A Walk on the Wild Side (46 page)

‘I got nothin’ against you, mister,’ Doc heard the bully say.

‘You deny you left with her? You deny living with her?’

‘I left with her and we lived together too. I don’t deny
that
, mister. But if I knew where she was I’d tell you. But I been away myself.’

‘Don’t give me that camouflage. You know where she is, for she sent you here to find out what I’m doing. You came by God because she sent you.’ He seemed oddly sure of himself. Kitty Twist stood just behind him. ‘You’ll say where she is, and you’ll take me there. Or by God you’ll take the consequences.’

‘Give the men room, boys,’ the outlaws and derelicts vied now like men of public spirit working for the welfare of all.

‘If it’s what they both want, let them have it out,’ Dockery took his stand, ‘’n no interferin’ – a square shake all around.’

‘Make ’em shake hands, Doc, that shows they’re both good fellas.’

‘Then let’s see which is best,’ Kitty Twist put her two cents in.

The panders pushed the women back, and as fast as they pushed them the women struggled up front again.

Then all felt the big hush come down.

‘Back up,’ Dove waved an iron spittoon, ‘I don’t want trouble,’ and took one step toward Schmidt.

Schmidt didn’t back but merely stood, figuring his man. Then turned, the women and men making room as he knee-walked to his platform and carefully buckled himself in.

‘Going home early, Big Dad?’ somebody asked, but the cripple didn’t answer that. His platform was his weapon as well as his armor, and they all knew that.

Dove began moving slowly along the wall toward where the late alley-light shown through a half-open door. If he got within one jump he’d make a run for that. And never come back.

But as he moved slowly Schmidt moved slowly, a ballbearinged monster with his hands on the bearings, ready to swivel, charge or reverse. Without closing in, the platform kept pace. Behind him, pale with pleasured terror, faces of men and faces of women followed and paused and followed again. With no sound in the place but the thud of the fans and the quickening breath, like a caught rabbit’s breathing, of one who was almost caught.

Dockery saw Schmidt’s lips moving silently, like a man trying a combination mentally before executing it. He feinted Dove to left, to right, and each time Dove switched the spittoon, left to right. ‘I don’t know where your wife’ – at ‘wife’ Schmidt gave his wheels one hard swift twist and thundered in, his forearm protecting his eyes.

Dove swung the heavy spittoon like a discus under the protecting arm. Schmidt rocked like a loosened stump in a storm but the platform kept coming in. Dove swung again.

The force of that second blow swiveled Schmidt’s wheels, he banged blindly in the wall and rebounded, wheels going this way then that.

‘
Get
him,’ Dove heard the whisper from every side, ‘
Now. Now. Now. Brain him while he’s blind
.’ For Schmidt’s head was so low that his bald-spot looked at Dove.

‘
Now. Now. Now
.’

Yet Dove stood with his weapon, gaping at that helpless head; and couldn’t lift the hand.

The cripple’s face, when he uncovered at last, was smeared by blood down the whole left side where the spittoon’s edge had ripped above and below the eye. Dove held out his own bandanna, for no one else offered Schmidt help. And watched while the half-giant daubed the blood off his face till he could see again. Then he touched the bandanna’s ends together as if to apologize for soiling it, and returned it to Dove. ‘Thank you son,’ he said.

Perhaps it was his tone that made Dove think that was it. For he pushed his way into the crowd. ‘The fight’s done,’ he said.

The crowd closed ranks.

‘The fight’s only begun,’ he heard Schmidt behind him say. ‘Get your best hold, son.’

And reached.

Dove leaped onto the small table at the bar’s far end and crouched upon it, trembling in the legs like a panicking puppy up there. Schmidt hurled the table with a single twist, sending Dove sprawling comic-strip fashion, all arms and legs, while the spittoon went clanging like a clock gone insane. The cripple held Dove face down to the floor, steadying him as he floundered. Then lifting him between his great hands, gave his hands that twist of a coiling spring. Dove hit the floor on his side, one arm outflung and the other across his eyes. Schmidt straddled the outflung arm by riding the platform over it and lifted the other off Dove’s eyes. When he let it go it fell loosely, as something unattached, an arm without a bone.

