A Walk On The Wild Side

  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.

  ‘Hellfire too good for us!’ – someone else trying to get in good with the preacher for sake of his Kill-Devil.

  ‘We aint wuth Hellfire!’

  They overdid everything. For they knew Fitz put The City of Pure Gold within their reach only for the pleasure of snatching it back.

  And actually they didn’t give a hoot for any city of gold. Desolation here and now, that was their dish. Blazing brimstone, eternal torture and a backhanded crack from the hindquarters of bad luck was what they lusted for. Though they never really believed his promise of Heaven Just At Hand, nothing was surer to them than Hellfire. And it took Fitz to lead them straight to its screeching brink. The preacher knew where the real action was all right.

  With the passion of one who has been there and back, Fitz brought them closer and closer to the unspeakable edge—

  ‘Un-utter-uble sorrows is in store for all,’ he gave his holy word – a Santa Claus with nothing save horrors in his sack, hollowing every syllable to make Hell so imminent they could scarcely await their turn on the spit. ‘Un-utter-uble sorrows! Un-dying Damnation! Ut-ray-jus visi-tay-shuns! Invasion by an army! A army of lepers! Two hundred million of flame-throwen cavalry! A river of blood and burnen flesh a hundred mile long! Seven month jest to bury the dead! A army comen! A leper army!’

  ‘Army-Gideon!’ one idiot was carried completely away. Oh, they loved those leper mounties so they scarcely knew which side to join first. It didn’t matter: no cause was too mad so long as the action was fast and the field bloody. Swept, they were swept by the enormous loneliness of their lives up to the very gates of the golden city, then swept clear back to the burning plains of Damnation. An action so fast it permitted no moment wherein to take breath and look within. To look within at their own hearts, so dark so empty just as hearts.

  ‘Mothers to eat the flesh of their new-born! A time of trouble such as never was since there was a nation even unto that same time!

  ‘Hailstones big as blocks of ice! Tawr’nts of bloody fire! Fountings ’n rivers turnen to foaming blood! El Paso buried under red-hot lava! Now you poor sorry buggers you’re really going to catch it.’

  ‘How about New York?’ some people never wanted to go anywhere alone.

  ‘Buried in a rain of toads! Toads big as cats to Wall Street’s topmost tower!’

  Wall Street had all the luck.

  ‘Every island shall flee away and the mountings will not be found! Fly or die! All who worship Jehovah will have to receive the mark of the beast or die! Walls of bricks and walls of steel staved in by hailstones weighing fifty-six pounds apiece!’

  Not even Byron knew where he got his figures.

  ‘Papists rapists – the fiend’s agents already are amongst us, preparen to seize the White House. A real person the ex-press image of Satan! – the Pope of Wall Street!’

  Several looked suspiciously at Byron. Fitz’s eyes followed – and the movement sent the whole crowd into a single trance-struck shout—

  In solemn delight I survey

  A corpse, when the spirit has fled:

  In love with the beautiful clay

  And longing to lie in its stead.

  Byron couldn’t bear hymning and to him this was the most dreadful of all—

  This earth is afflicted no more

  With sickness – or shaken with pain;

  The war in the members is o’er

  And never will vex him again.

  ‘O God,’ Byron answered all like a cry – ‘O God who scorns the shoeless – forget our daily bread but hasteth thy vengeance! Hasteth! Hasteth!’

  ‘Who the hell’s side is he on now?’ somebody wondered.

  But before anyone could make a guess, Byron had turned and was lost in the dark. Yet his father’s voice pursued him.

  ‘Friends, I reckoned when I told you, a minute ago, about the invasion of lepers ’n hailstones weighin’ fifty-six pounds ’n flame-throwen cavalry two-hundred million strong ’n a rain of toads big as cats ’n mothers eatin’ their new-born ’n wind stavin’ in walls of brick ’n steel ’n a river of burnen blood up to the horses’ bridles, that you were heading for a bit of trouble. Now I have to tell you your real troubles won’t begin till Antichrist get worken on your sinnin’ hides.

  ‘Already he is spreadin’ the Doc-treen of evolution, the universal fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. Already the Wall Street labor unions are armin’ to help him
, preparen for the day when no man will be able to earn his bread by the sweat of his face unless he has the mark of the beast – A-F-L – upon him. Neither will he be able to buy or sell. City unions teach you that Chinamens are your brothers! Ayrabs! Mexes!

