A Walk on the Wild Side

THREE

OLIVER FINNERTY, DISGUST high in his throat, went into Dockery’s hoping to drown it. Chicken farm promises, Mama’s warnings, Reba’s entrails, mouse-in-a-powder box, broads haughty broads humble, broads sober broads drunk, amputees tossing dollars to broads on all fours – fever and fantasy, hot dreams and cold cash lumped like dead meat at the back of his throat too far back to bring up and too high to swallow.

‘There’s one sick pimp in Storyville tonight,’ he reported himself in without pity. Then tossed down two shots of Canadian rye so fast they hit together, yet served only to bring the dead meat higher.

The little man leaned his head on his small pale hands and peered straight into the dark of his brain: a low motionless pall, like coalsmoke or smog, hung there over the roofs of a curious street – two short rows of bungalows long unpainted, like company houses down some company street; with one porch light left burning.

Yet it wasn’t smoke nor lack of paint nor even how, below the porch, a rain puddle burned like living fire that troubled the dreaming pander so.

For though in their narrow closets the women’s clothes still hung and their stoves still faintly gave off heat, the beer buckets stood half empty and the whiskey stood half drunk. One had steadied a dresser mirror by jabbing her slipper between it and the wood. Outside a dog kept trotting and sniffing between the deserted cribs. And an air of rage and terrible haste that could only mean the worst was yet to come walked the empty rooms.

It came by car splashing mud to the fenders, men and wild boys leaped out – he heard the first glass smash and saw the first flame reach.

Bringing the ponce a pleasured sorrow, a kind of release from everything.

The same sick pleasure at the same dead dream. Though he could not place the curious name of that place nor its women’s names either dark or fair.

He had never seen those wild boys. Nor how a rain puddle made fever fire below a last porch light left burning.

Whether as a child he had seen such a raid from the window of a moving train or whether it was all nothing more than a wish to rid his mind of all women for good and all, poor pimp Finnerty had no way of knowing.

‘Oliver, you’re looking poorly.’

The pimp raised his face that had lost all life, like that of an embryo more clever than most but stillborn all the same. And thought it must be part of his illness that he should now see his old Texas studbum standing right beside him.

His own good old studbum, the one and only studbum. Waiting for a live one with his tongue out a yard.

Someone had put a black-and-white-checked cap only a size too large on his head and someone had stuffed him into a blue serge suit only one size too small. Someone had given him a hair cut, someone had polished his boots. Someone had pinned on his lapel a little tin clown of red and blue – but it was still the same old studbum. Like dust before the hope of the world the pander’s sickened soul was swept. A sense of well-being filled him as a cup. He felt grateful for joys both small and great, he wished it were mealtime so he could say grace. His own old stew-faced studbum. The same big stinking crawling creeping loudmouth just as useless as before.

‘Big Stingaree!’ he greeted Dove, and stepped back shading his eyes as though unable to believe that the biggest wonder on the character side of town had come back for a bit of a visit. ‘You know for a second there I actually didn’t recognize you in that disguise?’

‘You looked like maybe you was mad at me, Oliver.’

‘Mad? Me mad at you?’ He slipped the knot of Dove’s tightly tied tie with one deft jerk and retied it, with elaborate care, into a looser, more fashionable knot. ‘Mad? When was there ever a prouder sight? Mad? Man, I made you what you are and I’m not ashamed of my work. Now what’s this?’ He slipped a small book out of Dove’s side pocket and his smile thinned – ‘On that little-kiddy con again? What are you sellin’ them? I know you got a hot angle by the shift of your clothes and I’m deeply interested in that. When I had a hot thing I counted you in, so I scarcely doubt you’ll count me in on yours.’

‘I can read ’n write now, that’s what, Oliver,’ – a touch of bravado returned to Dove’s voice as he returned the book to his pocket.

‘Why! I’ll just take your word for that! I’ll stand for drinks on it in fact!’ Finnerty seemed somehow relieved. ‘For aint I been the one been telling them all – “Don’t worry about Mr Bigass! A certain party is giving him lessons! She’s too-terin’ him!” Tex, they laughed till they howled – they thought I’d said “tattooin’ him”! “The bum’ll show all of you a trick or two yet” is what I been sayin’’ – and dropped his voice to imply the moment had come to trust one another. ‘I bet that fine high yellow ’n you been shackin’ up a regular storm.’

‘I don’t know where that girl is, Oliver, that’s the truth. I wish to God I did.’

‘She was just in here, lookin’ for you.’

‘Why, that scarce could be—’ Dove reflected dully.

‘Of course it scarce could,’ Finnerty admitted as fast as he’d learned all he needed to know. ‘Why should she come lookin’ for you when she knows right where to find you? Dockery! Two shots here!’

‘I don’t drink so heavy as I used, Oliver.’

‘Make them doubles!’

A sawed-off crutch pried the big door wide, letting the street light glint on the wheels. In he swung and darkness like night closed in behind him and like night came rolling soundlessly. Schmidt muted his wheels when he didn’t feel like balling.

Finnerty put out a foot. ‘Big Dad! A small celebration in your very honor! This here is an old-time fan of yours, seen you on the silver screen! Join us!’

‘We’ve met,’ the cripple excused himself, ‘I’m not drinking with fans tonight.’ He put his hands to his wheels, then paused to look Dove up then down. Finnerty read the hesitation right. ‘One drink, Big Dad,’ the pander pleaded.

‘Bum,’ Schmidt told Dove directly, ‘you look like you’ve come into a roll. If you got gold on you, I’ll get my share.’

‘And if you got none,’ little grinner Finnerty promised Dove, ‘he’ll see you get some. We all got to live,’ he approved of both bullies at once, ‘Stoodint here was just asking was you actually on the road with the Strangler.’ And handed Schmidt his whiskey down.

‘Why, there was nothing to that,’ Schmidt found a minute after all. ‘The Strangler’d get his lock on me ’n I’d let him keep it till I’d scaled the house, for I was workin’ on percentage them days. Then I’d bust it and let him pin one shoulder and I’d flippety-flop for the yokels – they thought he surely had me. I’d let him try till I felt him tire. Then I’d get my scissors—’ he crossed two fingers to indicate two locking thighs – ‘I’d work him off me ’n clamp my lock on him—’ his crossed wrists trapped the Strangler’s head – ‘You understand if I’d turned the pressure on I’d of been out of work. But he never did bust mine.’ And handed up his empty glass. ‘No, he never did bust mine.’

‘Drink up,’ Finnerty ordered without a flicker of expression. ‘He never did bust his.’

‘I wrassled a Mexican kid once back home,’ Dove volunteered, ‘but he throwed me so durn hard I never did try that again.’

Suddenly the cripple denied Dove and everyone – ‘No! He never did bust mine!’ And brought both big fists down upon his stumps as if to deny himself as well – ‘Zybysko couldn’t bust mine! Zybysko never did bust mine!’

‘Easy now, Dad, easy,’ Finnerty calmed him to lead him on, ‘I venture the girlies put more than one head lock on you that you never even tried to bust – How about that, Big Dad? Referring,’ he added hurriedly, ‘to your screen career of course.’

‘Screen? Career?’ Schmidt leaped to the bait like a starving bass, ‘Why yes, I did have a small part with Beery, but I didn’t know I’d made mention of that.’

‘You’ve talked of little else the past twenty years,’ Finnerty thought, and added aloud, ‘It came to me through mutual friends of the silver screen. I understand it was a wrestling scene you done. May we hear more about it, first-hand as it were? Big Dad?’

‘All past and done,’ Schmidt told him, ‘I met a woman who also had a bit part in the picture. We got engaged just before I went on the coast-to-coast tour with the Strangler. But the show broke up in the East and my coach ticket run out in Needles. I was in just such a hurry to get back to that girl that I didn’t want to lose an hour. Instead of wiring her for money I spent my last buck on a bottle ’n climbed an empty instead. One minute of midnight, December thirty-first, nineteen hundred and thirteen.

‘Next time I seen her was after the operation. Nursed me back to life with her own two hands. Begged me to go through with the marriage just as if nothing had happened – that’s a woman for you. How was I to take advantage of unselfishness such as that? Her with her whole career before her? Ruin two careers because one had smashed on the rocks? I sent her away and been taking care of myself ever since, better than most with better luck than my own has been.’

‘But,’ Finnerty inquired coolly, ‘Didn’t it take some time to get used to being smaller than other people after you’d been the biggest thing in sight for so long?’

Was it the question or the pander’s tone? That Schmidt didn’t care for either was plain. ‘I don’t see nobody around here bigger than me,’ he looked right up at Finnerty as Dockery put three whiskies down and didn’t pick up his own. ‘If there’s anything you can do I can’t, now is your chance to tell me.’

‘Don’t be salty with me, Big Dad,’ Finnerty’s tone was serene. ‘I don’t pretend to compete with you. But Stoodint here now is something else – he’ll out-stud any man alive, Big Dad.’

Schmidt turned on Dove with a swerve of his wheels. ‘Can you do anything I can’t do better, bum?’

‘I can’t do lots of things even able-bodied men can do, mister,’ Dove hurried to say; and even to his own ears that didn’t sound quite right.

‘For example,’ Finnerty helped him, ‘he could never get work as THE LIVING HALF.’

So that was the bit. Out at last.

‘I wish you both joy of your trade,’ Schmidt told both, and wheeled off as noiselessly as he’d come.

Yet Finnerty called after, openly jeering, ‘If you aint champeenship material, might as well let the women get you now!’

Then pressing his finger hard into Dove’s chest – ‘You know who he meant by that “joy-of-your-trade” crack? You, that’s who. You don’t have to take it, Tex. I’m back of you.’

Dove emptied his own glass and Schmidt’s too.

‘I’m back of you, too, Oliver.’ And wished one of the glasses were full again.

‘And when I back a man I back him all the way. For as you know, Finnerty don’t fight. He just kills and drags out.’

Sometimes one of his glasses was full, sometimes both. In the bar mirror faces of people watched him too steadily. Along the bar faces of dolls watched the people. Faces of people and faces of dolls and his glass was full again. He had come to find somebody whose name was right on the tip of his tongue but just at that moment the juke began playing something about saints marching in. The people began marching behind the saints and the dolls behind the people as Dove began marching too. Where bells were ringing, trains kept switching, saints were marching, time was passing and his glass was full again.

Till a voice came down through the whiskey-mist saying no Linkhorn could read.

‘Who can’t read?’ he heard somebody asking ready to fight, ‘who sayz I can’t?’

‘Nobody said you couldn’t, son. Now be quiet or get out.’

‘Don’t talk like that to me, Ol-i-ver,’ he warned Finnerty.

‘This isn’t Oliver.’

‘Who you?’

‘Dockery, that’s who.’

‘And this is Big Stingaree, that’s who – Who!’

The floor tilted a little but he got hold of something and held, just held. Till the lights came up and there, with a small halo all around its edge, stood his own little whiskey glass filled again. For sheer love of whiskey, he began to cry. As dolls came marching, saints came marching, people were laughing. Through a Kewpie-doll jungle that had no end.

‘He’ll be alright, Doc,’ somebody who was the best friend anyone ever had told someone who wasn’t. He pulled at Finnerty’s sleeve to make him listen – ‘The people want me to make ’em laugh again, Ol-i-ver.’

‘Read ’em a kiddy-story out of your book.’

But the startled print leaped about like birds without brains, so whoever said no Linkhorn could read had been right after all, and everyone was so disappointed in him he began to cry for everyone, dolls or anyone, who had been disappointed in the end.

