When Cass rose that time he felt as though somebody had just turned on an electric fan in his belly that whizzed hot dry air in long ripples down his stomach’s lining. Long dry ripplings, all the way down, with a whirring there as of many blades. He felt the fingers of one hand with those of the other: they were cold. His head: it was hot. People were passing, morning was blue-gray again; and he needed a drink of water.
He walked till he saw a filling station, and he looked about for a hose. There was no one about the station that he could see. A fuzzy ball of a police pup lapped water from the tank wherein inner-tubes were tested. Inside, between a safe and a rack of colorful road maps, Cass saw water in a tall glass barrel. Paper cups were hanging above it. But before he’d taken two steps toward it, a voice behind him called him back.
“They’s nothin’ inside for you there, bub. The can is around the rear.”
Cass turned and saw the attendant, a dashing fellow in white overalls. He was cranking gas swiftly into the tank of a maroon roadster with frosted-sugar headlights.
“Ah oney want a drink is all,” Cass said turning half way around.
The attendant made no reply. He kept cranking endlessly, bending a little as he cranked and watching the hand of the pump-clock swinging. Cass watched too, while little tongues of flame singed the roof of his mouth. The mission would be on the other side of town—and he had to drink right now. The puppy lapped noisily at his feet; Cass had an urge to kick it and run. The attendant walked around the other side of the roadster to inspect its oil; no one was watching.
Carefully, cautiously with averted eyes, he lifted the pup off the ground with his shoe, holding it by its furry middle, and flung it hard as he was able toward the cement base of the pump. It landed softly, sprawling against stone, yelped once as it regained its feet, sneezed and went off sneezing.
That made Cass feel a little better; as though the boot had been put on the other foot for a change. As though he had just outwitted an enemy. And then it seemed to Cass that he could smell all that water standing so near, with all the clean white paper cups hanging right above it. He could smell it while his throat shriveled for one wet drop—he turned, ripped cups down, caught one after dropping three; and then, in using both hands to turn on the water, crushed the cup flat between his palms. As he stooped to retrieve one which he had dropped, the water began flooding the floor; he forgot about cups in a desperate effort to close the faucet before he was caught. In his haste he jammed the handle; the floor was littered with paper cups, it seemed to him, before he finally slammed the faucet off—paper cups afloat in a flood like a back-flooding sewer.
“Whew!” he gasped, stepping back, having in his excitement almost forgotten his thirst, “Whew! Ah shet it jest in time.”
But it hadn’t been in time at all.
“Well, isn’t this nice now, I must say. Couldn’t you leak a little on the desk for me too before you have to be leaving?”
This voice was a whip, contemptuously coiling. Cass flinched as though he were about to be spat upon—then a hand on his collar, he was reel-spinning through space; he was going face-forward; he felt the boot bite in deep, deep at the base of the spine where his father’s boot would have bitten, sending him onto the concrete of the driveway with his wrists straining stiffly in front of his face to save himself a bruised nose as he fell. Then he picked up and ran, dodging crazily in and out of Canal Street traffic, fancying the attendant hard on his heels. He ran along the steep curbing, while passersby stared for two full blocks. Then he could go no farther; he could have run not one step farther that time had there been a whole mob of attendants at his heels all shouting “Law that guy!”
And his throat, if it had known thirst before, was now varnished with it, like an asphalt road smoking in sun. He could not even spit now, he could not dampen his lips with his tongue. Hard hands were wringing his stomach out, as Nancy would wring out a gray dish rag. And his stomach was nothing more than a dark furnace for his thirst. Traffic was picking up down South Rampart; from an unseen corner a peanut-whistle twittered tinnily.
No one had spoken of thirst in the jungle. He had not been told about being kicked. Nobody had said much about shame and mockery.
He went into the first restaurant he saw and found it crowded with men eating oatmeal. The waitresses were too rushed to say “No,” so Cass just stood there, a little inside the door and a little off to the side, shifting uneasily from one loot to the other. And when he became too ashamed to stand and shift that way any longer, he left.
