Somebody in Boots

by Nelson Algren

  The country feels like it has come full circle since 1935, and maybe now, eighty-two years and eight editions into this book’s long life, it will finally receive the honest chance it always deserved.

  Here’s to hoping.

  Colin Asher

  Preface

  I WONDER WHETHER there stands yet, above an abandoned filling station a mile this side of the border, a wooden legend once lettered in red—

  Se Habla Espanol

  —that must now have been long washed to rose.

  It hung between an autumn-colored tangle of mesquite and a grapefruit grove gone to weed on a stretch of highway where nobody drove. I’d lettered it myself.

  And sat in its narrow shade shelling black-eyed peas below a broken sun.

  Once in the dead of day a field of white butterflies came out of that sun, fluttered at rest like a single creature: then fled like a dream of white butterflies.

  I shelled on.

  The Sinclair Company owned the station. A Florida cracker wearing a straw kelly the color of an old dog’s teeth was my partner. He called himself “Luther” and the one thing I knew about him for sure was that his name couldn’t be Luther.

  I’d met him working a small-time door-to-door fraud in New Orleans and he’d let me have a few doors. In no time at all we had had to leave town.

  Luther owned a grapefruit-packing shed in the Rio Grande Valley, he had assured me—if I’d meet him in McAllen he’d make me a partner. In McAllen it had turned out all he’d meant was that he had a buddy who bossed a shed there—and now his buddy had left. Fired, dead, absconded or gone on the arfy-darfy, Buddy wasn’t there any more. The only partnership Luther had left to offer me was in the station. Had he offered me half-ownership of a Southern Pacific roundhouse I wouldn’t have turned it down. I’d always wanted more responsibility.

  For I already knew that though wages were fine, spunk was better—and Sheer Grit was best of all. That was the stuff that enabled a young fellow to get himself a foothold on the Ladder of Success. There were deer in the chaparral and frogs in the ditch, if you didn’t work for nothing you’d never get rich, I shelled on.

  A Sinclair agent drove up with papers assigning responsibility for the hundred gallons of gas the company had let us have on credit. The man didn’t pretend to think we could sell gas on that dreadful stretch. His suspicion was that we planned to set up a still in the brush. But keeping the station open made him look like a go-getter with his front office.

  “It don’t matter which one of you signs,” he told us.

  “Ah caint handwrite proper,” Luther admitted humbly to the agent while handing me the papers, “but this lad here got more knowance ’n I’ll ever have.”

  I signed the papers. Luther looked down at me from his six-and-a-half-foot height with a smile that drained cold glee. “You’ll be the Filling-Station King of the Valley,” he told me, like a reward.

  I could hardly have been more proud.

  Selling produce was THE PLAN. Every morning Luther boggled off in a beat-up Studebaker and returned each evening with a fresh load of black-eyed peas in the back seat, and a five-gallon jug of fresh water.

  A store manager in Harlingen had told him that, if black-eyed peas were shelled and bottled, housewives would compete to buy them. Pointing out a Mason jar of peas, on display in the store window, that I personally had shelled and bottled, Luther rewarded me once more:

  “You’ll be the Blackeye-Pea King of the Valley.”

  I was shelling my way to fame.

  In a land that seemed like an empty room furnished with fixtures of another day; when nobody knows where the old tenant has gone nor who the new tenant will be.

  Nor what changes he’ll make in the fixtures.

  The land no longer knew what it was; so the men and women moving across it no longer knew who they were.

  The youth with the outfielder’s mitt on his hip, begging soap from housewives in backyards along the route of the Southern Railroad, thought he belonged to the Tallahassee Grays because he had a signed contract in his pocket. When he reached Tallahassee he’d learn that the league in which the Grays played had been dissolved. So all he belonged to was backyards along the route of the Southern Railroad.

  The woman whose green years had been wasted in the tumult and din of a hundred speakeasies, now sat before a whiskey glass with a false bottom saying, “Don’t get the wrong idea, Mister, I’m no whoo-er. But at the moment I don’t have a place to sleep.” And the tumult and din of nights without end kept dying slowly away.

