A Walk on the Wild Side

ONE

‘HE’S JUST A pore lonesome wife-left feller,’ the more understanding said of Fitz Linkhorn, ‘losin’ his old lady is what crazied him.’

‘That man is so contrary,’ the less understanding said, ‘if you throwed him in the river he’d float upstream.’

For what had embittered him Fitz had no name. Yet he felt that every daybreak duped him into waking and every evening conned him into sleep. The feeling of having been cheated – of having been cheated – that was it. Nobody knew why nor by whom.

But only that all was lost. Lost long ago, in some colder country. Lost anew by the generations since. He kept trying to wind his fingers about this feeling, at times like an ancestral hunger; again like some secret wound. It was there, if a man could get it out into the light, as palpable as the blood in his veins. Someone just behind him kept turning him against himself till his very strength was a weakness. Weaker men, full of worldly follies, did better than Linkhorn in the world. He saw with eyes enviously slow-burning.

‘I ain’t a-playin’ the whore to no man,’ he would declare himself, though no one had so charged him.

Six-foot-one of slack-muscled shambler, he came of a shambling race. That gander-necked clan from which Calhoun and Jackson sprang. Jesse James’ and Jeff Davis’ people. Lincoln’s people. Forest solitaries spare and swart, left landless as ever in sandland and Hooverville now the time of the forests had passed.

Whites called them ‘white trash’ and Negroes ‘po’ buckra.’ Since the first rock had risen above the moving waters there had been not a single prince in Fitzbrian’s branch of the Linkhorn clan.

Unremembered kings had talked them out of their crops in that colder country. That country’s crops were sea-sands now. Sea-caves rolled the old kings’ bones.

Yet each king, before he had gotten the hook, had been careful to pass the responsibility for conning all Linkhorns into trustworthy hands. Keep the troublemakers down was the cry.

Duke and baron, lord and laird, city merchant, church and state, landowners both small and great, had formed a united front for the good work. When a Linkhorn had finally taken bush parole, fleeing his Scottish bondage for the brave new world, word went on ahead: Watch for a wild boy of no particular clan, ready for anything, always armed. Prefers fighting to toil, drink to fighting, chasing women to booze or battle: may attempt all three concurrently.

The first free Linkhorn stepped onto the Old Dominion shore and was clamped fast into the bondage of cropping on shares. Sometimes it didn’t seem quite fair.

Through old Virginia’s tobacco-scented summers the Linkhorns had done little cropping and less sharing. So long as there lay a continent of game to be had for the taking, they cropped no man’s shares for long.

Fierce craving boys, they craved neither slaves nor land. If a man could out-fiddle the man who owned a thousand acres, he was the better man though he owned no more than a cabin and a jug. Burns was their poet.

Slaveless yeomen – yet they had seen how the great landowner, the moment he got a few black hands in, put up his feet on his fine white porch and let the world go hang. So the Linkhorns braced their own narrow backs against their own clapboard shacks, pulled up the jug and let it hang too. Burns was still their poet.

Forever trying to keep from working with their hands, the plantations had pushed them deep into the Southern Ozarks. Where they had hidden out so long, saying A Plague On Both Your Houses, that hiding out had become a way of life with them. ‘It’s Mr Linkhorn’s war. We don’t reckon him kin of our’n,’ they reckoned.

Later they came to town often enough to see that the cotton mills were the plantations all over again: the prescriptive rights of master over men had been transferred whole from plantation to mill. Between one oak-winter and one whippoorwill spring, the Linkhorns pushed on to the Cookson Hills.

Three score years after Appomattox a Linkhorn showed up in the orange-scented noon of the Rio Grande Valley still saying ‘Be Damned To The Lot Of You – Who got the pitcher?’ Had there been an International Convention of White Trash that week, Fitz would have been chairman.

Cotton grew, fruit grew, oil gushed a year and dried. Before it dried Fitz put in a year as a gaffer, made good money and found his girl. A girl who had thought herself rough enough.

Cotton failed, fruit failed – oil had spoiled the soil. It became a country of a single crop, and the crop was dust. Fifteen years of it did the girl in, feeling she’d had enough of oil.

Years begun with oranges and love, till dust blew love down the Gulf with the oranges. Leaving Fitz penniless as ever and more loveless than before. As the nineteen thirties lowered he trotted about town with a hired hose, pumping out cesspools.

And sensed no mockery in being greeted, hip-boots streaming, with a ‘Hiya, Preacher!’

Some of the folk of that little town offered the widower no greeting at all. He was too unpredictable. He would take one man’s jibes without offense and get his back up at another’s ‘Howdy, friend.’ In a town where nearly everyone danced, swore and gambled, the only fun Fitz had left was getting his back up.

He was against modern dancing, modern dress, swearing, gambling, cigarettes and sin. He preached that the long drought of 1930 was God’s way of putting an end to such things. But as the drought went on and on and never a drop of rain he reversed himself and said it must be the pope’s doing.

He was also said to be against fornication. But then it was said he was against corn whiskey too.

Saturday nights he pulled an ancient black frock coat over his patches; a coat with a pocket under the slit of the tail to hold the little brown bottle he called his ‘Kill-Devil.’ Getting stiff on the courthouse steps while denouncing the Roman Catholic clergy was a feat which regularly attracted scoffers and true believers alike, the believers as barefoot as the scoffers. For drunk as a dog or broke as a beggar, Fitz could spout religion like a hog in a bucket of slops.

Sometimes a girl would stand a moment among the men, pretending interest in The Word. But hunger has a scent more dry than love’s and she would move along wishing she were in Dallas.

For many in Arroyo the Lord’s Day was Saturday; but every night of the week was the Lord’s to Fitz.

‘“And when they wanted wine”’ – he put down a mocker who wanted to know what caused the bulge on his hip – ‘“the mother of Jesus saith unto him, ‘Give them wine.’” Satan didn’t claim Jesus’ mother ’count of wine, ah reckon he won’t claim me ’count of a half-pint of busthead.’

‘What cause folk to git dispatched to Hellfire then?’ a believer demanded to know right now.

‘You don’t git “dispatched” to Hellfire,’ Fitz assured him – ‘You’re born right in it. Gawd got a fence clean a-round Hell. So a sinner caint git out! Sinner caint dig underneath! Too deep! Sinner caint crawl between! Caint climb over! It’s ee-o-lectrified!’

‘How’d you git out?’ the mocker asked softly. He was astride the barrel of the town howitzer, his face and figure shadowed like a cannoneer’s who has lost both battle and cause.

‘Ah clumb,’ Fitz explained, and clumb right into his theme – ‘Ah clumb the lowest strand ’cause that’s the strand of LOVE. Ah clumb the second strand ’cause that’s the MERCY strand. Ah clumb the third because ah been LONGSUFFERIN’!’—

‘—thought you said that fence wasee-o-lectrified,’ the cannoneer reminded him, but Fitz was climbing too hard to hear – ‘Ah clumb clean ovah the topmost one of HIS MOST PRECIOUS BLOOD! Brothers! Sisters! Step on the strand of LOVE! Step on the strand of MERCY! Step on the LONGSUFFERING strand and get ready – to cross the strand of THE BLOOD!’

‘You know, I was thinking along those lines myself,’ the cannoneer commented, and spat. Yet Fitz paid him no heed.

‘I know some of you boys come a mighty far way in hope I’d save you for the Heavenly Home,’ he acknowledged. ‘That was my pure intent. But now that I see your actual faces I’ve had a change of mind. Boys, I’m woeful sorry, but the Lord just don’t want a bunch of dirt-eating buggers walking the Streets of Gold. The Lord don’t mind sinners – but he just can’t stand rats. And I’ll be goddamned if I’ll take the responsibility!’ – and openly took a defiant swig of his half-pint.

Both skeptics and hopers cheered at that – the old man was warming up. ‘You tell ’em, Preacher! Drink ’er down! Don’t you play whore to no man!’

Fitz smacked his lips, rewound his dirty bandanna about his bottle and replaced it in the hidden pocket.

‘Now tell us about Temptation, Father,’ the man on the cannon asked, trying to get Fitz pointed at the Pope.

‘I’ll tell you this much about Temptation, Byron Linkhorn,’ the old man answered directly – ‘there are so-called Christians right in this gathering tonight who voted for the Pope in ’28. Do you think the Lord caint remember two year?’

Fitz could forgive a man for using marijuana, but not for voting for Al Smith. Others who had voted for the Pope in ’28 stood silent, letting Byron take the full brunt of their guilt. It was Byron who had ruined everyone’s chance for the New Jerusalem, that silence implied. Now no one could go.

‘Tell the rest of us how to be saved, Preacher,’ one hypocrite pleaded.

‘Or the time you fell in the cesspool,’ Byron stayed in there.

Fitz was hell on the Pope, but Byron was hell on Fitz.

‘The Lord does work in mysterious ways, that’s certain sure,’ the old man found his text – ‘for example, the pitiful critter atop the county property happen to be my son.’

‘Here come the part I come for,’ somebody dug his naked toes in the earth with anticipated pleasure – ‘Here’s where thet busthead starts really taken holt.’

‘—a critter not long for this world,’ Fitz gave hope to all creation – ‘the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away – and the sooner he taketh away that particular civet, the air hereabouts will be considerable fitter for humans. His lungs is gone, his mind is weak, his heart is dry as an autumn leaf. The brickle thread of his life is ready to snap. I envy him his trials is about to cease!’

The man on the cannon tried to reply, but was trapped by a cough so racking that every face turned to his own. He was good as dead, those cold looks told, yet not one cared a tear.

Pressing a bandanna to his lips, Byron dismounted cautiously. His father’s cracked voice, with a dozen others as cracked, joined in a hymn familiar to all. That rose, contented in all its discords, in a chorus above all argument.

and pursued him down every step of the street hawking bloodily all the way.

They had come to see someone lose. That it should be the same doomed fool week after week gave a flip to their satisfaction. Saturday night after Saturday night, it was always Byron to be singled out. Between his cough, the crowd and his father, he always lost. What was it in him they had to disprove? What was it that mere repetition added?

Byron was one whose beginnings had been more brave than most – that was what needed disproving.

For how Fitz leaped then – literally leaped – clapping his hands above his head and barking triumphantly—

—in the name of Jesus, now come as you are!’ – and would skip down the steps, his sermon done, to take anyone’s bottle and everyone’s praise, mocking or sincere.

‘Keep your boots on, Preacher! Come just as you are!’

Fitz would be weaving a bit. Yet behind his shrouded glance a gleeful victory glinted. The Lord would forgive one who had defended His ark so well.

‘Preacher,’ one told him, ‘you just done my heart good tonight. You plumb restored me. Next week I’m bringen the younguns, they need restorin’ too. The old woman is beyond restoren. She aint been the same since the time she got throwed by the Power.’

‘You never should have picked her up,’ Fitz recalled an occasion when one of his listeners had passed out – ‘You should have left her right there where Jesus flang her. How’s she feeling?’

‘Better, thank you kindly. We got a bit of a job for you any time you’re of a mind to run out our way.’

That was all right with Fitz. If Protestant privies lined both sides of the road to the City of Pure Gold, by God he’d shovel his way to Salvation. But before he’d take money from papists rapists he’d go the other route. He was playing the whore to no man.

He was a Witness for Jehovah and saw the Holy See engaged in an international conspiracy against the Anglo-Saxon race in general and the Linkhorns in particular.

Papists Rapists! – that’s who it was who kept cheating!

Dove Linkhorn could not remember a time, a place nor a single person, house cat or hound dog that had sought his affection. But sometimes in the depths of a troubled sleep he had a fleeting feeling that a woman with red-gold hair had just touched his hand and fled beyond a curtained door.

A doorway that had not been curtained for years. The little cavern of a room was so sloping that the post of his high-ended bed touched its ceiling.

The old-fashioned bedstead they called a ‘stid’ – ‘It were Ma’s stid ’n all the makin’s was Ma’s too’ – ‘makin’s’ being the shuck-mattress, quilt coverlet, and two square pillows of the kind still called ‘shams.’ The sham on his left bore the embroidered legend, I slept and dreamt that life was Beauty. The one on the right, I woke and found that life was Duty. As often as not Dove’s head, in sleep, fell squarely in between.

That was just as well. Although he was sixteen he could read neither his pillow nor the sooty legend behind the stove:

Fitz had kept him out of school by way of protesting the hiring of a Catholic principal. But no one had protested his protest. No one had come to claim the boy for the board of education. There was no board of education.

If you wanted your young to learn, you sent them. If they wanted to, they went. If you didn’t and neither did they, they went to work.

There was no work. So they went to the movies. Dove had not yet seen one, but he planned to go pretty soon now. When John Barrymore and Marian Marsh came to Arroyo as Svengali and Trilby, he asked Byron to pay his way inside.

‘What if Eternity should come when you were on the Devil’s territory? What chance would you have?’ Byron asked for an answer, thus mocking both father and brother at once; and avoiding an admission that he didn’t have a nickel.

Dove hadn’t yet gone to a dance either. But he’d stood in the doorway of a hall and watched and kept time like the others—

Long after he had gone to bed that night the light from the bitch lamp kept him awake. The lamp had been made by fixing a rag wick to a stone and setting it in a vessel half-filled with whatever was left in the frying pan after the morning bacon was finished. Byron called it a ‘slut lamp.’ But Fitz always said ‘light the grease,’ and let it go at that.

By its ceaseless flicker Dove would see the pair of fools going at it again and both three sheets over. He would lay there moving his lips with the longest words he could pick up. ‘Corruption.’ ‘Generations.’ ‘Burnt-offering.’ ‘Peace-offering.’ ‘Sin-offering.’ Sometimes whole phrases: ‘What meaneth the heat of this great anger?’ ‘Would it were morning! For the fear of thy heart which thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see.’

‘I can’t argue with you no more,’ Byron would surrender as the wick burned low, ‘I’m feeling the sickness too bad.’

‘Another name for the soul’s corruption,’ Fitz assured him.

‘How do you feel these days yourself, Pappy?’ Byron asked.

‘Well and contented,’ the old man replied.

Even Dove knew the old man lied.

Mexican and American alike, the townsfolk knew that the preacher was off his rocker and that Byron smoked too much potiguaya bush for a lunger. ‘I was born to smoke bush,’ he boasted, ‘I may die poor but I won’t die tied.’ But what to make of Dove with his hair neither red nor yellow? And brows so light he looked browless? ‘You right sure that boy got everything he’s suppose to have?’ one doubter asked another.

If the boy bought a plug of tobacco he would lean against the grocer’s door and spit the whole morning away. If asked what he thought he was doing he would mumble, ‘leanen ’n dreamen,’ and would move a scant inch to one side. Yet sometimes strength would surge through him in a tide, he would run aimlessly and shout at nothing.

‘The boy is takin’ growth,’ Fitz explained uneasily.

In Dove’s mind, too, was a growing. A sudden light would flash within his brain illuminating earth and sky – a common bush would become a glory, a bird on a swinging bough a wonder – then the light would fade and fade like a slow gray curtain dropping. Such moments were irretrievable.

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—

keeping time to the rolling man lashed fast between those black-meshed thighs, breathing her breath as she breathed his till she moaned his lips apart: the pianola roll below flapped loose, the music stopped yet the roll whirred on. Her eyelids fluttered in the drains of her passion – it had not happened to her before like this. Fitz had felt the flutter against his cheek. The pianola roll whispered on and on, it had not happened to him before so heart-shakingly as this.

And the moon that could never wane dimmed down to no more than a gas lamp’s leaning glow. Drinkers and dancers, gaffers and gamblers, all had gone.

Out in the sand and the Spanish Dagger, in chaparral-pea and honey-mesquite where under the thorn the horned toad waits, the prairie dog slept in his burrow. White bones bleached in the sun. Before the music was over; before the dancing was done.

And a little wind went searching in circles to ask, Where had those lovers gone before the dance was done?

All was well. They had breathed each other’s breath. All was well: they had drunk of each other’s lips.

All was well, for what was dust had when living been loved.

Fitz had married his wild girl, who had turned out not so wild after all. She had given him two sons. And since her death he had returned but once to the side of town where the Davy Crockett still stood.

To find nothing left but boarded windows above and a dim-lit chili parlor below. Whose name was painted across its pane:

The town that had begun with a ball by electric light was dying by the glow of kerosene lamps. Time had gone backward in the little lost town.

By 1930 the old way West led nowhere but to the shade of a water tower where old bums drained sterno through ragged bandannas and left such small earnest tokens of their passing as a tennis sneaker with the sole gone through, an undershirt ironed brown by the wind or an empty half-pint labeled White Swan Gin – Bottled in Chicago.

Crease-faced or rosy, shaggy or bald, faded or florid, spare or stout, fried by sun or bedraggled by showers, one by one they came through the door of La Fe En Dios. To stand, shifting a cap from one hand to the next between the juke box and a potted fern till the Mexican women finished serving her paying customers. Then they received the last cold dregs from the coffee urn, half a day-old pineapple pie and a bar of American Family soap.

If they wanted more than that they would have to come by daylight and work for it. Bald or barefoot, old or young, each promised eagerly, even with gratitude, to be on hand at seven a.m. sharp.

And to a man seven a.m. found them riding as fast and as far from the little lost town as any S.P. freight could carry them. Yet let the east-bound freights pass by if a west-bound freight was due. They still sought the old way home.

The old way home that was now no more than any stretch of broken walk you reach at the end of any American town on any Saturday afternoon. Where blocks of paving stone lie severed by wind, sand and W.P.A. And a sign that may say TRUCK TURNING.

Where black-eyed Susans grow out of the separating sand and a rusty beer can with two holes punched in the lid awaits the Resurrection or one more real estate boom.

