A Walk on the Wild Side (15 page)

That was how Dove came at last to the town that always seems to be rocking. Rocked by its rivers, then by its trains, between boat bell and train bell go its see-saw hours.

The town of the poor-boy sandwich and chicory coffee, where garlic hangs on strings and truckers sleep in their trucks. Where mailmen wore pith helmets and the people burned red candles all night in long old-fashioned lamps.

The town where the Negro women sang,

And piano-men at beat-out pianos grieved—

On the Desire Street dock Dove turned into the first place he saw where beggars and bummies can lie down to rest.

‘Look like you been a-fightin’ a circle-saw, son,’ the desk-clerk told him.

‘No. Just sortin’ wild cats.’

‘I’ll give you a nice quiet room then, where you can rest up undisturbed. I came to town barefoot myself, so green you could scrape it off me with a cob.’

‘I’m a quarter light of proper change, mister,’ Dove observed without touching his change, ‘I think you’ve made a small errow.’

The clerk came up with the palmed quarter. ‘You’ll be wearing shoes sooner than I did,’ he laughed. ‘Up the steps and first room to your right.’ Between the first room to the right and the tenth there was no difference. All were equally keyless.

The ceiling was chicken wire. By the smell the chickens were still somewhere near. But the bed was exactly what an exhausted bum needed.

Dove slept through the dusty evening into the feverish night. And all night heard the river boats call and call.

Once he heard a woman, sounding like she was standing alone on a corner, telling the world all about it—

Under wire on either side other dime-a-nighties slept out their ten-cent dreams. Till the hundred harps of morning struck on strings of silvered light.

And down the long unshaded street a vendor of colored ices beat a rainbow of tin bells. A bell for every flavor as he tinkle-tinkled past. Every flavor made of water sold to tunes made out of tin.

Come bummies, come beggars, two pennies per tune.

With occasional glances at the metal net to see no one was peeking, Dove was bringing each bill before his eyes, memorizing its denomination and adding that to the one before. Stretching each carefully in the hope that two might be sticking together.

When he reached forty, one loose single still lay on the bed. So he began all over with the one loose child. And was only satisfied that he was the owner of forty-one dollars when he had counted back once again.

A Linkhorn was rich at last.

Old-time sterno drinkers and bindlestiff nomads made the flophouse forenoon murky with their hard-time breath. But he was a Linkhorn in a cubicle all his own. He owned neither shirt nor shoes – but joy to a world full of shirts and shoes. One loose tooth was a small penalty enough to wake up being Dove Linkhorn.

Too bad, of course, about that little fool gal who hadn’t been smart enough to keep from getting herself pinched. Kids like that shouldn’t try crime till they knew what they were doing. ‘I hope this proves a lesson to that child to go straight before it’s too late,’ he hoped. ‘She weren’t cut out for the life like us crim’nals with a more natural bent.’

A little handkerchief, torn nearly in two and gray now with soot, dropped out of his pocket onto the floor. When he brushed off the soot he saw it was black and had once had lace on it. He felt a certain stiffness in its folds. And felt a shadowy apprehension that he might never hurt anyone except those who were dearest.

That he would know an abundance of pangs, some swift, some slow, some merely passing, and one that would never let him go.

‘Hopes I didn’t hurt you bad, Señora,’ he explained. ‘Just when I was gettin’ ready to help you up to say I didn’t mean what I done, that fool engineer blew his whistle and I had to hasten on.’

Yet the light lay pasted like a second-hand shroud against a guilt-stained wall: she had held a handkerchief out to him and he’d wiped his mouth with the back of his hand instead.

‘I’ll get somebody to handwrite a letter,’ he promised himself, ‘to tell I’m sorry now for what I done.’

Down the long unshaded street a rainbow of tin bells pinked out two pennies worth of applause and moved off to some far wider street. Morning seemed done.

A looming fear followed down the darkened stair. The bannister had been greased with another’s guilt, step by slow step down an echoing well. Where regrets of strangers burdened all the air.

Out on the open street he felt like a parolee released on some promise he could never keep.