  I was a day-editor, night-editor, sports columnist, foreign correspondent, feature-writer and editorialist. At the moment, however, I was shelling peas.

  Between a past receding like a wave just spent and an incoming tide, in a time-between-times, multitudes were caught in the slough of the waters. To be hurled, if they were young, strong and lucky, high onto the sands; others were carried topsy-turvy and didn’t come up till they were far out to sea. Some were swept under never to rise.

  There were snakes among the field stumps and lizards on the stones. Once a field of black butterflies came out of the sun, fluttered one moment and were gone: fled, like a dream of black butterflies.

  I shelled on.

  Huey Long was clamoring for redistribution of the wealth of those who were richer than himself in 1931, and the D.A.R. was demanding that all unemployed aliens be deported immediately. A cardinal was announcing, with contentment, that the nation’s economic collapse was a spiritual triumph, because it brought multitudes closer to the poverty of Christ: the cardinal hadn’t missed a meal in his life. Al Capone, on his way to the Atlanta Penitentiary, denounced Bolshevism. Herbert Hoover wanted somebody to paint his portrait. Huey Long threatened to vote Farmer-Labor rather than with the “Baruch-Morgan-Rockefeller Democrats.” Alexander Meiklejohn observed that “American Statesmanship has come to a dead stop.”

  So had the cardinals, the rabbis, the ministers, the businessmen, the politicians, the bankers, the editorialists, the educators, the generals, the industrialists and the philosophers. Only the poets, the poets alone, saw what was building far out to sea.

  Under the palaces, the marble and the granite of banks

  Among the great columns based in sunless slime

  The anonymous bearers of sorrows

  Toil in their ancient march.

  They look like men.

  They look like men.

  Whence do they come? How endure?

  How spring from dragon’s teeth in gutters of death?

  Full-armed and numerous, where do they go?

  To gather red lilies sprung from seas of blood.

  They look like men.

  They look like men.

  They look like men of war.1

  American statesmanship had come to a dead stop; and yet I kept on shelling.

  It had been Herbert Hoover’s land of Every-Man-For-Himself. It had also been Walt Whitman’s land, saying, “If you tire, give me both burdens.” Between the shelling of one sack and the next, I had had this flash notion: to show what had happened to a single descendant of that wild and hardy tribe that had given Jackson and Lincoln birth.

  I had seen them riding the manifests and shilling at county fairs; whose forebears had been the hunters of Kentucky.

  Where had the hunters of Kentucky gone when all the hunting was done? These were the slaveless yeomen who had never cared for slaves or land. They had never belonged to the plantations: they had seen the great landowner idling his hours while the blacks worked his cotton. So they’d put their own backs up against their own cabin walls and idled away their hours too: a cabin and a jug was all a man needed. If he had a fiddle and could fiddle a tune he was rich: Burns was their poet.

  They had been as contemptuous of white mill hands as of black cotton pickers and for the same reason: they held all men in contempt who were dependent upon any owner. Nobody owned a man who owned a gun along the wild frontier. But, now that the frontier
had vanished, where did the man go whose only skills were those of the frontier?

  The struggle to preserve the great plantations was not their struggle, they knew: nor had they felt that “Mr. Lincoln’s war” was their own. Putting a plague on both houses, they became hiders-out between armies who began moving southwest after Shiloh. Forced down to the border by the spread of great cities, their final frontier became the dry bed of the Rio Grande.

  I hoped to show a Final Descendant: a youth alienated from family and faith, illiterate and utterly displaced, I thought of him always as a Southerner unable to bear scorn; who had yet borne scorn all his days. One who wandered through some great city’s aimless din, past roar of cab and cabaret, belonging to nothing and nobody. A walker in search of something to belong to in order to belong to himself.

  Where crossing-bells announced the long freight moving through the Georgia Pines, I had seen him riding shoeless on a boxcar roof. I had seen him with his face framed between the bars of the El Paso County Jail, looking out. I had seen him taking charity in a Salvation Army pew: a man representing the desolation of the hinterland as well as the disorder of the great city, exiled from himself and expatriated within his own frontiers. A man who felt no responsibility even toward himself.

