A Walk on the Wild Side

“A walk on the wild side.”

“Cotton grew, fruit grew, oil gushed a year and dried. Before it dried Fitz put in a year as a gaffer, made good money and found his girl. A girl who had thought herself rough enough. / Cotton failed, fruit failed – oil had spoiled the soil. It became a country of a single crop, and the crop was dust. Fifteen years of it did the girl in, feeling she'd had enough of oil.”

“Her breath began drawing slower, soot and sleep sealed her eyes. / Her face in sleep looked furtive yet innocent, like one already punished for a crime she hasn't grown up to commit. When she was old enough to commit it she'd find it.”

“‘The poorer people are the more likely they are to help you,’ Kitty told him the next morning after they had once again left engine and cars in charge of the crew. ‘Pick the first unpainted shack you see.’ / She followed Dove into a littered yard and waited while he rapped the door of a knocked-together-by-hand house the color of soot. A soot-colored wife came to answer.”

“All he recalled clearly was opening the door the next morning and seeing a veil of mist so blue it blurred the outlines of house, hill and tree. And as the morning warmed the whole big blue world began to smoke faintly. / Louisiana. / In the long afternoon the clouds stacked. And still, over it all, that pale shifting veil. / A real southland haze in which one sees whatever one wishes to see. A haze that seeps behind the eyes and makes a wish-dream of everything.”

“When opening time was closing time and everyone was there, down where you lay your money down, where it's everything but square, where hungry young hustlers hustle dissatisfied old cats and ancient glass-eyed satyrs make passes at bandrats; where it's leaping on the tables, where it's howling lowdown blues, when it's everything to gain and not a thing to lose – when it's all bought and paid for then there's always one thing sure: it's some Do-right Daddy-O running the whole show.”

“He came to an intersection where one road led to town and the other away. The town road was festooned, street lamp to street lamp, with welcoming pennants; it was wide and newly paved. The other was lampless and pennantless and plainly led nowhere at all. Without hesitation Dove chose the nowhere road. For that was the only place, in his heart of hearts, that he really wanted to go.”

“‘My line of work, as you may have guessed, Tex, is women. Do you know anything about them?’ / ‘I know that if God made anything better I aint come across it yet, but that's as far as my knowledge goes.’”

“‘When you start hitting toward sixty,’ Gross complained, ‘you feel some days like you want to take a cab to the graveyard and wait for your maker beside your stone. Yet when you've not had an hour's true contentment out of all those sixty years, you don't want to lay down till you've had your hour. You want something for all your pain.’”

“Finnerty, who looked like one of those little Australian foxes with ears half the length of its body, claimed to be five foot but had to be wearing his cowboy boots to make good the boast. / [...] / Oliver owned five women, a single-motored plane and a captive mouse. He claimed to be the first pander in the entire South to transport women by plane. A claim making every single one of the five proud of their five-foot daddy.”

“That nothing could lower human dignity faster than manual labor was understood. ‘Go get yourself a lunch bucket and get back in your ditch’ was the ultimate insult on Perdido Street.”

“The courts were against them, the police were against them, businessmen, wives, churches, press, politicians and their own panders were against these cork-heeled puppets. Now the missions were sending out sandwich men to advertise that Christ Himself was against them.”

“‘We're all a little on the odd side,’ Hallie guessed, ‘from the life we've led. The life we've all led.’ And taking his hand led him to the bed. / ‘I don't mean for you to love me,’ she had to tell him a minute after, ‘just hold me. Hold.’ / Dove held her, sensing only dimly that in holding her he was saving her.”

“When they came to the monkey house he stopped dead. In one cage a hairy little character was banging his knuckles on his girlfriend's skull to make her climb a tree for some special purpose all his own. / ‘Why! There's [a pimp] and [his whore]!’ Dove called to Hallie in real glee, and pitched popcorn at [the pimp]. Then of a sudden it didn't seem so funny after all, and they moved on.”

“A single iron-colored owl waited in the shadows of noon like a dream waiting only for nightfall to be dreamt. And a scent of decay blew off him, as though he were rotting under his feathers. / To watch where the elephant, crowned with children, swayed as he walked to excite the children. He looked like a great fool of a child himself. Yet he bore the weak upon his back.”

“In the middle of the first act the boat was caught in a wash and the whole stage tilted a bit. It was by this time obvious to the front rows that Othello, with a bad job of makeup, was tilting slightly on his own. But retained sufficient presence of mind, when he needed to lean against the air, to bear against the tilt of the stage rather than with it. By this instinctive device Othello held the front rows breathless, wondering which way he'd fall should he guess wrong.”

“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.’ [...] ‘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.’”

“‘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.”

“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.’”

“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.”

“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!’”

“‘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.”