“Ah hates the sight of fire,” the Negress said, watching next to Cass. “On account of it made me a widder oncet.”
The men were afraid when they saw. They huddled together in little groups, till the train in distance seemed to be stopping. And each man in his mind added one word then to the list of his crimes and felonies of the past five hours; here was something to reckon with more serious than all their previous offenses put together. This was arson. Some looked accusingly at Jones, the Northerner, but Jones looked right back and said nothing at all. He took no blame, not from any man, his look seemed to say.
As they scattered Cass found himself walking between Jones and the black girl. With two others they headed for a little copse of scrub cedar. Not until they had put the scrub between themselves and the tracks did they feel a degree safer. Someone would be caught, Jones said. Someone always was.
The boy who had been the Wobbly’s companion walked directly ahead, munching a sandwich; when he had consumed half of it he returned the remainder to his pocket, for future reference. Cass, watching hungrily, suddenly hated the boy; he was lanky and pimpled and walked slinkingly, like a thief. On his bindle Cass read his name, sewed on the pack with red thread, in large letters: Claude Burrus, The Smilin’ Kid. The black girl took a bar of chocolate out of one pocket and a pack of ten-cent cigarettes out of the other. After both had been passed around there was not a great deal of either left for herself. Claude Burrus took some of both, thanked her for neither, and walked on ahead chewing and smoking alternately.
The girl laughed and joked with them all as they walked. Cass saw that she was no longer afraid, because she was now in the open. And she told them of herself, of the place she had come from and where she was going; she had come from New Mexico, she was going to Louisiana. She had lost her husband, was going to work now in a laundry owned by the late husband’s brother. As she talked and smoked the breasts under her overalls rolled hugely. These appeared to weigh perhaps four pounds apiece, and thus betrayed her otherwise masculine aspect.
Jones thwacked her on the rump with the flat of his palm.
“Say, if y’jest lost yer husban’, you’d best to marry me now, black gal. I’m a good pervider, I am. Come on out in the scrub wid me an’ I’ll pervide y’ some right now.” He glanced at the others for approval, and Claude Burrus laughed.
“Go ahead, nigger gal. Marry the Yank.”
“Kin I be best man at yore weddin’, Yank?”
“All o’ you kin be best men,” Jones offered magnanimously, “soon as Lizah-Jane say the word. Oney you’ll have t’ take at bein’ best men, an’ we ort to chip up right now fer a gift fer our littl’ bride—fifteen cents apiece ort to do, ain it, Lizah-Jane?” He kept trying to suck his hare-lip down, to conceal it with his under lip. The habit gave him the impression of having two mouths; a big and oblong cross-cut one, and a little triangular hairy one right on top and growing out of the other. In his narrow eyes glowed a devil of cruelty.
The girl ceased to joke and to chatter. Once she dropped a little behind, to let them all pass on; but Jones wound his arm in hers and would not let her go.
“Ain’t time fer no divorce yet, Coconut-Tits—wait’ll we gets married first.”
Claude Burrus took up the joke immediately.
“Ain’t time fer no div-orce yet, Coco-nut Tits—You’n me is gonna git married t’gether in Waskom.” He took her other arm.
When houses began to dot the prairie, at closer and closer intervals, the men turned north to skirt a town.
To the east gray light rode down between the hills. Then the sun like a bucket of blood spilled over, and grayness became a running red. The homeless rested.
In a small valley they lay down, five ragged men and a girl. A red-buttressed mesa went all about, there came green pine-smell down from the mountains. The ’boes spread out their coats and slept. The grass was touched with early dew.
Cass slept with his back against a small tree, sharing the tree’s trunk with Claude Burrus. How tired Cass was! He slept till he heard a crow over the prairie let fall a single caw; the sound waked him, but he did not open his eyes until he heard someone walking off. The black girl, stepping quietly away from Jones; the Northerner lay purring in sleep. Obeying a passing impulse, Cass nudged Burrus. The boy jumped up and called the girl sharply. “Lizah, where you-all goin’ to?” Jones awoke, stretching.
Sleep had refreshed them; they were ready for deviltry.
The girl paid no heed to Burrus until she heard him coming up swiftly behind her. Then she whirled, all defiance, her voice a threat, and a plea—then a sob.
“Puppy, yo’ keep awn a-pesterin’ me an’ sho’ as shucks ah’ll beat yo’ eahs down. Sh-sho as sh-shucks.”