  “Keep things goin’ up, Son,” Luther advised me, “never inform on a sergeant to a private—inform on the private to the sergeant. Never inform on a lieutenant to a sergeant—inform on the sergeant to the lieutenant—Up up up.”

  There were wild pigs below the station’s floor. At night we heard coyotes cry.

  Luther boggled off one morning but failed to return that evening or the next. Two nights later I heard a car wheel up—then no sound but that of the frogs in the ditch. Standing in the station door I discerned, dimly, a figure crouching. I called out but got no reply.

  The next morning I discovered that Luther had siphoned the gas out of both tanks. I was stuck in the chaparral with nothing to drink but creek water, nothing to eat but black-eyed peas, and in debt to Sinclair Oil & Refining Company for a hundred gallons of gas. I started thumbing my way toward Mexico.

  In the small-time vice-village of Matamoros I took a room in a hotel run by a woman who had entitled herself “The Mother of the Americans,” though she didn’t look like anyone’s mother. There I wrote the first chapters of a novel I first called Native Son.

  Reading, thirty years after, this attempt to depict a man of no skills in a society unaware of his existence, the curiously opaque face of Lee Harvey Oswald, alive one day and dead the next, comes through like the face of new multitudes.

  Belonging neither to the bourgeoisie nor to a working class, seeking roots in revolution one week and in reaction the next, not knowing what to cling to nor what to abandon, compulsive, unreachable, dreaming of some sacrificial heroism, he murders a man he does not even hate, simply, by that act, to join the company of men at last.

  My flash notion of the story of a Final Descendant now appears to be that of a progenitor.

  This is an uneven novel written by an uneven man in the most uneven of American times.

  Now I have to get back to my shelling.

  —Nelson Algren

  1. From They Look Like Men, by Alexander F. Bergman

  Somebody in Boots

  PART ONE

  The Native Son

  The Miners came in ’49,

  The Whores in ’51,

  They jungled up in Texas

  And begot the Native Son.

  OLD SONG

  1

  WHY STUB MCKAY turned out such a devil he himself hardly knew; he himself did not understand what thing had embittered him. He knew a dim feeling as of daily loss and daily defeat; of having, somehow, been tricked. A feeling of having been cheated—of having been cheated—that was it. He felt that he had been cheated with every breath he had ever drawn; but he did not know why, or by whom.

  The man was a strong man, yet his strength was a weakness. For someone kept cheating all the time, someone behind him or someone above. Somebody stronger than anyone else. And although he could never quite wind his fingers about his feeling, although he could never bring it out into light, yet he was as certain of it as he was of the blood in his veins. It was there just as palpably. It was there, at the bottom of all he thought, said and performed. At times the feeling was like an old hunger, sometimes like a half-healed wound in his breast. He was never without it.

  In time he gave his pain a secret name. To himself he named it: The Damned Feeling.

  Some of his fellow townsmen thought Stuart McKay half mad. In a border town, where even children drank and smoked, Stuart took pleasure in little but fighting and hymning. He used neither tobacco nor whiskey, he seldom swore, and he laughed almost never. Yet there seldom came a Saturday night that did not find him brawling, and he never missed a Sunday morning at the Church of Christ of the Campbellites. So he was hated, damned, and respected in Great-Snake Mountain as only a fearless man could be both damned and respected in that place.

  A lean and evil little devil Stubby was, all five feet and five inches of him, inflammable as sulfur and sour as citron, sullen as a sick steer and savage as a wolf. A moody, malevolent little man, with a close-cropped, flat-backed head of bristling red hair, and eyes so very pale, so very slit-like and narrow, that the blue of them was scarcely distinguishable from their small sooty whites; so dust-rimmed, narrow-wise and cold that they seemed nothing but brief blue glintings beneath the cropped red bristles.

