Somebody in Boots

by Nelson Algren

  Yet once he dreamed he was walking softly down a dark and narrow way where little blue lights burned all in a row. Black-cowled children stood in darkened doorways as he passed, and he walked ever softer and softer, for everything about this street seemed strange. Then all the little blue lights went out at once, there was no light anywhere in the world, and he woke. And that time it was good to see the work-a-day world once more; Cass felt, somehow, that on that night he had come close to death.

  He did not always dream. Sometimes he lay awake beside his sleeping brother, wondering, filled with an adolescent yearning, imagining all manner of far-away places. He saw broad blue waters and woody places, pleasant cities where children played. Sometimes as he lay so Nancy would laugh lowly out of sleep, and he would be recalled from wonder. Then he would think of his father, how Stuart rode switch engines all through the mysterious night. He would think of his father, how, in the chill, smoky mornings, he would come in while Cass was dressing by the wood stove, tracking soot and cinders and sand into the kitchen on his pointed little brown Spanish boots, dangling an empty tin dinner pail from his hand.

  In after years Cass never heard the long thunder of passenger cars over a bridge in the dark, but he caught a brief glimpse of a smoky dawn through an opening door; never saw the white steam whistle in the light, but he saw his lather stretched, mouth agape, on the disarranged cot in the corner, brown boot-toes pointing upward.

  And in after years Cass always feared a night of storm or wind. On such nights, as a boy, he heard something, or someone, come stealing through darkness out on the road; he heard cold fingers tap along the west wall, wind-fingers trying the knob, then, whispering something quickly, something running like the wind in haste away, driving all small things before it.

  Yellow and black, yellow and black: these came, for Cass, before he was grown, to be the colors of sun and blood, the hue of life and the shade of death. To think of living was to see yellow; to see blood was to think of black. He could never in all his life see blood as crimson—it looked too dark for that. When Cass thought of blood he saw a black rivulet running a rail that gleamed in sunlight—an iron rail gleaming yellowly, as though smiling while it drank.

  This was because of a thing which occurred when Cass was not quite sixteen.

  All one bright windy morning he had worked in the dooryard. (Stuart had forbidden him to run with Mexican boys.) He had built himself a tire-swing; he had turned a clothes-wringer for Nancy for an hour, and had helped her hang out the washing; he had carried in kindling; he had patched a frayed kite.

  And all about him, on the roofs of the houses, aslant the old privy, across the small garden, through air, earth and water—over all things streamed the strong yellow sunlight. As though coming like rain from atop Great-Snake Mountain, the deep yellow sunlight. The good yellow sunlight; and the mad March wind.

  He had heard the whistle of the noon freight on the Southern Pacific to Houston—three long and two short blasts—and swiftly, as a thing done every day, he hopped down from his tire-swing and raced toward the S. P. tracks. Even though this train would not be hauling coal, as he knew it would not be, yet it remained a duty to watch it pass. To see the ’boes that would be riding the tank cars, to exchange hand-waves with them, to share the excitement that all there would feel—this would be the event of Cass McKay’s day.

  He was almost too late. The engine itself was a quarter of a mile east of town when he arrived, and he was only in time to see the last half-dozen gondolas roll by; she was fast picking up speed, and the brakeman was already back in the cab. Two Mexican section hands and several town boys were standing about a thing atop the cinder embankment. A thing huddled. Yes indeed, it wasn’t often that one could come into town without seeing a sight or two for one’s pains. Eagerly Cass clambered up, small stones slipping beneath his bare feet, stepping over the sagebrush that grew up through the cinders: then he pressed himself roughly between the two Mexicans and saw what they saw.

  Face downward in the sand beside a clump of thistle a boy was lying, his right arm flung across his eyes, a boy in a brown shirt and blue corduroy slacks.

  Over him a tall man stood looking down as though understanding this all to himself.

  The left arm was spewed off slantwise at the shoulder, the jaw hung limp. This Cass saw first. One eye hung out of its socket by one long thin wet thread, the filament rising and falling a little straight up and down as it hung. Someone had pitched a small bundle of clothes to one side and strewn it over with sand.