Standing so, her body thick in some sharecropper’s overalls, short arms akimbo, she tooked fully capable of thrashing the gangling, pimpled youth. Yet, her eyes were wet. Behind her a clump of dead mesquite stood against the light of noon, its boughs blackly barren against the sun; like the form of something from which the spirit had fled. A meadowlark rose in a swift white blooming, bright tail splitting the sky in two. The men barked laughter. One egged the girl on and another the boy.
“Nervy black heifer,” Olin Jones grumbled. “They’re whores every time. Why don’t he push her black puss in anyhow? They all yell some, but don’t believe that, they like white boys to do ’em that way. That’s what they’re for, y’know.”
Then he laughed lowly, a faint half-laugh; they all had to laugh then at what they saw. Burrus, with his side turned toward them, was urinating on the girl’s overalls; when she stepped back he followed. And when she could go no further back, because of the mesquite behind her, she screamed and struck out at him. He caught one arm and imprisoned it, laughing, but her teeth found his wrist and his laughter broke—“Oooooo”—he yelped like a lashed pup—“Oooooo, now I will git yo’ fer real.”
He advanced slowly, the girl’s voice rose to frenzy.
“White! White! Mah Joe you burnt!”
She came forward like an outraged cat, and her fingernails screeled deeply down his face. In a panic of surprise and pain, he recaptured her arm and twisted until she screamed darkly, like a cat with its throat cut trying to scream. Twisting thus slowly and using both of his own hands, enraged by the feel of blood on his cheeks and encouraged by sharp cries behind him, he forced the girl to her knees and to earth. He was not quite strong enough, however: though he pinned her arms deep in sod and kneeled hard on her breasts, yet she writhed so that he could no longer control her. Had Olin Jones not run up swiftly, still feigning faint laughter, she would have escaped them all. Jones squatted heavily down on her legs in the very moment when it seemed she was finally free; holding her firmly with one hand, with his other he ripped her overalls down the middle. Laughing faintly.
Cass saw. The other boys saw. They all came laughing forward to see.
And the girl’s cry went up like a silken thread into air till a hand like shears cut it down. A hand over her mouth as laughter died. And there was no sound then save the sound of five indrawn breaths, and somebody who said, “Ah—ah.”
Jones spoke steadily.
“Free ride t’day, gentlemen. If you want it, come an’ get it.”
Now there came into Cass’s heart a dark and terrible desire. Drawn by a power more strong than himself, like a strong hand pushing him from behind, he went closer and closer. About him others moved slowly closer. All moved slowly, in silence, toward the black woman. The air became charged with the smell of the woman, they all smelled the dark woman, her thighs and her womb: womb, belly and breasts, her thighs flexing in fear.
They were all of them men; they were men without women.
7
CASS AND THE man called Olin Jones stood on the corner of Common and Cotton Streets, in Shreveport. For the first time in many months Cass did not feel alone in the world. He had a friend, one who was wiser than himself. They had been drunk together the night befo
re, and they were hungry now. Unwashed, they stood in rags.
“I kin mooch a dime out of anything with pants on, male or female,” Olin boasted to Cass; “you watch my smoke an’ all you’ll see is ashes.” Olin knew when to whine, when to cringe, and when to beg boldly; he knew when to come fawning with a “Jest three cents fer carfare, mister, so’s I kin get to work?” And he knew when to wink broadly and say, “Be a sport, pal, I’m a vet an’ I ain’t had a drink all day. Let’s have a dime for a shot, waddya say?” He had taught Cass that sheer stick-to-it-iveness was the larger part of successful mooching.
“Come on, Red,” Olin offered. “They’s a jernt on Market Street belongs to a guy used to be a pal of mine in the field artill’ry. He’ll set us up to coffee an’. He’s a Greek, an’ his misery’s the hottest stuff in cups. Come on.”
Walking swiftly and turning odd corners, they passed the courthouse on Milam Street; a block later they passed the jail. Olin jerked his thumb toward its upper windows.
“Put sixty-one days of my life up there on the second floor an’ I ain’t yet found out why. They kep’ me two months, an’ then they let me go. No trial, no hearin’, no show-up, no nothin’. Just settin’ up there fer sixty-one days, askin’ the jailer every day ‘Why?’ An’ I never did find out.”
