A Walk on the Wild Side (5 page)

One day in March he saw a solitary sapling on a hill, bending before the wind against a solid wall of blue, and it seemed to him that it had not been there before he had looked up and would vanish as soon as he turned. Many times after that he looked at the same slender shoot; never again did he see it so truly.

At times he could catch his brother Byron in such strange life-glimpses. One second he would be moving about the kitchen, his useless brother about his useless tasks, and the next he would be a total stranger, doing no one knew what. A picture of him not moving but rigid; tensed with life yet still as death. In after years Dove never heard the long thunder of passenger cars across a bridge in the dark but he caught a brief glimpse of a smoky dawn through an opening door – never heard the white steam whistle in the night but saw Byron stretched, mouth agape like the dead, brown boot-toes pointing upward on a disarranged cot bed in a corner. Yet never learned, his whole life, who Byron really was.

Another mystery was the bougainvillaea. It grew beneath a bicycle frame nailed high on the shack’s north wall – now why should anyone nail a bicycle, front wheel gone and frame rusted by rain, against a clapboard wall? No one could tell him, yet nobody took it down. The bougainvillaea stretched for those useless spokes. It almost touched the down-slung handle-bars. The bougainvillaea yearned to conceal all things in leaves. The plant seemed half asleep in the early morning, but became restless toward night. Sometimes a dustwind made it shudder as though dust-hands touched it roughly. And once when the sun was directly overhead the whole plant bent in pain.

The house itself looked as if one peart wind would blow it down.

Its floor was dirt. The curtains were guano bags. The stovepipe was stuck through a hole in the wall. Behind it rose a jagged cliff as old as America.

One night a small rain lay the dooryard dust. Dove heard the drops tap dancing. And the sleep-drawn breath of two drunks wearied once again of useless drinking.

He turned the smoking bitch lamp low. In the yard the Mexican stars were out, the Mexican dogs were barking. Someone was singing ‘
Poy! Pooey poy!
’ so shrill he must have been mocking the dogs. Dove touched his plant with eyes closed fast the better to understand the leaves. Beneath his fingers he felt it blooming.

In the morning the bicycle lay in the dust and the bougainvillaea grew about it. No one so much as noticed that Dove had taken the bicycle down. He himself wasn’t sure just why.

Yet as the magic spring of 1930 died in endless drought, Dove’s hours too grew drier day by day. Till filled with a nebulous homesickness he would shamble down a dead-end road that long ago had led men west. That led now only to tin-canned circles where hoboes hopped off the Santa Fe.

Years before a box car had slipped a coupling, scudded downhill and turned onto its side in the chaparral. Half sunk now in sand, ruined and stripped, only its bare iron skeleton and a few beams remained to cast a meager shade on days when shade was precious as water. There were always a couple of hoboes resting there.

One day Dove came there, curiously seeking he didn’t know what, and saw a man in khaki pants and torn shirt lying flat on his back with a bottle in his hand. When he came closer he saw it was his brother and stood studying him: a stranger sinking in the sand, like the box car ruined and stripped. He had often seen Byron drunk at home; but lying like that for everyone to look at left the boy pale with shame.

Yet he saw boys there no older than himself passing a bottle. They boiled black coffee in open tins and ate beans stuck on a twig; rolled cigarettes singlehanded and boasted of time in jail.

Hard time and easy, wall time and farm time, fed time and state, city time, county time, short time and good time, soft time and jawbone time, big house, little house and middle house time, industrial time and meritorious time – ‘that’s for working your ass off.’

In jails where food was inedible, as it was in most county clinks, the men, Dove heard, bought their own by levying each newcomer to the extent of whatever he carried. If he didn’t have money he paid with his shoes. If he came in broke and barefoot too the other inmates took as many slaps at his behind as the court decreed for the felony of breaking into jail without consent of the inmates. Yet, barefoot or shod, man or mouse, he always shared in food bought outside the jail.