The old way home that led, at last, to nothing more than a tossing gas-flare over a sign at the walk’s very end:

A statistic that didn’t include the Mexican woman whose residence was just far enough beyond it to keep her free of local taxes. Whose own way home, eleven months of twelve, was up a flight of careworn stairs to a room guarded only by the Virgin Mary.

Terasina Vidavarri slept within a double ruin. Within the wreck of her own hopes, inside what was left of the Hotel Crockett. The last guest had left and all along the long uncarpeted hall, the doors, like her own soul’s door, were boarded on both sides.

Yet in sleep sometimes heard a pianola play. The boarded doors opened, the place came alight with the light that shines in dreams; to show men taking women on all the beds till she wakened. And saw a full moon rising with a yearning all its own.

‘It is lucky to love any time, for then you have someone to live for,’ Terasina thought, ‘but if you are not in love that is lucky also. Because then you have no problem.’

Actually she’d hardly tried her luck. Her first and only lover had pitched such a fright into her that she’d taken no chances since.

A girl of no family, a chambermaid in hotels catering to American tourists down in Merida in old Yucatán, Terasina, at sixteen, had become engaged to a bald, middle-aged Floridan of Spanish extraction.

In his youth a second lieutenant, in his middle age a florist both by vocation and avocation, a carrier-off of prizes in flower shows, an exporter of day-lilies. An ancient wet-lipped orgiast in an American Legion cap – what a rare plant her florist was the girl had had not an inkling until their wedding night.

She had wakened from a light sleep. Beside the bed a little lamp threw a deep orange glow. She heard the ex-lieutenant moving about the bathroom and it had struck her that he had been in there an unconscionably long while. She called his name. No reply.

And was looking straight at that door when he strode out naked but for a helmet and swagger stick borne like a rifle – ‘Ein! Svei! Drei! What? Afraid of a soldier?’ Yet the impulse to laugh froze fast in her throat, for his face was a mask that brooked no laughter. Goose-stepping high past her bedside, three times past her bed, he came to attention in a light that seemed swathed in a sweltering mist. And touched the swagger stick with disdain between her eyes.

‘What? Afraid of a soldier?’

She saw he was completely hairless then.

For the indignities that had followed Terasina still had no name. But once she had warned him, ‘Now I’m going to scream.’

The swagger stick’s shadow fell across the sheet. She had bitten the pillow instead.

And the scent of cologne, like a nightmare in lilac, had risen first strong and then faint.

Till daybreak had emptied him at last of everything save self-disgust. Too exhausted to cry, he lay drooling weakly with the odor of lilac dying slow, like midnight in a barber shop.

Two days later the girl had looked in a mirror: above her blue-black bangs the hair had turned, in one small triangular patch, to the whiteness of fresh snow.

Her Floridan had returned to his flower beds and the Negro boy who assisted their cultivation.

Now, ten years after, Terasina’s only flowers were great hairy-stemmed barnyard hollyhocks. And her dreams contained far stranger creatures.

She would find herself waiting in some great shadowed corral in a sheer night dress, for one whose hair, worn long, kept blowing across his face like a mane; whose scent had salt and sweat in it. A stallion made of moonlight, to rear against her neighing and all her hopes rearing with him. Then the salt-sweat scent turned sick and she wakened with a barber-shop scent fleeing faintly along the boarded doors. Weak with disappointment, she would dress in the holy cold and shrive herself like a nun to make herself proud again. Ready to play waitress downstairs to the brotherhood of trailer, truck and bus, below a sign that said:

And when lettuce ran out used cabbage instead.

‘Mexicans are lovely people,’ one of these smug-looking dunces with a badge in his cap was fond of assuring her, ‘and may I add, Señora, you got a right purty make on you?’

‘You lovely people too,’ Terasina would promise the Badge.

For ten years now this tightly wound woman with the snow-drifted hair had been serving section hands, firemen, railroad detectives, brakemen, tramps, tourists, engineers, conductors and truck drivers.

Antojitoes Mexicanoes the back of her menu read, but she’d taken no Mexican fancy to any of them in all ten years.

Abierta hasta a las 12 de la noche – empuje, her door invited them to push in and stay late. Yet kept her own self shut around the clock.

‘You must be connected with the railroads,’ one would try – ‘you got such a purty caboose.’

‘You remind me of Dolores Del Rio,’ another reported when his motor was running smoothly. Would the señora mind if he started a small bank account in her name to keep his wife from spending it all on whiskey? Would the señora object to be named beneficiary in a will? Or to taking a trial run in a new trailer over to Matamoros for the weekend?

She marveled at truckers whose vanity knew no truck-turning. The driver sat so long above so much pent-up power that after a while he came to believe the motor’s power was his own. Look out, I may shift into first. When he wanted to know what type of heating she had upstairs she said, ‘Same kind I got down.’ Well, he was only asking, because he happened to have a buddy in the oil-stove line. Gracias, no, he was very kind, but she already had one stove up there and what would be the use of another? Why own something she wouldn’t use?

And did she use everything she owned now, or was she wearing falsies?

‘God has been generous,’ she replied, and let her breasts rise with her pride. Yet let him tickle her palm when he took his change, flashed him her wide white smile and palmed two bits for her trouble.

The little restaurant drew drivers because it was the end of a long narrow road. There was always some cross-country monstrosity backing and turning between gas-pump and mesquite.

The only thing in pants around the place who pleased her was the browless, raggedy boy with the streaky red hair who had come in one day with a sheet of Sunday funnies in his hand – ‘I don’t know how letters make words,’ he told her, ‘so I’d appreciate it mightily if you’d quote these to me, M’am.’

At first she had not understood why he had come to her, of all people. Then she had realized he was ashamed to ask anyone else. So she had gone over the pictures with him section by section until she had gotten stuck on a word herself. That was when she had brought out one of her two books – How To Write Better Business Letters. But before they could make any progress with that a driver with a flat tire pulled up and the raggedy boy was gone to beg.

Sometimes she saw him circling a trailer in an anxious dog trot, one shoulder higher than the other and a tire wrench in his hand. Other times there would be only two big dirty feet sticking out from under a truck, the toes spread tensely lest the job be unfinished when the driver was ready to haul. What was he always so anxious about?

Or he’d just be leaning against the tin sign – FLATS FIXED – that whirled one minute this way and the next minute that as the wind off the chaparral passed and repassed. Beside it he could stand looking as lonesome as though tires were going out of style, treasuring each drag on his roll-your-own cigarette.

‘What do I owe you, Red?’ she heard a trucker asking and the redhead replying, ‘Makin’s ’n cawfee do jest fine for me, mister.’ She knew by his voice then he needed more than tobacco and coffee. ‘Hungry all the way down,’ Terasina guessed.

Apparently he thought money was going out of style too. Coffee and a sack of Bull Durham was his rate for an hour’s sweating labor in the sun. It angered Terasina, who could tell a ten-dollar bill from a Mexican nickel either side of the river, to see older men take advantage of him.

At last she had told a driver herself. ‘Changing two tires and a battery, six bitses please.’

‘The kid said coffee and a sack.’

‘Changing two tires and battery six bitses please. I set price at La Fe.’

The driver put six bitses down. Terasina didn’t touch it. ‘And tip for boy please.’

The driver extracted a final dime and left without a word. The way Dolores Del Rio was feeling today he didn’t feel he could afford it.

‘You take it,’ Dove told her when she put the money beside his cup, ‘for letting me hang around.’

She rang it up promptly – pshtang! ‘Okay! You got it!’

Six bits credit – he had it.

He decided, after due thought, on Sesos lampreados – brains wrapped in egg. She brought the order, fit for a section hand.

All she saw, for a while then, was his big thick ears sticking up like handles. All she heard was the beat, like a tribal drum, of knife and fork against his plate.

‘—’ n cornbread, m’am. I can eat cornbread till the world looks level.’

A minute later: ‘I’ll take a bowl of chili please m’am.’

‘Segundoes?’ she asked when the chili was gone.

A single bean lodged in the corner of his lip. ‘Si, señora.’

And under the browless eyes there burned remembrance of ancestral hungers; again the tribal drum beat fast.

‘You like more?’ she smiled weakly. ‘Chicharrones maybe?’

‘I got most all I can chamber,’ he admitted at last – ‘but for a slab of that cross-barred pie.’

She fetched the cross-barred pie and coffee. Stooping so far to get his lips to the saucer that his back stood up like a surfacing whale’s, he slurped it up with one magnificent slurp.

As close as she could figure it he now owed her eighty cents. She brought a broom.

He took it and shuffled heavily, right shoulder still higher than the left, to the door. Then, suddenly fired by the hottest chili north of Chihuahua, stormed from the front porch to the rear, behind the counter and up the stairs. He swept her room as if preparing it for holy services, then broomed the steps down in such a cloud that she rushed up with a sprinkling can.

He washed dishes, scrubbed eatingware till it shone and patched a screen in a minute. Then announced some triumph from the kitchen – ‘Uno! Dos!’ He was swatting flies with the Police Gazette.

‘Is alright,’ she sought to calm him, ‘everything is square.’

Then in the stilly mid-afternoon hush that comes to all old chili parlors they sat together over How To Write Better Business Letters.

‘This is how letters make words,’ she told him. ‘The first letter is “A”’ – she made him push up and cross the A. ‘Alright. Now “B.”’

Thus a child taught a child.

When he had shown improvement in both letters she suddenly wearied of the game and found another – how to trip the little key behind the coin box of the juke so that it would play without a nickel. It came on playing Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland; for, like herself, it was divided between American and Mexican songs.

The next song was her choice – Cuando sale de la luna and Dove couldn’t get enough of that. She spiked a coke with tequila and asked him how Angloes could drink the sticky stuff without spiking it. His answer was to agree with her by adding another shot. He began to shift, one foot to the other like a happy bear that had never been happy before—

It had been so long since she had herself felt joy, it eased her deeply now to see another’s. He was one of the strange ones all right, and certainly no florist. He smelled of sweat and salt. No day-lily had touched him.

‘I like to see men dance—’ her own voice surprised her, and she changed the record back to the juke’s Mexican side.

Every time the juke cried out ‘corazon,’ Terasina hiccupped. The third time it happened she seized Dove’s hand and held it hard across her nostrils and mouth, encouraging him to press. ‘Empuje,’ she ordered the Mexican cure for hiccups. With one arm about her shoulders to brace her, he pressed so hard she began to choke and he had to stop.

‘Death is a poor cure for hiccups,’ she informed him.

She preferred dancing to hiccups or death. Her joy was to hear the eager mingling of human voices, with children’s among them, like voices heard on the other side of a wall where strangers are having a birthday party; and never know one listens who never can enter there.

Once she had heard a young father asking forgiveness and seen the young mother make reply simply by giving suck to his only child. That memory tugged at Terasina’s darkly encircled nipples yet, at her own white breasts so aching.

‘In Jesus is my peace,’ she told the mirror in her small room, ‘en tristes horas de tentacion, en Jesus tengo paz.’ And the mirror looked back as much as to say I think somebody just lied.

And strangely, for one so devout, in dreams sought neither peace nor Jesus. She would find herself back in some Mexican place, the hour midday and all shades drawn. In wan doorways wan dreams of Mexican dogs dreamed on.

Everyone in the city slept save one whose hand rested on the knob of her door as though it had rested there for hours. ‘It is so hot in the street,’ the listener beyond her wall complained in a voice much too used to lying. ‘May I have water?’

‘Only Jesus may drink here,’ she forbade him, and wakened with a sense of dry loss clutching her throat. Outside the rainwind was making mirrors of every ditch. She saw the true stars walking hand in hand down paving stones to the end of town. And then walk back again – like lovers coming home.

Suddenly the cup in her hand looked so empty, she dashed the water across the floor, poured it running-full of tequila; till it too ran over.

And drank, with her hands shaking and her back turned to the wall lest the Virgin Mary see her.

After Sesos lampreados, coffee and makin’s left Dove as dissatisfied as had the Sunday funnies, once he had seen a book.

So after the day’s last driver had gone Terasina opened her other book to him.

Now Dove saw a Chinese prince in flight, bearing lightly on his back a flaxen-haired boy with a green feather stuck in his hat; a fairy princess in a nutshell afloat on a leaf, cowering from a gigantic bullfrog saying ‘“Croak croak croak” was all her son could say for himself;’ a little patched man driving a herd of cows while smoking a clay pipe; and reindeer, Santa Clauses, dancers, goblins, ducks, mandarins, angels, castles and teapots and trees half as old as the earth.

But the one that trapped Dove’s interest completely was the steadfast tin soldier who shouldered his musket bravely although he had but one leg.

He had been made last, there had been not quite enough tin to finish him. Yet he stood quite as well on his one leg as others did on two. Dove guessed right away that, of the whole army, this was the very one who would get to see most of the world, have the greatest adventures and at last win the love that all the others wanted too.

The steadfast soldier didn’t have far to look: she was a paper dancer dressed in lightest gauze, with a blue ribbon across her shoulders pinned by a spangle as big as her face. She was standing tiptoe, stretching both arms toward the soldier so that, so far as he could see, she too had but one leg. This made him feel very close to her, though it made Dove uneasy. A mistake as bad as that could lead to nothing but trouble. Yet the soldier had made up his mind, and lay down full length behind a snuffbox, so that when the other soldiers were put in their box and the people of the house went to bed, the soldier still had an eye on his dancer.

‘Then the clock struck twelve, when pop! Up flew the lid of the snuffbox, but there was no snuff in it. No! There was a little black goblin, a sort of jack-in-the-box.

‘“Tin soldier,” said the goblin, “have the goodness to keep your eyes to yourself.” But the tin soldier pretended not to hear.

‘“Ah! You just wait till tomorrow,” the goblin threatened him.’

Just as Dove had guessed, there was trouble coming. The very next morning while standing guard on a window sill, the goblin blew him off the sill, the soldier fell head foremost from the third story and landed with his bayonet fixed between two paving stones. People went by without seeing him and some almost trod on him. It began to rain, a regular torrent, and when the rain was done and the gutters rushed, two small boys found him, made a boat out of newspaper, put the soldier in the middle of it and away he sailed into a long wooden tunnel as dark as it had been in his box.

The current grew stronger, the paper boat began to take water and sank beneath him. The soldier was swallowed by a fish, yet shouldered his musket as dauntless as ever until a flash like lightning pierced his darkness and someone called out loudly, ‘A tin soldier!’ The fish had been caught, taken to market, sold, and brought to the kitchen, where the cook cut it open with a large knife. She took the soldier up by two fingers and carried him into the parlor, where everyone wanted to see the wonderful man who had traveled so far. They set him up on the table and – wonder of wonders! – there were the same children, the same toys on the table and in the middle, with a sort of glow about her, his own tiptoe dancing girl! He was home once more!

The soldier was so moved at all this, especially at sight of his beloved, that he was ready to weep tears of tin joy. But that would hardly have befitted a soldier. So he looked straight ahead, a bit to one side, as one returns an officer’s look; but she looked directly at him. At that moment one of the little boys took up the soldier and without reason or rhyme pitched him into the fire, where he died, true to duty, looking straight ahead but directly at no one.

Dove leaped up, slammed the book so hard he caught Terasina’s thumb – ‘Basta!’

Enough of fairy tales. He hadn’t liked an ending like that, it appeared. For he raced to the juke, tripped it and began to dance as though trying to forget the soldier’s sad end as soon as the juke began to sing—

Raising one foot then the other, he began a slow swaying with his head, arms hanging loosely in a dance wherein, the woman saw, love strangely mixed with despair.

‘See the King of the Elephants!’ Terasina encouraged him, and applauded only to conceal her uneasiness. Somehow, that dance didn’t look right; though she could not have said where it was wrong.

He put his hands on his haunches and, grinning obscenely, sweat on his lip and breath coming faster, invited all women in a grind so purified by lust Terasina felt her own thighs start to part. A look half anguish and half shame made his face go gray and he sank to the table with his head on his hands. She saw his shoulders tremble as the music died all around.

When she touched his shoulder he gave her a smile that suffered too much, that pulled at her heart like an animal’s plea.

Holding the fingers of her left hand together, away from the thumb, she sprinkled salt on the stretched tendon and licked it up with her quick small tongue.

‘You must get yourself a girl,’ she announced as though salt had made her suddenly wise. And held the salt of her hand out to him, that he might become wise as herself. He pinched a speck of it, gave it to his tongue, thought for a moment and decided, ‘There aint no girl in this whole fool’s valley worth a second look.’ Then, swallowing the salt at last, had a cunning afterthought: ‘’ceptin’ yourself of course, Señora.’

‘Well,’ she pretended not to have heard the afterthought, ‘it is true things here are not so good. But if just this one little part of the world had everything, pretty girls and good crops too, bad men would come from the bad parts of the world bringing ugly daughters. Then things would not be so good as they are now. So it is good things are not so good.’

That night Terasina slept poorly. Half in sleep and half in waking she saw the smile that suffered too much.

A week before Christmas she gave him the key to the Fe, to play caretaker and watchman for her till she should return. She could not always go home when her heart was troubled. But this year the trouble came at Christmas, providing her with a pious excuse.

Through the drought of 1930, when old friends’ pennies counted most, merchants tossed Kiwanian greetings from all the doors of the little town’s stores, and smiled, smiled, smiled. But when the drought was relieved and tourists Matamoros-bound again began to get lost between the curio shop and the post office an hour, they were much too busy to smile. Business was business and time became money then.

The barefoot men and boys in overalls would walk around some tourist’s Buick, pointing its advantages to one another so solemnly that it seemed the days of walking from place to place must be over for everyone. Had anyone thought of letting the air out of the tires he would have been prevented, for their interest was proprietary. What they hoped for was many miles per gallon, no nicks on their fenders, contented journeying and no blowouts.

They knew they came from the wrong side of a town that had only two sides, the wrong and the wronger, so strangers with loose cash must be shown respect. And if the women in the cars with the Eastern licenses seemed more prideful than common, that was only agreed to in Spanish, that courteous tongue.

