A Walk on the Wild Side (32 page)

‘Girl, I was born in this country.’

It was plain Mama hadn’t caught the play even yet.

‘
Mama
,’ Hallie pleaded, ‘
forget
the man’s uniform. I’m trying to tell you he isn’t
like
other men.’

Mama stiffened like a retriever. ‘Honey, he aint one of them
O
-verts?’ – She was ready to rip off her handkerchief-head masquerade and run the whole O-vert navy out of town ‘I wont cater to
them
. Not for
no
amount.’

‘If he were he’d be better off,’ Hallie reassured her. ‘Now turn around,’ and pinned skirt over skirt till Mama, weighted down, sank heavily into a chair.

‘Honey, I’m starting to sweat,’ she complained.

‘Sweat till you shine,’ Hallie encouraged her, ‘but don’t show your face till I give you the sign.’ And stepped through the portiere.

Beneath the ruin of the gold-braid hat the King of the Indoor Thieves had collapsed at last, his undershirt tangled about his throat as if someone had tried to improve his manners by finishing him off altogether. He snored till his toes were spread, he stretched till he creaked in dreams of some final assault for an earth about to be his for keeps.

‘All of you stop talking out of the corners of your mouth like you were Edgar G. Robinson and everybody was in the can,’ Hallie quieted the woman – ‘You’ve got a guest tonight that means gold from way back, so try to show manners.’

For down the stair with an admiral’s tread came the hero of sea fights as good as won, looking like the dogs had had him under the house; with a gin glass latched to his hand.

Hallie crooked one finger toward the portiere.

Mama came forth with forehead shining, bandanna and broom, all sweat and Aunt Jemima, in the peppermint apron that hung like candy.

The second he saw her Navy dropped his glass. ‘I didn’t
mean
to do that,’ he apologized immediately, and began trying to clean the floor with his sleeve, glass, splinters, and all, making a worse mess than before.

Mama seated herself across from him, in all her preposterous gear. Hallie put a warning finger to her lips. The girls exchanged looks part fear and part wonder.

‘I’m a Protestant by birth but a Catholic by descent,’ Mama felt it was time to explain the curious no-man’s land of her faith, ‘I’ve shod the horse all around.’ Meaning she had had four husbands. ‘So I’m not acceptable to the Church. But if I can’t die sanctified I hope to die blessed.’

His elbow touched Floralee’s glass. It tottered, he reached as if to keep it from tipping and knocked it over, of course, instead. The girl pushed back her chair and he began mopping it up with a silk handkerchief, although all he was doing actually was swishing the handkerchief around in it. ‘Go on with your story,’ he told Mama, ‘I’m sorry to be so clumsy.’

Mama had lost the thread. All she could remember was that she had four husbands.

‘Three of them were thieves and one was a legit man – I’d never marry another legit man. Did you know that a prize fighter is more gentle than other men, outside the ring? That’s because he knows what a man’s fists can do. Do you know that you’re safer living with a man who kills for hire than with a man who has never killed? That’s because one knows what killing is. The other don’t.’

‘Why,’ Navy remarked, ‘in that case ill-fame women ought to make better wives than legitimate girls.’

Again that odd little silence fell. Nobody knew what to say to that.

‘Navy, I think that’s the nicest thing I’ve heard anyone say since I’ve been in the trade,’ Hallie said – and his elbow tipped Mama’s glass into her lap.

‘Now don’t tell me that “just happen,”’ Mama scolded in real earnest now – ‘Don’t tell me
any
man is that
clumsy
. Mister, my frank opinion is you done that a-purpose.’

‘Honest, I didn’t, Mammy,’ he lied patiently.

‘Don’t whup him, Mama,’ Floralee pleaded for him.

‘I’m
sure
he wont do it again,’ Hallie defended him too.

‘Give me
one
more chance, Mama,’ he whimpered.

‘Only out of respect for your uniform,’ Mama issued final warning, ‘and one more is
all
you gets.’ She turned to shake out her skirts, somebody tittered and somebody honked and she whirled just in time to catch him with two fingers to his nose. Now Mama scarcely knew what to feel.

‘Why, that isn’t the least
bit
nice, a man of your background to have such manners—’

‘He didn’t
mean
anything, Mama,’ Hallie was sure.

