Dove had a railroad bull to thank for his life, and other bulls less to thank for. They wouldn’t come into the cars by day, when they were crowded, but hurried discreetly past as if the cars were empty. But at night they’d get four or five ’boes off by themselves and really go to work on them.
One noon an armed nab stuck his nose in a boxcar door – ‘Come on out of there one by one!’
Nobody moved. Each knew that the first to go out would get bloodied, while those who followed might get by unscratched.
‘I said “Come out” by God!’
Nobody moved.
‘By God you don’t come out, we come in.’
Their silence dared him.
‘You know,’ he turned with feigned boredom to someone behind him, ‘I’m so tired of kickin’ asses I just think I’ll start crushing skulls.’
The second he said that somebody leaped to be the first – the deputies mobbed him while the others scattered free. Three bulls with gun butts to one unarmed stray was the common yardstick of the railroad bull’s courage. No man with the nerve to go after another with only a gun against bare fists could become a railroad bulclass="underline" you had to have at least two other guns on your side to measure up to a vocation wherein ferocity betrayed innate cowardice.
Sometimes the bulls took everyone off a train, marched them downtown, fingerprinted and photographed the lot, then released them with the warning, ‘Now we got a record on you. If you try riding through here again you go to the pea-farm.’ Thus the homeless were blocked out of town after town, until almost any town you could name had issued fair warning to anyone what would happen to him if he tried it again.
Another afternoon Dove jungled up with four others beside a creek. Those who had used this patch of jungle before had left a sign asking those who came after to leave it as clean as they’d found it. Moreover, someone had left a pair of almost new shoes for Dove to find. They fitted as though made for him.
A couple of the boys got a mulligan going. Dove lay naked in the creek smoking a cigarette and smelling the mulligan. It was his first peaceful moment since leaving Arroyo.
He didn’t see the officers until he heard the shots. One put six holes into the mulligan pot – it steamed into the fire while the strays fled. Dove’s head peeked out of the water like a sitting duck’s. He came out dripping and sheepish.
The game then was to see how fast a bum could get dressed while getting smashed in the head with billys from both sides. He got one for his shirt, two for his pants, and would have gotten by with no more than that if he’d had the sense to run for it. But in the midst of blows he had to sit down and try to pull on his shoes – that got him so many that he ran without them at last.
When he hopped off the yards in Algiers across the river from New Orleans his head was still aching.
He got the topmost layer of blood and soot off his face at somebody’s pump. Offering a nickel to the tolltaker at the ferry, the man jerked his thumb in a come-ahead-son gesture – ‘The lady paid for you.’
Dove saw a middle-aged woman who had walked onto the ferry ahead of him. He walked up beside her, nickel still in hand.
‘I’ll pay my own way, thank you kindly all the same, m’am,’ he told her, and dropped the nickel in her palm. She turned beet-red but Dove felt better.
When the boat pulled into the pier and a deckhand hurled a coil of rope to fasten the boat to the dock, Dove rushed up and helped him tie it. But all he got for his trouble was an irritated, ‘I’ll handle this, son.’
That was how Dove came at last to the town that always seems to be rocking. Rocked by its rivers, then by its trains, between boat bell and train bell go its see-saw hours.
The town of the poor-boy sandwich and chicory coffee, where garlic hangs on strings and truckers sleep in their trucks. Where mailmen wore pith helmets and the people burned red candles all night in long old-fashioned lamps.
The town where the Negro women sang,
And piano-men at beat-out pianos grieved—
On the Desire Street dock Dove turned into the first place he saw where beggars and bummies can lie down to rest.
‘Look like you been a-fightin’ a circle-saw, son,’ the desk-clerk told him.
‘No. Just sortin’ wild cats.’
‘I’ll give you a nice quiet room then, where you can rest up undisturbed. I came to town barefoot myself, so green you could scrape it off me with a cob.’
‘I’m a quarter light of proper change, mister,’ Dove observed without touching his change, ‘I think you’ve made a small errow.’
The clerk came up with the palmed quarter. ‘You’ll be wearing shoes sooner than I did,’ he laughed. ‘Up the steps and first room to your right.’ Between the first room to the right and the tenth there was no difference. All were equally keyless.
The ceiling was chicken wire. By the smell the chickens were still somewhere near. But the bed was exactly what an exhausted bum needed.
Dove slept through the dusty evening into the feverish night. And all night heard the river boats call and call.
Once he heard a woman, sounding like she was standing alone on a corner, telling the world all about it—
Under wire on either side other dime-a-nighties slept out their ten-cent dreams. Till the hundred harps of morning struck on strings of silvered light.
And down the long unshaded street a vendor of colored ices beat a rainbow of tin bells. A bell for every flavor as he tinkle-tinkled past. Every flavor made of water sold to tunes made out of tin.
Come bummies, come beggars, two pennies per tune.
With occasional glances at the metal net to see no one was peeking, Dove was bringing each bill before his eyes, memorizing its denomination and adding that to the one before. Stretching each carefully in the hope that two might be sticking together.
When he reached forty, one loose single still lay on the bed. So he began all over with the one loose child. And was only satisfied that he was the owner of forty-one dollars when he had counted back once again.
A Linkhorn was rich at last.
Old-time sterno drinkers and bindlestiff nomads made the flophouse forenoon murky with their hard-time breath. But he was a Linkhorn in a cubicle all his own. He owned neither shirt nor shoes – but joy to a world full of shirts and shoes. One loose tooth was a small penalty enough to wake up being Dove Linkhorn.
Too bad, of course, about that little fool gal who hadn’t been smart enough to keep from getting herself pinched. Kids like that shouldn’t try crime till they knew what they were doing. ‘I hope this proves a lesson to that child to go straight before it’s too late,’ he hoped. ‘She weren’t cut out for the life like us crim’nals with a more natural bent.’
A little handkerchief, torn nearly in two and gray now with soot, dropped out of his pocket onto the floor. When he brushed off the soot he saw it was black and had once had lace on it. He felt a certain stiffness in its folds. And felt a shadowy apprehension that he might never hurt anyone except those who were dearest.
That he would know an abundance of pangs, some swift, some slow, some merely passing, and one that would never let him go.
‘Hopes I didn’t hurt you bad, Señora,’ he explained. ‘Just when I was gettin’ ready to help you up to say I didn’t mean what I done, that fool engineer blew his whistle and I had to hasten on.’