Cass was strangely well-pleased with his four little pennies. He felt he had worked hard for them, he felt that he’d earned them. Above all he felt that he could now get money again almost any time he wished, just like Olin Jones. He felt that he had overcome that shame which, many times since he had left Great-Snake Mountain, had kept him from begging. Cass did not yet know how temporary is the courage which the simple fact of food in the belly loans a man. For twenty-five minutes he begged and he wheedled, plinged, panned, mooched and pursued; and with such force that he amassed sixty-eight cents. Then he stopped a tall man bearded like a physician, a man with a cane and a waxed goatee, one dressed like a duke who strode like a king. Cass thought, “Ah’ll bet that’s a millyunaire sho’ ’nuf, an’ jest fo’ plain orn’ryness ah’m gonna give him a mooch.” The answer came smooth-smiling and soft: “I’m on the stem too, son. Sorry as hell.”
“Well anyhow,” Cass reflected, cocking his head to the side in puzzlement, “anyhow, ah got mine.” He wished, as he began working back to the little showhouse on Market, that older men would quit calling him “son.”
He hoped that Olin had not done too well. Olin brushed past him before he reached Market.
“I’m goin’ in, son; I got mine.”
Cass was proud then that he too had plinged enough for an admission. In the lobby he bought two packs of gum, to show his appreciation of Olin, and they went inside chewing five sticks apiece.
Now Cass had never been to a show before, any kind of a show. After his eyes had adjusted themselves to alternate darkness and glare he saw a stage thronging with beautiful women, and he heard a voice trilling sweetly as any lark; albeit there were but five rouged wenches there and a contralto who quavered her voice in weepy songs by seizing her windpipe between two fingers. The girls danced without any semblance of rhythm, sometimes one scratched herself as she plodded. When there was nothing else to do, and all five moppets were out of step together, they stopped, one by one, and waggled their breasts loosely, like half-filled water bottles. But for Cass the air rocked with beauty, and angel-voices sang. The cheap tinsel hangings had, for him, a high magnificence. He was lifted wholly out of himself.
And, wholly, wonder overcame him. Once, from far away, he thought he heard Olin Jones say something about the air being stuffy or stale. Cass was not even conscious that there was air about him, however; then, after a timeless interval, he remembered hearing faint laughter near; he turned toward Olin then, but Olin was gone, leaving behind him only his faint echo. How long he had been gone Cass never learned, for he never saw Olin Jones again.
He sat on in the front row, bending toward the stage with mouth unhinged, till lights came on, and an usher started toward him. Cass rose at the usher’s touch—and how he envied the fellow! “Lawd! To work in such a place as this! To come heah every day!” In that moment Cass could imagine nothing on earth more desirable. At the door he turned and looked once more at the stage, but there was nothing there now save a sheet of cheap shoddy hanging crookedly over some dark and barren boards.
Cass never forgot the Market Street burlesque house, and the desire to attach himself to burlesque was to remain with him until simple circumstance would bring him to such a place.
Outside it was raining, soft autumn rain of Shreveport midnight; the long unlovely Southern street glowed wetly under round street-globes. The wavering line of light running the column of each lamp made each globe seem a little Southern moon, tethered to the Southern street. Cass walked on as in a dream; he could not waken. Women in vision raced his brain. They whirled, they bowed, they rose in pairs; they sang, and, bending sweetly over, spoke low and lustful for his ears. Then they danced in a wanton circle round, paused one moment, and were gone.
And the fierce frenzy Cass had known three days before with the Negro girl came blazing afresh in his blood—when the singers in fancy came again their flesh had turned from white to brown. Then their legs twinkled darkly, brown breasts quivered, slender brown arms reached warmly up for him.
The brown girl’s arms had fought him fiercely. Cass looked around.
He was sitting on a bench facing the river, and the rain had stopped—and in one moment all the dim faces and brown breasts of fancy, the far away sound of swift music—even the scent of the perfume still in his nostrils—these in one moment became crystallized, hardened, grew smaller, came closer, became one solid thing. It was no longer fancy then, no longer vision, but hard hot lust. He rose quickly, and his loins were stiff with his desire; his brain held nothing but his desire, and his blood was storming with it.
