Behind a radiator it had hidden the baretoothed carcass of a kitten dead for weeks, and was suckling it. The kitten’s teeth were bared to the bone of the jaw but the brindle put her mouth to the wasted belly and pushed against the death-stretched hide. Dove began beating it to make it quit but it felt no blows; though he beat it a long time. At last it looked around at him.
Along its whiskers fresh milk gleamed, and the dream went out slowly, like a twenty-watt light bulb saying goodnight.
Nobody on Perdido Street considered the legless man a freak. No one told that once, for a few brief weeks, he had once let himself be billed as one. For no one who knew that lion-browed gaze could doubt his profound naturalness. Below the heavy brows his eyes, set wide, burned even as candles in a room with no wind. Schmidt never blinked. He sat his platform like a saint of the amputees and gave you gaze for gaze. When at last you turned your eyes away he touched his little brown beard as much as to say, ‘I’ve seen enough of you too, friend.’
He sold his wares and made his bets and drank his beer both dark and light and never forgot his dignity; nor permitted others to forget it. Once a girl had told him, ‘Keep your money, you need it worse than me,’ and had meant it kindly. But the man waiting like a mutilated statue on the low bed’s edge, had paled below his tan.
‘You should never have said that, sis,’ he told her and lowered himself and left.
Yet, the very next afternoon, the same girl had handed him a five dollar bill for a twenty-five cent bottle of perfumed water and he’d pocketed the five without even the pretense of making change.
Some saint. When you gave, he felt, you gave it all. When you took you took it all.
Now, nearing forty, having rebuilt his whole life on the rock of sheer courage, he felt the rock shift and could not believe it. Surely a man who has been once destroyed and fought back to the land of the living would not be picked for destruction twice. God would not permit it.
He was Schmidt who needed nobody, he was Schmidt who could never lose. And yet when he thought of Hallie, surely the rock slipped. How had his life, that he’d held so hard, come to be cupped lightly in a woman’s palm, and the woman herself to be held in any nameless stranger’s arms?
The thought sent him kneewalking about his small room, pounding his stumps in a blood-colored tantrum; for the neon traffic light beside his window flashed from red to dull gold and back to the hue of blood again. The stumps! The stumps were to blame for everything!
‘One at the hip and one at the knee’ – he punished both at once with his hands like hammers, sending a wire of white pain zig-zagging through his breast to his brain.
The stumps! The dirty stumps! He gasped like a great seal for air, air. Not again. Not twice.
Then composing himself began to wheel slowly, for wheeling was therapy for his rage. And as he wheeled remembered, and remembering, loved again. Saw her standing in a bead-curtain doorway as though even now she were waiting only for him; and how she would turn her head slowly when he rolled in, and how she would not look at him with pity, and how her mouth would say ‘darling’ just to him.
‘I’ll get this out of my system tonight once and for all,’ Schmidt promised himself.
But before he’d go to Mama’s he’d have a taste of Dockery’s booze, to numb the pain in the stumps before making love. And a bit of talk with other cripples to numb the pain in his breast.
Dockery catered to cripples, and one that was almost sure to be on hand was Kneewalking Johnson; whose handicaps were greater even than Schmidt’s own. Johnson was a Negro, and owned no platform. He had padded his stumps with leather and reinforced the pads with tin. To Schmidt there was something so backward about stumping up and down the city’s walks on tin plates that he felt it his duty to modernize Johnson.
‘Get on this thing,’ he ordered. Johnson didn’t want any part of the platform, yet didn’t wish to offend the Big Half.
‘I get along alright, Mister ’chilles,’ he reported without looking at the raft, ‘I got my own way.’
‘Can you back?’ Schmidt demanded. ‘Can you swivel? Can you move sidewise? Can you make good time?’ And to show just what he meant he wheeled straight toward the juke, made an airbrake stop – ‘back!’ he backed, ‘swivel!’ he swiveled, ‘sidewise!’ his hands on the wheels seemed mechanically driven, pimps and cripples and their girls scattered while cool heads got chairs in front of them – it was like being in a swimming pool with a rudderless motorboat.
Dockery stayed in the dark of his bar so that none might see his narrow smile. He loved seeing men and women in panic and flight, did old Doc Dockery, closed in with all their sins. Whatever ran over them only served them right, that smile revealed.
‘Now let’s see you try it,’ Schmidt paused at last.
Johnson had no choice. Hands lifted him and other hands buckled him fast, then everyone stood back.
‘Give the man room,’ Schmidt commanded, ‘give the man a chance.’
So the old man with kinked hair gone white, and nothing beneath his chest but a pair of short pants that small boys wear, put his hands, that were only half the breath of Schmidt’s and yet a full inch longer, to the wheels. And rolled himself gently back and forth, forth and back. Only a timid roll forward, only a shy roll back. As though he had not a room as big as a dance floor to move in but just a tiny cell.
It was no use. Nobody could get Johnson to be more daring. It grew tiresome watching him roll those few feet up and back till someone put a coin in the juke thinking that music might liven the old man up.
But when the music began all that happened was that the old man sang along with it and rolled no faster than before.
he made a strange, sorrowing cripple’s dance—
‘Now you see how much better it is my way?’ Schmidt told him when he’d performed as best he could and had been allowed to unbuckle himself and kneewalk to the bar for the beer that was his reward. ‘Once you get used to it,’ Schmidt assured him, ‘you’ll be ashamed that you ever went around in that old-fashioned way. I’ll get you the wood, I’ll get you the skates and straps, I’ll even put it together for you. Man, you’ll be proud to be on skates.’
‘Mister ’Chilles,’ the Negro felt obliged to assert himself at last, ‘what you don’t keep in mind is I caint work main-town routes like you. I aint allowed on Canal, I aint allowed in white neighborhoods. They tells me to get my livin’ off my own people ’n the walks is all bust and cracked out there. Lots of places aint no walks at all, just old rutty wagon roads. I come to a broke walk or a mud-hole after rain, what I’m gonna do with a big old board like that? I got to unstrop myself, haul that old board through the mud or down a drop, then strop me up again. So you see, Mister ’Chilles, I wouldn’t be savin’ time, I’d be losin’ it.’