To this lost place the Depression arrived as a sort of modest boom, bringing a relief station and a case worker that caused a dozen wetbacks to wade back across the river. ‘More fried yams for the rest of us,’ old friends wished them indifferent luck.

Shambling down Main Street one bleak evening, Dove noticed the pharmacist idling in front of his shop wearing the face that said, ‘Keep moving, Useless. Business is Business.’

Useless kept moving, for business was business.

Useless always kept moving until he was told to stand to one side. Then he stood to one side until told to start moving. All weathers to Dove were a single season in which he moved or stood unwanted.

On the courthouse steps Fitz was playing the fool for the same gang of cactus-headed rundums for whom he always played the fool. Byron was leaning against the howitzer as though too exhausted tonight to mount it.

‘Preacher,’ asked a hungry-looking misfit, stooped as under a pack, ‘is it right for a man’s wife to bob her hair?’

‘Go to Deuteronomy,’ Fitz promised, ‘your answer is there.’

‘But I don’t feel it’s wrong,’ the wife’s voice defied Deuteronomy.

Fitz’s eyes sought her out. ‘Woman, did you ever get down on your knees and ask God if it was wrong?’

‘No I didn’t, Preacher.’

‘When you do He’ll let you know. If He wanted a woman to cut off her hair he’d have her to shave too, wouldn’t he?’

There didn’t seem to be any answer to that.

‘How fast do angels travel?’ was the next issue Fitz had to solve. That was easy.

‘Why, an angel can leave the New Jerusalem at six o’clock in the morning, travel all over the earth, and be back home at six in the evening where the lion doth lie down with the lamb. Heaven just at hand! Where neither moth nor rust do corrupt! Where thieves break not through nor steal. No sickness! No pain! And a thousand years is as a single day!’

‘What’s the fool rushin’ to get home by six o’clock then?’

Fitz ignored Byron.

‘There is balm in Gilead! No wreaths of sorrow on the doors – and the doors is all pure gold! Pure gold!’ The old man bethought himself – ‘Only don’t you count on that – nobody is going to be fool enough to mistake a bunch of chicken-thieves like you for angels. No, my pitiful friends, what’s in store for you aint no New Jerusalem.’

‘Good old Hellfire fer us, Preacher,’ a believer sounded like he could scarcely wait.

‘Hellfire too good for us!’ – someone else trying to get in good with the preacher for sake of his Kill-Devil.

‘We aint wuth Hellfire!’

They overdid everything. For they knew Fitz put The City of Pure Gold within their reach only for the pleasure of snatching it back.

And actually they didn’t give a hoot for any city of gold. Desolation here and now, that was their dish. Blazing brimstone, eternal torture and a backhanded crack from the hindquarters of bad luck was what they lusted for. Though they never really believed his promise of Heaven Just At Hand, nothing was surer to them than Hellfire. And it took Fitz to lead them straight to its screeching brink. The preacher knew where the real action was all right.

With the passion of one who has been there and back, Fitz brought them closer and closer to the unspeakable edge—

‘Un-utter-uble sorrows is in store for all,’ he gave his holy word – a Santa Claus with nothing save horrors in his sack, hollowing every syllable to make Hell so imminent they could scarcely await their turn on the spit. ‘Un-utter-uble sorrows! Un-dying Damnation! Ut-ray-jus visi-tay-shuns! Invasion by an army! A army of lepers! Two hundred million of flame-throwen cavalry! A river of blood and burnen flesh a hundred mile long! Seven month jest to bury the dead! A army comen! A leper army!’

‘Army-Gideon!’ one idiot was carried completely away. Oh, they loved those leper mounties so they scarcely knew which side to join first. It didn’t matter: no cause was too mad so long as the action was fast and the field bloody. Swept, they were swept by the enormous loneliness of their lives up to the very gates of the golden city, then swept clear back to the burning plains of Damnation. An action so fast it permitted no moment wherein to take breath and look within. To look within at their own hearts, so dark so empty just as hearts.

‘Mothers to eat the flesh of their new-born! A time of trouble such as never was since there was a nation even unto that same time!

‘Hailstones big as blocks of ice! Tawr’nts of bloody fire! Fountings ’n rivers turnen to foaming blood! El Paso buried under red-hot lava! Now you poor sorry buggers you’re really going to catch it.’

‘How about New York?’ some people never wanted to go anywhere alone.

‘Buried in a rain of toads! Toads big as cats to Wall Street’s topmost tower!’

Wall Street had all the luck.

‘Every island shall flee away and the mountings will not be found! Fly or die! All who worship Jehovah will have to receive the mark of the beast or die! Walls of bricks and walls of steel staved in by hailstones weighing fifty-six pounds apiece!’

Not even Byron knew where he got his figures.

‘Papists rapists – the fiend’s agents already are amongst us, preparen to seize the White House. A real person the ex-press image of Satan! – the Pope of Wall Street!’

Several looked suspiciously at Byron. Fitz’s eyes followed – and the movement sent the whole crowd into a single trance-struck shout—

Byron couldn’t bear hymning and to him this was the most dreadful of all—

‘O God,’ Byron answered all like a cry – ‘O God who scorns the shoeless – forget our daily bread but hasteth thy vengeance! Hasteth! Hasteth!’

‘Who the hell’s side is he on now?’ somebody wondered.

But before anyone could make a guess, Byron had turned and was lost in the dark. Yet his father’s voice pursued him.

‘Friends, I reckoned when I told you, a minute ago, about the invasion of lepers ’n hailstones weighin’ fifty-six pounds ’n flame-throwen cavalry two-hundred million strong ’n a rain of toads big as cats ’n mothers eatin’ their new-born ’n wind stavin’ in walls of brick ’n steel ’n a river of burnen blood up to the horses’ bridles, that you were heading for a bit of trouble. Now I have to tell you your real troubles won’t begin till Antichrist get worken on your sinnin’ hides.

‘Already he is spreadin’ the Doc-treen of evolution, the universal fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. Already the Wall Street labor unions are armin’ to help him, preparen for the day when no man will be able to earn his bread by the sweat of his face unless he has the mark of the beast – A-F-L – upon him. Neither will he be able to buy or sell. City unions teach you that Chinamens are your brothers! Ayrabs! Mexes!

‘You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country. You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.’ – He leaped straight up and came down barking like a gibbon—

‘—O! Look yander! Comen down the streets of gold! I do see a great bloodwashed throng all robed in white!’

A dozen heads turned quickly to see God only knows what, but all they saw was Dove Linkhorn looking forsaken. As though wishing his poor crazy pappy would come down off the courthouse steps. When the crowd’s eyes moved toward him he turned away to follow his brother into the dark.

He passed the little movie where Thomas Meighan was being featured in ‘Young Sinners.’ But paused in front of the curio shop to admire the little fringed souvenirs festooned there, pretending to be made of buffalo hide and to be engraved with a branding iron.

Byron had read the words to him long ago. All over town were signs and posters, legends, warnings and invitations Dove had learned by heart. Now it was his amusement to stand making his lips move with his memory, so that some passerby might get the impression that he was actually reading. He even frowned now and again to pretend he’d hit one that was tough enough even for an educated boy like himself.

Passersby paid little heed to the sloucher with the hair in his eyes. So he paused below the barred window of the old jail. Prisoners, at least, had time for him.

But the only one the jail held this night, his fingers wound whitely about the bars, was Chicken-Eye Riley, an Indian gouged in a brawl years before. He wore his hair long, pioneer-fashion, with a tucking-comb in the back. And stood with his scooped-out skull bent between the iron, trying to get a breath of the night he could never see. Dove saw light glint off the comb.

‘Got t’bacco for me down there?’ Riley demanded.

Dove picked up a pebble, slipped it into his Bull Durham sack for ballast, and glanced about for the sheriff. The old man raged at the townsfolks’ habit of tossing sacks of this and that or anything, even grapefruit, through the bars, for it forced him to plod a steep flight of stairs to make the prisoner stand inspection.

‘Stand back, Chicken,’ Dove told Riley. Then tossed the tobacco – he heard the stone hit the floor with a tiny clink. The skull reappeared.

‘Thanks, son.’

‘What’s it for this time, Riley?’

‘Same old thing. Refusing to make love to my wife when she was sick. What kind of a man do they take me for anyhow?’

‘What kind of sickness have she got, Riley?’

‘You sound like a pretty well-growed boy. You know how women are. Wouldn’t a man be a beast to go to his wife at that time of the month?’

‘Reckon he sure would.’ Dove took a hazy guess.

He actually didn’t know how women were.

‘Now if I’d took her against her will – if I’d beat her, if I’d tortured her, that would be something to arrest me for. If I did a thing like that I’d turn myself in. I’d give myself up.’

‘You oughtn’t whup a woman, Chief.’

‘I didn’t whup her, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. I wouldn’t hurt my sow, far less my wife.’

‘You oughtn’t whup either one, Chief. A dumb brute like that.’

‘I’m glad you see it that way. But just suppose I did? Suppose I was kicking my sow and the sheriff happened along. Do you think he’d interfere?’

‘I should think he ought.’

‘Well, he wouldn’t. You know why? Because the sow is mine to do with as I please. He would no more tell me how to deal with her than he’d tell the barber how to cut hair. So why should he interfere now if I’m not kicking my sow at all but just being tender to her till my wife is well? Can I help it if my wife is even more jealous than usual at that time of the month? A little kindness and they treat you like a monster.’

‘You shore aint no monster, Chief,’ Dove didn’t sound too certain, ‘but I got to get to work now. I’m maintenance engineer at the hotel up the road. Come in when you get out. I’ll have my cook fix you up.’

Dove left the tender monster puffing contentedly against the bars. ‘Mighty mannerable fellow,’ the maintenance engineer decided, feeling pleased with the impression he himself had made.

He had to step carefully over the gulleys that the townsfolk called ‘love-holes’ because they were supposed, in horse-and-buggy days, to throw lovers into one anothers’ arms.

He passed the ramshackle Negro church where the town’s dozen Negroes gathered to pray, and heard them beginning as he passed:

It was that moment before frogs begin, when Mexican women and Mexican men draw their shawls across their mouths to keep the night damp out. In the dust-blue dusk the boarded windows of La Fe looked down as blindly as Riley. The careworn stairway, the windworn walls, the sandworn doors down a heart-sore hall, all remembered Terasina.

Terasina Vidavarri.

Frost knocked at the window. Though she had not asked him to remember, yet he lit her virgin every night. By its light he got the stove roaring. Then lit himself a little stick of Byron’s home-grown potaguaya and drew a deep, defiant breath.

‘Crazy Old Hasteth! Little-Time-to-Repent! Old-Cut-Off-Your-Nose-to-Spite-Your-Face – if you’d but hasted me to school instead of playing Gawd for a pack of utter fools I’d have a readin’ ’n writen trade tonight.’

With each draw he rose another inch off the floor.

‘Buggy old Just-As-I-Am’ – suddenly, the stick dangling from his lip, he crossed himself and genuflected, though his knees touched nothing.

‘Pump that out of your hose, old man,’ he told Fitz – ‘let that do fer you, Hell-’n-Brimstone.’

Here was her bedside, here was her bed. Of late she had lain here restless or dreaming and soon would lie dreaming again.

Between the white kerosene lamp’s glow and the virgin’s flickering yellow, he looked at the words of the story that told HOW A GOOD MAN IS ALWAYS RIGHT, for he knew that one by heart:

The tip of his narrow cigarette danced like a tiny ballerina in the dark. He turned the page to where the Eastwind, dressed like a Chinaman, told the Prince to hold tight or he might fall.

A scent of the Orient came to him. He left the book and followed his nose, sniffing like a rabbit, right up to a bureau drawer.

A chiffon blouse, a white slip frayed at the hem and a black brassiere like the vestments of some holy order. Dove felt of them with that special reverence of men who have lived wholly apart from women. Under these clothes, it came to him like a mystery, the señora walked naked. The realization weakened him so that he sat on the bed’s edge with the slip lying limp across his knees and stroked it as if it were her flesh. In the nippled cup of the black brassiere he smelled her special smell, like that of Russian Leather.

Here her breast had fitted – why it must be softer yet than this! And tested the garment’s texture against his leathery cheek.

Señora, let me touch your naked heart.

A yearning deep as need can go stretched him onto his stomach, clasping her slip to his chest. Pressing the pillow where her head had lain, his limbs convulsed and a dizzying surge left him limp as the slip. Sweating and passionless, guilty and spent, the boy lay a long moment with shuttered eyes. This had never happened to him before while waking.

‘That’s purty fair pot,’ Dove thought.

And fell into a snoring sleep.

To dream he was coasting gently about a county fair merry-go-round as he had once seen four small monkeys coast. Strapped tight into toy autos, each wearing a jockey cap matching the color of his car, one red, one green, one yellow and one blue; while about the guard rail people crowded and leaned – he touched the peak of his own cap to make sure it wouldn’t blow off when the big race began—

the music began with the happiest bang.

Now he was losing ground, now gaining – now he was almost out in front. O – Hasteth! Hasteth! From his father’s shouting face he saw Eyeless Riley’s skull emerge – the dream wheel tipped straight up, the rails slipped sidewise and out from under.

‘Señora! Save me from Riley!’

He sat in the middle of the floor with the pillow still clasped to his chest. Above him the virgin burned bright. Beside him the stove burned low. Down the dark road Negroes foretold and foretold—

Within the fire Terasina’s eyes saved him from Riley as the dream wheel died with the dream.

‘Old grandpaw came last night,’ was how Fitz said hello one morning to the frost that had come in the night. The roofs of Hooverville shown white and nothing to burn but grapefruit crates and precious few of these.

The single spigot froze, but a Mexican couple two houses down made neighbors welcome to their well. Rumors of a coal train coming through raced from door to door like news of a wedding come June. True or false, it made happy telling: all people would soon be warm once more.

Dove and a boy called Jehova went down the tracks carrying a clothes pole and a sack. Half a hundred men, women and children huddled at the water tower. Barrows and boxes stood about. A Mexican girl held, in a fold of a yellow shawl, a carnival kewpie to her breast. The shawl’s dusty fringes, tumbling past her ankles, had gathered enough soot to start a fire itself. Kewpie and child guarded an empty doll buggy on knock-kneed wheels.

‘Your baby will catch cold, sis,’ Dove teased her, but she gave him only a glance of unmoving enmity for reply.

‘When you’re spoken to, answer,’ Jehova reproached her; but got no more answer than Dove. ‘Wetback fraidy-cat,’ Jehova apologized for her to Dove as the cars came grinding to a clanking screech and the engine began to take on water.

Staking out one side of a car as their own, Jehova climbed atop the coal and lined the iron shelf that runs the length of the car with the biggest lumps he could handle, requiring both his hands. Neither knew why it had to be done this way, except that the other ways were too easy. Dove stood below with the pole. The problem wasn’t only to get the biggest lumps in the shortest time but to keep neighbors from snatching them first.

Jehova finished filling the shelf just as the cars began rolling again. And got down just in time to get the sack open at the shelf ’s end. The first lump, hitting the pole held by Dove, tumbled into the sack. One by one the lumps fell and not one was lost.

As they fell Dove asked Jehova above him – ‘What if these were yams?’ He got no answer, so only asked himself – What if they were onions? At thought of onion gravy his mouth watered – just let somebody tell Dove Linkhorn where he could steal onions and Byron would make the gravy. Somebody shouted – a plain-clothes man was humping down the spine. They lunged down the embankment with the sack between them. In the ditch at the embankment’s foot a doll buggy lay upside down, its wheels still turning this way then that. A few feet away someone had slung a yellow shawl. It stirred. Then its yellow began seeping to black.

‘The wheel caught the buggy but she wouldn’t let go of the handle,’ he heard somebody say.

‘Wait for the priest,’ said somebody else in such a tone that Dove assumed that the priest, when he came, would explain, in low, simple tones, how a child so small could love a doll so much that she had not feared even a freight train’s wheels.

In the final week of January he stood in the woodshed of the Fe warming a glass egg between his palms in remembrance of chickens of summers past. He heard someone trying the front door. His heart raced out of the woodshed before him and his raggedy knees raced after.

Terasina.

Wearing long black gloves and looking so much like one of the unattainable New York tourist women that he stood stock still, barefoot and abashed.

She smiled her wide white smile. She smelled like Mexican sunlight and pecked his cheek when he came. He handed her the egg and said, ‘A little girl got kilt,’ for a thank you.

‘Tell me later,’ she told him, and he went up the old stair so worn by human care, lugging her suitcase that also had had a bit of battering. At the door to her room he stood aside and she went in before him.

He had drawn the blinds and fastened them fast. The room smelled of darkness, soap and peace. His mouth fell full on her own and his mouth was a boy’s: she felt the big deep warmth of all his being in it. Till the kiss grew into a man’s that parted her lips, and flowed into her own. That arched her spine and made her heart drink wine. Her tongue-tip teased his till he gave her his tongue; eyes shut, she drew softly upon it. Her strength began draining as his gathered power till only his enfolding hand held her up. The other he brought up between her thighs so possessively she felt how kind he is to touch so gently and spread herself in gratitude. Of a sudden the blinds were too tight for gratitude, they were being stretched to the point of pain as his lips found her throat and her back felt the bed. She twisted from under and leaned for breath against the bed, the front of her skirt hooked onto her belt. Shame mixed in her with anger. She smoothed the skirt down.

He took a step toward her and she showed him her nails, inviting him to try again. In the dark they glinted like delicate knives forged especially for use against men’s eyes. He tossed his hair back off his forehead and grinned weakly.

‘You find yourself another job,’ she told him.

He turned, disgraced in a groping haze. ‘I think the fire needs fixin’,’ he guessed.

A minute later she heard the big stove begin to roar – whenever he didn’t know what to do with himself he threw kindling into it as though kindling came cheap. She waited until she heard the door close below.

