A Walk on the Wild Side (20 page)

‘Nary a yam, son.’

‘Wall, I just had a hankerin’.’

He heard Fort and Luke bickering about the last week’s rent, but listened only absent-mindedly. His right buttock still burned where the mosquito had gotten him. He rubbed the spot while waggling his tooth, till sleep stopped waggle, rub and hankerin’.

Fort looked like an ice-house horse mistakenly entered in a claiming race, then insulted publicly for not winning.

All his life he had been lapped by competition too fast for an ice horse. All his life he had been outclassed. Therefore no failure had been his own. How could a man who had never had a proper start be blamed for anything?

Worse, nobody would listen to Fort’s side of the story. How all the good times had passed Fort by, the love and the high living. ‘Watch out for yourselves after this,’ he warned all men, ‘I’m takin’ care of Number One.’

Yet moments of melancholy touched him when he realized that, somewhere, some deserving girl with a steady job was being deprived of him every day. He had tried, through lonely hearts columns, to help her to find him. But the columns had turned out to be taken up mostly by spongers advertising for somebody to support them.

What was the use of a world that failed to reward the deserving while heaping all manner of goodies on people who ought simply be given a kick in the teeth and sent flying? Someone just hadn’t been paying attention was how things looked to Fort.

He had ruined himself over and over for the sake of others and not one yet had said, ‘Thank you, goodbuddy.’ Forty years of selfless devotion to humanity had brought him no more than the faded cotton on his back.

Actually, those thin and rubbery lips had begun taking care of Number One with the first tug of his pinewood mother’s teat. And had lactated every available nipple since. ‘That was a real smart woman,’ Dove heard him talking in his sleep – ‘she
gave
me twenty dollars.’

That was how Fort had gone about making others happy. That was why, when teats ran dry and orange groves froze and shoe-soles flapped he could feel himself so terribly wronged.

And could bear his cross so mournfully, a sort of Kiwanis Christ in a Bing Crosby shirt, resigned to insult and injury, without a shred of larceny and incapable of imposing his woes on others. In fact, he told Dove so: ‘I’m not the kind to burden others with my troubles. Nobody will know from these sufferin’ lips through what Old Fort have went.’

Then play by play revealed through just what Old Fort had went.

However self-deluded, he wasn’t much deluded about New Orleans. ‘It’s just scratchin’ a pore man’s ass to try to make a living in this town,’ he informed Dove right off. ‘This town’ll starve you to death. I’m a mechanic, a cook, I can drive a truck or cab, I play the gee-tar and I can keep books for anybody. I made twenty cents yesterday and a nickel the day before and that’s doing better than a good many. A man can live on a dollar a day like Hoover tells him he got to – but where’s he to get the dollar?’

‘It’s a hard git-by,’ Little Luke cut in, ‘but what have a man got to lose by leading a Christian life? What if he
don’t
get rich but just poor-hogs it all his days? He still got a high place in the Kingdom comin’, aint he? Rich or poor don’t matter – Heaven apportion its awards accordin’ each man to his merit as I look at it.’

‘I guess everyone get exactly what he got comin’,’ Dove agreed, ‘but I aint old enough to vote myself and don’t think I will till I am.’

Fort had come out of the ’gator backlands to Coral Gables just as the beaches were being prepared for the boomer and the shark. Boomers and shark already lolled the palmetto sands. ‘Makin’ any money?’ they asked instead of ‘good morning.’

Fort had wandered among them looking for another Southern boy, but every face he saw wore the same obscene ‘N.Y.’

‘Makin’ any money?’

He had stood bent and sweating over oven and stove, plying the frycook’s fearsome trade, while New Yorkers got suntanned with girls half their ages a hundred yards away.

Soiled and baked by grease and sweat, still bent but beyond sweating, when waiters swung through the kitchen door, he glimpsed boomer and shark once more. Now they had changed to evening clothes and their girls to sleeveless satin. On the damask white as snow, dark wine or light looked equally cool.

One night an order had come back – ‘Not done enough,’ and had then been returned once again – ‘now it’s too well done.’ He had heard the metallic ring of laughter right out of downtown Gomorrah.

Between the dark wine and the light on damask white as snow.

