A Walk On The Wild Side by Nelson Algren
‘What? Afraid of a soldier?’
She saw he was completely hairless then.
For the indignities that had followed Terasina still had no name. But once she had warned him, ‘Now I’m going to scream.’
The swagger stick’s shadow fell across the sheet. She had bitten the pillow instead.
And the scent of cologne, like a nightmare in lilac, had risen first strong and then faint.
Till daybreak had emptied him at last of everything save self-disgust. Too exhausted to cry, he lay drooling weakly with the odor of lilac dying slow, like midnight in a barber shop.
Two days later the girl had looked in a mirror: above her blue-black bangs the hair had turned, in one small triangular patch, to the whiteness of fresh snow.
Her Floridan had returned to his flower beds and the Negro boy who assisted their cultivation.
Now, ten years after, Terasina’s only flowers were great hairy-stemmed barnyard hollyhocks. And her dreams contained far stranger creatures.
She would find herself waiting in some great shadowed corral in a sheer night dress, for one whose hair, worn long, kept blowing across his face like a mane; whose scent had salt and sweat in it. A stallion made of moonlight, to rear against her neighing and all her hopes rearing with him. Then the salt-sweat scent turned sick and she wakened with a barber-shop scent fleeing faintly along the boarded doors. Weak with disappointment, she would dress in the holy cold and shrive herself like a nun to make herself proud again. Ready to play waitress downstairs to the brotherhood of trailer, truck and bus, below a sign that said:
Pie a la mode … 10.
Pie a la mode with ice cream … 15
Lonches y sanguiches
25 y 35
And when lettuce ran out used cabbage instead.
‘Mexicans are lovely people,’ one of these smug-looking dunces with a badge in his cap was fond of assuring her, ‘and may I add, Señora, you got a right purty make on you?’
‘You lovely people too,’ Terasina would promise the Badge.
For ten years now this tightly wound woman with the snow-drifted hair had been serving section hands, firemen, railroad detectives, brakemen, tramps, tourists, engineers, conductors and truck drivers.
Antojitoes Mexicanoes the back of her menu read, but she’d taken no Mexican fancy to any of them in all ten years.
Abierta hasta a las 12 de la noche – empuje, her door invited them to push in and stay late. Yet kept her own self shut around the clock.
‘You must be connected with the railroads,’ one would try – ‘you got such a purty caboose.’
‘You remind me of Dolores Del Rio,’ another reported when his motor was running smoothly. Would the señora mind if he started a small bank account in her name to keep his wife from spending it all on whiskey? Would the señora object to be named beneficiary in a will? Or to taking a trial run in a new trailer over to Matamoros for the weekend?
She marveled at truckers whose vanity knew no truck-turning. The driver sat so long above so much pent-up power that after a while he came to believe the motor’s power was his own. Look out, I may shift into first. When he wanted to know what type of heating she had upstairs she said, ‘Same kind I got down.’ Well, he was only asking, because he happened to have a buddy in the oil-stove line. Gracias, no, he was very kind, but she already had one stove up there and what would be the use of another? Why own something she wouldn’t use?
And did she use everything she owned now, or was she wearing falsies?
‘God has been generous,’ she replied, and let her breasts rise with her pride. Yet let him tickle her palm when he took his change, flashed him her wide white smile and palmed two bits for her trouble.
The little restaurant drew drivers because it was the end of a long narrow road. There was always some cross-country monstrosity backing and turning between gas-pump and mesquite.
The only thing in pants around the place who pleased her was the browless, raggedy boy with the streaky red hair who had come in one day with a sheet of Sunday funnies in his hand – ‘I don’t know how letters make words,’ he told her, ‘so I’d appreciate it mightily if you’d quote these to me, M’am.’
At first she had not understood why he had come to her, of all people. Then she had realized he was ashamed to ask anyone else. So she had gone over the pictures with him section by section until she had gotten stuck on a word herself. That was when she had brought out one of her two books – How To Write Better Business Letters. But before they could make any progress with that a driver with a flat tire pulled up and the raggedy boy was gone to beg.
Sometimes she saw him circling a trailer in an anxious dog trot, one shoulder higher than the other and a tire wrench in his hand. Other times there would be only two big dirty feet sticking out from under a truck, the toes spread tensely lest the job be unfinished when the driver was ready to haul. What was he always so anxious about?
Or he’d just be leaning against the tin sign – FLATS FIXED – that whirled one minute this way and the next minute that as the wind off the chaparral passed and repassed. Beside it he could stand looking as lonesome as though tires were going out of style, treasuring each drag on his roll-your-own cigarette.
‘What do I owe you, Red?’ she heard a trucker asking and the redhead replying, ‘Makin’s ’n cawfee do jest fine for me, mister.’ She knew by his voice then he needed more than tobacco and coffee. ‘Hungry all the way down,’ Terasina guessed.
Apparently he thought money was going out of style too. Coffee and a sack of Bull Durham was his rate for an hour’s sweating labor in the sun. It angered Terasina, who could tell a ten-dollar bill from a Mexican nickel either side of the river, to see older men take advantage of him.
At last she had told a driver herself. ‘Changing two tires and a battery, six bitses please.’
‘The kid said coffee and a sack.’
‘Changing two tires and battery six bitses please. I set price at La Fe.’
The driver put six bitses down. Terasina didn’t touch it. ‘And tip for boy please.’
The driver extracted a final dime and left without a word. The way Dolores Del Rio was feeling today he didn’t feel he could afford it.
‘You take it,’ Dove told her when she put the money beside his cup, ‘for letting me hang around.’
She rang it up promptly – pshtang! ‘Okay! You got it!’
Six bits credit – he had it.
He decided, after due thought, on Sesos lampreados – brains wrapped in egg. She brought the order, fit for a section hand.
All she saw, for a while then, was his big thick ears sticking up like handles. All she heard was the beat, like a tribal drum, of knife and fork against his plate.
‘—’ n cornbread, m’am. I can eat cornbread till the world looks level.’
A minute later: ‘I’ll take a bowl of chili please m’am.’
‘Segundoes?’ she asked when the chili was gone.
A single bean lodged in the corner of his lip. ‘Si, señora.’
And under the browless eyes there burned remembrance of ancestral hungers; again the tribal drum beat fast.
‘You like more?’ she smiled weakly. ‘Chicharrones maybe?’
‘I got most all I can chamber,’ he admitted at last – ‘but for a slab of that cross-barred pie.’
She fetched the cross-barred pie and coffee. Stooping so far to get his lips to the saucer that his back stood up like a surfacing whale’s, he slurped it up with one magnificent slurp.
As close as she could figure it he now owed her eighty cents. She brought a broom.
He took it and shuffled heavily, right shoulder still higher than the left, to the door. Then, suddenly fired by the hottest chili north of Chihuahua, stormed from the front porch to the rear, behind the counter and up the stairs. He swept her room as if preparing it for holy services, then broomed the steps down in such a cloud that she rushed up with a sprinkling can.
He washed dishes
‘Is alright,’ she sought to calm him, ‘everything 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—
I’d like to live in Dreamland
With a girl like you
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.
Adios, mi corazon
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—
All of me
Why not take all of me
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 strange
‘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.