‘I’ll sing for the people! I’ll dance ’n sing!’ That was the solution, he realized, to everything. And supporting himself with one hand on the juke, he raised one big foot as if just to raise a foot like that in itself was a feat. And peered all around through the whiskey-mist to make sure the people were watching this. After all standing on one foot was something not everyone could do. He was the only one who knew exactly how it was done. They’d soon see that. Somebody applauded, now he had them. If he could just change to the other foot he’d bring down the house.

And slowly began to change feet.

He came out with his hands hanging loose and head swaying, bending forward so far he tottered a bit. Someone else clapped, then another and another. The dance went faster, foot to foot. Some saw love in it, some despair. Through a Kewpie-doll jungle the king of the elephants danced again.

He put his hands on his haunches and began a slow, obscene grind. The music stopped but nobody applauded at all.

‘Can that!’ someone protested, ‘there’s women here!’

‘Let him show what he got!’ Someone else saw things differently.

Then out of the whiskey-mist nearer and nearer Dockery’s eyes like those of a bee bent deep, too deep into his own.

‘Now you’re overdoing things, son. If you can’t behave, get out. I won’t tell you again.’

‘Who you?’

‘Dockery, that’s who.’ People began pushing this way then that, he had come to find someone but where was she at? Who? he kept asking, ‘Who-who-who?’ and pushed them all back – ‘Let me go. Who you?’ he asked them.

‘If we let you go you’ll fall on your head.’

‘Fall on my head – that’s what I want! I got a good header comin’ to me!’ And struggled madly to fall on his head.

But they wouldn’t let him, he couldn’t beg or buy them just to let him fall on his head. Bells began listening to their own fool tunes, trains to run right toward one another. Women were waiting in doorways for him. His glass was full again.

‘If you aint champeenship mater’l,’ he announced, ‘might as well let the women get you now!’

‘He wants to let the women get him – let them get him then,’ all agreed.

‘Get him out of here,’ Dockery had had enough, and out the door in the middle of a mob of laughing panders, the feather of his hat bobbing higher than any, Dove stumbled still trying to get in his header. But every time was held up again.

By the time they got him next door to Mama’s his new suit-jacket was gone forever, one trouser was ripped from belt to knee, the shirt pocket hung by a single thread. Yet somehow he’d kept his hat, though its feather was broken.

‘Here comes Big Stingaree, ready to ball!’ one pimp called.

‘Come to let the girls get him!’ another explained.

‘We don’t want him,’ the girls seemed sure.

While in the doorway, faithful to himself, Oliver Finnerty stood and watched.

And felt his old nausea slowly subside.

When taxis wheel backward from the curbs and the darkness between the lights grows longer, when the whiskey in the glass before you is one whiskey you don’t want and the sky holds a sort of criminal glow full of longing and full of loss, then is that Come-here-and-tell-me-all-about-it, that Let-me-just-talk-to-you-mister-twenty-cents-will-see-me-through, that Hit-me-with-a-dime-and-I-sleep-under-blankets, that all-night pleaders’ hour. Then the pale lost ghosts of the girls in the night’s last doors – (how white their night-old hunger leaves them!) – see there’s no way left to keep the last of the lights from going out and even the pimps begin giving up.

The legless man smoked the first bitter cigarette of the coming day and watched the last of the two-leggers hurrying, hurrying; hurrying home to love and to rest. And a pang like a pang of utter defeat, like a wind off the flat ice plains of death passed over his heart and shivered it like a leaf.

So what if they had had a bit of a laugh on him? Worse things than that happened to people every day. A handicapped man had to learn to take the bitter with the sweet, it was part of the game and all of that. Everyone knew they were nothing but a pair of pimps of the cheaper sort while he himself had never yet taken a cent off a woman.

But dropped his eyes in a brooding dream to where his great thighs once had been.

And saw no way of getting his own life back, his own good life gone too far, too far.

One at the hip and one at the knee.

Why give them a chance?

What chance had anyone given him?

Whatever it was Floralee had done to make her think God could no longer bear her, it didn’t of necessity follow that He was the one who phoned for the Hurry-Up.

One moment the juke was beginning Please Tell Me How Many Times, the next the parlor was full of the boys in blue and someone smashed the glass of the juke – Now what was the need of that? But the song came on louder for lack of glass – I’d feel bad if you’d kissed too many but I’d feel worse if you hadn’t kissed any.

Where was Reba when the glass went out?

Praising the Chinese no doubt.

Where was Five when the box was smashed? Galloping from door to door in nothing more than her earrings and a bath-mat, hollering ‘Get them guys out!’ And rushing three tricks down the hall with their pants in their hands in as much of a hurry not to be witnesses as Five was anxious to prevent them. She shoved one out a window, another walked past a nabber with a bill in his hand, and the same nab said to another – ‘Uncle Charlie!’ And let him pass.

Where was Mama when the juke glass went? Studying a twenty-two-hundred-dollar receipt for down payment on a house and lot, six kennels and a pair of Doberman pinschers; and having her first misgivings.

Where was Finnerty when all this transpired? In a single-motor plane with two thousand two hundred in fives and tens, on his way to Miami to get his armpits tanned. And gnawing his nail with burning regret, asking over and over, ‘Oh, why didn’t I bury that crip?’

Where was Floralee all the while? Humbling herself in the sight of the Lord by supporting the length of a roaring drunk while other roarers encouraged him.

Where was Kitty Twist that lovable kid? Thinking of Finnerty and wishing she were dead. When she heard the crash she took a big swig of gin, tossed the bottle out the window and followed after it – right into the arms of two of them.

‘I just don’t have any luck, and that’s all there is to it,’ said tough Kitty Twist.

‘Your luck is as good as the next one’s I’d guess,’ the nab said, ‘Up you go, sis.’

And sure enough, up into the Hurry-Up went Kitty Twist. ‘Who’s that?’ she asked the paddy wagon gloom, ‘Who’s else takin’ this ride?’

‘It aint Herbert Hoover,’ Frenchy’s voice said.

‘Officer,’ Kitty Twist told the nab guarding the door, ‘What are you waiting for? We’re ready to roll.’

‘There may be others along in time,’ the officer said.

‘You only got one wagon for the good sake of God?’ Kitty scolded him.

‘We’re trying to make it in one trip, sis,’ he apologized, and a roar like a battle shout rocked the stars just then. The girls poked their sad fancy faces out and heard an iron clamor ring.

‘Sure sounds like someone don’t want to come along,’ Frenchy guessed.

Someone framed in a door-shaped light. Dove in an undershirt, nothing more, hollering ‘hands off me!’ Slamming right and left with the flat of a book, raging with whiskey and terrible fright. Kitty saw one nab catch it across the cheek – ‘Hands off I said!’ – another caught it smack in the eye. Then one of them clasped him by the nape of the neck, another caught his book hand. ‘Be a good boy like I was at your age,’ one said, and another yanked his legs right out from under. Then all three got a good firm hold – ‘One! Two! Three!—’ Kitty and Frenchy had just time to get out of the way as the bare-assed body came flying – Bawnk – and Watkins’ ex-representative lay on his stomach clutching an iron floor.

‘At least this time you came along,’ Kitty congratulated him. And gave him a tentative dig with her toe.

The body never stirred.

Kitty found then she didn’t care really whether he came along or not. She didn’t care for anything or anyone, least of all herself. Anything that happens has a right to happen, so what does it matter who it happens to? That was how Kitty felt.

‘I heard a sneeze in the closet,’ the nab informed the girls, ‘and when I open the door, there was this boy buck-naked but for hat and undershirt and a book under his arm.’

‘Just somebody who didn’t have time to pull his pants on,’ Frenchy sounded out the law on how much he really knew.

‘So long as he wasn’t no inmate he aint in serious trouble,’ the nabber felt. ‘He don’t look to me like no pimp.’

‘Myself, I never seen him before,’ and gave Kitty the nudge.

‘I never did neither,’ Kitty Twist said.

Dove came to in a dungeon heat with something across his face.

Hello, pants.

He felt his head swell and subside, then try to swell again. By not so much as batting an eye it hurt a little less. When someone lifted the pants off his face he stared straight up. ‘I think the sonofabitch is dead,’ he heard an indifferent voice report and caught a whiff of cigar smoke.

‘I don’t see no blood, Harry.’

‘They bleed inside.’

‘Then we’re both in this together.’

‘Both? Since when did Smitty get out of it?’ The pants dropped back.

‘Why, that’s right. Oh, that Smitty, suppose to be watchin’ the whore in the Hurry-Up, instead he’s showin’ off he’s a tackle now for L.S.U.’

‘Remember the time he finished off the nigger with his open palm? That shows you what jiu-jitsu can do.’

‘No, but I was with him the time he lost his temper on the Spanish lad for pretendin’ he can’t talk good English. That’s what pretendin’ can do.’

‘Officer,’ some phony down the tier piped, ‘I can pay for aspering if it aint asking too much.’

‘It’s asking too much. You’ll get aspering at your destination,’ Harry promised the piper and belted Dove a crunchy kick in the side just for a crunchy little surprise.

‘I been kicked lots harder than that,’ Dove reflected and wished they’d stop smoking. It didn’t seem respectful at a time like this.

‘You know what, Jeff?’ Harry asked softly.

‘What?’ Jeff was anxious to know.

‘I think the sonofabitch really is dead.’

Deep in Dove’s throat a great tear trembled, making a bubble that tickled his neck. There wasn’t a breath of air in the cell and if they didn’t quit smoking he’d have to cough and come alive once more. He’d rather be dead, Dove thought, than that.

‘Poor rummy. Between whiskey and women, his heart give out.’

‘Was that his heart clanged like a damned bell when he landed on iron? If you can’t make sense don’t say nothin’.’

‘Captain’ll be on our side,’ Jeff kept trying, sense or no.

‘That cracker? Are you sure you’re feeling well? I’m sure he’d purely hate to see that cracker puss on the front page of the Picayune for cleaning roughnecks out of the department. Sure he would.’

Then a silence bespoke an understanding reached. Dove felt one take his arms and the other his feet.

‘People treat you better when you’re dead,’ Dove realized as they bore him gently. ‘Now this is really something like it.’

‘Where we takin’ him, Harry?’

‘Where you think? Loew’s State?’

A river-boat moaned like a weary cow abandoning hope between darkness and tide.

Dove felt the air clear suddenly and knew they were in the open night. Somewhere above him a window slammed.

‘What are you silly bastards up to now?’ Dove heard a new voice, more commanding than Harry’s.

‘Another one kicked off on us, Captain.’

‘How many times do I have to tell you that a man can die in jail just the same as in a hospital? Get him over to Charity and get a receipt. I’m getting sick of having to tell you every time.’ The window slammed. Dove hoped that they wouldn’t drop him; he had a feeling he was hanging above concrete.

‘What he mean, Harry, “get a receipt”?’

‘He means register the stiff with the hospital.’

‘Couldn’t we just leave him on the steps and trust to the kindness of nurses?’

‘I’d as soon be took inside if you don’t mind,’ Dove requested politely.

Like statues of astonishment both nabs froze. In that second Dove realized that had been his own voice and leaping free, was off and running straight into a red brick wall.

Harry caught him on the rebound and led him by the hand back to Jeff.

‘I knew he was faking all the while,’ Harry decided, ‘I was only waiting for him to make one false move. See, I made him give hisself away.’

Dove folded his pants carefully into a pillow and tucking it neatly under his head, stretched out contentedly, waiting to be lifted again.

‘You see,’ he excused himself to the Southern stars above the nabber’s heads, ‘I really wouldn’t want to leave this old world, for it’s the only one I know anything about.’

Jeff looked at Harry. Harry looked at Jeff.