From the window she saw him shambling, the boy who would be a man if she would be a woman, missing steps down a broken walk and every time he missed, she stumbled. ‘It has nothing to do with me.’ Terasina guarded herself all around.

Yet high in the windless light a flight of pelicans ferris-wheeled to the Gulf, the tail-bird supplanting the leader after the manner of pelicans, in a ceaselessly changing cycle; down to a useless sea.

‘Well, a man stays sad when a woman makes a fool of him,’ went through her mind, and a twinge of compunction took her. Where was such a dunce to find another friend?

That night, as the drift of snow in her hair slept in the woodstove’s dreaming light, she knelt before sleep and confessed all her fault. A woman of thirty with a boy of sixteen – she tried her best to feel ashamed, but a sense of contentment rose instead. And contentedly let her head rest on the bed, the better to hear, from some far-off square, old-fashioned music blowing faint across an old-fashioned sea.

Girls were passing hand-in-hand and boys counterclockwise, sizing them up. But herself walked a bit to one side as befitted one luckier than some but lonelier than any. And she saw she was followed by some sort of luckless mongrel bitch looking for its owner, its leash dragging dust. It had a broken tail, as though it had been very nearly run over; people laughed for the way the broken bone bobbed this way then that, inviting males from anywhere. It ran the alleys dawn till dark, lolling its tongue in ashcan corners and any strip of shade that could hide her; then her scent would catch and she’d run on weakening legs again.

Panting for protection, the bitch stretched in exhaustion at Terasina’s feet, blood on her hindquarters and eyes unseeing.

‘Don’t laugh because others follow it,’ Terasina defended it to those who dared mock – ‘she is a leader, the one who decides what game dogs shall play, and now she is thirsty from play, that’s all.’ ‘What game shall we play now?’ she asked, to teach it there was no shame in being a leader, ‘if you were not so ugly I would take you home with me.’ (Yet how it panted in that airless heat!)

Its flesh was so thin the reddish meat shown through, and letting her hand pass caressingly down its spine felt her hand becoming part of that flesh. What she held in her hand was certainly no dog.

‘Not mine!’ she explained to everyone – ‘It kept following me!’ And wakened still kneeling, firelight flickering down all the walls and one hand wringing the other.

‘Fill your tires, mister?’ Terasina heard Dove, bright and early on the job the next morning as though nothing had happened between them. She looked out at him one story down, pressing hose to valve. He wore fresh jeans, his hair was parted and slicked down, his face scrubbed to shining. Around his neck he flaunted a clean green bandanna – even his ankles were clean! Had he thought he’d been fired for lack of neatness?

When he came in for coffee she hadn’t the heart to tell him she’d meant it when she told him to leave. She saw it would be of no use. He would go on working all the same.

Yet she could make things tough for him. Before he’d gotten the fires going she was on him about last night’s dishes. Before the sink was cleared she was after him because the coffee in the urn was low. How had she ever gotten by without him, he wondered; and she wondered a little too. He was perched on a chair filling the big chrome percolator when she leaned a broom against him – ‘Floor needs a good sweeping.’

‘O, put it up my tail,’ he told her below his breath, ‘I could sweep and wash the walls at the same time that way.’

‘You say something to me?’

‘A little girl got kilt.’

She glanced at him dubiously and turned away. He felt better for having fooled her, but fooling her earned him no rest.

Just before noon two jungle bums diverted her. One was a kind of Mexican bear, a regular little Pachuco, sideburns and all, arm in arm with a frayed-looking Swede twice his height and three times his age.

‘We stopped by to wish you good luck in your new location,’ the youth congratulated Terasina in Spanish. ‘Our family ate with yours often in past times, better times.’

‘The location is not new,’ she advised him in his own tongue. ‘I’ve been here ten years and have no family.’

‘Meet my father,’ he switched to English. ‘He has just been offered the job of district manager in Dallas and needs only fare to get there. Kindly to loan him one dollar fifty cents. If he doesn’t mail it back to you in two days I’ll make good on it myself – for sake of past times, better times.’

‘Talk English you sonofabitch,’ Dove heard Father whisper.

‘You should be ashamed of yourself, a nice Spanish boy of such good breeding,’ Terasina scolded the Pachuco and put two cups of coffee down for sake of past times.

Father dipped right for it but the Pachuco had more pride.

‘We take our trade elsewhere, Father,’ he decided for both, hauling the Swede, complaining, to the door.

Immediately Terasina applied herself to a new sign, laboring pencil to tongue the better part of an hour before it was done and hung on a handle of the coffee urn:

‘What it mean?’ Dove wanted to ask after she’d read it to him as though it were self-explanatory. Things being as they were between them, he didn’t presume to ask what it meant, but merely sat and wondered.

‘You are paid for sitting?’ she asked, and he again hopped to it.

Simon the Pieman drove up in time to pay for a piece of his own pie.

‘I admire Latin women,’ he admitted with a chocolate smear for a chin, for Simon always ordered the most expensive kind, ‘and I’m thinking of marrying and settling down.’

He got no answer out of her to that, so he tried erudition on her.

‘I’m the intellectual type,’ he confided. ‘Here’s an example: Did you happen to know that Indians don’t react to lie detectors?’

‘Maybe Indians don’t lie.’

‘You always got an answer. Answer me this: Did you know that Navajoes eat grasshoppers?’

She worked up a mild astonishment. ‘Imagine that.’

‘I’ll tell you why, too. If you really want to know—’

‘Why?’

‘Because they come from a different culture. That’s why.’

‘So would you if you did,’ Terasina assured him, putting a lettuce-and-tomato sandwich before him in which she’d replaced the lettuce with cole slaw.

‘Will you warm this up?’ – he shoved his half-empty coffee cup toward her – ‘just a wee bit?’ Terasina pointed to the new warning; he saw too late that filling the cup would cost him another nickel.

‘What are you trying to do?’ he asked, ‘be the richest woman in the cemetery?’

Yet he tickled her palm when he left, the simple chocolate pieman.

They weren’t exactly stallions made of moonlight, these kings of truck and trailer. They were clods whose vices ran over weakly like coffee into their saucers. Over-eaters, over-drinkers, snuff-chewing chiselers, doers of great sins to hear them tell it, though tilting the pinball machine was actually their greatest. Their conquests were many, they let it be known. How to deal with the envy of lesser lovers their perpetual problem. Yet when she pretended to one that the weekend trip to Matamoros really sounded interesting, he changed his plans. It wasn’t to Matamoros, after all, but only to Brownsville. Not for a weekend but just for the day. And naturally he would have to bring his family.

The only man she’d met in ten years whose flattery she found difficult to resist, because it was unintended, was Dove’s. In his eyes she read dedication.

‘Is that fresh choklut pie?’ he asked as if thinking it might be banana cream.

She slapped a bar of Bon Ami down. ‘Call this pie.’

He went to work on the windows – loveless, shoeless, choklut-pieless. When the windows were done she handed him a flyswatter – but had not reckoned he would keep track of the score.

‘Uno!’ he reported from the kitchen. ‘Dos! Tres! Cuatro!’ He was lying; she could tell by the swish of the swatter he wasn’t hitting a thing. Yet listened to his triumphs mount as he mounted the high dry stair – ‘Seis! Siete! Ocho!’ He was nueve from the top, diez would bring him to the bedroom door, once would bring him to the bed, at doce she heard him swatting above her head, pretending to pursue a greenbottle that wasn’t there, around the bed and around. He feinted it this way – she heard his feet reverse in a dramatic presentation of a man fooling a fly on the wing – then vaulted right over the bed and brought the swatter down smash as though pinning it to the floor. Then silence.

A silence in which she ached to cross her ankles behind his back on that same good hard bed. And leaned her head on her hands, made half sick by that natural goodness of body and heart she had been taught was mortal sin.

‘En Jesus tengo paz,’ she tried to pray the good hard bed away.

No warm-ups, the sign behind her warned: No wee bits.

While on the bed Dove waited for her.

He came downstairs at last swinging the swatter disconsolately, hung it where it belonged and pushed out the door.

‘Now I give you pie,’ she tried to call him back.

He spat through his teeth to lay all dust and was gone.

Gone in the silver end of day under a sky emptied of the last pelican.

Terasina abandoned her friend on the wall that night. It was no night for virgins, that was all.

Closed inside and shuttered out, alone in the shuttered dark she heard a small clock say ‘sick sick sick’; a prim little clock alone as herself yearning the small second hand around for the long silken lunge that could ease her. For the stroke to fill the wellsprings of her unused delight.

What a devilish kind of clock, to tick and tick as if minutes spent lying chastely alone were the only actual sin.

She breathed in a season without sound, not a breath of wind nor cricket to chirp. But only a clock offering alibis for playing the beast with a boy half her age.

Till the very stillness took pity, and sleep tossed her about for a while.

Wearing a low-backed evening gown of midnight blue spangled with green sequins but disgustingly smeared with chocolate, she asked ‘Which way to the church?’ of an elegant little humpbacked gentleman in black tie and tails, – ‘I wish to become a nun today.’

‘I am a great admirer of nuns,’ the elegant little gentleman assured her, and bowed even lower, ‘in fact, my father was Bishop of Seville. Our family knew yours well, Señora.’

‘Sire,’ she replied respectfully, ‘our family and yours descend from Cortez. Perhaps you remember my father?’

‘Of course. He was a lame pimp from Puebla.’

‘There has always been a good pimp in our family,’ she reported with quiet pride.

‘There has always been a good whore in ours,’ he boasted modestly in turn. ‘Perhaps you remember my mother?’

‘Who could forget that royal lady who kept the pool tables where one might sleep for no more than the price of three games? How is she?’

But before she could hear how the royal lady fared the dream trailed off and she lost her way to the church.

She was sitting in her black lace slip, on the bed’s edge, the following morning when Dove pushed in, both arms heaped with firewood for an excuse, without troubling to knock.

‘Take the doors down,’ she told him, ‘we don’t need them any more.’

He evaded her eyes, yet her own stayed hard upon him: she saw the hand holding the match tremble slightly, waiting for the flame to take hold. When it took, the weaving light flowered down his countrified face.

Then within her a valentine of gladness struggled bravely up, there was no use denying fire.

‘You come to me here you,’ she ordered him, and he came to stand at attention like a summoned private. Looking past her shoulders at something outside; prepared for any order. Submitting himself so completely that it came to her heart sweetly as an old revenge.

She pushed the suitcase slyly with her toes until it touched his own.

‘Why do you stand so? Do you expect me to decorate you for bravery?’

‘Never been in no army, m’am.’

‘Why not? So afraid of being a soldier?’

‘Aint afraid to soldier. Never been asked.’

‘I see. Afraid only of Terasina.’

‘I respect you most mightily, m’am.’

‘Then you have changed mightily since yesterday. Then your hand did not respect me’ – abruptly she seized both his hands in hers, turned them palm upward and flung them from her in feigned dismay – ‘Why! The very same. Only dirtier by a day. Why do you always disappoint me?’

The stove door opened and blew an orange-colored passion across his face. His face so young yet so old.

‘Don’t intend to disappoint you, m’am.’ And in the arm he placed about her she felt a commanding gentleness.

‘What is a woman to do with such a cunning man?’ then waited for him to begin apologizing and so spoil everything.

Instead he hauled her shoulder straps down as though he had paid for her clothes, cleared her of everything to her waist, and made her lean against him. Then lifted her breast to study it: a brown melon tipped with pink. Apparently satisfied with that one, he replaced it and studied the other.

‘It’s the same,’ she assured him. ‘Is there anything else I can do for you, useless cunning man?’

For answer, Useless gave her breasts an approving squeeze.

‘Ready for crating,’ he told her. Then the touch of his lips made her eyes come wet as his hands went gently wild. In a kiss that went on and on, in an everlasting kiss. Till her eyes that had darkened with desire now lighted in electric bliss.

His hide-tight jeans and her black lace slip lay tangled inextricably on the floor. ‘Empuje’ and her arms drew him down and in. Compressing her pleasure till she threshed for release. He eased the pressure then; precisely as slowly as he had pressed.

And began a kind of controlled abandon that made her half marvel and half mourn at all she’d missed – ‘So slow. I did not know, I did not know.’

Right to the precipice’s edge he brought her, letting her subside only to draw her yet closer to the brink. Prolonging her pleasure till it verged on pain. Then, needing to rid herself of all this, locked him more fiercely in, beat at his chest with both her fists, and upon the peak, with one flame-like thrust, fell and fell in a weightless delight released from all pleasure, all pain.

Down and down in a dream of falling where nothing lived but two far-off voices in a Mindanao Deep of peace, some bottomless depth of perfect rest. Hearing a man’s slow-drawn breath and a woman’s grateful sobbing.

Till somebody’s hands lightly wandered her face and she realized remotely it was her own eyes someone was trying to dry. Tears were sealing them.

After the moment of joy, he had had that deep pang of guilt that lasts less long than the flesh hangs limp, and is gone, good riddance to it.

Her hands traced his back to show she understood, though she understood nothing at all. Then fell languidly away. Terasina Vidavarri slept like a great baby then.

‘I don’t know what kind of great I’m bound to be,’ Dove considered his prospects calmly, ‘all I know for certain is I’m a born world-shaker.’

And drew on his hide-tight jeans like a victor.

The born world-shaker was tying an apron around his waist, preparing to clean up pans and pots, when he saw Byron hurrying barefoot through the dust. Certainly didn’t take long for word to get around this shite-poke town. Dove had just time to snatch a cigarillo from the tobacco counter and light it for courage before Byron pushed in and looked around. In the dappled gloom of early morning he wasn’t able to see a thing.

‘Mornin’, Byron,’ Dove introduced himself.

‘Mornin’, Dove.’

‘Do anythin’ for you this mornin’?’

‘Reckon not. Just happen to be passin’ by.’

‘Care for coffee?’

‘I’m a mite low in funds.’

Dove drew the coffee. ‘On the house. Sweet roll?’

‘Mighty kind of you, Dove. Mighty kind. It appear you’re makin’ it pretty good.’

‘I’m makin’ it.’

‘How’s Dolores Del Rio?’

‘I didn’t mean makin’ in that particular sense’ – Dove got a good strong whiff of danger – ‘I just work here, Byron.’

‘How old is that Mex, Dove?’

‘She give her age as twenty-one.’

‘I reckon she lost her measuring stick. How much she pay you?’

‘Aint no business of you’rn.’

‘Taint likely Dear Little Pappy approve.’

‘Taint likely I’m to tell Little Pappy.’

‘Mighty likely I’m to.’

‘I’d name that right onfriendly.’

‘Why then, let’s be friendly.’

‘You want a cigar too, Byron?’

Byron coughed his little dry cough. He shook his head, though the very invitation made his throat tickle pleasurably. Holding his bandanna to his mouth, he pointed to the register and held up a single finger.

Dove stared. Byron snapped his fingers. ‘Pronto! Pronto!’

Dove hurried to obey, hoping to make as tiny a ring on the register as possible. There were bills, there was silver. He picked four quarters and weighed them a moment as though changing his mind.

Byron’s open palm reached over the counter. The quarters fell one by one.

It was only when Byron slammed the screen that Dove realized the cash drawer was still standing open.

She wakened slowly, feeling more well than she had in years. A great white sun was making a Mexican mosaic across the floor.

She felt lazily grateful to it for going to all that trouble just on Terasina’s account. She felt she had been ill and the sun had healed her. Mighty nice of the sun.

But who had slammed a door?

Then saw a small handkerchief of black Spanish lace still damp from her own tears. Remembrance returned like bad news from a stranger. News of some injustice that could never be undone. And visualizing herself convulsed on a bestiary bed, the room that had smelled of soap and chastity smelled now only of lust. She picked her night dress off the floor as gingerly as though it were befouled.

Just as the cash-drawer banged shut.

She composed her features and her hair, dressed unhurriedly and came downstairs assuring herself that nothing was different than yesterday, though a slow-burning fury shook her every step of the way.

Dove appeared to think a number of changes had been made. He was toting a cup of coffee with the look of a daydreaming idiot’s, mild and satisfied. The stump of a cigar burned in his mouth as smugly as if it had been paid for.

‘Come here to me you,’ she told him from the register, ‘I want to show you funny theeng.’ Her English had no Spanish accent unless she were under emotional stress; he should have taken warning just from that. ‘A funny theeng – look!’

She was pointing to a peso note. ‘See. Is made by American company – Mexico must have Americans to make even their money!’

He nodded thoughtfully. It didn’t seem quite right at that, and came a step nearer, balancing his coffee carefully.

‘But it is alright,’ she reassured him – ‘Mexicans make the money for Chinamens’ – and with an upsweep of her open palm spun coffee and saucer and all; he stood running coffee from eyes to chin, his mouth unhinged for coffee to run in. Saucer and cup crashed at his feet.

Clenching his overall strap in one fist and gripping the seat of his jeans with the other, she rushed him forward so fast his toes touched the floor only twice on the trip – and with a single two-handed shove sent him stumbling into the dust where she’d found him.

Dove knelt on all fours in the road as though looking for something he’d lost. He picked himself up heavily, brushed himself slowly down. To study her sunstriped figure behind the fast-hooked screen.

‘I tell you once,’ she reminded him – ‘Go. I tell you now Go. Go. Go.’

She watched him out of sight.

Then all her anger drained and died.

Leaving her just a small careworn woman with one stocking fallen under a sign that said—

Half that night Dove listened to Byron and Fitz arguing whether the world moved or stood still.

‘Take a butterfly,’ the old man kept insisting, ‘the way it keeps hovering over the ground just above one patch. If the earth moved, he’d come down in the next yard, wouldn’t he?’

‘That butterfly got more brains than you have, old man,’ Byron replied. ‘He knows the world is round and that’s more than you do. So he moves just fast enough to keep up with the patch. It may look to you like he’s just fluttering, but he’s keeping even all the same.’