  ‘You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country. You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.’ – He leaped straight up and came down barking like a gibbon—

  ‘The cross! The cross!

  The bloodstained cross!

  The hallowed cross I see!

  O the blood! The precious blood

  That Jesus shed for me!

  Upon that cross in crimson blood

  Just now by faith I see—

  ‘—O! Look yander! Comen down the streets of gold! I do see a great bloodwashed throng all robed in white!’

  A dozen heads turned quickly to see God only knows what, but all they saw was Dove Linkhorn looking forsaken. As though wishing his poor crazy pappy would come down off the courthouse steps. When the crowd’s eyes moved toward him he turned away to follow his brother into the dark.

  He passed the little movie where Thomas Meighan was being featured in ‘Young Sinners.’ But paused in front of the curio shop to admire the little fringed souvenirs festooned there, pretending to be made of buffalo hide and to be engraved with a branding iron.

  Out where the smile’s a little longer

  Out where the handclasp’s a little stronger

  That’s where the West begins

  Byron had read the words to him long ago. All over town were signs and posters, legends, warnings and invitations Dove had learned by heart. Now it was his amusement to stand making his lips move with his memory, so that some passerby might get the impression that he was actually reading. He even frowned now and again to pretend he’d hit one that was tough enough even for an educated boy like himself.

  Passersby paid little heed to the sloucher with the hair in his eyes. So he paused below the barred window of the old jail. Prisoners, at least, had time for him.

  But the only one the jail held this night, his fingers wound whitely about the bars, was Chicken-Eye Riley, an Indian gouged in a brawl years before. He wore his hair long, pioneer-fashion, with a tucking-comb in the back. And stood with his scooped-out skull bent between the iron, trying to get a breath of the night he could never see. Dove saw light glint off the comb.

  ‘Got t’bacco for me down there?’ Riley demanded.

  Dove picked up a pebble, slipped it into his Bull Durham sack for ballast, and glanced about for the sheriff. The old man raged at the townsfolks’ habit of tossing sacks of this and that or anything, even grapefruit, through the bars, for it forced him to plod a steep flight of stairs to make the prisoner stand inspection.

  ‘Stand back, Chicken,’ Dove told Riley. Then tossed the tobacco – he heard the stone hit the floor with a tiny clink. The skull reappeared.

  ‘Thanks, son.’

  ‘What’s it for this time, Riley?’

  ‘Same old thing. Refusing to make love to my wife when she was sick. What kind of a man do they take me for anyhow?’

  ‘What kind of sickness have she got, Riley?’

  ‘You sound like a pretty well-growed boy. You know how women are. Wouldn’t a man be a beast to go to his wife at that time of the month?’

  ‘Reckon he sure would.’ Dove took a hazy guess.

  He actually didn’t know how women were.

  ‘Now if I’d took her against her will – if I’d beat her, if I’d tortured her, that would be something to arrest me for. If I did a thing like that I’d turn myself in. I’d give myself up.’

  ‘You oughtn’t whup a woman, Chief.’

  ‘I didn’t whup her, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. I wouldn’t hurt my sow, far less my wife.’

  ‘You oughtn’t whup either one, Chief. A dumb brute like that.’

  ‘I’m glad you see it that way. But just suppose I did? Suppose I was kicking my sow and the sheriff happened along. Do you think he’d interfere?’

  ‘I should think he ought.’

  ‘Well, he wouldn’t. You know why? Because the sow is mine to do with as I please. He would no more tell me how to deal with her than he’d tell the barber how to cut hair. So why should he interfere now if I’m not kicking my sow at all but just being tender to her till my wife is well? Can I help it if my wife is even more jealous than usual at that time of the month? A little kindness and they treat you like a monster.’

  ‘You shore aint no monster, Chief,’ Dove didn’t sound too certain, ‘but I got to get to work now. I’m maintenance engineer at the hotel up the road. Come in when you get out. I’ll have my cook fix you up.’

  Dove left the tender monster puffing contentedly against the bars. ‘Mighty mannerable fellow,’ the maintenance engineer decided, feeling pleased with the impression he himself had made.

  He had to step carefully over the gulleys that the townsfolk called ‘love-holes’ because they were supposed, in horse-and-buggy days, to throw lovers into one anothers’ arms.