Through a park and down a flowered way he passed. On a bench a woman lay under an overhanging bough, protected from its dripping by yellowing comic-strips. Her bare legs stuck out from under the heaped paper like two thin white clothes-poles out of a damp laundry basket; Cass saw, in their protuberant veining, that the woman was very old.
He had lost his cap somewhere, he didn’t know where, and his head was uncombed for days. Sweat stood on his forehead; his hands twitched in his tom pockets. He could not sit down, although twice he tried. The same hand that five days before had thrust him from behind now made him rise and walk on. He tried telling himself that he was only looking for a place to lie down, but his heart knew better. His veins ran with fire and his heart cried out. His brain and his heart, and more than his heart. As in a mist of memory he remembered his brother Bryan, and a secret vice Bryan had often practiced. Cass didn’t want to do that.
Although he had not slept for hours, had not eaten since the morning, hunger and weariness had no part of him now. He began to plan crazily.
“Back o’ town. Where’s back o’ town? Ah’ll do like ol’ Olin do, when he want it bad enuf. Give her a nickel when yore through an’ if she don’t like it tell her to stuff it. Where’s back o’ town? If she raises a fuss beat hell out o’ her. That’s what ol’ Olin does; that’s what black gals is made fo’.” He fumbled in his coat and found a dime and four pennies. It did not take him ten minutes to be accosted.
In a yellow sweater with an upturned collar a mulatto girl stepped out of a slant alleyway as he passed, holding a newspaper over her head in lieu of an umbrella. Cass stooped under the paper with her, and in silence they walked to an old frame house with a musky negroid smell all about it. It smelled heavy and sweet inside, as tropical flowers smell at night. Up a winding stairway they went, then down a dim passageway lined with doors. Smelling that heavy purple smell, Cass recalled a dooryard lilac blooming.
One door stood open as they passed; Cass saw cards littered across green carpet, and he heard a woman singing.
O fill mah casket with sweet marijuana
Let me dream mah life away
Ah ain’t gonna marry or settle down
Ah’ll cook me up pills till some bull shoots me down . . .
The odor about the old house was more than negroid, more than lilac. Cass had never smelled anything quite like it before. It smelled like punk, and it smelled like disease. It smelled like patchouli. It smelled like fernol.
While the girl was unlocking a door a white man came out of a room far down the hall; he paused, buttoning his trousers, and passed on, whistling. Out of memory where it had slept came a shrill and savage cry into Cass’s brain.
“Jack! Jack Gaines!”
Slowly Cass turned about and slowly walked back toward the winding stairway. When he reached the head of it the yellow girl overtook him.
He couldn’t bluff it through as he had planned. Like a child caught in a small lie he held out his hand, and all he possessed in its palm. “Ah ain’t got so much as ah thought ah had,” he said, and his heart dragged darkly when he said it. She peered through dimness into his palm; he hoped against hope that she’d take fourteen cents—then she laughed very softly and slapped the palm upwards. The dime rolled silverly down the stairway, the four pennies rolled into darkness; and the yellow girl was gone, laughing mulatto laughter.
On his hands and knees d
own the staircase then, Cass recovered three pennies; but the other penny was lost, and so was the dime. He looked for them until he heard someone at the head of the stairs. Then he picked up and ran, a big country lout out of a Shreveport whorehouse, three pennies in his fingers and his hair in his eyes.
Cass knew where he was going to spend the pennies, too. He went straight for the arcade off Fannin Street. There, on moldy postal cards from 1912, he saw, first: a girl sitting in a bath tub; second, a girl plunging into surf wearing a bathing suit; and third, a mere blank grayness. He stared at this mere blank grayness till the owner came by and said, “Machine’s out o’ order—caint yo’ read?” Cass went hurriediy out of the place, carrying with him the wanton leer of the girl he had seen in a tub; he had seen her breasts and her thighs, he kept assuring himself.
But it was not enough. The thing would not let him be.
On the corner of Fannin and Edwards he almost ran into a girl or a woman, he couldn’t tell which, walking alone. Face powder smell came to him strongly, and he turned to follow. She had smelled just like the girls in the show. And though the streets here were unlit, yet he seemed to perceive her whole body clearly, only twenty yards in front of him, saw all its movements beneath a dark dress, sensed all its whiteness, felt all its warmth.
