A Walk on the Wild Side (45 page)

Country’s throat was the same dead-gray as his fingers; the color of the concrete that had held him so long; the color of his only home; as well as the hue of that new and untried shore to which for so long he had half-wished to go.

‘We’ll have to op-rate, dad. Say “Okay,”’ the sheriff asked.

Caught between the double disappointments of dying too soon or staying alive to no purpose whatsoever, his eyes looked inward to make a choice; unaware that the choice had been taken from him. Behind his eyes Dove saw the man racing like a fox in an ever-diminishing circle. It was so hard to go, it was so hard to stay, it was all so hard all the way. The fingers, wet with rain or sweat, twisted weakly on the cap, trying to keep hold; the eyes kept trying to understand.

The sheriff put one ear to his lips to hear the whisper of legalized consent. If it had been himself with the gun he would have gotten the man at the knees, he felt.

The fingers abandoned the cap and wandered about the wound’s gray edge, tracing the torn tissue to make sure it was at last his own.

‘Tell us we can op-rate, dad,’ he asked. ‘I ought to sew you now.’

Outside the rain ceased a minute, as though it too listened for the whisper. The doctor looked up at the sheriff and the sheriff looked down at the doctor, his face a mask of impassivity. He’d been sued once; he wasn’t getting sued again. The odor of iodine began filling the tank.

‘Say yes,’ Dove urged him, ‘Say yes, Country.’

The turnkey came up, trying to hurry and walk softly both at once. ‘They got some broad downstairs claims she used to be his old lady. Got papers to prove it, I didn’t look too close. No, I didn’t search her, I was afraid of what I’d find. Maybe she’ll say yes for him.’

‘“Used-to-be” don’t git it,’ the sheriff shook his head like a weary mastiff, ‘as I understand it, as long as he’s conscious he’s suppose to say it hisself. If he aint, it takes a legal relation, else I’m liable. First aid is as far as law give me the right to go.’

Outside the rain began again, Dove heard the wind blowing between the wash of it, trying to say ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’

But no one heeded the brainless rain and nobody heard what the wind tried to tell. For the wind and the rain came every day and whispered like two unpaid lawyers together all night, fixing to say what, in the coming day, what everyone wished to hear said.

‘It’s awful when it’s like this,’ Dove thought, ‘and it’s like this now.’

Out of the corner of his eye he felt he was being watched, yet did not turn his head. Something moved in the corner – that cat! Hallie’s brindle again! She made a dash for it right across the floor and as she turned a corner invited him, by one whisk of her tail, to follow. He followed into a room where a virgin burned vaguely high above and, closer at hand, a woodstove cast a heartshaped flame the flowing hue of blood. A woman’s black lace slip and a man’s blue jeans were entangled on the floor and he could not tell where the cat had gone. A layer of dust had fallen, long ago, across the floor and the walls. The entangled slip and the jeans that had, but a moment before, been clothing, was a heap of dust. Panes, pictures, doorways, curtains; all were dust.

He touched a speck to his tongue and it was not dust, but salt. As the light of the virgin too high on the wall began burning too bright and he wakened with the night bulb shining right in his eyes.

And the taste of salt on his tongue.

‘What’s the word on Country?’ he asked.

‘Turned his face to the wall half an hour ago,’ the turnkey replied.

And heard Gonzales grieving—

‘I feel like I been everywhere God got land,’ Dove thought, ‘yet all I found was people with hard ways to go. All I found was troubles ’n degradation. All I found was that those with the hardest ways of all to go were quicker to help others than those with the easiest ways. All I found was two kinds of people. Them that would rather live on the loser’s side of the street with the other losers than to win off by theirselves; and them who want to be one of the winners even though the only way left for them to win was over them who have already been whipped.

‘All I found was men and women, and all the women were fallen. Sports of the world, poor bummies, poor tarts, all they were good for was to draw flies I was told. You could always treat one too good, it was said, but you never could treat one too bad. Yet I wouldn’t trade off the worst of the lot for the best of the other kind. I think they were the real salt of the earth.’

