Somebody in Boots

by Nelson Algren

  Dripping and horrified, the boys stared at the kerosene swirling about their feet, and then they stared at each other. In that moment Cass felt a trickle coursing down the back of his right ear . . . Johnny whooped like an Indian, Cass grabbed a can, with one scoop filled it to overflowing, and raced for the fence at Johnny’s heels. This time Johnny needed no boost. When they came down on the other side of the fence Cass saw that half of what he had secured had spilled in the climb, and that the remainder was leaking fast. So he wadded his cap, already sodden, around and below the tin, and ran like a mad boy before the rest was lost. Johnny’s footsteps pounded far behind.

  On the next night, after dark had come down, and Stuart had left the house, Nancy and Cass enjoyed the luxury of a lamp. They sat together over the precious glow, set on the living room table between them, trying to warm cold hands over the flame.

  Somewhere in the room a fly without wings kept knocking itself against the wall, oppressed perhaps by the sharp smell of the lamp.

  Outside of the window Cass could see the barren boughs of the sycamore, where his tire-swing had hung, stretching cupped hands to the wind, like lean old fingers cupped for alms; he heard the wind rush past without stopping, without seeing, without heeding the little tree.

  Nancy and Cass.

  They did not know each other very well, this brother and sister. He was almost eighteen years old, but he did not yet know his sister very well. He thought, “What is father doing? Where does he go?” And he had a sense as of an impending disaster; his heart pained a little, and felt tired of beating.

  “Bryan is drunk,” he told himself. “He’s layin’ back o’ the Mex cathouse mebbe, or back o’ th’ filling station with Clark Casner. He won’t come back ’cause he’s too scared of paw now. Nance is hungry, oney she don’t say it ’cause thet’d jest make us both hungrier. Nance is colder’n me ah guess. But down at the yards there’s logs eight foot high, an’ every freight fo’ the last six weeks has been haulin’ coal through here. Seems like a little mought come our way, oney it never do.”

  On the ceiling flame-shadows from the lamp flowed endlessly, like moving lights on a river at night; the shadow-pattern here was that of having no pattern, ceaselessly. Nancy’s face in the lamp’s bronze glow looked almost like an Indian woman’s face, half turned away.

  Her eyes were dark and her cheekbones high, and her hair was like a helmet. When he looked close Cass perceived the turmoil in his sister’s face, he saw there the joylessness of her life. Her eyes seemed to be smoldering; he studied their sullen flare unaware that she knew he studied her. And he had the peculiar notion that her pupils might roll back in her head any moment—rolling back till only the blind whites showed—that then, screaming, she would rise, seize his throat and try to strangle him, the while her hair hung in her eyes like a madwoman’s hair.

  Cass shuddered his odd thought away. He did not know why he thought of such things so frequently. He only knew that of late he was often hungry.

  “It’s gittin’ low,” Nance said.

  Cass thought, “She used to laugh lots. Now after she gits in bed she cries sometimes.”

  Nancy cried for the utter joylessness of her life.

  The wick began sputtering, and Nancy rose. Cass heard her undressing behind the dark curtain and resolved to sit by the flame until it had died entirely. Nancy had pretended that she noticed nothing when he had come in with a pint of kerosene leaking out of a rusty tin can held in a sodden cap.

  “Shore don’t smell like y’all been rained on,” was all she had said.

  After Cass had climbed into bed he was unable to restrain his tongue any longer.

  “Are yo’ hungry, sister?” he asked.

  She did not answer him. Within him hunger worked up and down through his bowels.

  And then slowly, terribly, Nancy began to sing. Cass had heard her sing hymns a thousand times, but never before sheerly out of pain—he tried to close his ears to the shrill madness of her voice.

  Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?

  Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?

  Are you fully trusting in his grace this hour?

  Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?

  “Shet up!” he howled miserably, for it racked him horribly to hear.

  When the bridegroom cometh will your robes be white?

  Pure white in the blood of the lamb?

  Will your soul be ready for the mansions bright?

  Are you washed in the blood of the lamb,

  In the soul-cleansing blood of the lamb?

