A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren Page A

wrench in his hand. Other times there would be only two big dirty feet sticking out from under a truck, the toes spread tensely lest the job be unfinished when the driver was ready to haul. What was he always so anxious about?
    Or he’d just be leaning against the tin sign – FLATS FIXED – that whirled one minute this way and the next minute that as the wind off the chaparral passed and repassed. Beside it he could stand looking as lonesome as though tires were going out of style, treasuring each drag on his roll-your-own cigarette.
    ‘What do I owe you, Red?’ she heard a trucker asking and the redhead replying, ‘Makin’s ’n cawfee do jest fine for me, mister.’ She knew by his voice then he needed more than tobacco and coffee. ‘Hungry all the way down,’ Terasina guessed.
    Apparently he thought money was going out of style too. Coffee and a sack of Bull Durham was his rate for an hour’s sweating labor in the sun. It angered Terasina, who could tell a ten-dollar bill from a Mexican nickel either side of the river, to see older men take advantage of him.
    At last she had told a driver herself. ‘Changing two tires and a battery, six bitses please.’
    ‘The kid said coffee and a sack.’
    ‘Changing two tires and battery six bitses please.
I
set price at
La Fe
.’
    The driver put six bitses down. Terasina didn’t touch it. ‘
And
tip for boy please.’
    The driver extracted a final dime and left without a word. The way Dolores Del Rio was feeling today he didn’t feel he could afford it.
    ‘You take it,’ Dove told her when she put the money beside his cup, ‘for letting me hang around.’
    She rang it up promptly – pshtang! ‘Okay! You got it!’
    Six bits credit – he had it.
    He decided, after due thought, on
Sesos lampreados
 – brains wrapped in egg. She brought the order, fit for a section hand.
    All she saw, for a while then, was his big thick ears sticking up like handles. All she heard was the beat, like a tribal drum, of knife and fork against his plate.
    ‘—’ n cornbread, m’am. I can eat cornbread till the world looks level.’
    A minute later: ‘I’ll take a bowl of chili please m’am.’
    ‘
Segundoes?
’ she asked when the chili was gone.
    A single bean lodged in the corner of his lip. ‘
Si, señora
.’
    And under the browless eyes there burned remembrance of ancestral hungers; again the tribal drum beat fast.
    ‘You like more?’ she smiled weakly. ‘
Chicharrones
maybe?’
    ‘I got most all I can chamber,’ he admitted at last – ‘but for a slab of that cross-barred pie.’
    She fetched the cross-barred pie and coffee. Stooping so far to get his lips to the saucer that his back stood up like a surfacing whale’s, he slurped it up with one magnificent slurp.
    As close as she could figure it he now owed her eighty cents. She brought a broom.
    He took it and shuffled heavily, right shoulder still higher than the left, to the door. Then, suddenly fired by the hottest chili north of Chihuahua, stormed from the front porch to the rear, behind the counter and up the stairs. He swept her room as if preparing it for holy services, then broomed the steps down in such a cloud that she rushed up with a sprinkling can.
    He washed dishes, scrubbed eatingware till it shone and patched a screen in a minute. Then announced some triumph from the kitchen – ‘
Uno! Dos!
’ He was swatting flies with the
Police Gazette
.
    ‘Is al
right
,’ she sought to calm him, ‘every
thing
is square.’
    Then in the stilly mid-afternoon hush that comes to all old chili parlors they sat together over
How To Write Better Business Letters
.
    ‘This is how letters make words,’ she told him. ‘The first letter is “A”’ – she made him push up and cross the A. ‘Alright. Now “B.”’
    Thus a child taught a child.
    When he had shown improvement in both letters she suddenly wearied of the game and found another – how to trip the little key behind the coin box of the