He heard of a jail in Southern Louisiana where prisoners had built up a treasury of over two hundred dollars and dined the turnkey and sheriff once a week. That at the Grayson County Jail prisoners got out a weekly paper called the
Crossbar Gazette
.

In Laredo the cells were all on one side, he learned. The whip boss at Huntsville was named Crying Tom. In Hillsboro, Missouri, prisoners got sheets and mattresses.

They spoke too of good fortune: one had once been taken into a minister’s home for two months; another had come upon a drunken girl in a cattle car; another had found a new jacket hanging in a reefer into which he had climbed one night in Carrizozo.

Dove learned that Beaumont was tough. That Greensboro, in some place called Nawth Klina, was a right mean little town to get through. That Boykin, right below it, was even harder. That toughest of any was any town anywhere in Georgia. If you were caught riding there you heard the long chain rattling. But they gave you fifteen cents every week and a plug of tobacco on Sundays. ‘
That
part’s not so bad,’ thought Dove Linkhorn.

‘Stay ’way far from Waycross,’ an old canboy warned him – ‘’less you want to do a year in a turp camp.’ And he began beating a tin-can in time with a song—

East Texas was rough but the Rio Grande Valley was easy – all the crews asked was that you get off on the side away from the station. You could get through Alabama all right provided you didn’t stand on the spine like a tourist and wave at the sheriff. And stayed off the A. & W.P.

Those A. & W.P. bulls made a point of putting you off at a water tank in the wilderness called Chehawee and you walked forty-four miles to get to Montgomery. For a fiver, cash down on the barrelhead, you could ride.

Look out for a town in Mississippi called Flomaton, because that’s Wing Binga’s town. One night he pistol-whupped two ’boes and they came back and shoved him under the wheels. That was how he lost his right wing. He was mean before that but he’d gotten meaner since.

Look out for Marsh City – that’s Hank Pugh’s. Look out for Greeneville – that belongs to Buck Bryan. Buck’ll be walking the spines dressed like a ’bo – the only way you’ll be able to spot him is by his big floppy hat with three holes in the top. And the hose length in his hand.

Your best bet is to freeze and wait. You can’t get away. He likes the hose length in his hand but what he really loves is the Colt on his hip. So just cover up your eyes and listen to the
swwwissshhh
. He’s got deputies coming down both sides. God help you if you run and God help you if you fight. God help you if you’re broke and God help you if you’re black.

Look out for Lima – that’s in Ohio. And look out for Springfield, the one in Missouri. Look out for Denver and Denver Jack Duncan. Look out for Tulsa. Look out for Tucson. Look out for Joplin. Look out for Chicago. Look out for Ft Wayne – look out for St Paul – look out for St Joe – look out – look out – look out—

Dove saw a crippled one caught like a rabbit in the great head-lamps’ glare, turning blinded eyes to the engineer and the engineer waving – ‘Go
on, go on
—’

Of their pathetic efforts to keep clean, merely to keep clean, Dove never heard them tell. Yet they were forever begrimed and begging soap and water. As soon as his thirst was quenched, the ’bo was washing his one shirt. On every fence post at every junction faded shirts hung, wet weather or dry. Combs, pocket mirrors and toothbrushes, carried by a string around the neck, were treasured.

He could tell carnie hands and circus roustabouts because they took their money out of grouch-bags, pouches drawn by string, like tobacco pouches.

Once he saw a grizzled old hand passing a woman’s black elbow-length glove, the kind that strip-teasers once tossed to the front rows. As it passed from hand to hand, each man sniffed at it and swore he could smell its perfume yet. Its owner finally pocketed it as if secretly relieved that he didn’t have to fight anyone to get it back.

And one told of a young boy found bleeding to death in an empty somewhere up the line.

Dove felt the uneasy guilt go around them like the perfumed glove; it too had made the circle of homeless men.