  “Do yo’ al’ays sing when yore that hungry?” he asked, wishing in some way to hurt her now, somehow to mock her with her own pain, and yet not knowing quite how.

  For reply Nancy only sang more shrilly.

  Are your garments spotless? Are they white as snow?

  Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?

  She did not finish. Sobs checked her. He listened to her catching her breath between her teeth till he could bear it no longer; then he rose and went in. She was lying face down on the pillow, and the tattered quilt had been tossed aside; Cass stood in cotton underwear, his feet were bare on the bare dirt floor; he shivered with wet November chill.

  “What is it, Nance?” he asked. “Caint ah help some way? Ah’ll git rice in the mo’nin’ at the station, we’ll have that, sister.”

  She only sobbed into the pillow for reply, and he sat down beside her on the bed, put his hand on her naked shoulder, and stroked the silken carpet of her hair. She turned her face to him then, streaked and hollow-eyed, and pressed his hand so fiercely in hers that she hurt his fingers. He saw a long shudder run through her as she lay, and he put the quilt back about her. Her voice strained with the effort to keep out pain.

  “Ah been tryin’ to pray, Cass, like Maw used to tell me to do. ’Member Maw, Cass? She uz good to me. She used to tell me an’ Bry’n to pray to Christ Jesus in ’diction an’ want, an’ not to leave off goin’ to the Church o’ Christ no matter what. We shouldn’t never left off church-goin’, Cass—an’ now ah’m so shamed for Paw an’ Bry’n an’ all . . .”

  “Y’all think it’d do good if we stahted to church agen, an’ prayin’ like we used?” she asked.

  For the first time in their lives then, Cass felt stronger than his sister. He saw in that moment how strangely helpless Nancy was, in all things; he spoke with an assurance that was new to him.

  “God ain’t never fed us, Nance—not wunst he ain’t. When Paw ain’t workin’ we beg our breakfast, that’s all. Elts we go without. He never fetched us kindlin’. But mebbe it was him what fetched me a beatin’ f ’om a Santy Fé dick when ah tried to cop us coal to burn, an’ it bled all day an’ left me a mark on mah neck fom it too. So ah reckon he jest don’t give a damn, if he’s anywhere ay-tall. Elts he’s actin’ plain orn’ry.”

  “Mebbe we been sinnin’ an’ he are punishin’. Y’all been sinnin’, Cass?”

  She looked up. In the darkness Cass traced his scar furtively. He recalled the old man in the jailhouse.

  “Reckon the wrongest sin we done, sister, was just bein’ bo’n hungry in a pesthole in Texas.”

  She turned slowly toward him, looking at him somehow wildly, as though she had not heard, and almost as though she did not know that he had been with her these many minutes.

  “Git back to yore baid”—her voice was strange. “Git off ’n mah baid! Caint yo’ see ah’m ’most nekkid?”

  She jerked the covers up high over her shoulders, looking at him with eyes empty and burning like two lamps already fading to darkness—“Go awn now”—ah know what your aimin’ at well enough.”

  Stunned as though he’d been struck between the eyes, Cass groped back to the other side of the curtain. He could not understand. For hours he lay awake, trying to understand. Then he concluded, “She was jest actin’ smart, that’s all. Derned if Nance ain’t gittin’ as catawampus as the ol’ man sometimes.”

 
But what was it then she murmured into the night as though to speak between clenched teeth? Every night now he heard her. Low, troubled words; confused pleadings, and a half-told despair.

  He had heard her, and he had not understood. He was too hungry to think it all out into a clear understanding.

  He was too hungry to understand what hunger wrought in his sister’s mind.

  Cass and Nancy did not have fire four times that winter; and that was the winter of 1928–29. It was a good winter for the tourist trade, and Cass pimped boldly for the Poblano Café. What few pennies he earned, however, went to the table. Before spring came Nancy knew he was pimping. She said nothing. But she could not forgive it.