‘Did you ever throw a ball in the air and catch it coming down?’

‘Naturally.’

‘Then common sense will tell you that if the earth actually moved you’d be too far away to catch it coming down, wouldn’t you? Now tell me the ball knows the earth is moving.’ The old man had victory within reach.

‘For God’s sake, when they say the earth moves it don’t mean it goes forty miles an hour, old man,’ Byron protested.

‘What’s to keep it from going forty?’ Fitz asked dryly, ‘if it’s round as you claim it ought to be going faster and faster like a snowball down a hill. I’ll tell you the reason it don’t move is the same reason it aint round – it got corners to keep it from moving. I’ll prove it by the good book.’

Dove heard him rustling about with the battered Bible, trying to find the passage that proved him right.

‘Don’t bother, old man,’ Byron sounded tired. ‘I know what you’re lookin’ for – “and the winds blew from the four corners of the earth” – so how can anything round have corners? Go to sleep, fool old man.’

The light was turned down. Dove heard the old man creep onto his cot bed. So long as the world was flat he would sleep well upon it. Only round worlds left Fitz sleepless.

As softly as if he’d been saving it Byron asked – ‘On what day of the Creation did God say “Let there be light and there was light”?’

‘The first, of course,’ Fitz answered contentedly.

Dove heard a little silence run about around the room and back. Byron had a sense of timing.

‘And when did He make the two great lights, the greater to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night?’

‘The fourth, naturally.’

‘Think that over, old man.’ Byron turned on his side. He slept best upon a rounded star.

Dove heard the old man thinking it all over; tossing then fuming. While Byron slept the sleep of the just, snoring softly.

Dove was glad Byron had won for once. But personally didn’t care if the planet was shaped like a pretzel. He had issues more pressing to solve.

‘First she totes me on and the next thing I know I’m standin’ on my haid in the middle of the road. She could have spore me that.’

Well, he wasn’t the sort to hang around a door he’d been shoved through. She’d have to send for him before he’d work for her again. That much was certain.

All the same, there is no statute forbidding a man to walk down the common highway.

Dust puffs filed behind him early the next morning, and an anxious wind went sniffing ahead like a hound favoring a sore forefoot; gas lamp to telephone pole, one side of the road to the other. Till it came to the lamp that leaned toward the La Fe as the La Fe leaned toward it. There it scooted suddenly around the corner into the yard, abandoning Dove altogether.

He hadn’t heard of any law forbidding a man to go around the corner of a broken-down chili parlor either.

Terasina’s back was toward him. Her earrings glinted green against the white of the wash like news of an early spring. Slips and step-ins, yellow and pink, flapped about her like invitations to love in the morning. The strong forenoon light silhouetted her thighs to the full and the wide.

Sure enough, she was hanging yesterday’s black night dress. He watched the wind pawing it and saw it turning a little away from the wind like a girl evading a jealous lover. A wind that could not let matters be, but had to twist things around to suit itself.

Raising herself on her sandaled toes to reach the topmost point of the line, she stretched her brown sleeveless arms and her haunches pressed hard together.

As he had pressed them with his own large hand, when his other had pillowed her head.

That he would not pillow again. He spat across the fence and saw his spittle strangle itself on a thorn.

Look who’s hangin’ out her dirty underdrawers.

Out of the corner of her eye Terasina saw him leaning. One more tramp come to stare. So stare. If it helps your health it does me no harm. I did not send for you.

Won a wetback beauty contest forty years ago and thinks she’s the Queen of the May.

Go when you wish to go.

Let’s people see her make a-purpose. Thinks she got so much to show because she sells old fried beans. Wouldn’t be the least surprised if folks run her back across the river one of these nights.

If I am to play the whore I will play for my own people.

Better lookers than this Pachuco would be giving him the eye in Dallas or Houston one of these days. ‘Let me spend my money on you, Big Boy,’ is what they’d be asking him. Big Boy wouldn’t be wasting time on Pachucos then. He’d have some trim blue-eyed Anglo all his own, to cook him up real American meals. There wouldn’t be any frijoles in that house by God. And she’d say ‘think’ instead of ‘theenk’ and go to a Christian church and wear enough clothes on her back to keep every passerby from seeing how she was built between ankles and belly button. In Houston. Or was that Dallas?

‘No work today,’ she took the clothespin out of her teeth to announce.

‘I got a better job,’ he assured her.

‘Oh? That is nice.’

‘Aint in this old shite-poke town neither.’

‘What poke town is it in?’

‘Dallas, natcherly.’

‘What do you do there, in Dallas?’

‘You’ll read about that in the paper.’

‘You bring the paper and I read about it, so you know what you do there too.’

‘It’s not hard to make fun of weakness in others. I’ll pay you the dollar I borrowed.’

‘You owe me nothing but goodbye,’ she told him and bent, trim at the waist and broad at the shoulders, hitching her skirt to the backs of her knees.

She didn’t sense him coming up until his hands clamped her waist – then she wheeled like an ambushed cat and jammed the clothespin into his teeth. He rocked as if hit by fire.

‘Segundos?’ Terasina inquired politely.

He drew off, shaking his head and spitting splinters. No, he didn’t care for seconds on clothespins. He reached cowlike toward the blood trickling down his chin, and she held out the little black lace kerchief.

He shook his head. ‘Keep your rag.’

‘That is all I can do for you today then.’ The proceedings were closed.

‘You done nothin’ so great for me any other day,’ he told her, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand – ‘but you durn well liked what I done fer you.’

Her face showed no recollection.

‘It felt good is what you said,’ he remembered gallantly. ‘Slow you said – you liked it slow,’ and put his hand on the nape of her neck. She sank her teeth into his palm, he felt them sink to the bone and forced her, biting still, to her knees.

‘It’ll be a little faster today,’ he assured her, ‘I’m a mite short of time.’

Spring-green and sun-yellow the clothes flapped about. Polkadot bandannas flapped a polkadot quadrille. But the night dress turned aside and a stocking hung dark as a shroud. Till she lay on her side with her head between her hands and her dress tossed back to her hips. The front of the dress was ripped to the waist. A low wind paused long enough to toss a handful of dust and pass on. It was done.

Dove picked up her handkerchief and daubed his chin. He waggled a lower front tooth. It was just a mite loose. The noon freight hooted two miles away.

Like a man walking through water he shuffled toward the S.P. water tower. The freight whooped like a Sioux who has seen too many westerns.

He stayed out of sight till the cars began passing.

The first stars arrived early that night to see how Dove Linkhorn was making out. And saw right off that here was one party who didn’t take funny stuff off anybody any more. Folks who thought this boy looked foolish felt different when they began to hurt. ‘Mighty rough customer,’ the planets agreed till Dove closed the doors on those gossiping stars.

He heaped straw for a mattress, wadded a bandanna for a pillow, pulled a yellowed rotogravure page to his chin for a sheet. Who needed Texas? Let Texas roll by.

And slept without remorse.

Only once, clasping his stomach as the car rocked and rolled him between nightmares and dreams, he whimpered a little.

When he wakened the cars were clanking an iron alarm and daybreak was shagging the shirtless and shiftless, the lame, the lost and the shoeless from under the brake beams and down the spines. Fleeing reefers, clambering couplings, climbing raggedly down off the ladders; walking wounded and battle-stragglers limped, leaned and hobbled to the closest aid-station.

‘Lots of fine folks out seein’ the country,’ Dove tried to get in step, ‘Didn’t reckon there’d be so many so early in the year.’ And stayed out of step for a quarter of a mile, to some half-sunken barns that might have stabled the federal cavalry that had once pursued Pancho Villa.

As a matter of fact, that was exactly what they had. Though the horses were gone with Villa now – mavericks and herd-bound hides alike. Hoof prints long sunk and riders unsaddled – captains and privates all alike. In rooms where the lighting was still by gas some lay drunk and others lay dying, and all were long since unsaddled. Dead or dying, drunk or derailed, Captains or privates, all alike.

The whole wide land looked disheveled as a bed in a cheap hotel.

‘Folks looken a bit peakedy,’ Dove observed, feeling slightly on the peakedy side himself. A lettered warning stopped him the way a stranger’s lips, moving silently, stop a deaf mute.

‘What do the sign sayz, mister?’ he tapped a fedora no higher than his shoulder, rambling along atop a faded plaid lumberjack.

‘It sayz here this is a city shelter,’ a foxlike bark came out of a face like that of a terrier bitch – a face neither feminine nor male, but the voice was a girl’s – ‘it sayz to scoff up here all you want ’n thank the citizens of San Anton’ for it in your prayers—’ she paused to let others give thanks – ‘but stay out of town or them same citizens will slap you right into the crummiest slammer in Texas.’

‘It sayz all that, sis?’

‘It also sayz Laughable Fools with Dirty Feet Keep Off All Trains Not In Motion, Laughable Fool. It says your best bet is to do what you see the smart people do. So crawl your weak-minded ass after mine and do what I do. Don’t do nothing you don’t see me do first. And don’t call me sis. Call me brother.’

‘You reckon yourself one of the smart folks ’n me just a big ignoramus?’ Dove considered the preposterous notion.

Brother raised a cautioning finger. ‘I got a jacket. You got no jacket. I got a shirt. You got no shirt. I got shoes. You got no shoes but we’re both up against a knife and fork. I ate last night and I ate this morning and you haven’t eaten since God knows when. Now who’s the smartest, me or you?’

The raggedy line shuffled one raggedy inch.

‘You’re so smart it’s a pure pity,’ Dove decided – ‘Just tell me this much – they got liverpuddin’ in that kitchen ahead or not?’

‘They not only got liverpuddin’ friend. They got candied yams, Virginia ham ’n possum pie.’

‘Yankee vittles is a mite rich for my blood,’ Dove was forced to decline. Brother glanced up to see who was being kidded now.

But Dove’s jaw hung so long, so mournfully from cheeks so cavernous, the hair bothering his eyes had been so long uncut and the eyes themselves so darkly shadowed, it was hard to believe anyone could kid in that condition.

‘You should of stayed in the hospital till they cut your hair,’ she advised him.

‘I bet if you taken off that hat you could stand a trim your own self.’ Dove answered. He felt a friendly hand on his shoulder.

‘Ah’ll bet y’all from the Big Bend Country, haint yo’?’ Dove tossed the hair back out of his eyes to see if it were someone he knew, forgetting for the moment that he didn’t know anybody. A Marine sergeant was studying him smilingly.

‘Me? No sir,’ Dove corrected him with pride, ‘I’m from Rio Grande country.’

‘Taylor ’n Halsted, pleased to meet you both,’ the terrier introduced herself so assertively that the uniform had to talk over the fedora in order to recruit Dove.

‘How’d you like three square meals a day, Red? A chance to see the tropics, chase Sandino, defend your country, get two pairs of shoes and a pension shortly after?’ He gave Dove a wink so broad that Dove winked back just as broadly – ‘and how those South American girls go for that uniform.’

‘It sounds like a right good position, mister’ – Dove decided. ‘I especially like that part about defendin’ my country. But first I got to git me a small bait of vittles.’

‘I think you’ll make a fine soldier, son,’ the sergeant was confident – ‘You got no physical deefect have you?’

‘Take another look at that squint, Colonel,’ the disguised girl recommended.

‘A squint aint no deefect,’ the sergeant explained authoritatively, ‘—it’s more what we term a “impedimunt.” We’ll get Red specs to correct his. Spanish women like soldiers with glasses.’

‘Look at them choppers.’

Without being asked, Dove opened his mouth and the sergeant put a big dirty thumb flat down on his tongue.

‘In six months the clown won’t have a tooth in his head,’ the girl seemed certain. ‘Jungle-rot will get him.’

‘Well, we don’t want him to bite Sandino,’ the sergeant already excused Dove from one detail.

‘I have one loose awready anyhow,’ Dove managed to tell simply by removing the thumb temporarily, between two of his own fingers – ‘it waggles’ – and replaced the thumb hoping the sergeant would waggle it a bit for him.

‘Let the army dentist do that.’ The sergeant took his fist out of Dove’s face. ‘You’re going to make one hell of a Marine. Wouldn’t be surprised if you caught Sandino yourself. You can close your mouth now.’

He took out a small notebook and a pencil. ‘Tell me, you got any other deefects, son?’

Dove reddened. That was when you couldn’t read or write. ‘I reckon that in time that might be corrected too,’ he answered evasively because of those standing about.

‘Nothing serious, is it?’ He gave Dove a nudge – ‘Nothin’ you picked up from town girls?’

The sarge had girls on his mind alright.

‘The second spell he took after supper last night he foamed a bit – Would that be anything serious?’ Dove’s friend asked blandly.

‘He takes fits?’ The Marine grew anxious. He didn’t want to lose a rookie but he didn’t want to hook a lemon.

‘I never throwed a fit in my whole derned life,’ Dove defended himself stoutly. ‘Pay no heed whatsoever to my brother here, captain – jest jealous cause I out-growed him. I aint even inclined toward spells.’

‘Good lad,’ the sergeant congratulated him, ‘Tex, you’re a real stand-up kid. Tell me this – routine question – nothing personal – if an enemy capable of rape had you trapped with your sister and mother and one of you had to be left behind, which one of you would you choose it to be?’

‘How about them señoritas?’ Brother gave Dove a nudge that almost knocked him down.

‘Will you stay out of this?’ the sergeant turned on the girl.

‘I got neither mother nor sister, captain,’ Dove found the safest answer.

‘Suppose you had.’

‘Sister would have to go,’ he heard a terrier-whisper.

‘Sister would have to go,’ Dove repeated hopefully.

‘I told you stay out of this,’ the sergeant menaced the fedora and turned back to Dove – ‘Put it this way. Your outfit of one hundred men is surrounded by bloodthirsty Nicaraguan bandits but you can save them all by sacrificing your own life. Which would come first with you? The lives of the ninety-nine others or your own?’

Dove needed no help on that.

‘My own, naturally.’ He beamed.

Dove was a little sorry to see the sergeant shake his head and move off.

‘Wasn’t that the right answer?’ Dove wanted to know.

‘It was the right answer alright,’ she reassured him. ‘How do you feel, Red?’

‘Fairly fainty,’ Dove confessed. The odor of hot soup was swinging his stomach like a bell.

‘Now what did I tell you just before, Red?’

‘I ferget, friend.’

‘I told you don’t do nothin’ you don’t see me doing. Did you see me asking Uncle Whiskers for a new suit? Did you see me showing him my choppers? Did you see me standing still to get measured for a rifle?’

‘Nobody asked you,’ Dove recalled.

‘You could still call him back – and spend the rest of your life doin’ close-order drill down in the banana country instead of riding passenger trains and sleeping in the shade. I won’t stop you.’

Somebody handed Dove something steaming in a bowl just then and all notion of soldiering fled upward with the steam.

When he had finished the bowl he looked up to see his friend’s hardly touched. The girl pushed it to him.

‘Thanks, sis.’ She gave him a look. ‘I mean brother,’ he corrected himself.

‘You’ll thank me for keeping you out of barracks one day too.’

A haunted-looking cracker in a grease-stained apron put a tab of paper between them already so thumb-smirched Dove thought he wanted their prints.

‘Give me a couple phonies, boys,’ he advised them.

‘We didn’t have it in mind to give you good ones,’ the girl told him.

‘We got to keep track of how many feeds we put out,’ the hant apologized. ‘Citizens got a right to know how their money is being spent.’

‘My ignorant brother here went back three times for seconds – What will the citizens say about that?’

‘Directly y’all finish eatin’,’ the cracker invited them both, ‘you might step outside and lend me a hand with a spot of kindling – takes kindlin’ to cook y’all cawnbread y’know.’

‘He has it in mind for us to chop down a tree,’ she explained to Dove.

‘A mighty mannerable feller, and I don’t mind work,’ Dove added, anxious lest he miss a chance to do some.

‘I don’t mind a spot of light labor myself,’ she admitted.

A circle of half a dozen vagrants sitting cross-legged about a sack of charity beans looked like a spot sufficiently light. With a pan and a bucket between them, Dove and the little ’bo trickled beans through their fingers. Bugs, stones, old crockery, weeds and beer-corks were for the bucket and beans were for the pan. Since it was their own supper they were preparing, they trickled with some care. Dove found a chipped agate and pocketed it like a blue treasure.

‘Everybody got to eat. Everybody got to die,’ a white-haired Greek sitting cross-legged told them like it was big news.

A wisp of a creature beside Dove squeaked happily right in his ear – ‘I’m the littlest guy here,’ n the oldest. Wouldn’t be surprised if I was the smartest too. I know I’m the sassiest.’

Dove’s eyes followed his friend’s hands. Such a careful way with the smallest pebble, yet so much quicker than his own.

‘I once growed the biggest crop of these yet seen in Northern Michigan,’ a florid-faced fellow in a frayed sheepskin boasted. ‘Fact is, it was the biggest crop in that part of the state that year if not in the entire state. Done it without help, too. Cooked my own meals. Done my own laundry. Put up my own preserves. Didn’t have no wife. Didn’t need none. Didn’t have a hired hand. Didn’t want one. Biggest cooperative farm in the state, likely biggest in the country, right next door to mine. Fifty able-bodied men workin’ night ’n day with tractors ’n every farm instrument known to modern man. Four professors to study their soil. All I had was a old-fashioned plow my grandpappy made out of a pine tree he felled hisself, and iron he’d worked out of ore he dug hisself. I turned out a crop near to double of theirs – a mite better than double, truth to tell. Didn’t have a hired hand neither. Didn’t need none. Didn’t have a wife. Didn’t want none.’

‘I reckon the sun didn’t hinder none,’ Dove observed.

As soon as one sack was finished, the hant dumped a sack of black-eyed peas, and for some reason this lightened everyone’s spirits, almost as though he had brought in a sack of cherries and told them to eat all they wanted.