“Ah never really been in jail ’cept to sleep overnight up north sometimes. Ah like Sallies better.”
Olin spoke crisply. “I never stand up fer Jesus. I’d ruther go to jail fer a week then sing one of them chicken-dribble songs jest fer a crumby cot. I don’t trust no holy bastard, livin’ or dead. The holier they look the quicker they’ll rook you.”
They turned down Texas into Market Street.
The little white restaurant was crowded, and steaming; buttocks in trousers warmed every stool greasily. The owner was a monster, a Greek with a belly; under his egg-stained apron he strouted out somehow awfully, like a woman come too late to her time. He saw what they wanted before they begged it, and a middle-aged blonde came bearing two cups of coffee in one hand and three bowls of soup in the other. The soup was for paying customers, the coffee for Cass and Olin. She bore bowls and cups on her fingertips in a mechanical unconcern rather baffling to Cass. They drank leaning over the cigar-case, and drops spilled onto white business cards face-up under the glass; the first sip made Cass wish for sugar. He made a wry face. Olin was bolder. He reached down the counter, returned with a bowl, and Cass spooned out one timorous helping. But Olin turned the bowl on end and sugar avalanched into his cup. His coffee overflowed onto the counter and still he poured sugar, grinning faintly. “Ah guess he’s as hard as he says he is,” Cass thought uneasily, looking about to see whether the owner were watching.
Olin drained his cup in two gulps; he did not trouble to replace the bowl. The glass beneath his elbows became a running farrago of coffee, drifting sugar, and two smoldering cigarette butts; he leaned over the mess unashamed. Half-covering it with his unclean sleeve, he hissed at the waitress:
“Ssssssss—sneak us a sugar doughnut, Blondie.”
The woman refused to hear, and when she returned he took a petty vengeance on her for her deafness. Whispering just low enough to be heard by her clearly, he said, “That blonde scurve ain’t young no more, Red. Jest look at her, what she’s doin’ now. Say, don’t she look jest like a old slut gettin’ set fer her last big Sattiday night?”
Cass cautioned, “Be still, Olin, be still. Y’all won’t git nothin’ talkin’ thataway.”
The woman was placing a long platter of steak and potatoes before a man with a milk-driver’s badge pinned onto one side of his cap; a slow-surging flush across her temple showed only too clearly how well she had heard. Olin laughed his faint laugh, being well-pleased. Then Cass, feeling the milk-driver’s eyes on him, himself reddened. The driver’s look was insolent; he too had heard Olin’s whisper. Cass’s cap was ripped at the side, his shoes had only strings for laces; and that impersonal look kept walking over him. The man chewed an onion as he surveyed, to add to the quiet insult of his eyes. Olin saw that look and came to Cass’s aid.
“Jeez,” he gasped in an awed undertone, looking straight at the driver, “Didja ever see a mug like that before, Red? Say, Red, don’t it look sort of like somethin’ you throw sawdust on an’ sweep out quick ’fore it smells up the whole barn? Don’t it look sort of like somethin’ like that, Red?”
The driver turned his eyes away, and Cass said, “Shhhh.” The Greek was coming with a bag, and the bag’s open throat revealed butter-rolls and sugar doughnuts. Cass received it in both hands. Then the kind Greek monster gave Olin a dime, and they mooched out arm in arm.
Olin held the bag, but Cass could eat faster because he had no hare-lip. Olin’s deformity worked obscenely in and out as he ate, all brown and hairy and bristling. When the sack had been emptied Olin puffed the bad lip into the bag, twisted its throat, and burst it with a “pop” disappointingly feeble. Then, hanging over a white stone parapet, they watched the ripped paper drift zig-zaggedly down into Red River far beneath.
For the first time in many days Cass did not feel hungry. He launched a slow nodule of spittle after the sack and leaned far over to follow its course. “It’ll go clear down to the ocean now, that little hunk o’ spit,” he informed Olin.
When Olin Jones laughed his mouth looked like two mouths, a big one and a small.
Down Market Street, in the business district, they paused in front of a little burlesque house to gaze at the pictures of girls displayed in front. Cass thought of the black girl violated on the prairie. Yet he said, “Say, this looks hot enough to scorch mah pants off, Olin. Let’s go in, Yank ol’ boy. Let’s us pling fo’ bits apiece an’ go in here. What yo’ say?” Cass spoke in bravado, to drown secret shame.