‘He’s had it,’ somebody said.

It was true: they crowded in to see. Whether stunned by his fall or fogged by fright, he lay like some animal whose final defense lies in complete helplessness, eyes bright and unseeing, open to anyone’s blows.

Schmidt looked down at the face suddenly like a child’s. Then he brought back his right arm till its knuckles touched the floor behind him. There were two men standing who could have put a foot upon it. But one stood looking down at the way the knuckles stretched the sunburnt skin. And the other said, ‘Cold as a frog,’ nothing more.

‘Faking,’ was Schmidt’s answer to that, and brought the arm high in a full-swinging arch – and down.

It broke with a soft and sogging sound, the very bones went
oof
.

‘I like to get up close to accidents,’ Kitty Twist pushed in, and put her ear down to Dove’s broken mouth, that was trying to speak though swallowing blood.

‘If you let me go,’ Kitty Twist heard him say, and repeated it for those not so lucky as to be as close as herself, ‘he says if you let him go—’

‘I’ll say a prayer for you—’

‘—he’ll say a prayer for you.’

‘Tell him to save his prayers,’ Schmidt told her, ‘I want to know where my wife is.’ He looked down at Dove. ‘Don’t think you can scare me with a little blood,’ he said.

Dove’s head wobbled weakly from side to side, still denying all.

And though, when Schmidt’s fist was raised again everyone thought ‘relent’ – panders and cripples and fallen girls, yet when it fell all felt a heartbroken joy. As though each fresh blow redeemed that blow that his life had been to him.

Later, a woman who saw that the face on the floor was no longer a face but a mere paste of cartilage and blood through which a single sinister eye peered blindly, recalled: ‘When I seen him on the floor unable to rise and fight back, it went right through my mind –
Murdering. Murdering
. Why give
him
a chance?’

And when it was done Schmidt looked all around like a man in a lifting daze. He looked at them all as though there were something they knew he did not know. As if he did not understand the blood that was fouling his hands.

Kitty Twist knelt to put her thin arms around the cripple’s neck, and her lips were almost on his before he pushed her off, his eyes glassed by disgust.

‘Get this man help and open the doors,’ he commanded, and the doors were opened just in time to let the last of daylight in.

Schmidt saw the day and the open door. Yet he sat his platform without a move until Dockery said, ‘Get him out of here.’

And eagerly then, its tension relieved and its contempt wakened, the crowd went for the half-giant as though he were just some sort of thing. One shoved him from behind. Another hauled him by his hair. While another began kicking the little wheels that only a minute before he had feared; but that now didn’t move fast enough to please him. While that same poor bitchified prey, Kitty Twist, spat down the nape of his neck.

And he took it, Schmidt took it, he took it all. Like a statue of grief with a sorrowing air, as though he had done nothing more than their own work for them: a saint of the amputees.

Out of the speakeasy that had outlived its time, through the final door of a dead decade, they wheeled the deposed hero that once had been a man. Onto a downhill street.

Somebody gave the platform a shove. And waited a minute, with others who waited, to watch the thing reel from one side of the walk to the other, gathering speed as it lost control, making uphill trudgers dodge like dodging a drunken wrong-way driver – when it hit the telephone pole not one laughed. They merely stood watching to detect, from their distance, some movement from that crumpled lump, half on the curb and half on the street. But saw no movement at all.

Inside they heard the juke box begin—

And returned inside with the executive air of men ready, if need be, to vie with one another for whatever was best for the public welfare.

On Saturday nights the backland squatters came into Arroyo by Model T and by cart, but most came by foot. Some had shoes and some had none. But booted or barefoot they all shambled; and the woman stayed just a step behind all the way. She would have her shawl drawn across her mouth to keep the dangerous night-damp out and he would be breathing into a handkerchief or bandanna; after the Mexican manner.

