The Devil's Stocking by Nelson Algren

Author:Nelson Algren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sports, literary fiction, sports books, novels, fiction, fiction books, literature, books fiction, realistic fiction books, baseball, football, sport, boxing, classic, romance, contemporary fiction, music, mystery, coming of age, golf, american literature, art, comedy, hockey, family, satire, drama, soccer, historical, friendship, wrestling, hollywood, cinema, drugs, surfing, crime, marriage, running, gambling, school, modern, love, adventure, realistic fiction, short stories, americana, relationships, road trip, film, journalism, basketball
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2019-07-02T16:00:00+00:00

Calhoun—it was to become increasingly clear—in his concern for prisoners’ interests, had not abandoned his own.

He had obtained the interest of two energetic, effective people. One was the man with whom he’d once boxed in the Police League, Barney Kerrigan. The other was Adeline Kelsey, a mulatto woman of forty, who’d been bullied into prostitution in her teens. Before she’d reached twenty she’d gained domination not only over her first pimp—by the simple expedient of slicing him from forehead to lip with an ivory-handled springblade (which she still carried)—but also over every other pimp within reaching distance, black or white. She’d gained a name for being a dangerous whore.

She’d gone legit by investing in a fleet of taxicabs. Before that year was out she was running a dry-cleaning establishment. By the time she was thirty she owned four dry-cleaning plants and still ran a fleet of cabs. Now, nearing forty, she was into bail bonding as well.

A woman so strikingly successful was bound to be ugly as sin, Calhoun assumed. Instead he found himself confronted by a beigehued Elizabeth Taylor. One who carried herself just as dramatically.

No public relations firm could have devised a finer camouflage for her irresistible aggressiveness than Adeline Kelsey had devised for herself. Slight, low voiced, she concealed a relentless drive beneath a manner almost shy.

Her hidden fury, when it burst out, usually burst out against white men. Kerrigan was standing in a queue before the visitors’ desk at Athens, when a woman’s voice behind him said, “Excuse me,” and stepped in front of him, “if you don’t mind.”

Kerrigan was not a man to be pushed lightly to one side by anybody. “I do mind, madam,” he assured her and stepped in front of her.

He felt a sharp kick on his ankle and backed out of the line. He stood back, rubbing the ankle contemplatively. Almost all the people in the line were women, most of them black. All were smiling quietly at Adeline Kelsey’s triumph. They had, most of them, seen her in action before.

Kerrigan lifted her off the floor, put her down toward the end of the line and told her, “I can get rougher than this, if you want.”

The other women appeared pleased to see her put into her proper place; some of them smiled softly but said nothing.

“Oh, I see the kind you are,” Adeline informed him; but she did not try to get in front of him again.

While waiting for Calhoun in the prison library, neither acknowledged the presence of the other. Neither knew that both had come to visit the same prisoner. When Calhoun came in, smiling, and introduced them, Kerrigan gave her a small nod but she gave him no nod at all.

It wasn’t until Kerrigan began speaking to Calhoun about Don Kessler that Adeline began getting interested in him.

Kessler, a white man not yet thirty, had put twelve years into New Jersey prisons, six of them locked with Calhoun.

He had also locked with Baxter at Bordentown.

Kerrigan had gotten wind of Kessler through Esteban Escortez.

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