here.’

He poured her a cognac and offered it full to the brim without a spilling a drop. But Mama’s hand shook so when she took it he had to help her to bring it to her lips. When it was empty she held it out for more. He filled it again. This time she drank more steadily. And still she wanted more.

‘If I can save one sparrow a single misstep,’ she began.

‘That’ll do for now, old woman,’ Finnerty told her, ‘I’ve got work to do and so have you.’

And left to study his mouse.

What passed for the Wrath To Come on the walk and what passed for the Wrath inside the parlor were hells an earth apart. Though that amateur savior warned the women of the middle-pits of Hell, the women themselves felt sure that the pits were reserved exclusively for finks. Certainly no reasonable God would hold a grudge against a girl for earning her bread by the sweat of the sex with which He had blessed her. But to save one’s own skin by crying off on a sister – no God worth the name would overlook as lousy a trick as that.

Beside, God must be on their side because He was on Mama’s. And wasn’t Mama forever bringing home moulting canaries or bargain goldfish because she felt sorry for them? Didn’t she say almost every day, ‘If I can save one sparrow a single misstep it makes my own missteps worthwhile?’

Long after midnight old lonely trains called up to Mama like lovers forever arriving too late for love. Up from the long grieving river they called, past track and tower and dock, to windows long darkened and doorways long locked; old beaux that had walked Perdido Street long ago, returning to mourn the names of girls they had loved. They had plenty to spend and all night for loving. But the windows were darkened, the doors were locked, and the only girls whose names they knew had no name now but dust.

Mama would rise from her bed so wide, the Woman The Pope Didn’t Want, so fierce to defend the weak and the motherless, so watchful of the sparrow’s fall until a dollar was involved. And saw some too-late lover come to stand below a lamp that made the whole night look hired.

Down on the corner she heard some woman jangling around for a straight four dollar trick. Then her husband, down the block, signaling with a set of keys of his own – ‘I got a trick here, Baby, so come on home.’ And the empty night came down again.

From somewhere upstairs or somewhere down, a mountain girl’s voice began telling the dark—

And knew, Mama knew that soon or late the hour would come when the hurry-up wagon would haul girls with pride and girls with none, those who had saved and those without Penny One, to that cellar below the cells where one door leads to freedom and another door leads to jail. One back to the street and one to a tier. That some would buy out then and some would bail out and some would cry off on their sisters.

‘If I can’t die sanctified,’ Mama crossed herself where she stood, ‘at least let me die blessed.’

Because the air was so close, the whiskey so bad, the prices so high and the place so hard to climb up to, everyone came to Dockery’s Dollhouse night after night while other bars stayed empty.

Everyone came, that is, but the law. To this lopsided shambles, where the floor slanted slightly, no police ever came. When the big hush fell that meant trouble was starting, the old man drew the shutters until the trouble was done.

The old man had himself never fought another man in his life – yet he took a senile pleasure in watching others go at it. He pretended that it was the manly thing, to ‘let them fight it out’ – but the titillating joy he took when the first blood flowed was a womanish delight.

And though there were frequent brawls, he took care that none attracted the attention of strangers on the street outside. Only the steady thud of the fans overhead and a desperate scuffle of shoes and breath would be heard when two panders fought up and down the floor.

Suddenly as it began it would be done. Doc would be letting in the light, victor and vanquished would be having a shot on the house, the babble of voices would rise once more, the juke would start
Dream Train
or
It’s Only a Paper Moon
 – and everyone would feel something real had been accomplished at last.

‘Let’s see what them damn mackers are up to,’ hustlers would suggest to each other on afternoons off – ‘I’d rather see a fight tonight than ride the New York Central—’

If a man were hurt so seriously that he could not rise to drink, old Doc poured a shot down his throat personally, and friends hoisted him and deposited him behind some less lucky dive.

Yet all the fights were strangely unnecessary, and not one of them ever solved anything. The mackers never fought over anything real, like money or love. Had High Daddy really told Easy Rider’s woman that she didn’t dress her man with class? Had Easy Rider actually said that Spanish Max would stool on his own mother? They fought for their honor, that must have been it.

Not because they had too much whiskey in them, but because they hadn’t enough. Their lives went dry as their glasses; lack of love parched their throats. They wished to be drunken, forever drunken.