On the corner of Camp and Felicity people were thronging out of a church. Dimly Cass wondered whether Catholics would drink holy water if they were as thirsty as he was and had no other water to drink. Then the hands on his stomach were hard and callused, as Nancy’s hands had become; he walked on while they wrenched and wrung, thinking of Nancy and Nancy’s hands. Till he came to a second gas station. The water-tank here was enamelled white. A slender bronze statue stood on its peak, a little naked man with wings on both heels, standing on tiptoe as though preparing to glide off the tank and by out the door into the sun above the Camp Street palms.
Cass looked about a little more covertly than before. This time he would do differently; this time he would plead so piteously that he could not be denied.
The attendant was a Negro.
“What is it, son?” he asked just as though he really thought Cass might reply, “Ten gallon o’ gas in mah lawng maroon roadster.”
The black face was smiling like a full moon in eclipse. It looked, somehow, kind.
“Mister, kin ah git a drink heah?”
“Sho! Theah!”
But he wasn’t pointing straight at the ice-water tank with the little bronze man on its peak. He was pointing off to the side a little. He was pointing, in fact, to the radiator hose. Meekly Cass went there and drank from a rusty nozzle. The water was warm, with the warmth of stale urine, a sticky, sweetish-sour warmth like that of sodden pickles. When it trickled through his fingers it trickled dark amber; in the palm of one hand it left small specks like the specks that flies leave in summer in milk. Perhaps, Cass thought, such specks were only soot. “Just good ol’ root, that’s all. Mebbe them little speck-things’ll just make it meaty-like, sort of, so’s ah wont have to hunt up that derned Jesus-Saves joint all over town agen.”
After he had swilled down almost a pint of the muddy stuff, he washed the dotted blood off his mouth and dried his lips on the back of his hand.
He didn’t feel any better, somehow. He felt sick. He felt sick and lonely. He didn’t want to go to Jacksonville after all. He didn’t even want to see Baton Rouge. He wanted to go home.
And with no further ado he turned toward the wharves.
4
WHEN CASS CAME to the ferry he saw that a fare was required, and he formed the hasty opinion then that the ferry was free were one going west across the river, but cost a nickel when one went east. He stood at the side in his tattered overalls with blood on his mouth half-coagulated, while hot bolts of pain tore him and thirst came anew, and he begged. He begged humbly, with one palm outstretched. An elderly woman put a nickel in the box for him, and he limped out onto the boat.
It took him two hours to retrace the streets he had walked with Clay on the previous morning. When he reached the S.P. tracks at noon, he lay down in spare and cindery grass, and slept with his shoe for a pillow. He did not waken until the freight to Houston roused him; it took all his strength to swing up a ladder. As soon as he found an empty he fell once more to sleep, this time to waken only to change freights in Houston, early in the morning hours. On the outskirts of San Antonio he ate at the same beanery where he had eaten with Clay the week before. for had his name really been Clancy?) That same night he was on his way back to Great-Snake Mountain.
Slouched down in the cool dark of a fruit-car reefer, he smelled thousands of ripening oranges all night. All night long he smelled them. He could see them dimly, stacked high as the roof, only
a few feet from his finger-tips. He would have liked to suck on one for a while, but because of the reefer’s steel screening there was no reaching them at all.
He had learned that for him, Cass McKay, there was no escape from brutality. He had learned that, for him, there was no asylum from evil or pain or long loneliness. It might be that for others there was something different; but for him lonely pain and lonely evil were all that there was in the whole wide world. The world was a cruel place, all men went alone in it. Each man went alone, no two went together. Those who were strong beat those who were weak. They who said they loved Jesus wore little spiked boots, and those who kept silent ran swiftly away. There was only one God, and he was a devil; he was everything that there was in the world, for he was all pain and all evil. He was all that was secret and dark and unclean. There were only two kinds of men wherever you went—the men who wore boots, and the men who ran. You must not try to take that which belonged to another unless you were strong enough to keep it when that other found out. Otherwise you would be kicked into a jailhouse. If you could get much you were strong, and therefore good; God gave to the strong and took from the weak. He was on the side of the ones who rode in autos, who lived in white houses: he was as big as County Sheriff Shultz, as rich as Judge Bankhead from Presidio, pious as the Reverend Benjamin Cody, and fierce as the rancher Boone Terry.
