A Walk on the Wild Side (4 page)

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Authors: Nelson Algren

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BOOK: A Walk on the Wild Side
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Later they came to town often enough to see that the cotton mills were the plantations all over again: the prescriptive rights of master over men had been transferred whole from plantation to mill. Between one oak-winter and one whippoorwill spring, the Linkhorns pushed on to the Cookson Hills.
Three score years after Appomattox a Linkhorn showed up in the orange-scented noon of the Rio Grande Valley still saying ‘Be Damned To The Lot Of You – Who got the pitcher?’ Had there been an International Convention of White Trash that week, Fitz would have been chairman.
Cotton grew, fruit grew, oil gushed a year and dried. Before it dried Fitz put in a year as a gaffer, made good money and found his girl. A girl who had thought herself rough enough.
Cotton failed, fruit failed – oil had spoiled the soil. It became a country of a single crop, and the crop was dust. Fifteen years of it did the girl in, feeling she’d had enough of oil.
Years begun with oranges and love, till dust blew love down the Gulf with the oranges. Leaving Fitz penniless as ever and more loveless than before. As the nineteen thirties lowered he trotted about town with a hired hose, pumping out cesspools.
And sensed no mockery in being greeted, hip-boots streaming, with a ‘Hiya, Preacher!’
Some of the folk of that little town offered the widower no greeting at all. He was too unpredictable. He would take one man’s jibes without offense and get his back up at another’s ‘Howdy, friend.’ In a town where nearly everyone danced, swore and gambled, the only fun Fitz had left was getting his back up.
He was against modern dancing, modern dress, swearing, gambling, cigarettes and sin. He preached that the long drought of 1930 was God’s way of putting an end to such things. But as the drought went on and on and never a drop of rain he reversed himself and said it must be the pope’s doing.
He was also said to be against fornication. But then it was said he was against corn whiskey too.
Saturday nights he pulled an ancient black frock coat over his patches; a coat with a pocket under the slit of the tail to hold the little brown bottle he called his ‘Kill-Devil.’ Getting stiff on the courthouse steps while denouncing the Roman Catholic clergy was a feat which regularly attracted scoffers and true believers alike, the believers as barefoot as the scoffers. For drunk as a dog or broke as a beggar, Fitz could spout religion like a hog in a bucket of slops.
Sometimes a girl would stand a moment among the men, pretending interest in The Word. But hunger has a scent more dry than love’s and she would move along wishing she were in Dallas.
For many in Arroyo the Lord’s Day was Saturday; but every night of the week was the Lord’s to Fitz.
‘“And when they wanted wine”’ – he put down a mocker who wanted to know what caused the bulge on his hip – ‘“the mother of Jesus saith unto him, ‘Give them wine.’” Satan didn’t claim Jesus’ mother ’count of wine, ah reckon he won’t claim me ’count of a half-pint of busthead.’
‘What cause folk to git dispatched to Hellfire then?’ a believer demanded to know right now.
‘You don’t git “
dispatched
” to Hellfire,’ Fitz assured him – ‘You’re born right
in
it. Gawd got a fence clean a-
round
Hell. So a sinner caint git out! Sinner caint dig underneath! Too deep! Sinner caint crawl between! Caint climb over! It’s ee-o-lectrified!’
‘How’d
you
git out?’ the mocker asked softly. He was astride the barrel of the town howitzer, his face and figure shadowed like a cannoneer’s who has lost both battle and cause.
‘Ah
clumb
,’ Fitz explained, and clumb right into his theme – ‘Ah clumb the lowest strand ’cause that’s the strand of LOVE. Ah clumb the second strand ’cause that’s the MERCY strand. Ah clumb the third because ah been LONGSUFFERIN’!’—
‘—thought you said that fence wasee-o-lectrified,’ the cannoneer reminded him, but Fitz was climbing too hard to hear – ‘Ah clumb clean ovah the topmost one of HIS MOST PRECIOUS BLOOD! Brothers! Sisters! Step on the strand of LOVE! Step on the strand of MERCY! Step on the LONGSUFFERING strand and get ready – to cross the strand of THE BLOOD!’
‘You know, I was thinking along those lines myself,’ the cannoneer commented, and spat. Yet Fitz paid him no heed.
‘I know some of you boys come a mighty far way in hope I’d save you for the Heavenly Home,’ he acknowledged. ‘That
was
my pure intent. But now that I see your actual faces I’ve had a change of mind. Boys, I’m woeful sorry, but the Lord just don’t want a bunch of dirt-eating buggers walking the Streets of Gold. The Lord don’t mind sinners – but he just can’t stand rats. And I’ll be god