Their home was ten thousand water towers, their home was any tin-can circle. Their home was down all lawless deeps where buffalo-colored box cars make their last stand in the West.

He saw their nightfires burn and burn against the homeless heart, and felt he had himself gone West. That it had come to nothing then, and yet that he would go again.

Someone had done some cheating all right.

‘I’m getting the evening-wearies,’ he decided, and returned to the penetrating odor of cold collards in a bowl above a stove coated with grease. Where dish towels hung in a low festoon from the damper of the stovepipe to a spike above the sink. The sink was a tin trough salvaged from a dump heap. Unwashed dishes and pans lay in it. It had no spigot.

The spigot was outside and served shanties on either side of the Linkhorns’. These three shanties, upended green-pine clapboard so dried and shrunk it left chinks for rain and wind, made a kind of slum Alamo right in the middle of Mexican-town. Their men were either swart, like Fitz and Byron, or tended toward a certain thinness of color, like Dove. The women were fading for lack of forests. Davy Crockett was gone for good.

Old forests had shaped their hands to gunstocks but never to cotton-picking. They couldn’t bear mill work and could neither buy nor sell. Hill and plain no longer claimed them. They had lost their claim to hill and plain and Crockett would not come again.

They were backwoodsmen without a backwoods, the last of those who never would pick cotton. Plantation and mill were blocking them off like rabbits when a field is mown. They scorned both factory and town and wore brown jeans in preference to blue.

And all night long, down that unlighted road, sometimes low and sometimes shrill, Dove heard an alien music. In their smoking, unlighted halls Mexicans sang and were well.

Mexicans had no old forests to mourn.

The old way West, the old trails: wagon trail and cattle trail lost in miles and miles and miles of chaparral and mesquite. Gone and grown over in dry cacti. Old hopes, fierce hopes, pride and patience alike in vain. All the love they had once had for that big brown land blown like dust off the heart’s chaparral.

The road West now led only to a low, dark and battered chili parlor in what had once been the big, white and merry Hotel Davy Crockett.

Behind the darkened parlor’s pane a lamp’s reflection, doubled and blurred, burned like the double-ghost of a great chandelier that once had lighted a lobby like a ballroom at sea. Then its hundred-glassed gleam had flared all night like a light that could never wane. On brandy, brandy glass and wine.

DANCING BY ELECTRIC LIGHT – that had pulled the bloods into the old Davy Crockett of Saturday nights. The wild boys from the wells, wearing those big red and green bandannas, come to drink down their wild girls. Their girls that could drink down the moon.

The old Aztec moon of the Rio Grande, buffalo-robed to its outlaw eyes, that had watched the wild boys from the wells blowing their gold like beer-foam across the mirrored bar and heard the pianola rolling—

and a guitar player from Arkansas twanging – for drinkers and dancers, hard-rock drillers, gaffers and gamblers, all alike. Drinking and dancing and gambling by real electric light—

a changeless twang that once had trembled the springs beneath one wild girl on an upstairs bed wearing a silver comb in her red-gold hair; black-mesh hose and nothing more.

Fitz had been a man past thirty that year of 1909, but a real wild boy all the same. Who always went right for the wild girls the hour he came to town. Till he sat one night on the redhead’s bed putting the last of a bottle to her lips. Eyes shuttered tight against all light she drank as long as whiskey would pour without once lifting her red-gold head. It had burned her throat inside and out – then his mouth had been sweeter even than that. It had held her own so firm while his flesh, thrusting deep, held firmer even than that. Till the whole room rocked in the looking light and had locked them heart to heart.

While the moon that could never wane looked on, on brandy, silver comb and wine.

While in all the rooms upstairs or down, beds wide or beds narrow, the lights had flared brighter and more bright.

On marble, mirror-shine and wine.

Till the dice players had begun crying out with despair at something more than merely losing, the roulette wheel had begun to spin as if each turn must be its last; and the pianola began a beat that rolled as though all hope were gone—