A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren Page A

little silence run about around the room and back. Byron had a sense of timing.
    ‘And when did He make the two great lights, the greater to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night?’
    ‘The fourth, naturally.’
    ‘Think
that
over, old man.’ Byron turned on his side. He slept best upon a rounded star.
    Dove heard the old man thinking it all over; tossing then fuming. While Byron slept the sleep of the just, snoring softly.
    Dove was glad Byron had won for once. But personally didn’t care if the planet was shaped like a pretzel. He had issues more pressing to solve.
    ‘First she totes me on and the next thing I know I’m standin’ on my haid in the middle of the road. She could have spore me that.’
    Well, he wasn’t the sort to hang around a door he’d been shoved through. She’d have to send for him before he’d work for her again. That much was certain.
     
    All the same, there is no statute forbidding a man to walk down the common highway.
    Dust puffs filed behind him early the next morning, and an anxious wind went sniffing ahead like a hound favoring a sore forefoot; gas lamp to telephone pole, one side of the road to the other. Till it came to the lamp that leaned toward the
La Fe
as the
La Fe
leaned toward it. There it scooted suddenly around the corner into the yard, abandoning Dove altogether.
    He hadn’t heard of any law forbidding a man to go around the corner of a broken-down chili parlor either.
    Terasina’s back was toward him. Her earrings glinted green against the white of the wash like news of an early spring. Slips and step-ins, yellow and pink, flapped about her like invitations to love in the morning. The strong forenoon light silhouetted her thighs to the full and the wide.
    Sure enough, she was hanging yesterday’s black night dress. He watched the wind pawing it and saw it turning a little away from the wind like a girl evading a jealous lover. A wind that could not let matters be, but had to twist things around to suit itself.
    Raising herself on her sandaled toes to reach the topmost point of the line, she stretched her brown sleeveless arms and her haunches pressed hard together.
    As he had pressed them with his own large hand, when his other had pillowed her head.
    That he would not pillow again. He spat across the fence and saw his spittle strangle itself on a thorn.
    Look who’s hangin’ out her dirty underdrawers.
    Out of the corner of her eye Terasina saw him leaning. One more tramp come to stare. So stare. If it helps your health it does me no harm. I did not send for you.
    Won a wetback beauty contest forty years ago and thinks she’s the Queen of the May.
    Go when you wish to go.
    Let’s people see her make a-purpose. Thinks she got so much to show because she sells old fried beans. Wouldn’t be the least surprised if folks run her back across the river one of these nights.
    If I am to play the whore I will play for my own people.
    Better lookers than this Pachuco would be giving him the eye in Dallas or Houston one of these days. ‘Let me spend my money on you, Big Boy,’ is what they’d be asking him. Big Boy wouldn’t be wasting time on Pachucos then. He’d have some trim blue-eyed Anglo all his own, to cook him up real American meals. There wouldn’t be any
frijoles
in
that
house by God. And she’d say ‘think’ instead of ‘theenk’ and go to a Christian church and wear enough clothes on her back to keep every passerby from seeing how she was built between ankles and belly button. In Houston. Or was that Dallas?
    ‘No work today,’ she took the clothespin out of her teeth to announce.
    ‘I got a better job,’ he assured her.
    ‘Oh? That is
nice
.’
    ‘Aint in this old shite-poke town neither.’
    ‘What poke town is it in?’
    ‘Dallas, natcherly.’
    ‘What do you do there, in Dallas?’
    ‘You’ll read about that in the paper.’
    ‘You bring the paper and I read about it, so
you
know what you do there too.’
    ‘It’s not hard to