A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren Page B

juke so that it would play without a nickel. It came on playing
Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland
; for, like herself, it was divided between American and Mexican songs.
    The next song was her choice –
Cuando sale de la luna
and Dove couldn’t get enough of that. She spiked a coke with tequila and asked him how Angloes could drink the sticky stuff without spiking it. His answer was to agree with her by adding another shot. He began to shift, one foot to the other like a happy bear that had never been happy before—
I’d like to live in Dreamland
With a girl like you
    It had been so long since she had herself felt joy, it eased her deeply now to see another’s. He was one of the strange ones all right, and certainly no florist. He smelled of sweat and salt. No day-lily had touched him.
    ‘I like to see men dance—’ her own voice surprised her, and she changed the record back to the juke’s Mexican side.
Adios, mi corazon
    Every time the juke cried out ‘
corazon
,’ Terasina hiccupped. The third time it happened she seized Dove’s hand and held it hard across her nostrils and mouth, encouraging him to press. ‘
Empuje
,’ she ordered the Mexican cure for hiccups. With one arm about her shoulders to brace her, he pressed so hard she began to choke and he had to stop.
    ‘Death is a poor cure for hiccups,’ she informed him.
    She preferred dancing to hiccups or death. Her joy was to hear the eager mingling of human voices, with children’s among them, like voices heard on the other side of a wall where strangers are having a birthday party; and never know one listens who never can enter there.
    Once she had heard a young father asking forgiveness and seen the young mother make reply simply by giving suck to his only child. That memory tugged at Terasina’s darkly encircled nipples yet, at her own white breasts so aching.
    ‘In Jesus is my peace,’ she told the mirror in her small room, ‘
en tristes horas de tentacion, en Jesus tengo paz
.’ And the mirror looked back as much as to say I think somebody just lied.
    And strangely, for one so devout, in dreams sought neither peace nor Jesus. She would find herself back in some Mexican place, the hour midday and all shades drawn. In wan doorways wan dreams of Mexican dogs dreamed on.
    Everyone in the city slept save one whose hand rested on the knob of her door as though it had rested there for hours. ‘It is so hot in the street,’ the listener beyond her wall complained in a voice much too used to lying. ‘May I have water?’
    ‘Only Jesus may drink here,’ she forbade him, and wakened with a sense of dry loss clutching her throat. Outside the rainwind was making mirrors of every ditch. She saw the true stars walking hand in hand down paving stones to the end of town. And then walk back again – like lovers coming home.
    Suddenly the cup in her hand looked so empty, she dashed the water across the floor, poured it running-full of tequila; till it too ran over.
    And drank, with her hands shaking and her back turned to the wall lest the Virgin Mary see her.
     
    After
Sesos lampreados
, coffee and makin’s left Dove as dissatisfied as had the Sunday funnies, once he had seen a book.
    So after the day’s last driver had gone Terasina opened her other book to him.
    Now Dove saw a Chinese prince in flight, bearing lightly on his back a flaxen-haired boy with a green feather stuck in his hat; a fairy princess in a nutshell afloat on a leaf, cowering from a gigantic bullfrog saying ‘“Croak croak croak” was all her son could say for himself;’ a little patched man driving a herd of cows while smoking a clay pipe; and reindeer, Santa Clauses, dancers, goblins, ducks, mandarins, angels, castles and teapots and trees half as old as the earth.
    But the one that trapped Dove’s interest completely was the steadfast tin soldier who shouldered his musket bravely although he had but one leg.
    He had been made last, there had been not quite enough tin to finish