Cass heard that tapping there, and woke to a sense of horror. Even in sleep a stale horror had held him. He woke with a fear that had not left him since seeing his father leave the house with eyes unseeing and fixed in the twilight. His fear was like another being in the room, and he did not know what he feared.
He saw Nancy standing in the kitchen with her back turned toward him, stirring something on the stove. With the tears of his terror already starting he went to her, and she turned to face him. For one brief moment Cass did not recognize Nancy—he stepped back, gasping, and his hands caught his throat.
She was looking at him out of his father’s eyes, cold and sullen and hostile.
Cass understood in that moment that his father had done some terrible thing, but he didn’t know what. In that moment whatever it was did not seem at all to matter. He could only see that this was not Nancy at all, and could not think of his father. Like one in a dream he turned slowly to run, lifting leaden feet toward the door—she caught him before he had taken four steps. He struggled, and his arms were strengthless things. He tried to cry out, but his voice was choked. He wanted only to get outside to the safety of the broad dooryard where there were no corners in which to be caught — but she caught him as his father might have caught him, struck him cruelly across the teeth as his father might have struck him; and then she held him fast. He had to listen, and as she spoke her fingers twitched spasmodically, like ten little white snakes eager to strike once more. And she spoke hard. Hard as a spent harlot speaks.
“Pussy-faht, yo’ stay in this house. Caint yo’ see out of window? Yore Paw pushed Luke Gulliday under a freight, an’ half the town seen him do it. He done it a-pu’puss too he did, an’ took a cut at Lem Shultz when Lem come to take him. Oh, ah hope they stretch him now till he faht blue ice—ah swear ah hope they stretch him out this very night on co’thouse square. Oney whether they does or not, we’re both murderer’s kids jest the same.” Her voice did not soften. “Say, pussy-faht, how do it feel to be a murderer’s kid this mo’nin’?”
Outside someone shouted and threw a stone; it zoomed against the east wall and then tinkled away as though, in rebounding, it had struck another stone. Cass returned to the living room, lay down once more on his disheveled bed, and stared up at a long slit of light in the ceiling. It was through that slit that rainwet came, sometimes at night while thunder rolled; tapped down onto the floor at the foot of the bed or splashed onto the bedclothes till he felt it on his feet. Then he would have to rise to bring a basin from the kitchen. He closed his eyes, and shut out all light, and tried not to hear any sound from the dooryard. He whimpered to himself in fear.
The sheriff drove up to the house late in the afternoon, swerving into the dooryard in a small cloud of dust. He parked his little gray sedan under the sycamore and called to those within to come out. He drove Cass and Nancy to the courthouse then; till evening Cass answered questions there. He had to answer most of those which were put to Nancy sitting beside him, for she seemed reluctant to reply. Cass wanted to see his father, but he had not the courage to ask by the time the questioning was done. It was almost dark by that time, and the sheriff drove them back home.
It was the first time Cass had ridden in an automobile.
The next morning Lem Shultz drove up again, and this time, after the questions were done, Cass saw his father.
“Y’all tell him ‘hello’ fo’ me,” Nancy said.
Lem Shulz walked beside him all the way up the winding stone staircase to the cell. “Ef yo’ wants to be alone with yore pappy ah’ll hev to frisk yo’ first,” he said.
“Ah’d ruther be alone,” Cass replied, and Lem searched him before unbolting the heavy door. “All you McKays is bad hats,” he said, “an’ a sheriff has got to be keerful.”
Then Cass was alone with his father.
Stubby lay on a blanket in a five-foot cell, his left leg cuffed to a ring in the floor. Two Mexican boys were playing cards on the floor of the run-around, and someone unseen called out, “Is that the nut’s kid, Sheriff ?” At the end of the bull-pen water stood in a puddle. Cass looked through the bars and said, “Hello”; but the man on the floor did not reply, and Cass had no other words to say.
Stubby looked at him a second without recognition; then he rose and went to his window, dragging his chain behind him.
He stood at the window with his side turned to Cass, looking down into the dusty road below. Cass did not want his father to stand in plain view like that; all day men had been moving about the town. Some curious, some sullen, some angry.