‘Son,’ Jeff broke the news at last, ‘we both been on duty this whole hard hot day, and it’s been just one darned thing after another. Would you mind walking back to your cell?’

‘Why,’ Dove leaped to his feet and began pulling on his pants, all eagerness, as though invited to a chicken dinner. ‘Why, I’d admire to do just that. A little walk in the night air would clear my head.’ Then looked slyly from one to the other. There was something in the air.

‘You fellows mad at me about something?’

‘Of course, not, son,’ Harry reassured him with good-natured gruffness. ‘You’re a character. That’s your turn and we enjoy it. We want everyone in on the joke,’ and slammed Dove so hard on the side of the head with his open palm that he spun him almost clean about. Dove stood shaking his head to let the night air make it even clearer. The nights were certainly getting cooler.

‘Promise us you’ll tell the court everything that happened,’ Harry threatened him with his big hand raised, ‘Promise.’

Dove stood rubbing the back of his head: a huge thought was struggling to live in it.

‘I tell you,’ he decided slowly, ‘I don’t think I’d care to bring up a thing like this in court at all. It might make me appear a bit of a fool.’

‘I told you this was a boy of good breeding,’ Jeff came to his aid.

Harry studied him steadily, hand still high. ‘I’ve took an awful lot off you, son,’ he announced, ‘I’m just not going to take any more.’

‘Oh, put down your hand, Harry, the boy’s had enough,’ Jeff decided. ‘He’s a real smart lad and means just what he says.’

Harry let the hand fall. ‘God help him if he don’t,’ he said.

A minute later the big door closed behind Dove.

‘I think I’ll get a little rest,’ he decided, and groped in the dark till he found a bench.

Each morning the tenants of Tank Ten took turns at the tank’s single window. It opened upon the courtyard of the Animal Kingdom’s Protectors, whose men in heavy gloves busied themselves protecting the kingdom’s little charges from early morning till late at night.

BE KIND BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE was the kingdom’s motto, painted in hospital white. Sometimes a kindly looking woman in a nurse’s uniform came outside to help the work of kindness on. This was done by shooting each hound squarely between the eyes and shoveling the carcass into a cart. Cats were less trouble, Dove saw right off, for they had only to be swung by their tails and get their little skulls cracked against an iron post. And didn’t have to be shoveled at all. Straight into the cart they went – plop! plop! plop!

For some reason the prisoners felt it had devolved upon themselves to keep track of the number of dogs done in as opposed to the number of cats. A C.C.C. deserter called Make-Believe Murphy began making book, taking bets in Bull Durham on the day’s totals. A non-betting man, neither pro-dog nor pro-cat was required to keep a reliable count. Dove volunteered, and never left his post without reporting to his relief the exact numbers of each done in during his watch.

And sometimes wondered, that if the men and boys to whom Tank Ten was home were outlaws, where the true criminals were being kept.

‘The best days of my life, my happiest time,’ a human dishrag called Pinky would recall, ‘was doing close-order drill in the evening with the national guard.’

Pinky had stolen fifty feet of garden hose in lieu of back wages. That the back wages were largely imaginary didn’t make the hose less real, and Pinky still had five months to go.

His cell mate was a beetling, black-browed timberwolf right out of the timber with a blood-red gash for a lolling tongue and hands like claws to rend. A real baby-eater with a spine-chilling record: he had lowered himself through a greenhouse roof and come within inches of escaping with two flower pots of African violets. Unluckily he had gone through a pane and been trapped in a chrysanthemum-colored crash, face-down in freshly planted ivy but still clutching his precious violets. The fall, apparently, had subdued the wilder side of his nature, because now he seemed happy enough just being permitted to wash and dry Pinky’s spoon twice a day.

Another was an old sad lonesome lecher with a face that had never been up from the cellar, who had nobody’s sympathy at all; not even his own. The turnkey had nicknamed him ‘Raincoat’ – which was kinder than what the prisoners had named him.

This ancient simple satyr’s offense had been nothing more dreadful than the devising of a time-and-money-saving operation. Raincoat had discovered how to save time and money in making love, and at the same time to protect the lover against emotional entanglement. A pair of rubber bands and a raincoat with one loose button was all the self-sufficing lover required.

So attired he had taken a stroll, one wanton April evening, down Carondelet Street. Having, of course, taken the perfectly sensible precaution of severing his trousers at the knees and binding the bottoms to his calves with the rubber bands; lending an impression, to the casual passerby, that he was fully clothed. Here and there, passing some woman who appeared deserving, he would fling the raincoat wide for her amazement and delight, then modestly button himself and modestly hurry on.

Talent can spring up anywhere.

‘I’m not here for insulting a woman,’ he reproved society gently, ‘I’m here for not insulting one. I put on my innocent little show for her but instead of going on about her business she looks back over her shoulder as much as to invite me to follow her. She must have taken me for a moron, to think I’d do a thing like that. For Heaven’s sake, a man could catch a disease that way.

‘She started coming toward me – “Don’t be afraid,” I heard her say, “I’m not going to hurt you.” Oh, no, not much she wouldn’t. I know her kind. But I hadn’t expected one to turn on me. She was getting closer by the second, I was rooted to the spot, her hand reached for me – O God’ – Raincoat buried his face in his hands, the other criminals stood about. They had all been to the Sex Bureau and back, they knew what the man had been through. And waited politely till he had composed himself.

Raincoat dabbed at his eyes and went on – ‘Do you know what that thing had the brassbound gall to ask me? – “Would you like to sleep with a nice girl?” – that’s just what she asked and not more than three feet away! The woman was sex-crazy, that was plain. But you know what I answered her? “I’d rather go to bed with a wet shepherd dog!” – now that’s just what I said. How did a notion like that come into my head? Then I ran.

‘Before I could so much as say God with my mouth open there were half a dozen of them around me, I don’t know where they came from yet. Hauling me this way then that, tearing my clothes, screaming “sec fiend! sec fiend!” If I were a sec fiend I would of gone with the woman instead of trying to run, wouldn’t I?’

There were always half a dozen in for drinking or distilling corn likker, and it wasn’t surprising that those who bought too much and those who made too little should cell together. What wasn’t so easy to understand was how men who could no longer communicate with the outside world, but could only sit and mutter, automatically fell together. Citizens of the Republic of Natural Bugs, they felt themselves trapped together in an alien land.

Raincoat’s cell mate, for example, was a natural whose wife had had him locked up because he had made up his mind to have a baby by their fifteen-year-old daughter. Nobody could talk Natural Bug out of this. He couldn’t be roasted or frozen out of it. He knew he was right in this. But Raincoat was the only one to whom he communicated his defense.

‘He says the kid is a lot better-looking than his wife,’ Raincoat interpreted. ‘And not only that, but she’s much younger.’

And there was always, in one cell or another, the usual sexless, toothless queen of mezzanine, park bench and shrubbery. One of these was Wayback, who claimed to have been a saxophone player who had become addicted to something, he didn’t yet know what. He was too far back for that.

‘The doc wouldn’t tell me and I can’t read Latin,’ was his excuse, ‘but whatever the stuff was, someone kept raising the price of it on the doc so naturally he had to raise it on me.’

The price had gone up until he’d had to hock his upper plate. Then he’d had to hock his sax to redeem the plate because he couldn’t play without it. Then he was all set to go to work, but had no sax. Something had to be done. He was doing a year and a day.

‘You see,’ he’d begin as though he couldn’t get over it yet, ‘I couldn’t blow a sax without a plate.’

‘We’ve heard it all before,’ Out-Front would interrupt him. ‘You’re not way back, you’re yet farther back than that,’ and there would be no word for a while out of the sexless, toothless, saxless, dopeless, hopeless queen of mezzanine, park bench and shrubbery.

Out-Front was way out front about what he was on. He was a rugged old hand who’d taken morphine for migraine headaches contracted in the red zinc mines of Oklahoma. He’d been at the Federal Hospital at Lexington, Kentucky, for healing of his habit and remembered that institution with genuine gratitude.

‘The beauty part about Lex is that they take you off your habit by putting you on something new nobody ever heard of before because they don’t have a name for it yet. Then all you got to do is kick two habits instead of one. I loved the joint. A man would be a fool not to trade off one little flea-powder habit for a real burning-down one, wouldn’t he?’

Out-Front preferred to cell up with another user, but he could put up with a sex case if necessary – ‘You got a worse sickness than mine,’ he’d tell men like Wayback. What he really couldn’t bear was a lush. In those whose weakness was whiskey he saw a hostile tribe undeservedly favored by the powers that be. Why was it that one little white pill was enough to put a man with marks on his arm to hard labor for months, while another, weaving on the corner with a pint of uncorked gin sticking out of his pocket, got a free ride home, if he could still give the nabbers his address?

‘When you see a bum duck into the gutter for a butt,’ Out-Front challenged all corn-likker kukes, ‘you can be sure he’s a wino or a gin-head. No self-respecting junkie ever falls that low.’

Dundee claimed to have spent every weekend for thirteen years in the same cell. His wife had a brother on the force, and to keep Dundee from blowing his check on whiskey, brother picked him up on the job when the Saturday noon whistle blew and booked him for vag. Then he turned Dundee’s check over to sister – ‘to protect you from yourself.’ Monday morning brother handed Dundee his lunch bucket and let him out in time to get back on the job without getting docked.

‘One thing I’ve always insisted on,’ Dundee boasted wildly, ‘I never come along till I’ve finished my Saturday lunch.’

Dundee’s cell mate had also been strangely victimized. His name was Wren and he liked to buy Fords on Sunday, particularly in small towns. He’d pay a thousand dollars or so for one, by check, and show the dealer his bank balance for that amount. Then he’d drive it to the used-car agency across the street and sell it for six hundred. When the Ford dealer would have him picked up, to be held till the banks opened on Monday morning, Wren claimed he had always been sporting enough to warn the man, ‘You’re making a big mistake, friend.’

Morning would prove the check perfectly good, and Wren would sue for fifty thousand dollars for false arrest. The most he’d ever actually collected was thirty thousand.

‘I must have made a million,’ he computed. But a sinister change had come over Ford dealers on Sunday; particularly in small towns. They had begun to trust him. He had had to act increasingly furtive and fly-by-night. He had even gone to the length of pasting a stage moustache onto his upper lip that looked ready to fall off any moment; and still they wouldn’t arrest him. Wren had run into a solid wall of human faith. And every time he ran into it it cost him four hundred dollars. Finally he had such a vicious run of not getting arrested that he would have gone broke altogether but for a tiny drill, a length of wire and some colored crayon. Parish police had picked him up in a roadhouse for tampering with slot machines.

‘I drill an eighth-inch hole in the side of the machine – it’s only aluminum casting. When the three payoff bars come up I stop the works with the wire and she pays off. Then I plug the hole with crayon of matching color – usually blue, red or silver. When the chumps fill up the jackpot I come back again. Sometimes I got a buddy to cover for me while I drill, we concentrate on fraternal organizations. What can they do about it? Slot machines aint legal either.’

It was true that the authorities were uneasy about their right to hold him. Yet it seemed that somebody ought to.

Cell doors to Tank Ten were left unlocked. Only the big door to the block, operated by air brake, barred the prisoners from the outside world. This permitted the area between the jail’s wall and the cells to be used for prisoner recreation. And since this was left to the prisoners’ own devising, all it came to in the morning was someone reporting casualties in the Animal Kingdom, or a spitting contest in the afternoon. But even the spitting contests lost interest, as the tobacco-chewers always won.

The men changed cells at will. When Wren wearied of Dundee’s grievance against his brother-in-law he moved, simply for change of grievance, into the cell of a barnyard cretin called Feathers.

