Yet out of courtesy and having nowhere else to go, they still listened to the threats of his faded passion.
‘The glory is gone from motherhood,’ he told them. ‘Women who smoke and drink and wear pants are unfit to be mothers of men. What a monster-osity is a cursing, drinking, smoking, painted, bobbed-haired mother! When the Pope says modern woman is an insult to her maker he got more backbone than our own protestant preachers. Didn’t the Lord say, if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her?
‘More shameful things are worn by women on the open street these days than were worn in brothels a few years ago,’ the old man went on and on. And there was nobody to ask him how did he know what had been worn in brothels a few years ago.
‘Even our little girls are turned out into the streets almost naked, inviting God’s judgement on sin black as Sodom! Are we willing to pay the price?’ he asked, and answered his own question, ‘When it comes to God dealing with a nation’s sin, there are no dollar days. Are we willing to pay the price?’
They stared up at him indifferently. If they had the price of anything they would be in the movie or brothel, that look told.
Few noticed, in that dusky light, the man in the city suit, a broken feather in his cap, leaning against a tree in the shadows. Strangers came through town at all hours these days.
‘He’s lost the call, that’s all,’ Dove realized, trailing his hand down the howitzer barrel to where he felt it narrowing. Then touching a tree to his left with his walking stick, touched his way to the street. ‘Not paved yet,’ he thought at the stick’s first touch of the familiar dust.
Under the street lamp in front of the domino parlor two Mexicans saw him coming along the curb. One took a step toward him to guide him across the street, but the other held him back. ‘If he needs help he’ll ask for it,’ he told his friend.
The man didn’t need help, it appeared. He waited for a cart to pass, then went without haste but directly down that old road that had once led west.
This was in that hour that frogs begin, when the scent off the honey mesquite comes strongest.
Deep in the chaparral frogs were clamoring. As he came near they ceased, were quiet as he passed; then set up a clamor again. It was that hour that frogs begin, when the scent off the honey mesquite comes strongest.
Behind him a car, sounding more like a Chevie than a Ford, came banging by and pulled up a few yards ahead.
‘Give you a lift, bud?’ a man’s voice asked. As he came to the car Dove caught the scent off a woman’s clothes.
‘Am I going the right way to the chili parlor?’ he asked.
‘You’re standing fifty feet from it now,’ a girl’s voice told him.
‘Can you see if there’s a light in it?’
He felt her bare arm as she leaned across him to see.
‘There’s a light upstairs,’ she reported. ‘Should I holler them down for you?’
‘Thank you kindly, I’ll find my own way now,’ he told her. He heard the little car go banging back and felt himself alone in the big Rio night.
And felt a strange content in that.
‘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.
Praise for Nelson Algren
‘Nelson Algren may be the funniest man around. Which is another way of saying that he may be the most serious… As with all good poets, the guy is a prophet.’
‘A book that at root, proves America has always been a third world country.’
‘Awesome … one of the original urban jungle anthropologists to come back with reports of another America.’
‘Algren is an artist whose sympathy is as large as Victor Hugo’s, an artist who ranks, with this novel, among our best American authors.’
‘The finest American novel published since the war.’
‘Looks back to Dickens and forward to Hubert Selby Jr and Irvine Welsh.’
‘This is a man writing and you should not read it if you cannot take a punch… Mr Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful… Mr Algren, boy, you are good.’
About the Author
NELSON ALGREN was born in 1909 in Detroit and lived mostly in Chicago. He was the author of five novels, including A Walk on the Wild Side (which inspired the Lou Reed song of the same name), Somebody in Boots and Never Come Morning. He was also a prolific writer of short stories, essays, travelogues and poems. In 1950 The Man with the Golden Arm earned him the first American National Book Award.
His life was a succession of gambling problems, disastrous marriages and wild extremes – ranging from Texas prisons and skid-row soup-kitchens to Hollywood parties and literary celebrations. He also had a passionate love affair with French feminist Simone de Beauvoir.
Algren died in 1981, shortly after being appointed as a fellow of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
RICHARD FLANAGAN’s novels Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping and Gould’s Book of Fish have been published to acclaim in 24 countries. He lives in Tasmania.
BY NELSON ALGREN
Somebody in Boots
Never Come Morning
The Neon Wilderness
The Man with the Golden Arm
Chicago: City on the Make
A Walk on the Wild Side
Who Lost an American
Notes from a Sea Diary:
Hemingway All the Way
The Devil’s Stocking
The Last Carousel
Copyright
This edition first published in Great Britain in 1999 by Rebel Inc, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published by Canongate in 2009
Copyright © 1956, renewed 1984 by the estate of Nelson Algren
Introduction copyright © 2005 by Richard Flanagan
All rights reserved
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 649 8