And his heart remembered the harlots’ streets till it came to a rutted and unpaved road at the end of a little lost town. A town where time, going backward, had left great paving stones severed by wind and sand. And felt the wind still coming across the mesquite to where a single gas lamp at the end of town made a lonely fire. By midnight its faltering, flickering glow would lighten a legend across a dark pane:

‘Terasina,’ the boy asked in a small awed wonder of the woman who once had pitied his ignorance there, ‘Are you there? Are you there in your bed at the end of the world while I’m here in my bed at mine?’

On the morning that seven meal-tins came up instead of eight, an immediate clamor rose. A prisoner didn’t get breakfast the morning of his release. All were willing to go hungry for freedom’s sake. ‘Who’s makin’ it, Mr Foster?’ they had to know, ‘Who’s makin’ the big door?’

Dove, on his haunches and his blanket over his shoulders, answered instead for Mister Foster.

‘All you crim’nals can quit worryin’. It’s Linkhorn makin’ it today.’ He had kept exact count of the days.

The Rag, the Timberwolf, Sec Fiend, Natural Bug, Wayback and Out-Front, Chicken Spanker and the Honorable William Makepeace Murphy crowded about to wish him the worst.

‘You’ll be back tomorrow!’ Wayback promised.

‘Hell, he’ll be back tonight,’ Out-Front was sure.

‘Meanwhile, make this last you,’ Murphy said, and presented Dove with a sack of Bull Durham, neatly tied as a gift ought to be.

Dove hesitated. Gathered crumb by crumb from seven sacks, it was nearly three-quarters full. ‘
And
the papers,’ Murphy added proudly, holding out the pitiful gift.

Dove accepted. ‘I’ll see you guys,’ he told them, then shook hands on that understood lie, knowing he would never see a man of them all again.

In the mixed-up April of ’32 the numbers of jobless rose to eight millions, two hundred thousand steelworkers took a fifteen percent wage cut and it took a cardinal to perceive that the country’s economic collapse was actually a wonderful piece of luck, for every day it brought thousands closer to the poverty of Christ, who had been nowhere near before. For thousands it was the chance of a lifetime to bring Jesus’ simplicity, the cardinal said, right
into
the home. All over the country men and women and even small children began taking advantage of this spiritual opportunity. All manner of little goodies like that were lying about in the mixed-up April of ’32.

The D.A.R. demanded that unemployed aliens be deported; a mob lynched a man at Atwood, Kansas; a detachment of the Nicaraguan National Guard killed its American commander; a crisis in unemployment relief was imminent; somebody shot the President of France; cotton was up slightly following wheat and Huey Long said the time had arrived to redistribute the wealth. Russ Columbo was still singing
Please
.

Cuban sugar was held to imperil our own; Mayor Walker announced that New York Had Kept The Faith. The search for the missing Lindbergh infant was extended to England; Al Capone was on his way to Atlanta. Mayor Walker decried local pay reductions and Huey Long said he would vote Farmer-Labor before he’d vote with the ‘Baruch-Morgan-Rockefeller Democrats.’ Cotton was down again following wheat but the Congress decided not to redistribute the wealth after all.

In the curious April of ’32 Mussolini wrote a play and Calvin Coolidge had to make public apology and pay a St Louis insurance man twenty-five hundred dollars for calling insurance abstractors ‘twisters’ in a radio speech. Max Schmeling was taking his forthcoming fight with Sharkey seriously; California refused to pardon Tom Mooney and people were still singing
I Surrender Dear
. Senator Borah demanded that arms be reduced and atoms of hydrogen were transmuted to atoms of helium. The president of the University of Wisconsin announced that statesmanship had come to a full stop; Herbert Hoover was having his portrait painted; the Congress was asked to unseat Senator Bankhead and the crisis in unemployment relief was more imminent than ever.

In curious, long-ago ’32 so many people were saying that Prohibition was a failure that the New York Chamber of Commerce said it officially. Cotton was up again following wheat and domestic wine-growers demanded that domestic wines be made legal. A fragment of a human jawbone found near Lake Victoria was believed to be that of the earliest man. The Congress refused to unseat anybody. Kansas was the last state still voting dry and even Kansas was close to going wet. Sharkey was taking his forthcoming fight with Schmeling seriously and an ash-dust obscured the sun over Buenos Aires for forty hours.