  And although Stubby McKay was a good worker, yet because of his temper he seldom held any one job for a very long while. He was a section hand on the Southern Pacific a couple of months, he cleaned backhouses about the town for a time, then became a hostler’s helper on the Santa Fe. After that he got work as a night watchman in the town’s lumber yard, and that too he soon lost. Inevitably, in whatever capacity employed, high or low, he would be discharged for fighting. He would strike some yardman, or buffet a boilermaker, or insult a foreman. He was arrogant, insolent, and disrespectful toward his employers, and therefore earned very little when he did work. The townsfolk called him “catawampus,” meaning that they thought him violently cross-tempered. “Som’un ort to clean thet Stub McKay’s canyon up proper for him jest once,’ the folk agreed. “Mebbe thet’d learn him to be so derned catawampus all the time. The man’s that mean he ort to be muzzled.”

  No one ever succeeded in cleaning Stubby’s canyon for him, however. For all his brawling, he was never soundly beaten once. When hard-pressed he would draw a knife, pick up a brick or a bar of iron—anything within reach. Once, upon being chided for having employed a four-foot length of rubber hose to knock down a Mexican section boss, he explained himself half-apologetically:

  “Well, y’all see, when ah fight a man ah jest go all-to-pieces-like, so sometime it happen ah don’ rightly know exacly what is it ah got in mah hand. This Spik straw boss now, when he commence givun me all thet boss-man talk, ah gotten god-orful nervous-like an’ straighten up mah back to see does he mean it all—an’ ’en all o’ suddent there ah was, alarrupin’ his arse with thet ol’ rubber-hose line; an’ ah s’pose ah’m right fortunate it weren’t his haid ’stead of his arse, ’cause ah swear ah caint recall where ah picked up thet hose. Ah swear, ah jest caint recall.”

  And his favorite hymn, which he sang with clenched fists, was number thirty-six in Hymns of Glory:

  The son of God goes forth to war, a kingly crown to gain

  His blood-red banner streams afar—Who follows in his train?

  Who best can drink his cup of woe, triumphant over pain?

  He lived with two sons and a daughter in a three-room shack in Mexican-town, and most of his neighbors were Mexicans. The shack faced a broad dust-road that led east to the roundhouse and west to the prairie: a road hung with gas lamps leaning askew above lean curs asleep in sun, where brown half-naked children played in ruts that many wheels had made. Within the home, poverty, bleak and blind, sat staring
at four barren walls. Ragged dish towels hung, in a low festoon, from the damper of the stove-pipe to a nail above the sink, and the sink was a tin trough salvaged from a dump heap. Unwashed dishes and pans lay in it.

  Stuart’s living room was used for both dining and sleeping. In its center stood a table built solely of orange crates—a creation of Bryan McKay’s. It was unsteady, inclined to totter, as Bryan had been the morning he built it. A faded strip of green oilcloth covered it. A smoky and cheerless place, this room, with but one small window. On one wall hung the shack’s sole decoration, a dusty piece of red cardboard bearing the simple legend:

  CHRIST

  Is the head of this house

  THE UNSEEN HOST

  At every meal

  THE SILENT LISTENER

  To every conversation

  One room was a mere hole in the wall, a little sloping windowless cavern in which the sister Nancy slept, partitioned off from her men by a strip of dark cheesecloth nailed above the cavern’s opening.

  Slantwise behind the home ran the Santa Fe railroad; between the tracks and the house stood a lop-sided privy.

  The privy was loathsome within. It stank fulsomely. Scraps of torn paper lay strewn across its floor, flies swarmed in the place, no one had ever cleaned it. Its door hung creaking and half-unhinged, a thousand nameless dark weeds grew about it.

  The red dining-room legend one day found its way onto the privy wall. Stubby found it hanging lop-sidedly there, and came back into the house with one suspender unbuttoned. He laid the cardboard on the table, clutched a tuft of his close-cropped scalp with one paw, and rapped the legend fiercely with the knuckles of his other hand. Although he was very angry, yet his voice held a complaining ring that was like a plea beneath a threat.

  “Bry’n,” he said, “were you-all a well man today, ah swear ah’d beat yo’ fo’ this.”

  Bryan tittered slyly, girlishly, half to himself, and Stubby turned away. He could not bear to hear womanish giggling in a full-grown man. And Bryan would not admit that he had done the thing, although everyone knew that it could have been nobody else. Later on the younger brother asked Bryan if he were not just a little afraid of Christ Jesus.