‘
Don’t
whup him,’ Floralee
begged
.

‘
Cross my heart
I didn’t mean anything,’ Navy swore in that same unbearable small-boy whine that in itself entitled him to a thrashing.

‘O he
meant
it all right,’ Kitty informed, ‘I saw him with my naked eye – and I have a
very
naked eye.’

‘I
will
try to do better, please mum,’ he promised so humbly, ‘I
will
try to behave and be a
good
boy—’ and standing to cross his promise, yanked tablecloth, bottle, glasses, trays, cokes, decanters and four bottles of beer crashing to the floor.

‘O you
fool’s fool
,’ now Mama roared right at him, black with rage as he turned white with fright, neither pretending in the least – right under the table the two-hundred pound hero ducked. And cowering there all could hear him plea – ‘
Don’t
whup me, Mama,
please
don’t whup me.’

Unable to reach him with her fist, Mama seized his black silk ankles and hauled him forth floundering on his back, his eyes closed and covered by his arm to ward off anticipated blows.

‘I don’t like the looks of this,’ Mama told Hallie, ‘he aint got no right to be so loose without being drunk or sick, neither.’

‘He’s sick enough for twenty,’ Hallie informed her. ‘Somebody get some water.’

‘Wouldn’t beer do as well?’ Floralee inquired, and emptied a full pitcher right in his face. Then, looking into her pitcher, grew sad. ‘Why, it’s empty, fun’s all done.’ She looked ready to cry.

‘Use cokes,’ Hallie ordered.

Now who but Hallie could have thought of
that?
Floralee leaped for the half-finished bottles standing like small sentries on ledge and divan, and in no time at all had her pitcher full again. This time she poured it down the front of his shirt.

‘That
was
fun,’ she told Hallie then.

‘The fun is done,’ Hallie told her.

‘Fun done,’ the girl accepted matters.

But on the floor the fun had only begun. There he lay licking his big ox-tongue, a coke-licking Lazarus too languid to rise.

‘I’ve been everywhere God got land,’ Mama announced, ‘but this is the most disgusting sight yet seen.’

‘You can drop his legs now,’ Hallie pointed out, and Mama released the ankles, that dropped like a dead man’s legs.

Both women stood looking down. Hallie herself didn’t know what to do with the fellow.

As Navy finally opened his eyes.

His eyes so blue, so commanding.

‘That was the nicest party I’ve had in twelve years,’ he congratulated everyone.

Mama lowered herself in all her finery, onto a divan and sighed, just sighed.

‘Bring me the evening paper,’ she asked after a while, ‘I want to see what the white folks are up to.’

The figure, the face and the gleaming braid of the madman who had spent a month’s pay in a night dimmed swiftly. His money long spent, nobody cared what had become of the Lieutenant-in-Command.

‘I wonder,’ Mama grew suspicious later, ‘whether that officer told us the entire truth.’

‘So far as he knew it,’ Hallie took a guess.

‘You figure he left out a little something or other?’

‘Black Mammy wasn’t as simple as he likes to think. I think she had lapped the field.’

‘I don’t follow your meaning.’

‘Why, I think from the day she paddled that little boy, she knew what kind of material she was working with. I think whether that little boy became a man or stayed a little boy was entirely up to her. She had a choice between herself and the boy, and she chose against the boy. That was the only way she had of not one day losing him to a white girl.’

‘I’d purely hate to believe that a common field darky could be that evil,’ Mama turned Hallie’s theory down cold.

‘She wasn’t a field darky. She was a house darky with scores to settle in that same house. Everything she had the white folks had taken. She saw her chance to get something back. I’ll take my oath she was getting even on somebody.’

‘No,’ Mama still declined to believe, ‘everybody got to love somebody and that woman wasn’t give nobody but a little white boy to love, and he wasn’t give nobody but an old black mammy. When things are like that color and age even don’t matter. In love, not even price matter. Yes, Black Mammy genuinely love that child.’

‘It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all along,’ Hallie agreed. ‘In love price don’t matter nor which lover pays. It’s why he can’t hate her even to this day though he knows now what she did to him.’

Though the languid lieutenant was far to sea – gone without trace never to return, his visits began a slow sea change. He had spent so freely Finnerty had been encouraged to believe there must be other such fools about, in uniform or out. Finnerty was right.