  All one April afternoon Stuart McKay had been lying, eyes tightly closed, on the disheveled cot in the corner. When he thought no one looked, he opened one eye. From the kitchen Cass had watched furtively, had seen his father breathe heavily, feigning sleep, and he had been afraid. The slant sun climbed the wooden walls, dropped slowly down behind the mountain, left the room to final night. When its reflected rays had paled from the window Stuart sat up, stretched as though after long sleep, and swung his legs over the side of the bed; then silently, as one upon whom many wait, he passed out into the deepening dusk. Cass saw his shadow pass the door, heard the quick little boots tapping over the dust of Mexican-town . . . then pity replaced fear in his heart; and he could have wept tears of blood for that poor man, his father.

  Stuart walked up the Santa Fe toward the roundhouse. On either side stood workers’ homes; dark, unpainted, unlovely even in the dusk they stood. So many boxes, all in a row. One after another, all the same, each one alone, every one dark.

  Somehow to Stuart McKay they seemed to be standing without shame, just because they stood all in a row like that. He did not see the little low houses now, yet he felt shame like a wind on his cheek as he passed. He had gone this way a thousand times, each time it was the same. It was the same; he felt that always as he passed houses watched him with small squint eyes, that each squat hovel was naked and black.

  “Like nigger whores,” he said to himself, “sinnin’ nigger whores thet’d give a man clap jest to look at ’em wunst.”

  So on this night Stubby did not turn his eyes to where the little low houses stood.

  The odor of tamales frying came to him mingled with another smell, as of a dead burro or cow lying somewhere close by.

  He passed the jailhouse, waiting quietly like a thick-necked wrestler who watches an opponent and knows his own strength to be the greater. He followed the tracks over an embankment between gardens where grape-vines hung, lifeless and dry and dinging in wind. Stubby heard their leaves whisper crisply as he passed. Without turning his head, without clearly realizing what sound he had heard, he spoke to himself, “Drought done fo’ thet grape patch. Dry as a guinea hen’s arse since way last August. Good. Now the rest’ll go too . . . the cotton, the corn . . . the cows . . . good.”

  Ahead of him signal towers burned yellow, red and green. Down from the roundhouse floodlights came slanting so brightly that their glare defined cinders between the ties. The night freight from San Angelo had come in and waited, panting and throbbing like a thirsty beast, beside the dripping watertank. There would be steel on that man before it pulled for Presidio, Stuart knew—steel bars upon steel bars. Long fierce cold rails that would lie quietly in darkness, but could flash blue death like any lightning flash; that would flash blue light when the sun came upon them. He liked the thought, and let the picture of long sharp bars roll about in the back of his brain. Iron—that rusted. Not steel. Steel was a trickster. Steel killed men.

  He passed between two sidings of sealed boxcars and came to a shadowed corner of the powerhouse. This was his corner, his secret place. From here he could see the man whom he came every night to see, but the man could not see him. He would watch this little devil that gave whiskey to others, this runt-devil who stole other men’s jobs. He would see that the devil worked well, that he did not shirk, that he did not drink when he should be working. Damn all runt-devil’s whiskey that made men drunk.

  The Damned Man—Stubby had to call him that.

  He crouched in darkness almost an hour before he saw anyone other than Mexican stokers. Then a hostler passed within a few feet of him, and behind the hostler came Gulliday. Stuart saw Luke clamber up the cabin and into the fireman’s seat. He saw him climb over the tender to the watertank as soon as the engine rolled under the standpipe. The tender was standing with its tank under a spout like a colossal camel’s nose, projecting. Standing on his toes there, Luther reached up, yanking against the great counterweights, shoved the spout into the tank, and opened the valve. Water poured down so last that in less than a minute the 8,000 gallon tank was full. Stuart knew that it was full. He heard the water rushing over Luke’s boots, slopping all over the rounded deck, drenching Luke’s gloves and his sleeves and the knees of his trousers. He saw Luke shut the valve and ding the spout upward—and Stuart felt, on seeing this, that had it been himself atop that tender the valve would have been shut a second sooner. Small as he was, he was bigger than Luke. Luke was too timid, too uncertain in his movements; uncertain and none too strong; whereas he, Stub McKay, was fast as a rabbit and strong as a burro; and always cold sober.