  At the waist, between the dark shirt and a broad bright belt, the side began to tuck in and out in short quick violent little jerks. In—out. One of the Mexicans called shrilly. “Look! Look! See what he do now! In and out he going!” Two of the town boys walked toward the bundle and went off down the tracts with it dangling between them.

  And all down the gleaming yellow rail there ran the warm wet blood—warm wet blood running black and slow beneath the unpitying sun; black and slow down an iron rail, darkening small stones as it spilled and seeped, into ties; the blood of heart and brain and sinew wetting a thistle in the sand. And black, black, black; black as darkness on the bright sun’s face.

  The thunder of the morning freight faded to a low singing of rails through heat, to die at last in the east into silence.

  There never came, in later years, a sunny, windy day in March, but Cass would feel the heart within him pumping, pumping momently; and he would be faintly sickened and half uneasy and somewhat afraid.

  Yellow and black, yellow and black—these were the colors of sun and blood, the hue of life and the shade of death, the symbol of flesh and the sign of dust.

  In August of 1926 Cass saw blood again. Bryan killed an old housecat that had been around the home for seven years; and he killed the creature by wrenching off its head.

  Bryan McKay was easy-natured enough when sober; yet when drunk he could be as cruel as malice itself. One day he noticed the old cat chase one of the hens off the porch, but he paid little attention and went on his way. He knew the old tom never killed anything, not even mice. But three days later, drinking tequila in the town with friends, he remembered, and put his bottle down.

  Cass was in the kitchen that morning, painting a shoeshine box for use in town. The old tom was curled on a chair beside the sink, pulsing evenly, after the manner of most good cats. Cass heard Bryan’s voice approaching, and he put his brush aside.

  “Chicken-chasin’! Bird-killin’! Sly black egg-suckin’ son-a bitch . . .”

  Cass grabbed a newspaper off the stove and threw it over the cat as it slept. Had he not done so Bryan might never have caught him. At Cass’s touch the tom vaulted to the floor and raced directly into Bryan’s hands as Bryan lurched into the doorway. Bryan scooped the cat up and whirled him about like a flywheel, first this way and then that, while his mouth fixed into a hard and crooked grin.

  Cass pleaded hoarsely, “Bry’n! Yore hurtin’ him”—then the body, claws still outspread, whanged like a small pillow against the wall above the stove, and the head remained in the hand. Bryan flung this at Cass, and the sun from the doorway was in Cass’s eyes. Fur brushed his shoulder and dampened his cheek. He screamed in fright, in hoarse terror, and in hate. He stared at a ragged head on the door at his feet, saw dark blood seeping into dust there, and touched his cheek with his finger. He stood looking down for minutes after Bryan had left, hand on cheek touching blood. Then, slowly, his hate drowned his fear.

  He ran up the road after Bryan, and pounded Bryan’s back with both fists till Bryan whirled and caught him. He held Cass fast, with no drunken fingers, white dark-shawled women paused as they passed and Mexican children gathered to see. For one terrible second Cass thought Bryan was going to twist his head off as he had the cat’s.

  “Combate! Combate!” sang the little brown children, leaping and skipping in the sun.

  Bryan did not strike. He stood looking down and holding Cass tightly, with all the drunkenness gon
e out of his fingers. Yet when he spoke Cass thought him still drunk, for what Bryan said made simply no sense at all. Although Cass was squirming and writhing and twisting, yet he heard each word clearly.

  “Nothin’ but lies—nobody told nothin’ but Jesus-killin’ lies. Told us it was to fight fo’ this pesthole—told me . . . Oh, ah didn’t believe all they told, none of us did, but we laughed an’ went anyhow. Now, look at me. An’ they won’t never speak truth to you-all neither.”

  He released Cass as suddenly as he had seized him and went on his way toward the town, walking slow.

  Mexican children trailed Cass all the way toward the house, mocking and inquisitive. “What goin’ on, red-son-of-beetch—eh? What trouble you sons-of-beetch make t’day?”

  Back in the kitchen Cass made a coffin out of his shoeshine box and buried the tom within the lilac’s shadow.