Dove left all guilty loomers behind for a while in the wide wonder of Canal and the hurly-burly holler-and-bounce of its sun-bound whisper and roar. Theatre marquees, mounted policemen, a red motorcycle with a blue sidecar and a popcorn machine popping right out on the street. A woman’s perfume turned him clean about – O, look at her legs moving under her dress! Here comes another! He found his way into an awning’s shade and leaned there against a barber’s pole until his senses steadied.

‘Why do I act so derned
suspicious?
’ he complained to himself – a man with forty dollars don’t have to take a back seat to no man. Why, a man who owned that much was already on his way to being a captain.

A banana or a cotton captain, a peanut or a popcorn captain, a coffee or a whiskey or a corn-likker captain – though of course nobody got to be a captain of anything just like that. First you had to help those already captains to haul their coffee and pop their corn, drive their black locomotives or steer their big white boats. Not even a captain could do everything himself. ‘I could be a tooth dentist,’ he thought. ‘A doctor is good too, account he can cut ’n slash ’n have license to do it.’

You began at the foot of the ladder and when somebody tried pushing past you he got your big foot in his face – he’d have to get a pair of waterproof boots right soon. Though there wasn’t, of course, much danger of anyone being foolhardy enough to try wise stuff on a Linkhorn—

‘I count purty fair too,’ he considered a bookkeeping or banking career ‘though I
do
have that one little
dee
fect, that I never got beyond B.’ Nevertheless, he took measure of his varied powers, ‘I
do
have a very strong mind. I reckon a man with a mind as strong as mine could in time prize up creation and put a small chunk under it.’

In the window the barber was signaling something with a bottle of hair tonic in his hand. Dove grinned to see if the man wanted to make friends. When the man made for the door with shears in his hand Dove judged not and shambled back to Canal.

He bought two colored ices, an orange one and a green, from a vendor wearing sunglasses, and slipped him a Mexican nickel. Sure enough, he got an American penny in change. ‘Good deal, Linkhorn,’ he congratulated himself, ‘when it comes to figuring I’m already well past B. Got to git me a change purse for these smaller operations.’

He followed a St Charles Street trolley up to Lee Circle. There, one hand stained green and the other orange, he crowded an elderly fellow with a bandaged foot off a bench to make room for his own big feet. The old man went off stabbing the pavement with his cane.

‘Crip got all fired up about somethin’,’ Dove sensed, ‘Now I wonder who
that
captain might be,’ and squinted up in perplexity at a heroic sculpture. ‘Must be somebody from the Rebel War,’ he finally decided.

A bald-headed man in a soiled suit and a Hoover collar came up to Dove’s bench with a sheepish air. ‘I’m not a beggar,’ he explained, ‘actually, I’m in the diplomatic service. They’re holding a post for me in Washington and when I get there I’ll sleep in the best hotels, of course. Tonight, however, it will be necessary for me to sleep out again unless someone like you should loan me fifteen cents.’

He offered Dove his calling card, stained yellow at the edges. Dove pretended to read it and became so impressed that he owed the man a nickel, ‘Since it’s for the country,’ he explained.

The St Charles Street trolley swung about the circle. ‘Have to ride that sometime,’ he promised himself.

An Anglo girl in a white sailor tam and an over-the-shoulder bag sauntered into the shadow cast by Lee’s boot and paused to smile directly at Dove. He glanced back over his shoulder but saw nobody waiting for her there. She popped her gun smack at him – ‘Well?’

Dove rose, bowed from the waist hand over heart, thus sweeping his straw skimmer almost to the earth.

‘Howdy, m’am.’

The girl left without looking back.

No matter. When he got that good old gee-tar and picked himself out a couple good old tunes he’d have his pick of the merry lot.

And coasted, easily and unseeing, past broken men and breaking ones; wingies, dingies, zanies and lop-sided kukes; cokies and queers and threadbare whores. Ulcerous panhandlers lame and cancerous, tubercular pencil peddlers, staggering lushes. Old sick cats from everywhere yowling as they went.

All was right with the world.

Till he caught an unexpected glimpse of himself in a window and saw nothing was right after all. No wonder that girl had shied off.