And because he had already learned that life gave no good thing fairly, that all things go to those most cruel, Cass put down in himself what there was of ruth, and he walked faster. When he was only a few feet behind her he broke into a run, the girl turned her head, and he stifled her scream with one long arm that went like an ape’s around her mouth. He saw her mouth opening whenever he looked, opening and closing without any sound. But he did not know he had struck her till he saw her lower lip bleeding. He did not know where he was till he saw they were no longer on a street; somehow, they were in an alley and she was beneath him. “Why’nt she pick up an’ run off from me?” he wondered, unaware of his knees that pinned her.
Cans and ashes lay strewn about them; he saw all things standing out in sharp detail, as though roundhouse floodlights were shining down from directly above him. He whipped off the hat that concealed the girl’s eyes. “Say, ain’t you Nancy?” he whispered, running fingers through her hair to see. But it was not thick hair like Nancy’s. It was thin and fair. Slowly then he understood, touching that head, that this was only a little girl struggling beneath him. A little ten-year-old wisp of a thing.
“No, yore not sister,” he said and he saw her lips moving.
“Please . . .” (he saw the moving child-lips say it, and he felt himself waking).
“Please . . .”
And in shrill terror Cass rose and ran.
Before morning came he was out of Shreveport. He never went there again.
8
THE PEOPLE WERE moving about, moving about. It seemed to Cass that no one knew why. Sometimes it seemed to him that men were all, somehow, blind; that they went from city to city in darkness.
By the winter of 1931 Cass knew that disaster had come to the world above him. For all through the South that winter, East and West, the trains gathered people like flies. Whole families piled into cattle-cars, women rode in reefers; old men rode the brakebeams, holding steel rods above the wheels with fingers palsied by age. Several times Cass saw pregnant women riding in empties.
“It’s the big trouble everywhere,” a girl told him. Wherever he went men spoke of “the big trouble.”
And even though there were now faces always about him, some moving east and some west, yet he himself went alone. All men went alone; no two went together.
Faces changed. One spoke of Seattle, one of Memphis, another of ripening wheat in Kansas. But whatever they said, Cass felt that they were lying; he felt somehow that these faces had never seen the cities and fields, that they only thought they had seen them.
And the voices always lying, always boasting or lying voices, they all came to sound alike to him, as voices sound in rain. Their words were encrusted with a thin film of white spittle, like the spittle on the lips of the pervert in the park.
Wherever he walked that winter, whether in New Orleans along icy docks or on Railroad Street in Baton Rouge, he saw the vast army of America’s homeless ones; the boys and old women, the old men and young girls, a ragged parade of dull gray faces, begging, thieving, hawking, selling and whoring. Faces haggard, and hungry, and cold, and afraid; as they passed, booted men followed and watched. Springfield, Decatur, Little Rock, Fort Smith; Beaumont, Houston, Austin, San Marcos. Then, San Antonio.
Cass got into San Antonio on the third night of January of 1931; and 1931 hit San Antonio with rain, sleet, and hail. He slept under newspaper that night in a wheelless S. P. passenger coach standing on a siding outside the S. P. yards. It smelled foul within, but its windows were boarded and its floor was dry.
All night rain tapped against the windows; a timid rat came to nibble something at the far end of the coach, and Cass rustled his paper to scare him away.
When he rose in the morning he felt hunger like a wound behind his navel; so he came to his feet slowly, having learned that hunger spun his head like a top whenever he came too swiftly to his feet. Outside a false dawn was breaking over a dripping watertank, and beyond the tank lay the city. He tied his shoes standing against a pile of carwheels through which stunt burdock was still trying to grow; then he pushed through fields of buffalo grass knee-high and stiff with frost, until he came to a street.
Nogalitos Street.
“If ah could rustle me up two bucks in this pesthole,” he promised himself, “ah’d get me tattooed all over.”
He decided to look for that beanery where, three years before, he had eaten with a boy named Thomas Clay. Or had it really been Thomas Clancy? Cass pondered this ancient question as he walked.
