A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren Read Free Book Online

found bleeding to death in an empty somewhere up the line.
    Dove felt the uneasy guilt go around them like the perfumed glove; it too had made the circle of homeless men.
    Their home was ten thousand water towers, their home was any tin-can circle. Their home was down all lawless deeps where buffalo-colored box cars make their last stand in the West.
    He saw their nightfires burn and burn against the homeless heart, and felt he had himself gone West. That it had come to nothing then, and yet that he would go again.
    Someone had done some cheating all right.
    ‘I’m getting the evening-wearies,’ he decided, and returned to the penetrating odor of cold collards in a bowl above a stove coated with grease. Where dish towels hung in a low festoon from the damper of the stovepipe to a spike above the sink. The sink was a tin trough salvaged from a dump heap. Unwashed dishes and pans lay in it. It had no spigot.
    The spigot was outside and served shanties on either side of the Linkhorns’. These three shanties, upended green-pine clapboard so dried and shrunk it left chinks for rain and wind, made a kind of slum Alamo right in the middle of Mexican-town. Their men were either swart, like Fitz and Byron, or tended toward a certain thinness of color, like Dove. The women were fading for lack of forests. Davy Crockett was gone for good.
    Old forests had shaped their hands to gunstocks but never to cotton-picking. They couldn’t bear mill work and could neither buy nor sell. Hill and plain no longer claimed them. They had lost their claim to hill and plain and Crockett would not come again.
    They were backwoodsmen without a backwoods, the last of those who never would pick cotton. Plantation and mill were blocking them off like rabbits when a field is mown. They scorned both factory and town and wore brown jeans in preference to blue.
    And all night long, down that unlighted road, sometimes low and sometimes shrill, Dove heard an alien music. In their smoking, unlighted halls Mexicans sang and were well.
Tres Moricas tan lozanas

Mas lindas que Toledanas

Iban a cojer manzanas a Jaen
.
Axa, Fatima, Marien
.

Dixayles quien sois señoras

De mi alma robadoras

Christianas de ramas Moras de Jaen
.
Axa, Fatima, Marien
.
Three Moorish girls of spirit
More lovely than Toledan girls
Went out to harvest apples in Jaen
Axa, Fatima, Marien.

Say who you are, Señoras,
The robbers of my soul,
Christian girls of Moorish roots from Jaen.
Axa, Fatima, Marien.
    Mexicans had no old forests to mourn.
    The old way West, the old trails: wagon trail and cattle trail lost in miles and miles and miles of chaparral and mesquite. Gone and grown over in dry cacti. Old hopes, fierce hopes, pride and patience alike in vain. All the love they had once had for that big brown land blown like dust off the heart’s chaparral.
    The road West now led only to a low, dark and battered chili parlor in what had once been the big, white and merry Hotel Davy Crockett.
    Behind the darkened parlor’s pane a lamp’s reflection, doubled and blurred, burned like the double-ghost of a great chandelier that once had lighted a lobby like a ballroom at sea. Then its hundred-glassed gleam had flared all night like a light that could never wane. On brandy, brandy glass and wine.
    DANCING BY ELECTRIC LIGHT – that had pulled the bloods into the old Davy Crockett of Saturday nights. The wild boys from the wells, wearing those big red and green bandannas, come to drink down their wild girls. Their girls that could drink down the moon.
    The old Aztec moon of the Rio Grande, buffalo-robed to its outlaw eyes, that had watched the wild boys from the wells blowing their gold like beer-foam across the mirrored bar and heard the pianola rolling—
Sometimes I live in the country
Sometimes I live in town—
    and a guitar player from Arkansas twanging – for drinkers and dancers, hard-rock drillers, gaffers and gamblers, all alike. Drinking and dancing and gambling by real electric