A Walk on the Wild Side (37 page)

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Authors: Nelson Algren

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BOOK: A Walk on the Wild Side
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But the closet was empty, the shoe holder hung shoeless, the dresser was swept of brush, compact and comb.
Everyone was so stunned by the news that no one even thought to ask where Big Stingaree had gone, leaving his cowboy boots under his bed.

 

Achilles Schmidt had had his sniff of fame – a scent that prevails against all perfumes. Born on the outskirts of Mobile in a carnie show, he had grown into a shrewd wild boy who had learned reading and writing by working the bingo tents. He could still guess a woman’s weight to the ounce by running his hands once down her clothes.
He had begun boxing professionally at seventeen and had lasted two rounds of his first bout – he’d never make a boxer. At seventeen he was already too heavily muscled for that.
He had billed himself as ACHILLES THE BIRMINGHAM STRONG BOY and country girls came to stand at the feet of a boy with an IBM brain in the body of a honeyfed bear. To bring the yokels crowding, he could scale a house and threaten the local sheriff, and give the wink to the girls all at once.
Yet it wasn’t until he’d gone on the road as a professional wrestler in a coast-to-coast tour, stooging for a claimant to the world’s championship, that he had found his own trade.
A trade that soon taught him such physical superiority over other men that he began, like the honeyfed bear, to protect others against his strength. For it wasn’t just in the biceps and chest that he was greater than others, he saw without arrogance, but in the mind and the heart as well. That he was incapable of the meannesses he observed in others the boy did not consider a virtue in himself so much as an advantage, like the breadth of his chest, and was grateful. Who had put him together so generously he did not know, and yet wished to honor the wonderful luck of it. Leaning on the ropes in a great red cape, looking across row upon row in the smoky coliseums and tents, he saw how surely the wealth of all earth’s tents, the women within them, the fame as well, would come to him. There was time, and more than time for everything to come to Schmidt.
‘When are you going to stop growing, Achilles?’ a town girl once had waited outside his tent to ask.
‘When I win the undisputed title,’ he told her jokingly, for his awareness of his powers had come to him so swiftly he had not yet had time to realize fully that there was actually nothing in the way of his winning that disputed title. Yet he could take the hand of a girl like that like any nineteen-year-old brother and say, ‘I don’t want to grow bigger. I don’t like to scare people.’
‘You’re big enough now to scare the champion,’ she told him that night, ‘but you’re not big enough to scare me,’ and turned her face to his own for the taking.
A face forgotten these twenty years. Yet the hand that had lain so light in his lay there lightly yet.
She had been right. He had been big enough for anything that night. On the road with the Strangler, he had had to hold himself back to keep his job. By the time they had reached the eastern mining towns he knew that no one in the world could beat the shrewd wild boy with the heart of a honeyfed bear.
But the Strangler had only a few years left, he himself had a lifetime. And he liked the Strangler, poor brute.