Once he came in with a basket of tomatoes and offered them around. Everyone took one or two except Dove. ‘I wouldn’t eat love apples,’ he warned his friend, ‘it’s a poison fruit.’

The careful afternoon trickled through their fingers with less and less care. The big room darkened and dampened, walking wounded came and went. Dove’s thick thigh pressed his friend’s slender one and he felt the pressure lightly returned. Their fingers touched one moment in the sack.

‘You think these times are hard?’ the Michigan farmer was asking. ‘Why compared to times I’ve seen, these are absolutely flush. If you just look at it right, we’re right spang in the middle of the biggest boom this country ever seen. Look at us settin’ here stuffin’ ourselves to bustin’ on cornbread ’n beans!’

‘That’s right,’ Dove agreed, ‘we eat so much it keeps us skinny just carryin’ it around.’

‘Why,’ the farmer went on, ‘when I was a boy in Northern Michigan we didn’t know there was anything else to eat on earth but skim milk ’n wild onions. Drunk branch water ’n et sheep sorrel ’n counted ourselves more fortunate than most. Mother run a highly successful boarding house on them two victuals in fact – biggest boarding house that part of the state. Never seed a toilet till I was seventeen year old. I’d heard of backhouses but never seed one. Never seen a well pump. Full grown man afore I tasted ice cream.’

‘My own folks lived mostly on pawpaws,’ Dove agreed. ‘It were mighty hard sleddin’ when the pawpaws didn’t hit and the wind died down.’

‘I’ll never forget the winter of 1917,’ the farmer went right on. ‘The snow was deeper than the world. Wolves killed my goats, hawks got the chickens, night-riders burned my barn an’ mother run off with a preacher. Made me of half a mind to quit farming and go to work.’

The encircling faces looked like so many tin plates on a shelf. They gave off a faint odor, as of disinfectant with smoke in it. The locked-in and the locked-out lived between the smoke of small wood fires and the odor of jail house disinfectant in 1931.

‘I’m the oldest ’n the littlest,’ the happy mouse introduced himself eagerly to each newcomer. ‘I’m the sassiest too. Wouldn’t be surprised if I were the randiest. How come I be first in everything?’

‘You’re last in pickin’ beans,’ Dove told him.

‘But I was the first to vote for Hoover,’ the old man snapped more now like a youthful rat than an ageing mouse – ‘’n the first to admit I was wrong.’

‘Hoover is a great man,’ the Michigan farmer was certain – ‘but he’s too far ahead of his time. The whole Republican Party is ahead of its time.’

‘I lived through Hoover myself,’ somebody agreed. ‘It give me real strength. Now I can live through anything.’

The kitchen-hant came blowing a whistle. All hands quit on the second’s split. Dove stepped over the sack gingerly.

By the time he got to the mess hall the hant had put on a greasy beany just to direct traffic. Mexicans to the right, Negroes to the left. But Dove he directed straight ahead, to where the white Americans ate at the longest board of all.

‘Pappy wouldn’t approve this kind of carrying-on,’ Dove realized, ‘mixin’ Cath’lics ’n Protestants this way.’

‘Where’s the Reb table?’ his friend came asking.

‘Take the elevator, Yankee,’ the hant instructed her.

Dove got a slab of cornbread in molasses and a stack of beans piled so neatly they appeared to have been counted one by one. When he considered how many he had picked he felt that, percentage-wise, he was getting a bad count.

‘Everyone always gets more than me,’ he complained, and the girl pushed her plate before him again.

‘Why you so good to me?’ Dove asked.

‘Because I want you to be good to me,’ she told him so frankly that he felt he must be doing her a favor and cleaned up every crumb.

‘Everybody got to eat,’ somebody lamented, ‘everybody got to die.’

Dove had hardly finished his third helping when they heard the Man to Houston whistle. ‘Let’s scram out of here before that fool makes us chop down that tree,’ the girl urged him – ‘Put that stuff in your pocket, Red.’

Dove shoved the cornbread into his jeans and they ran for it.

Most of the cars were empties and came clattering past too fast to chance. They waited, flat on their stomachs on the under embankment until the ore cars, whose ladders hung lower, began sliding by.

Dove counted them coming. ‘It’s plumb mass-dark and they’re travelin’ fast,’ he warned her.

‘It’s the last one to Houston before tomorrow night,’ she answered. ‘You comin’?’

Straddling the car, Dove saw its sides were merely chutes slanting straight to the rails. She piled past him and over with a victor’s cry and he caught her wrist as she felt no floor. She pulled him powerfully over but his free hand caught the iron edge and held.

Just held. Then froze like floorless death itself on the iron.

He could not pull her up. He could not let her go. Her double-grip on his wrist, pulling the ribs out of his side, informed him if she were going he was coming with her. The wheels glinted green lightning in the black, he heard pebbles clicking against her shoes in the roar. His right hand no longer held the iron: the iron held the hand.

Her little stricken face, lighted briefly, tried to tell him some last something. Dove caught her overall strap in his big buck teeth and hauled, neck backstraining till she got her fingers onto the side and drew herself onto the edge. He steadied her though his arm trembled to the shoulder.

She was caked with coal-dust, fright had hollowed her eyes. When the train slowed to go into a hole for a passenger train he helped her down. ‘It sayz keep off all trains not in motion,’ he reminded her. Her trembling turned weakly to laughter then.

They rested their backs on the lee side of a heap of coke. There she let her laughter turn to sobbing.

‘What’s the matter, friend?’

‘Run,’ the girl told him, struggling to her feet. Dove put an arm around her shoulders.

‘Where you think you’re going?’ He pulled her back down.

‘Run.’

‘Mebbe you better just cry,’ he suggested.

She found that so easy that she kept it up too long, like a child.

‘What you chokin’ yourself up for?’ Dove finally asked.

‘Lost my jacket,’ she remembered.

‘If you’d been wearin’ the jacket—’

‘I know’ – she assured him that she knew where she’d be if she’d been wearing something he could not have gripped.

Her breath began drawing slower, soot and sleep sealed her eyes.

Her face in sleep looked furtive yet innocent, like one already punished for a crime she hasn’t grown up to commit. When she was old enough to commit it she’d find it.

Her hand on his own pressed his in sleep. He let his hand fall between her knees then moved it up till it cupped her and rested there.

She stirred and he took it away.

‘Keep it right there,’ she told him, ‘I owe you that much.’

Lanterns and flashlights passed and repassed down the rails, building shadows on the box car doors. Railroad crews didn’t care how many climbed aboard once the engineer had given his warning toot; but it made them look bad to have the strays lounging the cars like tourists when a train wasn’t moving.

‘The name is Kitty Twist,’ the girl told Dove, ‘—not my real handle of course. It’s just what they took to callin’ me in The Home. I’m seventeen almost eighteen ’n I’ve run from five homes. I’ll keep on runnin’ till I’m eighteen. Then I’ll marry a good pickpocket and settle down.’

‘I better look this man over,’ Dove told her uneasily, and wandered down the track, inspecting the cars from grab-iron to stirrup-ladder. When he was satisfied he whistled for her, helped her into the car he had picked, and shut the door. One beam shone, dancing slenderly whenever the long car trembled after shunting.

‘Red,’ she told him in the dark when the car began at last to roll, ‘put your hands under me before these boards pinch my little hump clean off.’

With both hands cushioning her pine-knot bottom, Kitty Twist wriggled comfortably until she grew warm. She didn’t mind that Dove’s own narrow behind was freezing.

‘I love you, baby,’ he told her because having saved her life he supposed he ought to. ‘I’ll buy you play-pretties and posey flowers. I’ll learn me a trade ’n take care of you.’

He felt her cold little lips and her small cold mouth, her little cold hands that felt so greedy.

‘Daddy, you’ll never have to work,’ Kitty Twist told Dove. ‘I’ll work hard ’n give you all my money.’

He couldn’t see her smiling too knowingly in the dark.

‘The poorer people are the more likely they are to help you,’ Kitty told him the next morning after they had once again left engine and cars in charge of the crew. ‘Pick the first unpainted shack you see.’

She followed Dove into a littered yard and waited while he rapped the door of a knocked-together-by-hand house the color of soot. A soot-colored wife came to answer.

‘My brother took hisself a small fall, M’am,’ Dove pleaded, ‘Would you allow him to worsh up at yer pump?’

‘Whut he sayin’?’ the woman looked to Kitty for help.

‘He wants to know can I wash up in your house.’

‘Come in, child,’ the woman invited Kitty, holding wide the door.

Dove waited in the yard humming softly—

Until Kitty came out scrubbed and shining, a band-aid on her cheek and a half a bar of Ivory soap in her hand.

‘Oldfolks wasn’t fooled for a minute,’ Kitty reported. ‘Called me “Sis”’n set me down in the tub ’n scrubbed my back ’n made me wash between my toes – Look’ – she revealed white anklets – ‘And would you believe it? She sung to me the whole time.’

‘What she sing?’

‘Don’t Bite The Hand That’s Feeding You.’

‘They aint like you and me,’ Dove explained, ‘they’re simple people. But I could stand a worsh-off myself.’

‘You’ll get one uptown,’ Kitty promised – ‘Look – I throw like a damned man,’ and she hurled the Ivory clear across the tracks.

‘Mighty fine whip for a girl,’ Dove had to concede.

‘For a girl hell. Walter Johnson never throwed better. I’m a big-league kid from a big-league town.’

‘I never did see a real big town,’ Dove admitted, ‘full of store-bought marvels. They got them in Houston?’

‘They got ’em, but you’ll have to go shopping yourself. I go down the main stem and I’m on my way back to The Home by morning. I got a W on me, Jack.’

‘I’ll see law-folks don’t snatch you, Kitty,’ Dove promised.

‘I’ll see you get shoes and a shirt too, Red,’ she returned the favor – ‘I’ll dress you up in the finest.’

‘I’ll get you a red silk dress with a tasselly-sash ’n goldy year-rangs too.’

‘Red, what I’m trying to say is I’ll hustle for you if want me to.’

‘I’ll hustle for you too,’ he promised.

‘My God,’ the girl thought, ‘he thinks I mean I’m going to be a shoe-clerk for him. I’m going to have to straighten him out till there’s nothing left but kinks.’

Although Kitty Twist had never hustled, she knew the trade from older hands with whom she’d been institutionalized, and had run off upon the prospect of going into business for herself.

Down a side-street a sign invited them – PRISONERS’ VOLUNTEER AID SOCIETY.

‘The usual fee here is two bits,’ the ex-con at the desk confided, ‘but if you boys are short I’ll accommodate you both for that. Got two bits between you?’

‘What’s the accommodation?’ Kitty was curious.

‘One meal, one flop, one shower apiece.’

The ex-con pocketed her quarter and they followed him into the kitchen. He put two bowls of withered cole slaw before them and two cups of cold chicory coffee.

‘That’s the meal,’ he explained. ‘You still got a shower and a flop comin’.’

‘Go get your wash-off right away, Red,’ Kitty urged him as soon as she’d tasted the coffee – ‘They’re running out of well-water hereabouts.’

An old man stood under the stream letting the water trickle in and out of his navel while keeping a worried eye on a lean and vulturous creature crouched above his clothes. The vulture had just finished examining the old man’s rags and was cupping his palms to the light; then kicked the bundle off to one side without taking his eyes off his palms. He had caught something all right.

‘Extryordinary!’ the old man seemed to know what it was. ‘Extryordinary!’

The louse-runner ground his palms together under the water.

‘Them that don’t git crushed gits drowned,’ he announced with barbarous glee.

Then hovered over Dove as Dove undressed in turn.

The shower was cold but there was strong brown soap. The touch of it burned the bruise on his lip, but he scrubbed himself till his fingers went numb. The water kept getting colder and colder.

The louse-runner returned Dove’s clothes with a disappointed air. Dove asked him for a cap, and after some rummaging was presented with a battered and sunburned floater of straw. It would keep the coal out of his hair and the sun out of his eyes. He lacked the courage to ask for shoes.

Then down some wide and quiet street the pair trudged past windows curtained and shaded. Although it was only midafternoon everyone seemed asleep. They came to a playground where no children played.

‘School’s out!’ Dove decided in a shout, and made for the nearest swing. Standing spreadlegged, he got it pumping high. Kitty’s little sexless face looked up at him from below. Every time he swung past her she said, ‘We don’t have time for fooling, Red.’

He came down off the swing in a shambling run. She watched to see what was next.

The rings: around and around, toes scraping the ground, his hair in his eyes and his mouth in a shout, ‘Look at me! Look at me!’

‘I never seen anything like it.’ She decided to watch a while.

‘How’s this?’

Dove had looped his knees into the rings and was hanging head down, hat gone and hair brushing cinders and sand.

‘Just let me know when you’ve had enough, Red. I got all day.’

But his childhood had just begun and he hadn’t had nearly enough.

‘Catch me when I come down!’ he warned her from the top of a chute. And she, the wingless jay of alley and areaway, had to stand at the foot of the chute as he came down head first to prevent him from breaking his neck. He grabbed her hand and hauled her to the teeter-tawter.

‘Break your back or bust your ass,’ Kitty Twist had had enough – ‘I’m New Orleans bound myself.’

Dove sat on the useless teeter-tawter, a see-saw boy with no one to see-saw. And watched his only friend go out the playground gate. The teatless little fly-by-night outcast wandering the wild earth just to get even with everything upon it.

‘She acts like she done me a favor letting me save her life,’ Dove thought, ‘let her go.’

He pumped himself high again on the swing. He took a flyer, even faster than before, on the rings. Then climbed the highest chute in the yard. When he reached the top he was breathing hard and had strangely lost heart for sliding. He slid down at last only as a way of getting back to the ground. Stumbling with loneliness, he hurried after anyone who could keep him from being alone again. Leaving his boyhood at the top of the chute and his true manhood still unreached.

Kitty was nowhere in sight. Nobody at all down the sunstricken street. Dove wanted to run back home.

‘Here’s your hat.’ She stepped out of the shadows so softly that he knew she had been watching him.

‘I’m not yet sure you’re real, Red,’ she told him as though to explain his suspicion.

‘If I don’t ask you to prove something like that yourself,’ he told her thoughtfully, ‘then you wont have to have ask proof of me.’

‘I’ll watch it after this,’ she told him, always wary. But he was lost, she saw, in wonder of the houses lining either side of this avenue where private footpaths led to every door.

‘How many folks you figure live in jest that one place?’ he asked, pointing at one.

‘None at all,’ she informed him, ‘the sign says FOR SALE.’

After that Dove noticed many such signs on houses whose paint was beginning to crack. Weeds grew in the paths guarded by oaks that had guarded Indian trails.

In a small suburban park they came to a line of sleepy stores, in several of which no business was done any more. Kitty took him for a leisurely arm-in-arm stroll down one side of the little half-dead town and up the other.

‘You got kin-folks around here?’ Dove asked because of the way she lingered.

‘Neither chick nor child,’ she assured him, bringing him up in front of a window where sawdust lay scattered. As they watched, a musty-looking rabbit hippety-hopped from a corner, got halfway across the window and turned back to its home-corner. Kitty left Dove to conduct inspection of the areaway behind the shop and returned briefly.

‘We’ll look in here after dark,’ she reported back, ‘I’ll need a little boost. Don’t worry – I’m the best damn stinker for my size and age in the business.’

‘I can’t help you in that business, sis,’ Dove informed her, ‘account I prefer a daytime trade. Like on one of them big white boats I seen a picture of in N’wawlins.’

‘In where?’

‘A book. Picture-book.’

‘I mean where was the place you just said?’

‘N’wawlins.’

Kitty thought everything over. Even then she didn’t sound too sure. ‘You wouldn’t by chance be talking about New Orleans, would you?’

‘It’s what I said. N’wawlins.’

‘I see. And when you get there you’ll walk into the steward’s office without a shirt, barefoot, needing a haircut ’n ask him if he needs a captain?’

‘I weren’t intended to be no captain,’ Dove told her. ‘I weren’t meant to be more than a private. But I don’t figure to try even for private without I first look genteel.’

‘What size shoes you wear, Red?’

‘Haint wearin’ none. Walkin’ barefooty.’

She studied the feet he kept throwing from one side of the walk to the other.

‘Thirteen and a half,’ she judged.

‘That’s pretty close,’ Dove agreed.

‘Close to what?’

‘Close to fourteen.’

‘You can stop putting on the weakminded act for me any time now,’ Kitty Twist advised him. ‘I’m on.’

Down in Houston’s Mexican slum there stood, that June of ’31, a three-story firetrap with a name:

That’s all: Hotel Hotel.

‘Never did try sleepin’ in a skyscraper afore,’ Dove looked up – ‘Whut do it costes here?’

‘Thirty-five cents apiece,’ Kitty informed him, ‘and some places go yet higher.’

‘In that case,’ Dove decided, ‘we’ll have to find an inexpensive place.’

‘We get breakfast throwed in here though.’

‘What gits throwed?’

‘Mission donuts ’n coffee black.’

‘Then we’re too far north.’

Kitty tried to let it go but the temptation was too strong.

‘How do you figure that, Red?’

‘When folks stop puttin’ out liverpuddin’ for breakfast, everyone’s too far north.’

‘And I’m not in the least surprised,’ Kitty agreed. And supporting herself on his arm she slipped her sneaker off a moment, slipped it back on and released his arm.

‘Well what do you know? Just look here what I found in my shoe, Red.’

A five dollar bill lay folded in her palm.

‘That’s purely luck, sis. How it git there?’

She gave him a knowing nudge. ‘Didn’t I tell you colored folks are the friendliest? Why does everyone think that their kitchen matchbox is the First National?’

‘I never would of pecked that door if I’d knowed that that was what you were up to,’ Dove told her.