  The engine rumbled off to the coal station, and Luke walked back to the roundhouse, shuffling his boots as he walked.

  Stuart waited till Luke had reached the roundhouse before he dared to follow. On his way he paused to peer between two sidings of boxcars. Mexican mechanics, blackened and half-naked, scurried under the droplights.

  “Heatherns, every one,” Stubby muttered, peering. “Heatherns cleanin’ Amerikun road-hogs.”

  An S. P. express locomotive crashed past him, hurling up great sparks to the brooding sky, hauling its string of pullmans as though they were toy carriages. The great drivers thundered by, boiler-lightning flashed spasmodically across the maze of tracks, the earth shook under Stubby’s feet, and a long smoke went up against the sky. Then the windows of the pullmans raced by, every one darkened but the last, where lights and silverware were flashing. Stubby glimpsed a woman all in white sitting with a spoon in her hand, laughing, with her head thrown back.

  “She’ll be in San Anton’ by mornin’,” Stubby told himself, fingering soot out of his eye.

  Over a dead locomotive he saw heat-lightning cleave the sky. It glowed and quivered ominously, a three-tined fork far, far to the north, silhouetting momently against the night the tall, encircled smoke-jacks of the great roundhouse. In just that way once, he remembered, heat lightning had silhouetted to the north a distant wood hill; it had illuminated trees there that time, tall and encircled, so that he had stayed up late that night to watch, and to wonder. Then he had walked, with someone in white, down a dark way between two fields of ripening cotton. He had walked and talked with someone in white that time; Where had that been?

  Where had they walked? Who? He had forgotten so many things. Everything now seemed long ago. He only remembered a dim place, and a lost thought, and a half-seen figure waiting where two white fields of cotton met beneath heat-lightning in the sky.

  He walked on till he could see Luke again. Luke was pulling down the iron spout of a standpipe once more; again he was fighting with a coal chute that was too heavy for him, but that was not too heavy for a better man. Stuart heard him panting with his effort—Good! He was breathing in dark dust! Might he soon breathe in dark death!

  The cars far behind the engine started slowly, their wheels slipping, jerking, slipping, jerking. Then wheels were turning, wheels were straining, wheels were shrieking with gathering speed. Stubby came slowly out of shadow when he heard their turning sound. He could not help but come, for wheels were steel, and wheels were rolling. Directly into the flood-beams’ glare he walked, and he did not wince once in their fierce light; he was unaware of light, he did not know why he had come out of shadow. He heard only wheels, felt only an old fury, saw only o
ne man.

  The Damned Man. The Damned Feeling. He smelled nothing but smoke, felt nothing but hate, heard nothing but wheels.

  He saw only—The Man.

  A brakie walking the tops saw Stubby coming up swiftly behind the little hostler, and something in Stuart’s stride caused him to point one finger and call out.

  Little Luke Gulliday did not see, he never heard that warning shout. Stubby caught him at the waist and raised him above his head high into the glare of the floodlights, held him high for one long moment there—laughing. Luke struggled once, and then, as though suddenly realizing what hands held him, screamed wildly above the din of the passing cars. And Stuart hurled him so far under that the last of the scream became a brief part of the roar of wheels turning with gathering speed.

  A mob has a face with a single mouth. Opening, closing. It has one long hand with a thousand fingers, it points at a house, it weeps and hisses.

  “Yeah,” said Mob-Mouth, “Stuart McKay, the very same one as acts sech a bad hat, an’ that there is the house, the very same house. He been actin’ bad-hat-about-town goin’ on fifteen year, an’ the Jesus-God hisself don’t know what’s gone on behind them walls in alt these years. They say Beulah Gulliday jest won’t believe. Poor, poor Beulah.”

  A boy with a dog-like mane wormed swiftly out of the crowd’s very center, ran to the kitchen window, tapped twice at the pane, whirl-stumbled about and disappeared once again into the heart of the gathering throng.