Feathers had been snatched redhanded in the act of chicken-spanking.

‘I never heard tell of no such crime as that,’ Dove declined to accept chicken-spanking as a crime, ‘it must have been he tried to steal that hen.’

‘Feathers wasn’t trying to steal nobody’s hen,’ Make-Believe Murphy protested. ‘All Feathers done was set that leghorn on his lap and pat its bottom. Understand, I’m not saying the man was in his rights. After all, the bird hadn’t done nothing to be spanked for.’

‘I like chickies,’ Feathers clucked from his cell.

‘I’ll represent him even if I don’t care for the case,’ Murphy assured Dove. He seemed to have appointed himself a sort of Kangaroo Public Defender. Who was defending Murphy Dove didn’t ask.

Gonzales vs. Gonzales was more to Murphy’s taste than Feathers vs. Louisiana. Gonzales, a laborer six days a week, was resting on the seventh when Mrs G. suggested idly that they go on a second honeymoon. This had upset Vicente, as they had never had a first. He had gone through the house methodically with a Number Five shovel, smashing holy images, pictures, glassware, chairs, pottery and a Victor gramophone and every time he’d brought the shovel down had cried out, ‘Call this a honeymoon!’

He had been prying the bathtub off the floor by its stubborn enamel claws when he’d heard Consuela run into the bedroom, snatch something and run out of the house again. He’d apprehended her trying to save their wedding photograph and pointed to the stove. She had always been an obedient wife, and she did what he ordered now: she threw the picture in.

Then they had stood, holding hands by side, until the flames had caught.

‘Mister Gonzales,’ Consuela told him then, ‘that just did it.’ And had phoned the police, had him booked and now promised, every time she came visiting loaded with dainties, that she was going to get him ninety days for malicious mischief if it was the very last thing she did.

‘Why you do that, Vicente?’ Dove inquired with some concern.

‘When I feel like going, I go,’ Vicente explained to his own satisfaction if nobody else’s.

‘You were in your rights,’ Murphy told him confidently, ‘you were remodeling your home. No court in the country can convict you.’

‘I’m just sorry he seen fit to remodel that photograph,’ Dove felt, ‘if you ask me that was pure meanness.’

‘I’m glad you brought that angle up,’ Murphy said, ‘I got that one whipped too. It was my client’s intent to burn only his half of the picture.’

‘It didn’t do her half much good,’ Dove felt obliged to point out.

‘I see,’ Murphy regarded him coldly, ‘you’re the type would actually deprive a man of his freedom for the sake of an old photograph. What kind of man are you anyhow?’

‘I’ll tell you just what kind,’ Dove informed him, ‘I’m the kind that’d injunct that Mexican’s shovel, if I were his wife, before I let him in my house again. That’s what kind.’

‘Shovel no matter,’ Gonzales promised everyone cheerfully, ‘when I feel like going, I go.’

‘A little on the headstrong side,’ Make-Believe Murphy had to concede, squatting beside Dove. He was a lanky stray from nowhere who’d been lost in the shuffle along the way. A year or two older than Dove. Older prisoners tolerated his make-believe practice, knowing that was as close to practising law as Murphy was going to get.

‘Great Hand of God,’ he marveled now, ‘for what it cost this country to keep us criminals in here, we could send a navy to Mexico.’

‘What for?’ Dove wondered. ‘We don’t have no war with Mexico.’

‘Well, by God,’ the boy resolved. ‘By God, if we don’t we’ll send down ’n get us one.’

The only true criminal in the whole tankful of fools, the only one who had soldiered honestly against law and order, was an old-timer named Cross-Country Kline, with a battered and seamed old round brown ball of a face that looked as if it had been lined into the grandstand and lined right back. They were having a hard time getting Country out.

‘Blow wise to this, friend,’ he advised Dove, ‘it’s always easier to convict a man of something he didn’t do than it is to prove that what he actually was doing was a crime. That’s why the nabbers are so much tougher on the man without a record than they are on the finished criminal product. They’ve got the finished product solved, they can nab him any time, so they can afford to be friendly. It’s the bird who pops up on some corner they never seen him around there before, he claims he never been arrested, he got no needle marks, he don’t act like a thief and they can’t find a set of prints on him that worries them. They figure he must be some too-wise ghee. They got to find a crime to fit him. And if he’s innocent that takes persuasion.

‘Do you know that half the men serving time are serving it for somebody else? Shaking somebody else’s jolt for copping somebody else’s plea, playing culprit for a lesser crime than the one they actually done?

‘What a young fellow like you got to think about, if you’re going into crime serious, is what any young business man got to consider before he invests in anything – How can he wire himself so that, if he takes a fall, he falls the least distance instead of the longest? He got to wire himself to the courts, the state’s attorney’s office, the police department. He can’t trust just any old lawyer, you don’t learn the law by going to law school. He got to have someone who can operate behind the bench as well as in front of it, behind the public prosecutor as well as in front of him. Then if he takes a fall he got a choice – Should it be one-to-life for armed robbery or one-to-three for simple robbery?

‘But blow wise to this, buddy, blow wise to this: Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own. Never let nobody talk you into shaking another man’s jolt. And never you cop another man’s plea. I’ve tried ’em all and I know. They don’t work.

‘Life is hard by the yard, son. But you don’t have to do it by the yard. By the inch it’s a cinch. And money can’t buy everything. For example: poverty.

‘Take my own experience with money, for example. I was suppose to be a writer on the coast but all I ever wrote was phone numbers. I’d slip into a party like I was invited, spot some fluff who looked like she’d left her jewel case home, talk her out of her address and phone it to a couple fellas who were just setting around some hotel room talking religion. When she got home the jewel case would be empty. How should I know they were that kind fellas?

‘We made so much I didn’t have time to spend it. Still I felt them fellas were giving me a shellacking. I got out and went on my own. I lined up a most trim little number – you understand I passed for sharp myself them years. Husband had gold. Had her own car. One day she give me the key to it on a ring with her other keys, to drive around while she shopped. I wheeled eighty an hour out to her place, cleaned out every bit of her jewelry and the husband’s too, and was waiting for her when she got through shopping.

‘I was scoring like that every week, stuffing a suitcase for a trip to Chicago. There was a fence I trusted there. What tripped me was I figured it was my turn to give a party.

‘The country had just gone dry. I was living in Catalina and went across to L.A., bought a second-hand suitcase and stuffed it with Canadian rye. I got off the boat with it and carried it up hill to my cottage. I had to go past the nab station. I knew all the nabs. I set the suitcase down and cut up jackpots with them a spell. One of them asked, “What’s in the keister, Kline?”

‘“Just what you’re thinkin’ is in it, MacElheny my boy,” I told him, “booze.” We all had a laugh. I laughed too.

‘I just got into the cottage when somebody knocked. Four nabs I’d never seen in my life before. “What’s in the keister, Kline?” Only this one meant it.

‘“Liquor,” I told him right out, “Want a shot?”

‘“We’ll have to take you to the station, we have a tip you’re bootlegging.”

‘I went along. What else? Some clown of a justice of the peace clapped a hundred-fifty-dollar fine on me. I didn’t have that much on me, so they kept me in the clink. I played cards with the jailer and went to bed. I was still laughing but not so loud.

‘About three in the morning a deputy sheriff came in and shook me awake, took me into the jail office and pointed.

‘It was all spread out on a table. $120,000 in hot ice. They must have tore that cottage apart to find it.

‘My head was spinning like a top the rest of that night, trying to figure how to get rid of the stuff. I’d never been fingered for burglary, if they didn’t have the ice I was clean. In the morning the chief turned me over to a deputy, to take me on the boat to L.A.

‘The deputy was skirt-crazy. As soon as the band started playing he made it to the dance floor, lugging the jewelry in a cardboard shoebox under his arm. Once he threw it to the drummer to keep while he dragged a broad around the floor.

‘I wasn’t handcuffed. Where could I go? Nowhere but overboard and I can’t swim enough to bother. So I sat around gnawing my fingernails twenty-eight miles worth, waiting for a break. When we were almost in it came.

‘The deputy got the shoebox back, and we went up on deck to watch the boat make the pier. I said I was getting seasick and made for the rail. We were in the channel, almost to Wilmington Harbor. The deputy came along with me – to hold my head I guess – and when we reached the rail I started one from the ankle and he took it big.

‘He hit the deck on the back of his neck and I grabbed the shoebox and heaved it. It plopped into the propellor wash and burst like a bomb. It rained jewelry all over the muck in the channel.

‘The nab went for his gun and I held out my hands so he wouldn’t dare mow me down in front of all the passengers. He put the gun back and begun bawling, handcuffing me to the rail and crying like a baby, both at once, simply slobbering all over me. Then he ran for his box, still sobbing. He could have saved his sobs. They kept a gang of divers prowling that channel bottom ten days without bringing up a single piece. By the time we made the pier there were four cars from the bureau of identification. That nab stopped me three times on the way and begged me – begged like a kid for candy – to get out and run for it. “Give me a chance,” was how he put it, “You owe me that much.” I sat awful still.

‘The B. of I. give me the business. For seventy-two hours they kept me in the blue room and the things a bunch of tough coppers can think to do to a guy who won’t talk makes me shaky when I remember it yet. I could tell you things that’d make Uncle Sam’s whiskers turn black.

‘They jumped on my feet. They slapped my ears till I couldn’t hear. They put the glare in my eyes and held the lids open till I thought I was going blind and all the time somebody I couldn’t see kept hollering right into my ear at the top of his lungs. I got a pivot tooth now in place of one some ham-handed law cracked out, but I aced it out. Years later in stir I used to wake up thinking they were starting on me again, but I aced it. I aced it till one of my fluffs heard a radio broadcast ’n sent me a lawyer. That was when my real troubles begun.

‘You should of seen the jobs they hung on me! A finger for every jewel heist pulled in California since the earthquake. I found I was the Hollywood Taxi Bandit, and also some San Diego peterman who’d been out of range over a year. They put me up in front of some goof in pinch-nose glasses squealing I was the guy stuck him up in Pasadena and took his portable typewriter. Now would I fool around like that with all that ice in my kick?

‘Still I wouldn’t widen about the ice. I was framed was all I’d say. I went back and talked to the stir-simple kukes in the clink. They told me the only way to handle my case was to get some broad-lawyer whose daddy was a judge – she’d drag it into his court and get it whitewashed.

‘One old-timer warned me, “Don’t let no lawyer get you to shake another man’s jolt,” but I didn’t heed him. I give the broad-lawyer a large slice and for three months I lay in that lousy jail when I should have been partying in Chicago. Then she told me the best thing I could do was ask for probation. I had no record, it should go through sweet. I listened and pleaded guilty to two of them bum beefs, stuff somebody else had pulled they had to have a culprit for, and threw myself on the mercy of the court as a first-offender. Then up spoke my broad-lawyer right beside me, “Your Honor, this man has had his chance” – Wham! Daddy give me 4½ – 1 CC – two stretches, one for four and a half and the other for a year to be served concurrently.

‘There I was with my ice in Wilmington Harbor, clean of my own jobs but tagged for two other guys’ and on my way to San Q.

‘I was still laughing. But for some reason I kept gagging.

‘I don’t mind getting roughed up, everybody gets roughed up. Everybody, in jail or out, is shaking somebody else’s jolt. The thorn that sticks my side to this day is the one time in my life I was innocent was the one time that I got it. You through with them funnies, buddy? Let’s see ’em here. Maybe some of ’em’s in trouble ’n I’ll have to help ’em out.’

