Free A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren Page A

sloucher with the hair in his eyes. So he paused below the barred window of the old jail. Prisoners, at least, had time for him.
    But the only one the jail held this night, his fingers wound whitely about the bars, was Chicken-Eye Riley, an Indian gouged in a brawl years before. He wore his hair long, pioneer-fashion, with a tucking-comb in the back. And stood with his scooped-out skull bent between the iron, trying to get a breath of the night he could never see. Dove saw light glint off the comb.
    ‘Got t’bacco for me down there?’ Riley demanded.
    Dove picked up a pebble, slipped it into his Bull Durham sack for ballast, and glanced about for the sheriff. The old man raged at the townsfolks’ habit of tossing sacks of this and that or anything, even grapefruit, through the bars, for it forced him to plod a steep flight of stairs to make the prisoner stand inspection.
    ‘Stand back, Chicken,’ Dove told Riley. Then tossed the tobacco – he heard the stone hit the floor with a tiny clink. The skull reappeared.
    ‘Thanks, son.’
    ‘What’s it for this time, Riley?’
    ‘Same old thing. Refusing to make love to my wife when she was sick. What kind of a man do they take me for anyhow?’
    ‘What kind of sickness have she got, Riley?’
    ‘You sound like a pretty well-growed boy. You know how women are. Wouldn’t a man be a beast to go to his wife at that time of the month?’
    ‘Reckon he sure would.’ Dove took a hazy guess.
    He actually didn’t know how women were.
    ‘Now if I’d took her against her will – if I’d beat her, if I’d tortured her, that
would
be something to arrest me for. If I did a thing like that I’d turn
myself
in. I’d give myself up.’
    ‘You oughtn’t whup a woman, Chief.’
    ‘I
didn’t
whup her, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. I wouldn’t hurt my sow, far less my wife.’
    ‘You oughtn’t whup either one, Chief. A dumb brute like that.’
    ‘I’m glad you see it that way. But just suppose I did? Suppose I was kicking my sow and the sheriff happened along. Do you think he’d interfere?’
    ‘I should think he ought.’
    ‘Well, he wouldn’t. You know why? Because the sow is mine to do with as I please. He would no more tell me how to deal with her than he’d tell the barber how to cut hair. So why should he interfere now if I’m not kicking my sow at all but just being tender to her till my wife is well? Can I help it if my wife is even more jealous than usual at that time of the month? A little kindness and they treat you like a monster.’
    ‘You shore aint no monster, Chief,’ Dove didn’t sound too certain, ‘but I got to get to work now. I’m maintenance engineer at the hotel up the road. Come in when you get out. I’ll have my cook fix you up.’
    Dove left the tender monster puffing contentedly against the bars. ‘Mighty mannerable fellow,’ the maintenance engineer decided, feeling pleased with the impression he himself had made.
    He had to step carefully over the gulleys that the townsfolk called ‘love-holes’ because they were supposed, in horse-and-buggy days, to throw lovers into one anothers’ arms.
    He passed the ramshackle Negro church where the town’s dozen Negroes gathered to pray, and heard them beginning as he passed:
Well, hush, O hush,
Somebody’s callin’ me.
Well, hush, O hush,
Somebody’s callin’ me.
    It was that moment before frogs begin, when Mexican women and Mexican men draw their shawls across their mouths to keep the night damp out. In the dust-blue dusk the boarded windows of
La Fe
looked down as blindly as Riley. The careworn stairway, the windworn walls, the sandworn doors down a heart-sore hall, all remembered Terasina.
    Terasina Vidavarri.
    Frost knocked at the window. Though she had not asked him to remember, yet he lit her virgin every night. By its light he got the stove roaring. Then lit himself a little stick of Byron’s home-grown potaguaya and drew a deep, defiant breath.
    ‘Crazy Old