  Toward the end of that afternoon he was in the living room watching a hawk wheeling in dusk far over the prairie as the prairie night came down. He saw night come walking between the little low houses, down through the winding Mexican alleys. Wind came, bearing sand between houses and trees. He saw sand on the broad road rise, in whirling night-spires, to spread over the roof tops. For a long hour he watched the approaching storm, till all was utterly dark. Wind struck against wall then, whispered something quickly, and passed on, driving all small things before it.

  Cass wondered if he would ever have to be outside, to be driven before darkness as a small thing before wind.

  2

  DURING THE RAINY months of winter, after the wagon-wheels of autumn had left long knolls and low ridges far over the prairie, when rooftops were sometimes white of a morning, then talk of a coal train coming through would spread like wildfire in the town. Some would say it was coming on the Southern Pacific; others would have it straight from the station-master himself that it was due on the Santa Fe: and this made a difference, for the trains took water at different points. Usually the majority of those who sought the coal were driven off by brakemen or detectives before they secured so much as a single lump, but there were times when a coal train did come through and neither brakeman nor bull came near. These times were rare in Great-Snake Mountain, and they were remembered for long weeks after as a holiday is remembered.

  One morning in February of 1927, there came the usual afternoon whisper—two coal cars were coming through on the Santa Fe at three o’clock! Clark Casner, the ticket agent, had just let the cat out of the bag. There wouldn’t be so much as one bull riding, Clark had said. The train would stop fifteen minutes for water, and the coal cars would be toward the tender. Fifteen minutes! No bulls! Could such a thing be? Then someone, of course, had to refute it—the car, this one said (and he too had it straight), would come through on the S. P. about four in the morning—“An’ when it do y’all best be in yo’ baids, ’cause thet man ain’t gonna stop fo’ fifteen secon’s—ain’t gonna stop ay-tall—he’s gonna come thoo heah shoutin’ lak th’ manifest t’ Waco.” Rumor and conflicting rumor rose then and strove, and only the actual arrival of the train on the Santa Fe put an end to argument.

  Cass and Johnny Portugal, a halfbreed boy who lived near the roundhouse, went down to the tracks together that afternoon with a gunny-sack between them. It took two boys, working swiftly together, to fill such a sack.

  They found a dozen children huddled on the pumping station with chapped blue lips. All carried gunny-sacks, and one held a clothes-pole besides. This man was Luther Gulliday, the McKays’ next-door neighbor. The clothes-pole had a purpose.

  Beside Luther Gulliday stood a little Mexican girl in a long black shawl, clutching behind her the handle of a wobble-wheeled doll buggy. In the bottom of this carriage Cass observed a carnival kewpie doll that had no head lying sprawled on its back with arms outspread.

  It looked somehow odd to see such a doll, so helpless and headless in cold and wind.

  The girl surveyed Cass and Johnny with an Indian antagonism in her eyes. When Johnny greeted her familiarly, in Spanish, she did not reply. Merely stood waiting in mute hostility there, bare baby-knuckles clutching a doll buggy’s handle.

  “She’s half Osage,” Johnny whispered. “Her folks come down from Pawhuska last week.”

  “Osage or Little Comanche,” Cass replied, “she won’t git enough coal fo’ two nights in that contraption.”

  Cass wondered what the child would do if he stepped over and lifted the doll out of the carriage as though he intended to take it from her. Then he looked at her, out of one eye’s corner, and concluded immediately that she would do plenty. No one was getting very far ahead of this girl on this trip, that was plain enough to be seen.

  “She don’t have to look so fix-eyed at everyone,” he thought. “If that man really comes through like they say, there’ll be a-plenty fo’ all us. Why, ah cu’d fill that dinky buggy out o’ this heah sack an’ hardly miss me a lump. How perty she look tho’—My!”

  Cass had never, heretofore, seen such beauty in a child.

  And when the train came toiling painfully around the base of the mountain three miles distant, Cass saw her step back just an inch. He saw that she was already afraid. Then the cars were lumbering past, someone cried, “Carbón! Carbón!”—and the first of the coal cars was going by. Rolling slow.

  What a bustling about there was now! Nobody stomped cold feet or swung his arms now. Nobody stood slapping his palms together just because a couple of thumbs were cold—there was something better to do with cold fingers now. Cass and Johnny Portugal were among the first to get into the coal car, but a dozen others followed, like so many buccaneers swarming over the sides. Johnny held the sack while Cass filled it; they filled it between them, right there and then, laughing and swearing all the while. Everyone laughed and swore, working frantically.

