A Walk on the Wild Side (7 page)

He washed dishes, scrubbed eatingware till it shone and patched a screen in a minute. Then announced some triumph from the kitchen – ‘
Uno! Dos!
’ He was swatting flies with the
Police Gazette
.

‘Is al
right
,’ she sought to calm him, ‘every
thing
is square.’

Then in the stilly mid-afternoon hush that comes to all old chili parlors they sat together over
How To Write Better Business Letters
.

‘This is how letters make words,’ she told him. ‘The first letter is “A”’ – she made him push up and cross the A. ‘Alright. Now “B.”’

Thus a child taught a child.

When he had shown improvement in both letters she suddenly wearied of the game and found another – how to trip the little key behind the coin box of the juke so that it would play without a nickel. It came on playing
Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland
; for, like herself, it was divided between American and Mexican songs.

The next song was her choice –
Cuando sale de la luna
and Dove couldn’t get enough of that. She spiked a coke with tequila and asked him how Angloes could drink the sticky stuff without spiking it. His answer was to agree with her by adding another shot. He began to shift, one foot to the other like a happy bear that had never been happy before—

It had been so long since she had herself felt joy, it eased her deeply now to see another’s. He was one of the strange ones all right, and certainly no florist. He smelled of sweat and salt. No day-lily had touched him.

‘I like to see men dance—’ her own voice surprised her, and she changed the record back to the juke’s Mexican side.

Every time the juke cried out ‘
corazon
,’ Terasina hiccupped. The third time it happened she seized Dove’s hand and held it hard across her nostrils and mouth, encouraging him to press. ‘
Empuje
,’ she ordered the Mexican cure for hiccups. With one arm about her shoulders to brace her, he pressed so hard she began to choke and he had to stop.

‘Death is a poor cure for hiccups,’ she informed him.

She preferred dancing to hiccups or death. Her joy was to hear the eager mingling of human voices, with children’s among them, like voices heard on the other side of a wall where strangers are having a birthday party; and never know one listens who never can enter there.

Once she had heard a young father asking forgiveness and seen the young mother make reply simply by giving suck to his only child. That memory tugged at Terasina’s darkly encircled nipples yet, at her own white breasts so aching.

‘In Jesus is my peace,’ she told the mirror in her small room, ‘
en tristes horas de tentacion, en Jesus tengo paz
.’ And the mirror looked back as much as to say I think somebody just lied.

And strangely, for one so devout, in dreams sought neither peace nor Jesus. She would find herself back in some Mexican place, the hour midday and all shades drawn. In wan doorways wan dreams of Mexican dogs dreamed on.

Everyone in the city slept save one whose hand rested on the knob of her door as though it had rested there for hours. ‘It is so hot in the street,’ the listener beyond her wall complained in a voice much too used to lying. ‘May I have water?’

‘Only Jesus may drink here,’ she forbade him, and wakened with a sense of dry loss clutching her throat. Outside the rainwind was making mirrors of every ditch. She saw the true stars walking hand in hand down paving stones to the end of town. And then walk back again – like lovers coming home.

Suddenly the cup in her hand looked so empty, she dashed the water across the floor, poured it running-full of tequila; till it too ran over.

And drank, with her hands shaking and her back turned to the wall lest the Virgin Mary see her.

After
Sesos lampreados
, coffee and makin’s left Dove as dissatisfied as had the Sunday funnies, once he had seen a book.

So after the day’s last driver had gone Terasina opened her other book to him.

Now Dove saw a Chinese prince in flight, bearing lightly on his back a flaxen-haired boy with a green feather stuck in his hat; a fairy princess in a nutshell afloat on a leaf, cowering from a gigantic bullfrog saying ‘“Croak croak croak” was all her son could say for himself;’ a little patched man driving a herd of cows while smoking a clay pipe; and reindeer, Santa Clauses, dancers, goblins, ducks, mandarins, angels, castles and teapots and trees half as old as the earth.

But the one that trapped Dove’s interest completely was the steadfast tin soldier who shouldered his musket bravely although he had but one leg.

