A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren Page B

make fun of weakness in others. I’ll pay you the dollar I borrowed.’
    ‘You owe me nothing but goodbye,’ she told him and bent, trim at the waist and broad at the shoulders, hitching her skirt to the backs of her knees.
    She didn’t sense him coming up until his hands clamped her waist – then she wheeled like an ambushed cat and jammed the clothespin into his teeth. He rocked as if hit by fire.
    ‘
Segundos?
’ Terasina inquired politely.
    He drew off, shaking his head and spitting splinters. No, he didn’t care for seconds on clothespins. He reached cowlike toward the blood trickling down his chin, and she held out the little black lace kerchief.
    He shook his head. ‘Keep your rag.’
    ‘That is all I can do for you today then.’ The proceedings were closed.
    ‘You done nothin’ so great for me any other day,’ he told her, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand – ‘but you durn well
liked
what I done fer you.’
    Her face showed no recollection.
    ‘It felt
good
is what you said,’ he remembered gallantly.
‘Slow
you said – you liked it
slow
,’ and put his hand on the nape of her neck. She sank her teeth into his palm, he felt them sink to the bone and forced her, biting still, to her knees.
    ‘It’ll be a little faster today,’ he assured her, ‘I’m a mite short of time.’
    Spring-green and sun-yellow the clothes flapped about. Polkadot bandannas flapped a polkadot quadrille. But the night dress turned aside and a stocking hung dark as a shroud. Till she lay on her side with her head between her hands and her dress tossed back to her hips. The front of the dress was ripped to the waist. A low wind paused long enough to toss a handful of dust and pass on. It was done.
    Dove picked up her handkerchief and daubed his chin. He waggled a lower front tooth. It was just a mite loose. The noon freight hooted two miles away.
    Like a man walking through water he shuffled toward the S.P. water tower. The freight whooped like a Sioux who has seen too many westerns.
    He stayed out of sight till the cars began passing.
     
    The first stars arrived early that night to see how Dove Linkhorn was making out. And saw right off that here was one party who didn’t take funny stuff off anybody any more. Folks who thought this boy looked foolish felt different when they began to hurt. ‘Mighty rough customer,’ the planets agreed till Dove closed the doors on those gossiping stars.
    He heaped straw for a mattress, wadded a bandanna for a pillow, pulled a yellowed rotogravure page to his chin for a sheet. Who needed Texas? Let Texas roll by.
    And slept without remorse.
    Only once, clasping his stomach as the car rocked and rolled him between nightmares and dreams, he whimpered a little.
    When he wakened the cars were clanking an iron alarm and daybreak was shagging the shirtless and shiftless, the lame, the lost and the shoeless from under the brake beams and down the spines. Fleeing reefers, clambering couplings, climbing raggedly down off the ladders; walking wounded and battle-stragglers limped, leaned and hobbled to the closest aid-station.
    ‘Lots of fine folks out seein’ the country,’ Dove tried to get in step, ‘Didn’t reckon there’d be so many so early in the year.’ And stayed out of step for a quarter of a mile, to some half-sunken barns that might have stabled the federal cavalry that had once pursued Pancho Villa.
    As a matter of fact, that was exactly what they had. Though the horses were gone with Villa now – mavericks and herd-bound hides alike. Hoof prints long sunk and riders unsaddled – captains and privates all alike. In rooms where the lighting was still by gas some lay drunk and others lay dying, and all were long since unsaddled. Dead or dying, drunk or derailed, Captains or privates, all alike.
    The whole wide land looked disheveled as a bed in a cheap hotel.
    ‘Folks looken a bit peakedy,’ Dove observed, feeling slightly on the peakedy side himself. A