damned
if
I’ll
take the responsibility!’ – and openly took a defiant swig of his half-pint.
Both skeptics and hopers cheered at that – the old man was warming up. ‘You tell ’em, Preacher! Drink ’er down! Don’t you play whore to no man!’
Fitz smacked his lips, rewound his dirty bandanna about his bottle and replaced it in the hidden pocket.
‘
Now
tell us about Temptation, Father,’ the man on the cannon asked, trying to get Fitz pointed at the Pope.
‘I’ll tell you this much about Temptation, Byron Linkhorn,’ the old man answered directly – ‘there are so-called Christians right in this gathering tonight who voted for the Pope in ’28. Do you think the Lord caint remember two year?’
Fitz could forgive a man for using marijuana, but not for voting for Al Smith. Others who had voted for the Pope in ’28 stood silent, letting Byron take the full brunt of their guilt. It was Byron who had ruined everyone’s chance for the New Jerusalem, that silence implied. Now no one could go.
‘Tell the
rest
of us how to be saved, Preacher,’ one hypocrite pleaded.
‘Or the time you fell in the cesspool,’ Byron stayed in there.
Fitz was hell on the Pope, but Byron was hell on Fitz.
‘The Lord
does
work in mysterious ways, that’s certain sure,’ the old man found his text – ‘for example, the pitiful critter atop the county property happen to be my son.’
‘Here come the part
I
come for,’ somebody dug his naked toes in the earth with anticipated pleasure – ‘Here’s where thet busthead starts
really
taken holt.’
‘—a critter not long for this world,’ Fitz gave hope to all creation – ‘the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away – and the sooner he taketh away that particular civet, the air hereabouts will be considerable fitter for humans. His lungs is gone, his mind is weak, his heart is dry as an autumn leaf. The brickle thread of his life is ready to snap. I envy him his trials is about to cease!’
The man on the cannon tried to reply, but was trapped by a cough so racking that every face turned to his own. He was good as dead, those cold looks told, yet not one cared a tear.
Pressing a bandanna to his lips, Byron dismounted cautiously. His father’s cracked voice, with a dozen others as cracked, joined in a hymn familiar to all. That rose, contented in all its discords, in a chorus above all argument.
O lovely appearance of death
No sight upon earth is so fair;
Not all the gay pageants that breathe
Can with a dead body compare—
and pursued him down every step of the street hawking bloodily all the way.
They had come to see someone lose. That it should be the same doomed fool week after week gave a flip to their satisfaction. Saturday night after Saturday night, it was always Byron to be singled out. Between his cough, the crowd and his father, he always lost. What was it in him they had to disprove? What was it that mere repetition added?
Byron was one whose beginnings had been more brave than most – that was what needed disproving.
For how Fitz leaped then – literally
leaped
 – clapping his hands above his head and barking triumphantly—
‘Just as I am though tossed about
With many a conflict many a doubt
Fightings and fears within, without
O lamb of God, I come! I come!
Just as I am! Just as I am!—
—in the name of Jesus, now come as you are!’ – and would skip down the steps, his sermon done, to take anyone’s bottle and everyone’s praise, mocking or sincere.
‘Keep your boots on, Preacher! Come just as you are!’
Fitz would be weaving a bit. Yet behind his shrouded glance a gleeful victory glinted. The Lord would forgive one who had defended His ark so well.
‘Preacher,’ one told him, ‘you just done my heart good tonight. You plumb restored me. Next week I’m bringen the younguns, they need restorin’ too. The old woman is beyond restoren. She aint been the same since the time she got throwed by the Power.’
‘You never should have picked her up,’ Fitz recalled an occasion when one of his listeners had passed out – ‘You should have left her right there where Jesus flang her. How’s she feeling?’
‘Better, thank you kindly. We got a bit of a job for you any time you’re of a mind to run out our way.’
That was all right with Fitz. If Protestant privies lined both sides of the road to the City of Pure Gold, by God he’d shovel his way to Salvation. But before he’d take money from papists rapists he’d go the other route. He was playing the whore to no man.
He was a Witness for Jehovah and saw the Holy See engaged in an international conspiracy against the Anglo-Saxon race in general and the Linkhorns in particular.
Papists Rapists! – that’s who it was who kept cheating!