Who ever heard of a captain of anything going barefooty?

From the Barracks Street wharf to Bienville, drydock to drydock, dead ocean liners lay like ruined whales, their great white hulls turning to rust. The whole town was in drydock.

Over all, in a coffee-hued haze from happier years, one still smelled the big brown smell of coffee. The warehouse walls, like the hulls, were stained with it. The planks of the wharves were embedded with it. Below the planks ancestral sacks were rotting in the lap and wash.

The whole town was in drydock, the whole country in hock, but the pit of the Depression, a secretary of labor announced, was past at last. The President’s stand on wages had averted an even worse slump, the secretary added, ‘Business is starting back.’

‘Nobody goes hungry,’ said Little Round Hoover, wiping chicken gravy off his little round chin. A man with the right stuff in him didn’t need government help to find work. That would make him lazy. He might even get sick. Self-reliance for the penniless and government help to the rich, the Old Guard was in again. Hoover patted the chicken inside his own pot. ‘
I
got it made,’ said Little Round Hoover.

And in all those miles of wharves and docks the one boat still shipping water was a freighter under an Argentine flag and the proud Spanish title of
Shichi-Fukujin
.

In his dizziest daydream Dove had never dared to dream up anything this big. All he could do was gape as the shallows slapped, a little man looking up at a little man looking down.

The one looking down waved to him to come up. As soon as he got on deck Dove saw his help was needed here. For one thing, the sailors were too small to steer anything this big. With eyes too little to tell the difference between a lighthouse and a dock till they’d be right on top of it and then it would be too late.

His friend who had done the waving began talking something neither English nor Spanish and pointing at the smoke stack with a paint brush. Dove had never seen a brush that big nor a stack that high. But if needed he could make that old chimbley look like new.

He reached for the brush but the little man held it back, pointing now to a dock window at dock level:

‘Boss man.’

‘Wait for me,’ Dove warned the crew. He hurried down the gangplank, into the warehouse and up a spiral stair. Through an open door he saw a framed photograph of an ocean liner that took up half a wall. Below it a drydock foreman sat wishing he were rich.

‘Papers’ – the man held out his paper-taking hand without looking up.

‘Aint the newsboy,’ Dove explained.

The man glanced up, then wished he hadn’t. Before him stood something in a pitch helmet off a Walgreen counter, share-croppers’ jeans, sunglasses, a dollar watch with a tick like grandfather’s clock, and butter-colored shoes.

‘You the bull-goose here?’ Dove asked, ‘I’m lookin’ for boat-work.’

‘There’s ship captain lookin’ for that, son,’ the foreman told him.

‘Didn’t reckon on bein’ no captain right off,’ Dove offered to compromise, ‘I’d be mightily satisfied just to swab the deck – or if by chance,’ – he added cunningly – ‘you happened to have a chimbley needs a fresh coat of paint I’d admire to try my hand.’

‘You have to have your able-bodied seaman’s papers.’

‘More able-bodied than most,’ Dove persisted. ‘Whatever you’d pay me I’d be mighty grateful and praise you most highly for. I’m a very light eater, I might add.’

‘Son you aren’t implying you’d
scab
, would you?’

‘Mister, I’ll cook, I’ll cuss, I’ll mend yer socks, I’ll stoke yer engines ’r catch you a damn whale barehand.’ N if you want me to scab somethin’ I’ll scab ’er fore to aft. For I want to learn the sailing trade ’n I’m strong enough for four.’

‘You
do
know that there is a seafaring man’s union?’ He gave Dove the benefit of a serious doubt.

‘Mister, I’m a Christian boy and don’t truckle to Yankee notions. Put my name in your ship’s dinner-pot and you’re my captain, I’m your hand. Just tell me ever-what you want done and I’ll ’tend it, for I’m bedcord strong. If I don’t turn you out what in your eyes makes a fair day’s work you can put me off at the first port of call. Aint that fair enough?’

‘Mighty fair, son. If more boys were willing to work for nothing there’d be just that many more millionaires.’

‘It’s how I figure it too, mister. You got to work for nothing or you’ll never get rich, that only stands to reason.’