There were men looking up from under that window now, Cass knew. He could hear laughter from the street, and someone calling up.
In Stubby’s eyes was nothing of fear. He stood looking down at those below, with the old lawless look in his eye. It occurred to Cass that not once in his life had he seen fear in his father’s face.
Stubby returned to his blanket, and Cass asked him to try to sleep.
“Jest close yo’ eyes an’ fo’git it all,” he asked, “It’ll come out awright sho’ ’nuf. Y’all didn’ mean to hurt Luke, we know. Jest foolin’ ’round was all y’done, an’ Luke tripped up an’ fell. We know. We ain’t worryin’. We jest want y’all to shet yore eyes an’ sleep a while now, that’s all.”
Surprisingly then, Stubby obeyed. He closed his eyes tightly, like an overly-obedient child, and appeared soon to sleep. The face looked strangely untroubled then; it looked almost quiet, as though it had lost all old bitterness. Cass looked long at his father, at the face so still after years of malice, at the fierce old jaw and the hollows long hunger had forged in the cheeks. Then Lem Shultz rattled his keys and Cass passed again through an open door, and he never saw his father again.
Lem kept jangling his keys till, midway down the stairs, Cass paused. He could not see clearly, and he felt ill. Lem put the keys in his belt then, and Cass felt a bit steadier. Downstairs, in the county clerk’s office, Nancy waited. Lem drove them back home, back across the S. P. tracks into Mexican-town down Chihuahua Street and around the corner, into their own small dooryard. All the way Nancy did not speak once.
But once they were back in the house and alone, she laughed a sly little laugh to herself and spoke in the flat hard voice that Cass had already come to fear.
“See them boys by the spik pool-hall when we druv by? What yo’ reck’n them boys was figgerin’ on, standin’ there thataway? Figgerin’ on goin’ to Divine Service t’night? Them was ever’ one friends o’ Luke Gulliday’s, that’s what they was, an’ you’n Bryn mought do right well to get out o’ town direc’ly. Y’ll know that, pussyfaht?”
Cass could have struck his sister in that moment. “Ah might do that yet, sister,” he heard himself saying. And then he said a thing that all his life he regretted.
“Ah’ll take out o’ town direc’ly, an’ then y’all kin go down valleyway like you said wunst, to get yo’self a job in a spik whorehouse in La Feria. There’s lots o’ houses south of La Feria, sister. Y’all might try it over at the Poblano a spell.”
It was the last word that Cass spoke to his sister.
And he could not yet know, as he never would know, what simple thing had wrought change in his sister. He could only know, lying in bed and remembering lost laughter in the little dooryard, that to him his sister had been lost. For his father Cass felt little more than a sigh of relief and a sigh of pity. It was almost as though he had known for long that a day would come when his father would kill. It was not this that left him filled with shame. The change in Nancy alone served to shame him. It was for her, despite the words he had spoken, that he felt the larger pity, and the deeper fear. It was Nancy, not his father, who remained inexplicable. It was his sister that was gone, not his father.
Half that night Cass lay awake, his heart filled with remorse for what he had said. Yet he could not, despite all his desire, go to his sister and say he had not meant his words. She was no longer Nancy to him. The wall between them was
too high. His thoughts plunged and swerved, remembering hostile men. Under the blankets he clenched his thin fists.
He heard a freight engine switching in the distance, and he wondered if Nancy would go on living here. He ran his hand under his chin, and he felt the ridge of a running scar that would never disappear in all his days, like a ridge of deep-encrusted dirt there that would not be scraped off no matter how often he plucked it. Down from his mouth’s left corner to his throat’s beginning it ran; and he realized slowly, picking at it there in the dark old room, with his sister’s breath coming softly from behind the dark curtain, that, of itself, the time to leave had come to him at last.
This time there would be no one to turn back to. There would be no place waiting for him now. Neither waiting love, nor patient peace, nor help for daily shame. No shelter when a night was cold. No running now from loneliness and fear of stronger men; only the pain of being ashamed, and the pain of being alone.
Alone, with his shame. On the streets, people pointed. So long as he stayed folk would point as he passed. So long as he stayed, each day would bring shame.