Country Kline claimed it was because of his good behavior but it must have been bad bookkeeping – he had been released from Leavenworth nine days before his last sentence had expired officially. When he’d learned of the error, he was in the South and had raced all over Louisiana and Mississippi trying to get some local official to lock him up for nine days in a county jail, give him a receipt and thus square him away with Federal law. He was uneasy about surrendering directly to Leavenworth lest he have to go to bat again against the same judge who’d already sentenced him once. ‘He might just get mad and give me a year for contempt or something,’ was what Country still feared.

He’d driven for days, asking gas station attendants whether they thought he was a fugitive, but no local official would lock him up. ‘You don’t owe us nothing down here, son,’ sheriffs and constables alike had told him. ‘You owe it to Broomface, not to us. Go on back to Kansas, son, we don’t want you. They got to take you.’

Now he waited for the feds with a mixture of hope and fear he could never clearly divide, his cap tilted cockily on the side of his head and a plug of Red Seal in his cheek. Dove studied that philosophical mug creased like a first-baseman’s mitt and concluded he couldn’t possibly have done better for a cell mate.

Whatever happened, it was Country’s consolation, he had Broomface where it pinched. He owed so much time here and there that even were he to serve it concurrently, he was sure to die owing at least fifty years. They’d never be able to collect.

He saw new ways and means of beating the law even in devices invented by madmen. One day Natural Bug came up with a brand new one. When told by a turnkey, ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ Bug replied quickly, ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ When the doctor poked his head into his cell to ask ‘How you feeling?’ Bug answered as fast, ‘How you feeling?’ Every attempt at conversation with him whether about the weather, death or parole withered on the vine.

‘One conversation with you is its own cure,’ his own cell mate abandoned him in disgust, and sure enough – ‘One conversation with you is its own cure,’ Natural Bug replied.

‘He’s no more bug than you or I,’ Country felt certain, ‘all he wants is privacy and I can’t blame him. I don’t even want to think of the trouble I could have saved myself if I’d thought of a thing as simple as that years ago.’

All of the inmates of Tank Ten were white. At night they heard laughter from the Negro tier one flight above, and most of the trusties were short-term Negroes. Murphy insisted it was his influence that kept the tank lily white, but Dove suspected privately that the authorities had something to do with it.

These were neither the great gray wolves of the snowplain wilderness nor fanged cats treed and spitting; but only those small toothless foxes of summer someone had chased and someone had chained, barking at changes in the weather.

The tricked, the maimed, the tortured and the sly, doers of small deeds from the nation of furnished rooms, they came off streets half as old as time to buy a little and sell a little and take their adventure in penny arcades. Their lives had been bounded by those windows SAYING ROOM FOR TRANSIENT. SLEEPING ROOM. LIGHT HKSP., where across a book of a thousand names the clerk who proffers the pen suggests, ‘Give me a phony, mister. We’re both safer off that way.’

Everybody is safer off that way.

They emerged from between those long green walls and those long spook-halls that are shadowed by fixtures of another day. That damp dull green the very hue of distrust; where every bed you rent makes you accessory to somebody else’s shady past.

They were the ones who’d rather play a pinball machine than put in a claim to a desk in an ad agency. Above gutters that run with a dark life all their own or down cat-and-ashcan alleys too narrow for a Chrysler, they hid out in that littered hinterland behind the billboards’ promises, evading the rat-race for fortune and fame. Their names were ‘Unemployed Talent Scout’ and ‘Part-Time Fry Cook,’ ‘Part-Time Beautician’ and ‘Self-Styled Heiress,’ ‘Water-Ski Instructor’ and ‘Dance-Instructress.’ And they strolled as matter-of-factly through their part-time nightmares into a self-styled daylight no less terrible than all their dreams. Their names were the names of certain night-blue notions and they seldom lay down to rest.

Their crimes were sickness, idleness, high spirits, boredom and hard luck. They were those who had failed to wire themselves to courts, state attorney’s office or police. Hardly a stone so small but was big enough to trip them up and when they fell they fell all the way.

Fell all the way and never got up. If life was a cinch by the inch, they did it by the yard. They always found someone named Doc to play cards with. They went out of their way to eat in a place called Mom’s. They slept only with women whose troubles were worse than their own. In jail or out, they were forever shaking somebody else’s jolt, copping somebody else’s plea, serving somebody else’s time. They were unwired to anything.

Lovers, sec-fiends, bugs in flight, the tricked, the maimed, the tortured, the terribly fallen and the sly. All those who are wired to nobody, and for whom nobody prays.

That the public defender defends by saying, ‘Your Honor, this man has had his chance.’

Country Kline rolled a cigarette one-handed, drew the string of the sack with his teeth and lit it with a flint device cupped carefully in his palm, as though fearing Dove might divine its magic and patent it; it looked like Dove would see freedom first. ‘My glin-wheel,’ he explained cryptically, and handed Dove a cigarette already lit.

Dove took a deep drag. ‘I made a small errow myself,’ he admitted, ‘I figured it would work better the second time than the first, being as I’d already a bit of practice at it.’

And he waited for Country to ask ‘Practice at what?’

‘Practice at what?’ Country at last obliged him.

‘Practice at playin’ dead. It seemed to me that was the coward’s way out so I took it. I held my breath ’n stared straight up ’n never moved a muscle. All I fergot was not to talk. So whenever they didn’t have anything else to do that week, they’d put me on a stretcher n’ carry me in the police wagon over to another station ’n set me down ’n tell the other policemen, “He’s dead, you don’t have to feed him,”’n then they’d leave me there. When it came meal time all the other guys got bologna except me. “Lay down, ghost,” they’d tell me. I wasn’t suppose to get no bologna because I was dead, you see.’

‘I see,’ Country assured him, ‘go on.’

‘Well, all the other criminals caught on and they’d holler, “How you feeling today, ghost?” “I feel like hell is a mile away ’n the fences is all down” is what I’d tell them. Because I felt like hell was a mile away ’n all the fences was down.’

‘How long did that keep on?’

‘Why them fellows acted like they now thought nothing could kill me. I was in five stations last week. Finally I told them if I didn’t get something to eat pretty soon I really would die ’n then the joke would be on them. So they finally give me something but I still don’t know what it was. I guess the joke begun to wear. You know another funny thing – not eating like that loosed up every one of my choppers but except the very one I could best have spore?’

Dove waggled that chopper that would never come quite all the way loose.

On the wall above his blanket someone who’d checked out long ago had scratched: Poor John Mendoza. He went East. He went West. He went the way he thought was best. He loved his girl but nobody believed him.

In the weighted hours of the blue-moon night Dove thought about Poor John Mendoza and wished that his girl had believed in him.

He learned how to get an extra drag out of a cigarette by wetting his lips when the snipe was too small to be held in the fingers. He learned how to split a match four ways. And every night, before turning in, pursued lice across his blanket with burning matches. When a louse was caught he crackled once, and died.

One morning Make-Believe Murphy suddenly appointed himself meal distributor. Although all the tins were practically identical, he began a pretense that each had been designated for a particular prisoner. For some reason everyone submitted to this nonsense, while Murphy identified each with an eye for minute differences in the way the cornbread had been sliced.

‘Yo tengo hambre, Campañero,’ Gonzales complained when he felt himself shorted.

‘We’re all hungry, buddy,’ Murphy assured him but keeping his left palm closed, ‘nobody’s getting shorted.’

‘Then you can open your hand,’ Dove told Murphy, ‘so we can see for sure nobody is getting shorted.’

‘I don’t have to open my hand to nobody,’ Murphy clenched his fingers so fast cornbread crumbs pinched out of his fist, ‘Or do you figure you’re big enough to make me?’

‘I don’t have to make you,’ Dove conceded, ‘if you don’t it’ll just go to prove you are shortin’ the man.’

Murphy opened his fist slowly, as though hoping enough of the bread had pinched out to make it look like a fair distribution after all. But at least half of Vicente’s slice lay there pleading guilty to everything. Dove picked it out of his palm and tossed it to Vicente.

Murphy reddened but said nothing more.

‘I wouldn’t of done that if I were you,’ Country warned Dove, ‘that was the Mexican’s quarrel, not yours. What did I tell you about shaking another man’s jolt?’

‘We’re all shaking somebody else’s jolt anyhow, Country,’ Dove decided.

Kline was the only one of the prisoners who didn’t care whether he got cornbread or not. ‘Eat mine,’ he sometimes told Dove, extending his plate, and while Dove ate would wail a cheerful dirge—

Great itching lumps formed below Dove’s skin, and traveled so fast he could see them move. If he touched the cluster above his knee and then touched his ankle, in a minute his ankle was swollen and itching too. He waited till the turnkey passed, then threw open his shirt – ‘These whelps give me a terrible eetch, mister.’ The turnkey saw the nauseous lumps and returned with a spray-gun filled with insecticide.

‘All you got is the nettle hives,’ he told Dove, ‘this’ll burn your hide but it’ll cure it.’

Dove declined. ‘I’d ruther have my hide scrofuloed than scalded,’ he voted to stick with the nettle hives.

That night he saw himself lying asleep in a bed two stories over a murmurous street. Lights like fireflies went on and off, a piano played in an unseen court. And under the music as he slept and saw himself asleep, Dove heard a metal whirring as of tiny wheels on stone.

And sidewise, hand over stump and stump over hand, heard the hard ascent of the legless man up a gaslit stair begin.

Coming on as he’d been coming for years, by bar light, by star light, by mist light by stair, breathing heavier with each step, yet sure in his final hour to claim his own at last. There was time, just barely time, to lock the door against him. The key was in the lock but he lacked the strength to give it a full turn. Dove saw the rubber point of the short-hand crutch, that the cripple used to help him up stairwells, come through the wood of the door like the door was dust and wakened wishing he had never dreamt.

Bad air and boils – yet sometimes there came a day so blue it caught at the heart like a sense of loss – all these days too blue, all lost. Rainy days were melancholy but sunny ones were worse. When it was raining out there he could sink into a sullen half-dream where nothing could touch him. But blue days recalled his every folly and he’d think, ‘So much time gone! So little time left! Scarcely time left for a boy to rise!’

Murphy sat in his own cell, bent above a small digest called Guidance, which revealed, for one dollar a year, how to grow rich through prayer.

‘It don’t do no good for a man to rise these days, son,’ was Country Kline’s curious philosophy, ‘for that can’t be done any longer except on the necks of others. And when you make it that way, all the satisfaction is taken out of it. Son, I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but you got pimp wrote large all over you – but that’s the sorriest way of all to rise, and the reason I’ll tell you why – if God ever made anything better than a hustling girl He’s kept it to Himself. There’s no trick in not going down the drain if you don’t live in the sink. But you take a woman who makes her living where the water is sucking the weaker bugs down and she don’t go down, she’s twice the woman that one who never had to fight for her soul is.’

One day the tank grew strangely still. Murphy came to lean too casually against his door. He and Dove hadn’t been on speaking terms for a week.

‘What’s the extent of your education,’ he suddenly demanded of Dove.

‘It don’t extend nowheres, account I got none,’ Dove acknowledged.

‘What’s your excuse for being in here?’ Murphy persisted.

‘I was drinkin’ heavy,’ Dove told him.

‘Most you Injuns do.’

Apparently Murphy had given some thought to this.

‘I aint even part Injun, mister,’ Dove went along.

‘If you aint, what you squattin’ like one for?’

Dove, on his haunches with a blanket about his head, let smoke trail through his nostrils before he answered, knowing any answer had to be wrong.

‘My folks always set this way, mister. I notice sometimes you do yourself.’ And flicked his cigarette through the bars.

That was it.