Night-clouds hung heavily, threatening snow. A child’s face peered wanly from a window as he passed, like the face of a sick child peering. As he passed the false dawn died, the streets became black as pitch once more. He could not find the old beanery, nor any similar place, though he sought along the streets for long.
When he turned down Pedro Avenue into Navarro it was seven o’clock—and three blocks away, unevenly scissored there from a gray mist, a soup line seemed a thousand-humped serpent winding. Regularly and minutely the dark line jerked, was still with waiting, then wormed six convulsive inches through one narrow door. Its humps were the heads of homeless men, centipede legs were arms in rags. Its hungering mouth was a thousand mouths; even from three blocks away Cass felt that dreadful humility with which homeless men wait for food. A feeling as though of some disgraceful defeat came to him. On the curb gray sparrows flirted their tails, and pecked where horses late had passed.
Once, far ahead of the place where Cass stood in the queue, at the place where the queue found the door, someone shouted something in anger or pain, and a mocking response came from within. A little flurry of excitement ran up and down the line, many laughed together and a single cry went up, weakly and thinly striving up into the unseen sky. Fog wrapped the cry, and Cass saw the bum who had cried out: he was walking swiftly away down Navarro. At the corner his angry figure turned, Cass could see it only dimly, the voice came muffled by mist.
“Do a man have to wait all mornin’ in line to git a tin plate o’ cow-donick? I kin get garbage out o’ any old can.”
But even Cass knew better than that. He knew that once a week, on Saturday, all open garbage was sprayed by the city. (In order to keep paupers from poisoning themselves on Sunday, which was the Sabbath.) So to the sullen shoulders in front of him, to a flat-backed head on a hairy neck he said, “They’re puttin’ stink-oil on the grab-cans now. That guy won’t find even crap left clean. Ah seen ’em sprayin’ it on last summer, back o’ Commerce Street in Dallas. It was green kind o’, looked like to me.”
The flat-backed head did not turn to reply. But three sparrows rose in a single flight and the head turned then slowly to follow that rising.
Cass’s throat contracted when he saw the man’s face. Disaster or disease had torn or eaten the nose away until only the nostrils now remained. Cass had seen faces beaten expressionless by defeat, faces hungry and hopeless and sick with long shame—but this was the mask of death itself. He touched his own nose and found it running. He smeared phlegm off on the back of his hand and looked down at his wrists. They were blue-black with dirt and cold, and the reddish hairs on the backs of his fingers seemed frozen around the roots.
“That stuff they’re puttin’ on the cans is coal-oil, bub,” a voice behind him informed. “I read about it in the paper, that’s how I learned. Coal-oil, so kids’ll quit gettin’ sick from eatin’ slop.”
The noseless man spoke nasally.
“Yeh, they want the kids to starve healthy-like is why they doin’ it.”
The fog began to lift above the mission. Two of the sparrows returned to the curb.
When Cass was only a few feet from the building, a door opened and a smell from within came billowing out. It sugged up his nostrils in one thick and sticky woosh. In one moment hunger went out of him. Like blood through a bag, hunger drained out. Had it not been for remembering coal-oil on the cans Cass would have followed the bum who had cried out in protest. Instead he tried to close his senses when he came into the place. He reached for a plate, found an empty place at a bench, and sat down among a dozen other ragged once-men.
“I Am The Way And The Light,” a wall-sign informed him. “Christ Died For Your Sins,” said another.
Cass looked down at his plate. The thing upon it was formed like a meat-ball and it well might have been all of that; but it wambled about in a thin yellow swill, a kind of diarrheal brown gravy. Cass thought of cow-dung dropped thinly and long. “Cowdonick” the man in the fog had called this meat, and the recollection did not help Cass greatly. After moderating its odor with salt and hot pepper, he yet could not down the stenchful stuff. One bite, wholly vile, convinced him that the man had been right. He swallowed, retched halfway, and paused one moment to reflect: the meat was as rank as something a half-starved street-cur would have to regurgitate twice before downing. The coffee had been ground out of chicory and some cheap dry cereal; he swashed it down hastily to cleanse his mouth of the meat, found it both hot and good. It was bitter as medicine, but invigorating, and he felt a little stronger after drinking. When he learned that he could have a second cup he reached for it eagerly.
Somebody in Boots Page 14