‘That’s why I didn’t tell you.’

‘It aint right to steal off folks while they’re doin’ you a kindness, Kitty. Do unto others as you would be done by.’

‘I’ll try to remember that too—’ she swung him about. ‘Why, Red, do you know what a pair of three-dollar shoes and a two-dollar shirt would do for you? People would be calling you Preacher, that’s what.’ She took his arm and hurried him into the lobby. ‘And you wouldn’t be the first country boy to turn into a town pimp neither,’ she added to herself.

‘My pappy was a preacher of sorts,’ he told her. ‘The sort to make you throw your Bible away.’

He stood on one side while she conferred with the desk clerk, and eyed himself sidelong in the long lobby mirror. She was right at that: if anything could improve him it was clothes.

‘The only bedtime story my old lady ever told me began and ended with “You leave me cold,”’ Kitty Twist recalled. ‘That’s what she’d say when she’d sober up. When they took me away from her and put me in Juvenile I was a real little terror there. I was mad ’cause I hadn’t stole things like the other kids. I wetted the bed and a matron snitched so I had to sleep in the Skunk Room. That’s the dorm with rubber mattresses for bed-wetters. I was eight. They were afraid by the time I was ten I’d flood them out.

‘That was when Mama went on the wagon to show them she meant it when she said she wanted me back. Got a crowd of ex-alkies to back her so I had to go. “All for my baby” was how she’d put it.

‘“If that’s the case you can step down any time,” I finally told her, “Because now you leave me cold.” Mama couldn’t stand a tie – in her book somebody had to win and somebody had to lose. When she fell off the wagon you could heard the crash for miles.

‘But if I was going to do another stretch I was going to do it for something I done, not on somebody else’s account. They caught me crossing some bridge. If I’d made that bridge I would of been alright. I would of been out of Illinois.

‘By the time I was fourteen I was back with kids a full head shorter than me. I wetted the bed the first night. Imagine – fourteen years old and right back where I’d been at eight! I realized then I wasn’t getting ahead.’

She pulled up the sleeve of her right arm. It was tattooed from shoulder to wrist.

‘Got ’em on my legs too. Done ’em myself with plain needles ’n plain ink. I had thirty-two days wrestling with the bear so I worked on myself to keep from getting even crazier. I wanted to do something they could never undo. That nobody could undo. Now I’d give anything to be rid of the damn things. But at least it showed the others I wasn’t no rat.

‘Did you ever see four big men hold a girl down on a table while the fifth does the whipping? It was how they done me with a leather belt four feet long. It had a silver buckle I can’t forget yet. And how they did drag it out! I could count up to ten between wallops. One hundred licks – I took the most they were allowed to give. And didn’t cry Tear One. That showed I wasn’t a crybaby.

‘Why’d they do it? I flooded the toilet with cotton, that’s why. Why’d I do that? Search me. I’m always doing things I don’t know why. Maybe I just wanted to be a character. You know how you get to be a character? You sit in your room like the living dead, that’s how. They take everything away. There’s nothing to read – not even a candy wrapper. You can’t write letters neither. You get half a cup of dry cereal for breakfeast, two slices of stale bread and a piece of bologna for lunch and half a cup of sloppy stew for supper. That’s how you get to be a character.

‘I found a friend. A skunkie just like me. A little deaf-and-dumb Spade chick, used to lay there on the floor shagging and counting on her fingers. I stuck around, even when I had a chance to run, on her account. She was my friend. When they put her in some sort of hospital I had no reason for sticking any longer. Next time I came to that bridge I took the trolley. How long you been on the run, Red?’

‘Things did get a mite hot around home,’ Dove acknowledged, ‘so I just tuck with the leavin’s.’

She misunderstood. ‘Stealing is kicks alright. I like to get in there and do the job myself. There’s something about going through an empty joint when it’s dark and empty and you can take what you please that’s got kicks like crazy. It’s so much fun you want to do it all the time. You know what the best kick of all is, Red? It’s when you put a gun on grownups and watch them go all to pieces and blubber right before your eyes. That’s the best. How long you say you been on the run?’

Dove didn’t answer but he was on the run all the same. Making good time down Dream Boulevard. She watched him curiously. In sleep his mouth looked as if he’d just been insulted. She couldn’t know that he was standing on the courthouse steps in Fitz’s split-tail coat, leading the singing—

while a figure with a shaded face, astride a howitzer, kept swaying in solemn delight.

a prison where it cost ten cents to go in and see a corpse from which the spirit had actually fled. Kitty Twist, wearing black elbow gloves, was selling tickets just the other side of the wall. They had grown rich and famous traveling from town to town but she giggled too much and he woke to her giggling. For she had locked him to her in a vise and it was a moment too late to get loose.

‘I’m just so ashamed,’ she told him later. ‘What ever got into you to make me do such a thing?’ In her eyes stood the same glass tears.

‘I must of just got carried away,’ Dove decided.

‘Promise you’ll never pull a sneaky trick like that on me again?’

‘I promise.’

‘Then I forgive you.’

‘You’re good to me. Real good. Just one thing I don’t understand.’

‘What’s that, Red?’

‘What’s wrestling with the bear?’

‘Solitary.’

And exhausted by forgiveness and good works, they slept the late light down.

‘Let’s hear your whistle, Red.’

Dove made a kind of feeble piping. Kitty waited.

‘That was it,’ he had to admit.

She put two fingers to her lips and sirened a low-pitched shriek. ‘When I put on the steam you can hear it two blocks – it means drop everything, it’s the nab.’

He stood, shifting from one foot to the other in the unlit areaway.

‘What’s the matter, Red? Afraid?’

‘Afraid of steppin’ on glass is all.’

She triggered a dime-store flashlight – ‘Follow the spot.’ Dove followed.

‘We’re lookin’ for Cousin Jim,’ she explained.

‘Got no cousin of that name,’ he thought he saw a way out of this – ‘fact is I got no cousin. See you later.’ She hooked his belt and hauled him along to the rear door of a shop. She knocked so imperiously that his feet tried to turn right around. Her hand around his waist held him still. He hoped she couldn’t feel him trembling. She knocked again. But all was locked and barred.

‘Make me a step.’

He made a stirrup of his hands and raised her until she secured a grip on the open transom; then it was up and over.

She dropped so softly on the other side that, though Dove listened, he did not hear her land. Then the door swung silently, he felt the flash placed in his hand. How had she gotten behind him? ‘Straight ahead to the register,’ she took command – ‘I’m backin’ you.’ And gave him a forward shove that carried him through to the cash drawer of exactly the same model of Ohmer register he had banged for his brother. So he banged this one too and the whole side fell out. He stuck his hand in the side, grabbed a handful of something papery. Under his feet a house cat leaped from sleep. Dove went headlong, shattering the flash and on his knees felt wings brush his hair – the fool cat was halfway up a wall trying to get at something big as an owl. Clutching his bills in a flurry of feathers and fur he saw the thing flutter, wall to wall, for the open door. Its wings got through just above the cat and Dove stumbled crazily after both just as the whistle-shriek rang out.

By the alley entrance light a small figure struggled with one twice its size. ‘Folks are certainly active tonight,’ he marveled.

The entrance was his only way out. He walked slowly till he was almost upon the wrestling pair – then jumped for it, felt a big hand reach and miss him and bounded free to the open street.

Over a fence and down the dark, over another and down a wall, big feet going every which way till he fell in a grassy plot.

With no sound but that of one sleepy cricket to heed the pounding of his heart.

‘I’m not sure whether you’d call that runnin’,’ he congratulated himself breathlessly – ‘but if I’d had a feather in hand I could call it flyin’.’

His hand had fastened so hard onto the bills he had to rub his palms to get the circulation going again. Then he stuffed them into the pocket of his jeans. This was no time for counting, what he needed was a railroad track.

If Dove had one sure instinct it was, like the rabbit’s, for keeping out of sight till you reach the end of town. He turned this way and that, till a signal tower’s red and green stars led him at last to a railroad embankment.

‘Which way to the S.P., Mister?’ he called down to a lantern swinging in the dark.

The light swung up. ‘You’re walkin’ the S.P. now,’ the lantern assured him – ‘keep off all trains not in motion.’

Dove put his back up against a telephone pole and waggled his loose tooth a while, but it wouldn’t come loose all the way. And as he waggled it seemed to him the pole he was braced against was in the middle of the track. A headlight came bearing down at ninety an hour but no hurry, it had been coming on for days. He slept on.

The clackety-banging roar of boxcars a dozen yards away woke him at last. Far down the line a little red caboose joggled and swayed like a caboose on a toy railroad.

Dove put his hand on his bankroll to make sure it didn’t jump out, and clambered into a rocking gloom.

‘Anybody here?’

No word but a creaking floor.

‘Good deal, Linkhorn,’ he congratulated himself. ‘Got yourself a private car and by God you’ve earned one.’ He closed the door and turned on his side. Sometimes crooks rode these trains.

The day and the night that followed always remained a hazed kind of memory to Dove. All he recalled clearly was opening the door the next morning and seeing a veil of mist so blue it blurred the outlines of house, hill and tree. And as the morning warmed the whole big blue world began to smoke faintly.

Louisiana.

In the long afternoon the clouds stacked. And still, over it all, that pale shifting veil.

A real southland haze in which one sees whatever one wishes to see. A haze that seeps behind the eyes and makes a wish-dream of everything.

‘I figure I’ll learn me to play the gee-tar,’ he dreamed against the boxcar door, ‘I’ll just go around playin’ a gee-tar – that’s what brings the purty girls around.’

Louisiana.

He saw a taller Dove in shining pants, astride a stallion white as snow, playing a guitar with one hand and holding the stallion back with the other, singing and prancing into New Orleans.

Louisiana.

His fingers wandered over unseen strings

Dove reined in a bit to let the people see him better.

Wishes and hopes in a blue-smoke dream as the big car rolled and his head lolled lightly. Nothing but peace and pretty weather. Dove dreamed that whole blue-smoke day away till the milking-stars came out.

Later, while lying prostrate on the top of the car, and the train was taking water in the wilderness, he thought himself unseen while flashlights and lanterns inspected couplings and wheels. But just as the train pulled out, someone called up laughingly, ‘Keep stretched or get down inside, son.’

So he stayed prostrate smack into a roaring blackness with a tunnel-roof scraping his back. Coal fumes piled down on him. He got his bandanna over his mouth and nose and hooked one arm under the wooden spine. All that kept him from fainting was the hope that no tunnel can last forever.

This one nearly did. When air hit him again his senses were reeling. He spat coal dust half across that fool state.

Dove had a railroad bull to thank for his life, and other bulls less to thank for. They wouldn’t come into the cars by day, when they were crowded, but hurried discreetly past as if the cars were empty. But at night they’d get four or five ’boes off by themselves and really go to work on them.

One noon an armed nab stuck his nose in a boxcar door – ‘Come on out of there one by one!’

Nobody moved. Each knew that the first to go out would get bloodied, while those who followed might get by unscratched.

‘I said “Come out” by God!’

Nobody moved.

‘By God you don’t come out, we come in.’

Their silence dared him.

‘You know,’ he turned with feigned boredom to someone behind him, ‘I’m so tired of kickin’ asses I just think I’ll start crushing skulls.’

The second he said that somebody leaped to be the first – the deputies mobbed him while the others scattered free. Three bulls with gun butts to one unarmed stray was the common yardstick of the railroad bull’s courage. No man with the nerve to go after another with only a gun against bare fists could become a railroad bull: you had to have at least two other guns on your side to measure up to a vocation wherein ferocity betrayed innate cowardice.

Sometimes the bulls took everyone off a train, marched them downtown, fingerprinted and photographed the lot, then released them with the warning, ‘Now we got a record on you. If you try riding through here again you go to the pea-farm.’ Thus the homeless were blocked out of town after town, until almost any town you could name had issued fair warning to anyone what would happen to him if he tried it again.

Another afternoon Dove jungled up with four others beside a creek. Those who had used this patch of jungle before had left a sign asking those who came after to leave it as clean as they’d found it. Moreover, someone had left a pair of almost new shoes for Dove to find. They fitted as though made for him.

A couple of the boys got a mulligan going. Dove lay naked in the creek smoking a cigarette and smelling the mulligan. It was his first peaceful moment since leaving Arroyo.

He didn’t see the officers until he heard the shots. One put six holes into the mulligan pot – it steamed into the fire while the strays fled. Dove’s head peeked out of the water like a sitting duck’s. He came out dripping and sheepish.

The game then was to see how fast a bum could get dressed while getting smashed in the head with billys from both sides. He got one for his shirt, two for his pants, and would have gotten by with no more than that if he’d had the sense to run for it. But in the midst of blows he had to sit down and try to pull on his shoes – that got him so many that he ran without them at last.

When he hopped off the yards in Algiers across the river from New Orleans his head was still aching.

He got the topmost layer of blood and soot off his face at somebody’s pump. Offering a nickel to the tolltaker at the ferry, the man jerked his thumb in a come-ahead-son gesture – ‘The lady paid for you.’

Dove saw a middle-aged woman who had walked onto the ferry ahead of him. He walked up beside her, nickel still in hand.

‘I’ll pay my own way, thank you kindly all the same, m’am,’ he told her, and dropped the nickel in her palm. She turned beet-red but Dove felt better.

When the boat pulled into the pier and a deckhand hurled a coil of rope to fasten the boat to the dock, Dove rushed up and helped him tie it. But all he got for his trouble was an irritated, ‘I’ll handle this, son.’

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 deefect, 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.’

‘You know,’ the foreman put a brotherly hand on Dove’s shoulder – ‘I liked your face the moment you came in here. Would you take off your glasses so I can see more of it?’

Dove snapped off the sunglasses and snapped to attention.

‘I liked the way you entered, too,’ he assured Dove, ‘without bothering to knock.’

‘I judged you had time and to spare.’

‘And the intelligent way you stated your case.’

‘I reckon I measure up,’ Dove admitted modestly.

‘You measure up to something,’ the foreman thought, ‘but I’m not sure to just what.’

What the foreman was actually measuring was the stack through the window that went sixty feet up from dock level; and the shaky union scale that rose every foot after twenty-five. An eight-hour day at two-seventy per hour for ten days, the foreman made a mental estimate of what he could claim on the books.

‘I’ll pay you a buck-fifty an hour to paint that stack, Son.’

Dove came scurrying back up the gangplank like the flightless kiwi, a bird not built to fly. He heard the foreman holler from window to deck, ‘Put this man in the chair, boys!’ By the time he reached the deck the scrapers, brushes, paint and thinner were ready. Dove jumped right into the bosun’s chair and shouted, ‘Haul steady, maties!’ Then glanced down and found himself nearly twenty feet off the deck.

‘Okay, boys!’ he called down cheerfully, ‘I’ll start here ’n work up!’ But the chain kept going higher.

Who would ever have thought such a fine breeze would be stirring here while other fellows had to sweat out the heat below? He was about to take a second look but the chair began to swing like a cradle and he changed his mind.

Up and up. Above him leaned the rust-flaked stack, below the river tilted oddly. The hands of his watch seemed strangely bent, but seemed to say 10:55. Good – in five minutes he’d have his tools together so he could begin right on the hour. A full day’s pay for a full day’s work, that was the way to rise in the world.

‘Beginnin’, maties!’ he called over the side, ‘Beginnin’!’ That should show them he was no coward.

Something tugged at the chair and he understood the foreman had had a change of mind – he could come down any time now. Dove whipped the rope fast around the stack, and knotted it with the last of his strength. By God, the man had sent him up, he wasn’t going to get him down without a day’s pay in hand.

Once fastened, the chair steadied and so did Dove. Not enough to stand upright, but enough to get the lid off the paint can. Just as he got it off, the wind tilted the chair and the tinned oil spilled. He dabbed it off his jeans. ‘Lucky it didn’t get my shoes,’ he took the happier view.

No use taking a chance on ruining his shoes altogether with a wind that tricky sneaking around. He clamped the lid back on and glanced at his watch: 11:04. By God, just because a man couldn’t read didn’t mean he couldn’t count. That was a dime he’d made already today or he’d know the reason why.

That was when he looked right over the edge and down and saw the little circle of grinning faces looking up. He closed his eyes to keep from heaving. That would never do the first day on the job.

When his stomach had steadied he remembered something and found, in the bottom of a Bull Durham sack, just what he was looking for: a palm-full of light green potoguaya and a couple of brown papers. ‘Wasn’t told nothin’ about not smokin’ on the job,’ he argued sensibly. And at the first drag felt the chair rise an inch.

‘Let her rise,’ he thought, ‘the higher we go the higher the pay.’

Scraper, thinner, bucket and brush lay at his feet forgotten; as he had apparently been forgotten by those below. When he looked at his watch again it was almost two. My, how time did fly.

‘Lunch!’ he shouted over the side, ‘bring her up!’

But saw no one climbing the rigging one-handed, tray in the other, to ask whether he took sugar and cream in his coffee.

‘Bunch of hogs are at chow,’ he thought sullenly, ‘stuffin’ theirselves like a set of sows. Struck me right off as a sorry lookin’ crew.’

All through the treetop afternoon Dove dozed, and every time he woke, woke hungrier.

‘Chow!’ he tried for his dinner one more time. But all he got was a wave from a deck-hand far below.

‘I know your play,’ he finally informed the foreman aloud, ‘you’re tryin’ to starve me down. But you wont do it till I got a full day comin’, friend.’ And went right back on the nod.

It was almost five when he wakened again, feeling a chill breeze pass. He unlooped the draw-rope. ‘Good thing I didn’t have lunch,’ Dove thought going down, and hopped out onto the deck, pale and swaying. Two of the crew had to hold him up and every man but the foreman looked pleased with his work.

‘Not a damn dime, boy!’ the foreman let him know right off. ‘Mention money and I’ll heave you right over the side!’

