Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,64
Stamford garage sale. Mild blue eyes watched from behind surplus aviator’s sunglasses of the same shade of blue.
All of this, in addition to his fondness for writing postcards and scrawling sketches at tables outside pubs, made Chase a natural target for London’s growing array of panhandlers and blowlamps. Against this Chase kept a pocket well filled with coins, for his heart was rather kind and his eye quite keen to memorize the faces that peered back from the fringes of Hell.
But this face had seen well beyond the fringes of Hell, and as Chase glanced up, he left the pound coin in his pocket. His panhandler was a meth-man, well in the grip of the terminal oblivion of cheap methylated spirit. His shoes and clothing were refuse from dustbins, and from the look of his filthy mackintosh, he had obviously been sleeping rough for some while. Chalky ashes seemed to dribble from him like cream from a cone in a child’s fist. Beneath all this, his body was tall and almost fleshless; the long-fingered hand, held out in hope, showed dirt-caked nails resembling broken talons. Straggling hair and unkempt beard might have been black or brown, streaked with grey and matted with ash and grime. His face—Chase recalled Sax Rohmer’s description of Fu Manchu: A brow like Shakespeare and eyes like Satan.
Only, Satan the fallen angel. These were green eyes with a tint of amber, and they shone with a sort of majestic despair and a proud intelligence that not even the meth had wholly obliterated. Beneath their imploring hopelessness, the eyes suggested a still-smoldering sense of rage.
Ryan Chase was a scholar of human faces, as well as impulsive, and he knew any coins the man might beg here would go straight into another bottle of methylated spirit. He got up from his seat. “Hang on a bit. I’ll treat you to a round.”
When Chase emerged from The Queen’s Larder, he was carrying a pint of bitter and a pint of cider. His meth-man was skulking about the Church of St George the Martyr across the way, seemingly studying the informational plaque affixed to the stucco wall. Chase handed him the cider. “Here. This is better for you than the meth.”
The other man had the shakes rather badly, but he steadied the pint with both hands and dipped his face into it, sucking ravenously until the level was low enough for him to lift the pint to his face. He’d sunk his pint before Chase had quite started on his own. Wiping his beard, he leaned back against the church and shuddered, but the shaking had left his hands as the alcohol quickly spread from his empty stomach.
“Thanks, guv. Now I’d best be off before they take notice of me. They don’t fancy my sort hanging about.”
His accent was good, though too blurred by alcohol for Chase to pin down. Chase sensed tragedy, as he studied the other’s face while he drained his own pint. He wasn’t used to drinking in a rush, and perhaps this contributed to his natural impulsiveness.
“They’ll take my money well enough. Take a seat at the table ’round the corner, and I’ll buy another round.”
Chase bought a couple packets of crisps to accompany their pints and returned to find the other man cautiously seated. He had managed to beg a cigarette. He eagerly accepted the cider, but declined the crisps. By the time he had finished his cider, he was looking somewhat less the corpse.
“Cheers, mate,” he said. “You’ve been a friend. It wasn’t always like this, you know.”
“Eat some crisps, and I’ll buy you one more pint.” No need to sing for your supper, Chase started to say, but there were certain remnants of pride amidst the wreckage. He left his barely tasted pint and stepped back inside for more cider. At least there was some food value to cider in addition to the high alcohol content, or so he imagined. It might get the poor bastard through another day.
His guest drank this pint more slowly. The cider had cured his shakes for the moment, and he was losing his whipped cur attitude. He said with a certain foggy dignity: “That’s right, mate. One time I had it all. And then I lost it every bit. Now it’s come down to this.” Chase was an artist, not a writer, and so had been interested in the man’s face, not his life story. The story was an obvious ploy to gain a few more pints,