‘Get up ’n put that snipe out,’ Murphy commanded. ‘You trying to burn the place down with all us white folks inside?’

‘I wouldn’t go throwin’ fire around, mister. That snipe is put out.’

‘Put it out again.’

‘Mister,’ Dove called to the African-violet fiend lounging in the run-around pretending he had been promoted to trusty, ‘Would you mind puttin’ out that put-out snipe for me?’

‘I didn’t give him the order,’ Murphy interrupted, ‘I give it to you.’

‘Then put it out yourself, mister.’

‘Deputy!’ Murphy called parties unseen, ‘bring in the prisoner of the court!’

Somebody spun Dove about, shoved him through the open door and down the run-around into a cell full of prisoners. He had never seen all the tenants of Tank Ten assembled, and now he wished he hadn’t till he felt stronger.

They looked like bulldogs, they looked like coyotes, they looked like real hard cases. The human dishrag with hair and brows so colorless he seemed more like something hung out to dry than anything actually living. His faithful timberwolf beside him, holding a spoon in event the rag should want it washed, shined or dipped in gravy. Wayback without a tooth in his head, standing beside Out-Front who had enough teeth for two. Wren, holding Dundee’s lunch bucket to keep Feathers from laying an egg in it, and Chicken Spanker himself, looking as though he’d like to peck somebody. And Gonzales, without his shovel. But who was ready to go all the same.

Even Murphy was dismayed. ‘Just look at the material they’re sending me. Who can do anything with material like that? Sec Fiend!’

Raincoat was late, he hadn’t known court was convening. He hurried in apologizing for the way he was dressed. Only Cross-Country Kline was missing and Dove was grateful for that.

‘Sec Fiend!’ Murphy demanded. ‘Who’s the judge of this here court?’

Several gave dull unseeing glances about: at walls, at bars, at windows, at doors, at faces in the winding air, for they didn’t know which sec fiend was meant.

‘Raincoat Sec Fiend!’ Judge Murphy made it plain as possible, ‘the court asked you a question!’

‘What was the question, Hon’r?’

His Honor had forgotten the question himself.

‘It don’t matter,’ he improvised cleverly, ‘Just tell the court who was it said he could whup you if he wanted and you admitted he could if he wanted.’

‘You could whup me any old time your Honor you wanted to whup me, your Honor.’ Timberwolf always wanted to be first.

‘You whup me too!’ They all got the idea at once, with envy, some even pretending that Murphy actually had so favored them.

‘You whup me somethin’ terrible,’ the Dishrag lied.

‘You whup me even worse,’ the Wolf just wouldn’t be outdone.

‘Whup even worse,’ the Bug began his echoing.

‘Get that one out of here,’ Judge Murphy decided.

‘One out of here,’ Bug had just time to agree before he was rushed back to his cell and told to stay there, they’d tell him the verdict later.

‘Tell you the verdict later,’ he agreed, being the most agreeable of bugs.

‘What I whup you with, mighty fellows?’ Murphy asked.

‘Big fistes!’ Sec Fiend shouted as though only now beginning to feel pain.

‘Big fistes is right,’ Murphy agreed and poked his fist right under Dove’s nose – ‘What it look like?’ he demanded to know, ‘Is it look like a man’s fist or don’t it?’

‘Wouldn’t be surprised if that aint but what it is,’ Dove shrugged indifferently.

Murphy stepped back, pulled a crumpled sheet of notepaper from his pocket and read while all listened reverently:

‘These are the rules of the Kangaroo Court. Any man found guilty of breaking into this jail without consent of the inmates will be fined two dollars or else spend forty days on the floor at rate of five cents per deem. Or else he could carry his Honor three times around the run-around piggyback if the jury recommended mercy.

‘Every man entering this tank must keep cleaned and properly dressed. Each day of the week is wash day except Sunday. Every man must wash his face and hands before handling food even his own. Any man found guilty of spitting in ash tub or through window will voluntarily duck his head in slop bucket, else have it ducked. Each and every man using toilet must flush with bucket immediately afters. Man found guilty by jury of his peers gets head ducked in bucket else he wants to or not.

‘Throw all paper in the coal tub. Don’t draw dirty pictures on wall, somebody’s sister might come visiting. When using dishrag keep it clean. Any man caught stealing off another criminal will have William Makepeace Murphy to reckon with.

‘Every man upon entering this tank with ven’ral disease, lice, buboes, crabs or yellow glanders will report same immediately. Any man found violating any of these rules will be punished according to the justice of the court and the jury of his peers and William Makepeace Murphy. Also Tank Treasurer.’

William Makepeace Murphy batted his eye at Dove, proud as a frog eating fire. ‘Every time you open your mouth from here on out it will be used against you. No mercy is this court’s motto.’

‘Then I won’t talk.’

‘Prisoner in contemp’!’ Dishrag chortled – ‘Boy, did you walk into that.’

‘He’s right,’ the judge backed up the peer. ‘You’re now in contemp’ somethin’ awful.’

‘Why?’ Dove asked.

‘Because I contemp’ you, that’s why, son.’ Murphy took a sympathetic tone, ‘I want to help you but you’re not helping me. If I were you I’d make a clean breast of all the dirty crimes you done and throw yourself on the mercy of the court. I think you’d feel better spiritually.’

‘But you said the court’s motto is no mercy.’

‘Using a legal loophold like that is even more contempt’ble. Now you’re deeper contempted than before.’

‘Ataboy, Judge!’ the Dishrag cheered, ‘walked right smack-dab into it again! Now he got to confess what he done!’

‘Why, I never did outrightly crime,’ Dove had to defend himself.

‘Of course not, because you’re a holy angel,’ Murphy congratulated him, ‘only where are your wings?’

This flash of wit literally rocked the cell. ‘Where are your wings, Holy Angel?’ ‘That’ll learn him to crack wise.’

Dove had to wait a minute before the court grew relatively quiet again.

‘I just meant I weren’t guilty of nothin’ you read in them rules,’ he explained.

‘Guilty of nothin’ you say? Why then it naturally follow you’re mighty innocent of somethin’. Let’s see you deny that one.’

‘Of course I’m innocent of nothin’,’ Dove began to get angry as he grew confused.

‘Then you’re guilty of everythin’, naturally.’

‘Guilty of everythin’!’ the Dishrag bleated, the Timberwolf beetled, Sec Fiend giggled and Feathers crowed, ‘Guilty! Everyone guilty of everythin’!’

‘Looks like you walked smack-dab into it again,’ Murphy mourned for him. ‘If you’d just own up the court might go lighter. What we call mightigating circumstance.’

‘I stand mute,’ Dove resolved suddenly.

‘Too late,’ Murphy still sympathized, ‘you’ve already confessed.’

‘Confessed nothin’,’ Dove protested. ‘I didn’t confess nothin’!’

‘You said you were innocent of nothin’, and if that aint confessin’—’

‘Innocent of nothin’! Guilty of everythin’!’

‘You’ve heard the verdict,’ Murphy informed him. ‘What are you standing there for? The slop bucket’s in the corner.’

‘I don’t duck my head in no slop bucket,’ Dove took a firm stand.

Country Kline came to lean in the door. ‘I suggest you recommend mercy, gentlemen,’ he told no particular gentleman.

‘Six piggybacks! Call that mercy,’ Dishrag decided.

His Honor waited to see whether the prisoner would accept commutation. Dove looked at Country. Country nodded.

Dove stooped, hands on knees as though for leapfrog and His Honor clambered onto his back. Then it was up and down and around, Dove bowed nearly double with the lank youth’s weight, while the jury of his peers raced from cell to cell, keeping count at every turn.

When the punishment was done and Murphy had dismounted he told Dove lightly, ‘It wouldn’t do no great harm to spend a little tobacco on the boys to show you don’t bear them no ill will.’

Dove handed the court his Picayunes. His jealousy satisfied, Murphy lit one for Dove.

Peace reigned in Tank Ten once again.

And the bugs were back in their beds.

Early next morning the turnkey came up long before the meat tins were due.

‘Kline! Get dressed! Sheriff ’s waitin’ on you. That’s all I know.’

But the tank knew more than that: the feds had come for Country at last. Yet Country took his own good time in getting ready, as though still unsure about what that judge might throw at him.

‘I need time to think this over,’ he told the waiting turnkey as though he had a choice in the matter.

At last he shook hands all around, and last of all with Dove. ‘See you a hundred stretches hence,’ he promised and Dove was sorry to see him go.

To go in a driving rain, when the Mardi Gras was done, but night bulbs still burned on.

The night bulb that usually dimmed at six was allowed to burn that morning till the courthouse chimes rang at nine. A minute after the bulb began fading. Slowly, as though burning out. And the cells were left shadowed by the night that had passed.

A dark and lost hour, the first Dove had spent in a cell all alone. When a faraway train called like a train going farther and farther from home and he thought, ‘That engineer sounds terrible lonesome.’

Later, by standing at the run-around window, he saw they were at it again in the Animal Kingdom. But he had lost all desire to keep count. Someone was trying to get a spitting contest going for a sack of Bull Durham, but no one wanted to play. A green Lincoln wheeled around the yard, swaying a bit down the unpaved alley, its siren rising as it hit the open street with headlights fighting the fog.

‘There go the nabs!’ he announced to the tier, and everyone came crowding to see, but by then it was gone.

Still its siren rang on the iron faintly and he felt dead sick for home.

All that wintry afternoon the Southern rain never ceased. In the run-around the prisoners gathered together uneasily as dark came on, to read the rules of the Kangaroo Court like men reading Genesis on a raft at sea. Toward evening came a lull in the rain: in the lull they heard boots climbing stairs as though burdened.

It always took the sheriff longer to open the Tank Ten door than the outer doors because it was opened by the brake locked in a box on the outer wall and the key to the box, smaller than his other keys, always eluded him for a minute.

The men listened while he fumbled. ‘Somebody with him,’ everyone sensed.

The sheriff and a deputy with a badge on his cap, and between them Country Kline bent double, and all three soaking wet. He looked somehow smaller and his toes kept scraping the floor as they half-dragged and half-carried him.

Beneath the cocky red cap his face was so drained of blood it held no expression at all. Somebody bundled a blanket and stuffed it through the bars. Country sagged, mouth agape.

When he was stretched out he clutched his cap against his stomach and drank the rain running off his hair. The fingers began searching feebly for the wound.

‘I knew I had him when I seen him vomick,’ the deputy explained. Country’s face was more gray than Dove had ever seen a living face and his eyes kept dilating with shock.

‘Shouldn’t have turned rabbit on us, dad,’ the sheriff reproved him while the doc swabbed the belly with cotton batting.

‘He jumped out of the car,’ the deputy seemed to feel he owed the men peering through the bars an explanation, ‘I hollered, but he just bent over and started zig-zagging. Not sure as I blame him. Ninety-nine years is a mighty long time.’

Country’s throat was the same dead-gray as his fingers; the color of the concrete that had held him so long; the color of his only home; as well as the hue of that new and untried shore to which for so long he had half-wished to go.

‘We’ll have to op-rate, dad. Say “Okay,”’ the sheriff asked.

Caught between the double disappointments of dying too soon or staying alive to no purpose whatsoever, his eyes looked inward to make a choice; unaware that the choice had been taken from him. Behind his eyes Dove saw the man racing like a fox in an ever-diminishing circle. It was so hard to go, it was so hard to stay, it was all so hard all the way. The fingers, wet with rain or sweat, twisted weakly on the cap, trying to keep hold; the eyes kept trying to understand.

The sheriff put one ear to his lips to hear the whisper of legalized consent. If it had been himself with the gun he would have gotten the man at the knees, he felt.