Dove got his landlegs under him.

‘Mister, I went up in your fool chair like you asked me. We made a bargain.’

‘Now you listen here to me, son. I’m Chief-by-Jesus foreman of this everlastingly damned dry dock, I’ll have you under-goddamn-stand that. I’m not to be dic-hellfire-tated to by you or anyone. Is that the Christian-Killing-Moses clear or not? I can make it mother-murdering clearer if you want.’

‘A bargain, mister.’

‘Talk sense, boy.’

‘I’m a-talkin’ sense, mister,’ n you leave mothers out of this. I were aloft six hour, not chargin’ you for overtime because I realize I didn’t do too well my first day. But I tried six dollar worth.’

The foreman took Dove by the arm, led him to one side and whispered, ‘Take this and get off my God-by-Jesus deck.’ Dove looked down. It was a two dollar bill.

‘I got six comin’, mister.’

‘As high as I go.’ He had changed it for a fiver.

‘I’ll settle.’ Dove took it. The foreman went wearily to the rail, looking downriver and out to sea.

Down on the dock Dove took one last look up. The little man at the rail was grinning down. He waved the big brush at Dove. ‘Be work on time tomorrow, matey!’ he called. Dove waved back. Mighty mannerable fellow.

Yet felt a lingering sadness as he left the big river to know he wasn’t going to sea after all.

Later that day he discovered the door of the men’s room in the Southern Railway Station barred by a white-haired Negro porter. ‘Excuse me, pappy,’ Dove tried to get past.

‘Country boy, you got colored blood?’ Pappy demanded.

‘Naturally it aint white,’ Dove told him.

‘No funny business,’ the old Negro warned him, ‘I’m responsible here.’

Dove didn’t know what was wrong. He just felt wrong. And left the REST ROOM FOR COLORED in retreat.

He was bending above the water-fountain when he saw the porter coming at him again. The old man had been searching for someone like this in dreams for years.

‘You got colored blood, you caint drink this water.’

‘Aint everybody got colored blood, mister?’ By this time Dove really wanted to know.

‘You think you make a fool of me with fool questions,’ the old man answered, ‘but all you make a fool of is yourself. Boy, if you white, stay white. If you black, stay black and die. Now get out of my station and out of my sight.’

‘It purely wonders me,’ Dove brooded thoughtfully, ‘Why, a Christian don’t scarcely stand a chance for a drink of water in town no more. Looks like my crazy little pappy was right after all.’

His throat felt parched and he turned into the first doorway he saw with a Coca Cola sign over it. Coca Cola signs went all around this shady nook with nothing on its shelves but empty cokes. He rapped the counter with a dime.

A little brassiereless beauty, a real fence-corner peach all of nineteen appeared, opened a coke on a nail hooked to the counter, and let her shoulder strap slip to bare her left breast to its tinted nipple. Under the breast was tattooed the single word – Whiskey.

‘Aint this the By-Goddest weather you ever seen?’ Dove asked.

‘I’ve seen By-Godder,’ the fence-corner peach replied.

‘Now I reckon I got a nickel change comin’, m’am,’ Dove reckoned.

‘Reckon you awready got your change’ – and replaced the strap, looking bored.

‘You don’t feel maybe you made a slight errow, m’am?’

‘Right sure.’

‘How much fer a stror?’

‘Help yourself, country boy.’

‘Now there’s another funny thing,’ Dove marveled, taking four straws in an effort to get even, ‘you’re the second person in the past hour noted that. However do folks tell?’

The peach merely looked blank. When the straws would draw no more he bent each carefully and put down another dime.

This time she wiped the bottle with a counter cloth and slipped in a single straw. He took it from her with his eyes glued to that left strap.

It didn’t slip an inch.

But she rang up his dime and slammed the register so fast, just as the right strap fell away, that he thought she had punched the machine with the nipple. Now she merely leaned on the machine, resting the breast on the NO SALE sign.

Underneath this one was tattooed – Beer. Dove studied the word solemnly. ‘Do you mind if I spend an opinion, Miss? Somethin’ a bit personal?’ he asked at last.

‘Nothing you could tell me could possibly be personal.’

‘Why it strikes me you got a mite too much whitenin’ on,’ he told her all the same, ‘it make you look plumb puny.’

The blankness of her regard surpassed itself. She didn’t so much as blink. Just tipped the bottle’s last drop out, put the bottle away and replaced her strap.

‘M’am, I can’t help thinking there’s something dead up the tree.’

She raised one pencilled brow in the mildest of inquiries.

‘Yes?’

‘Last night I bought a sody the other side of the station ’n it were only five cents.’

‘That’s the other side of the station. They got a price war there.’

‘Hope nobody got kilt,’ he hoped and put down a third dime.

This time she opened the bottle, wiped it off, inserted the straw, rang up the dime, shut the register and stepped back all in a single motion. Yet the strap failed to fall. Dove drank slower.

Nothing.

‘How many sodies you sell in a single day m’am?’

‘’Bout as many as there are crows at a hog-killin’,’ she made a close guess.

‘Why, that’s a good few,’ Dove decided.

‘What did you come in here for, mister?’

‘Got barred from the water-founting.’

‘I think you’re wasting your money.’

‘After all, it’s my money.’

‘And so long as it’s money, it’s a-plenty,’ she pointed out – ‘but when it’s all spent it can get right scarce.’

‘I’ve heard that sometimes money don’t hardly last till it’s gone, that’s true. Or so I’ve been told. You think my forty-dollar might last that long?’

‘You spend it all on cokes it wont, if you follow me.’

‘I don’t follow you too near. All I know is this coke tastus right fine.’

‘It what?’

‘Tastus right fine. But what if I should put a dollar down here?’

‘Try one.’

Dove put it down and she had snapped it up before it touched the counter.

‘Now see if you can follow me.’

Somewhere at the bottom of that narrow passage a girl was laughing mirthlessly like a girl laughing at herself, and all its doors were numbered.

No light, no window, no sound. Dove stood lost in a burning blackout till he heard someone hooking a door. Then a little green light came up in a corner and the beer-and-whiskey beauty stood stripped to her slippers in a glow, a girl delicate as a deer.

‘Never did see such a purty girl afore even though you are a mite scarce-hipped,’ he told her. ‘I’m gittin’ a mighty urr to lewdle. Would you care to lewdle too?’

Later, with one foot planted on the floor to keep himself from falling off the narrow cot, he grew confidential.

‘My stomach is swoll,’ he told her.

‘Next time drink whiskey,’ she advised him and added, ‘Country boy, your time is long up.’ Then hooking his trousers on one green-tinted toenail, derricked and dropped them with dainty disdain across his knees at the same moment that his wallet dropped from the pocket and curiously vanished beneath the sheets.

‘M’am,’ Dove declared, ‘you are the very darnedest galperson ever I have met up with.’

‘How’s that?’ she sounded suspicious about something.

‘Why, them toenails.’

‘You’ve had your money’s worth and more,’ she decided as though suddenly resolved not to be good friends after all. ‘Get dressed and get out.’

‘I’m just layin’ here gettin’ myself up an apology to you, m’am. I’ll have it done quite soon.’

‘Apology for what?’

‘Why, for callin’ you scarce-hipped like I done. There was no call for my takin’ an advantage such as that. As a matter of fact, you got what railroading folk call a mighty trim caboose.’

‘The bathroom’s to the right.’

‘M’am, I’m right sorry, indeed and double-deed I am. But the fact is I’m plumb fatigued and now I got to rest a spell.’

She padded around the bed and peered out into the hall. ‘I’ll get a party who’ll restore your strength,’ she promised.

Her back was to him, her hand on the knob and the pocket of her parade pantie bulged with his wallet so plainly he could see the grain of the leather through the sheer of the cloth; but he didn’t try to snatch it. Instead he hooked a fingertip in the rubber-band that bound it, stiffened his arm exactly as he had just seen her stiffen her leg, and thus derricked it as neatly and nervelessly as she had derricked his pants.

She sensed a slight movement behind her and whirled toward the bed. There the big boob lay pretending to sleep and anyone could see at a glance he was faking. ‘Mister, I don’t know who you think you’re fooling, but it isn’t me,’ she gave him final warning and stepped into the hall – ‘Knifey! Knifey-Love! A party to meet you!’

Dove sprang out of the cot, into his pants and was out the window shoes in hand.

Two Negro girls directly across the way, watching for men to come out the front – they spent their afternoons keeping count – appeared mildly surprised to see one come out the window instead. How do you count that?

Someone, it seemed, was forever thinking up ways of doing things that no one else had thought up before.

There’s one advantage women have over men: they can go down to hell and come straight up again. An old song says so and it says just right. Yet it fails to allow for special cases like Dove Linkhorn’s.

Dove knew he’d been underground all right. The moment he stepped back onto the Canal Street side of the Southern Railway Station it seemed he had either come up out of somewhere or else the sky had risen an inch.

The city fathers, Do-Right Daddies and all of that, Shriners, Kiwanians, Legionaires, Knights of this and Knights of that, would admit with a laugh that New Orleans was hell. But that hell itself had been built spang in the center of town – this they never could admit. For panders and whores are a plain disgrace, and Do-Right Daddies are family men whose families are part of themselves like their backs.

But not many a daddy (do-right or do-wrong) is satisfied simply to own a back. He has to kick loose of home and fireside now and again. He has to ball with outlaws, play the fool on the door-rock, and have a handsome hustler call him by his first name in the presence of an out-of-town friend. That makes daddy feel like a man again. Three shots of corn likker and the whole stuffed zoo – Moose, Elks, Woodmen, Lions, Thirty-Third Degree Owls and Forty-Fourth Degree Field Mice begin to conspire against the very laws they themselves have written.

It was all right to take a slug of whiskey from your own flask in a taxi, but forbidden on a trolley-car. That didn’t help those who rode trolley-cars. You couldn’t carry liquor down the street, but if you owned a car you just bypassed that. For every statute they had a little loophole – that by coincidence fitted their own figures as if measured for them. Those who had no hand in writing statutes – panders and madams and such as that – had a harder time squeezing through.

It was an ancestral treachery that all do-righters practice. When opening time was closing time and everyone was there, down where you lay your money down, where it’s everything but square, where hungry young hustlers hustle dissatisfied old cats and ancient glass-eyed satyrs make passes at bandrats; where it’s leaping on the tables, where it’s howling lowdown blues, when it’s everything to gain and not a thing to lose – when it’s all bought and paid for then there’s always one thing sure: it’s some Do-right Daddy-O running the whole show.

There were stage shows and peep shows, geeks and freaks street. It wasn’t panders who owned the shows. There were all down old Perdido Street. But it wasn’t geeks who ran that chippified blondes and elderly rounders, bummies and rummies and amateur martyrs. There were creepers and kleptoes and zanies and dipsoes. It was night bright as day, it was day dark as night, but stuffed shirts and do-righties owned those shows.

For a Do-Right Daddy is right fond of money and still he don’t hate fun. He charged the girls double for joint-togs and drinks, rent, fines, towel service and such. But before any night’s ball was done, he joined in the fun.

Later he had to be purged of guilt so he could sleep with his wife again. That was where the pulpit came in. There had to be something official like that to put the onus on the women. The preachers, reformers, priests and such did this work well. Some girls were just naturally bad, they explained. Others were made bad by bad men. In no case was it ever the fault of anyone who profited by the shows. Daddy, you can go home again.

Pulpit, press, police and politicians pushed the women from crib to crib and street to street – yet never pushed any but diseased ones out of reach. Daddy still wanted some healthy good-looker available for his weekend and there had to be a retriever to fetch her. That was what helped keep pulpits filled, increased newspaper circulation, made the arrest blotters look respectable and gave politicians a record to ride.

When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only one way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don’t have enough. If everybody has more than enough, what good is my more-than-enough? What good is a wide meadow open to everyone? It isn’t until others are fenced out that the open pasture begins to have real value. What good is being a major if you can’t have more than a second lieutenant? What good is a second lieutenant for that matter?

The girls themselves read of the latest crusade, but their eyes skimmed idly over the print. When the last sermon was preached, the last editorial written and the last raid done, then those who had preached, written and raided would be coming down to see them for a bit of fun again.

That was the ancestral treachery no one would admit.

Yet over the treachery, under the revelry, there hung, that airless summer, a feeling that this was all as sad as hi-jinks in an invaded land. In the ravaged faces of young girls and the painted faces of boys in secret bars there hung the sense of impending defeat.

Lonely bones of the old French Graveyard, that had slept contented decades through, felt it and wakened to work their dusty way out through brick, through wood, through stone.

Dove Linkhorn, passing a crumbling wall, peered in and saw how harshly death dealt with old bones.

Old bones that death would not let lie still. Spaniard and Frenchman, Creole and Kentuckian, bones of sailor and hunter alike, women of honor and women kept, all bones bleached the same in the Saturday sun. They too had been to Hell and come up again.

Dove’s own bones felt sore. ‘Too dern much runnin’ ’n jumpin’,’ he scolded himself, ‘nothin’ to show for it but a suit of clothes ’n a pair of shoes ’n a dollar watch. Things could be worse.’

When a girl with eyes that could only have been gotten in a box of tacks demanded, ‘Boy, you got a dolla?’ Dove didn’t feel it was right to lie to her.

‘I got a dolla,’ he admitted, ‘but I don’t feel like foolin’.’

She opened the door. ‘Come in here. I’ll make you feel like foolin’.’

Ten minutes later Dove came out hungry enough to eat snake. There was a poor-boy sign at the end of the block, but before he could reach it another girl stopped him by swinging a screen door right in his path. ‘Boy, you got a dolla?’

‘I got a dolla but I need it for eatin’.’

‘You can eat here,’ she promised him. He stepped inside. It didn’t look like a restaurant.

Ten minutes later he came out, leaned a moment against the crib, then proceeded slowly, head down to get past the rest of the doors till he came to the sign with the poor-boy painted on it. But when he looked inside all he saw was one more brassiereless girl opening a coke.

He shuffled on and on, block after block, finding his way toward food more by scent than by sight.

And so at last entered a certain sea-cave acrawl with the living smells of lobster and shrimp, steaming with simmering oyster stew and awash with gumbo in which little snails paddled about. He sat at a table as scarred and aged as the Old French Market itself.

When his eyes had got used to the deep-sea light he discerned a Negro the size of Carnera, naked to the waist and shining with iron-colored sweat, decapitating snapping turtles with silvered precision.

Now the trouble with turtles is that they believe all things come to him who will but struggle. There’s always room at the top for one more, they think. And in this strange faith the snapping kind is of all the most devout. For it’s precisely that that makes them the snapping kind. Though the way be steep and bloody, that doesn’t matter so long as you reach the top of the bleeding heap.

The dark butcher looked to Dove like Doctor Death in person.

Doctor Death whose patients come one by one along an ever-narrowing plank, each confident of ultimate mercy: a last-minute reprieve, with full civilian rights restored – the knife would snap in mid-air, a modern miracle. Death was all right for certain classes, sand turtles and such, but didn’t suit noble old sea-going families of true terrapin lineage.

Losing his head didn’t lose one his footing. His legs kept seeking yet bloodier heights. Say Not The Struggle Naught Availeth, Onward and Upward was the cry.

Indeed, once the knife had done him in, to raise oneself in the world became more urgent than ever. Sensing that time was against him, he worked all the harder to succeed. Till the floor about the pyramid streamed black with blood, with some on their backs and some on their bellies.

Dove felt another’s eyes watching the growing pile: down on the floor beside him a severed terrapin’s head, big as his own hand, stared cataleptically at its own body slipping and flipping up the distant heap. It could be no other’s body, for it alone matched the king-sized head that stared with faith unshakable.

Stepping on the stumps of a hundred bleeding necks, hauling itself over other backs, giving one a kick there and one a shove there, the body sent a dozen rival climbers sprawling over the cliff to failure. Dove and the Head watched together to see if the Body would make it.

Driven by some strength greater than that of others, wading contentedly over mothers and orphans, it got its blind flippers at last onto the tail of a red snapper, hauled itself onto the snapper’s back, pushed Red out from under and landed smack in the middle of the heap.

He was the King of the Turtles.

The king waved his arrogant flippers triumphantly – ‘Always room for one more at the top’ – just as something bumped him hard from behind and his short day was done. Sliding, sprawling, skidding, he slipped off the heap in a bloody skein and landed flat on his back below the table wigwagging frantically.

‘Dear friends and gentle hearts,’ he wigwagged, feeling the final cold creep up – ‘Will you stand by to leave your old friend die? I wanted nothing for myself – money, comfort, power, security – I worked for these only because those dear to me wanted them. (Of course, as long as they were handy I shared them from time to time.) Would you really leave me here to die?

‘True, I ate well. But that was only to keep up my strength for the sacrificial ordeal of my days. For I never knowingly harmed a fellow creature unless he got in my way. I never took unfair advantage unless it profited me. Can you really leave so lovely a turtle to die?

‘A devoted father, a loyal citizen, a faithful employee, a kind employer, a considerate neighbor, a regular church-goer. Out of purity of heart I respected the laws of God and man. Purity, and fear of jail. Could you really stand by and watch so saintly a turtle die?

‘I seemed a bit intent a moment ago, you say, on grinding my brothers’ necks to gristle? I confess – but that was a moment ago, and now I’ve changed my ways. Could you bear to see such an open-minded turtle die?

‘Lift me up, lift me up, gentle hearts – lift me up to let me look one last time at the top of the heap where once I ruled so.’

And with that most slowly drew in his dark tail. His flippers grew rigid. His struggles forever ceased.

The wisest of turtles was dead.

Just as Bing Crosby came onto the juke singing I Aint Got Nobody.

‘What’ll it be, boy?’ the waiter asked.

Dove didn’t hesitate. ‘I’ll take the tarpon soup.’

He didn’t yet know that there was also room for one more at the bottom.