Cass turned his face down into the pillow. Fear made his face white, but no tears would come. Some dim knowledge of what was yet to be forced them down his throat. He stuffed the ragged comer of the pillowcase into his mouth, and held it there till he no longer had need of crying. Then he rose quietly and dressed; and he felt no need of saying good-bye.
In the dooryard a million crickets sang; he looked at the lilac as he passed, and he wondered when it would bloom again.
PART TWO
The Big Trouble
“Harlots and Hunted”
BAUDELAIRE
6
NOW CAME MONTHS that caught Cass on a dark human tide. From city to city he went now; there was no standing still and there was no turning back. No place to go, and no place to rest. No time to be idling and nothing to do. He moved, moved, everything moved; men either kept moving or went to jail. Faces, like fence-posts seen from trains, passed swiftly or slowly and were no more. They raced for one moment by, they faded, they changed; they became dim, darkened, or ran blackly in sun. From day to day faces appeared and passed, from hour to hour dimmed and died. Finally they seemed to Cass like faces seen in dream. They were no longer real then, they were no longer living. They were things then formed of death-flesh, as dark and as dead as the fence-posts flying.
And there were always such faces. In a sullen circle they stared for an hour, neither hostile nor friendly nor kind. They too were of the hunted. They moved aside to make place for him or silently turned away; he stood among them in silence; he then, too, stared unhostile in his turn. Then it was move, move—Don’t come here any more—and the faces were gone again.
A summer passed, suns passed, clouds passed, rain fell; he begged, he cringed; he lived within a ragged throng.
Sometimes he wondered what it would be like just to lie very still in a house somewhere and be well and clean once more. He slept, he walked, he lived in fear; beside him others slept and walked.
Sometimes he stole; pennies off a newsstand, a pear from a fruit store (this while waiting to beg the store’s owner for over-ripe bananas); and once a shirt from an old man sleeping, only to find it alive with lice the minute he put it on. In Brooklyn he waited in front of the subway for newspapers which men and women dashing for trains dropped or discarded. When he caught a full paper he peddled it covertly. Some papers would be stamped: “If this paper is offered for sale it has been stolen.” He could read all of these words, and he knew what they meant, but he took the chance just the same. By keeping every paper tightly folded until he received his three pennies for it, he was never caught. He learned to watch penny peanut machines for salty crumbs left up the slot after a buyer had walked away. He thrust muggy fingers up a machine and licked off what stuck to his fingers. Once, in front of a candy store in New York, two girls were giving away samples of fudge, and from each he got two pieces before he was refused more. Once he stole a bottle of milk off a door-step, but a dog started barking beneath the step and he dropped the bottle and ran. In a ten-cent store in Harrisburg he picked three chocolate bars from a counter and walked without haste toward a revolving door. On the other side of the counter a white-frocked flapper began walking without haste also, keeping just even with him toward the door all along the long counter. Past multi-colored gum drops, chocolate peppermints, Lafayette mixture and licorice cigars she went, watching him out of one eye’s corner. Outside it was snowing, she caught his arm just as he reached the door. He knew that the jig was up then, of course; he got so scared that his heart slipped and fell briefly, making him cough a small cough as he stood, her hand restraining his. But she didn’t speak loudly, she only whispered.
“I seen you take something. You put it in your pocket. Better fish it out quick and go.”
Cass thrust the candy into her hand, and ran. The sidewalk was filmed with ice thin as paper, and in trying to run too swiftly across it he slipped and fell; as his heart had slipped and fallen.
And even though there were faces always about him, some moving north and some south, yet he himself went alone.
He learned how to sleep on a boxcar roof when that roof was swaying from side to side. He became used to park benches, and fugitive unlit places; he lay down on wooden floors in the flops of great cities, and found brief rest on the tile of strangers’ hallways. Yet sometimes when he was tired he had no place to sleep or was too afraid to lie down. Once at night in October, on a bench in a park in Chicago, a man came and stood looking down quietly, paternally. He wore a furry dark coat with a belt. When he spoke Cass saw a warm small mouth; it was rouged and moved roundly; its lips were sweet berries. And when this man saw that Cass was tired and yet had no place to sleep but a bench, he sat down fatherly beside him.