‘Too much salt on the potato chips,’ someone was always complaining to Dockery.

‘Them chips is what gives people a thirst,’ Doc explained, ‘it’s why the mustard bowls is always full and plenty of good old salty pretzels too.’

To be drunken, forever drunken.

Yet Dove came there at noon, long before the drinkers’ hour, only to put his sample case below the table and his book above it, to order a poor-boy sandwich and a bottle of beer.

Then the book before him, the beer forgotten, at last he saw for himself how different an A was from a B.

He was studying M and N one noon when a shadow fell across the page and Finnerty’s finger shut the book like shutting it forever.

‘What kind of con is this –
Fairy Tales
 – you connin’ little kids or something now, country boy?’

Dove took his book and pocketed it. ‘Hello, Oliver,’ he said.

Finnerty shook his head incredulously. ‘To think I took you for the simplest fool in town. To think that I thought that W on your forehead stood for Watkins.’

‘I’m in the field for Watkins, Mister,’ Dove reminded the pander with understandable pride.

‘Man, you
are
great. Simply great. And the sample case tops it. Just tops it. Lugging that thing with your country look, who could ever have guessed what your real line of goods was?’

He pulled a chair beside Dove’s, and sat so near and talked so low, his mouth right at Dove’s ear and his little finger hooked to Dove’s, that Dove felt trapped between him and the wall.

‘Buddy,
as
your buddy,’ Oliver whispered wetly, ‘it’s now my duty to tell you that my new child got one terrible hard edge out for you. It’s all I can do to keep her from coming in on you. No, I don’t mean that real hard swindle where she took the rap and you went south with the bundle. I doubt Texas will extradite you for that. But how’s your conscience resting, buddy? Did you know the broad done a hundred days without commissary? You and I both know what it is to be busted without a pack, Jack. Of course if that’s how you expect your broads to do time that’s your business. But
I
wouldn’t treat a yellow dog like that.’

‘Mister,’ Dove tried to get his little finger unhooked, ‘Mister, that old gal quoted you a mistruth.’

‘I hope you aren’t thinking I’d take a hustler’s word against that of my own sample case buddy? The very buddy who broke in my top-earning broad for me?’ Oliver was hurt that Dove should even suspect him of forgetting a favor like that – ‘
Naturally
she lied. Who ever heard of a hustling woman who wouldn’t rather lie than ride a passenger train? Buddy, what I’m telling you is I’m going to get you
out
of this. Man, I
been
to Hurtsville, I
know
what it is. They made me regret the day I was born there but they aint going to make my sample case buddy regret the day
he
was born. What if she
does
claim she was underage when you transported her across a state line in a moving vehicle? That don’t cut ice with Oliver Finnerty.’

‘Mister,’ Dove got in a word at last – ‘I never transported
nobody
. We just rode a old freight train a ways together, that was all. You’d scarcely call that “a moving vehicle” I don’t reckon.’

Finnerty unlocked his little finger as though that had been Dove’s idea – ‘What would
you
call it, Mr Bigass? A possum up a telegraph pole?’

‘Well, it weren’t no
passinger
train.’

‘Brother,’ Finnerty put a hand on Dove’s shoulder, ‘Brother, it don’t matter was that a box car or on roller skates, that broad can swear out a hold order for you in any district station in town—’

‘I pulled her out from under the wheels!’ Dove remembered in a shout – ‘I treated her
good!
’

Finnerty shook his head solemnly. ‘You can
always
treat one too good,’ he reminded Dove, ‘but you can never treat one too bad.’

‘I saved her dirty fool life,’ Dove added, yet felt his courage sliding down all drains.

‘I’m sure you did,’ Finnerty agreed sympathetically, ‘but still it don’t cut ice.’

‘She were
willin
’,’ Dove recalled desperately. ‘Fact is, she were more willin’ than me. She got more willin’ all the time. Fact is I took to sleepin’ on my stomach, she were that willin’.’

‘Willin’ don’t matter. Under-age is statutory rape though she put a gun at your head.’

‘She didn’t have no gun,’ Dove conceded, ‘but I sure didn’t sexutory-rape nobody, mister—’ yet strangely flushed with guilt.