Fort had that pinewood prurience that made him feel that going half-naked into the sea, even in the summer night’s sheltering dark, was ‘lewdling.’ So when he went wading into the midnight waters he wore long winter underwear. He felt safer, somehow, that way. Fort was afraid of all open waters.

He only went in far enough to let it spill through his palms and was careful not to splash. High overhead the bright windows paid for in Yonkers and the Bronx were filed one above the other. Oh, he knew what they were up to behind the shades all right.

O you smiling, treacherous girls, blouses unbuttoned and skirts unzipped, lolling up there in your bed lamps’ joy, saying ‘Maxie, play with me just right,’ while some king of the garment trade undressed her garment by garment. Hotel Sodom – that was what it ought to be called. To think of Christian girls, good Southern girls, daughters of families who remembered Shiloh and Atlanta naked up there in the arms of hairy brown thieves from Babylon. The giraffe-like man in the sea spilled Southern waters from palm to palm. In his heart burned all Atlanta.

Back in the windowless frycook’s quarters he froze one minute and sweated the next. He saw himself wheeling a Stutz – it was always a Stutz. And the wind that went by lifted the skirt of the slender blonde girl beside him so high he reached his big hand out – ‘
Makin’ any money?
’ she taunted him, and then there was no one at all on the seat beside him. Indeed, there was no seat beside him. Only a soiled pillow too hot to touch and the morning light seeping in from the hall that led one-way to the kitchen.

‘
Makin’ any money?
’ the chef had asked as soon as Fort had tied his apron that morning.

‘
Makin’ any money?
’ was the last thing Fort had heard that night.

He had learned to command the easy credit of that day and rushed, with other thousands there, to lay hand on anything of earth or steel or stone whose value would be enhanced as soon as a city would be built up about it. Though not a street had yet been cut from swamp, everyone knew the metropolis would soon rise and held stubbornly onto their pieces of earth or stone though offered fifty times their worth. Why give fortunes to strangers? Land that had sold for two dollars an acre went for three hundred. Business lots worth two thousand came to be worth a hundred thousand. Lots remote from any business district were reckoned business lots. Farmlands worth fifty dollars an acre became ‘subdivisions’ and were held for ten thousand per acre – ‘in a couple years this will be downtown.’

On the morning he made his first timid hundred dollar killing, Fort left the chops for other cooks to fry. Five hundred, eight-hundred – twelve-hundred dollars! He had never in his life been worth so much.

He developed cunning. Four thousand, eight thousand – the wind was behind him now but he was afraid to move out of his small furnished room for fear of breaking the magic. Twelve-thousand – fifteen-thousand – at eighteen he thought of actually buying a Stutz. When he’d run up eighteen thousand he resolved to pull out at twenty-five. The bottom
had
to fall out, he sensed. He wouldn’t be caught trying to make a million.

He made his limit in a single operation – then realized that stopping now would only be to throw away another twenty-five grand. At fifty he would surely stick. Every day he thought of that Stutz.

At forty-two thousand he bought himself the loudest swimming trunks in Coral Gables and showed himself in the sun at last, feeling suddenly half kindly toward other dollar daddies. Why hold it against a man because he was born in New York? A New Yorker could be a good American too.

He spent three days haggling over the price of a Model-T that he drove proudly back to his furnished room at last, and proudly mounted the hot dim stair for the final time. On the table a letter reported that his forty-two thousand was unnegotiable dust.

The sleeping till noon and the sherry, the port and the Stutz and the linen, all had been in his hands and all had slipped through. Now he would never give any waiter orders. Now he would never once sleep past seven.

Fort walked through the curious ruins of a future that never would be, through old never-was cities. The great million-girded metropolises fallen to decay before anybody had laid a brick. The grand hotels, the gleaming lobbies, the fountained parks, where now there was nothing but grass and cinders along the Southern Railway’s right of way.

Walked the little midnight towns, remembering the dark wine and the light; hearing his own heels ring. Thinking still how it might have been to walk at morning in a garden of his own.

And find her lying on her side in a striped hammock, in a dress so sheer the softest breeze rippled it and half-pretending sleep. He would rock her gently, there would be no need of words. Only her waking smile and her drowsy hands lazily slipping the buttons of her blouse to please him.