The fingers abandoned the cap and wandered about the wound’s gray edge, tracing the torn tissue to make sure it was at last his own.

‘Tell us we can op-rate, dad,’ he asked. ‘I ought to sew you now.’

Outside the rain ceased a minute, as though it too listened for the whisper. The doctor looked up at the sheriff and the sheriff looked down at the doctor, his face a mask of impassivity. He’d been sued once; he wasn’t getting sued again. The odor of iodine began filling the tank.

‘Say yes,’ Dove urged him, ‘Say yes, Country.’

The turnkey came up, trying to hurry and walk softly both at once. ‘They got some broad downstairs claims she used to be his old lady. Got papers to prove it, I didn’t look too close. No, I didn’t search her, I was afraid of what I’d find. Maybe she’ll say yes for him.’

‘“Used-to-be” don’t git it,’ the sheriff shook his head like a weary mastiff, ‘as I understand it, as long as he’s conscious he’s suppose to say it hisself. If he aint, it takes a legal relation, else I’m liable. First aid is as far as law give me the right to go.’

Outside the rain began again, Dove heard the wind blowing between the wash of it, trying to say ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’

But no one heeded the brainless rain and nobody heard what the wind tried to tell. For the wind and the rain came every day and whispered like two unpaid lawyers together all night, fixing to say what, in the coming day, what everyone wished to hear said.

‘It’s awful when it’s like this,’ Dove thought, ‘and it’s like this now.’

Out of the corner of his eye he felt he was being watched, yet did not turn his head. Something moved in the corner – that cat! Hallie’s brindle again! She made a dash for it right across the floor and as she turned a corner invited him, by one whisk of her tail, to follow. He followed into a room where a virgin burned vaguely high above and, closer at hand, a woodstove cast a heartshaped flame the flowing hue of blood. A woman’s black lace slip and a man’s blue jeans were entangled on the floor and he could not tell where the cat had gone. A layer of dust had fallen, long ago, across the floor and the walls. The entangled slip and the jeans that had, but a moment before, been clothing, was a heap of dust. Panes, pictures, doorways, curtains; all were dust.

He touched a speck to his tongue and it was not dust, but salt. As the light of the virgin too high on the wall began burning too bright and he wakened with the night bulb shining right in his eyes.

And the taste of salt on his tongue.

‘What’s the word on Country?’ he asked.

‘Turned his face to the wall half an hour ago,’ the turnkey replied.

And heard Gonzales grieving—

‘I feel like I been everywhere God got land,’ Dove thought, ‘yet all I found was people with hard ways to go. All I found was troubles ’n degradation. All I found was that those with the hardest ways of all to go were quicker to help others than those with the easiest ways. All I found was two kinds of people. Them that would rather live on the loser’s side of the street with the other losers than to win off by theirselves; and them who want to be one of the winners even though the only way left for them to win was over them who have already been whipped.

‘All I found was men and women, and all the women were fallen. Sports of the world, poor bummies, poor tarts, all they were good for was to draw flies I was told. You could always treat one too good, it was said, but you never could treat one too bad. Yet I wouldn’t trade off the worst of the lot for the best of the other kind. I think they were the real salt of the earth.’

And his heart remembered the harlots’ streets till it came to a rutted and unpaved road at the end of a little lost town. A town where time, going backward, had left great paving stones severed by wind and sand. And felt the wind still coming across the mesquite to where a single gas lamp at the end of town made a lonely fire. By midnight its faltering, flickering glow would lighten a legend across a dark pane:

‘Terasina,’ the boy asked in a small awed wonder of the woman who once had pitied his ignorance there, ‘Are you there? Are you there in your bed at the end of the world while I’m here in my bed at mine?’

On the morning that seven meal-tins came up instead of eight, an immediate clamor rose. A prisoner didn’t get breakfast the morning of his release. All were willing to go hungry for freedom’s sake. ‘Who’s makin’ it, Mr Foster?’ they had to know, ‘Who’s makin’ the big door?’

Dove, on his haunches and his blanket over his shoulders, answered instead for Mister Foster.

‘All you crim’nals can quit worryin’. It’s Linkhorn makin’ it today.’ He had kept exact count of the days.

The Rag, the Timberwolf, Sec Fiend, Natural Bug, Wayback and Out-Front, Chicken Spanker and the Honorable William Makepeace Murphy crowded about to wish him the worst.

‘You’ll be back tomorrow!’ Wayback promised.

‘Hell, he’ll be back tonight,’ Out-Front was sure.

‘Meanwhile, make this last you,’ Murphy said, and presented Dove with a sack of Bull Durham, neatly tied as a gift ought to be.

Dove hesitated. Gathered crumb by crumb from seven sacks, it was nearly three-quarters full. ‘And the papers,’ Murphy added proudly, holding out the pitiful gift.

Dove accepted. ‘I’ll see you guys,’ he told them, then shook hands on that understood lie, knowing he would never see a man of them all again.

In the mixed-up April of ’32 the numbers of jobless rose to eight millions, two hundred thousand steelworkers took a fifteen percent wage cut and it took a cardinal to perceive that the country’s economic collapse was actually a wonderful piece of luck, for every day it brought thousands closer to the poverty of Christ, who had been nowhere near before. For thousands it was the chance of a lifetime to bring Jesus’ simplicity, the cardinal said, right into the home. All over the country men and women and even small children began taking advantage of this spiritual opportunity. All manner of little goodies like that were lying about in the mixed-up April of ’32.

The D.A.R. demanded that unemployed aliens be deported; a mob lynched a man at Atwood, Kansas; a detachment of the Nicaraguan National Guard killed its American commander; a crisis in unemployment relief was imminent; somebody shot the President of France; cotton was up slightly following wheat and Huey Long said the time had arrived to redistribute the wealth. Russ Columbo was still singing Please.

Cuban sugar was held to imperil our own; Mayor Walker announced that New York Had Kept The Faith. The search for the missing Lindbergh infant was extended to England; Al Capone was on his way to Atlanta. Mayor Walker decried local pay reductions and Huey Long said he would vote Farmer-Labor before he’d vote with the ‘Baruch-Morgan-Rockefeller Democrats.’ Cotton was down again following wheat but the Congress decided not to redistribute the wealth after all.

In the curious April of ’32 Mussolini wrote a play and Calvin Coolidge had to make public apology and pay a St Louis insurance man twenty-five hundred dollars for calling insurance abstractors ‘twisters’ in a radio speech. Max Schmeling was taking his forthcoming fight with Sharkey seriously; California refused to pardon Tom Mooney and people were still singing I Surrender Dear. Senator Borah demanded that arms be reduced and atoms of hydrogen were transmuted to atoms of helium. The president of the University of Wisconsin announced that statesmanship had come to a full stop; Herbert Hoover was having his portrait painted; the Congress was asked to unseat Senator Bankhead and the crisis in unemployment relief was more imminent than ever.

In curious, long-ago ’32 so many people were saying that Prohibition was a failure that the New York Chamber of Commerce said it officially. Cotton was up again following wheat and domestic wine-growers demanded that domestic wines be made legal. A fragment of a human jawbone found near Lake Victoria was believed to be that of the earliest man. The Congress refused to unseat anybody. Kansas was the last state still voting dry and even Kansas was close to going wet. Sharkey was taking his forthcoming fight with Schmeling seriously and an ash-dust obscured the sun over Buenos Aires for forty hours.

‘The darker the valley the more the spirit of Christ-like charity appears,’ said that same cardinal in that strange brief spring, and New Orleans began planning a beer parade.

There, in Dockery’s Dollhouse while the juke played

a straight-haired flat-chested hard-of-eye hustler called Tough Kitty was trying to get credit for just one little beer.

But the bartender, acting as oddly as Hoover, didn’t seem to hear.

‘Did my husband leave owing you money or something?’ she wanted to know. ‘Is that what’s making you so salty over a simple deal like a glass of green beer?’

‘If you’re talking about a party name of Finnerty,’ Doc advised the girl, ‘he surely did, for he’s gone and he’ll never return.’

‘So long as I’m around you can be sure that sooner or later he’ll show up,’ Tough Kitty promised upon her word. ‘He thinks too much of me to leave me stranded and broke.’

‘He thinks so much of you,’ the old man asked mildly, ‘where is he now?’

‘I’m not free to tell,’ the girl answered before he’d finished asking.

‘And I’m not free to hand out free beers,’ Doc answered almost as fast.

So she drew from the pocket of her faded blue jeans a small change-purse and emptied it on the bar: twelve pennies and one nickel.

‘I got enough for a beer,’ she took count, ‘but not enough to get drunk on.’ And looked left-out of everything.

The old man brought the beer and scooped up half her pennies. ‘I’ve got a little money put by,’ he recalled casually, ‘I’d like to invest in a chicken farm. Do you know where I can go for advice?’

‘Why, that’s exactly what my Oliver—’ she cut herself short, the shrewd hard girl as gullible at the last as any. And the old man turned back to his dolls.

His dolls that were never drunken.

Someone pressed the buzzer just right and, peering out, he saw that bully, missing many days, that once had called himself Stingaree.

It was plain enough, the moment Dove came in, that if he wasn’t just out of hospital he was just out of jail. But so many had been in and out since the old man had last seen this one he had lost track of who was in where and who was out. And didn’t much care which.

‘Stay as long as you got something to spend,’ he warned the fellow, ‘then get out. Don’t let me catch you cadging others for drinks.’

‘I bought drinks for others a-plenty here and you never seemed to mind, old man,’ Dove reminded him.

‘I don’t mind yet,’ old Doc assured him. ‘Buy as many for others as you want. What are you having yourself?’

‘Whiskey and wash,’ Dove told him. The old man waited till he’d put his money down.

Dove poured his whiskey into his beer, taking his time with the pouring. Then took it to a table by himself, saying hello to no one. In the dingy light the panders and their women moved like people under water. Overhead the slow fans beat like the beat of a ship’s propellers heard on a deep sea floor. Though he had known everyone in the place by his or her first name only five months before, now they seemed people from some lost lifetime hardly known at all. When he asked a woman if she had seen Hallie, all he got was a shrug. Either the woman didn’t know or was too careful too tell. Nobody was long remembered on Old Perdido Street.

The only one whose memory of himself seemed fresh was the very one by whom he wished to be unremembered, with her side-of-the-mouth wise grin. Kitty came up to him but before she could either beg for a drink or offer him one, he shook his head, No. He was having no part of her.

It was a quiet afternoon. Dockery looked out once or twice to see that nobody was sneaking his own bottle. Of course the slobs were littering his floor once more – but a kind of tittering delight took him when his slobs did that, for it promised him the later joy of making all spick and span again. It was one of the few joys the old man had left.

He noticed Legless Schmidt’s platform leaning against a wall and Schmidt himself at a table, stumps sticking straight out before him, across from Tough Kitty. The old man approved of that: she wouldn’t be with him if he weren’t spending. He even thought of bringing them a couple shots, compliments of the house, to get them started, but then thought better of it. And took to dusting his dolls, giving Raggedy Ann special attention.

He never heard the first threat. There was only a sort of half-muted babble that rose for a moment above the fans’ steady thudding, then curiously subsided. When he looked out the redhaired bully with the hospital pallor had his back planted against the wall and Schmidt was standing before him, stumps spread wide, the flat of his palm on the floor to brace himself.

‘I got nothin’ against you, mister,’ Doc heard the bully say.

‘You deny you left with her? You deny living with her?’

‘I left with her and we lived together too. I don’t deny that, mister. But if I knew where she was I’d tell you. But I been away myself.’

