A Walk on the Wild Side (41 page)

‘Remember the time he finished off the nigger with his open palm? That shows you what jiu-jitsu can do.’

‘No, but I was with him the time he lost his temper on the Spanish lad for pretendin’ he can’t talk good English. That’s what pretendin’ can do.’

‘Officer,’ some phony down the tier piped, ‘I can pay for aspering if it aint asking too much.’

‘It’s asking too much. You’ll get aspering at your destination,’ Harry promised the piper and belted Dove a crunchy kick in the side just for a crunchy little surprise.

‘I been kicked lots harder than that,’ Dove reflected and wished they’d stop smoking. It didn’t seem respectful at a time like this.

‘You know what, Jeff?’ Harry asked softly.

‘What?’ Jeff was anxious to know.

‘I think the sonofabitch really is dead.’

Deep in Dove’s throat a great tear trembled, making a bubble that tickled his neck. There wasn’t a breath of air in the cell and if they didn’t quit smoking he’d have to cough and come alive once more. He’d rather be dead, Dove thought, than
that
.

‘Poor rummy. Between whiskey and women, his heart give out.’

‘Was that his heart clanged like a damned bell when he landed on iron? If you can’t make sense don’t say nothin’.’

‘Captain’ll be on our side,’ Jeff kept trying, sense or no.

‘
That
cracker? Are you sure you’re feeling well? I’m sure he’d purely hate to see that cracker puss on the front page of the
Picayune
for cleaning roughnecks out of the department.
Sure
he would.’

Then a silence bespoke an understanding reached. Dove felt one take his arms and the other his feet.

‘People treat you better when you’re dead,’ Dove realized as they bore him gently. ‘Now this is really something like it.’

‘Where we takin’ him, Harry?’

‘Where you think? Loew’s State?’

A river-boat moaned like a weary cow abandoning hope between darkness and tide.

Dove felt the air clear suddenly and knew they were in the open night. Somewhere above him a window slammed.

‘What are you silly bastards up to now?’ Dove heard a new voice, more commanding than Harry’s.

‘Another one kicked off on us, Captain.’

‘How many times do I have to tell you that a man can die in jail just the same as in a hospital? Get him over to Charity and get a receipt. I’m getting sick of having to tell you every time.’ The window slammed. Dove hoped that they wouldn’t drop him; he had a feeling he was hanging above concrete.

‘What he mean, Harry, “get a receipt”?’

‘He means register the stiff with the hospital.’

‘Couldn’t we just leave him on the steps and trust to the kindness of nurses?’

‘I’d as soon be took inside
if
you don’t mind,’ Dove requested politely.

Like statues of astonishment both nabs froze. In that second Dove realized that had been his own voice and leaping free, was off and running straight into a red brick wall.

Harry caught him on the rebound and led him by the hand back to Jeff.

‘I knew he was faking all the while,’ Harry decided, ‘I was only waiting for him to make one false move.
See
, I made him give hisself away.’

Dove folded his pants carefully into a pillow and tucking it neatly under his head, stretched out contentedly, waiting to be lifted again.

‘You see,’ he excused himself to the Southern stars above the nabber’s heads, ‘I really wouldn’t want to leave this old world, for it’s the only one I know anything about.’

Jeff looked at Harry. Harry looked at Jeff.

‘Son,’ Jeff broke the news at last, ‘we both been on duty this whole hard hot day, and it’s been just one darned thing after another. Would you mind
walking
back to your cell?’

‘Why,’ Dove leaped to his feet and began pulling on his pants, all eagerness, as though invited to a chicken dinner. ‘Why, I’d admire to do just that. A little walk in the night air would clear my head.’ Then looked slyly from one to the other. There
was
something in the air.

‘You fellows mad at me about something?’

‘Of course, not, son,’ Harry reassured him with good-natured gruffness. ‘You’re a character. That’s your turn and we enjoy it. We want everyone in on the joke,’ and slammed Dove so hard on the side of the head with his open palm that he spun him almost clean about. Dove stood shaking his head to let the night air make it even clearer. The nights were certainly getting cooler.

‘Promise us you’ll tell the court everything that happened,’ Harry threatened him with his big hand raised, ‘
Promise
.’