  He passed the ramshackle Negro church where the town’s dozen Negroes gathered to pray, and heard them beginning as he passed:

  Well, hush, O hush,

  Somebody’s callin’ me.

  Well, hush, O hush,

  Somebody’s callin’ me.

  It was that moment before frogs begin, when Mexican women and Mexican men draw their shawls across their mouths to keep the night damp out. In the dust-blue dusk the boarded windows of La Fe looked down as blindly as Riley. The careworn stairway, the windworn walls, the sandworn doors down a heart-sore hall, all remembered Terasina.

  Terasina Vidavarri.

  Frost knocked at the window. Though she had not asked him to remember, yet he lit her virgin every night. By its light he got the stove roaring. Then lit himself a little stick of Byron’s home-grown potaguaya and drew a deep, defiant breath.

  ‘Crazy Old Hasteth! Little-Time-to-Repent! Old-Cut-Off-Your-Nose-to-Spite-Your-Face – if you’d but hasted me to school instead of playing Gawd for a pack of utter fools I’d have a readin’ ’n writen trade tonight.’

  With each draw he rose another inch off the floor.

  ‘Buggy old Just-As-I-Am’ – suddenly, the stick dangling from his lip, he crossed himself and genuflected, though his knees touched nothing.

  ‘Pump that out of your hose, old man,’ he told Fitz – ‘let that do fer you, Hell-’n-Brimstone.’

  Here was her bedside, here was her bed. Of late she had lain here restless or dreaming and soon would lie dreaming again.

  Between the white kerosene lamp’s glow and the virgin’s flickering yellow, he looked at the words of the story that told HOW A GOOD MAN IS ALWAYS RIGHT, for he knew that one by heart:

  ‘“Always going downhill, and always merry! That’s worth the money.”’

  The tip of his narrow cigarette danced like a tiny ballerina in the dark. He turned the page to where the Eastwind, dressed like a Chinaman, told the Prince to hold tight or he might fall.

  ‘“Oh, have you come from that quarter?” said the mother, “I thought you had been in the Garden of Paradise.”

  ‘“I am going there tomorrow,” said the Eastwind. “It will be a hundred years tomorrow since I have been there. I have just come from China, where I danced round a porcelain tower till all bells jingled. The officials were flogged in the streets. The bamboo canes were broken over their shoulders and they shrieked, ‘Many thanks, Father and Benefactor,’ but they didn’t mean what they said. And I went on ringing the bells and singing ‘tsing, tsang, tsu!’”’

  A scent of the Orient came to him. He left the book and followe
d his nose, sniffing like a rabbit, right up to a bureau drawer.

  A chiffon blouse, a white slip frayed at the hem and a black brassiere like the vestments of some holy order. Dove felt of them with that special reverence of men who have lived wholly apart from women. Under these clothes, it came to him like a mystery, the señora walked naked. The realization weakened him so that he sat on the bed’s edge with the slip lying limp across his knees and stroked it as if it were her flesh. In the nippled cup of the black brassiere he smelled her special smell, like that of Russian Leather.

  Here her breast had fitted – why it must be softer yet than this! And tested the garment’s texture against his leathery cheek.

  Señora, let me touch your naked heart.

  A yearning deep as need can go stretched him onto his stomach, clasping her slip to his chest. Pressing the pillow where her head had lain, his limbs convulsed and a dizzying surge left him limp as the slip. Sweating and passionless, guilty and spent, the boy lay a long moment with shuttered eyes. This had never happened to him before while waking.

  ‘That’s purty fair pot,’ Dove thought.

  And fell into a snoring sleep.

  To dream he was coasting gently about a county fair merry-go-round as he had once seen four small monkeys coast. Strapped tight into toy autos, each wearing a jockey cap matching the color of his car, one red, one green, one yellow and one blue; while about the guard rail people crowded and leaned – he touched the peak of his own cap to make sure it wouldn’t blow off when the big race began—

  Just as I am! Just as I am!

  the music began with the happiest bang.

  Now he was losing ground, now gaining – now he was almost out in front. O – Hasteth! Hasteth! From his father’s shouting face he saw Eyeless Riley’s skull emerge – the dream wheel tipped straight up, the rails slipped sidewise and out from under.

  ‘Señora! Save me from Riley!’

  He sat in the middle of the floor with the pillow still clasped to his chest. Above him the virgin burned bright. Beside him the stove burned low. Down the dark road Negroes foretold and foretold—