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

eagerly, even with gratitude, to be on hand at seven a.m. sharp.
    And to a man seven a.m. found them riding as fast and as far from the little lost town as any S.P. freight could carry them. Yet let the east-bound freights pass by if a west-bound freight was due. They still sought the old way home.
    The old way home that was now no more than any stretch of broken walk you reach at the end of any American town on any Saturday afternoon. Where blocks of paving stone lie severed by wind, sand and W.P.A. And a sign that may say TRUCK TURNING.
    Where black-eyed Susans grow out of the separating sand and a rusty beer can with two holes punched in the lid awaits the Resurrection or one more real estate boom.
    The old way home that led, at last, to nothing more than a tossing gas-flare over a sign at the walk’s very end:
YOU ARE NOW ENTERING ARROYO
Pop. 955
    A statistic that didn’t include the Mexican woman whose residence was just far enough beyond it to keep her free of local taxes. Whose own way home, eleven months of twelve, was up a flight of careworn stairs to a room guarded only by the Virgin Mary.
    Terasina Vidavarri slept within a double ruin. Within the wreck of her own hopes, inside what was left of the Hotel Crockett. The last guest had left and all along the long uncarpeted hall, the doors, like her own soul’s door, were boarded on both sides.
    Yet in sleep sometimes heard a pianola play. The boarded doors opened, the place came alight with the light that shines in dreams; to show men taking women on all the beds till she wakened. And saw a full moon rising with a yearning all its own.
    ‘It is lucky to love any time, for then you have someone to live for,’ Terasina thought, ‘but if you are not in love that is lucky also. Because then you have no problem.’
    Actually she’d hardly tried her luck. Her first and only lover had pitched such a fright into her that she’d taken no chances since.
    A girl of no family, a chambermaid in hotels catering to American tourists down in Merida in old Yucatán, Terasina, at sixteen, had become engaged to a bald, middle-aged Floridan of Spanish extraction.
    In his youth a second lieutenant, in his middle age a florist both by vocation and avocation, a carrier-off of prizes in flower shows, an exporter of day-lilies. An ancient wet-lipped orgiast in an American Legion cap – what a rare plant her florist was the girl had had not an inkling until their wedding night.
    She had wakened from a light sleep. Beside the bed a little lamp threw a deep orange glow. She heard the ex-lieutenant moving about the bathroom and it had struck her that he had been in there an unconscionably long while. She called his name. No reply.
    And was looking straight at that door when he strode out naked but for a helmet and swagger stick borne like a rifle – ‘
Ein! Svei! Drei! What?
Afraid of a soldier?’ Yet the impulse to laugh froze fast in her throat, for his face was a mask that brooked no laughter. Goose-stepping high past her bedside, three times past her bed, he came to attention in a light that seemed swathed in a sweltering mist. And touched the swagger stick with disdain between her eyes.
    ‘What? Afraid of a soldier?’
    She saw he was completely hairless then.
    For the indignities that had followed Terasina still had no name. But once she had warned him, ‘Now I’m going to scream.’
    The swagger stick’s shadow fell across the sheet. She had bitten the pillow instead.
    And the scent of cologne, like a nightmare in lilac, had risen first strong and then faint.
    Till daybreak had emptied him at last of everything save self-disgust. Too exhausted to cry, he lay drooling weakly with the odor of lilac dying slow, like midnight in a barber shop.
    Two days later the girl had looked in a mirror: above her blue-black bangs the hair had turned, in one small triangular patch, to the whiteness of fresh snow.
    Her Floridan had returned to his flower beds and the Negro boy who assisted