Dove stood rubbing the back of his head: a huge thought was struggling to live in it.

‘I tell you,’ he decided slowly, ‘I don’t think I’d care to bring up a thing like this in court at all. It might make me appear a bit of a fool.’

‘I
told
you this was a boy of good breeding,’ Jeff came to his aid.

Harry studied him steadily, hand still high. ‘I’ve took an awful lot off you, son,’ he announced, ‘I’m just not going to take any more.’

‘Oh, put down your hand, Harry, the boy’s had enough,’ Jeff decided. ‘He’s a real smart lad and means just what he says.’

Harry let the hand fall. ‘God help him if he don’t,’ he said.

A minute later the big door closed behind Dove.

‘I think I’ll get a little rest,’ he decided, and groped in the dark till he found a bench.

Each morning the tenants of Tank Ten took turns at the tank’s single window. It opened upon the courtyard of the Animal Kingdom’s Protectors, whose men in heavy gloves busied themselves protecting the kingdom’s little charges from early morning till late at night.

BE KIND BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE was the kingdom’s motto, painted in hospital white. Sometimes a kindly looking woman in a nurse’s uniform came outside to help the work of kindness on. This was done by shooting each hound squarely between the eyes and shoveling the carcass into a cart. Cats were less trouble, Dove saw right off, for they had only to be swung by their tails and get their little skulls cracked against an iron post. And didn’t have to be shoveled at all. Straight into the cart they went –
plop! plop! plop!

For some reason the prisoners felt it had devolved upon themselves to keep track of the number of dogs done in as opposed to the number of cats. A C.C.C. deserter called Make-Believe Murphy began making book, taking bets in Bull Durham on the day’s totals. A non-betting man, neither pro-dog nor pro-cat was required to keep a reliable count. Dove volunteered, and never left his post without reporting to his relief the exact numbers of each done in during his watch.

And sometimes wondered, that if the men and boys to whom Tank Ten was home were outlaws, where the true criminals were being kept.

‘The best days of my life, my happiest time,’ a human dishrag called Pinky would recall, ‘was doing close-order drill in the evening with the national guard.’

Pinky had stolen fifty feet of garden hose in lieu of back wages. That the back wages were largely imaginary didn’t make the hose less real, and Pinky still had five months to go.

His cell mate was a beetling, black-browed timberwolf right out of the timber with a blood-red gash for a lolling tongue and hands like claws to rend. A real baby-eater with a spine-chilling record: he had lowered himself through a greenhouse roof and come within inches of escaping with two flower pots of African violets. Unluckily he had gone through a pane and been trapped in a chrysanthemum-colored crash, face-down in freshly planted ivy but still clutching his precious violets. The fall, apparently, had subdued the wilder side of his nature, because now he seemed happy enough just being permitted to wash and dry Pinky’s spoon twice a day.

Another was an old sad lonesome lecher with a face that had never been up from the cellar, who had nobody’s sympathy at all; not even his own. The turnkey had nicknamed him ‘Raincoat’ – which was kinder than what the prisoners had named him.

This ancient simple satyr’s offense had been nothing more dreadful than the devising of a time-and-money-saving operation. Raincoat had discovered how to save time and money in making love, and at the same time to protect the lover against emotional entanglement. A pair of rubber bands and a raincoat with one loose button was all the self-sufficing lover required.

So attired he had taken a stroll, one wanton April evening, down Carondelet Street. Having, of course, taken the perfectly sensible precaution of severing his trousers at the knees and binding the bottoms to his calves with the rubber bands; lending an impression, to the casual passerby, that he was fully clothed. Here and there, passing some woman who appeared deserving, he would fling the raincoat wide for her amazement and delight, then modestly button himself and modestly hurry on.

Talent can spring up anywhere.

‘I’m not here for insulting a woman,’ he reproved society gently, ‘I’m here for not insulting one. I put on my innocent little show for her but instead of going on about her business she looks back over her shoulder as much as to invite me to follow her. She must have taken me for a moron, to think I’d do a thing like that. For Heaven’s sake, a man could catch a disease that way.