An old-time promoter, one of Dockery’s hangers-on, admired The Birmingham Strong Boy yet – ‘He could hit you in the ass so hard you’d break your leg. And still I’ve seen him suffering the agonies of the damned, letting some country athlete haul him from one side of the ring to the other while he scaled the house, though nobody who was unarmed could really hurt him. Once some brave guy pitched him into the folding chairs before he’d finished counting the balcony. Achilles picked up two sets of them chairs, stretched the brave guy cold with one set and his manager with the other and held off the house till the cops arrived. Neither man nor box office could whip him. If you ask me, he could hold off the cops today.’
Yet in the time it takes for a second-hand to move from twelve to six he had been beaten for keeps and his glowing manhood beginning so luckily, so clean, was smashed into something half man and half-platform. Santa Fe freight wheels had proved even shrewder than he.
What had been extricated, after hours of extremest pain in which he had not once permitted himself to faint, was no longer Achilles The Birmingham Strong Boy, but only Legless Schmidt. One-At-The-Hip-And-One-At-The-Knee Schmidt to whom every two-legger might be the one who had rolled him beneath the wheels.
Sure he’d been drunk but what of that? He’d been on the drunk before and gotten a bit of sleep with one leg locked in a box-car’s spine between one county fair and the next.
If it had been his own doing, no one’s fault but his own, it would be easier to accept even now. Yet, moving behind his memory there lurked forever the suspicion that he had been deliberately shoved over. At moments he could almost feel the hands at his shoulder, the knee in his back.
Two years in a dusty desert hospital where the power that once had moved dead Achilles’s thighs began to flow with a wilder pride through crippled Schmidt.
All he now recalled of the hospital was the bitter blowing of alkali dust all day against the pane. And the face of some intern’s wife who had cut a turtle-neck jersey for him from his red cape.
Where in letters once gilt now long washed to gray all that remained of his brief fame kept fading—
Young Achilles
Lost lost, all lost, swift as the desert dust that taps once and never is blown again.
Blown, blown, the fame and the gathering strength, the girls, the money, the power. Profession and pride gone in one night’s passage – and gone so uselessly.
After that he had let himself be billed briefly as
The Living Half
. He had sat his home-made platform in the freakish sun, looking down at farmers in town to see the freaks. And the honeyfed bear, that once had drawn in his claws, wished as he sat that he could be no more than one great claw.
The sideshow billing had been his greatest humiliation, one upon which he had drawn a shade. He never spoke of it himself and felt his secret was safe enough among the lost and the damned of Perdido Street.
Yet in his heart had never evened up for
The Living Half
 – a thing like that.
Once while he chatted with several girls crowding behind a Perdido Street screen, a man with a metal support compensating for one short leg came hurrying down the street. He carried a briefcase under one arm and pens and pencils in his coat. Late for some business appointment, that was plain.
Schmidt flared at sight of him, and wheeling after on noiseless bearings, sent the rival cripple spinning so hard that, had he not caught himself against a wall, he would have ended flat on his face. Then swerved with one deft twist of the wheels and faced his man, head lowered in challenge.
But all his man wanted was to be allowed to go his own way. He clubfooted it, hippety-hop, off the curb and around and went free.
Schmidt wheeled in triumph back to his girls. ‘Well, why give
him
a chance?’ he asked. ‘What chance would he have given me?’
And the mascaraed, Maybellined eye-shadowed girls agreed with a cold vindictive glee—
‘Why give
him
a chance? What chance would he have give you?’