 

Dove Linkhorn could not remember a time, a place nor a single person, house cat or hound dog that had sought his affection. But sometimes in the depths of a troubled sleep he had a fleeting feeling that a woman with red-gold hair had just touched his hand and fled beyond a curtained door.
A doorway that had not been curtained for years. The little cavern of a room was so sloping that the post of his high-ended bed touched its ceiling.
The old-fashioned bedstead they called a ‘stid’ – ‘It were Ma’s stid ’n all the makin’s was Ma’s too’ – ‘makin’s’ being the shuck-mattress, quilt coverlet, and two square pillows of the kind still called ‘shams.’ The sham on his left bore the embroidered legend,
I slept and dreamt that life was Beauty
. The one on the right,
I woke and found that life was Duty
. As often as not Dove’s head, in sleep, fell squarely in between.
That was just as well. Although he was sixteen he could read neither his pillow nor the sooty legend behind the stove:
CHRIST
is the head of this house
THE UNSEEN HOST
at every meal
THE SILENT LISTENER
to every conversation
Fitz had kept him out of school by way of protesting the hiring of a Catholic principal. But no one had protested his protest. No one had come to claim the boy for the board of education. There was no board of education.
If you wanted your young to learn, you sent them. If they wanted to, they went. If you didn’t and neither did they, they went to work.
There was no work. So they went to the movies. Dove had not yet seen one, but he planned to go pretty soon now. When John Barrymore and Marian Marsh came to Arroyo as Svengali and Trilby, he asked Byron to pay his way inside.
‘What if Eternity should come when you were on the Devil’s territory? What chance would you have?’ Byron asked for an answer, thus mocking both father and brother at once; and avoiding an admission that he didn’t have a nickel.
Dove hadn’t yet gone to a dance either. But he’d stood in the doorway of a hall and watched and kept time like the others—
Take her by the lily-white hand
And lead her like a pigeon
Make her dance the weevily-wheat
Till she loses her religion
Long after he had gone to bed that night the light from the bitch lamp kept him awake. The lamp had been made by fixing a rag wick to a stone and setting it in a vessel half-filled with whatever was left in the frying pan after the morning bacon was finished. Byron called it a ‘slut lamp.’ But Fitz always said ‘light the grease,’ and let it go at that.
By its ceaseless flicker Dove would see the pair of fools going at it again and both three sheets over. He would lay there moving his lips with the longest words he could pick up. ‘Corruption.’ ‘Generations.’ ‘Burnt-offering.’ ‘Peace-offering.’ ‘Sin-offering.’ Sometimes whole phrases: ‘What meaneth the heat of this great anger?’ ‘Would it were morning! For the fear of thy heart which thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see.’
‘I can’t argue with you no more,’ Byron would surrender as the wick burned low, ‘I’m feeling the sickness too bad.’
‘Another name for the soul’s corruption,’ Fitz assured him.
‘How do
you
feel these days yourself, Pappy?’ Byron asked.
‘Well and contented,’ the old man replied.
Even Dove knew the old man lied.
Mexican and American alike, the townsfolk knew that the preacher was off his rocker and that Byron smoked too much potiguaya bush for a lunger. ‘I was born to smoke bush,’ he boasted, ‘I may die poor but I won’t die tied.’ But what to make of Dove with his hair neither red nor yellow? And brows so light he looked browless? ‘You right sure that boy got everything he’s suppose to have?’ one doubter asked another.
If the boy bought a plug of tobacco he would lean against the grocer’s door and spit the whole morning away. If asked what he thought he was doing he would mumble, ‘leanen ’n dreamen,’ and would move a scant inch to one side. Yet sometimes strength would surge through him in a tide, he would run aimlessly and shout at nothing.
‘The boy is takin’ growth,’ Fitz explained uneasily.
In Dove’s mind, too, was a growing. A sudden light would flash within his brain illuminating earth and sky – a common bush would become a glory, a bird on a swinging bough a wonder – then the light would fade and fade like a slow gray curtain dropping. Such moments were irretrievable.

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