‘Don’t give me that camouflage. You know where she is, for she sent you here to find out what I’m doing. You came by God because she sent you.’ He seemed oddly sure of himself. Kitty Twist stood just behind him. ‘You’ll say where she is, and you’ll take me there. Or by God you’ll take the consequences.’

‘Give the men room, boys,’ the outlaws and derelicts vied now like men of public spirit working for the welfare of all.

‘If it’s what they both want, let them have it out,’ Dockery took his stand, ‘’n no interferin’ – a square shake all around.’

‘Make ’em shake hands, Doc, that shows they’re both good fellas.’

‘Then let’s see which is best,’ Kitty Twist put her two cents in.

The panders pushed the women back, and as fast as they pushed them the women struggled up front again.

Then all felt the big hush come down.

‘Back up,’ Dove waved an iron spittoon, ‘I don’t want trouble,’ and took one step toward Schmidt.

Schmidt didn’t back but merely stood, figuring his man. Then turned, the women and men making room as he knee-walked to his platform and carefully buckled himself in.

‘Going home early, Big Dad?’ somebody asked, but the cripple didn’t answer that. His platform was his weapon as well as his armor, and they all knew that.

Dove began moving slowly along the wall toward where the late alley-light shown through a half-open door. If he got within one jump he’d make a run for that. And never come back.

But as he moved slowly Schmidt moved slowly, a ballbearinged monster with his hands on the bearings, ready to swivel, charge or reverse. Without closing in, the platform kept pace. Behind him, pale with pleasured terror, faces of men and faces of women followed and paused and followed again. With no sound in the place but the thud of the fans and the quickening breath, like a caught rabbit’s breathing, of one who was almost caught.

Dockery saw Schmidt’s lips moving silently, like a man trying a combination mentally before executing it. He feinted Dove to left, to right, and each time Dove switched the spittoon, left to right. ‘I don’t know where your wife’ – at ‘wife’ Schmidt gave his wheels one hard swift twist and thundered in, his forearm protecting his eyes.

Dove swung the heavy spittoon like a discus under the protecting arm. Schmidt rocked like a loosened stump in a storm but the platform kept coming in. Dove swung again.

The force of that second blow swiveled Schmidt’s wheels, he banged blindly in the wall and rebounded, wheels going this way then that.

‘Get him,’ Dove heard the whisper from every side, ‘Now. Now. Now. Brain him while he’s blind.’ For Schmidt’s head was so low that his bald-spot looked at Dove.

‘Now. Now. Now.’

Yet Dove stood with his weapon, gaping at that helpless head; and couldn’t lift the hand.

The cripple’s face, when he uncovered at last, was smeared by blood down the whole left side where the spittoon’s edge had ripped above and below the eye. Dove held out his own bandanna, for no one else offered Schmidt help. And watched while the half-giant daubed the blood off his face till he could see again. Then he touched the bandanna’s ends together as if to apologize for soiling it, and returned it to Dove. ‘Thank you son,’ he said.

Perhaps it was his tone that made Dove think that was it. For he pushed his way into the crowd. ‘The fight’s done,’ he said.

The crowd closed ranks.

‘The fight’s only begun,’ he heard Schmidt behind him say. ‘Get your best hold, son.’

And reached.

Dove leaped onto the small table at the bar’s far end and crouched upon it, trembling in the legs like a panicking puppy up there. Schmidt hurled the table with a single twist, sending Dove sprawling comic-strip fashion, all arms and legs, while the spittoon went clanging like a clock gone insane. The cripple held Dove face down to the floor, steadying him as he floundered. Then lifting him between his great hands, gave his hands that twist of a coiling spring. Dove hit the floor on his side, one arm outflung and the other across his eyes. Schmidt straddled the outflung arm by riding the platform over it and lifted the other off Dove’s eyes. When he let it go it fell loosely, as something unattached, an arm without a bone.

‘He’s had it,’ somebody said.

It was true: they crowded in to see. Whether stunned by his fall or fogged by fright, he lay like some animal whose final defense lies in complete helplessness, eyes bright and unseeing, open to anyone’s blows.

Schmidt looked down at the face suddenly like a child’s. Then he brought back his right arm till its knuckles touched the floor behind him. There were two men standing who could have put a foot upon it. But one stood looking down at the way the knuckles stretched the sunburnt skin. And the other said, ‘Cold as a frog,’ nothing more.

‘Faking,’ was Schmidt’s answer to that, and brought the arm high in a full-swinging arch – and down.

It broke with a soft and sogging sound, the very bones went oof.

‘I like to get up close to accidents,’ Kitty Twist pushed in, and put her ear down to Dove’s broken mouth, that was trying to speak though swallowing blood.

‘If you let me go,’ Kitty Twist heard him say, and repeated it for those not so lucky as to be as close as herself, ‘he says if you let him go—’

‘I’ll say a prayer for you—’

‘—he’ll say a prayer for you.’

‘Tell him to save his prayers,’ Schmidt told her, ‘I want to know where my wife is.’ He looked down at Dove. ‘Don’t think you can scare me with a little blood,’ he said.

Dove’s head wobbled weakly from side to side, still denying all.

And though, when Schmidt’s fist was raised again everyone thought ‘relent’ – panders and cripples and fallen girls, yet when it fell all felt a heartbroken joy. As though each fresh blow redeemed that blow that his life had been to him.

Later, a woman who saw that the face on the floor was no longer a face but a mere paste of cartilage and blood through which a single sinister eye peered blindly, recalled: ‘When I seen him on the floor unable to rise and fight back, it went right through my mind – Murdering. Murdering. Why give him a chance?’

And when it was done Schmidt looked all around like a man in a lifting daze. He looked at them all as though there were something they knew he did not know. As if he did not understand the blood that was fouling his hands.

Kitty Twist knelt to put her thin arms around the cripple’s neck, and her lips were almost on his before he pushed her off, his eyes glassed by disgust.

‘Get this man help and open the doors,’ he commanded, and the doors were opened just in time to let the last of daylight in.

Schmidt saw the day and the open door. Yet he sat his platform without a move until Dockery said, ‘Get him out of here.’

And eagerly then, its tension relieved and its contempt wakened, the crowd went for the half-giant as though he were just some sort of thing. One shoved him from behind. Another hauled him by his hair. While another began kicking the little wheels that only a minute before he had feared; but that now didn’t move fast enough to please him. While that same poor bitchified prey, Kitty Twist, spat down the nape of his neck.

And he took it, Schmidt took it, he took it all. Like a statue of grief with a sorrowing air, as though he had done nothing more than their own work for them: a saint of the amputees.

Out of the speakeasy that had outlived its time, through the final door of a dead decade, they wheeled the deposed hero that once had been a man. Onto a downhill street.

Somebody gave the platform a shove. And waited a minute, with others who waited, to watch the thing reel from one side of the walk to the other, gathering speed as it lost control, making uphill trudgers dodge like dodging a drunken wrong-way driver – when it hit the telephone pole not one laughed. They merely stood watching to detect, from their distance, some movement from that crumpled lump, half on the curb and half on the street. But saw no movement at all.

Inside they heard the juke box begin—

And returned inside with the executive air of men ready, if need be, to vie with one another for whatever was best for the public welfare.

On Saturday nights the backland squatters came into Arroyo by Model T and by cart, but most came by foot. Some had shoes and some had none. But booted or barefoot they all shambled; and the woman stayed just a step behind all the way. She would have her shawl drawn across her mouth to keep the dangerous night-damp out and he would be breathing into a handkerchief or bandanna; after the Mexican manner.

But when they got into town there was so much talking to be done they forgot all about the dangerous air, or perhaps the air inside the city limits was made of better stuff. For the women chattered through all the stores, pointed in the windows with other wives or went to see a movie starring Rod La Roque. They all tried to get the old man to the movie too, whether he would or no: that much less chance of his getting drunk was the point.

He seldom fell for that. He sent her in and shambled off to the courthouse steps to hear if the preacher had anything to say he hadn’t said on a thousand other Saturdays.

An uneasy rumor was going around that the old man wasn’t as strong against the Pope as he once had been. In fact he didn’t seem as strong against anything as he once had been. The wrath and the fire that had been as good as a free shot of tequila seemed to have gone out of Fitz.

Was it whiskey or weariness that had caught up with him? Or just that, since Byron had been buried, there was nobody left to heckle him? Whatever it was, when he led them to the uttermost edge of Damnation now and forced them to look over the terrible rim, the fall they saw was no more than a foot or two into a coal yard of rain-wetted cinders with a few rusty beer cans lying about. Broken gin bottles lay among the dead slag that held promise of neither flame nor fire. They sniffed for the assurance of sulphur on the air: and smelled nothing but marigold that grows in old dumps.

Marigold mixed with the scent of blown dust that they knew so well it had no more scent than air. The old man had not really taken them anywhere.

Yet out of courtesy and having nowhere else to go, they still listened to the threats of his faded passion.

‘The glory is gone from motherhood,’ he told them. ‘Women who smoke and drink and wear pants are unfit to be mothers of men. What a monster-osity is a cursing, drinking, smoking, painted, bobbed-haired mother! When the Pope says modern woman is an insult to her maker he got more backbone than our own protestant preachers. Didn’t the Lord say, if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her?

‘More shameful things are worn by women on the open street these days than were worn in brothels a few years ago,’ the old man went on and on. And there was nobody to ask him how did he know what had been worn in brothels a few years ago.

‘Even our little girls are turned out into the streets almost naked, inviting God’s judgement on sin black as Sodom! Are we willing to pay the price?’ he asked, and answered his own question, ‘When it comes to God dealing with a nation’s sin, there are no dollar days. Are we willing to pay the price?’

They stared up at him indifferently. If they had the price of anything they would be in the movie or brothel, that look told.

Few noticed, in that dusky light, the man in the city suit, a broken feather in his cap, leaning against a tree in the shadows. Strangers came through town at all hours these days.

‘He’s lost the call, that’s all,’ Dove realized, trailing his hand down the howitzer barrel to where he felt it narrowing. Then touching a tree to his left with his walking stick, touched his way to the street. ‘Not paved yet,’ he thought at the stick’s first touch of the familiar dust.

Under the street lamp in front of the domino parlor two Mexicans saw him coming along the curb. One took a step toward him to guide him across the street, but the other held him back. ‘If he needs help he’ll ask for it,’ he told his friend.

The man didn’t need help, it appeared. He waited for a cart to pass, then went without haste but directly down that old road that had once led west.

This was in that hour that frogs begin, when the scent off the honey mesquite comes strongest.

Deep in the chaparral frogs were clamoring. As he came near they ceased, were quiet as he passed; then set up a clamor again. It was that hour that frogs begin, when the scent off the honey mesquite comes strongest.

Behind him a car, sounding more like a Chevie than a Ford, came banging by and pulled up a few yards ahead.

‘Give you a lift, bud?’ a man’s voice asked. As he came to the car Dove caught the scent off a woman’s clothes.

‘Am I going the right way to the chili parlor?’ he asked.

‘You’re standing fifty feet from it now,’ a girl’s voice told him.

‘Can you see if there’s a light in it?’

He felt her bare arm as she leaned across him to see.

‘There’s a light upstairs,’ she reported. ‘Should I holler them down for you?’

‘Thank you kindly, I’ll find my own way now,’ he told her. He heard the little car go banging back and felt himself alone in the big Rio night.

And felt a strange content in that.

‘If God made anything better than a girl,’ Dove thought, ‘He sure kept it to Himself.’

That was all long ago in some brief lost spring, in a place that is no more. In that hour that frogs begin and the scent off the mesquite comes strongest.