‘She started coming toward me – “Don’t be afraid,” I heard her say, “I’m not going to hurt you.” Oh, no, not
much
she wouldn’t. I know
her
kind. But I hadn’t expected one to
turn
on me. She was getting closer by the second, I was rooted to the spot, her hand reached for me – O
God
’ – Raincoat buried his face in his hands, the other criminals stood about. They had all been to the Sex Bureau and back, they knew what the man had been through. And waited politely till he had composed himself.

Raincoat dabbed at his eyes and went on – ‘Do you know what that
thing
had the brassbound gall to ask me? – “Would you like to sleep with a nice girl?” – that’s just what she asked and not more than
three
feet away! The woman was sex-crazy, that was plain. But you know what I answered her? “I’d rather go to bed with a wet shepherd dog!” – now that’s
just
what I said. How did a notion like
that
come into my head? Then I ran.

‘Before I could so much as say God with my mouth open there were half a dozen of them around me, I don’t know where they came from yet. Hauling me this way then that, tearing my clothes, screaming “sec fiend! sec fiend!” If I were a sec fiend I would of gone with the woman instead of trying to run, wouldn’t I?’

There were always half a dozen in for drinking or distilling corn likker, and it wasn’t surprising that those who bought too much and those who made too little should cell together. What wasn’t so easy to understand was how men who could no longer communicate with the outside world, but could only sit and mutter, automatically fell together. Citizens of the Republic of Natural Bugs, they felt themselves trapped together in an alien land.

Raincoat’s cell mate, for example, was a natural whose wife had had him locked up because he had made up his mind to have a baby by their fifteen-year-old daughter. Nobody could talk Natural Bug out of this. He couldn’t be roasted or frozen out of it. He
knew
he was right in this. But Raincoat was the only one to whom he communicated his defense.

‘He says the kid is a lot better-looking than his wife,’ Raincoat interpreted. ‘And not only that, but she’s much younger.’

And there was always, in one cell or another, the usual sexless, toothless queen of mezzanine, park bench and shrubbery. One of these was Wayback, who claimed to have been a saxophone player who had become addicted to something, he didn’t yet know what. He was too far back for that.

‘The doc wouldn’t tell me and I can’t read Latin,’ was his excuse, ‘but whatever the stuff was, someone kept raising the price of it on the doc so naturally he had to raise it on me.’

The price had gone up until he’d had to hock his upper plate. Then he’d had to hock his sax to redeem the plate because he couldn’t play without it. Then he was all set to go to work, but had no sax. Something had to be done. He was doing a year and a day.

‘You see,’ he’d begin as though he couldn’t get over it yet, ‘I couldn’t blow a sax without a plate.’

‘We’ve heard it all before,’ Out-Front would interrupt him. ‘You’re not way back, you’re yet farther back than that,’ and there would be no word for a while out of the sexless, toothless, saxless, dopeless, hopeless queen of mezzanine, park bench and shrubbery.

Out-Front was way out front about what
he
was on. He was a rugged old hand who’d taken morphine for migraine headaches contracted in the red zinc mines of Oklahoma. He’d been at the Federal Hospital at Lexington, Kentucky, for healing of his habit and remembered that institution with genuine gratitude.

‘The beauty part about Lex is that they take you off your habit by putting you on something new nobody ever heard of before because they don’t have a name for it yet. Then all you got to do is kick two habits instead of one. I loved the joint. A man would be a fool not to trade off one little flea-powder habit for a real burning-down one, wouldn’t he?’

Out-Front preferred to cell up with another user, but he could put up with a sex case if necessary – ‘You got a worse sickness than mine,’ he’d tell men like Wayback. What he really couldn’t bear was a lush. In those whose weakness was whiskey he saw a hostile tribe undeservedly favored by the powers that be. Why was it that one little white pill was enough to put a man with marks on his arm to hard labor for months, while another, weaving on the corner with a pint of uncorked gin sticking out of his pocket, got a free ride home, if he could still give the nabbers his address?

‘When you see a bum duck into the gutter for a butt,’ Out-Front challenged all corn-likker kukes, ‘you can be sure he’s a wino or a gin-head. No self-respecting junkie ever falls that low.’