He had been made last, there had been not quite enough tin to finish him. Yet he stood quite as well on his one leg as others did on two. Dove guessed right away that, of the whole army, this was the very one who would get to see most of the world, have the greatest adventures and at last win the love that all the others wanted too.

The steadfast soldier didn’t have far to look: she was a paper dancer dressed in lightest gauze, with a blue ribbon across her shoulders pinned by a spangle as big as her face. She was standing tiptoe, stretching both arms toward the soldier so that, so far as he could see, she too had but one leg. This made him feel very close to her, though it made Dove uneasy. A mistake as bad as that could lead to nothing but trouble. Yet the soldier had made up his mind, and lay down full length behind a snuffbox, so that when the other soldiers were put in their box and the people of the house went to bed, the soldier still had an eye on his dancer.

‘Then the clock struck twelve, when pop! Up flew the lid of the snuffbox, but there was no snuff in it. No! There was a little black goblin, a sort of jack-in-the-box.

‘“Tin soldier,” said the goblin, “have the goodness to keep your eyes to yourself.” But the tin soldier pretended not to hear.

‘“Ah! You just wait till tomorrow,” the goblin threatened him.’

Just as Dove had guessed, there was trouble coming. The very next morning while standing guard on a window sill, the goblin blew him off the sill, the soldier fell head foremost from the third story and landed with his bayonet fixed between two paving stones. People went by without seeing him and some almost trod on him. It began to rain, a regular torrent, and when the rain was done and the gutters rushed, two small boys found him, made a boat out of newspaper, put the soldier in the middle of it and away he sailed into a long wooden tunnel as dark as it had been in his box.

The current grew stronger, the paper boat began to take water and sank beneath him. The soldier was swallowed by a fish, yet shouldered his musket as dauntless as ever until a flash like lightning pierced his darkness and someone called out loudly, ‘A tin soldier!’ The fish had been caught, taken to market, sold, and brought to the kitchen, where the cook cut it open with a large knife. She took the soldier up by two fingers and carried him into the parlor, where everyone wanted to see the wonderful man who had traveled so far. They set him up on the table and – wonder of wonders! – there were the same children, the same toys on the table and in the middle, with a sort of glow about her, his own tiptoe dancing girl! He was home once more!

The soldier was so moved at all this, especially at sight of his beloved, that he was ready to weep tears of tin joy. But that would hardly have befitted a soldier. So he looked straight ahead, a bit to one side, as one returns an officer’s look; but she looked
directly
at him. At that moment one of the little boys took up the soldier and without reason or rhyme pitched him into the fire, where he died, true to duty, looking straight ahead but directly at no one.

Dove leaped up, slammed the book so hard he caught Terasina’s thumb – ‘
Basta!
’

Enough of fairy tales. He hadn’t liked an ending like that, it appeared. For he raced to the juke, tripped it and began to dance as though trying to forget the soldier’s sad end as soon as the juke began to sing—

Raising one foot then the other, he began a slow swaying with his head, arms hanging loosely in a dance wherein, the woman saw, love strangely mixed with despair.

‘See the King of the Elephants!’ Terasina encouraged him, and applauded only to conceal her uneasiness. Somehow, that dance didn’t look right; though she could not have said where it was wrong.

He put his hands on his haunches and, grinning obscenely, sweat on his lip and breath coming faster, invited all women in a grind so purified by lust Terasina felt her own thighs start to part. A look half anguish and half shame made his face go gray and he sank to the table with his head on his hands. She saw his shoulders tremble as the music died all around.

When she touched his shoulder he gave her a smile that suffered too much, that pulled at her heart like an animal’s plea.

Holding the fingers of her left hand together, away from the thumb, she sprinkled salt on the stretched tendon and licked it up with her quick small tongue.