‘The darker the valley the more the spirit of Christ-like charity appears,’ said that same cardinal in that strange brief spring, and New Orleans began planning a beer parade.

There, in Dockery’s Dollhouse while the juke played

a straight-haired flat-chested hard-of-eye hustler called Tough Kitty was trying to get credit for just one little beer.

But the bartender, acting as oddly as Hoover, didn’t seem to hear.

‘Did my husband leave owing you money or something?’ she wanted to know. ‘Is that what’s making you so salty over a simple deal like a glass of green beer?’

‘If you’re talking about a party name of Finnerty,’ Doc advised the girl, ‘he surely did, for he’s gone and he’ll never return.’

‘So long as I’m around you can be sure that sooner or later he’ll show up,’ Tough Kitty promised upon her word. ‘He thinks too much of me to leave me stranded and broke.’

‘He thinks so much of you,’ the old man asked mildly, ‘where is he now?’

‘I’m not free to tell,’ the girl answered before he’d finished asking.

‘And I’m not free to hand out free beers,’ Doc answered almost as fast.

So she drew from the pocket of her faded blue jeans a small change-purse and emptied it on the bar: twelve pennies and one nickel.

‘I got enough for a beer,’ she took count, ‘but not enough to get drunk on.’ And looked left-out of everything.

The old man brought the beer and scooped up half her pennies. ‘I’ve got a little money put by,’ he recalled casually, ‘I’d like to invest in a chicken farm. Do you know where I can go for advice?’

‘Why, that’s exactly what my Oliver—’ she cut herself short, the shrewd hard girl as gullible at the last as any. And the old man turned back to his dolls.

His dolls that were never drunken.

Someone pressed the buzzer just right and, peering out, he saw that bully, missing many days, that once had called himself Stingaree.

It was plain enough, the moment Dove came in, that if he wasn’t just out of hospital he was just out of jail. But so many had been in and out since the old man had last seen this one he had lost track of who was in where and who was out. And didn’t much care which.

‘Stay as long as you got something to spend,’ he warned the fellow, ‘then get out. Don’t let me catch you cadging others for drinks.’

‘I bought drinks for others a-plenty here and you never seemed to mind, old man,’ Dove reminded him.

‘I don’t mind yet,’ old Doc assured him. ‘Buy as many for others as you want. What are you having yourself?’

‘Whiskey and wash,’ Dove told him. The old man waited till he’d put his money down.

Dove poured his whiskey into his beer, taking his time with the pouring. Then took it to a table by himself, saying hello to no one. In the dingy light the panders and their women moved like people under water. Overhead the slow fans beat like the beat of a ship’s propellers heard on a deep sea floor. Though he had known everyone in the place by his or her first name only five months before, now they seemed people from some lost lifetime hardly known at all. When he asked a woman if she had seen Hallie, all he got was a shrug. Either the woman didn’t know or was too careful too tell. Nobody was long remembered on Old Perdido Street.

The only one whose memory of himself seemed fresh was the very one by whom he wished to be unremembered, with her side-of-the-mouth wise grin. Kitty came up to him but before she could either beg for a drink or offer him one, he shook his head, No. He was having no part of her.

It was a quiet afternoon. Dockery looked out once or twice to see that nobody was sneaking his own bottle. Of course the slobs were littering his floor once more – but a kind of tittering delight took him when his slobs did that, for it promised him the later joy of making all spick and span again. It was one of the few joys the old man had left.

He noticed Legless Schmidt’s platform leaning against a wall and Schmidt himself at a table, stumps sticking straight out before him, across from Tough Kitty. The old man approved of that: she wouldn’t be with him if he weren’t spending. He even thought of bringing them a couple shots, compliments of the house, to get them started, but then thought better of it. And took to dusting his dolls, giving Raggedy Ann special attention.

He never heard the first threat. There was only a sort of half-muted babble that rose for a moment above the fans’ steady thudding, then curiously subsided. When he looked out the redhaired bully with the hospital pallor had his back planted against the wall and Schmidt was standing before him, stumps spread wide, the flat of his palm on the floor to brace himself.