Somebody in Boots

by Nelson Algren

  Cass never became hardened to fighting. He was never to learn total indifference toward it. He was to live all his life among fighters, yet himself fight not once. He was to see men fight with guns and knives, with bare fists and with their teeth. All his manhood he would live with evil: with men who hated and mocked and fought, with strong men who were cruel to the weak, with men who were weak but were yet more cruel, and with men consumed with a wanton greed. Yet not once in his young manhood was he to see the shadow of pain cross a human face without being touched to the heart. He was never to see a blow struck or a man beaten, in all his young manhood, but he would be sickened almost to fainting.

  3

  CASS RODE ATOP a boxcar, watching the Texas hills roll by. “Leavin’ them hills now,” he kept telling himself, “lieavin’ ’em fo’ good an’ all—leavin’ paw an’ po’ Bry’n an’ sister.” And when he thought of Nancy his heart pained. But he was going to San Anton’ now, that big city where the army lived, and he wasn’t coming back. He was headin’ from San Anton’ to New Awlins, ’cause that was even bigger than Houston. Oh, he’d go everywhere now, everywhere he’d always wanted to go—Jacksonville, Shreveport, Montgomery and Baton Rouge. He’d see all the strange places he’d always wanted to see. He’d get tattooed like a sailor, all over his chest and arms.

  As the train gathered speed and the night wore on the cold began to reach him; he climbed down into a gondola loaded with iron rails, seeking warmth there.

  From sleep he woke with a sudden start, a warning heard in the jungle many months before ringing in his brain: “The wheels slipped on the track an’ two rails jolted loose an’ damn ef one didn’ go clearn through that Po’ boy’s belly . . .”

  He climbed once more atop the boxcar, but his body had cooled from his brief nap and he could not bear the biting cold. Carefully then he worked along the spine of the cars, afraid to stand upright because of the wind. When he reached a box with a loose hatchway he crawled inside. It was an empty cattle car, the door was covered with straw. Cass heaped several dusty armfuls in a corner and fell to sleep with a wadded yellow newspaper under his head for a pillow. He was very tired.

  When he awoke it was morning, and slant light was flashing past into the gaps between the car’s boarding. The train was approaching the yards in San Antonio, and he climbed out as it began to slow down.

  Cass was gladdened and surprised to see a full twenty more ’boes come off with him, from several parts of the long van, and he fell in with them as they walked. All seemed headed for the same destination. Down the track a hundred yards they came to a frame house resembling a stable. Near the place, hunkered over wood fires, a dozen-odd men with empty faces waited. Cass paused before a sign on a fence, and spelled out a warning there; his lips moved as he read:

  FREE SOUP KITCHEN AND CITY SHELTER—STAY OUT OF TOWN AND KEEP OFF ALL TRAINS NOT IN MOTION

  He was suddenly aware that he was ravenously hungry.

  As he was standing in line someone tapped his shoulder gently; he turned his head, and such a man as he had never before seen in all his life stood before him. A tall man in khaki, in glistening black boots, with badges and buttons, with red stripes and gold braid. And this apparition was speaking to him, Cass McKay.

  “Boy, don’t you know you’re wasting your life?” it asked.

  Cass cocked his head; he hadn’t known. He wanted to reach out one finger, to touch that bright braid.

  “Riding the rods I mean—that’s wasting your life, ain’t it? The army makes men out of green kids like you.”

  Cass grinned a half-grin with one side of his face. His nose was running, so he licked up with his tongue.

  “The government wants men to send to China, the Philippine Islands, Cuba, Haiti—you couldn’t ever get to Haiti by riding the rods, now could you, son?”

  Cass wasn’t very certain; but someone in back barked at the sergeant: “No—and he couldn’t get a bullet up his arse in Nicaragua if he stayed at home, neither.”

  A few of the bums laughed, but the sergeant seemed only annoyed. “Well, he’ll never lose a leg under a freight train by joinin’ the infantry, wise-guy back there,” and he turned again to Cass. “Don’t never listen to wise-guys, son. They’ll poison your mind against your own country. An’ I’ll bet you’re straight from the Big Bend country, aren’t you, son?” He asked this last with a friendly white smile, and placed one friendly hand on Cass’s shoulder. Cass drew back from that hand; he remembered his father’s hand, on his brother’s shoulder.