‘You must get yourself a girl,’ she announced as though salt had made her suddenly wise. And held the salt of her hand out to him, that he might become wise as herself. He pinched a speck of it, gave it to his tongue, thought for a moment and decided, ‘There aint no girl in this whole fool’s valley worth a second look.’ Then, swallowing the salt at last, had a cunning afterthought: ‘’ceptin’ yourself of course, Señora.’

‘Well,’ she pretended not to have heard the afterthought, ‘it is true things here are not so good. But if just this one little part of the world had everything, pretty girls and good crops too, bad men would come from the bad parts of the world bringing ugly daughters. Then things would not be so good as they are now. So it is good things are not so good.’

That night Terasina slept poorly. Half in sleep and half in waking she saw the smile that suffered too much.

A week before Christmas she gave him the key to the
Fe
, to play caretaker and watchman for her till she should return. She could not always go home when her heart was troubled. But this year the trouble came at Christmas, providing her with a pious excuse.

Through the drought of 1930, when old friends’ pennies counted most, merchants tossed Kiwanian greetings from all the doors of the little town’s stores, and smiled, smiled, smiled. But when the drought was relieved and tourists Matamoros-bound again began to get lost between the curio shop and the post office an hour, they were much too busy to smile. Business was business and time became money then.

The barefoot men and boys in overalls would walk around some tourist’s Buick, pointing its advantages to one another so solemnly that it seemed the days of walking from place to place must be over for everyone. Had anyone thought of letting the air out of the tires he would have been prevented, for their interest was proprietary. What they hoped for was many miles per gallon, no nicks on their fenders, contented journeying and no blowouts.

They knew they came from the wrong side of a town that had only two sides, the wrong and the wronger, so strangers with loose cash must be shown respect. And if the women in the cars with the Eastern licenses seemed more prideful than common, that was only agreed to in Spanish, that courteous tongue.

To this lost place the Depression arrived as a sort of modest boom, bringing a relief station and a case worker that caused a dozen wetbacks to wade back across the river. ‘More fried yams for the rest of us,’ old friends wished them indifferent luck.

Shambling down Main Street one bleak evening, Dove noticed the pharmacist idling in front of his shop wearing the face that said, ‘Keep moving, Useless. Business is Business.’

Useless kept moving, for business
was
business.

Useless always kept moving until he was told to stand to one side. Then he stood to one side until told to start moving. All weathers to Dove were a single season in which he moved or stood unwanted.

On the courthouse steps Fitz was playing the fool for the same gang of cactus-headed rundums for whom he always played the fool. Byron was leaning against the howitzer as though too exhausted tonight to mount it.

‘Preacher,’ asked a hungry-looking misfit, stooped as under a pack, ‘is it right for a man’s wife to bob her hair?’

‘Go to Deuteronomy,’ Fitz promised, ‘your answer is there.’

‘But I don’t
feel
it’s wrong,’ the wife’s voice defied Deuteronomy.

Fitz’s eyes sought her out. ‘Woman, did you ever get down on your knees and ask
God
if it was wrong?’

‘No I didn’t, Preacher.’

‘When you do He’ll let you know. If He wanted a woman to cut off her hair he’d have her to shave too, wouldn’t he?’

There didn’t seem to be any answer to that.

‘How fast do angels travel?’ was the next issue Fitz had to solve. That was easy.

‘Why, an angel can leave the New Jerusalem at six o’clock in the morning, travel all
over
the earth, and be back home at six in the evening where the lion
doth
lie down with the lamb. Heaven just at hand! Where neither moth nor rust do corrupt! Where thieves break not through nor steal. No sickness! No pain! And a thousand years is as a single day!’

‘What’s the fool rushin’ to get home by six o’clock then?’

Fitz ignored Byron.

‘There
is
balm in Gilead! No wreaths of sorrow on the doors – and the doors is all pure gold! Pure gold!’ The old man bethought himself – ‘Only don’t you count on that – nobody is going to be fool enough to mistake a bunch of chicken-thieves like you for angels. No, my pitiful friends, what’s in store for
you
aint no New Jerusalem.’

‘Good old Hellfire fer us, Preacher,’ a believer sounded like he could scarcely wait.