‘It’s the age of specialization is what it is,’ he began preaching a new faith, ‘Do you go to a eye doc to get a tooth yanked? Do you go to the ice cream parlor for stamps? New fields is opening and one is the bug field. Hundreds of bugs loaded with gold, the Depression aint even touched them, willing to pay somebody to make them happy. It don’t make a bug happy to come into a joint, point out a girl and go to bed. Nowadays he wants the bit spiced up. He wants the girl to tell him, “Do what you want with me.”’

Perhaps too it was Finnerty’s new girl, a spare and bitter child just out of a Houston jail who had encouraged him, for she seemed not to care in the least what became of her. ‘My name is Kitty Twist,’ she had told him, ‘and I do everything.’

Her breastless, sexless personality was no matter, Finnerty knew. For this was the kind of girl upon whom a man might recover something of which a wife or mistress had robbed him. The city was full of hatless Harrys seeking not so much love but vengeance for wrongs, real or fancied, forever imposed by women: wife, nurse, sister, daughter, mistress or aunt. Woman,
there
was the cause of it all.

A traffic founded on self-pity that paid off better than the old-fashioned traffic in love. Love’s dividends came in single bills; but hatred’s comes by twenties.

‘It’s the new way of doing things,’ Finnerty approved.

And the men who came buzzing in the lieutenant’s wake had the twenties. Apparently they didn’t read the papers, for they gave no sign of knowing that the country was in the very depths of an economic disaster. They were men who had been sheltered all their lives and were sheltered yet. Their world was the world of their own needs alone, and if they looked out of a window at the street below, nothing they saw, or nobody down there, had any relationship to their own safe halls.

Brokers and buyers, efficiency experts with private means, personnel managers from banking families, men who had been born to ownership of ships or banks or mines or wells – the whole contented clan of white-collar foxes whose hearts were in their collars and their love locked in their files, who yet wanted to know of life – ‘What’s the answer?’ Without pausing once to wonder what was the question.

‘These are
class
people,’ Finnerty tried to impress his girls. ‘If one tells you to swing from the chandelier, baby, you swing.’

‘Why not just sell the beds and buy trapezes for the money?’ the new child wanted to know right off.

‘You’re always in there with the wise answer, aint you?’ Oliver warned her.

‘Because you’re always there with the right question, Little Daddy,’ Kitty tried quickly to soften her new daddy.

Against the collar clan the lunch bucket brigadiers – boiler-makers, janitors, construction workers, merchant mariners, grease-monkeys, slaughter house bullies, plasterers and bricklayers didn’t stand a chance. The collars had fancied love up until the best looking and youngest of the women were out of range of the bucket boys. Why tie up a piece of merchandise for half an hour with a date smelling of fish or tar, when one smelling of nothing but after-shave lotion would pay five times as much and perhaps not even soil a towel?

‘Mama,’ Oliver gave out the news, ‘we’re going to forget these workin’-ass bums who don’t even know a girl has a soul. I know one pimp willing to stand on the corner waiting for a broad to turn a three-dollar trick so he can get a haircut, but I don’t call that a pimp. I got every one of my broads insured and I got a plane to keep up too. What the workin’-ass man wants he can get elsewhere. From here on out we cater strictly to the bug who wants something he’s afraid to ask his wife for – or what he’d rather not have her give. Or what she can’t give.’

‘I’m not sure I’m following, Oliver.’

‘You’re following all right,’ Finnerty assured her.

‘Well, I don’t care for where I think you’re leading. What can any girl of ours give a man that his wife can’t?’

‘
Virginity
, woman,’ the pander almost spat the word –
virginity
. Else how is it that when I say to some clown – “Would you like to see the girls, mister?” he just dogeyes me and keeps on walking. But when I say, “Mister, are you interested in a girl who’s never been had?” it’s just too much for him. He slows down, thinking it over, turns the corner, comes back on the other side of the street and all I have to do is wait. He comes to me then. “What did you mean by that?” he wants to know and by the way he says it I know whether he’s the law or a bug. “I meant are you interested in witnessing a girl giving in for the first time?” Mama, you’d be astonished how almost every one will come up with a ten-spot just on a promise like that. Honest to God, some days I feel rotten about everyone but myself.’