  And he looked down, and he saw that this man wore pointed boots.

  “Ah guess ah don’t want to join no army today, mister,” he said.

  The sergeant put one gloved finger under Cass’s chin, and lifted Cass’s face to his own. “Why not? You have no physical defect, have you? You haven’t got anyone dependent on you, have you, son?”

  Cass stared, he didn’t know what all those lawng words meant.

  “You haven’t . . .”

  The man in the back iet out a warning whoop—“Don’t listen to that army-pander, kid—Uncle Sam is a old he-whore and that guy is his youngest pimp.”

  A few laughed faintly, moving up an inch. The sergeant blinked and feigned not to hear. “Have you any physical defect, son?” he persisted quietly.

  “Yeah, ah reck’n,” Cass said.

  The sergeant frowned, spat fiercely toward earth to conceal a self-doubt, hesitated a second and passed on down the line, surveying prospects. Cass heaved a long sigh of relief. To the man in front of him he whispered, “Is that some gen-rel? Do he git paid much?”

  “Five dollars for every kid he recruits, that’s all he gets.”

  Cass drew in breath in amazement. “Gawsh a-mighty,” he gasped. Then he thought, “Why, hell—that old feller was a-doin’ the same thing ah used to do fo’ Pepita back home. Oney ah didn’t get no five bucks apiece, ah just got a sack o’ terbacco or a Mex nickel.”

  When he got inside the doors something within his stomach’s pit took a cold little slippery flop, nauseating him momentarily—each man in the line ahead, he saw, was writing his name in a book before receiving food. Fear strove with hunger then. He became afraid that he might not remember how to write his name, for it had been long since he had learned how. But he was shoved ahead by those behind until it was his turn. Then he thought wildly, “Ah’ll make a stab—ah’ll just bluff the whole bunch—mebbe ah’ll be able to do it agen if ah do it suddent-like.” He picked up the pencil, felt eyes on him, made a long swift scribble and grabbed for a plate. Although no one seemed to see, it was not until he was safely seated at the rough board table in the dining room that he again drew easy breath. On his plate was a square of cornbread afloat in black molasses.

  The smell of unclean bodies mingled in the heavy air with the smell of beans boiling in the kitchen. All about him men were eating, and the doors and walls were smeared with mud and scraps of food. One place at the bench whereon he sat was vacant because someone had vomited there, in an orange-ed puddle.

  Cass watched those about him as he ate, wondering about each of them. Most were boys. One or two gray-beards, but only one or two. Not half a dozen out of thirty, all told, who even approached middle age. Three Mexican boys, sitting at a separate table; eight Negroes, ranging from twelve years to twenty, on a bench equally segregated; and the rest sitting at the table where he sat, with faces American and much like his own. High-cheek-boned, thin-lipped, blue-eyed faces. Several he thought younger than himself.

  One had a face as fruity as a cherub’s, a rosy, soft and smiling face that had not yet lost the rounded contours of its infancy. When the counterman asked this boy his name, the lad replied swiftly, “I’m Thomas Clay; I’m thirteen-and-a-half-goin’-on-fourteen—gimme an extra lot o’beans an’ two cups o’ misery an’ I’ll tell you some more.”

  A little stout man with a huge breadth of chest and shoulders and a small bent nose in a perfectly circular face appeared in the doorway and roared
jovially at everyone:

  “Directly yo’ all finish eatin’, couple you boys step out heah an’ give me a han’ with a bit of kindlin’—takes kindlin’ to cook yo’ all cawnbread yo’ know.”

  He said this so smilingly, so pleasantly, that three who had already finished rose immediately to help him. Then the others were set to cleaning dishes and making up the wooden bunks on the second floor. Cass wanted to bathe, he was caked with coal-dust; but he saw no sign of a shower or a tub and he lacked the courage to ask. With a dozen other American boys, each with a pan and a bucket, he was set to sorting raw beans; letting these trickle through their fingers, a handful at a time, the boys picked out small stones and foreign matter.