Olin Jones laughed faintly. He was always ready.
“That’s how I like to hear you talkin’, Red. Like you got some life in you, like you was a real man. What side the street you want? I’ll take this an’ you take that. Watch out fer cops an’ preachers an’ do like you been seein’ me do. Don’t take no Mex nickels, don’t stand in one spot, don’t get scared of nothin’—an’ I’ll meet you here in an hour.”
Left atone, Cass’s courage drained out of him. A hundred white faces passed him by every minute, and he let them all pass. Some faces were young, with round, meaty cheeks, and others were gray as winter with age. And all, young and old, were going somewhere in a hurry. It seemed to Cass that everyone had something important to do in the world save himself. He himself had nothing to do, so the least he could do was to stay out of the way. He was like some lost burro, he thought, a young burro who walks riderless all through a dark night.
“Ah’d like to do somethin’ big,” he thought; “Ah’d like to be in one hell of a hurry like other folks.”
Lounging against a wall, he waited long for some likely seeming prospect. Half a dozen times he sidled up beside strangers, only to lose his voice the moment they turned to face him. Finally, however, he resolved to be bold. He slipped up beside an old woman who dangled a silver mesh bag from her left arm, and he whispered. She screwed her eyes up one moment inquiringly; then fear like a curtain clouded them and they looked like an aged sheep’s eyes: sick old sheep eyes pleading timidly, “No. No. Please go away. How terrible you seem, how ugly and fierce!” She tightened the mesh bag about her wrist, drawing it swiftly closer up. Cass stopped dead in his tracks; he had frightened her badly. Watching her retreating figure, his fingers found his scar and traced it. Next time he would try a man. Some young man. When red traffic tights stopped eastbound pedestrian traffic on Marshall Street he stunk abreast of a stim fellow in a seersucker suit.
“Gimme a dime, mister,” he asked, “Ah’m hungry as hett.”
Surprising even to himself, he was demanding. He heard the sound of his own voice, and its sound was encouraging. It rang true, like the voice of a man who wouldn’t take “No” very easily. The slim fellow slipped on the sidewalk, and turned angril
y on Cass.
“Beat it,” he snarled, as though Cass were somehow to blame for his slipping.
“Did’ y’almost fall, mister?” Cass inquired, with hair hanging in his eyes. Olin wouldn’t have retreated now, he knew, so he tossed his hair back, and he stood his ground. “Well, a nickel then,” he persisted, coming closer. Hell, he was half an inch taller than this fag and twice as tough; even if he wasn’t wearing white flannels. His shoulders were as broad, almost; even though they weren’t wrapped in a silk-striped shirt.
A mole on the fellow’s cheek began bristling, his face seemed to darken under the eyes; then the red traffic lights flashed to green, he brushed Cass aside with a cool contempt and paced away with the crowd.
Cass hesitated only a second, but the fellow had reached the opposite curb before he’d gathered the courage to follow. Halfway down the block, singling out a straw hat among many straw hats, he fell into step again with the seersucker suit.
“Well, mister, y’all gonna gimme that nickel? Jest tell me what yore gonna do, that’s all.”
He felt as tough now as Olin Jones himself. Tough as a bullwhip and twice as mean. No ice-cream-panted college bastard was going to shove him, Cassy McKay, off the sidewalk.
The fellow was keeping his eyes ahead, pretending not to hear. “Ah know how to git a rise out of this kind,” Cass thought, and aloud he said, “That seersucker suit look just like a sea-sucker’s suit to me, mister.”
The other did not reply; he was thinking, “By right I ought to call a cop on this lout. He ain’t hungry, he looks strong as an ox. Still, he is kind of cave-chested at that. And he sure ain’t had a haircut since Hoover won Arkansas.—Oh, hell.” He dug for his change. Cass, bending over with one hand outstretched, saw three quarters, a dime, and four pennies. He saw all that lying there in the clean soft palm, so close that he could have snatched one of the quarters and run. In anticipation, he cupped his palms. When he received in them only the four pennies he didn’t say, “Thanks.” A devil rose to his tongue and said instead, “Ah deserve more, mister. Honest to Jeez, ah’m really deservin’.” He grinned, feeling himself wholly clever now. “Ah guess ah’m workin’ mahself through somethin’ too.” But the seersucker suit was gone.
Somebody in Boots Page 13