He, Cass, was on the other side, because he himself was so weak. He was weak, for his father was poor and his brother was sick, and his sister was ragged and his mother was dead, and he lived in Mexican-town.
Somehow now Cass felt that he was walking in darkness, below a high dark wall, a shadow among many shadows. He didn’t know whose many forms walked before and behind him. They too were crouched in night-dark, below a high dark wall.
The house was silent when he arrived. It was late, and the town slept. In order to avoid waking his sister he lay down in the dooryard, in the long buffalo grass by the fence. The air smelled of punk.
Toward morning he was awakened by the straining of a freight engine; he rose and went to the swing on the garden side to wait until dawn.
Although it was scarcely a week since he had left, yet it seemed many days to Cass.
Above the house the first slant rays of morning touched Great-Snake Mountain. As the light grew there he saw low clouds across the prairie, in a long moving mist crouching toward the green mountain. Slowly the long mist moved toward the high mountain, like a sleek gray cat approaching, then it lunged forward swiftly and ruthlessly, and all the great peak was enwrapped from his sight. As though daws of fog had pierced an earthen heart.
Sitting in the lop-sided tire-swing, Cass thought to himself then that could one but come dose to a shining star it might look much as the great peak did now: just a dim height curtained by roiling cloud, with all the shining vanished away. The peak did not look beautiful to him now. It seldom had. Even after the mist dispersed and Great-Snake Mountain stood up clearly and tall, like a stately woman standing alone robed in purple and gold and green, not even then did it appear even pleasant to him to see. Cass was hungry, and more than anything else it looked to him like a huge and green-streaked heap of ancient horse-dung that had lost most of its odor. To a man who had just eaten well the mountain no doubt would have appeared beautiful; for the sun was on it and the sky was behind it—and humbly now in its high white mist three quiet sheep were grazing. But to Cass they appeared much like himself: just lour somewhat hungry-looking sheep atop a hungry hill, their fleece bitten by frost in the morning air and their heads hanging a little out of too-long loneliness.
He heard movement in the kitchen, went to the back door and tapped like a stranger there. It was Nancy. She came to the door with her hair undone; it cascaded in an auburn torrent halfway down to her waist. She gave a cry half surprise and half joy, and caught him into her arms.
For very emotion Cass could not speak, his affection swelled his heart till his throat felt dry. He could only cling to his sister, and run his hands through her hair, and try not to whimper again. Nancy’s hair held a red-brown sheen; it was tawny in the light. It held the odor of the dooryard lilac that long ago had ceased to bloom.
Being taken unaware by emotion made restraint difficult for Cass. Nancy ran a finger over the cut on his mouth, traced it down from his mouth to his throat. There was guilt in his eyes when she did that, and he winced. He averted his eyes. “That hurts, Nance,” he said, and he took her finger away.
“But Lawd—how’d y’all git cut that away? Look at me.”
He faced her. “Slipped an’ fell on a railroad spike. How y’all been gettin’ on with the charity-folks?”
“Tol’able.”
He saw the raggedness of his sister.
While eating clabber and combread over the kitchen stove he asked, “Where’s Bry’n?” Nancy did not answer for a minute.
“Bry’n’s stayin’ on uptown some’eres,” she hnally replied, “Paw thrashed him so’s he won’t walk all by hisself for a spell. Luke nex’ door tuk him on uptown; so now he’s at Clark Casner’s place, ah s’pose.”
Cass asked for his father only to inquire briefly, “He’ll be home directly, y’ reck’n?”
Nancy did not reply at all this time. They had finished eating and Cass was clearing the dishes when Stubby strode into the kitchen. He tossed his empty tin dinner pail into the sink, and went on into the living room without giving any indication that he had so much as seen Cass. His whole bearing was that of a man either returning from a hard night’s work, or of a man walking in a dream. He went directly to the bed, stretched out on it without removing his boots, and to all appearances fell to sound sleep the moment his head touched the pillow.
The brown boot-toes pointed sharply to the roof.