  Cass found himself working beside the lad of the cherubic aspect. In an undertone the boy confided to Cass that the information he had given the counterman was false; his real name, he said, was not Thomas Clay but Thomas Clancy, his true age not twelve but sixteen, and the time he had spent on the road nearer four years than four months.

  He had run away from a reform school in Cleveland, he added, when he was twelve, and had been on the road ever since that time. Cass did not know which tale was true and did not greatly care.

  The long afternoon wore on; as soon as one sack was picked through the counterman brought out another, and Cass’s eyes began to burn with the strain of keeping them fastened on his palms in the darkness of the place. There were no lights, the place was damp as a tomb. The counterman told them that when night came they would have to double up on bunks upstairs.

  Shortly before dark—Cass was again feeling hungry—the friendly fellow of the forenoon came in. He stood in the doorway as he had done in the morning, shutting out the gray October light with shoulders so square that he gave the impression of wearing a two-by-four plank under his coat. For a minute he said nothing. Then he planted his feet wide beneath him, and drunkenness pumped out in his voice. And he spoke hard—hard as a fighting man might speak, after a hard defeat.

  “Git to thet woodpile now, ye tramps, ye goddamned pesky go-about bastards—y’all been eatin’ an’ crappin’ roun’ heah sence mo’nin’ now—git t’ thet woodpile o’ git yo’ arse in the in-fun-tree, one o’ the other.”

  His right hand kept jerking over his shoulder to the lumber yard.

  “Woodpile o’ in-fun-tree, one o’ the other.”

  He repeated this several times, then cursed them all once more and abruptly walked away. The counterman began to laugh; but even as he did so he checked himself, for, surprisingly enough, the little man had returned.

  “Git in th’ army o’ elts git t’ thet woodpile, ah says—tha’s what ah says. Shet down th’ goddamned charity-suckin’, bumfeedin’ bean’ry racket—that’s what ah been tellin’ ’em all. Put the sonsabitches in th’ army or put th’ sonsabitches to work—tha’s the idee—sweat the bastards’ balls off—teach th’ pesky go-abouts to keep out o’ Texas—tha’s what ah tells ’em all, uptown.”

  He cast a challenging eye about the room, saw no one uncowed, and left once more. This time he did not return, and the counterman finished his laugh, albeit somewhat sheepishly now. None of the men at the tables joined with him; somehow, absurd as the little man had sounded, not one felt like laughing. All sat silent at their idiot’s task, letting the little brown kidney-shaped beans run through their fingers, looking morosely down at their palms. Such a ring of authority had there been in that drunken voice that it had left every man and boy of them inwardly agitated. The words had sounded too much like an alternative offered by one perfectly sober. It had left them troubled, resentful, and fearful of they scarcely knew what. It had made each man too sharply aware that he was an outcast—an outcast sorting pebbles out of small brown beans on the sufferance of society, an outcast whose next job might be that of shooting down outcasts in other lands—on the sufferance of society. The feeling was not good.

  An hour before midnight the man to Houston whistled past. Cass and Thomas Clay crouched under an embankment until the engine passed, and Cass ventured the guess that there would be but few empties in the string, judging by the engine’s hard straining. They could not find even a cattle-car unclosed; everything rolling was sealed. Cass became a bit afraid that the entire string would go by and leave them behind for another ten-hour wait; but Clay insisted on an empty, and Cass wanted companionship. Clay could not be hurried. “I’m kind of pooped out t’night,” he complained. “You kin grab anythin’ you feel like grabbin’, but me, I want an empty so’s I can sleep. These S. P. reefers feel like you’re settin’ ’top a wobbly waffle iron—Jeez, they make dents in my fanny so’s I can’t walk straight all next day.” An empty ore car came rolling by. Since the cab itself was but six cars behind this, Clay had to consent to hopping it. He went up first, and Cass ran with the car till Clay was on the last rung of the ladder before he himself hopped.

  Clay clung to the side, peering down into the darkness. He would not jump till he could see into what he was jumping. He saw that the car was unloaded, that its sides sloped steeply to the center, and that there two chutes gaped wide. Beneath the chutes he caught the glint of rolling wheels; and he turned his head to say that they would have to find another car.

