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

light—
Sometimes I have a great notion
To jump in the river and drown—
    a changeless twang that once had trembled the springs beneath one wild girl on an upstairs bed wearing a silver comb in her red-gold hair; black-mesh hose and nothing more.
    Fitz had been a man past thirty that year of 1909, but a real wild boy all the same. Who always went right for the wild girls the hour he came to town. Till he sat one night on the redhead’s bed putting the last of a bottle to her lips. Eyes shuttered tight against all light she drank as long as whiskey would pour without once lifting her red-gold head. It had burned her throat inside and out – then his mouth had been sweeter even than that. It had held her own so firm while his flesh, thrusting deep, held firmer even than that. Till the whole room rocked in the looking light and had locked them heart to heart.
    While the moon that could never wane looked on, on brandy, silver comb and wine.
    While in all the rooms upstairs or down, beds wide or beds narrow, the lights had flared brighter and more bright.
    On marble, mirror-shine and wine.
    Till the dice players had begun crying out with despair at something more than merely losing, the roulette wheel had begun to spin as if each turn must be its last; and the pianola began a beat that rolled as though all hope were gone—
Sometimes I have a great notion
To jump in the river and drown—
    keeping time to the rolling man lashed fast between those black-meshed thighs, breathing her breath as she breathed his till she moaned his lips apart: the pianola roll below flapped loose, the music stopped yet the roll whirred on. Her eyelids fluttered in the drains of her passion – it had not happened to her before like this. Fitz had felt the flutter against his cheek. The pianola roll whispered on and on, it had not happened to him before so heart-shakingly as this.
    And the moon that could never wane dimmed down to no more than a gas lamp’s leaning glow. Drinkers and dancers, gaffers and gamblers, all had gone.
    Out in the sand and the Spanish Dagger, in chaparral-pea and honey-mesquite where under the thorn the horned toad waits, the prairie dog slept in his burrow. White bones bleached in the sun. Before the music was over; before the dancing was done.
    And a little wind went searching in circles to ask, Where had those lovers gone before the dance was done?
    All was well. They had breathed each other’s breath. All was well: they had drunk of each other’s lips.
    All was well, for what was dust had when living been loved.
    Fitz had married his wild girl, who had turned out not so wild after all. She had given him two sons. And since her death he had returned but once to the side of town where the Davy Crockett still stood.
    To find nothing left but boarded windows above and a dim-lit chili parlor below. Whose name was painted across its pane:
LA FE EN DIOS
Bien venidas, todas ustedes
    The town that had begun with a ball by electric light was dying by the glow of kerosene lamps. Time had gone backward in the little lost town.
    By 1930 the old way West led nowhere but to the shade of a water tower where old bums drained sterno through ragged bandannas and left such small earnest tokens of their passing as a tennis sneaker with the sole gone through, an undershirt ironed brown by the wind or an empty half-pint labeled
White Swan Gin – Bottled in Chicago
.
    Crease-faced or rosy, shaggy or bald, faded or florid, spare or stout, fried by sun or bedraggled by showers, one by one they came through the door of
La Fe En Dios
. To stand, shifting a cap from one hand to the next between the juke box and a potted fern till the Mexican women finished serving her paying customers. Then they received the last cold dregs from the coffee urn, half a day-old pineapple pie and a bar of American Family soap.
    If they wanted more than that they would have to come by daylight and work for it. Bald or barefoot, old or young, each promised