“You want a job tonight, sonny? I’ll give you a nice job. Easy. Soft. You know? Soft as sugar-titty. You like sugar-titty, sonny?”
Then he laughed like a girl and gave Cass a long cigarette and moved uneasily nearer, till Cass smelled perfume on the coat and could see white spittle on the little red lips. Cass thought of boys who became slaves to men, and he wanted to run from this man. Yet he dared make no move, fear wrapped him ’round. He sat very still and smoked the cigarette swiftly, feeling colder and colder within with each draw. About him the lake-fog came creeping alive; the man put one hand about him possessively and with his other hand stroked Cass’s thigh. And as he stroked he spoke slowly, in rhythm with his hand.
“Come on, kiddo, you got me now. You’ll love it, honest you will. It’s fun for you too, and we’ll have a drink first, and we’ll take a long ride.”
He showed Cass a bill then, and Cass had never seen a bill that big before. He stared at it, all dumbyokel curiosity, till the cigarette began suddenly to taste as sweet as Texas sugarcane—he flicked the butt, in one brief arc, away into nightgrass and creeping lake-fog. Then he took the bill in his hand the better to see it (though the man held tightly the other end all the while), and he counted the number of times it had “twenty” printed upon it. Then he let it go, the man took his hand away and stood up abruptly and walked briskly off down the gravel bridle path, his pearl spats a twinkle in the arc light under his long dark coat. And after a while Cass got up too, to look for some other bench.
He could not find another, and to the one he had left two other ’boes had come; the benches were filled with sleeping men. He was too tired to look for long that time. So he lay down in the aged October grass with a newspaper about him to keep off the damp.
For two months Cass lived in Chicago, in the fall of 1930. He walked up and down West Madison Street every day, one ragged bum among ten thousand ragged bums. He lived on what he could beg off the streets, and he went with a mind that was dark. Sometimes, for one day or one morning, he had a friend, but only for one day or one morning. He was always half-hungry; he slept in parks; he knew shame and cold. He was often afraid.
&nbs
p; Curled up on the editorial page of the Evening American one afternoon, within the lengthening shadow of some butcher-on-horseback’s statue, he wakened just as the sun was setting behind the city; when he brushed aside paper his eyes met the sunset, a thin red line between two darkening towers.
Lying here among other men now, starving and thirsting daily with other men, being now part of this life led by so many other men, Cass thought, in his moment of waking, that “Civilization” must mean a thing much like the mob that had threatened his father. For this too was a thing with a single mouth, this too mocked with pointing fingers. And as it had threatened his father, so now it threatened him. Through hunger, cold, and shame it had pursued. “We have no work for you” (he heard familiar voices); “We have no place for you. This is our world, louser. We do not claim you, you have no right here. We are The Owners. We Own All. Get out, get along, go somewhere else—keep moving till you die.”
Along the broad boulevard a thousand men raced in automobiles toward food, warm fires, homes and wives. This was the fecund and darkening city, its towers, its terror, its threat.
“If once we catch you begging openly we’ll stick you in jail. If you ride our trains you’ll land in jail. And if once we catch you stealing—then to the pen you go. Get out, move along, go somewhere else. And stay out of sight till you die.”
Cass walked down the I. C. tracks, for it was time to be getting on. Nights were growing cold again, and so he was headed south.
Once, two weeks later, as a train neared Marsh City in East Texas, Cass was wakened. A big man stretched on straw at the other end of the car was warning everyone fiercely, in a big man’s voice.
“If Hank Pugh opens up the doors when we gets in, jest y’all stay right where yore settin’, at now. Don’t go hoppin’ out the side or runnin’, ’cause they jest ain’t no sech thing as runnin’ here. I been here befo’; I know. They shoot in this man’s town.” The big man rose clumsily, like a small elephant rising, and added quietly, “Jest set tight till he says, ‘Awright, lousers, come awn out now.’ An’ then y’all want to say to him right back, ‘Aw, come awn up in, Tuffnuts’—like that.” The big man made a long face at the wall and spat tobacco out the door.
Somebody in Boots Page 11