 

Hallie and Dove lived behind a wrought-iron rail a long winding way from old Perdido. The rail enclosed a tiny balcony two stories above Royal Street. Across the way someone long ago had painted a white tin moon against a blue tin sky. A sky of midnight blue. A moon of Christmas snow. Long ago.
Now rust and rain had run the colors, sun had flaked the midnight snow. Nothing remained but a ruined moon in a sky that had fallen through.
Here in the hour of the firefly, while he and Hallie watched the lights of the Old Quarter flicker, the happy time came at last to Dove. The one happy time. From an unseen court or honkytonk, now far, now near, a piano invited them to join the dancers. Each night they heard the same piano and knew the dancing had begun once more.
Behind them a room, no bigger than a beer bottle turned upside down, held little more than a bed where the pupil slept with his fingers spread on his teacher’s breast; and as she slept pressed to his side.
Till morning woke them with vendors’ cries—
Here comes your skin-man!
Bring out your dishpan!
Cracklin’s at five cents a pound!
Once he wakened to see she had been smiling at him. When he asked her why the smile she told him it was because he made her sad ‘being such as you are and still not seeming to mind.’
Along a bureau stood a set of morocco-bound books, all that was left of Miss Hallie Breedlove’s schoolroom hours. Sometimes it was his turn for reading from them, sometimes Miss Hallie Breedlove’s. For in that first swift rush of their days together he had learned, by the making of wonderful o-shaped mouths, to read unaided—
Water now is turned to stone
Nurse and I can walk upon;
Still we find the flowing brooks
In the picture-story books
We may see how all things are,
Seas and cities, near and far
And the flying fairies’ looks
In the picture-story books
How am I to sing your praise
Happy chimney-corner days
Sitting safe in nursery nooks
Reading picture-story books?
And when he had finished the last round sound, would flatten his lips in a grin so contented she would protest, ‘You look like a cat eating hot mush on a frosty morning,’ and would snatch back the book. ‘You haven’t done anything a six-year-old couldn’t to look that pleased,’ she reminded him to make the fat cat-grin go. ‘
Here
’ – and gave him a passage wherein he immediately mired himself in such tongue-thudding woe that she took pity and began it from the start—
We shall not sleep, but we shall all be changed
In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump:
For the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised
incorruptible, and we shall be changed
For this incorruptible must put on incorruption.
And this mortal must put on immortality—
‘Now what do you think of
that?
’
‘I don’t think purely
nothin
’ of that,’ Dove decided – ‘it remind me too near of my poor crazy pappy. Teacher dear, read me that one where somebody’s pappy got entirely drownded.’
Full fathom five Thy father lies
‘
That’s
the good part,’ he assured her.
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
‘Didn’t take much changin’ to make Pappy strange,’ he reflected. ‘He were a little on the odd side, from the life he led.’
‘We’re all a little on the odd side,’ Hallie guessed, ‘from the life we’ve led. The life we’ve all led.’ And taking his hand led him to the bed.
‘I don’t mean for you to love me,’ she had to tell him a minute after, ‘just hold me.
Hold
.’
Dove held her, sensing only dimly that in holding her he was saving her.
For around the margins of her mind, as about a slowly tilting floor, a tyrant torso wheeled and reeled.
Hominy-man is on his way!
someone shouted up from the street below—
To sell his good hominy!
The last metallic cries of day rang in the tootle and low moan of the earliest evening ferry. Then in the big blue dusk she told him of battles lost at sea and cities half as old as time. Together they read:
The ashes in many places were already knee-deep; and the boiling showers which came from the steaming breath of the volcano forced their way into the houses, bearing with them a strong and suffocating vapor. In some places, immense fragments of rock, hurled upon the house roofs, bore down along the streets masses of confused ruin, which yet more and more, with every hour, obstructed the way; and as the day advanced, the motion of the earth was more sensibly felt – the footing seemed to slide and creep – nor could chariot or litter be kept steady, even on the most level ground.
Sometimes the huger stones, striking against each other as they fell, broke into countless fragments, emitting sparks of fire, which caught whatever was combustible within their reach; and along the plains beyond the city the darkness was now terribly relieved; for several houses, and even vineyards, had been set on flames; and at various intervals, the fires rose sullenly and fiercely against the solid gloom. To add to this partial relief of the darkness, the citizens had, here and there, in the more public places, such as the porticos of temples and the entrances to the forum, endeavored to place rows of torches; but these rarely continued long; the showers and the winds extinguished them, and the sudden darkness into which their fitful light was converted had something in it doubly terrible and doubly impressive on the impotence of human hopes, the lesson of despair.
‘Fishee! Fishee!’ yet another peddler called – ‘Mullet! Mullet! Flounder! Blackfish! Shark steaks for dem what likes ’em! Swordfish for dem what fights ’em! Fishee! Fishee!’
Toward midnight they went, by backstreets, to the ferry. As the lights of the eastern shore swung toward them he suddenly made up his mind – ‘Pack of fools! To keep right on livin’ smack at the foot of the mountain ’n that volcano gettin’ ready to pop any minute! Didn’t they care if they lived or died?’
‘Why did you keep on living in a place where nobody cared whether you lived or died?’
‘I got
out
, didn’t I?’
‘And you’re going
back
, aren’t you?’
‘Reckon so,’ he admitted, ‘some day. It’s home.’
‘Well, the foot of the mountain was home to the people of Pompeii. Fact of the matter is they’d been there lots longer than your people been in Arroyo.’

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