  Only Luther Gulliday worked slowly.

  Luther Gulliday loved order and system in his work. He too climbed into the car, but he did not, like the others, begin an unmethodical hurling of coal into a sack or over the side of the car. Luther did all things differently from other men. He went about now picking out the largest lumps he could lay hands on, placing them carefully, one by one, along the iron shelf that runs the length of a car on the outside above the wheels, all the while counting: “One! Two! Three!”—until the iron shelf was lined to its full length. Then he hopped down, held the pole like a lance against the first lump and stood stiff as a statue, his gunny-sack open and waiting. Should anyone have presumed to take one of his lumps before the car began moving, Luther would have cracked him smartly with the pole. And as the car started rolling again the lumps fell neatly, one by one as they met the pole, into the open sack. He counted aloud as they fell in the resounding accents of a man counting votes for his closest friend, “One! Two! Three!”

  When their own sack was almost full the boys heaved together and got it over the side—and someone shouted “Jump!” The brakie was coming. Cass saw him running toward them far down the spine of the train. He saw too that there was plenty of time, so he threw one more lump over just for good measure; then he felt the car moving faster under his feet, and jumped. Johnny followed, and stood grinning and pointing at Cass because a thick coat of coal dust filmed Cass’s face. Cass heaved impatiently at his end of the sack. He did not like anyone to laugh at him, especially a half-breed.

  “Nancy’ll sho’ feel good to see this,” Cass assured himself as they toiled along under the heavy sack. She couldn’t tell him this time he was sinning—not after they had been without coal for so long;—even his father would have to smile! Why—here was almost enough to last through till March! Think!—Were it filled with potatoes instead, would his sack be then one jot the more precious? Well, could one burn potatoes and keep a house warm with them? And how heavy it was! But how warm they would be! No more going to bed after freezing at supper now! And all because of himself; that was the main thing. In the pride of his exploit the boy’s heart exulted. Why couldn’t every day be just
like this one? Why couldn’t something like this happen every day? Johnny Portugal shifted his end of the sack and paused to look down at his feet; a doll buggy lay in a deep rut there, turned upside down with its wheels in the air, wobbly tin wheels turning this way and that like toy windmills in the wind. Beside it lay the Mexican child, her bare arms outspread. The long black shawl was drenched scarlet now, and one finger clutched one dark crumb of coal. She lay on her back, and her head had been severed from her body. The kewpie doll lay in a dark pool beside her, and people began running up to see. “She must of got anxious an’ got up too close,” Luther Gulliday said, “she must of just slipped a little.”

  That coal was the last that Cass ever brought home. Before it was gone Stubby had lost his job on the Santa Fe, and this time there was no other job to be found. Stubby had come to be known throughout the county as a “bad hat,” and jobs for “bad hats” were not plentiful in a place where even tame men would work for a pittance. To make matters no easier for Stuart, the man who was taken on in his place by the Santa Fe was little Luther Gulliday. Stuart saw Luke coming home every morning, an empty tin dinner-pail on his arm; Stuart saw him passing down the road toward the roundhouse every night. He never saw without growing white with fury.

  Luke was a little man, smaller than Stuart; but in the town he was as well liked as Stubby was hated.

  And Stuart’s mind was dark. Within his head inconstant fleeting shadow-shapes passed and repassed, without cessation, all day, all night. All day, all night lights flickered there. He had always been aware of his own darkness; now he began to fear it. The man had had so many cruel tricks played on him in his lifetime, he had hurt so many other men, that sometimes now he became afraid of the darkness growing within him; it too would deal him a scurvy back-handed slap one of these days, he felt, if he didn’t strike out first. Often while he slept he became aware of something that a passing flash, like a brief lightning, had revealed within his brain; had revealed clearly there against the black, yet too briefly to be discerned. So briefly that he saw only that there was a thing there—a thing growing, a thing wholly evil. And sometimes some ancient fancy or some feeling not his own laughed within a cavern in his brain—he knew the laugh because it was mocking. Laughter was mockery, Stuart knew.