At midnight in the never-was towns hearing his own heels ring.

Or in the steaming New Orleans night, heard laughter faint yet still undying – dark men and fair women going at it again in the heart of downtown Gomorrah.

Then block after block the big freckled man, so stooped, spavined and drooping, wandered the lovely New Orleans night till he found an ice-cart. Then would sniff the ice in the cart’s single flickering flare, holding two pennies tightly as a child, this financial counsellor nearly six and a half feet high. Was the chocolate syrup really fresh? No syrup but chocolate could assuage his self-pity. Had it been made that very morning? At last he would venture one slow suspicious lick before finally letting his pennies go. He just wasn’t taking chances any more.

One warm night Dove went along to help him find an ice-cart with proper chocolate, and that night the first lick convinced him. He turned and beamed down on Dove – ‘Lend me two more cents, goodbuddy’ – and held out the ice to the vendor – ‘Make her a
double
, goodbuddy!’

That night the chocolate must have been just right.

Though himself without manners enough to carry grits to a bear, Fort was ashamed of shabby companions. Above a cup of chicory coffee he would study Dove so steadily that the boy would begin to wonder what he could have done wrong so soon in the day with the sun scarcely up over Melpomene Street.

‘Your whole family eat with their hats on?’ Fort finally asked.

Dove set his straw skimmer to one side of his plate.

‘Never heard of hat racks,’ Fort commented bitterly to the bitter window.

‘Your whole family drink out of the saucer?’ he asked.

‘I
like
coffee poured out in the sasser,’ Dove explained firmly. ‘Would you kindly pass me the toastes bread? I like it better with a touch of long-sweetenin’, but since there aint no long-sweetenin’ I’ll just give it a touch of the coffee in my sasser.’

Fort lived in a welter of unwashed socks, cigarette butts, icesticks, Bull Durham and strewn want-ads. What he was through with he tossed on the floor and never washed a dish.

‘Got the megrims again from eatin’ too light,’ he accused the human race in general and Dove Linkhorn in particular. ‘So dern hongry if I went out in the sun I’d be prostated like a dog.’

‘There’s a loaf of store bread on the fireboard, Fort,’ Dove told him.

‘I’d as soon let the moon shine in my mouth as to eat light bread,’ Fort spurned the baker’s common loaf.

‘Well,’ Dove thought it all over a minute, ‘light bread’s better than nothin’. I’ve tried both.’

But Fort, moved by the vision of himself prostrated like a dog with people stepping over him, rose and announced, ‘Turnin’ over a new leaf – takin’ care of
Number One!
’

And left in a rush to start taking care of Number One.

‘I do believe hard times is crazyin’ him,’ Dove told Little Luke later.

If Fort cast gloom wherever he went, Little Luke was a man whose life was one long yak. A go-getter with a little pug face like a rouged pekinese and a breath to cripple a kitten. ‘I’m unfinancial for the moment,’ he never blamed anyone but himself for being broke – ‘I was selling holy stones for luck and like a fool

I sold them all. Didn’t keep a single one for myself. Carelessness, carelessness.’

‘I don’t believe in nothing like that,’ Dove told him, ‘and wouldn’t buy one from a stranger if I did.’

Luke always had a commission coming in, a percentage going out and an urgent transaction in the offing.

The offing was in a shambling gin mill called Dockery’s Dollhouse, down in the district where all his strange business was done. Others said gin was a weakness with him, but Luke had a different name for it.

He called it wanderlust. Wherever he went some Miss Jane or Miss Molly pled with him to settle down with her on some fine old Southern estate. Luke would put her affairs in order, assuaging her fears by day and her lusts by night, until she’d surprise him preparing his blanket roll – they all went hysterical on him then. If he left her now she’d kill herself. Things had gotten so bad he’d taken to sneaking off in the middle of the night.

‘That part I can readily believe,’ Fort would comment.

‘Met Miss Molly at a Memphis candy-breakin’ ’n she treated me like I was somethin’ on a stick. Had this fine old home in Greenville and a restaurant chain – oh the sweet potato pie that woman put out!’ – Luke went lying blithely on – ‘the sentimental little fool. When she seen I had my mind set on leaving she give me five-dollar meal ticket good in either Memphis or Atlanta.’