But when they got into town there was so much talking to be done they forgot all about the dangerous air, or perhaps the air inside the city limits was made of better stuff. For the women chattered through all the stores, pointed in the windows with other wives or went to see a movie starring Rod La Roque. They all tried to get the old man to the movie too, whether he would or no: that much less chance of his getting drunk was the point.

He seldom fell for that. He sent her in and shambled off to the courthouse steps to hear if the preacher had anything to say he hadn’t said on a thousand other Saturdays.

An uneasy rumor was going around that the old man wasn’t as strong against the Pope as he once had been. In fact he didn’t seem as strong against anything as he once had been. The wrath and the fire that had been as good as a free shot of tequila seemed to have gone out of Fitz.

Was it whiskey or weariness that had caught up with him? Or just that, since Byron had been buried, there was nobody left to heckle him? Whatever it was, when he led them to the uttermost edge of Damnation now and forced them to look over the terrible rim, the fall they saw was no more than a foot or two into a coal yard of rain-wetted cinders with a few rusty beer cans lying about. Broken gin bottles lay among the dead slag that held promise of neither flame nor fire. They sniffed for the assurance of sulphur on the air: and smelled nothing but marigold that grows in old dumps.

Marigold mixed with the scent of blown dust that they knew so well it had no more scent than air. The old man had not really taken them anywhere.

Yet out of courtesy and having nowhere else to go, they still listened to the threats of his faded passion.

‘The glory is gone from motherhood,’ he told them. ‘Women who smoke and drink and wear pants are unfit to be mothers of men. What a monster-osity is a cursing, drinking, smoking, painted, bobbed-haired mother! When the Pope says modern woman is an insult to her maker he got more backbone than our own protestant preachers. Didn’t the
Lord
say, if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her?

‘More shameful things are worn by women on the open street these days than were worn in brothels a few years ago,’ the old man went on and on. And there was nobody to ask him how did he know what had been worn in brothels a few years ago.

‘Even our little girls are turned out into the streets almost naked, inviting God’s judgement on sin black as Sodom!
Are
we willing to pay the price?’ he asked, and answered his own question, ‘When it comes to God dealing with a nation’s sin, there are no dollar days. Are we willing to pay the price?’

They stared up at him indifferently. If they had the price of anything they would be in the movie or brothel, that look told.

Few noticed, in that dusky light, the man in the city suit, a broken feather in his cap, leaning against a tree in the shadows. Strangers came through town at all hours these days.

‘He’s lost the call, that’s all,’ Dove realized, trailing his hand down the howitzer barrel to where he felt it narrowing. Then touching a tree to his left with his walking stick, touched his way to the street. ‘Not paved yet,’ he thought at the stick’s first touch of the familiar dust.

Under the street lamp in front of the domino parlor two Mexicans saw him coming along the curb. One took a step toward him to guide him across the street, but the other held him back. ‘If he needs help he’ll ask for it,’ he told his friend.

The man didn’t need help, it appeared. He waited for a cart to pass, then went without haste but directly down that old road that had once led west.

This was in that hour that frogs begin, when the scent off the honey mesquite comes strongest.

Deep in the chaparral frogs were clamoring. As he came near they ceased, were quiet as he passed; then set up a clamor again. It was that hour that frogs begin, when the scent off the honey mesquite comes strongest.

Behind him a car, sounding more like a Chevie than a Ford, came banging by and pulled up a few yards ahead.

‘Give you a lift, bud?’ a man’s voice asked. As he came to the car Dove caught the scent off a woman’s clothes.

‘Am I going the right way to the chili parlor?’ he asked.

‘You’re standing fifty feet from it now,’ a girl’s voice told him.

‘Can you see if there’s a light in it?’

He felt her bare arm as she leaned across him to see.

‘There’s a light upstairs,’ she reported. ‘Should I holler them down for you?’

‘Thank you kindly, I’ll find my own way now,’ he told her. He heard the little car go banging back and felt himself alone in the big Rio night.

And felt a strange content in that.

‘If God made anything better than a girl,’ Dove thought, ‘He sure kept it to Himself.’

That was all long ago in some brief lost spring, in a place that is no more. In that hour that frogs begin and the scent off the mesquite comes strongest.