  Cass was already coming up—when he reached the top he leaped past Clay, with a victor’s shout, and flung himself over the side onto the slant steel floor. Clay swung over swiftly, saw a white hand sliding downward in darkness, and mashed his shoe down on its knuckles. He felt Cass fumbling at his heel, felt him clutch his leg—and for three long miles it was thus they rode, the one clinging fiercely to the car’s steel side, the other clinging no less fiercely to the leg he could not see. In those brief minutes Cass saw the wheels below his toes, and remembered in terror a boy in a dark shirt sprawled in sand among cinders; he saw again a Mexican girl who had come for coal with a doll carriage.

  When the train went into a hole for a passenger engine Clay gave him his hand, and Cass hitched himself up to safety. He was caked with coal dust, his face was bruised in a dozen places, he had lost his cap and skinned the knees out of his overalls; but he shouted, “Ah’m obleeged, fella.” The other made no reply. Cass began to laugh then, uncontrollably, at nothing at all; he laughed until his knees were shaking and his eyes were wet, and he could not stop even when he saw Clay looking at him in amazement. He became so weak with laughter that when Clay left him to seek another car he could not follow his friend for several minutes. By the time that he felt able to follow, Clay had disappeared somewhere down the spine. Cass was too shaken to follow far. He found an oil tanker, and sat all night with his back braced against the rounded side and his legs against a coupling, watching the Texas hills go by.

  In the morning, in Houston, he found Clay once more; they went uptown to the Sally together. After eating they snuck out the rear entrance to avoid work, and returned to the Soupline tracks. Before dark they were on their way to New Orleans.

  Cass could not sleep a wink that night for thinking of New Orleans. “Ah’ll bet there’s places to git tattooed on every corner, an’ showhouses an’ whorehouses with Creole gals.” Twice he saw small yellow lights gleaming in distance, and both times he had to rouse Clay, thinking he saw the lights of New Orleans. One city was about the same as another to Clay, however, and he merely rolled over, grumbling, “Fella, I’ve told you nine times now we can’t hit New Orleans before light. Them lights is still in Texas. You’d best be gettin’ yourself some rest whiles you still can get it.”

  But Cass could not sleep. He sat in the open doorway of the swaying box, his legs dangling over the side, trying not to remember Nancy.

  Great dim forests rose out of darkness, rose and fell to rise again; stretches of field where he smelled cane-soil, cone-shaped hills of high-heaped rice-husks that even in daytime would have looked like soft-coal mounds. The car roared through tiny hamlets darkened and steeping, and Cass fancied he smelled the wind off the Gulf. Sometimes sudden valleys opened beneath him—so deep that he drew hi
mself back in brief fear; and just before dawn he grew very tired and curled up beside Clay to take a short nap. When he woke Clay was standing above him, sullenly digging him in the ribs with his toe.

  The car was rolling very slowly. Cass blinked out into sun-lit fields. Then he jumped to his feet, brushed straw off his coat, and rolled a cigarette with Clay. How long he had slept! He saw by the sun that it was well past ten o’clock.

  When they leaped to the ground Cass thought to see people—thousands of men and women, all rushing, all shoving and mauling and pushing each other; he thought to see towering buildings and streetcars roaring like trains through the midst of the press. But to his dismay he was still on the prairie, with only the long steel track ahead, and only the back end of a retreating caboose to amaze him. After walking a few miles they came to the houses of the Negro suburbs—little one-story shacks much like his own had been. Clay informed him that they now were in Gretna and that New Orleans lay west across the river. They turned down a pleasant street called Copernicus Avenue. A shaded, quiet little street lined by clean white cottages on either side; from porches and lawns Negro children paused in play to watch them as they passed.

  “Goddamn,” Cass swore, “Ah nevah did see so many jigs in all mah life befo’—where ah come from we have lynchin’ bees to keep the population down.” He spoke loudly, in order that Clay would think he was tough.

  Clay grunted assent. “Yep, niggers got all the jobs, everywhere, an’ that’s why you’n me is on the road. Up north they’s six dinges for every telygraph pole. A white man don’t stand a chance no more, anywhere.”