Cass looked at Nancy in bewilderment. He had never seen his father like this before, and he was frightened. But Nancy would not answer his glance, she would not turn her face to show that she saw. Instead, she turned her face away. Cass saw that she was ashamed of their father.
And in the weeks that followed it seemed to Cass that Nancy never once looked directly at him; she seemed to be forever shifting her eyes or turning her head or walking abruptly away. He could not understand how the week of his absence could have wrought such an irreparable change.
Yet, it had split life in two.
He remembered how often Nancy had waked him out of sleep with low laughter. Yet now she laughed not even when awake. All day now she went about the empty house, puttering, fidgeting, tight-lipped, dry-eyed. Cass had no inkling of the conflict in her heart. After the joy she had evinced at first seeing him she seemed to recoil, so that at times he was reminded in her of his father. She too would walk past him as though not to see. And she never learned how severe a gash he had suffered down the side of his mouth, for he tended it himself, at night, half-secretly. He did not want her to see it, he did not wish now that she tend it: he was ashamed of that wound. He never told her how he had gained it. And a wall began growing between them.
He washed the cut late at night, at the dooryard well. He picked it and daubed it with unclean rags. When the scab was half-formed he tore it off, and it bled anew. And when it was finally healed he looked in a mirror, and he saw a little road of gray scar tissue running like a loose gray ribbon out of his mouth’s left corner.
Cass resumed his trips to the charity station. And January came with rain, mountain days were gray again. And outside was the gray Texas winter.
To Cass it seemed that the town was coming to be full of men like his father. Not until he had been away from the town and had returned did he really see how many idle, swaggering rogues there were in the place. The fear of blood and fighting seized him whenever he passed a group of men on the street. For blood and fighting were on their minds, and he sensed it as he passed.
On hot afternoons through June and July he saw them lounging about on the courthouse steps, or in front of the pool hall or domino parlor. They wore great gray hat
s and dusty blue overalls, they were cold-eyed even when smiling. Sullen men, sharply dissatisfied, and quick to cross in their mood. Vain, ignorant, native; and cunning as the mountain wotves.
Although all were troubled by the same sharp discontent, some could free themselves of the feeling by fighting. Some hearts, like Stubby’s, were consumed by a flame that burned steady and hot, demanding blows and the feel of flesh cringing. Something there was within such men that burned like a fever; they turned to fighting to escape feeling: to a cock-fight, a bull-dog fight, a bull-fight across the border or a human fight near at hand. They turned to drink and to gambling and to the Mexican whorehouse, or to a lynching.
In the middle of July, nine months after Cass had returned from New Orleans, there were two killings on the streets in a single week. One boy was stabbed, and a second was lynched for the stabbing. Two brothers, sons of a small tenant-rancher named Ross Kilbane, started the trouble. Kilbane, a harmless little man and a widower, had had trouble with his boys ever since the death of their mother. Cass knew both boys, and ran when he saw either. They called him a Mexican because he lived among Mexicans, and they chased him with added fervor because he was red-haired.
The precious pair were sitting together near the watertank on the Santa Fe one boiling Tuesday afternoon, waiting for a freight to take them to San Antonio, when the quarrel began. A young Negro transient who had been waiting a short distance away for the same train later told what he had seen of the fight.
He told it standing on the courthouse steps, with Sheriff Lem Shultz standing on one side and a gang of idlers on the other. Cass, nearby, heard every word.
“This un, th’ little un, he was settin’ cross-leg first ah seen ’im, chawin’ a straw ’tween he teeth; but this un, he were layin’ down on he back all th’ while. This un, the little un, he kep’ sayin’ how hongry he feel, but this other, he kep’ layin’ down an’ don’ say how he feel atall. Then this un, th’ little un, he say he so hongry now he could chaw he tongue, had he oney pinch o’ salt, an’ ask me nigger has ah got any grub. Ah tol’ him no,’ cause o’ co’se ah ain’t, an’ he call me ol’ name lak he think ah lyin’ an’ commence chawin’ at ol straw agin. But other boy don’ say is he hongry atall. He jes’ keep layin’ still all th’ while, lak he deep asleep; oney ah seen o’ co’se he werent.
Somebody in Boots Page 8